Harry Turtledove: Jaws of Darkness

Forward Sidroc went, on snowshoes because some of the drifts were higher than his head. His sigh briefly raised a young fogbank around his face. In Gromheort, whole winters would go by without snow on the ground. In Unkerlant, it sometimes seemed a day couldn’t pass without a new blizzard.

“Mezentio!” Sidroc shouted as he slogged forward. “Hurrah forKingMezentio!” He yelled in Algarvian, not Forthwegian. Plegmund’s Brigade might have been named for a Forthwegian king, but it used the occupiers’ language. Yelling in Algarvian also lessened the chances that a redhead would take him for an Unkerlanter and blaze him by mistake. He and his countrymen looked more like the enemy than they resembled their allies and paymasters.

The Unkerlanters holed up in the hamlet ahead didn’t intend to be run out. They had a couple of egg-tossers in there, and hurled death back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians with them. The eggs burst when they struck, releasing blasts of sorcerous energy and sending fragments of their metal eggshells whistling through the air like flying scythe blades.

When eggs started bursting close to Sidroc, he flopped down on his belly in the snow. Chunks of sharp metal screeched past above his head. Not far away, somebody shrieked and then started cursing in Forthwegian. Cursing was something not subject to military discipline.

“Urra!” shouted the Unkerlanters in the village. “Swemmel! KingSwem-mel! Urra!” Their word forking wasn’t much different from Sidroc’s; he understood it. The Unkerlanters sounded raucous and drunk. Sidroc had some spirits in a flask on his belt, too. He wish he were drunk stupid and mean. He didn’t have enough in the flask for that, worse luck.

“Forward!” the Algarvian officer shouted again. “We have to keep moving. We have to drive them back. Herbornwill be ours again.”

Herborn was the capital of the Duchy of Grelz. Herborn had been the capital of the Algarvian puppet Kingdom of Grelz till Swemmel’s soldiers recaptured it a couple of months before. They’d capturedKingRaniero, too-the cousin Mezentio had put on the throne of Grelz: captured him and boiled him alive.

“Mezentio!” Sidroc yelled, and got to his feet again.

“Mezentio!” Ceorl snowshoed forward beside him. Like more than a few men who’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade, he’d been a robber, a bandit, before. The Algarvians weren’t fussy about such things, not even a little.

Eggs fell on the village, too, kicking up fountains of snow. Sidroc whooped when some of the thatch-covered roofs caught fire, sending columns of black smoke into the gray sky. Unkerlanter soldiers ran through the streets. They were awkward and bowlegged on their snowshoes, just as Sidroc was on his. He raised his stick to his shoulder, thrust his right index finger out through the open seam in his mitten, and rammed it into the stick’s activation hole. The beam leaped forth from the other end. He hoped it bit an Unkerlanter.

Swemmel’s soldiers were blazing back at the men of Plegmund’s Brigade and the Algarvians, too. Puffs of steam rose from the snow where their beams missed Sidroc and his comrades. The screams that rang out said not all the beams had missed. Sidroc did his best not to think about that, even when a beam zipped past his head so close, he smelled thunderstorms for a moment.

A few inches more to the left, and… Sidroc shook his head. I’m notthinking about that, curse it.

He spied more movement in the village. He raised his stick again, then lowered it, swearing as vilely as he could.

SergeantWerferthsaw that movement, too, and also knew it for what it was. “Behemoths!” he shouted in Algarvian, and followed that with his own foul Forthwegian. Werferth was no youngster looking for adventure like Sidroc, nor a ruffian two jumps ahead of the constables like Ceorl. He’d been a sergeant in the Forthwegian army before the Algarvians smashed it. As far as Sidroc could see, he’d joined Plegmund’s Brigade simply because he liked being a soldier. He would never make officer’s rank, not in the Brigade-he wasn’t an Algarvian. Of course, he wouldn’t have made officer’s rank in the Forthwegian army, either-he wasn’t a nobleman.

But Sidroc didn’t have much time to worry about Werferth. The behemoths, now, they were really something to worry about. They lumbered forward, each one with enormous snowshoes on its feet, each one with a surcoat that made it harder to spot flapping over its chainmail, each one with its great curved horn sheathed in iron to make it all the more sharp and deadly-and each one mounting a crew of armored Unkerlanters who served either a heavy stick or an egg-tosser that made the behemoth deadly far beyond the reach of its horn.

Sidroc threw himself down in the snow again. A footsoldiercould blaze down a behemoth-if he put a beam right in its eye. What were the odds? Not worth betting. He tried to knock over the Unkerlanter footsoldiers who ran forward with the beasts. He had a better chance of that.

“Where areour behemoths?” he shouted. Eggs burst around the Unkerlanter animals, but only a direct hit was likely to slay one. The best way to fight behemoths was with other behemoths.

“Whereare our behemoths?” That was Ceorl, and that was alarm in his voice. The summer before, Algarve had lost far more behemoths than she could afford to lose, trying to smash the Unkerlanter salient around the town of Durrwangen. Since then, the redheads hadn’t had enough to meet the Unkerlanters’ onslaught-which was one great reason Swemmel’s soldiers had pushed so far east since the battles around Durrwangen. The Algarvians had come up with a fair number of behemoths for the counterattack aimed at Herborn-which was one great reason Mezentio’s soldiers had been able to head west again. juvs of

If, however, they didn’t get some behemoths right here pretty soon, some of Mezentio’s soldiers and a good many Forthwegians who’d been rash enough to join them were going to have a very thin time of it indeed.

An egg burst right on top of an Unkerlanter behemoth. All the eggs it had been carrying for its tosser burst, too: a great flash of light, an enormous clap of thunder. Only a hole in the ground-a shallow hole in the ground, for it was frozen hard-showed where the beast had been. The Unkerlanters who served that egg-tosser couldn’t have known what hit them. Sidroc cheered. He didn’t raise his head to do it, though. Plenty ofKingSwemmel ’s soldiers remained alive.

Flame enveloped another behemoth and its crew. This time, Sidroc saw the dragon that flamed the beast. It was painted in green, red, and white: Algarvian colors. He cheered again. The redheads had been short of dragons since Durrwangen, too, though not to the same degree as they’d been short of behemoths.

But the Unkerlanter behemoth crews who served heavy sticks also blazed at the Algarvian dragons. Their beams were strong enough to burn through silvery belly paint and the armoring scales beneath. A dragon slammed into the snow. It thrashed for a long time before it died; its great tail sent a couple of Unkerlanters spinning, smashed and broken, to their deaths. The dragon-flier, though, had surely died at that first crushing impact.

With most of the enemy behemoths dead, Algarvian officers blew their whistles. Their imperative cry rang out again: “Forward!”

Sidroc would sooner have stayed where he was and let somebody else take the chances. But, along with the other troopers from Plegmund’s Brigade- and along with the Algarvians, too; no denying the redheads had spirit-he scrambled to his feet and went forward. Even as he did, he wondered why. He didn’t particularly care about clearing the Unkerlanters from the village ahead. He didn’t even particularly care about retaking Herborn; he’d seen enough battered Unkerlanter villages and towns and cities to last him the rest of his days.