Authors: Harry Turtledove
Then the illusion shattered. Marstalu himself almost seemed to shatter. He’d always reminded Skarnu of a kindly grandfather. Now he reminded him of a kindly grandfather whose wife of many years had just died: Marstalu was suddenly a little old man cast adrift in a world he neither understood nor desired.
“Command me, your Grace!” Skarnu said, trying to put some spirit back into the man who commanded not merely him but the entire Valmieran army struggling to resist the assault from Algarve.
It was no good. He could see it was no good before Marstalu spoke. “Your words prove you noble,” the duke said with a sad, sweet smile. “But what good is nobility in these times? The commoners shun it, as do most even of our so-called nobles. We are beaten, Skarnu, beaten. All that remains is to learn how badly we are beaten.”
“Surely we can yet rally,” Skarnu said.
“Perhaps we can rally in the south—back of the Soretto,” Marstalu said. “Defending true Valmierans may put the heart back in our soldiers. We do have to form a line here in the center. How and where we can do that, I am not so sure. In the north, I admit, things are rather better. The thick forests and rough country along the border there will leave the Algarvians with their work cut out for them.”
“Then we ought to fall back to the Soretto in the south and use the men we save to help strengthen the center here,” Skarnu said.
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” Marstalu showed temper for the first time. “But powers above, it’s not been easy. The cursed folk of Rivaroli have raised a guerrilla against our soldiers there, and the Algarvian behemoth brigades smash through everything we can move against them, throwing us into disarray far behind what should be the line.”
“Have we no behemoths of our own, your Grace?” Skarnu asked. In the retreat, he’d seen a handful of dead Valmieran beasts, but none in action.
“Aye, distributed along the line to support our foot,” the Duke of Klaipeda answered. “That is the way sensible men have employed them as long as they have been utilized in warfare.”
Skarnu was about to point out that the Algarvian way seemed to work better and therefore seemed more sensible when shouts came from the street. The young lieutenant dashed outside. When he came back a moment later, smiles wreathed his face. “Your Grace,” he cried, “they have a carriage to take you to the rear.”
“Oh, very good.” Marstalu pointed to his splinted leg, then to Skarnu. “My lord Marquis, will you be so kind as to help my aide get me to the said carriage?”
With one of the duke’s arms draped over each of them, Skarnu and the lieutenant did haul him to the carriage and heave him aboard. The lieutenant stuck his head into the carriage, spoke briefly with Marstalu, and then turned to Skarnu. “You and your company are to continue your stalwart defense, as before.”
“Aye,” Skarnu said in a hollow voice. The lieutenant mounted a unicorn. The carriage began to roll. Marstalu’s followers rode off with it. They left Skarnu and his men behind, to salvage what they could.
Count Sabrino peered down at the ground from atop his dragon. Thick woods hid some of the roughness of the terrain, but could not conceal it all. For generations, generals on both sides had been convinced these uplands on the northern part of the border between Algarve and Valmiera were too rugged for any large operations. King Mezentio’s men aimed to prove those generations of generals mistaken.
Had Sabrino swung his dragon so he could look more to the west, he would have seen the great columns of men and behemoths stretching back into Algarve. He didn’t bother; he knew they were there. His task, and that of his wing, was twofold: to keep Valmieran dragonfliers from spying on them as they deployed and to support them when they come out into the open country east of the uplands.
He had not seen many enemy dragons. Maybe the Valmierans were using all they had in the south, against the Algarvian assault and against the rebellious men of the Marquisate of Rivaroli. Maybe they didn’t have enough to cover all their frontier with Algarve. Maybe both those things were true. Sabrino hoped they were. If they were, Valmiera would soon get a nasty surprise.
“In fact,” Sabrino breathed, “I think the cursed Kaunians may be getting a nasty surprise just about now.” He patted the side of his dragon’s scaly neck, a gesture of affection altogether out of keeping with his usual annoyance at the beast he rode.
Down below, the wooded uplands gradually gave way to the flatter farming country of most of western Valmiera. And now he spied emerging from the woods the heads of the columns whose tails stretched back into Algarve. Behemoths trotted across newly planted fields, marking fresh paths easily visible from the air.
