Harry Turtledove - Darkness Descending

“No!” Sabrino cried in dismay as the beam spat upward. To his frightened eyes, it seemed bright as the sun, wide as the sea. No dragon’s scales, not even if they were silvered, could withstand a beam like that at close range. The beam lashed out again.

But the stick had not been aimed his way. Since he was in the lead, he couldn’t tell whether it had struck one of the beasts behind him--no time to look back, not now. The stick slewed toward him as the Unkerlanters swung it on its mounting. If it blazed once more, it was death.

Sabrino slapped his dragon a different way. This time, the beast obeyed without hesitation, not least because he was ordering it to do what it already wanted to do. Its great jaws yawned wide. It belched forth a sheet of flame that engulfed the Unkerlanters’ heavy stick and the men who served it.

Fumes reeking of brimstone blew back into Sabrino’s face. He coughed and cursed, but he would rather have smelled that odor just then than his mistress’ most delicate perfume. Those fumes and the flames from which they sprang had just saved his life.

Nearer the head of the column, the dragon flamed again, incinerating a wagon and the horses that pulled it. Sabrino whacked it with the goad to make it gain height and come round for another run. As its great wings worked behind him--he could feel the mighty muscles contract and loosen, contract and loosen, with every wingbeat--he craned his neck to see how the rest of the dragonfliers had served the supply column.

He waved the goad with glee. Great clouds of black smoke rose into the sky, the pyre of dozens of wagonloads of food, clothing, eggs, sticks--who could guess what?--that would never reach the Unkerlanters struggling to hold back the Algarvian footsoldiers and behemoths.

A good many Unkerlanter soldiers and drivers had burned, too. So had a good many horses. Not all of them, men or beasts, died at once. A burning horse ran madly through a wheatfield, spreading fire wherever it went. It galloped close to half a mile before falling over.

And two dragons lay not far from the wreckage of the Unkerlanter column. That meant two Algarvian dragonfliers surely dead. Sabrino cursed; the Unkerlanters had caught him by surprise there. They fought hard. From what he’d seen, they fought harder than either the Forthwegians or the Valmierans. Already, the word had gone through the Algarvian army--don’t let yourself get captured behind the enemy’s lines.

Sabrino spoke into the crystal once more: “We’ve done what we came to do. Now we can head back to the dragon farm and get ready to do it all over again tomorrow.”

“Aye, sir,” Captain Orosio said. “I’m already bringing my men up into formation.” And so he was. Though a good deal older than Domiziano, he hadn’t commanded a squadron for nearly so long as the other man. Poor fellow, Sabrino thought. His family connections aren’t all they might be. Now that Orosio had the squadron, he handled it with matter-of-fact competence. Too bad he couldn’t get it sooner.

Orosio’s squadron was, in fact, the first one to reform. Because of that, Sabrino ordered that squadron up above the rest, to cover them from attack by Unkerlanter dragons as they flew east. Here and there below them, knots of Unkerlanter troopers still held out against the Algarvians. Elsewhere, though, Algarvian behemoths, some carrying egg-tossers, others with heavy sticks mounted on their mail-covered backs, trotted west with next to no one even to slow them down. By all the signs, it was a rout.

But when the wing flew over land where there’d been fighting, Sabrino saw, as he’d seen before, that things weren’t so simple. The Unkerlanters had fought hard in every village and town; most of them were little more than charred rubble. And the corpses of men and behemoths, unicorns and horses, scattered through fields pockmarked with craters from bursting eggs proclaimed how hard they’d fought in open country, too.

“Dragons, Colonel!” Captain Orosio’s sharp warning snapped Sabrino out of his reverie. Dragons they were, half a dozen of them, painted in Unkerlanter rock-gray that made them hard to spot against the hazy sky. They were flying back toward the west, which meant they’d been raiding behind the Algarvian lines.

They could have escaped Sabrino’s wing and fled into the all but limitless plains of Unkerlant. Instead, no matter how outnumbered they were, they flew straight for the Algarvian dragons.

For Sabrino, it wasn’t a question of urging his mount on. It was a question of holding back the dragon, of making the attack part of an organized assault on the Unkerlanters rather than a wild beast’s headlong rush. With the dragon goad in his right hand, he used his stick with his left. Aiming from dragonback was tricky, but he’d had a lot of practice. If he blazed an enemy flier, the fellow’s dragon would be nothing more than a wild beast, as likely to attack friend as foe.

He’d fought Unkerlanters in the air before and had a low opinion of their skill. Seeing six assail sixty or so, he also had a low opinion of their common sense. But, as with their comrades on the ground, he’d never been able to fault their courage. Here they came, as if they outnumbered his dragonfliers ten to one instead of the other way round. They couldn’t have hoped to win, or even to escape. They intended to sell themselves as dearly as possible.

For his part, he wanted to dispose of them as fast as he could. He sent several of his dragons after each of theirs, to give them no chance for heroism. Somebody blazed one of their fliers almost at once. That dragon, suddenly on its own, flew off. Another one plunged to the ground when an Algarvian got in back of it without its flier’s knowing and flamed it from behind.

Inside a couple of minutes, all the Unkerlanter dragons were out of the fight. Sabrino himself blazed the dragonfliers his group of Algarvians attacked. But one of King Swemmel’s men got a measure of revenge. A couple of Algarvian dragons had flamed the one he flew. It was horribly burned, and so, no doubt, was he. Still, he made it obey one last command: he flew it straight against an Algarvian dragon. They smashed together and both tumbled out of the sky.

“That was a brave man,” Sabrino said softly. A moment later, as an afterthought, he added, “Curse him.” Save for the Algarvians, the heavens were empty. Sabrino waved the wing back toward the dragon farm where they and the handlers would tend to their beasts. But now they had one more slot that wanted filling.

Ealstan looked up from the page of bookkeeping questions his father had set him to find his cousin, Sidroc, grinning a most unpleasant grin. “I’m done with my work for the night,” Sidroc said. “But then, I only have what the school dishes out. I told you you’d end up stuck with more.”

“Aye, and you’ve been telling me, too--telling me and telling me,” Ealstan said. “Why don’t you shut up and let me finish?” He wished Leofsig, his older brother, were around. But Leofsig had gone to hear music with Felgilde, whom he’d been seeing even before he went into King Penda’s levy.

Sidroc went off. He did his best to look insulted, but he was chuckling, too. Ealstan felt like chucking the inkwell after his cousin. Instead, with a sour frown, he buckled down and finished the rest of the problems. After rising, he stretched till his back creaked; he’d been sitting there a long time. It certainly seemed a long time.

He took the problems into the parlor, where his father and Uncle Hengist were sharing a news sheet. His father turned away from the sheet. “All right, son,” he said, “let’s see what you’ve done with this lot.”

“Let’s see what this lot’s done to me,” Ealstan returned. Uncle Hengist--Sidroc’s father--laughed. Ealstan’s father smiled for a moment and started checking the work.