Into the Darkness (95 page)

Like rills and creeks and streams flowing together to form a great river, the Unkerlanter squads and companies that had been quartered on the countryside came together into regiments and brigades and divisions and flowed toward the east, toward the border with Algarvian-held Forthweg. Leudast smiled and nodded approval at every squadron of horsemen and unicorn-riders who kicked up dust on the newly dry roads. He felt like cheering at every section of behemoths he saw, and wished there were more of them to see.

In the fields between the roads, Forthwegian peasants plowed and planted as they had done for centuries since largely displacing the isolated Kaunians left behind when the Algarvians swept up from the south and wrecked the Kaunian Empire. The Forthwegian peasants did their best to ignore the Unkerlanter soldiers moving along the roads, just as, farther east, Forthwegian peasants were doubtless doing their best to ignore the Algarvian soldiers moving along the roads.

“They’ll be planting back in my village about now, too,” Leudast said to Sergeant Magnulf. He sniffed, then sighed. “Nothing like spring air, is there? It even
smells
green, you know what I mean?—like you ought to be able to grow crops from the smell without bothering with plowing and manuring and all that.”

“Don’t I wish!” Magnulf rolled his eyes. “Village I came out of is a lot farther south—matter of fact, it’s only a couple of days’ walk this side of the Gifhorn River, and on the other side of the Gifhorn they’re Grelzers first and Unkerlanters only when they bother remembering the Union of Crowns. Liable to be snowing down there even now—and if it’s not, people are still waiting for the mud to dry. Once it does, they’ll work their arses off, too. None of this moonshine about growing things with the air.”

“I didn’t say you really could,” Leudast protested. “I just said it smelled like you could.”

Magnulf, like any sergeant worth his pay, was constitutionally unable to recognize a figure of speech. He could recognize a crude joke, though, and did, pointing to a band of Unkerlanter unicorns riding across a field a Forthwegian farmer had just finished plowing. “Haw, haw, haw! Now that miserable whoreson’ll have to do it all over again. Haw, haw!”

Leudast chuckled, too; a Forthwegian peasant’s problems were none of his own. “I wish those unicorns were behemoths, is what I wish,” he said.

“Aye, that’d be good,” Magnulf agreed, laughing still. “Then he’d have bigger holes in the ground to worry about.”

That wasn’t why Leudast wished he saw more behemoths. All through Algarve’s victory over Forthweg, and then in her smashing wins against Valmiera and Jelgava, her behemoths had done more than their share of the damage. Everyone said so. The summer and autumn before, he’d spent a lot of time training against horses tricked out as behemoths. The more of the great beasts he saw with Unkerlanter crews atop them, the happier he’d be.

He kept looking up into the sky, and cocking his head to one side to try to catch the harsh cries of dragons overhead. As with the behemoths, he saw and heard some, but not so many as he would have liked. When he remarked on that to Magnulf, the sergeant said, “Be thankful you don’t see any flying out of the east. We’re getting too bloody close to the border now. Here’s hoping we’ve caught the redheads napping.”

“Aye, here’s hoping,” Leudast said in what he hoped wasn’t too hollow a voice. “Nobody else has managed to do that yet.”

Magnulf spat in the dirt. “They put one arm in a tunic sleeve at a time, same as we do. Remember”—he planted an elbow in Leudast’s ribs—“if they were as great as they think they are, they’d have won the Six Years’ War. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“You’re right, Sergeant. Can’t argue with that.” Leudast tramped on, feeling a little happier. His back ached. His feet ached. He wished King Swemmel’s impressers had never found his village. He’d spent a lot of time wishing that. He didn’t know why. It never did any good.

The regiment camped in the fields that night. That would give the Forthwegians who farmed them more work to do come morning—work likely to be undone when more Unkerlanter soldiers came through heading east. Leudast lost no sleep over that, or over the provenance of the chunks of mutton and chicken in the cookpots. Leudast lost no sleep over anything. As soon as he helped Magnulf make sure the squad was safely settled, he rolled himself in his blanket and plunged into slumber almost at once. He did not expect to wake till the rising sun pried his eyelids open.

But the first eggs fell out of the sky when morning twilight was barely beginning to stain the eastern horizon with gray. Now he heard dragons’ cries, fierce and raucous. The beasts swooped low above the Unkerlanter encampment, dropping their eggs and then gaining height once more with thunderous wingbeats. Some came close enough to the ground to flame before they flew higher. More flames sprang up from tents and wagons they set afire.