Sabrino whooped. “The blonds will know they’ve been diddled, all right!”
The behemoth crews started tossing eggs into the first villages they reached and blazing at the buildings in them with the heavy sticks the great animals carried. Wooden houses and shops burst into flames. Smoke rose in thick clouds. Sabrino nodded approval. The Valmierans might not think Mezentio’s men able to mount a major assault through the rough country lying between the two kingdoms, but they would have garrisons hereabouts.
And so they did. A behemoth went down, crushing some of the men who rode it. The rest perished when a Valmieran beam blazed through the metal-and-magic shell of an egg it carried. When that egg went up, it touched off the sorcerous energy stored in the others and in the heavy stick. The resulting blast of light made Sabrino close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, only a crater in the middle of the field showed where the behemoth and its crew had been.
But most of the others, and the mounted footsoldiers accompanying them, kept right on going forward. The dragoons entered the village. Before long, they came out the other side, rejoining the behemoths that had skirted the built-up area. The men who had held their horses brought them up so they could quickly move forward again. First tiny obstacles overcome, the advance rolled ahead like the oncoming tide.
Also like the tide, it left rubbish in its wake and pushed more along ahead of it. Not all the dots down there on the ground moved with military discipline and precision. Some were peasants and townsfolk, fleeing before King Mezentio’s soldiers as the ancient Kaunians must have fled before the fierce Algarvian invaders of another day—and as Algarvians had assuredly fled when Valmieran troops pushed into eastern Algarve.
Sabrino was tempted to order his wing to swoop down on the Valmieran refugees, to rake them with dragonfire. A less experienced officer would have done it, and would have been raked over the coals for it afterwards. Sabrino knew the Valmierans would finally be discovering they’d worried more about one attack when another was more important. They’d be rushing all the men and behemoths and dragons they could to the north, to try to stanch the breach. He didn’t want those dragons attacking his fliers with the advantage of altitude.
In any case, other, lower-flying, Algarvian dragons began dropping eggs on the roads and on the Valmierans clogging them. Sabrino nodded to himself. He’d been wise to resist temptation. The commanders were prepared for everything.
The first Valmieran dragons came winging their way out of the southeast less than half an hour later. Sabrino nodded again. Some Valmieran soldier in one of those little towns had had a crystal with him, and warned his comrades before he either died or ran away. The blonds had responded pretty quickly.
But they’d sent a boy to do a man’s job. They couldn’t have put more than a squadron of dragons in the air: more a reconnaissance force than one in any shape to fight hard. Sabrino laughed for joy as he signaled his wing to the attack. Even his dragon’s hiss seemed to have a gloating anticipation to it. He knew that was a product of his own imagination; dragons barely had the brains to know they were alive at the moment, and couldn’t possibly anticipate.
When the Valmierans realized how many Algarvian dragons they faced, some of them flew back the way they had come. The others soon wished they had. Sabrino and his men blazed some of the enemy fliers off their dragons’ necks. Other Valmierans perished in the dragon-to-dragon fights that always broke out in spite of everything fliers could do. A couple of his own men perished, too, which made him curse.
Later that afternoon, the Algarvians on the ground bumped into the first defenders who weren’t taken aback to find them there. The blonds held out in a small town and refused to yield. Sabrino laughed to watch the behemoths and mounted infantry simply go around the Valmieran strongpoint. If the enemy chose to come out from the town and fight, fine. If not, the strongpoint would soon wither on the vine. The Valmieran defenders, and the townsfolk with them, would get hungry in short order.
If everything had gone according to plan, ground troops would be laying out a dragon farm on this side of the uplands, so the wing wouldn’t have to fly all the way back to Algarve to land. Soon, he would have to find out if everything had gone as planned. His dragon was soaring more now, flapping less; it would be hard pressed to hold off a rested Valmieran beast.
He began to fly in an expanding spiral, still alert for enemy wardragons but also peering down to see if he could spy the promised dragon farm. When he did, he brought the dragon down to the ground. Handlers chained it to a stake. The rest of the fliers in his wing followed him down.
“We’ll need some beasts in the air,” Sabrino said worriedly to one of the handlers. “Some of my fliers should have mounts fresh enough to go back up.” He wondered if he was telling the truth; his dragon was almost worn enough to be docile, a striking measure of its exhaustion.
