Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“No.” For a moment, stark fear glinted in Ansovald’s eyes. Hajjaj was not afraid of Shazli; he liked the bright young man who ruled Zuwayza, as he’d liked Shazli’s father before him. But he’d thought he knew what Unkerlanters thought of their king, and what sort of power Swemmel enjoyed in this great, broad land. Now he saw he was right, and the seeing saddened him. Ansovald needed to gather himself before he could say, “It shall be as you wish. You may speak to your king.”

When things happened in Unkerlant, they happened with a furious energy that almost kept a stranger from noticing how often they did not happen at all. Not five minutes after Hajjaj had made his request, a crystallomancer stood beside him and-after a brief colloquy with Ansovald in Unkerlanter-spoke to him in halting Algarvian: “Your king, Excellency.”

“I see. Thank you.” Hajjaj sank down on a stool before the crystal that held Shazli’s image. “Your Majesty, let me give you the terms they will impose on us,” he said, switching to Zuwayzi.

“Go ahead,” Shazli answered in the same language. He stiffened ever so slightly, like a man bracing himself for a blow.

Hajjaj went through them one by one. Shazli asked a few questions; he answered them. When he was finished, he said, “Your Majesty, unless you order me not to do so, I shall accept these terms. I do not think we can do anything to improve them, and they are not so harsh as they might have been.” More than that he would not say, not when Swemmel surely had someone who spoke Zuwayzi listening to this conversation.

“They are not light, either,” Shazli said, which was also true. From a different kingdom, they might even have been reckoned onerous. But Swemmel was willing to leave Shazli on the throne and Zuwayza a kingdom in its own right. Had he chosen to go further, he could have. With a sigh, Shazli said, “I agree. Things being as they are, we must accept. Go ahead, your Excellency.”

“Thank you, your Majesty,” Hajjaj said. He turned to Ansovald and came back to the Algarvian they shared: “The king agrees, as I was sure he would. The terms are acceptable to Zuwayza.”

In a different kingdom, the ceremony would have been more elaborate.

Men from the leading news sheets would have crowded in to watch Hajjaj surrender. Here, what went into the news sheets came straight from Swemmel and his ministers anyway. Hajjaj signed the new treaty in a barren little palace antechamber, and had to remind Ansovald to get him a second copy so he could take it back to Bishah.

After he signed, he did get supper: an enormous plate of fatty boiled pork, boiled cabbage, and stewed parsnips. Ansovald got the same sort of supper, and consumed it with relish, washing it down with several mugs of ale. Food for a cold kingdom, Hajjaj thought. He ate what he could. It wasn’t badly prepared, but ran far from the direction his tastes usually took.

An enormous soft mattress with a prince’s ransom of wool blankets and fur coverlets was a bed for a cold kingdom, too. No matter how strange and foreign it felt to Hajjaj, though, he slept well that night. My kingdom will live. How could he toss and turn, with the relief that thought brought uppermost in his mind?

Colonel Sabrinohad not seen such a great wild melee of footsoldiers and, above all, of behemoths since the great battles in the Durrwangen bulge more than a year earlier. Now, though, the Unkerlanters and Algarvians were fighting east of Patras, between the Yaninan capital and the border between Yanina and Algarve. Swemmel’s men had broken through the Algarvian line with a great force of behemoths-whereupon the Algarvians at either end of the breakthrough, responding as smartly as they might have back in the days when they seemed to have the world on a string, fought toward one another and trapped the Unkerlanters who’d been overbold.

But whether the Unkerlanters would stay trapped was a different question. Peering down from his dragon, Sabrino shook his head in sour wonder. How many behemoths did Swemmel’s men have around the town of Mavromouni? Too many-he was certain of that. Had the trap really closed on them, or were they part of a trap closing on his countrymen?

Sabrino whacked his dragon with the goad. The beast screamed. It swung its head toward him on the end of its long, scaly neck. He whacked it again, harder. No matter what it thought, it wasn’t going to flame him out of the harness. He whacked it once more, and it dove toward the ground. The rest of his wing, what was left of it, followed.

Wind howled by him, a cold, nasty wind. The behemoths below swelled as if by sorcery. Before long, he saw that some of them had Yaninans aboard, not Unkerlanters. His lips drew apart in a mirthless grin. “You whoresons won’t get any more use out of them than we did,” he predicted.

However much he was tempted to attack the Yaninans for betraying Algarve, he didn’t. Without the Unkerlanters to stiffen them and give them the courage they would surely never find on their own, KingTsavellas ’ men were no great threat. They never had been, and they never would be. The Unkerlanters, on the other hand…

Sabrino chose his behemoth, and steered toward its tail. KingSwemmel ’s men aboard it had a moment to see horror diving on them, a moment in which to try to swing their personal sticks his way. One of them even got the chance to blaze, though wildly. Then Sabrino tapped the dragon on the side of the neck.

It was always glad to get the command to flame. Fire gushed from its jaws, engulfing the Unkerlanters and the behemoth they rode. Sabrino had had to wait till the dragon was almost on top of the behemoth before letting it flame. Algarve was desperately short of quicksilver these days, and without it dragonfire lost much of its heat and distance. That didn’t matter so much against behemoths, which had no hope of outrunning flame even at short range. Against Unkerlanter dragons, though, it was one more disadvantage to set beside a crushing disadvantage in numbers.

Against which, Algarve has… what? Sabrino wondered as the dragon clawed its way back up into the air again. Experience came to mind. He, for instance, had been flying dragons and commanding this wing since the day the war began. But so many dragonfliers were dead, and their replacements raw as any Unkerlanters.

They’re so young, Sabrino thought. It wasn’t that they were young enough to be his sons. Some of them were young enough to be his grandsons, he having fought in the Six Years’ War. They’re so young, and so brave. They’re braver than I am -powers above know that’s true. They go up there not knowing anything, and knowing they don’t know anything. But they go up anyway, with a smile, sometimes even with a song. I couldn‘t do that, not for anything.

Here came a swarm of Unkerlanter dragons, all in the dingy rock-gray paint that made them so hard to see, especially against autumn clouds. The men who flew them were better at what they did than they had been when the war was new. The Unkerlanters used many more crystals than they had in those days, and responded to trouble much more quickly. It made fighting a war against them look altogether too much like work.

But they held formation as rigidly as if they’d been glued together. That was how they’d been trained: to follow their leader and do as he did. Some few of them outgrew it and became pretty good dragonfliers. More, though, never learned. Sabrino wasted no pity on them. If they survived his lessons, they would pick up something. He hoped they didn’t.

“Melee!” he shouted into his crystal. “Break apart and melee!”

Against good dragonfliers in formation, the order would have been suicidal: break up a smaller force to oppose a larger, better-disciplined one? Madness, nothing but madness.