Leudast seized his stick and started blazing at them, but the sky was still so dark, he had no good targets. Even with a good target, he knew a foot-soldier had to be lucky—had to be more than lucky—to bring down a dragon. He kept blazing anyhow. If he didn’t, he had no chance at all to bring one down.

An egg burst close by him, knocking him off his feet and rolling him along the ground like a pin in a game of sixteens. He knocked over a couple of other soldiers, too, just as a well-struck pin would have done, though not enough to gain a good score. They shouted and cursed, as he did. Men were screaming, too, at the top of their lungs.

Some of those screams burst from the throats of wounded men. Others were shouts of anger or, more often, horrified astonishment: “The redheads!” “The Algarvians!” “King Mezentio’s men!”

They’ve got a lot of cursed nerve, hitting us first,
Leudast thought. The ground shook beneath his feet as another egg burst nearby.
We were supposed to hit them first, catch them by surprise.

That hadn’t happened. It wasn’t going to happen, not now. Remembering how his officers said the Algarvians liked to fight, Leudast had a sudden nasty premonition of what was likely to happen next. “Prepare to receive attack from the east!” he shouted to his squad and anyone else who would listen. “The redheads will be hitting us with foot and cavalry and those stinking behemoths, too!”

“Aye, that’s the truth!” No one who knew Sergeant Magnulf could mistake his bellow. “That’s what those cursed Algarvians think efficient fighting’s all about. Now that the dragons have knocked us cockeyed, they’ll send in the men on the ground to try and flatten us.”

Here and there in the madness—which did not cease, for Algarvian dragons kept on pounding the encampment—officers also tried to rally their men. But some officers were killed, some were hurt, and some, with action upon them, turned out to be worthless. Leudast watched one run for the west as fast as he could go.

He had no time for more than one quick curse aimed at that captain’s back. Then more eggs started falling on the tents. These were smaller than the ones the dragons carried, which meant the Algarvians had already got tossers over the border and into the part of Forthweg Unkerlant occupied. Leudast shook his head. No—the part of Forthweg Unkerlant
had
occupied.

A wild shout came from sentries posted east of the camp: “Here they come!”

“Come on, you whoresons!” Leudast yelled. “If we don’t fight the redheads, they’ll kill all of us.” Even if his comrades did fight the Algarvians, King Mezentio’s men were liable to kill them all. He chose not to dwell on that.

Now, instead of reaching for his stick, he grabbed his shovel off his belt and dug frantically. He had no time to make a proper hole from which to fight, but a little scrape with the dirt he’d dug thrown up in front of it was better than nothing. He lay flat in the scrape, rested his stick on the dirt parapet, and waited for the Algarvians to get close enough to blaze.

And then Colonel Roflanz, the regimental commander, shouted,

“The attack must go on as ordered. Forward against the foe, men! King Swemmel and efficiency!”

“No!” Leudast and Magnulf yelled it together. Both of them had seen enough combat to know Roflanz was asking to get himself slaughtered, and everyone who followed him, too. The men in their squad, or the two or three of them close enough to hear their corporal, held their places. But far more men followed Roflanz. He was their leader. How could they go wrong if they followed him?

They found out. It did not take long. Algarvians on behemoths blazed them with heavy sticks at ranges from which they could not reply. Other behemoths bore light egg-tossers. Bursts of sorcerous energy flung Unkerlanter soldiers aside, broken and bleeding. And the behemoths themselves, armored against footsoldiers’ weapons, lumbered forward and trampled down King Swemmel’s men. The Algarvians swarmed into the holes torn in their ranks.

Leudast almost started blazing at the first men he saw running back toward him. With the new-risen sun shining in his face, they were hardly more than silhouettes. His finger was already halfway into the blazing hole when he realized the men wore long tunics, not short tunics and kilts.

“Fall back!” one of them shouted, stumbling past his position. “If you don’t fall back, everything’s lost. Powers above, if you do fall back, everything’s lost, too.” Away he went, at least as fast as the captain who had incontinently fled when Algarvian dragons started dropping eggs on the encampment.

Magnulf said, “If the redheads make us fall back, I’ll do it. But I’m cursed if I’ll run away just because some coward tells me to.”