“Don’t worry about it, sir.” The fellow in leather protective gear pointed to the sky. Sure enough, more Algarvian dragons were flying up out of the west to take the place of the worn wing. The handler grinned. “So far, everything’s going just like it’s supposed to.”
“Isn’t it, though?” Sabrino murmured. In the Six Years’ War, nothing had gone as it was supposed to, either for Algarve or for her foes. They’d kept banging heads like a couple of rams till one side finally yielded. But the Algarvian army had had its own way in Forthweg, and everything here in Valmiera seemed to be working as the generals had drawn it on the map. Sabrino wondered how long that would last. He wondered how long it could last. For as long as it lasted, he—and Algarve—would enjoy it.
Another handler pushed up a cart full of chunks of meat thickly coated in red-orange powder: ground cinnabar, to give the dragons the quicksilver they needed. Along with the meat, the handler also set out a couple of lumps of yellow brimstone. Sabrino’s dragon stretched out its long, scaly neck and began to eat. The flier nodded; he’d expected nothing less. A dragon that wouldn’t eat wasn’t merely exhausted; it was at death’s door.
Sabrino fed himself, too. Supplies for the men had come forward along with those for their mounts, which proved everything was going according to plan. Gulping rough red wine and gnawing on a roll stuffed with ham and melon, Sabrino said, “I don’t think the yellow-hairs know what’s hit ‘em yet.”
“Here’s hoping you’re right, sir.” Captain Domiziano lifted his tin cup to turn the words into a toast. “We’ve got ‘em bending way forwards down south. Now we come around behind ‘em and give it to ‘em straight up the arse.”
“You’re a vulgarian, Domiziano,” Sabrino said, “nothing but a cursed vulgarian.”
“Why, thank you, sir,” the squadron leader said. He and his wing commander laughed together. While they sat on enemy soil drinking wine, life looked monstrous good.
It looked even better the next morning. Dragons were blessed—some would say cursed, for it made them more difficult to handle—with enormous powers of recuperation. When Sabrino climbed aboard his mount in predawn twilight, the beast was as stupid and bad-tempered and ready to fight anything that moved—except possibly him—as ever.
He took his wing of dragonfliers into the heavens before sunup. They flew southeast, in the direction from which day would break. Sabrino scanned the brightening sky ahead. Enemy dragons would be silhouetted against the glow, and easy to see from a long distance. But he spied none. Fighting on the ground had not waited for the sun to come up, either. Flashes from bursting eggs showed where the battle line lay. Sabrino whistled; the wind of his passage blew the sound away. King Mezentio’s men had moved miles since the evening before.
And the Algarvians were still moving forward. Here and there, the behemoths and the fast-moving mounted infantry accompanying them found obstacles: Valmieran fortresses (although not many, for they’d penetrated well beyond the border), garrisoned villages, stubborn companies or occasionally even regiments of Valmierans.
As they’d done the day before, as they’d learned to do in the Forthwegian campaign, they flowed around as many obstacles as they could. Where they had to fight, the behemoths did the bulk of the work. They would stand off from the opposition and use their egg-tossers and heavy sticks to fight at ranges from which the Valmierans, who mostly had weapons individual soldiers could carry, had trouble replying.
Every so often, the Valmierans would keep on fighting in spite of everything the Algarvian warriors on the ground could do. Then the crystallomancers sent out the call for help from above. Dragons would dive out of the sky and drop heavier eggs on the enemy. Few indeed were the times when the dragons had to drop eggs twice on the same target.
Algarvian dragons also swooped on Valmieran egg-tossers that hurled sorcerous energies at King Mezentio’s men. There were more of those as the day wore along, as the Kaunian kingdom slowly—too slowly—awoke to peril in the north. But the Algarvian advance rolled on, roughly paralleling the course of the middle reaches of the Soretto before that river bent from southeast to northeast but in any case well to the east of it: a spearthrust aimed straight at Valmiera’s heart.
Watching it from above, helping to drive off the Valmieran dragons that tried to check it, Sabrino grew sure on the second day of what he’d believed on the first. “They can’t stop us,” he told his dragon, and the beast did not argue with him.