Harry Turtledove - Darkness Descending

Kun asked a question Istvan wished he would have kept to himself: “How?”

Since the whole squad was looking at him, Istvan had to answer. Since he didn’t know, he said, “That’s for the officers to figure out.”

“Aye, but it’s for us to do,” Szonyi said. “We do the work, and we do the bleeding, too.”

“We are warriors,” said Kanizsai, who, not yet having been in any big fights, didn’t realize how quickly most of them could become dead warriors if they rushed a strong position manned by stubborn troops.

The officers set over them did seem to realize that, for which Istvan blessed the stars. Instead of the headlong rush he’d dreaded, the commanders in charge of the advance into Unkerlant sent dragons against the enemies blocking the pass ahead. Eggs fell from under the bellies of the great beasts. Having endured more rains of eggs on Obuda than he cared to remember, Istvan knew a sort of abstract sympathy for the Unkerlanters there to the east.

Szonyi had endured attack from the air, too. If he knew any sympathy for the Unkerlanters, he concealed it very well. “Ball the whoresons,” he said, over and over again. “Smash ‘em up. Squash ‘em flat. Don’t leave enough of any one of’em to make a decent ghost.”

Kun cleared his throat. “The notion that a ghost resembles a body at the moment of its death is only a peasant superstition.”

“And how many ghosts have you seen with your beady little eyes there, Master Spectacles?” Szonyi demanded.

“Stuff a cap in it, both of you,” Istvan said, rolling his eyes. “We’re supposed to be fighting the Unkerlanters, not each other.”

And the Unkerlanters, to his dismay, kept fighting back. They must not have saved all their heavy sticks for the fight against Algarve: they blazed a pair of Gyongyosian dragons out of the air as the beasts stooped low to drop their eggs precisely where their fliers wanted them to go. The rest of the men flying the brightly painted dragons urged them higher into the sky.

“Stars guide the souls of those two,” Szonyi murmured, and glanced over to Kun as if expecting the mage’s apprentice to argue with him. Kun simply nodded, at which Szonyi relaxed.

Eggs did keep falling on the Unkerlanter strongpoint, if not with the accuracy the Gyongyosians could have got by going lower. But eggs also kept falling on the footsoldiers waiting to assault the strongpoint, for the dragonfliers had not been able to wreck all the Unkerlanter egg-tossers.

A whistle shrilled. “Forward!” shouted Captain Tivadar, the company commander. He went forward himself, without hesitation. A commander who was not afraid to face the foe brought his men with him.

“Forward!” Istvan called, and trotted after the captain. He did not look back over his shoulder to see if his men followed. He assumed they would. If they didn’t, their countrymen would do worse to them for cowardice than the Unkerlanters would for courage.

Here, at least, he could see the position he was attacking. Back on Obuda, he’d often blundered through the forest without the faintest notion of where the Kuusamans were till he or his comrades stumbled over them. The disadvantage here was that the Unkerlanters knew where he was, too. He used what bushes and boulders he could for cover, but felt as if he were under the eyes of King Swemmel’s men at every stride.

Still under assault from the air, the Unkerlanters were slower than they might have been to shorten the range on their egg-tossers. That made life easier for Istvan and his companions . . . for a little while. But then flashes of light began winking from behind the piled-up stones at the mouth of the pass as the Unkerlanters brought their sticks into play.

Istvan blazed back at them. “By squads!” Captain Tivadar shouted. “Blaze and move! Make them keep their heads down while we advance on them!”

He wasn’t the only officer shouting similar orders. The Gyongyosian soldiers who’d seen war before, either in the mountains against Unkerlant or on the islands of the Bothnian Ocean, obeyed more readily than the new recruits. Running past a corpse with tawny yellow hair, Istvan shook his head. Living through a couple of fights improved your odds of living through more than a couple.

A moment later, he shook his head again. If you didn’t live through your first couple of fights, you were unlikely to live through any after that.

“Swemmel!” the Unkerlanter soldiers shouted. “Swemmel!” They shouted other things than their king’s name, too, but Istvan couldn’t understand those. To his ears, the Unkerlanter language sounded like a man in the last stages of choking to death.

A beam hissed past his head, so close that he could feel the heat and smell the sharp lightning reek it left behind in the air. He threw himself flat and scrambled toward the closest rock he could find. He peered out from behind it. In their gray tunics, the very color of the mountainside, the Unkerlanters were cursed hard to see.

When he did spot one, he took careful aim before blazing and then whooped as the fellow slumped bonelessly, stick falling from his fingers. “Good blazing, Sergeant,” Tivadar called, and Istvan puffed out his chest: nothing like doing well when a superior was watching.

Then he had no more time to dwell on such trivia, for he and his comrades were in among the Unkerlanters, forcing the enemy back more by weight of numbers than by skill at arms. Some of King Swemmel’s soldiers seemed glad to flee, running east down the valley toward the distant land where most of them were born. Others, though, iield their ground as stubbornly as if they too sprang from a warrior race. And, indeed, it was not through want of courage that some of the defenders finally did give way, but only through being overwhelmed by the swarming Gyongyosians.

“By the stars,” Istvan said, shaking his head in wonder as he finally made his way toward the end of the Unkerlanters’ defensive works, “if this were great army against great army and not a regiment of ours thrown at a couple of companies of theirs, Gyongyos and Unkerlant would both run out of men.”

“Aye.” That was Kun, who limped along after him, having taken a light wound from a stick. The mage’s apprentice still had his spectacles on, whether through some protective magic of his or thanks to an out-and-out miracle Istvan couldn’t have said. Kun pointed ahead. “One more little fortress of theirs up there, and then we can go on.”

“So we can,” Istvan said. “And then, a few miles farther east, they’ll choose another pass we have to go through, and they’ll entrench themselves there. At five miles a day, how many years are we from Cottbus?”

Kun wore a faraway expression as he calculated. “Three,” he said, “or rather a bit more.”

Istvan, who had only sketchy schooling, did not know if he was right or wrong. He did know the prospect struck him as gloomy. And he also rapidly realized that the Unkerlanters in the little fortress ahead had no intention of letting his comrades go any miles farther that day. They blazed away at the Gyongyosians with such ferocity across such level ground that to approach or to try to go around their strongpoint was an appointment with death.

Only after Gyongyosian dragons returned and dropped great swarms of eggs on the fortress did the blazing from it ease enough to let the footsoldiers mount an assault. Even then, Unkerlanter survivors kept fighting in the wreckage until, at last, almost all of them were slain. Only a couple of dark-haired men came out of the works with their hands held high.

And when Istvan went into the battered fortress, he discovered something that set him shouting for Captain Tivadar. After a while, the company commander picked his way through the wreckage and stood beside his sergeant. “Well,” he said at last, “now we know why they were able to blaze so well for so long.”