Harry Turtledove: Darkness Descending

“Spread too thin to do much,” Ortwin told him. “They bunched theirs, and they broke through with them.”

Rather exhaled angrily. “Shouldn’t that have given you a hint, General? We’re going to have to learn to fight like the Algarvians if we intend to throw them back.”

Ortwin said, “My lord Marshal, I didn’t have enough of the beasts to make any great counterattack with them anyhow.” He held up a hand whose back was gnarled with veins like old tree roots. “And before you ask why I didn’t get some from the north or the south, the redheads are driving back our armies there, too, and no general has enough for himself, let alone to spare any for his neighbors.”

“That is not good,” Rathar said, an understatement if ever there was one. “We must be able to concentrate our behemoths, as the Algarvians are doing, or else they will go right on smashing through us.”

“You are the marshal of Unkerlant,” Ortwin said. “If anyone can make it so, you are the man.” He cocked his head to one side. “Listen to the way the eggs are falling. Sure as sure, Mezentio’s men are trying to get over the Klagen.” Rathar cocked his head to one side, too. Ortwin was right. Most of the bursts came from the southeast, where the Unkerlanters were fighting to hold the line of the river. One of the crystallomancers turned and spoke urgently to the general.

“I came here to see the fighting,” Rathar said as he started out of the tent. “I am going up toward the line there.”

“Crystals,” Ortwin called after him. “We need more crystals, too. Seems as though the stinking Algarvians have ‘em on every behemoth and every dragon, and we’ve got regiments out there without any. They fight smoother than we can, if you know what I mean.”

“I do know,” Rathar flung back over his shoulder. “The sorcerers are working night and day to activate more. But we have to keep so many of them busy turning out sticks and eggs, we can’t do as much with crystals as we’d like.” Unkerlant was a bigger, more populous kingdom than Algarve. King Mezentio’s domain, though, had more trained mages and artisans than did King Swemmel’s. Algarve spent materiel and sorcerous energy lavishly. To stop the redheads, if they could be stopped, Rathar feared Unkerlant would have to spend men lavishly.

He shouted for a fresh horse. When he got one, he rode toward the Klagen at a rapid though bone-jarring canter. Unkerlanter egg-tossers were flinging relentlessly, straining to hold back the Algarvians. Even as Rathar watched, though, Algarvian dragons dove on a knot of tossers. The fliers released their eggs at just above treetop height, so they could hardly miss. Most of those egg-tossers fell quiet. No Unkerlanter dragons challenged the ones painted in red and white and green.

Men in rock-gray tunics streamed back toward the west. “Stand, curse you!” Rathar shouted. “Stand and fight!”

“The Algarvians!” three of them shouted at him in return. “The Algarvians are across the river.” One soldier added, “Our officers say that if we don’t get out now, they’ll cut us off and we won’t be able to get out at all.”

Their officers might well have been right. Rathar rode toward a farmhouse where a captain was pulling together a rear guard to hold off the redheads while their comrades retreated. The young officer gaped, goggle-eyed, at the large stars on the collar of Rathar’s tunic. “Carry on, Captain,” the marshal said crisply. “You know the situation and the ground better than I do.”

“Uh, aye, sir,” the captain said, staring still. He ordered his men--more than a company’s worth--with no small skill.

But then, from the east, another shout rose: “Behemoths!” Rathar grinned in fierce anticipation; he’d come a long way to see the fearsome Algarvian behemoths in action. Only belatedly did he realize that, having seen them, he was liable not to be able to make the long journey back again.

Far from thundering down on the farm in a great rampaging charge, the behemoths paused out of range of a footsoldier’s stick and began methodically pounding the Unkerlanter strongpoint to bits. Eggs fell on and around the holes the Unkerlanters had dug for themselves. Heavy sticks set the farmhouse and its outbuildings ablaze, flushing from cover the soldiers who’d sheltered there. After they’d battered the position, Algarvians in short tunics and kilts snaked forward to finish off their foes.

“My lord Marshal, get out while you can,” the young captain called to Rathar. “We’ll hold them off here while you get away.” A cheer rose from the Unkerlanter line. One of the troopers had been lucky enough to blaze a behemoth in the eye. As the beast toppled, it crushed a couple of the Algarvians who’d been riding it.

Rathar realized the captain was right. If he was going to get out, he had to do it now. He saluted the soldiers who would cover his retreat, then remounted and rode off toward the west. A couple of Algarvian behemoth crews lobbed eggs after him. They burst close enough to frighten his horse, but not close enough to knock it over.

More Algarvian dragons flew overhead. Again, they had the sky to themselves. They did not bother with a lone man on horseback, but saved their attention for larger groups of soldiers and horses and unicorns. Rathar had seen the gruesome results of that tactic on the ride up from Wirdum. Now, as he retreated along with the mass of Unkerlanter soldiery, he saw those results again, rather fresher this time.

On came the Algarvians behind him. All through their fights against earlier foes, they’d advanced as smoothly as a ley-line caravan. Nothing he’d seen here made it look as if things would be any different--till he thought of that young captain. And there, ahead of him, another officer was shouting at the men around him to form up for another rear-guard action. The men obeyed, too, though they must have known they were unlikely to last long.

This far south, darkness came late. A little bit further on toward summer and it would hardly have come at all. When at last twilight deepened, Marshal Rathar lay down in a hole in the ground and slept like a worn animal. The Algarvians hadn’t come far enough to scoop him up before he woke. Nor, for a wonder, had anyone stolen his horse, which he’d tied to a bush close by. He rode west again.

General Ortwin greeted him with a cry of glad surprise when he rode up to the headquarters. “Powers above be praised you’re here, my lord Marshal,” the general said. “We’ve got to pull back soon--can’t hold here much longer with the redheads over the Klagen; I told you that already--and you’re urgently ordered back to Cottbus.”

“What?” Rathar said irritably. “Why?” Only too late did he wonder if he really wanted to know.

Want to or not, he found out. “I’ll tell you why,” Ortwin said. “The Gongs have stabbed us in the back, that’s why. They’ve started up the war in the far west again.”

Two

After so long on the island of Obuda, the Ilszang Mountains, the borderland between Gyongyos on the one hand and Unkerlant on the other, seemed almost like home to Istvan. As a matter of fact, the valley where he’d been born and raised lay only a couple of hundred miles northwest of the hillside path along which he marched now. He scratched at his long, thick, tawny beard. Stars above! He could even think about going home on leave, something unimaginable out in the middle of the vast Bothnian Ocean.

“Come on, you mangy sons of goats,” he called to the men in his squad. “The stars have never once looked down on such a pack of lazy wastrels as you.”

“Have a heart, Sergeant,” Szonyi said. “Back on Obuda, you were a common soldier yourself, you know.”