“Aye, by the powers above,” Leudast said. There—there ahead of him were men in kilts. He blazed at them. They went down. Maybe he’d hit one or two, maybe they were battlewise like him, and knew enough to make themselves smaller targets. Either way, he whooped. “We
can
stop the whoresons!”

But the Algarvians, when they met steady resistance, did not try to overrun and overwhelm it, as any Unkerlanter force would have done. Instead, they flowed around it, and soon were blazing at Leudast and the other steady Unkerlanters from the flank as well as the front.

“We have to give way!” Magnulf shouted then. “If we don’t, they’ll get behind us in a minute, and then we’re dead.” When he retreated, Leudast went with him. Leudast didn’t want to move back, but he didn’t want to die, either. As far as he was concerned, for the moment survival and efficiency were one and the same.

Count Sabrino whooped with glee. He whacked his dragon with the goad. The great, stupid beast screamed fury at him. But then it dove on the Unkerlanter column on the road outside of Eoforwic. The Unkerlanters started to scatter, but it was already too late. Sabrino’s was not the only dragon falling out of the sky. His whole wing of dragonfliers plunged toward them.

When he saw five or six Unkerlanters tightly bunched, Sabrino whacked the dragon again, in a different way. Flame burst from its jaws. He heard the soldiers shriek as he flew by just above their heads. He didn’t whoop then. Savoring the enemy’s anguish might have been all very well for the Algarvian chieftains who’d toppled the Kaunian Empire, but listening to footsoldiers burn brought combat to a level too personal for his taste.

And then, off to the north, he spied a different sort of target, the sort of target of which dragonfliers usually but dreamt. For this campaign, the mages had given him a crystal attuned to his squadron and flight leaders. He spoke into it now: “Look, lads! Another Unkerlanter dragon farm. Shall we go pay them a visit?”

“Aye!” That was Captain Domiziano, sounding as fierce as any Algarvian chieftain from the ancient days. “If Swemmel’s men
will
give us presents, they can’t be surprised when we take them.”

The whole wing swung toward the dragon farm. Sabrino laughed under his breath. The Unkerlanters had intended to take Algarve by surprise. They’d moved strong forces very close to the front. But King Mezentio had had plans of his own, and now the Unkerlanters found themselves on the receiving end of the surprise they’d intended to give.

They weren’t responding well, either, any more than Forthweg or Valmiera or Jelgava had when Mezentio’s men struck them. There ahead, coming up fast, was a dragon farm whose dragons, on this second day of the attack, remained chained to the ground.

With a great roar, Sabrino’s dragon put on a burst of speed. Dragons had no sense of chivalry or fair play whatever. When they saw foes helpless in the ground, all that filled their tiny minds was killing them. Sabrino’s problem was not to urge his mount on, but to keep the dragon from flaming too soon and from landing to rend the Unkerlanter beast with its talons as well as burning them from above.

Unkerlanter fliers and keepers ran this way and that, trying to get a few dragons in the air either to oppose the Algarvians or simply to flee. They had little luck; Sabrino’s wing flamed them with almost as much gusto as his dragons gave to destroying their winged, scaly counterparts.

By the time the wing had made several passes above the dragon farm, it was as dreadful a shambles as Sabrino had ever seen. By then, his dragon could produce only little wheezes of flame. It still wanted to go back and do some more killing. Sabrino had to beat it savagely with the goad to get it to fly away from the Unkerlanter dragon farm. As long as it could see enemy dragons on the ground, it was ready to attack.

But, fortunately, it was, like any dragon, too stupid to own much in the way of a memory. After Sabrino had finally persuaded—and there was a splendid euphemism—it to leave the dragon farm, it flew on toward the east without a backwards glance. Sabrino, on the other hand, did look back, not for one more glimpse of the battered foe but to find out how the men and beasts of his wing had come through. He spied not a single hole in the formation. Pride filled him. The great force King Mezentio had built for revenge was performing exactly as its creator had intended.

Once Sabrino had made sure of that, he looked down to see how the fight on the ground was going. Pride filled him again. Here was the same pattern he’d seen in Valmiera. Wherever the Unkerlanters tried to make a stand, the Algarvians either used behemoths to pound them into submission with eggs and heavy sticks or went around them to strike from the side and rear as well as the front. And the Unkerlanters would have to retreat or surrender or die where they stood.