"Powers below eat you," Sabrino said.
"Dowsers have spotted a great swarm of Unkerlanter dragons flying our way," the dragon handler said. "They'll want to catch us on the ground, drop their eggs all over the dragon farms hereabouts. But if we get into the air first..."
Sleep, and the need for sleep, fell away from Sabrino like an abandoned kilt. "Get out of the way," he growled, springing off his cot. He checked himself, but only for an instant. "No. Run and sound the alarm."
Before the dragon handler could ever begin to turn, horns blared in the predawn darkness. Sabrino grunted in satisfaction. He pulled on his boots, donned the heavy coat he'd been using as a blanket, and put his goggles on his head. Then he ran past the dragon handler and toward his own stupid, evil-tempered mount.
Other dragonfliers, from his wing and Ambaldo's, were dashing to their dragons, too. Sabrino grudged a quarter of a minute to cry out, "If we get into the air, we slaughter the Unkerlanters who are coming to call. If they catch us on the ground, the way they want to, we're dead. Come on. Mezentio!"
"Mezentio!" the dragonfliers shouted.
Behind them, in the east, the sky was going pink. Off to the west, the direction from which those rock-gray dragons would be coming, stars still shone and night still ruled. But not securely, not even there. Purple-black had lightened to deep blue, and the dimmer stars winked out one by one. Day was coming. By all the signs, trouble would get here first.
A handler released the chain that held Sabrino's dragon to the spike driven deep into the black soil of southern Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad. It screamed at him. He'd known it would. He whacked it again, and it bounded into the air as much from sheer rage as for any other reason.
Sabrino didn't care why the dragon flew. He only cared that it flew. As the ground fell away below them, he spoke into his crystal to his squadron commanders: "Get as high as you can. We don't want Swemmel's boys to know we're up here till we drop on them."
"Aye, Colonel." That was gloomy Captain Orosio. He was the senior squadron commander left alive. He'd been juniormost when the war started-or had he even had a squadron then? After close to four years, Sabrino couldn't remember anymore. He marveled that he himself still survived. If fighting on the ground in the Six Years' War didn't kill me, nothing here will, he thought.
Light spread in the sky as he urged his dragon ever higher. Before long, he spied the sun, low and red in the east. Its rays hadn't yet reached the ground, and wouldn't for some little time to come. He might have been on a mountaintop, looking down into some still-dark valley.
And then, as he'd hoped he would, he saw things moving in the air below his squadron. He whooped with glee. "There they are!" he shouted into the crystal, and pointed for good measure.
"Aye, Colonel." That was Orosio again. "I saw 'em a little while ago." Dour, laconic-he hardly seemed like an Algarvian, but he was a good officer. Had he come from a more prominent family, he would have had a better chance to prove it. No matter how fierce the casualties among dragonfliers, he wasn't likely to rise above his present rank.
Flashes of light from the ground said the Unkerlanters were plastering the dragon farm with eggs, no doubt thinking they were wreaking havoc on the Algarvian beasts. Sabrino hoped the handlers had found holes. King Swemmel's dragonfliers would do some damage down below, but they hadn't yet awakened to the realization that they were about to take damage, too.
With astonishing speed, the Unkerlanter dragons swelled beneath Sabrino. He had his pick of targets; sure enough, the enemy had no idea he and his comrades were above them. This time, the dowsers had been right on the money. "And now the Unkerlanters will pay," Sabrino muttered. "How they will pay."
The wind from his dive swept the words away. For once, it mattered not at all. Sabrino blazed not just one Unkerlanter dragonflier, as he had dreamt, but two in quick succession. Even as the beasts they'd ridden went wild and useless, his own dragon flamed another Unkerlanter's mount. Sabrino brought his dragon in as close as he dared before letting it flame. Quicksilver was in short supply, and without it a dragon's flame grew short, too. But his mount had enough. The dragon painted rock-gray fell out of the air.
