Harry Turtledove: Out of the Darkness

“Of course he will,” Leudast said. Both men took care to speak as if they were paying the king a huge compliment. No one in Unkerlant dared speak of Swemmel any other way. You never could tell who might be listening. One of the oldest sayings in Unkerlant was, When three men conspire, one is a fool and the other two are royal inspectors. It held a lot of truth under any king who ruled from Cottbus. Under Swemmel, who’d had to win a civil war against his twin brother before taking the throne, and who scented plots whether they were there or not, it might as well have been a law of nature.

A few eggs burst, perhaps a quarter of a mile away: Algarvian egg-tossers, feeling for the new bridge. The bursts weren’t particularly close to it, either. A couple of the Yaninans in the work gang dropped the log they were carrying and made as if to run. One of the soldiers with them blazed a puff of steam from the wet ground in front of them. They probably didn’t understand his curses, but that message needed no translation. They picked up the log and went back to work.

“Surprised he didn’t blaze ‘em,” Drogden remarked.

“Aye,” Leudast said. “Back when the war was new-when we moved into Forthweg, or we’d just started fighting the Yaninans-I’d’ve taken cover when I heard bursts that close. I know better than to bother now. Those dumb buggers don’t.”

“You’ve been in it from the start?” Drogden asked.

“I sure have, sir,” Leudast answered. “Before the start, even-I was fighting the Gongs in the Elsung Mountains, way out west, when Algarve’s neighbors declared war on her. I was in Forthweg when the redheads jumped on our back, and I’ve been trying to kill those whoresons ever since. They’ve been trying to kill me, too, but they only blazed me twice. Add it all up and I’ve been pretty lucky.”

“Matter of fact, they’ve got me twice, too,” Drogden said. “Once in the leg, and once-” He held up his left hand. Till he did it, Leudast hadn’t noticed he was missing the last two joints of that little finger.

“Were you in from the very beginning, too?” Leudast asked him.

“I’ve been in the army since then, aye, but I only went to the front a year and a half ago,” Drogden said.

“Really?” Leudast said. “You don’t mind my asking, sir, how did you manage to stay away so long?” Who kept you safe? went through his mind. So did, Who finally got angry enough at you to make you come work for a living like everybody else?

But Drogden said, “For a long time, I was in charge of one of the big behemoth-breeding farms in the far southwest. It was crazy there, especially after the redheads started overrunning so many of the farms here in the east. We were getting breeding stock and fodder out as best we could, and sending the animals and everything else across the kingdom so we could go on breeding them in places where the enemy’s dragons couldn’t reach. We did it, aye, but it wasn’t easy.”

“I believe that, ” Leudast said. There had been plenty of times, the first year and a half of the war, when he’d wondered if the kingdom would hold together. There had been more than a few times when he’d feared it wouldn’t. He went on, “You had an important job, sir. What are you doing here?”

With a shrug, Drogden replied, “They replaced me with a man who knew behemoths but who’d lost an arm. He couldn’t fight any more, but he could be useful in my old slot. That freed me up to go into battle. Efficiency.”

“Efficiency,” Leudast echoed. For once, he didn’t feel like a hypocrite saying it. The move Captain Drogden described made good sense, even if he might have preferred to stay thousands of miles away from the war. On the other hand. . “Uh, sir? Why didn’t they put you in among the behemoth-riders, if you were in charge of a breeding farm?”

“Actually, I trained as a footsoldier,” Drogden answered. “Raising behemoths was the family business. I joined the army because I didn’t feel like going into it.” He laughed a brief, sardonic laugh. “Things don’t always work out the way you plan.”

“That’s true enough,” Leudast agreed. A couple of more Algarvian eggs burst. These were a little closer, but not enough to get excited about. He went on, “If things had worked out the way the redheads planned, they’d have marched into Cottbus before the snow fell that first winter of the war.”

“You’re right,” Drogden said. “From what I’ve seen, Mezentio’s men are almost as smart as they think they are. That makes them pretty cursed dangerous, on account of they really are a pack of smart buggers.”

“We’ve seen that, curse them,” Leudast said.

His regimental commander nodded. “Sometimes, though, they think they can do more than they really can. That’s when we’ve made ‘em pay. And now, by the powers above, they’ll pay plenty.”

“Aye.” Savage hunger filled Leudast’s voice. Like almost all Unkerlanter soldiers who’d seen what the Algarvians had done with-done to-the part of his kingdom they’d occupied, he wanted Algarve to suffer as much or more.

Drogden looked up to the dripping sky. A raindrop hit him in the eye. He rubbed at his face as he said, “I hope the weather stays bad. The worse it is, the more trouble the Algarvians will have hitting that bridge-and however many others we’re building across the Skamandros.”

“When the bad weather comes, that’s always been our time.” Leudast started to say something more-to say that, if not for Unkerlant’s dreadful winters, the redheads might well have taken Cottbus-but held his tongue. Drogden might have reckoned that criticism of King Swemmel. The fewer chances you took, the fewer risks you ran. Leudast looked across the Skamandros again. Facing the enemy, he had to take chances. Facing his friends, he didn’t.

Sunshine greeted him when he woke up the next morning. At first, he took that with a shrug. But then, remembering Captain Drogden’s words, he cursed. The business ends of some large number of heavy sticks poked up to the sky on the west bank of the Skamandros. Any Algarvian dragons that did dive on the bridge wouldn’t have an easy time of it. Mezentio’s dragonfliers hadn’t had it easy the last time they attacked, either, but they’d wrecked the bridge.

Leudast ordered his own company forward, all the way up to the edge of the river. The beams from their sticks couldn’t blaze a dragon from the sky without the wildest luck, but they might wound or even kill a dragonflier. That was worth trying. “The Algarvians will throw everything they’ve got at us,” he warned his men. “They can’t afford to let us get a foothold on the far side of the Skamandros.”

As if to underscore his words, a flight of Unkerlanter dragons, all painted the same rock-gray as his uniform tunic and cloak, flew low over the river to pound the Algarvian positions on the eastern side. The soldiers nodded approvingly. If the redheads were catching it, they would have a harder time dishing it out.

And when the Algarvian strike at the bridge came, Leudast didn’t even notice it at first. One dragon, flying so high that it seemed only a speck in the sky? He was tempted to laugh at Mezentio’s men. A few of the heavy sticks blazed at it. Most didn’t bother. They had no real hope of bringing it down, not from that height.

He didn’t see the two eggs the dragon dropped, either, not till they fell far enough to make them look larger. “Looks like they’ll land on the redheads,” one of his men said, pointing. “Serve ‘em right, the bastards.”

But it did not do to depend on the Algarvians to be fools. As the eggs neared the ground, they suddenly seemed to swerve in midair, and those swerves brought them down square on the bridge over the Skamandros. A long length of it tumbled into the river. “What sort of sorcery is that?” Leudast howled.