His shoulders slumped. ‘What do we eat, then?’

‘What have you got?’

‘Nothing.’

‘That’s what you’re eating, then. Unless you can find something better.’ Even considering he’d been woken before dawn, Tunny was unusually grumpy. He had a lurking sense he had something to be very annoyed about, but wasn’t sure what. Until he remembered the dirty water closing over Klige’s face, and kicked Yolk’s embarrassment of a fire away into the dripping brush.

‘Colonel Vallimir came up a while ago,’ murmured Yolk, as though that was the very thing Tunny needed to lift his spirits.

‘Wonderful,’ he hissed. ‘Maybe we can eat him.’

‘Might be some food came up with him.’

Tunny snorted. ‘All officers ever bring up is trouble, and our boy Vallimir’s the worst kind.’

‘Stupid?’ muttered Worth.

‘Clever,’ said Tunny. ‘And ambitious. The kind of officer climbs to a promotion over the bodies of the common man.’

‘Are we the common man?’ asked Yolk.

Tunny stared at him. ‘You are the fucking definition.’ Yolk even looked pleased about it. ‘No sign of Latherliver yet?’

‘Lederlingen, Corporal Tunny.’

‘I know his name, Worth. I choose to mispronounce it because it amuses me.’ He puffed out his cheeks. His standard for amusement really had plummeted since this campaign got underway.

‘Haven’t seen him,’ said Yolk, gazing sadly at that forlorn slice of bacon.

‘That’s something, at least.’ Then, when the two lads looked blankly at him. ‘Leperlover went to tell the tin-soldier pushers where we are. Chances are he’ll be the one bringing the orders back.’

‘What orders?’ asked Yolk.

‘How the hell should I know what orders? But any orders is a bad thing.’ Tunny frowned off towards the treeline. He couldn’t see much through the thicket of trunk, branch, shadow and mist, but he could just hear the sound of the distant stream, swollen with half the drizzle that had fallen last night. The other half felt like it was in his underwear. ‘Might even be an order to attack. Cross that stream and hit the Northmen in the flank.’

Worth carefully set his pan down, pressing at his stomach. ‘Corporal, I think—’

‘Well, I don’t want you doing it here, do I?’

Worth dashed off into the shadowy brush, already fumbling with his belt. Tunny sat back against his trunk, slipped out Yolk’s flask and took the smallest nip.

Yolk licked his pale lips. ‘Could I—’

‘No.’ Tunny regarded the recruit through narrowed eyes as he took another. ‘Unless you’ve something to pay with.’ Silence. ‘There you go, then.’

‘A tent would be something,’ whispered Yolk in a voice almost too soft to hear.

‘It would, but they’re with the horses, and the king has seen fit to supply his loyal soldiers with a new and spectacularly inefficient type which leaks at every seam.’ Leading, as it happened, to a profitable market in the old type in which Tunny had already twice turned a handsome profit. ‘How would you pitch one here anyway?’ And he wriggled back against his tree so the bark scratched his itchy shoulder blades.