Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Most of the dragons that had driven off the Forthwegian swarm had flown without eggs, making them faster and more maneuverable in the air. Now still more flew in from the direction of Gozzo. Some of their fliers released their eggs from on high, as was the usual Forthwegian practice—the usual practice everywhere, so far as Leofsig knew.

But the enemy, with Algarvian panache, had also found a new way. Some of the Algarvian fliers made their dragons stoop on the Forthwegian forces below like a falcon stooping on a mouse. They loosed the eggs the dragons carried at what seemed hardly more than treetop height, then pulled out of their dives and flew away, no doubt laughing at their foes’ discomfiture.

One of them, off to Leofsig’s right, misjudged his dive and smashed into the ground. The egg he carried erupted, searing flier and dragon both in its burst of flame. “Serves you right!” Leofsig shouted, though the flier was far beyond hearing. But the Algarvian’s swooping comrades kept on, placing their eggs far more precisely than did those who did not dive; they tore terrible holes in the Forthwegians’ ranks.

“Forward!” an officer shouted. Leofsig heard him through stunned and battered ears. “We must go forward, for the honor of King Penda and of Forthweg!”

Forward Leofsig stumbled. Around him, men raised a cheer. After a moment, he joined it. Turning to Beocca, he said, “Once we close with the Algarvians, we’ll crush them.”

“Aye, belike,” Beocca answered, “if there are any of us left to do the closing.”

As if to underscore that, more eggs started falling among the advancing Forthwegians. Not all of them—not even most of them—came from the dragons overhead. The army had come into range of the egg-tossers outside Gozzo. Dragons carried larger eggs than the tossers flung, but could not carry nearly so many; Leofsig, head down and hunched forward as if walking into a windstorm, trudged past a broken-backed unicorn, one side of its body all over burns, that dragged itself along on its forelegs and screamed like a woman.

Forthwegian egg-tossers answered the rain of fire as best they could. But they’d had trouble keeping up with the rest of the army: horse-drawn wheeled tossers clogged roads and moved slowly going crosscountry, while the retreating Algarvians had sabotaged ley lines as they fell back. Forthwegian mages had reenergized some, but far from all. And, to make matters worse, the diving dragons paid special attention to the egg-tossers that were on the field.

Up ahead, Forthwegian cavalry was skirmishing with Algarvian troopers on horses and unicorns. Leofsig cheered when a Forthwegian officer’s white unicorn gored an enemy horseman out of the saddle. He squatted down behind a bush and blazed at the Algarvian cavalry. The range was long, and he could not be sure his was the beam that did the job, but he thought he knocked a couple of redheads out of the saddle.

And then, when he blazed, no beam shot from the business end of the stick. He looked around for a supply cart, spied none, and then looked around for a casualty. On this field, casualties were all too easy to find. Leofsig scurried over to a Forthwegian who would never need his stick again. He snatched up the stick and dashed back to cover. An Algarvian beam drew a brown line in the grass ahead of him, but did not sear his flesh.

As more Forthwegian footsoldiers came forward to add their numbers to those of the cavalry, the Algarvian horsemen and unicorn riders began to fall back. Leofsig grunted in somber satisfaction as he advanced toward a large grove of orange trees. This skirmish, though bigger than most, fit the pattern of the fights that had followed Forthweg’s invasion of Algarve. The Algarvians might have won the battle in the air, but they kept on yielding ground even so.

Under the shiny, dark green leaves of the orange trees, something stirred. Leofsig was too far away to blaze at the motion, too far away even to identify what caused it till a great force of behemoths came lumbering out of the grove. Their armor glittered in the sun. Each great beast bore several riders. Some behemoths had sticks larger and heavier and stronger than a man could carry strapped on to their backs. Others carried egg-tossers instead.

Forthweg used behemoths to help break into positions infantry could not take unaided, parceling the animals out along the whole broad fighting line. Leofsig had never seen so many all gathered together before. He did not like the look of them. He liked that look even less when they lowered their heads, pointing their great horns toward the Forthwegian force, and lumbered forward. They moved slowly at first, but soon built up speed.

They smashed through the Forthwegian cavalry as if it hadn’t been there, trampling down horses and unicorns. As they charged, the crews of soldiers on their backs blazed and flung eggs, spreading havoc far and wide. The behemoths were hard to bring down. Their armor warded them against most blazes, and, while they were moving, the men on their backs—who, Leofsig saw, were also armored—were next to impossible to pick off.

The cavalry, or as much of it as could, fled before them, as the Forthwegian dragons had fled before those of Algarve. The Algarvian dragons now redoubled their attacks against the Forthwegians on the ground as the behemoths broke in among them. Leofsig blazed at the warriors aboard the closest one—blazed and missed. An egg burst close by him, knocking him off his feet and scraping his face against the dirt.

He scrambled up again. Algarvian footsoldiers were advancing now, rushing toward the great hole the behemoths had torn in the Forthwegian line. He saw an officer close by—not a man he knew, but an officer. “What do we do, sir?”

“What do we do?” the captain echoed. He looked and sounded stunned, bewildered. “We fall back—what else can we do? They’ve beaten us here, the bastards. We have to be able to try to fight them again, though how we’re supposed to fight this—” Shaking his head, he stumbled off toward the west, toward Forthweg. Numbly, Leofsig followed.

Without false modesty, Marshal Rathar knew he was the second most powerful personage in Unkerlant. None of the dukes and barons and counts could come close to matching the authority of the man who headed King Swemmel’s armies. None of the courtiers at Cottbus was his equal, either, and none of them had made the king believe Rathar a traitor, though many had tried.

Aye, below Swemmel he was supreme. Envy filled men’s eyes as he marched through the fortresslike palace on the high ground at the heart of the capital. The green sash stretching diagonally across his rock-gray tunic proclaimed his rank to any who did not recognize his hard, stern features. Women the world called beautiful called those features handsome. He could have had many of them, including some whose courtier husbands sought to bring him down. Had he been able to judge with certainty which of them wanted him for himself, as opposed to for his rank, he might have enjoyed himself more.

Or he might not have. Enjoyment, as most men understood it, he did not find particularly enjoyable. And he knew a secret no one else did, though some of his own chief underlings and some of King Swemmel’s other ministers might have suspected. He could have told the secret without danger. But he knew no one would believe him, and so kept silent. Silence suited his nature anyhow.

Before he went in to confer with his sovereign, he unbuckled his sword and set it in a rack in the anteroom outside the audience chamber. King Swemmel’s guards then searched him, as thoroughly and intimately as if he’d been taken captive. Had he been a woman, matrons would have done the same.

He felt no humiliation. The guards were doing their duty. He would have been angry—and King Swemmel angrier—had they let him go through unchallenged. “Pass on, sir,” one of them said at length.