Darkness Descending

by Harry Turtledove

  Colonel Broumidis sent him a hurt look. The Yaninan’s large, dark, liquid eyes were made for such expressions. Sabrino sighed. He could have said a good deal more, but he didn’t want to offend his ally. Shouting, If you buggers had done any fighting on your own, I could have stayed on the other side of the Narrow Sea, struck him as impolitic.

  “Well, we shall have to carry on the war as best we can.” Broumidis sighed, too. The Yaninans were hardly happier witJh the Algarvians than the other way round. They were a proud and touchy folk, and all the more touchy because of their failures in the field. Broumidis pointed. “Here comes the food for our dragons.”

  Several camels bore panniers full of chunks of meat. The meat came from other camels; cutting them up struck Sabrino as the best thing that could happen to them. They were almost as disagreeable as dragons. Sabrino know no higher dispraise.

  Mosquitoes didn’t care about cut-up meat. They wanted theirs live. Flies and gnats and midges weren’t so fussy. They swarmed round the panniers in buzzing, swirling clouds. They were perfectly willing to torment the camels carrying the panniers, too. And, because the camels had started shedding their heavy winter coats, they suffered badly.

  Not so the Ice People who led them. The natives of the austral continent remained swaddled in furs and robes, and offered the bugs few targets. Sabrino rather wished he were wearing something that covered more than a kilt; his legs looked hardly better than the meat the dragons were getting. And. ... “Before I came here, I thought the Ice People were hairy because that helped keep them warm. Now I wonder whether their being so hairy helps keep the mosquitoes away, too.”

  “It does,” Broumidis said with assurance. “I have seen as much in my service here.” He inhaled, choked on a gnat, and spent the next minute or so coughing. When he could speak again, he went on, “Even so, I would not care to be among their number.”

  “No indeed, my dear fellow!” Sabrino exclaimed. His own groundcrew men took the camel meat from the Ice People. They dusted it with brimstone and lavishly with cinnabar before feeding it to the dragons. Sabrino said, “We need not stint here, at any rate. That’s all to the good.”

  “Aye, dragons down here burn hot and flame far,” his Yaninan counterpart agreed. “Not for nothing do we need what the Ice People trade us.”

  Before Sabrino could answer, an insect bit him on the back of the neck. It wasn’t a mere mosquito; it felt as if it had driven a red-hot nail an inch into his flesh. He yelled and leaped in the air and slapped at himself, all at the same time. Something squashed under the palm of his hand. When he looked, he saw blood and bug guts. He scrubbed his palm on the new green grass shooting up now that the snow had melted. Like the bugs, like everything on the austral continent, the grass was speeding through its life as if it knew it had not a moment to waste.

  Another camel approached from out of the east. This one was a riding beast, with a man of the Ice People perched atop the curious padded bench that served it for a saddle. Seeing Broumidis, the fellow steered the camel toward him. As soon as he came into earshot, he began shouting in his own throaty language, pointing back over his shoulder as he did so.

  “You understand what he’s saying?” Sabrino asked. His neck still throbbed.

  “Aye,” Broumidis replied, “or I do when I don’t have to try to understand you, too.” Sabrino shut up. The Yaninan spoke in the language of the Ice People, listened, and spoke again. After he got another set of answers, he turned back to Sabrino. “The Lagoans are coming. Pathrusim here spied them fording the Jabbok River, about forty miles east of here. They’ll be across it now, of course, but not so far across it--they’re mostly footsoldiers, and couriers camels ride like the wind. We can strike them. We can smite them.”

  He sounded quiveringly eager. Had all the Yaninans been so eager to go into action against King Vitor’s men, Sabrino could have stayed in Unkerlant, in a fight he was convinced mattered more to his kingdom than this sideshow. The best way to escape the sideshow, though, was to smash the Lagoans. If they were beaten off the austral continent, he could go back to Derlavai.

  He shouted for his bugler. The fellow came running up, horn in hand. “Blow the call to combat,” Sabrino told him. “We fly against the Lagoans!”

  Familiar martial music rang out. His dragonfliers burst from their tents and ran for their beasts, which screamed in fury at having their meals interrupted. They were going off to a fight, which they liked as well as eating, but they hadn’t the brains to figure that out.

  A couple of minutes later, a Yaninan trumpeter also started blaring away. Broumidis’ men moved more slowly than the Algarvians despite their commandant s shouts and curses. Poor bugger, Sabrino thought--a good officer trapped in a bad service. Sabrinos whole wing was in the air and speeding east before the first Yaninan dragons left the ground. Sabrino sighed: This was why King Mezentio s men had had to come give them a hand. With Yaninans for allies, Algarve hardly needed enemies.