Sabrino looked around the brightening sky, looked around and howled with savage glee. Almost every Algarvian dragonflier was having luck to match his. The
Unkerlanters had hoped to catch them by surprise, but ended up caught themselves. In hardly more than the twinkling of an eye, the air was free of them. The ones left alive flew back toward the salient as fast as their dragons' wings would take them.
"Pursuit, sir?" Captain Orosio's voice came from the crystal.
Reluctantly, Sabrino said, "No. We take the dragons down, we get them fed-we get ourselves fed, too, while we're at it-and then we go back to hammering the Unkerlanter positions on the ground. I wish we could rest them more, but we haven't got the time. We land." He emphasized the words with hand signals, so all the dragonfliers could see what he meant.
They obeyed him. He would have been astonished-horrified-if they hadn't. Down they went. Now the sun had reached the Unkerlanter plains. Dead dragons, almost all of them painted rock-gray, cast long shadows across those plains. Sabrino whistled softly to see how many he and his comrades had knocked out of the sky.
"A good morning's work," he said to the handler who started tossing his dragon gobbets of meat. "The dowsers gave us a hand today."
"Aye," the handler agreed. "Wouldn't have been much fun if those buggers had caught us unawares."
"No." Sabrino shuddered at the thought of it. As he freed himself from his harness and slid to the ground, he asked the handler, "How's the cinnabar holding out?"
"All right so far," the fellow told him. "We'll get through this fight without any trouble, I think. Don't know what we'll do about the next one, though."
"Worry about it later. What else can we do?" Sabrino hurried off toward the mess tent. He would rather have gone back to his cot, but that wouldn't do. He yawned enormously. Falling asleep aboard his dragon wouldn't do, either. He gulped hot, strong tea, gulped it and gulped it till it pried his eyelids open. Breakfast was more of the stew that had been in the pot for supper the night before. He recognized barley, buckwheat, carrots, celery, onions, and bits of meat. He couldn't tell what the meat was. Maybe that was for the best.
Colonel Ambaldo raised his mug of tea in salute, as if it held wine. "Here's to the Unkerlanters outsmarting themselves," he said.
"I'll gladly drink to that," Sabrino said. "This morning's ours. Till they can bring more dragons forward, we'll pound 'em to our hearts' content."
"Sounds good to me, by the powers above," Ambaldo said. "The lads down on the ground need all the help they can get."
In Sabrino's eyes, Ambaldo wasn't too much more than a lad himself. That didn't make him wrong. Sabrino said, "Swemmel's men have been waiting for us too cursed long in these parts. Row on row of fieldworks, and they fight to hold every miserable, stinking little village as if it were Sulingen."
"Too right they do," Ambaldo agreed. "Brigades go into those places and companies come out. It's butchery, is what it is."
"Never saw anything like this in Valmiera, did you?" Sabrino couldn't resist the jab.
Colonel Ambaldo shook his head. "Never once. Not even close. They're madmen, these Unkerlanters. They fight like madmen, anyhow. No wonder we started killing
Kaunians to shift 'em. Though from what I hear, we're using up the blonds so fast, we're liable to run short."
"Swemmel won't ever run short on people to kill to power his magecraft," Sabrino said gloomily. "Unkerlant has more peasants than it knows what to do with." He scowled. "That's not quite right. Swemmel knows too bloody well what to do with them-and to them."
Both wing commanders slammed down their empty mugs at the same time. They hurried out of the mess tent, shouting for their men to join them. Sabrino spent a little while cursing because the dragon handlers hadn't finished securing the eggs
under all the dragons in his wing.
But the delay was only short. It might even have worked to the dragonfliers' advantage, though Sabrino wouldn't have admitted that to the handlers. Feeling how his dragon labored under him, Sabrino knew it needed rest, rest it couldn't have. A few more quiet minutes on the ground had surely done it some good.
Not having many fresh Unkerlanter dragons to face did the Algarvians a lot of good, too. Most of Swemmel's dragonfliers wouldn't have been allowed to mount an Algarvian beast, but they had more dragons than did Sabrino and his countrymen. A bad dragonflier on a fresh beast could match a master aboard a worn, overworked dragon.
