“You’re the first one who’s made it here,” he told Spinello. “I’ve set out smoked fish and black bread and spirits. Don’t be bashful.”
“That’s never been one of my vices, sir,” Spinello answered, and helped himself. The smoked fish was tasty, but full of tiny bones. The spirits packed enough punch to make his hair stand on end. “Good,” he wheezed through a charred throat. “Good, but strong. If we’re truly short on cinnabar, we ought to feed the dragons this stuff, to make them flame farther.”
“By what I hear, peopleare talking about doing something along those lines,” Tampaste said, which took Spinello by surprise. “The drawback, of course, is that drunken dragons are even wilder and stupider than they would be otherwise, if such a thing is possible.” He sipped his own spirits without flinching; Spinello wondered if he’d copper-plated his gullet. “How do you view the situation in front of us, Colonel?”
“Sir, I don’t like it,” Spinello said at once. “Swemmel’s men are up to something, but I don’t know what. I don’t like it whenever they try to get cute with us; it means they’ve got something up their sleeves.”
“Do you think we can throw in another spoiling attack and disrupt them?” Tampaste asked.
Spinello shook his head. “Not my brigade, anyway. We’re in no shape for it, not after the attack on Pewsum failed.”
“You handled your men well there, Colonel,” Tampaste said. “No blame to you that the try didn’t succeed. Just… too many Unkerlanters in the neighborhood. We’ve sung that song before.”
“If we sing it again too often, we’ll have too bloody many Unkerlanters in Algarve, sir,” Spinello said.
Tampaste grimaced. “You shouldn’t say such things.”
“Why?” Spinello asked. “Because they’re not true? Or because nobody wants to think about them even if they are true?”
The division commander plainly didn’t want to answer that. At last, he said, “Because saying them makes them more likely to come true. A mage would tell you the same thing.” Spinello thought that held an element of truth, but only an element. Too many things got said all over the world for any one of them to have much chance of swinging things one way or another. Before he could say as much, Tampaste changed the subject, asking, “Where in blazes are the rest of my brigade commanders?”
“Stuck in the mud, unless I miss my guess,” Spinello replied. “Whatever the Unkerlanters are doing, they won’t do it right away.” He took another pull at his spirits, which made it easier for him to sneer at anything and everything Unkerlanter. “It’s not as if they bothered paving their roads so they could move on them all year long.”
Tampaste said, “Captives claim one of the reasons Swemmel didn’t pave more of the roads was for fear we could move on them.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Spinello admitted. “If it’s true, we must have taught them quite a lesson during the Six Years’ War.”
“Maybe now they’re teaching us some things we’d rather not learn,” the brigadier said, and then, before Spinello could call him on it. “And now who’s speaking words of ill omen?” The gesture Tampaste used to turn aside the omen dated back to the days when the Algarvians skulked through the woods in the far south and the Kaunian Empire bestrode most of eastern Derlavai. Spinello had seen it reproduced on classical Kaunian monuments, and on pottery in the museum at Trapani.
Two of his fellow brigade leaders did eventually show up. The meeting that followed wasn’t worth having, not as far as Spinello was concerned. Both other colonels, like him, had seen more going on among the Unkerlanters opposite them than they would have liked. But both of them, also like him, claimed to lack the force to do anything about it. “Can you get us more men, sir?” one of them asked Tampaste.
The division commander unhappily shook his head. “I’ve got everything I can do to hold what strength I have,” he answered. “The bigwigs keep trying to rob me and send men south. That’s all they can think of. That’s where the worst of the fighting has been, so they think it always will be.”
“They’re a pack of fools, in that case,” Spinello burst out.
“As may be,” Tampaste said dryly. “But they’re a pack of fools with fancier rank badges than yours, Colonel, and fancier badges than mine, too. Any other comments?” After his depressing remarks, nobody said a thing. He nodded as if he didn’t seem surprised. “Very well, gentlemen. Dismissed.”
Spinello headed back toward his brigade, east of Pewsum, thinking dark thoughts. His mood did not improve when an Unkerlanter dragon dove at his wagon. He and the driver both leaped off into the mud. Had the enemy dragonflier timed his beast’s burst of flame as well as he might have, that would have done them no good. As things were, the Unkerlanter waited too long, and the flame kicked up steam east of the wagon. He didn’t come back for a second attack, but flew on, looking for another target.
Dripping and cold and filthy, Spinello scrambled back up into the wagon. “He didn’t think we were important enough to bother finishing off,” he said. “He went off to find something bigger and juicier.”
His driver was every bit as wet and cold and dirty as he was. “Are you complaining, sir?” the fellow asked.
“Not complaining, exactly,” Spinello admitted. “But my self-importance is tweaked. I want the Unkerlanters to think I’mworth killing, if you know what I mean.”
“Aye, sir.” The driver nodded. An Algarvian who didn’t think himself the center of the world was hardly an Algarvian at all.
By the time Spinello got back to the tumbledown hut in the village of Gleina that he was using for his own headquarters, he was shivering and his teeth were chattering. The soldiers in the village made sympathetic noises. So did Jadwigai, the brigade’s pretty little Kaunian mascot. “What can we do to make you feel better, Colonel?” she asked.
Come to bed with me. That’d do a proper job of warming me up. He thought it-he thought it very loudly-but he didn’t say it. What I do -or don’t do-for my men. The really annoying thing was, he didn’t think he would have to force her to slip between the sheets with him. If he broached the idea, he thought she’d lie down beside him gladly enough. Vanai would never have opened her legs for him if he hadn’t set her grandfather to building roads, but Jadwigai genuinely seemed to like him.
But the brigade came first. If finding out he’d bedded their pet would upset the men, he couldn’t do it. Powers below eat the brigade, he thought, not for the first time. What came out through his clicking teeth, though, was, “Tell them to heat up the steam room for me, would you, sweetheart?”
“Of course.” Jadwigai hurried away. She came back in a few minutes and took Spinello by the arm. “You get a fresh uniform and come along with me, Colonel. You’ll be better for it.”
“I’d follow you anywhere, darling,” he said, but he made sure he kept his tone light. Jadwigai laughed. So did Spinello, though it wasn’t easy.
Just as well for him that he did: his driver waited outside the steam room, too. They scurried in together, and shut the door behind them. “Ahh!” Spinello said, stripping off sodden tunic and kilt. The driver did the same.
Few Unkerlanters had their own bathing tubs. They didn’t go in for public bathhouses, either, the way their Forthwegian cousins did. Instead, they sat around roaring fires and sweated themselves clean. A circle of benches surrounded the central fire in the hut that did duty for a steam room in Gleina. Spinello and his driver sat down side by side and baked.
“Ahh!” This time, the driver said it, though Spinello would have. Warmth flowed into him, banishing the chilly damp. Then he began dripping again, this time with sweat. That felt better still. He picked up a bucket and poured water onto the hot stones around the fire. A great cloud of steam rose. He sweated more than ever.
During the wintertime, the Unkerlanters would go out and roll in the snow after baking long enough. In warmer weather, they made do with a bucket of cold water. Spinello had always considered either of those more nearly death-defying than anything else. When he got warm, he wanted tostay warm. Here, though, he couldn’t, or at least not indefinitely. He had to put on his uniform and hurry back to his own hut once he couldn’t bear the steam heat any more. Running through the rain wasn’t all that much different from getting splashed with a bucket of water. Spinello failed to see how it improved things.