Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

But the dragonflier shook his head. “Just us, the dragons, and some eggs. No room for anything else.” A Kuusaman came up. The Lagoan grinned again. “Well, we brought some friends along, too.”

“I see.” Fernao nodded to the short, swarthy, Kuusaman. “Do you speak Lagoan?”

“Little bit,” the fellow replied. He shifted languages: “But I am more at home in classical Kaunian.”

“Ah. Excellent,” Fernao said in the same tongue. “Most of our officers will be able to talk with you. Some of them will speak Kuusaman, too, of course. I wish I knew more of it.”

“You wear the badge of a mage, is it not so?” the Kuusaman asked. Fernao nodded. The Kuusaman held out his hand, saying, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, sorcerous sir. This war will be won with magic as well as with footsoldiers and dragons and behemoths. I am called Tauvo.”

Clasping the proffered hand, Fernao gave his own name, and added, “My colleague here is Affonso.”

“I am pleased to know you both,” Tauvo said after shaking hands with Affonso, too. “Lagoan mages have made a good name for themselves.”

“So have those from the land of the Seven Princes,” Fernao said. Tauvo smiled, his teeth very white against his yellow-brown skin. Fernao’s praise hadn’t been altogether disinterested; he went on, “Kuusaman mages have done some very interesting work in theoretical sorcery lately.” It was work about which he knew less than he wanted, and work about which he’d tried without success to find out more. Maybe this Tauvo knew a little something.

If he did, he didn’t let on. His voice was bland as he answered, “I am sure you honor us beyond our worth. If you ask me about dragons, I can speak with something approaching authority.” He looked around, seeming to take in the grim, almost empty landscape for the first time. “What do dragons eat in this part of the world?”

“Camel meat, mostly,” Fernao answered. “That is what we eat, too, for the most part, unless you prefer ptarmigan.”

People called Kuusamans impassive. No matter what people called Kuusamans, Tauvo looked revolted. “I prefer neither.” His dark, narrow eyes went from Fernao to Affonso. “Do I guess that I may not have a choice?”

“Well, you could eat gnats and mosquitoes instead,” Affonso said. “But they are more likely to eat you.” Right on cue, Fernao slapped at something crawling on the back of his neck.

Tauvo slapped at something, too. “There do seem to be a good many bugs here,” he admitted. “They put me in mind of Pori, not far from the family home back in Kuusamo.”

“You should have seen them a month ago,” Fernao said. “They were three times as bad then.” Tauvo nodded politely, but Fernao wasn’t deceived: the dragonflier didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t have believed anyone who said such things, either, not without going through it.

Someone came running from the tent where Junqueiro’s crystallomancers worked. “Dragons!” he shouted. “Scouts to the west say Algarvian dragons are coming!”

Tauvo forgot Fernao and Affonso. He ran back to his dragon, shouting in his bad Lagoan at the soldiers who’d just helped him chain it to a spike driven into the ground so they’d help get the chain off. All the dragonfliers were scrambling aboard their mounts. They fought their way into the air one after another.

The Algarvians came over the Lagoan army before many of the newly arrived dragons had got very high. King Mezentio’s dragonfliers didn’t seem to be expecting any interference. The little force of dragons the Lagoans had had before had stayed out of their way. No longer. The scouts from the new arrivals attacked the Algarvians before King Mezentio’s men knew they were there. A couple of Algarvian dragons tumbled out of the sky. The cheers from the Lagoans on the ground made Fernao’s ears ring.

But the surprise didn’t last long. The Algarvians quickly rallied. They dropped their eggs-they’d been cursed quick about getting resupplied after the Lagoan raid-without bothering to aim. Some struck home among the Lagoan soldiers on the ground anyhow. Others tore up the grass and low bushes-many of which would have been trees in a warmer part of the world- all around the encampment.

Without the eggs, the Algarvian dragons were swifter and more maneuver-able. Their fliers had more experience in battle than the Lagoans or the Kuusamans. Before long, some of the newcomers went down. The others kept fighting, though, and the Algarvian dragons did not linger, but flew back off toward the west.

Fernao turned to Affonso, who’d again dived into the same muddy trench as he had. “Pretty soon, it won’t just be the Algarvians dropping eggs on us. We’ll be dropping eggs on them and the Yaninans, too.”

His fellow mage laughed. “If we drop eggs on the Yaninans, they’ll run away. That’s all they know how to do.”

“It’s all they’ve shown, anyhow,” Fernao agreed. “But the Algarvians, whatever else you say about them, stand and fight.”

“We’ll just have to lick them, then,” Affonso said. “Now we can do it, and there are more of us down here than there are Algarvians.” He laughed and shook his fist toward the west. “On to Heshbon!”

“More of us than Algarvians now, aye,” Fernao said. “But they can bring in reinforcements easier than we can.”

“Not if we take Heshbon before they do it,” Affonso returned.

Fernao thought his friend was unduly optimistic, but said, “Here’s hoping we can bring it off. If we have enough dragons, maybe …”

Leudast counted himself lucky to be alive. He’d had that feeling any number of times when fighting the Algarvians, but rarely more so than now. The summer before, he knew he’d been fortunate to escape from a couple of the pockets the redheads had formed on the plains of northern Unkerlant. But getting out of the pocket south of Aspang hadn’t taken just good fortune; it had required something uncommonly like a miracle.

He chewed on a lump of black bread, then turned to Captain Hawart and said, “Sir, we’re in trouble again.”

“I wish I could say you were wrong,” Hawart answered around his own mouthful of bread. Both men sat on somewhat drier high ground in the middle of a swamp along with perhaps a hundred Unkerlanter soldiers-so far as Leudast knew, all the survivors from Hawart’s regiment. Mournfully, the captain said, “If only we’d known they were getting their own attack ready back there.”

“Aye, if only,” Leudast echoed. “It’s nothing but luck any of us are left alive, you ask me. We didn’t have enough of anything to stop them once they got gliding down the ley line.”

As if to underscore his words, a dragon screeched, not too high overhead. He looked up. The dragon was painted in Algarvian colors. Leudast stayed where he was. Bushes and scrubby trees helped hide the Unkerlanters in the swamp from the dragonfliers’ prying eyes. Leudast’s rock-gray tunic, now stained with grass and dirt, was a good match for the mud and shrubs all around.

After another screech, the dragon flew on. “Here’s hoping the whoreson didn’t spy us,” Leudast said.

Captain Hawart shrugged. “We can’t stay here forever, not unless we want to turn into irregulars.”

“We can eat frogs and roots and such for a long time, sir,” Leudast said. “The Algarvians’d have a cursed hard time digging us out.”

“I know that,” Hawart answered. “But there’s a bigger war going on than the one for this stretch of swamp, and I want to be a part of it.”

Leudast wasn’t so sure he wanted to be a part of it. He’d risked his neck too many times, and come too close to getting killed. Sitting here in a place the redheads would have a hard time reaching suited him fine. He would have liked it better with more food and a drier place to sleep, but, as he’d said, Unkerlanter peasants could get by on very little.