A fresh Algarvian attack was just going in against the village of Eylau. The wreckage of a couple of previous assaults still lay outside the place: dead men and behemoths. By all the signs, the new brigades assailing the Unkerlanter strongpoint would have had no easier time of it. But, after two wings of Algarvian dragons delivered an all but unopposed attack on Eylau, the strongpoint wasn't so strong anymore. The footsoldiers and behemoths battled their way into the village.
They fought their way in, but would they fight their way out? Already, more Unkerlanter soldiers were moving forward to try to hold them there. Even if the Algarvians did advance, how much good would it do them? Eylau was less than ten miles west of the point from which the assault had begun. At that rate, how long would this army take to join the one pushing east toward it? And would either of them have any men left alive by the time they joined?
Sabrino had no answers. All he could do was command his wing as best he could and hope those set over him knew what they were about. He ordered his dragonfliers back to the farm. More meat for the dragons, more eggs loaded under them, a little food and a lot of tea for the men, and back into the fight once more.
***
Sidroc wondered why he still breathed. Everything he'd been through before this great fight on the flank of the Durrwangen bulge, however horrid and terrifying it seemed at the time, was as nothing beside reality here. He'd always thought a fight would start, and then it would end. This one had started, aye, but it showed no sign of ever wanting to end.
"A week and a half," he said to Sergeant Werferth, who by some miracle also had not been blazed or gone up in a burst of sorcerous energy or been butchered by a flying fragment of egg casing or flamed by a dragon or had any other lethal or disabling accident befall him. "Have we won? Are we winning?"
"Futter me if I know. Futter me if I know anything any more." Werferth scratched his hairy chin. "I've got lice in my beard. I know that."
"So do I," Sidroc said, and scratched like a Siaulian monkey.
Smoke stained the sky above them. Somewhere not far away, eggs burst: Unkerlanter eggs, pounding the Algarvians, pounding the men of Plegmund's Brigade who fought at their side. Werferth said, "Every time we think we've knocked those buggers flat, they pop up again."
"If we kill enough Kaunians-" Sidroc began.
But Werferth shook his head. "What good would it do us? They'd just kill some more of their own, and we'd be back where we started. We've seen that happen too cursed often already."
Sidroc wanted to argue. He wanted Kaunians dead. What else were they good for? - except the enjoyment that Algarvian major had taken from the one his cousin was sweet on. "Vanai," Sidroc muttered under his breath. It had gone clean out of his head till the Algarvian spoke-knocked out when Cousin Ealstan slammed his head against the wall while they were fighting. But he remembered now. Aye, the pieces fit together again.
He laughed, a sound not far from honest mirth. He wondered what had happened, up there in Forthweg. Had the Algarvians gone in and cleaned the Kaunians out of Oyngestun, the way they should have? Or was dear old Ealstan still getting that redhead's sloppy seconds?
"We might as well kill some more Kaunians," he said, thinking of a new argument. "You think the Unkerlanters'll stop slaying their own if we quit? Not bloody likely, you ask me. They'll keep right at it, they will. Even if we don't kill blonds to strike, we'll need to do it to shield ourselves." He stuck out his chin. "Go on. Tell me I'm wrong."
Werferth grunted. "I'll tell you you talk too cursed much, that's what I'll do." He yawned so wide, the hinge at the back of his jaw cracked like a knuckle. "I want to sleep for a year. Two years, with any luck at all."
"I'm with you there." Sidroc had never known a man could be so worn. "I don't think I've slept more than a couple of hours at a stretch since this cursed fight started. I feel drunk half the time."
"I wish I were drunk," Werferth said. "Haven't even had a nip since I found that one dead Unkerlanter with a canteen half full of spirits." He stretched himself out on the torn ground. A couple of minutes later, he was snoring.
