Harry Turtledove: Out of the Darkness

“Of course, sir,” the crystallomancer said. “But no, sir, there aren’t. You know how thin we’re stretched these days.”

“Don’t I just?” Sabrino turned back to Orosio. “Do you think we can get them into the air again, Captain?”

“I suppose so, sir,” the squadron commander answered. “Powers above help us if the Unkerlanters hit us with fresh beasts while we’re in the air, though-or even the Yaninans.”

“Or even the Yaninans,” Sabrino echoed with a sour smile. Tsavellas’ small kingdom lay between Algarve and Unkerlant. He’d taken Yanina into the Derlavaian War as Algarve’s ally-not that Yaninan soldiers had covered themselves with glory on the austral continent or in Unkerlant. And, when Unkerlanter soldiers poured into Yanina, Tsavellas had switched sides with revoltingly good timing. With another sour smile, Sabrino went on, “As we said, we have to do what we can. Let’s go do it.”

His dragon-handler squawked in dismay when he reappeared. His dragon screamed in brainless fury-the only kind it had-when he took his place once more at the base of its long, scaly neck. More handlers brought a couple of eggs to fasten under its belly. It didn’t claw at them, though Sabrino couldn’t figure out why.

“Keep feeding it,” he told the handler, who tossed the dragon chunks of meat covered with crushed brimstone and cinnabar to make it flame hotter and farther. Algarve was desperately short of cinnabar these days. Sabrino wondered what his kingdom would do when it ran out altogether. What will we do? We’ll do without, that’s what.

Before long, all twenty-one dragonfliers were aboard their mounts. The wing had a paper strength of sixty-four, and hadn’t been anywhere close to it since the opening days of the war against Unkerlant. Stretched too thin, Sabrino thought again. He nodded to the handler, who undid the chain that held the dragon to an iron stake. Sabrino whacked the beast with an iron-tipped goad. With another scream of fury, the dragon sprang into the air, batwings thundering. The rest of the men he led followed, each dragon painted in a different pattern of Algarve’s green, red, and white.

With low clouds overhead, the wing had to stay close to the ground if it wanted to find its target. You can’t let Unkerlanters gain a bridgehead. Sabrino knew that as well as every other Algarvian officer. King Swemmel’s men were too cursed good at bursting out of such abscesses in the front when they judged the time ripe.

Orosio’s image appeared, tiny and perfect, in the crystal Sabrino carried. “There’s the bridge, sir,” he said. “On the bend of the river, a little north of us.”

Sabrino turned his head to the right. “Aye, I see it,” he said, and guided his dragon toward it. “The wing will follow me in the attack. With a little luck, the rain will weaken the beams from the Unkerlanters’ heavy sticks.” They would know the Algarvians had to wreck a bridge if they could, and they would want to stop Mezentio’s men from doing it. That meant blazing dragons from the sky, if they could manage it.

As Sabrino guided his dragon into a dive toward the bridge snaking across the Skamandros, the Unkerlanters on the ground did start blazing at him. He was the lead man: he drew the beams. He could hear raindrops and sleet sizzling into steam as beams burned through them. When one passed close, he smelled a breath’s worth of lightning in the air. Had it struck. . But it missed.

Below him, the bridge swelled with startling speed. He released the eggs under his dragon’s belly, then urged the beast higher into the air once more. He saw the flashes of sorcerous energy and heard the roars as the eggs burst behind him. More flashes and roars said his dragonfliers were striking the bridge, too.

He twisted in his harness, trying to see what had happened. He let out a whoop on spotting what was left of the bridge: three or four eggs had burst right on it. “You bastards will be a while fixing that!” he shouted, and turned his dragon back toward the farm in what passed for triumph these days. Only eighteen dragons landed with his. The bridge had cost the other two, and the men who flew them. It was, unquestionably, a victory. But how many more such “victories” could Algarve afford before she had no dragonfliers left?

Lieutenant Leudast stared glumly east across the Skamandros River. The river, running harder than usual because of the late-fall rains and not yet ready to freeze over, had stalled Unkerlant’s armies longer than its commanders would have wanted. Artificers were supposed to have bridged it by now, but Algarvian dragons had put paid to that. Now the artificers, or those of them the attack from the air hadn’t killed, were trying again.

Captain Drogden came up to Leudast. Drogden was a rugged forty; like Leudast himself, he’d seen a lot of war. He headed the regiment of which Leudast commanded a company. Both of them wore hooded capes over their tunics, and both of them had the hoods up to fight the freezing rain. Both of them also wore wool leggings, wool drawers, and stout felt boots. Cold was one thing Unkerlanter warriors knew how to beat.

“Maybe we’ll get it across this time,” Drogden said, peering through the nasty rain at the artificers at work.

“Maybe.” Leudast didn’t sound convinced. “But not if the stinking redheads send more dragons and we haven’t got any on patrol. That wasn’t what you’d call efficient.” King Swemmel had tried mightily to make efficiency Unkerlant’s watchword. His subjects mouthed his slogans-inspectors made sure of that- but they had a good deal of trouble living up to them.

Captain Drogden rubbed his nose. Like Leudast-like most Unkerlanters- he boasted a fine hooked beak, one that was sometimes vulnerable to cold weather. He said, “I hear there’s a new commander at the closest dragon farm. The old commander’s gone to a penal battalion.”

“Oh,” Leudast said, and said no more. Once in a while, the men who fought in a penal battalion escaped it by conspicuous, death-defying heroism. Far more often, they simply died softening up tough Algarvian positions so the soldiers who followed them in the attack got a better chance of success.

“Chief dowser almost went with him,” Drogden added.

“Rain must have saved the mage,” Leudast said. His superior nodded. Dowsers spotted dragons at long range by sorcerously detecting the motion of their wingbeats. Finding that motion in the midst of millions of raindrops taxed dowsing rods, spells, and the men who used them.

A gang of Yaninan peasants squelched by, carrying timbers for the Unkerlanter artificers and their bridge-building. The Yaninans were as swarthy as Unkerlanters, but they were mostly lean men with long faces, not stocky men with broad cheekbones. They grew bushy mustaches, where Leudast and his countrymen shaved when they got the chance. They wore tight tunics, trousers so tight they were almost leggings, and, absurdly, shoes with pompoms on them. They also wore unhappy expressions at being shepherded along by a couple of Unkerlanter soldiers with sticks.

“Our allies,” Leudast said scornfully.

Drogden nodded. “As long as we don’t turn our backs on them, anyhow. Powers below eat them for kicking us when we were down, and for getting away with switching sides when they did. We could have smashed them right along with the redheads.”

“Probably, sir,” Leudast agreed. “But the way I look at it is like this: their whole fornicating kingdom is a penal battalion these days. And they know it, too-look at their faces.”

The regimental commander thought about that, then laughed and nodded and slapped Leudast on the back. “A penal kingdom,” Drogden said. “I like that, curse me if I don’t. You’re dead right. King Swemmel will find a way to make them pay.”