Leudast believed him. By the way soldiers’ heads bobbed up and down, everybody believed him. Anyone who’d ever dealt with inspectors and impressers could have no possible doubt that they would blaze their own countrymen. But how many of them would get blazed in return while they were doing it?
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he shied away from it, as a unicorn might shy from a buzzing fly. If Unkerlanters began battling Unkerlanters, if the Twinkings War, or even some tiny portion of it, visited the kingdom once again, what would spring from it? Why, Algarvian conquest, and nothing else Leudast could see.
“So,” Hawart said. “There it is, lads. We don’t go back any more, not if there’s any help for it. We go forward when we can, we die in place when there’s no other choice, and we don’t go back, not unless.. ” He paused and shook his head. “We don’t go back. We can’t afford to, not anymore.”
“You heard the captain,” Leudast growled, as any sergeant might have after an officer gave orders. He’d heard the captain, too, and wished he hadn’t. Swemmel’s orders left no room for misunderstanding.
Hawart put the paper back into his belt pouch. He had to look up, orienting himself by the sun, before he could point east and north. “That’s where the Algarvians are,” he said. “Let’s go find them and give them a good boot in the arse. They’ve already done it to us too many times.”
“Aye,” Leudast said. A few other troopers snarled agreement. But most of the men, though they obeyed Hawart readily enough, did so without any great eagerness. They’d seen enough action by now to understand how hard it was to halt the redheads in the open field. Leudast had seen more action than almost any of them. He wondered why he retained enough enthusiasm to want to go forward against the Algarvians. I’m probably too stupid to know better, he thought.
Sunflower leaves rustled, brushing against his tunic and those of his comrades. Dry, fallen leaves crunched under his boots. The plants bobbed and shook as he pushed his way through them. The sunflowers were taller than a man, but an alert Algarvian with a spyglass could have tracked from afar the marching Unkerlanters by the way the plants moved without a breeze to stir them. Leudast hoped Mezentio’s men weren’t so alert-and also hoped that, even if they were, they had no egg-tossers nearby.
Coming out from among the sunflowers was almost like breaking the surface after swimming underwater in a pond: Leudast could suddenly see much farther than he had been able to. Ahead lay the village whose peasants would have harvested the sunflowers. Dragons-perhaps Algarvian but perhaps Unkerlanter, too-had visited destruction on it from the air. Only a few huts still stood. The rest were either blackened ruins or had simply ceased to be.
People moved amongst the ruins, though. For a moment, Leudast admired the tenacity of his countrymen. Who but Unkerlanter peasants would have tried so hard to go on with their lives even in the midst of war’s devastation?
Then he stiffened. Unkerlanters would have been more solidly made than these tall, scrawny apparitions. And no matter how tall and scrawny Unkerlanters might have been, they would never, ever, have worn kilts.
Leudast’s body realized that faster than his mind. He threw himself to the ground. At the same time, someone else shouted, “Algarvians!”
“Forward!” Captain Hawart called: he was going to obey King Swemmel’s order. Or die trying, Leudast thought. But Hawart didn’t want to do any more dying than he had to, for he added, “Forward by rushes!”
“My company-even squads forward!” Leudast commanded. He got up and went forward with the even-numbered squads. He’d learned from Hawart not to order anything he wouldn’t do himself. The men in the odd-numbered squads blazed at the Algarvians in the village ahead. As Leudast dove to the ground again, he wondered how many Algarvians the village held and how many more were close enough to join the fight. He’d find out before long.
He’d done a good job of teaching the raw recruits who flooded into his company’s ranks what needed doing. Even before he screamed the next order, the soldiers from the odd-numbered squads were running past their comrades and toward the Algarvians in the village. He blazed at the redheads. The range was still long for a handheld stick, but beams zipping past them and starting house fires would make Mezentio’s men keep their heads down and interfere with their blazing.
Captain Hawart’s regiment had worked its way across half the open country between the edge of the sunflower field and the village when eggs began dropping on the Unkerlanter soldiers. Leudast cursed in weary frustration. He’d seen that sort of thing happen too many times before. The Algarvians had too many crystals and used them too well to make them easy foes.
But the Unkerlanters kept moving forward. More slowly than they should have, their egg-tossers started pounding the village. The huts that were still standing went to pieces. “We can do it!” Leudast shouted to his men. He hadn’t seen any reinforcements running up to bolster the redheads in the place. It would be hard work, expensive work-it would probably get down to knives in the end-but he didn’t think the Algarvians could hold against a regiment.
He’d just got to his feet for another rush toward the village when dragons swooped down on his comrades and him. His first warning was a harsh, hideous screech that seemed to sound right in his ear. A moment later, with a belching roar like a hundred men puking side by side, a dragon painted in bright Algarvian colors poured flame over half a dozen Unkerlanters.
Leudast dove for cover and blazed at dragons and dragonfliers. The redheads aboard the dragons were blazing at soldiers on the ground, too. Other dragonfliers let eggs fall from hardly more than treetop height. They burst among King Swemmel’s men with deadly effect.
“Behemoths!” This summer, the cry wasn’t usually so full of panic and despair as it had been the year before. Now. .
Now, seeing the regiment falling to pieces around him, Leudast shouted, “Back!” A moment later, others took up the cry. The Unkerlanters who still lived stumbled and staggered off toward the sunflowers from which they’d emerged. King Swemmel could give whatever orders he liked. In the face of overwhelming enemy superiority, not even fear of him would make his men obey.
Six
In Algarve, ley-line caravans always traveled with the windows shut tight. Hajjaj had rather enjoyed that; it meant the cars were as warm as the Zuwayzi weather in which he’d grown up. In Zuwayza itself, however, the custom was just the opposite. Letting air into the caravan cars helped ensure that they didn’t get too intolerably hot.
As his own special caravan car glided east, Hajjaj sipped date wine and peered out at the sun-blazed landscape through which the ley line ran. Turning to his secretary, he remarked, “It never fails to amaze me that the Unkerlanters wanted this country badly enough to take it away from us so they could rule it themselves.”
Qutuz shrugged. “Your Excellency, I do not seek to fathom Unkerlanters any more than I seek to fathom Algarvians. The ways of the pale men who wrap themselves in cloth are beyond the ken of any right-thinking Zuwayzi.”
“Those ways had better not be, or we’ll end up in trouble without the faintest notion of how we got there,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister answered.
He sipped at his wine again, then let out a wry chuckle. “And if we do understand the clothed ones, we’ll end up in trouble knowing exactly how we got there.”
“Even so, your Excellency,” Qutuz said. “Thus this journey.”
“Aye,” Hajjaj said unhappily. “Thus this journey.” When he thought of it in those terms, he wanted to drink himself into a stupor. Instead, he went on, “I’ve spent most of my life learning everything I could about the Algarvians, admiring them, imitating their style and their energy, yoking my kingdom to Mezentio’s. And then the war came, and with it this.. this madness of theirs.”