Darkness Descending

The Unkerlanter army had its own fleet of mud wagons and confiscated any it found in reconquered villages. Such confiscations were few and far between, though, because the Algarvians stole the wagons, too.

Looking back over his shoulder, Leudast saw a couple of mud wagons making their way back toward the company he led. He waved to the driver of the lead wagon. The fellow waved back, calling, “You part of Captain Hawart’s outfit?”

“That’s right,” Leudast answered. He would have said the same thing had the driver asked him if he were part of some regiment he’d never heard of. Supplies didn’t come forward so often that he could afford to let them slip through his fingers. Lying to get his hands on them seemed no sin at all.

These, which were actually meant for his unit, didn’t come forward in a hurry. Mud wagons didn’t move quickly; what set them apart from every other vehicle was that they could move at all during the thaw. Leudast had plenty of time to shout for soldiers to help unload them before they actually arrived.

“What have you got for us?” he asked as his men swarmed over the wagons.

“Oh, some of this, some of that,” the lead driver answered. “Bandages, potted meat, charges for your sticks so you won’t have to cut a captive’s throat to keep blazing, all sorts of good things.”

“I should say so,” Leudast exclaimed. Such bounty hadn’t come his way in quite a while. “Powers above, we’ve been living hand-to-mouth for so long, I don’t know what we’ll do with all this stuff.”

“Well, pal, if you don’t want it, I figure there’s plenty who do,” the driver said. He laughed to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously. A good thing for him, too: several of Leudast’s soldiers were about to turn their sticks in his direction. They weren’t going to let him and his fellow drivers get away before they’d gone through the wagons, either.

Captain Hawart himself squelched up before the plundering was quite complete. “You can’t keep all the goodies for your own company, you know,” he told Leudast. He wasn’t laughing as he said it.

“Sir, I wouldn’t do that,” Leudast assured him.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Hawart answered. “I’ve got my eye on you. Amazing how well people behave when somebody’s watching, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leudast did laugh. So did Hawart, now. They understood each other pretty well.

Hawart said, “You are going to share this stuff, Leudast, because we’re ordered forward against the redheads in Lautertal up ahead past the woods there.” He pointed.

“Are we?” Leudast said tonelessly. “They’ll have had a deal of time to get ready for us, won’t they? And we won’t be able to come at ‘em quick and flank ‘em out, like we did so often in the snow.”

“That’s all true, every word of it,” his superior agreed. “But we’re ordered in anyhow, and so we’ll go. They aren’t supposed to have that many men holed up in the place. That’s the word coming back to us, anyhow.”

He didn’t sound as if he believed it. He didn’t look as if he believed it, either. Casting about for ways to ask how big a fiasco the ordered assault was likely to be, Leudast found one: “How hard are you going to push the attack, sir?”

“We’re going forward till we can’t go forward anymore,” Hawart answered. Spoken one way, that meant one thing; spoken another way, it meant something altogether different.

Leudast had no great trouble figuring out Captain Hawart’s tone. “Aye, sir,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about my company. We always do our best.”

“I know you do,” Hawart said. “If they haven’t killed us yet, they probably can’t kill us at all, don’t you think?”

“Aye,” Leudast said, knowing he was lying, knowing Hawart knew he was lying. But if he lied to the captain, maybe he could lie to himself, too. He went on, “What help can we count on when we go at this Lautertal place? Egg-tossers? Behemoths? Magecraft?” Magecraft was a euphemism for slaughtered Unkerlanters, but he might be able to lie to himself about that, too.

In any case, Hawart shook his head. “Tossers are mostly stuck in the mud ten miles behind us. Same with the behemoths. And this isn’t a big enough attack to deserve magecraft. Can’t say I’m too sorry about that.” He was probably lying to himself, too.

“Now we hope the Algarvians feel the same way about holding the place,” Leudast said, and Hawart nodded. Leudast went on, “I’ll let my men know what they’ll be doing. No wonder the powers above”--by which he meant the Unkerlanter quartermasters, not the abstract powers beyond the sky--”decided to let us have enough supplies for a change.”

After Hawart left, Leudast broke the news to the company he commanded. His veterans nodded in resignation. The new recruits exclaimed and grinned excitedly. They knew no better. They would, those who didn’t pay an irredeemable price for the instruction the Algarvians were about to give them.