Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

But the Algarvians, when they met steady resistance, did not try to overrun and overwhelm it, as any Unkerlanter force would have done. Instead, they flowed around it, and soon were blazing at Leudast and the other steady Unkerlanters from the flank as well as the front.

“We have to give way!” Magnulf shouted then. “If we don’t, they’ll get behind us in a minute, and then we’re dead.” When he retreated, Leudast went with him. Leudast didn’t want to move back, but he didn’t want to die, either. As far as he was concerned, for the moment survival and efficiency were one and the same.

Count Sabrino whooped with glee. He whacked his dragon with the goad. The great, stupid beast screamed fury at him. But then it dove on the Unkerlanter column on the road outside of Eoforwic. The Unkerlanters started to scatter, but it was already too late. Sabrino’s was not the only dragon falling out of the sky. His whole wing of dragonfliers plunged toward them.

When he saw five or six Unkerlanters tightly bunched, Sabrino whacked the dragon again, in a different way. Flame burst from its jaws. He heard the soldiers shriek as he flew by just above their heads. He didn’t whoop then. Savoring the enemy’s anguish might have been all very well for the Algarvian chieftains who’d toppled the Kaunian Empire, but listening to footsoldiers burn brought combat to a level too personal for his taste.

And then, off to the north, he spied a different sort of target, the sort of target of which dragonfliers usually but dreamt. For this campaign, the mages had given him a crystal attuned to his squadron and flight leaders. He spoke into it now: “Look, lads! Another Unkerlanter dragon farm. Shall we go pay them a visit?”

“Aye!” That was Captain Domiziano, sounding as fierce as any Algarvian chieftain from the ancient days. “If Swemmel’s men will give us presents, they can’t be surprised when we take them.”

The whole wing swung toward the dragon farm. Sabrino laughed under his breath. The Unkerlanters had intended to take Algarve by surprise. They’d moved strong forces very close to the front. But King Mezentio had had plans of his own, and now the Unkerlanters found themselves on the receiving end of the surprise they’d intended to give.

They weren’t responding well, either, any more than Forthweg or Valmiera or Jelgava had when Mezentio’s men struck them. There ahead, coming up fast, was a dragon farm whose dragons, on this second day of the attack, remained chained to the ground.

With a great roar, Sabrino’s dragon put on a burst of speed. Dragons had no sense of chivalry or fair play whatever. When they saw foes helpless in the ground, all that filled their tiny minds was killing them. Sabrino’s problem was not to urge his mount on, but to keep the dragon from flaming too soon and from landing to rend the Unkerlanter beast with its talons as well as burning them from above.

Unkerlanter fliers and keepers ran this way and that, trying to get a few dragons in the air either to oppose the Algarvians or simply to flee. They had little luck; Sabrino’s wing flamed them with almost as much gusto as his dragons gave to destroying their winged, scaly counterparts.

By the time the wing had made several passes above the dragon farm, it was as dreadful a shambles as Sabrino had ever seen. By then, his dragon could produce only little wheezes of flame. It still wanted to go back and do some more killing. Sabrino had to beat it savagely with the goad to get it to fly away from the Unkerlanter dragon farm. As long as it could see enemy dragons on the ground, it was ready to attack.

But, fortunately, it was, like any dragon, too stupid to own much in the way of a memory. After Sabrino had finally persuaded—and there was a splendid euphemism—it to leave the dragon farm, it flew on toward the east without a backwards glance. Sabrino, on the other hand, did look back, not for one more glimpse of the battered foe but to find out how the men and beasts of his wing had come through. He spied not a single hole in the formation. Pride filled him. The great force King Mezentio had built for revenge was performing exactly as its creator had intended.

Once Sabrino had made sure of that, he looked down to see how the fight on the ground was going. Pride filled him again. Here was the same pattern he’d seen in Valmiera. Wherever the Unkerlanters tried to make a stand, the Algarvians either used behemoths to pound them into submission with eggs and heavy sticks or went around them to strike from the side and rear as well as the front. And the Unkerlanters would have to retreat or surrender or die where they stood.

Some—quite a few, in fact—chose to do just that. No one had ever said the Unkerlanters were cowards: no one who’d fought them in the Six Years’ War, certainly. But many Valmierans had been brave, too, and it hadn’t helped them any. King Mezentio and his generals had out-thought them before they outfought them. The same drama looked to be unfolding on the plains of eastern Forthweg.

Every once in a while, the Unkerlanters would hole up in a village or a natural strongpoint too tough to be easily taken. Then, again as in Valmiera and Jelgava, the dragons would come in, dropping eggs on the enemy, softening him up so the men on the ground could finish him off.

When Sabrino’s wing came spiraling down to land at a hastily set up farm in what had been, up till that morning, Unkerlanter-occupied Forthweg, the keepers shouted, “How’s it going? How are we doing, up ahead there?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Sabrino said as he slid off his dragon once it was securely chained to a stake. “By the powers above, I really don’t see how anything could look finer. If we keep going like this, we’ll get to Cottbus almost as fast as we got to Priekule.”

The keepers cheered. One of them took a chunk of meat, rolled it in a bucket full of ground cinnabar and brimstone, and tossed it to the dragon. A snap, and the meat was gone. The dragon ate greedily. It had worked hard today. It would work hard again tomorrow. As long as it got enough food and close to enough rest, it would be able to do what was required of it.

“Eat, sleep, and fight,” Sabrino said. “Not such a bad life, eh?”

One of the keepers looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What about screwing?”

“A reward for good service,” Sabrino answered easily. “That’d pull ’em into the army, wouldn’t it? ‘Serve your kingdom bravely and we’ll put you out to stud.’ Aye, they’d be storming to join up once they heard that.” He laughed. So did the keepers. Why not laugh? The enemy fled before them.

Captain Domiziano came up. “What’s so funny, sir?” he asked. Sabrino told him. He laughed, too. “Can I quit and join up again?”

“Up till now, my dear fellow, I haven’t noticed you having any problems finding a lady—or, in a pinch, merely a woman—who was interested, or at least willing, when you were,” Sabrino said.

“Well, that’s true enough,” Domiziano said complacently. “The hunting was better when we were on the eastern front, though. Those Valmieran and Jelgavan wenches acted almost the way the ones in the historical romances do. Most of the Kaunian women here won’t give us the time of day, and half the Forthwegians are built like bricks.

“It won’t get any better,” Sabrino said. “When we break into Unkerlant, they’ll be even dumpier than the Forthwegians.”

“My lord count!” Domiziano said in piteous tones. “Did you have to make me think in such doleful terms?”

“What’s so doleful about breaking into Unkerlant?” Captain Orosio asked. He’d come up too late to hear how the conversation started.

Domiziano needed only two words to fill him in: “Homely women.”