Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

Even though it didn’t flame him, its breath, full of the stinks of brimstone and old meat, was nearly enough to knock him over. “Son of a worm!” he shouted, and whacked it in the snout with the iron-shod goad. “Daughter of a vulture! I am your better! You shall obey me!”

Every once in a while, a dragon forgot the most fundamental part of its training—in which case, the dragonflier never got another chance to curse it. Sabrino refused to let that risk enter his mind. He whacked the dragon’s scaly snout again. With an irate hiss, it straightened its neck once more. He gave it another tap, and this time, however sullenly, it swung its path more in the direction of Wihtgara.

Down below, Algarvian columns filed down roads and across fields. Here and there, scattered Forthwegian companies tried to withstand them. They had little luck. Sabrino shook his fist at them. “This is what you get for invading Algarve!” he cried, though only his dragon could hear him. “What you visited on us, we visit on you a hundredfold.”

He’d been worried when the Forthwegians approached Gozzo. Had the city fallen, King Penda’s soldiers could have spread across the plains of northern Algarve and done untold damage. But behemoths and dragons had turned the battle in front of Gozzo, and turned every fight since, too. However brave the Forthwegians were, they could not stand up against such force.

Here and there, the retreating Forthwegians had set fire in the fields and woods to slow the Algarvians’ advance. Had they done that more systematically, they would have got more good from it. As things were, occasional whiffs of smoke rose to Sabrino’s nostrils: hardly what the enemy could have hoped to accomplish.

More smoke rose above Wihtgara. Sabrino’s countrymen had bypassed the town to the north and south and joined hands beyond it, as they’d done with Gromheort a few days before. The Forthwegians trapped inside the jaws of the pincers still battled to break free, but they had little chance. Unicorn cavalry, tiny as dots down below, charged a squadron of behemoths. The egg-tossers and heavy sticks the behemoths bore on their backs wrecked the charge before the Forthwegians got to close quarters.

Dragons wheeled above Wihtgara. Till Sabrino drew near, he thought them Algarvian beasts dropping eggs on the defenders below. Then he saw they were painted in blue and white: Forthwegian colors. There were only a dozen of them or so. Without hesitation—or without any more hesitation than balky dragons usually caused—they hurled themselves at his entire wing.

Sabrino waved to his dragonfliers. “If they want it, we’ll give it to them!” he shouted, though he didn’t think any of the other men could hear. That they would give it to the Forthwegians, he had no doubt. Even after losses in the fighting thus far, he still commanded four times as many dragons as the foe had.

Like the unicorn cavalry down on the ground, the Forthwegian dragonfliers cared nothing about the odds. On they came. Sabrino’s dragon made a noise that reminded him of hot oil sizzling in a frying pan about the size of a small duchy: a challenge. Sabrino raised his stick and blazed at the nearest Forthwegian. If he didn’t have to fight at close quarters, he didn’t want to, no matter how eager his mount was to flame the Forthwegian dragon out of the sky.

But blazing straight wasn’t easy, not with both him and the Forthwegian moving at high speed along courses that changed unpredictably as one dragon or the other took it into its ferocious, empty head to dodge a little. Fighting in the air wasn’t just man against man. It was also dragon against dragon, and the beasts wanted nothing more than to burn each other and tear each other to shreds.

Here came the Forthwegian. He had some idea of what he was about, and a dragon that, by Forthwegian standards, was decently trained: the beast rose to give him a clear blaze at Sabrino instead of simply trying to close with the Algarvian’s dragon. Sabrino flattened himself against his mount’s neck to present a harder target as he goaded his dragon to climb, too.

And Forthwegian standards did not measure up to those practiced in King Mezentio’s domain. Moreover, Sabrino’s dragon was larger and stronger and swifter than his foe’s. He outclimbed the Forthwegian and got round behind him, despite the enemy’s best efforts to twist in the air.

When Sabrino’s dragon flamed, fire licked the other beast’s back and left wing.

The Forthwegian dragon’s hissing shriek of anguish was music to Sabrino’s ears. Very likely, the Forthwegian dragonflier shrieked, too, but his cry, if he made one, was lost in the greater cry of his mount. The enemy dragon plummeted out of the sky, not just burnt but burning. Because of the brimstone and quicksilver that had helped fuel it, dragon-fire clung and clung.

Sabrino’s dragon bellowed its triumph and spurted more flame. He whacked it with the goad to make it stop. It might need that fire in future fights. His head swiveled as he tried to see which of his dragonfliers needed help. He spied none who did. Most of the Forthwegian dragons were falling in flames (so, he was sad to see, were a couple painted in Algarvian colors). A couple of the enemy flew west, off to the shrinking stretch of territory Forthweg still held. And one, its flier blazed off it, struck out at the dragons around it like the wild beast it was till it too tumbled out of the sky.

More dragons were flying in out of the east, these lower, and with eggs slung under their bellies. As the eggs began falling on Wihtgara, Sabrino smiled broadly. “A splendid little war!” he cried, exultation in his voice. “Splendid!”

Occupied. Ealstan had heard the word before the war, of course. He’d heard it, and thought he’d known what it meant. Now he was learning the bitter difference between knowledge and experience.

Occupation meant Algarvian troops swaggering along the streets of Gromheort. They all had sticks at the ready, and they all expected everybody to understand Algarvian. People who didn’t understand the ugly, trilling speech—in Ealstan’s ears, it sounded like magpies’ chatter—fast enough to suit them were liable to get blazed for no better reason than that. No one could punish the Algarvians for doing such things. Their commanders probably praised them.

Occupation meant that Ealstan’s mother and sister stayed inside their house and sent him or his father out when they needed errands run. The Algarvians hadn’t perpetuated that many outrages, but they’d done enough to make decent Forthwegian women uninterested in taking chances.

Occupation meant that Sidroc and his family crowded the house to overflowing. An egg had turned their home to rubble. Ealstan knew it could have been his as easily as not. Sidroc and his father—Ealstan’s father’s brother—still shambled around as if stunned, for his mother and sister had been in the house when the egg burst.

Occupation meant broadsheets written in awkward Forthwegian going up on almost every wall that hadn’t been knocked flat. THE KAUNIAN KINGDOMS YOU LED INTO THAT WAR, some of them said. Others asked, WHY DO FORTHWEGIANS FOR KAUNIANS DIE? Ealstan had never had any particular use for the Kaunians who lived within Forthweg’s borders—except watching the blond women in their tight trousers. If the Algarvians wanted him to hate them, though, there had to be more to them than he’d thought.

Occupation meant having no idea what had happened to his brother, Leofsig. That was worst of all.

And yet, even with Count Brorda fled and an Algarvian officer ensconced in his castle, life had to go on. Ealstan’s sister stuffed a chunk of garlicky sausage, some salted olives, a lump of hard white cheese, and some raisins into a cloth sack and thrust it at him. “Here,” she said. “Don’t dawdle. You’ll be late for school.”