Nine Goblins(16)
The sergeant’s head hurt.
Somebody was singing under their breath. Thumper again, probably. “With a whack-whack here…” Gods, her head hurt. She wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep was good.
“Sarge?”
Oh, lord. They wanted her to wake up.
“Sarge, we have a problem.”
Worse and worse. They wanted her to wake up and be the sergeant.
She didn’t want to wake up and be the sergeant. Being the sergeant was thankless, and they didn’t pay you very much more, and when something went wrong, you were the one that had to fix things. Responsibility was lousy.
“Sarge…”
On the other hand, if you didn’t see things were done right, it’d get done badly, and watching the resulting inefficiency was like being poked repeatedly in a sore tooth. It galled at her.
Besides, if she didn’t get up, Murray would be in charge, and he hadn’t done anything bad enough to deserve that.
She opened one eye. Algol was shaking her shoulder.
“Ungghffff….”
That didn’t sound right. She paused, licked her lips, tried again. Her mouth was dry. “Yes, Corporal?”
“Um, we have a problem, Sarge.”
Of course they had a problem. Everybody always had a problem. There was a war on, after all.
She sat up.
“Where’s the battle?”
“We don’t seem to be there any more, Sarge.”
“Don’t seem to…” Nessilka looked around.
Most of the Nineteenth Infantry was sprawled on the ground. Murray was on the other side of what looked like a small clearing in the woods, except they’d been on a hillside, not in the woods. Where had the woods come from?
“Did these trees grow while I was asleep?”
Algol considered this dutifully. “I think they take longer than that, Sarge.”
“Is the battle over? Did you carry me back the way we came?”
Algol shook his head. “I just woke up, Sarge.”
Murray came over, folding up a little glass and brass contraption in his hands. “We’re not at the battlefield.”
“Thank you, Corporal Obvious,” said Nessilka, ignoring that she had said something similar about half a minute before.
“No, Sarge, you don’t understand. We’re not anywhere near the battlefield. We’re miles off. There’s a break in the trees over there, and I got a sighting on a mountain. I think it’s Goblinhome.”
“Well, that’s fine, then,” said Nessilka. “I mean, Goblinhome—”
“Sarge, it’s at least fifty miles away. We’re on the wrong side of it.”
She considered this.
“The sea side?”
“The human side, Sarge.”
Sergeants don’t scream. They shout at people quite a lot, but they do not scream. Nessilka took a deep breath, and let it out cautiously. She didn’t scream. Okay. That was fine, then.
“So what you’re saying is…we’re behind enemy lines.”
Murray laughed. There was a slightly hysterical edge to it. “Sarge, we’d have to move about forty miles up to just be behind enemy lines. We’re practically behind the enemy nation.”
“Ah.”
There was a long moment, while Murray fiddled with his glass and brass thing, and Algol stared up into the trees, and Nessilka’s mind was an absolute blank. She was a sergeant by virtue of always being the responsible one. She’d had the same two weeks of boot camp as everybody else. At no point had they covered what to do when you are accidentally whisked into the heart of enemy territory.
Still, you had to do something.
“Alright,” she said finally. “Murray, Algol, get everybody awake and on their feet. Check for wounded. See who came with us.”
They saluted and peeled off. Nessilka got to her feet, and looked around.
It wasn’t a bad forest. Other than the fact that they absolutely weren’t supposed to be there, it was a perfectly nice forest. It was deep and green and the ground was covered in a soft mat of some little plant or other. The spots under the trees were deep with pine needles and leaf litter. Birds were calling from the canopy. The branches whispered and shifted gently in the wind.
It was a nice forest. It had probably belonged to goblins once. It was a shame they couldn’t stay here for a bit. She sighed. Up in the trees, a crow went “ark!” and the call seemed to hang in the air for a long time.
“Everybody’s up, Sarge,” said Murray. “Nobody’s bad hurt, but Blanchett’s got a twisted ankle.”
“He says I can walk on it,” said Blanchett, nodding to the teddy-bear. “Probably not a full march, though.”
“Tell him thank you,” said Nessilka absently.