“We’d better beat Mezentio’s men first,” Rathar answered. “If we don’t do that, nothing else matters. We need every soldier now--every soldier, your Majesty, and every dragon, and every behemoth, and our little surprise for the Algarvians as well. Such things are best saved for when they are needed most, and this is the time.”
“Can our person be properly protected if these men and beasts are taken away?” Swemmel asked anxiously.
“Can your person be properly protected if you have to try to flee for your life from Cottbus with the redheads closing a ring around it after they push on from Thalfang and Lehesten?” Rathar returned.
King Swemmel grunted, a sound full of pain. “Traitors,” he muttered again. “Who will save us from traitors?” He glared at Rathar.
“One way or another, my head will answer for this, your Majesty,” the marshal said. “Whatever happens, I am not going west from Cottbus. If we have to fight here in the city, then here I will fight.”
“If only this whole kingdom had but a single neck!” Swemmel cried. “Then I’d take its head and use its energy to build a magical fire that would burn Mezentio in his palace in Trapani--aye, and all his kingdom with him.”
Rathar believed every word. Could Swemmel have done it, he would joyously have swung the sword. Rathar said, “Your Majesty, we have . . . reduced the power of their magecraft.” He wondered how many Unkerlanter peasants had paid with their lives for that reduction. Better not to know. Aye, better by far. War of a more ordinary sort was his proper business, and he stuck to it: “It’s more nearly man against man and beast against beast than it was for a time. But we need the men and beasts. We need all the men and beasts.” He realized he was pleading. King Swemmel seldom listened to pleas.
After a long pause, the king said, “We have learned there were riots against the Algarvians in Eoforwic yesterday.”
“That’s good news!” exclaimed Rathar, who hadn’t heard it. “Anything that keeps the redheads from using all they have against us is good news.”
“Aye,” Swemmel agreed, though he sounded almost indifferent. “Kaunians and Forthwegians went into the streets together, we have heard. Perhaps your notion of sending Kaunians back to Forthweg with their tales of woe bore fruit after all.”
“I hope so, your Majesty.” Rathar wondered if any Unkerlanter peasants had escaped the clutches of their own kingdom’s mages and brought tales of woe back to their villages. He doubted it. Swemmel preached efficiency more readily than he practiced it, but he’d been most efficient about killing since the days of the Twinkings War.
Somewhere in the middle distance, eggs started bursting: Algarvian dragons over Cottbus again. Swemmel turned and stared east. “Curse you, Mezentio,” he whispered. “You I trusted, and you betrayed me, too.”
How had he trusted Mezentio? To be unready to fight when the time for fighting came? So it had seemed then. It also seemed, as it always had to Rathar, a dreadful miscalculation. The marshal said, “Give me the men, your Majesty. Give me the men and the dragons and the behemoths. We can throw them back.” He didn’t know if Unkerlant could, but he wanted the chance to try.
“Who will protect us?” the king said again. But then, jerkily, he nodded. “Take them. We give them to you. Throw them into the fire, and may they smother it with their bodies. And now, we dismiss you.” Rathar went through the ceremonial involved in leaving the chamber without a shadow of unhappiness. Swemmel had given him the chance. How could he make the most of it?
A blizzard howled around Istvan and his squadmates and all the other Gyongyosian soldiers trying to carry the war in the stars-forsaken mountains to Unkerlant. Wool and sheepskin went only so far in warding them. Flaps from Istvan’s sheepskin cap protected his ears, but his beaky nose had long since gone numb. He hoped it wasn’t frostbitten.
“Even my valley doesn’t have weather like this,” he said: no small admission, when Gyongyosians from the interior would sometimes come to blows over whose home valley suffered through the nastier winters.
“What’s that, Sergeant?” Szonyi asked. He tramped along only a few feet from Istvan, but the shrieking wind blew words away.
“Never mind.” Istvan’s next complaint had more substance to it: “How are we supposed to fight a war in weather like this?”
“We’re a warrior race,” Szonyi answered.
“You’re a warrior blockhead,” Istvan said, but not too loud. He didn’t want Szonyi to hear him. Even if the other soldier wasn’t too bright, he was a good man to have along when a squad of Unkerlanters burst out from behind snow-covered rocks yelling “Urra!” at the top of their lungs.
The path--Istvan hoped it was the path, though he had trouble being sure--rose toward the outlet of yet another pass. Istvan wondered what lay beyond. Actually, he could make a pretty good guess: another valley not worth holding, with plenty of snow-covered rocks behind which Unkerlanters could hide. Every now and again, he wondered why Gyongyos wanted this miserable country. He shrugged inside his coat. That wasn’t his concern. All he had to worry about was taking the mountains away from the Unkerlanters and staying alive while he was doing it.
Somewhere back behind him was the whole intricate structure even a warrior race like the Gyongyosians needed to wage war in this day and age: baggage train, supply dumps, roads, and ley-line caravans eventually reaching back to Gyongyos itself. Istvan seldom thought about that structure, not least because it was behind him. He and his comrades were the very tip of the Gyongyosian spearpoint piercing the kingdom of Unkerlant.
Downhill. He’d been walking downhill for some little while before he realized he was doing it. Either he’d found the top of the pass and was heading down into the next valley or ... “Kun!” he shouted, breathing out almost as much smoke as if he were a dragon. “You frozen to death yet, Kun?”
“Aye, a couple of hours ago, Sergeant,” Kun answered, appearing at his elbow.
“Heh,” Istvan said. “All right, then. What I want to know is, are we still marching east, or have we gotten turned around in the snow? If we’re heading back toward our own men, they’ll cursed well blaze us for Unkerlanters.”
“Wind’s still blowing from behind us,” replied the corporal who had been a mage’s apprentice.
Istvan hadn’t thought of that, but it didn’t fully reassure him, either. “Here in the mountains, the wind blows all sorts of crazy ways.”
“That’s so.” Kun plucked at his tawny beard. Like Istvan’s, it was covered with rime. Unlike Istvan’s full, shaggy one, it grew by patches and clumps, and so did less to keep Kun’s cheeks and chin warm. “I can’t do anything about the wind, you know.”
“I don’t want you to do anything about the accursed wind,” Istvan snapped. “I told you, I want to know if I’m going east or west.”
“Oh, aye. So you did.” Kun plucked at his beard some more, as if hoping to find the answer there. After a few paces, he spoke again: “Have to see where the sun is.”
“If I could see where the sun is, would I need to ask you stupid questions?” Istvan shouted. Kun could make him as ready to burst with fury as an egg was with sorcerous energy. But having burst, he calmed again. “I can’t see the sun. If you can, tell me where it’s at.”
Kun wore heavy wool mittens. He took them off so he could fumble in his belt pouch. He finally pulled out a piece of what looked to Istvan like murky, milky glass. He held it in front of his right eye and peered through it now at one part of the sky, now at another.