Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

Quietly, Major Alva said, “Sir, that is not the illusion of a dragon. That is… a dragon, conjured here from wherever it lives. My hat is off to Bell’s sorcerers.” He suited action to word. “No matter how desperate I was, I would not have cared to try the spell that brought it here.”

“A real dragon?” George, who’d served in the east, had seen them before, flying among the peaks of the Stony Mountains. “What can your magic do against a real dragon, now that the beast is here?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Alva answered. “Not much, I don’t think. Magic isn’t what drove dragons out to the steppe and then to the mountains. Hunting is.”

Stooping like an outsized hawk, the dragon dove towards a knot of tents. Flame burst from its great jaws. The southron soldiers hadn’t panicked till that moment, thinking it an illusion similar to those Alva and their other wizards had also used. Then the tents-and several soldiers-burst into flame. Some of the screams that rang out were anguish. More were terror, as the men realized the beast was real-real, angry, and hungry.

They were good soldiers. As soon as they realized that, they started shooting at the dragon. Ordinary crossbow bolts, though, slowed it about as much as mosquitoes slowed a man.

The dragon roared, a noise like the end of the world. It didn’t like ordinary crossbow quarrels, any more than a man liked mosquitoes. As a man will pause to swat, the dragon paused to flame. As mosquitoes will get smashed, so a couple of squads of soldiers suddenly went up in smoke.

“Do something , gods damn it!” Doubting George shook Major Alva. He didn’t even realize he was doing it till he noticed the wizard’s teeth clicking together. Then, not without a certain regret, he stopped.

Once Alva had stopped clicking, he said, “I’m sorry, sir. I still don’t know what to do. Dragons aren’t a wizard’s worry.”

“This one is,” George snapped.

Before Alva could either protest or start working magic, the repeating crossbows opened up on the dragon along with the ordinary footsoldiers’ weapons. Those big crossbows shot longer, thicker quarrels and flung them faster and farther than a bow that a man might carry could manage.

This time, the dragon’s roars were louder yet, louder and more sincere. Now it might have had wasps tormenting it, not mosquitoes. But however annoying they are, wasps rarely kill. The dragon remained determined to lash out at everything that was bothering it and everything it saw that it could eat. As far as Doubting George could tell, between them those two categories encompassed his whole army.

Thuk! Thuk! Thuk! Crossbow bolts tearing through the membrane of the dragon’s wings sounded like knitting needles thrust through taut cotton cloth. Cotton, though, didn’t bleed. The dragon did. Drops of its blood smoked when they hit the ground. Soldiers that blood touched cried out in pain. But even if the dragon did bleed, that made it no less fierce, no less furious. On the contrary.

It flew towards a battery of repeating crossbows that hosed darts at it. Again, the fang-filled jaws spread wide. Again, fire shot from them. The flames engulfed the repeating crossbows. Some of the crews managed to flee. Others kept working the windlasses till the very last moment, and went up in flames with the engines they served.

The dragon landed then. Its tremendous tail lashed about, obliterating repeating crossbows its fire had spared. Doubting George cursed. Those engines would have been useful against the Army of Franklin. Now… now they might as well never have been built.

But, with the dragon on the ground, the soldiers serving catapults started flinging firepots at it. Some of them had already let fly while the dragon was still in the air. That was not the smartest thing they could have done. Their missiles missed, and came down on the heads of southron soldiers still in their tents or in the trenches or rushing about.

They aimed better with the beast on the ground. When a firepot burst on its armored back, the dragon remained grounded no more. It sprang into the air with a scream like all damnation boiled down into a pint. No mosquitoes here, and no wasps, either. Not even a dragon could ignore a bursting firepot.

Screaming again, the terrible beast flew off… toward the west. That set Doubting George to cursing once more. He’d hoped the dragon would visit vengeance on the northern sorcerers who’d summoned it, but no such luck. Have to take care of that ourselves , he thought.

Major Alva was staring in the direction the dragon had gone. “How much harm will it do before people finally manage to kill it?” he wondered.

“I don’t know. Probably quite a bit.” Even Doubting George was surprised at how heartless he sounded.

Alva looked more appalled than surprised. “Don’t you care?”

Shrugging, the commanding general said, “Not a whole hells of a lot. For one thing, the dragon won’t be doing it to us. For another, most of the people it will harm would rather see Geoffrey over them than Avram. Since Geoffrey’s wizards summoned it here, you could say they’re getting what they deserve.”

“Oh.” The wizard considered. “You make a nasty sort of sense.”

“We’re fighting a war, Major. There’s not much room for any other kind.” George stabbed a finger at the mage. “What are the odds the traitors will try flinging another dragon at us?”

“Thunderer smite me with boils if I know… sir,” Alva answered. “I’ll tell you this, though: I wouldn’t have tried bringing one, let alone two. Anybody who works that kind of spell has to be as close to crazy as makes no difference.”

“You say that?” George asked in amazement. “After the great sorceries you’ve brought off, you say that?”

“Hells, yes, I say that,” the wizard told him. “What I do is dangerous to the enemy. It’s not particularly dangerous to me. If something goes wrong with one of my spells, well, then, it doesn’t work, that’s all. If something went wrong with the spells those northern wizards cast to snare that dragon, it would have eaten them or flamed them or something even worse, if there is anything worse. Anybody who risks bringing that down on his own head has got to be a few bolts short of a full sheaf, don’t you think?”

“When you put it that way, I suppose so,” George said. “But you’re the one who knows about magecraft. I don’t, and I don’t pretend to.”

Alva let out a barely audible sniff, as if to say that anybody who didn’t know much about wizardry had no business commanding an army. In this day and age, he might well have been right. But George was the fellow with the fancy epaulets on his shoulders. He had the responsibility. He had to live up to it.

Part of that responsibility, at the moment, involved finishing the destruction of the Army of Franklin. He pointed to Alva. “Can you make it seem to the traitors that the dragon hurt us worse than it really did?”

“I suppose so, sir. But why?” Puzzlement filled Alva’s voice.

Doubting George let out a more than barely audible sniff, as if to say that anybody who didn’t know much about soldiering had no business putting on a uniform, or even a gray robe. Then he condescended to explain: “If they see us here in dreadful shape, maybe they won’t be looking for us to outflank them and cut them off.”

“Oh!” Alva wasn’t stupid. He could see things once you pointed them out to him. “Deception! Now I understand!”

“Good,” George said. “Now that you understand, can you do it?”

“I don’t see why not,” the sorcerer replied. “It’s an elementary problem, thaumaturgically speaking.”

“You’ll be able to fool the traitors and their mages?”