  Peering down from his perch at the base of his dragon’s neck. Sabrino spied a couple of Lagoan behemoths lumbering ahead of the enemy’s army. The Lagoans spotted his wing, too, and started blazing at the dragons with the heavy stick mounted on one behemoth. The wing, fortunately, was flying high, and even that powerful beam couldn’t knock any dragons out of the sky. It did keep Sabrino from ordering his dragons to swoop down on the Lagoan behemoths, though. They would pay a high price if they tried that.

  A few of the Algarvian dragonfliers did drop eggs on the behemoths. Down here on the austral continent, the wing had to carry eggs as well as fighting with flame and the fliers’ sticks. Sabrino didn’t see whether they knocked the Lagoan beasts down. He was looking ahead, trying to spot the Lagoans’ main force.

  He was also worrying. He’d flown against Lagoan dragons over the Strait of Valmiera; their fliers knew what they were doing. And the Lagoans, unlike the Unkerlanters, used crystals as freely as did his own kingdom. Those behemoths would let the rest of the Lagoan army know the dragons were coming.

  And they did. The Lagoans might not have brought along many dragons, but they had lots of behemoths. Some of those beasts carried egg-tossers, but the ones with heavy sticks all started blazing at the wing of Algarvian dragons.

  Captain Domiziano’s face appeared in Sabrino’s crystal. “Sir, shall we dive on them?” the squadron commander asked. By his tone, he would have liked nothing better.

  But Sabrino shook his head. “No--it would hurt us too much. We can’t afford to throw ourselves away--no telling if any more dragons will be able to come here if we do, and dragons can’t stop a whole army on the march by themselves anyhow.”

  “The Yaninans won’t be able to stop them, either,” Domiziano predicted. “Are we going to have to send soldiers here, too?”

  “I don’t know. Do I look like King Mezentio? You’d better not say aye, by the powers above.” Sabrino added the warning before Domiziano could say anything at all. “What I do know is, we’re not going to give the Lagoans anything easy.”

  Eggs rained down on King Vitor’s men at a height beyond that at which the foe’s heavy sticks could harm the dragons. The only trouble was, it was also a height beyond that at which the dragonfliers could aim accurately. Here and there, a bursting egg flung Lagoans in all directions. More often than not, though, the eggs only cratered the ground.

  After a while, there were no more eggs left to drop. “Back to the dragon farm, boys,” Sabrino ordered. “We’ll load up again and then hit these miserable whoresons another good lick.”

  The rest of the dragonfliers obeyed his command. As he spiraled down to a landing outside of Heshbon, the mosquitoes and flies and gnats he’d escaped in the upper air began to plague him once more. He cursed and slapped, neither of which did much good. Colonel Broumidis’ few dragons were landing alongside their Algarvian allies. They’d done well enough, or so Sabrino supposed. He cursed them anyhow for not stopping the Lagoans by themselves. If they’d managed that, he wouldn’t have
had to come to the austral continent and get nibbled to death by gnats.

  Now that the land of the Ice People was no longer frozen hard as stone, Fernao could dig a hole for himself when eggs began dropping all around him. He got filthy when he dove into the muddy hole, but he vastly preferred getting filthy to getting killed.

  Overhead, the Algarvian dragons wheeled unchallenged. They stayed high above the Lagoan army, not daring to swoop down and flame soldiers or behemoths. Fernao supposed that represented a moral victory of sorts. Moral victories, though, went only so far when measured against the real article. The Algarvians could hurt his comrades--and him, though he tried not to think about that-- while the men on the ground could do little to the dragons as long as they stayed high.

  As if to underscore that, a Lagoan soldier not far away started shrieking. With a curse--he wasn’t thrilled about exposing himself to danger--Fernao scrambled out of the hold where he sheltered and hurried to the wounded man’s side. The soldier writhed, clutching at his belly. Blood rivered out from between his fingers. Either a fragment of egg shell or a sharp stone propelled by a nearby blast of sorcerous energy had laid him open as neatly as a butcher might have done.

  Even as Fernao readied the spell that would slow the man down and give the physicians a chance to work on him, the fellow groaned one last time. He shuddered and went limp; his eyes rolled up in his head. When Fernao felt for his pulse, he found none. That might have been a mercy. The soldier would have known nothing but torment after coming out from under the shadow of the magic; and fever, against which even mages had little power, might well have carried him off anyhow. Fernao jumped back into his hole again.

