Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

The lieutenant leading the motley little group of which Sidroc was a part must have had the same thought. He didn’t let them get close enough to the wrecked caravan to be ordered to help shift it. They just went on their way, one band among many without much hope but without much choice, either. With only one choice, in fact: Break out or die.

More dragons appeared overhead. Sidroc promptly dove into the crater a bursting egg had left behind. His comrades took cover, too. He waited for more eggs to fall, for the earth to shake at their bursts, for the screams of wounded men to start. Nothing of the sort happened. After a moment, the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera said, “Those are Algarvian dragons.”

Algarvian dragonshad flown over the Mandelsloh pocket before, but not very often. When they did, they sometimes dropped food or medicines for the soldiers. Sidroc looked, up to the sky with sudden hope. The thought of getting his hands on a food package made his belly growl and his mouth water.

But no food parcels plummeted down. In a way, they were only cruel hoaxes, since the dragons couldn’t possibly bring in enough even to come close to supplying all the men trapped around Mandelsloh. Every little bit helped someone, though.

Instead of food packets, leaves of paper fluttered in the air, slowly dancing toward the ground. Sidroc grunted. “What sort of lies are they telling us?” he asked nobody in particular. The Unkerlanters sometimes dropped leaflets urging their foes to surrender and promising them good treatments if they did. The leaflets would have been much more persuasive had those foes not known what had happened to Raniero of Grelz.

Sidroc didn’t even have to climb out of his hole to get his hands on a leaflet. Two of them swirled down into the crater; one hit him in the shoulder. He grabbed it and turned it right side up.

Soldiers of Algarve, help is on the way! it read. A strong counterattack from the east has been launched to regain contact with you and reestablish the front in this area. We expect your rescuers to fight their way through the forces of the barbarous foe and join you within two days’ time. You are urged to break out toward the east to aid this movement and to insure that it is crowned with success no matter what the result of the attack fom the rescuing units.

He read it through twice. He spoke Algarvian better than he read it. But there still didn’t seem any room for doubt. “They’re going to try,” he said as he came out of the crater. “They’re going to try, but they don’t think they can do it.”

“That’s what it sounds like to me, too,”SergeantWerferth said. The Algarvian lieutenant nodded. He read Algarvian perfectly well. And he also had no trouble reading between the lines.

The Kaunian from Valmieran was holding a leaflet, too. “This attack of theirs will make the Unkerlanters turn away from us,” he said in his odd accent. “This will give us a better chance.”

He was probably right. He was, in fact, almost certainly right. But his being right didn’t turn the better chance into a good one. Nevertheless… Sidroc started tramping east. “We’d better get moving,” he said. “We want to break out while they’re still trying to break in.”

No one argued with him. The other soldiers emerged from their holes and slogged east, too. They weren’t any sort of formal unit, just a double handful of men thrown together by chaos. They clung to one another now, though, as if they’d fought shoulder to shoulder for years.

Until, that is, they tramped past the wreckage of what the Algarvians called a special camp. Eggs had hurled the neat rows of sacrificed corpses this way and that. Several days in the sun had turned them black and bloated and stinking. But they were all unquestionably blond.

Sidroc stared at the Kaunian from the Phalanx of Valmiera. What was he thinking? Whatcould he be thinking? Had Sidroc been the Algarvian lieutenant, he wouldn’t have waited around to find out. He would have run for his life.

The blond looked at the stick he carried. Sidroc thought about running for his life even though he wasn’t the Algarvian lieutenant. Slowly, the Valmieran said, “Algarve gave me this stick to fight Unkerlant. Fighting Unkerlant is the most important thing.”

Everybody relaxed. Sidroc realized he hadn’t been the only anxious trooper. He glanced over at the Valmieran. His private opinion was that the fellow was a little bit crazy. But then, if he weren’t a little bit crazy himself, why the demon had he signed up for Plegmund’s Brigade?

Crazy or not, he’d read that leaflet right. However hard the Algarvians farther east were trying to break into the Mandelsloh pocket, the Unkerlanters were holding them away. That meant his comrades and he had to break out, to make their own way toward the men fighting to link up with them. It meant the army in the pocket had to leave most of their weapons behind. It meant, in the end, that Sidroc had to throw away his stick and his uniform and swim fifty yards across a freezing river.

But there were Algarvians on the other side of it. They hauled him out of the water and gave him spirits and dry clothes-a short tunic and kilt, but that couldn’t be helped. And they did the same for the blond from the Phalanx of Valmiera. Exhausted, shivering, half drunk-the spirits went straight to his head-Sidroc stuck out a hand. The Kaunian clasped it.

Ealstan didn’t need long to discover that raising a revolt against the Algarvians in Eoforwic was not so simple as sorcerously disguising himself as a redhead and going off to assassinate somebody. Maybe his comrades and he had hurt the Algarvians with that murder. He hoped so. But Mezentio’s men had found somebody else to put in the dead man’s slot, and they went right on about the business of grinding the rebellion into the dust.

Reporting to Pybba one morning, Ealstan pointed west across the Twe-gen and angrily demanded, “What in blazes are the Unkerlanters waiting for? We’re tying up powers above only know how many brigades of Algarvians for them. Why don’t they cross the river and help us?”

Since the uprising started, Pybba looked to have aged ten years. His voice was grim as he answered, “There’s no good reason. I can think of a couple of bad reasons, if you want ‘em.”

“Go ahead,” Ealstan said.

“All right. First thing that springs to mind is that they’re letting the Algarvians solve their Forthwegian problem for ‘em. A Forthwegian who’d fight the redheads’d fight Swemmel’s buggers, too, so they may reckon a lot of us are better off dead.”

Ealstan grunted. That made entirely too much sense. He said, “The same way we let the Algarvians solve our Kaunian problem for us, eh?”

“Aye, just like that,” Pybba answered, before realizing exactly what Ealstan had said. When he did, he glared. “Funny fellow. Ha, ha.”

“I wasn’t joking,” Ealstan said. “How is it different?”

“Shut up,” the pottery magnate said in a flat, hard voice. “Just shut up. I don’t have time to argue with you. If you want to be a Kaunian-lover once we don’t have the stinking Algarvians on our hands, fine, go right ahead. For now, though, you’d cursed well better keep in mind which is more important.”

In that moment, Ealstan hated him: hated him with a hatred all the more bitter because Pybba was his own countryman and they would never, ever see eye-to-eye on this. Ealstan had to take a deep breath to keep from telling the pottery magnate exactly what he thought of him. By the look on Pybba’s face, he thought the same thing of Ealstan.

“Tell me what you need from me,” Ealstan said at last. “I’ll go do it, and then we won’t have to have anything to do with each other for a while.”