Harry Turtledove - Through the Darkness

“Go home!” the Algarvian lieutenant said again, shouting this time. Then he made an enormous mistake, adding, “In the name of King Mainardo, I order you to go home!” Mainardo was Mezentio of Algarve’s younger brother, put on the throne here after the redheads conquered Jelgava.

A moment of silence followed. People stopped shouting, “The arch! The arch! The arch!” When they resumed, they had a new cry: “Donalitu! Donalitu! Donalitu!” Talsu joined it, roaring out the name of Jelgava’s rightful king.

Even as he roared, he wondered at the passion for King Donalitu that had seized everyone, himself included. The king had been more feared than loved while he sat on Jelgava’s throne, and with reason: he’d ground down the commoners, and flung them into dungeons if they complained. In spite of that, though, he was a Jelgavan, not a redheaded usurper kept on the throne by redheaded invaders.

Instead of shouting again for the Jelgavans to go home, the Algarvian lieutenant tried a different ploy. “Stand aside!” he yelled. “Let us by!”

That would have left the square to the Jelgavans, the biggest victory they’d have had in Skrunda since their kingdom fell to Mezentio’s men. But it didn’t feel like enough to Talsu. It didn’t seem to feel like enough to anybody. People didn’t move aside. They cried out Donalitu’s name louder and more fervently than ever. In a moment, the brawl would start; Talsu could feel it.

Something in the air-a small hiss, right at the edge of hearing. Talsu’s body knew what it was before his brain did. He pushed Gailisa to the cobbles and lay down on top of her as the first egg burst no more than a couple of furlongs away. All through the square, young men, both Jelgavan and Algarvian, were going to the ground even before the egg burst. They’d all known combat in the recent past, and retained the reflexes that had kept them alive.

More eggs fell on Skrunda, some farther from the square, some nearer. The bursts were like thunderclaps, battering Talsu’s ears. “Where are they coming from?” Gailisa shouted. “Who’s dropping them?”

“I don’t know,” Talsu answered, and then, as she tried to struggle to her feet, “Powers above, sweetheart, stay down!”

No sooner had he said that than an egg burst right in the market square. The blast picked him up, then slammed him back down onto Gailisa-and onto the cobbles. His wounded side howled agony.

Shrieks all through the square said his side was a small thing. He knew too well what eggs could do. He’d never expected them to do it in Skrunda, though. They kept falling, too, more or less at random. Another one burst near the square. More people cried out as fragments of the egg’s shell tore into their flesh.

Only when no more eggs had burst for several minutes did Talsu say, “I think we can get up now.”

“Good,” Gailisa said. “You squashed me flat, and my back will be all over bruises from the stones.” But when she did get up, she forgot her own aches as soon as she saw what the eggs had done to others. She shut her eyes, then seemed to make herself open them again. “So this is war.” Her voice was grim and distant.

“Aye,” Talsu said. The Algarvian lieutenant lay groaning not ten feet away, clutching at a badly gashed leg. Before the eggs started falling, Talsu would gladly have bashed in his head with a cobblestone. Now he stooped and tore at the fellow’s kilt to make a bandage for his wound.

“My thanks,” the redhead said through lips bloody where he’d bitten them.

Talsu didn’t much want his thanks. He did want to learn what he could. “Who did this?” he demanded.

The Algarvian lieutenant shrugged and winced. “Air pirates,” he answered, which told Talsu little. But he went on, “Kuusamo and Lagoas can carry dragons in ships. Did not expect them so far north.”

“Why would they do it?” Talsu asked. “Why-this?”

With another shrug, the Algarvian said, “They fight us. You-you are only in the way.” Talsu scowled at that cavalier dismissal. But the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. In this war, anyone and everyone unlucky enough to be in the way got trampled.

Trasone tramped through the wheat fields surrounding a medium-sized town-no one had bothered telling him its name-somewhere in southern Unkerlant. A few of King Swemmel’s soldiers blazed at the advancing Algarvians from hastily dug holes.

As Trasone got down on his belly to crawl forward, Major Spinello cried out, “Behemoths!” Spinello sounded gleeful, so Trasone guessed they were Algarvian behemoths. The battalion commander wouldn’t have been so cheerful had the great beasts belonged to Unkerlant.

Sure enough, eggs from the tossers the behemoths carried on their backs began bursting on the Unkerlanter soldiers ahead. Before long, the Unkerlanters stopped blazing. Trasone didn’t raise his head right away. Swemmel’s men were sneaky whoresons. They might well have been waiting for unwary Algarvians to show themselves so they could pick them off.

But Spinello yelled, “Come on-they’re finished!” Trasone raised up far enough to see the battalion commander striding briskly toward the town. Muttering, Trasone got to his feet, too. Spinello was brave, all right, but he was also liable to get himself killed, and some of his men with him.

Not this time, though. Spinello and his soldiers went forward, and so did the behemoths. They came out of the wheat fields and onto the road leading into the town. Refugees fleeing the Algarvians already clogged the road. Seeing more Algarvians coming up behind them, they began to scatter.

Dragons swooped down on them just then, dropping eggs that flung bodies aside like broken dolls. And then they flew on to drop more eggs on the town ahead. The behemoths charged through the Unkerlanter fugitives who were still fleeing down the road. For once in this war, the behemoths’ iron-shod horns found targets. The soldiers on the beasts whooped and cheered as they ran down one peasant after another.

“That’s how things go,” Sergeant Panfilo said cheerfully. “You get in the way, you get flattened-and you deserve it, too.”

“Oh, aye, no doubt about that,” Trasone agreed. He was a big, broad-shouldered young man, almost as burly as an Unkerlanter. “We’ve flattened a lot of the buggers, too.” He looked ahead. More plains, more fields, more forests, more towns, more villages-seemingly forever. “But we’ve still got a deal of flattening to finish, we do.”

“Too right,” Panfilo said. “Too bloody right. Well, we’re gaining again.” He pointed ahead. “Look. The dragons have gone and set the town afire.”

“Aye,” Trasone said. “I hope they cook a regiment’s worth in there, but I don’t suppose they will. The Unkerlanters aren’t standing up to us the way they did last summer. I think we’ve got ‘em on the run.”

“They aren’t battling they way they did, that’s sure enough,” Panfilo agreed. “Maybe the fight’s finally leaking out of ‘em-or maybe they’re falling back toward wherever they’re going to make a stand.”

“Now there’s a cheery thought,” Trasone said. “Here’s hoping the Unkerlanters don’t have it. Wouldn’t you like things to be easy for once?”

“Oh, that I would,” Panfilo answered. “But you’ve been doing this a long time by now. How often are things easy?”

“Valmiera was easy,” Trasone said.

“That makes once,” the sergeant told him. Trasone nodded. They both let out noises that might have been grunts or might have been laughs, then got back to the serious business of marching again.

Not all the Unkerlanter soldiers had run off toward the west. Some egg-tossers the dragons hadn’t wrecked started lobbing eggs at the advancing Algarvians. Somebody not too far from Trasone went down with a scream. Trasone shivered as he tramped past the wounded man. It could have been him as easily as not, and he knew as much.