"My favorites," Talsu said: "dead man's cock and what he pissed through it."

"Listen to the funny man," said one of the cooks, who'd probably heard the stale joke two or three times already. "Get out of here, funny man, before you end up wearing this pot."

"Your sweetheart's the one who knows about dead man's cock," the other cook put in.

"Your wife, you mean." Laughing, Talsu sat down on a rock, took the knife from his belt, and cut off a bite-sized chunk of sausage. It was greasy, and would have been flavorless except that it was heading toward stale. Along with the porridge, it filled his belly. That was the most he would say for it. He wondered if Colonel Dzirnavu had ever tasted what his men ate. He doubted it. If Dzirnavu tasted sausage like that, the Algarvians in Tricarico would hear him screaming.

Presently, the regimental commander deigned to emerge from the tent. With green-brown tunic and trousers stretched tight to cover his globular frame, with bejeweled medallions of nobility glittering on his chest, with rank badges shining from his shoulder straps, he resembled nothing so much as a heroic coconut. "My men!" he said, and the sagging flesh under his chin wobbled. "My men, you have not advanced far enough or fast enough to satisfy our most magnificent sovereign, his Radiant Splendor, King Donalitu V. Press ahead more bravely hence forward, that he may be more pleased with you.

One of Talsu's friends, a tall, skinny chap named Smidsu, murmured,

"You don't suppose it's ever crossed the king's mind that one of the reasons we haven't gone farther and faster is that we've got Colonel Dzirnavu commanding, do you?"

"He's Count Dzirnavu, too, so what can you do?" Talsu answered.

"The only thing that would happen if we moved fast against the Algarvians; is that we'd leave him behind." He paused for a moment.

"Might be the best thing that could happen to the regiment."

Smilsu snickered, hard enough to draw a glare from a sergeant. Talsu loathed sergeants and pitied them at the same time. They made themselves as hateful as possible to the men of their own estate under them, knowing all the while that the officers above them despised them for their low birth, and that, however heroically they might serve, they could not hope to become officers themselves.

Colonel Dzirnavu, perhaps exhausted at having addressed his soldiers, retreated behind canvas once more. Smilsu said, "You notice the king is displeased with us, not even with us and the colonel?"

"So it goes," Talsu said resignedly. "When we win the war, though, he'll be pleased with the colonel and then, if he happens to recollect, with us, too."

From inside the tent, Dzirnavu let out a bellow. Vartu hurried in to see what his master required. Then he hurried out again. When he returned, he was carrying a small, square bottle of dark green glass.

"What have you got there?" Talsu asked. He knew the answer, but wanted to see what Dzirnavu's servant would say.

Sure enough, Vartu had a word for it: "Restorative."

Talsu laughed. "Make sure he's good and restored, then. If he's back here snoring while the rest of us fight the Algarvians up ahead, we'll all be better off."

"No, no, no." Smilsu shook his head. "Just restore him enough to get him fighting mad, Vartu. I want to see him go charing between the rocks, straight at the Algarvians. They'll run like rabbits - like little fluffy bunnies they'll run. They won't have figured we'd be able to bring a behemoth through the mountains."

Vartu snickered. He almost dropped the dark green bottle, and had to make a desperate lunge for it. Fortunately for him, he caught it.

Unfortunately for him, Colonel Dzirnavu chose that moment to bellow: "[..Corif I ing..] out again: sound it, Vartu, you worthless turd, what are you doing there, fiddling with yourself"

"If you were fiddling with yourself, you'd be having more fun than you are now," Talsu told the servant. With a sigh, Vartu went off to deliver the therapeutic dose to his master.

"If he liked the illustrious count better, we couldn't talk to him the way we do," Smilsu said.

"If he liked the illustrious count better, we'd probably like the illustri ous count better, too, and we wouldn't have to talk to him the way we do," Talsu said.

His friend chewed on that, then slowly nodded. "Some nobles do make good officers," Smilsu admitted. "If they didn't, we never would have won the Six Years' War, I don't suppose."

"I don't know about that," Talsu said. "I don't know about that at all. The Algarvians have noble officers, too."

"Heh." Smilsu shook a fist at Talsu. "Now look what you've gone and done, you lousy traitor."

"What are you talking about?" Talsu demanded.

"You've made me feel sorry for the stinking enemy, that's what." Smilsu paused, as if considering. "Not too sorry to blaze away at him and put him out of his misery, I guess. Maybe I won't have to report you after all."

Talsu started to say it would be softer back of the front than at it, but held his tongue. The dungeon cell waiting for anyone reported as a traitor would make the front feel like a palace. Worse things would happen to a traitor back there than to a soldier at the front, too.

By midafternoon, the regiment had taken possession of a little valley, in which nestled a village whose Algarvian inhabitants had fled, taking their sheep and goats and mules with them. Colonel Dzirnavu promptly established himself in the largest and most impressive house there.

His men, meanwhile, fanned out through the valley to make sure the

Algarvians had not yielded it to set up an ambush. Talsu looked up at the higher ground to either side of the valley. "Hope they haven't got an egg-tosser or two stashed away up there," he remarked. "That sort of thing could ruin a night's sleep."

"That's not in our orders," one of his comrades said.

"Getting myself killed for no good reason isn't in my orders, either," Talsu retorted.

In the end, a couple of platoons did sweep the mountainside. Talsu made sure he got part of that duty, thinking, if you want something done tight, do it yourself But he soon discovered even the whole regiment couldn't have done the job right, not without working on it for a week.

Near the valley floor, the mountainsides were covered with scrubby bushes. He might have walked past an Algarvian company and never known it. Farther up, tumbled rocks offered concealment almost equally good. The sweep found no one, but none of the Jelgavans - save possibly their captain, a pompous marquis - had any illusions about what that proved.

When Talsu got back to the village, he set out his bedroll as far from the handful of buildings as he could. He noted that Smilsu was doing the same thing not far away. The two men shared a wry look, shook their heads, and went on about the business of getting ready for the night.

Talsu woke up at every small noise, grabbing for his stick. No soldier who wanted to live to get old could afford to be a heavy sleeper. But he did not wake for the egg flying past till it slammed into the fanning village.

Three more followed in quick succession: not big, heavy, immensely potent ones, but the sort a crew might hurl with a light tosser a couple of men could break out and carry in and out with them on their backs.

They knocked down three houses and set several others afire. Talsu and his company went out into the fields to keep the Algarvians from getting close enough to blaze at their comrades, who labored to rescue the men trapped in the building the egg had wrecked. Looking back, Talsu saw the house Colonel Dzirnavu had taken as his own now burning mer fily. He wondered whether or not he should hope the illustrious colonel had escaped.

Leofsig trudged east along a dirt road in northern Algarve, in the direction of the town of Gozzo. That was what his officers said, at any rate, and he was wining to take their word for it. The countryside looked much as it did back in Forthweg: ripening wheatfields, groves of almonds and olives and oranges and limes, villages full of houses built from white washed sun-dried brick with red tile roofs.