A couple of minutes after that, Sidroc was probably snoring, too. His comrades said he did. Since he'd never heard himself, he couldn't have proved it one way or the other. Snoring or not, he was certainly asleep, the deep, almost deathlike sleep that comes from complete exhaustion.
And, a couple of minutes after that, he and Werferth were both awake and both digging like men possessed as Unkerlanter eggs burst all around them. Sidroc felt as if he were moving underwater. He kept dropping the little short-handled shovel. "Cursed thing," he muttered, as if his clumsiness were its fault.
The Algarvians finally started tossing eggs back at King Swemmel's men. "Took 'em long enough," Werferth growled. "I figured they'd wait till we were all dead and then give back a little something."
"I'm not all dead," Sidroc said. "I'm just mostly dead." He and the sergeant both found that very funny, a telling measure of how tired they were. They laughed without restraint, till tears rolled down their faces. And then, in
spite of the eggs that kept bursting all around them, they lay down in the hole they'd dug and went back to sleep.
An officer's whistle woke Sidroc a little before dawn. Lieutenant Ercole looked as grimy and beat as any of the Forthwegians he commanded; not even Algarvian vanity let him steal a few minutes for primping, not on this field. But he sounded far livelier than Sidroc felt. "Up, you lugs!" he cried. "Up! Up and forward! We've got a long way to go before we can be lazy again."
"What does he mean, again?" Werferth mumbled, staggering to his feet as if he'd suddenly aged forty or fifty years. "We've never once been lazy. Powers above, when have we had the time for it?"
"I'd like to have the time to be lazy," Sidroc said. He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a chunk of stale barley bread. He gnawed it as he listened to Ercole.
The company commander pointed ahead. "You see that wedge of behemoths in front of us?" Sure enough, a couple of dozen of the great shapes were silhouetted against the lightening sky. Lieutenant Ercole went on, "We are going to form up behind them. They will pound a breach in the next Unkerlanter line for us. We will go in behind them. We will go into the enemy line. We will go through the enemy line. We will go on toward our brothers who are fighting their way west toward us. Mezentio and victory!"
"Mezentio and victory!" The men of Plegmund's Brigade tried their best, but couldn't raise much of a cheer. Too many of them were dead, too many wounded, too many of the unhurt survivors shambling in an exhausted daze like Sidroc and Werferth.
Dazed or not, exhausted or not, Sidroc trudged forward to find his place behind the behemoths. Not only Forthwegians from Plegmund's Brigade were assembled there, but also Algarvian footsoldiers. The redheads didn't sneer at the Forthwegians anymore; ties of blood bound them together.
Other wedges of behemoths were coming together along the Algarvian line. "They've thought of something new," Sidroc remarked.
"Good for them," Werferth said. "And we get to be the ones who find out whether it works." He kicked at the dirt. "If we live, we're heroes." He kicked again, then shrugged. "And if we don't live, who gives a futter what we are?"
At shouts from the men who crewed them, the behemoths tramped off toward the rising sun. They didn't advance at a full, thunderous gallop, which wo
uld have left the footsoldiers far behind, but did move with an implacability that suggested nothing would stop them. Sidroc hoped the suggestion held truth.
From on high, Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the Unkerlanter trenches and redoubts ahead. The crews of the behemoths with egg-tossers also began pounding the enemy position as soon as they drew within range. The Unkerlanters had dug ditches to keep behemoths away from their trench line, but the rain of eggs caved in the edges to a lot of those ditches. And behemoths, even armored, even carrying men and egg-tossers or heavy sticks, were surprisingly nimble beasts. They had little trouble finding ways to go forward.
Just before the behemoths reached the first trench line, both Algarvian and Unkerlanter wizards used sacrifices to get the life energy they needed for their potent spells. Lieutenant Ercole wasn't twenty feet from Sidroc when violet flame shot up from the ground and consumed him. He had time for one brief, agonized shriek before falling silent forever. Sidroc smelled burnt meat. Absurdly, dreadfully, the smoke-sweet scent made his mouth flood with spit.
Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness Page 44