Harry Turtledove - Rulers of the Darkness

Eggs kicked up clouds of snow when they burst in and around the Grelzer village his company was holding. Fragments of metal from the eggshells whined through the air. But instead of cratering the ground, as they would have in summertime, the eggs only knocked holes about the size and depth of a small washtub in it; it was frozen too hard for anything more.

"Here they come!" somebody shouted.

Leudast peered out from the hut in which he sheltered. Sure enough, the Algarvians and Grelzers were trying to press home their attack against the village. They had better gear now than they'd used the first winter of the war in Unkerlant: they all wore white snow smocks, and almost all of them snowshoes. Some of them shouted, "Mezentio!" Others, presumably the Grelzers, yelled, "Raniero!"

"Plenty of time," Leudast called to his men as the enemy slogged across the snow-covered fields outside the village. "Make sure you've got a good target before you start blazing."

Before the Algarvians and Grelzers even got into stick range of the village, Unkerlanter egg-tossers started pounding them. Leudast knew a moment's abstract pity for the foe. With the ground hard as iron, the soldiers out there couldn't very well dig holes in which to shelter from the eggs. They had to take whatever the Unkerlanters could dish out.

Rock-gray dragons dropped out of the sky on the redheads and the traitors who fought on their side. More eggs burst, these delivered with pinpoint precision and released only a few feet above the enemy's heads. Flame yellow as the sun- and far hotter than the winter sun down here in Grelz- burst from the dragons' jaws. Leudast watched a kilted Algarvian blacken and writhe and shrink in on himself like a moth that had just flown into a campfire.

Recared's whistle screamed. "Forward- now!" the regimental commander shouted. "If we hit them hard, we can break them."

A bit more than a year earlier, battling down in the wreckage of Sulingen, Leudast would have laughed at the thought of breaking Algarvians. Overwhelming them, certainly. But breaking them? Making them run? It would have seemed impossible. A lot had happened since then. "Aye!" he shouted. "We can do it, by the powers above! Urra! King Swemmel! Urra!"

The Unkerlanters burst from the village and rushed at the redheads. Eggs kept falling on the enemy, helping to pin him in place. Some of the Algarvians tried to flee anyway, and were flung aside when eggs bust near then. Others threw their sticks down in the snow, raised their hands, and went willingly enough into captivity. And some of the redheads, good, stubborn, resourceful soldiers that they were, held on as long as they could to let their comrades escape.

Fighting alongside Mezentio's soldiers were men who looked like Leudast and his comrades, but who wore dark green tunics rather than rock-gray under their snow smocks. Few Grelzers tried to surrender. Few of those who did try succeeded. The men who'd chosen Raniero over Swemmel had discovered the Unkerlanters weren't much interested in taking them alive.

"Keep your eyes and ears open," Leudast warned the soldiers in his company. "You see somebody you don't know, watch him, especially if he talks with a Grelzer accent. The traitors will strip our dead for their tunics so they get the chance to sneak out of the fight."

He knew he wasn't the only Unkerlanter passing along that warning. He also knew a few perfectly loyal Unkerlanter soldiers who chanced to spring from Grelz would get blazed because their countrymen went for sticks without bothering to ask questions first. His broad shoulders moved up and down in a shrug. As long as the Grelzers got rooted out, he didn't much care what else happened.

Captain Recared hadn't been the sole commander to order a counterattack. Shouting "Urra!" and King Swemmel's name, Unkerlanter soldiers stormed forward all along the line. Instead of trying to break out of the cauldron around Herborn in which they were trapped, the Algarvians and Grelzers had to try to hold back a foe who outnumbered them in men, in egg-tossers, in horses and unicorns, in behemoths, and in dragons.

They tried. They tried bravely. But they could not hold. Here and there, they would form a line and battle the Unkerlanters in front of them to a standstill- for a while. But then Swemmel's soldiers would find a way around one flank or the other, and the Algarvians and Grelzers would have to give ground again: either that or be slaughtered where they stood.

The progress Leudast's countrymen made left him slightly dazed. That evening, he sat down to barley cakes and garlicky sausage filched from an Algarvian sergeant he'd captured. Toasting a length of sausage over a fire on a stick, he said, "Curse me if they're not starting to fall apart."

Captain Recared had some sausage, too. He pulled it away from the flames, examined it, and then thrust it back to cook some more. "Aye, they are," he agreed while the sausage sizzled and dripped grease into the fire. "By this time tomorrow, they'll have figured out that they can't pound their way through our ring. They'll start trying to sneak through in small bands. We have to smash as many of them as we can. Every soldier we kill or capture now is one more we won't have to worry about later on."

"I understand, sir," Leudast said. "And when they're hungry and scared and their sticks are low on charges, they're a lot easier to deal with than when they've got their peckers up."

"That's right. That's just right." Recared nodded. He took his sausage off the fire and looked at it again. With another nod, he began to eat.

He proved a good prophet, for over the next couple of days the spirit did leak out of the Algarvians, like water leaking from a cracked jar. They stopped standing up to the Unkerlanters and started trying to escape whenever and however they could. When they couldn't run and couldn't hide, they surrendered in a hurry, glad to do it before something worse happened to them.

After a couple of days of that, Leudast was as rich as he'd ever been in all his born days. He didn't suppose it would last; when he came to a place where he could spend the money he was taking from captured Algarvian officers, he probably would. But a heavy belt pouch wasn't the worst thing in the world, either.

One of his men asked, "Sergeant, what do we do with the coins we take that have false King Raniero on 'em?"

"Well, Kiun, if I were you, I'd lose the Grelzer copper," Leudast answered. "It'll never be worth anything on its own, if you know what I mean. But silver's silver, even if it is stamped with Raniero's pointy-nosed face. Somebody'll melt it down for you and give you what it's worth in metal, even if not in coin."

"Ah." The soldier nodded. "Thanks. That makes good sense."

The next morning, Leudast's company came on the tracks of a squad of men trying to make their way east. With snow on the ground, following the trail was child's play. Before long, his troopers caught up with the fleeing Algarvians. A couple of men started blazing at the redheads. As soon as steam puffed up from the smoke around them, the Algarvians raised their hands in surrender.

"Aye, you have us," one of them said in pretty good Unkerlanter as Leudast and his men came up: a bald fellow in his late middle years who wore a colonel's uniform. "We can run no more."

"You'd best believe it, pal." Leudast cocked his head to one side. "You talk funny." The officer's accent wasn't a typical Algarvian trill, but something else, something familiar.

"I was, in the last war, colonel of a regiment of Forthwegians in Algarvian service," the redhead answered.

"That's it, sure enough." Leudast nodded. His own home village, up in the north, wasn't so far from the Forthwegian border. No wonder he thought he'd heard that accent before- he had.

"Sergeant-" Kiun, the fellow who'd asked him about Grelzer money, plucked at his sleeve. "Sergeant, powers below eat me if that's not Raniero his own self."