  The Algarvian dragons seemed to stay in the air over the army forever. Part of that feeling came from being under attack; Fernao knew as much. And part sprang from the nature of daylight on the austral continent. When he’d first come, in winter, the sun had hardly peeked above the horizon. Not so very much farther south, it would never have risen at all. Now that spring had come, though, days grew longer with astonishing speed. Before long, the sun would spend almost all day in the sky. On the far side of the Barrier Mountains, it would never set.

  At last, no doubt because they were out of eggs, the Algarvian dragons flew off toward Heshbon. Fernao shook his head to get rid of the echoing roar of bursting eggs. Mosquitoes buzzed malignantly; he could still hear those. When he inhaled, a tickling in his nose warned him he’d breathed in a couple of midges. He exhaled sharply, and got ride of them before he started to choke.

  All over the field, Lagoans were emerging from the holes they’d dug for themselves. Like Fernao, his countrymen were worn and muddy. A lot of them had a look in their eyes that he didn’t like: the look of men who’d had to take a beating without being able to hit back. A few officers were calling for them to push on toward the west, but Fernao could see at a glance that the soldiers were in no shape to advance.

  Someone waved to him: Affonso. “You’re still alive,” the other mage called.

  “Aye, I think so,” Fernao said. “And you as well--congratulations.”

  Affonso bowed. “Thanks. I wish I could take credit for it, but it had more to do with luck or the powers above--your choice--than with me.” He slapped at the back of his leg, just above the top of his wool stocking. “Stinking bugs.”

  “When I was here before, they’d already passed their peak,” Fernao said. “Now it’s a miracle they don’t suck the blood out of everything.”

  “If they don’t, the Algarvians are liable to,” Affonso said gloomily.

  To that, Fernao could only nod. Algarve had a much easier time sending men and supplies across the Narrow Sea to the austral continent than did Lagoas. The same held true for Yanina, but King Mezentio’s men, unlike KingTsavellas’, took war seriously. Fernao said, “If they ship over footsoldiers and behemoths, we’re liable to be in a bad way.”

  “Aye,” Affonso agreed, more gloomily still. “The dragons are bad enough. Even when they aren’t dropping eggs on our heads, they’re looking down to see just where we’re going. Even Yaninan footsoldiers can put up a fight when they have an edge like that. Algarvians ... I don’t want to think about the bloody Algarvians.”

  “We have to have dragons of our own--that’s all there is to it,” Fernao said. He turned away.

  “Where are you going?” Affonso asked.

  “To tell Lieutenant General Junqueiro what I just told you,” Fernao answered. “Maybe he hasn’t figured it out for himself yet. The more I see of soldiers, the worse I think they are at trying to deal with things they’ve never met before.”

  He found Junqueiro in the middle of a heated argument with the hostages the chieftain of the Ice People named Elishamma had left with the Lagoan army. Since the general and the hostages had no language in common, the exchange of ideas was necessarily limited, but both sides seemed most sincere.

  One of the hostages, a fuzzy fellow named Abinadab, spoke some Yaninan, even if he hadn’t admitted it when Elishamma handed him over to the Lagoans. Seeing Fernao, he rounded on him. “You tell your big man to let us go,” he cried. “Our chief not know mangy Yaninans have strong mangy friends when he give us.”

  “Too bad,” Fernao said. “We are not without power ourselves. We have marched a long way. Now we are almost in sight of Heshbon. Soon we will take it. Then the Algarvians will have a harder time fighting us.”

  “You dream,” Abinadab said, and scornfully turned his back.

  “What is he havering about?” Junqueiro demanded. “What are they all havering about? Powers above, they’re ugly--and smelly, too.” Fernao translated for him. The Lagoan general clapped a hand to his forehead. “Tell them that, if they don’t like being hostages, they can be victims. I doubt their worthless lives have much energy, but they might keep a few sticks charged.”

  No matter what Fernao thought of Junqueiro, that was exactly the right line to take with the Ice People. If the mage enjoyed putting it into Yaninan so Abinadab could translate it for the rest of the nomads, no one but he had to know that. The men of the Ice People cried out in furious indignation, but when Fernao and Junqueiro both ignored them, they went off shaking their heads and muttering.

  “Teach them the fear of the powers above,” Junqueiro muttered, glaring at their backs.

  “They don’t believe in the powers above--only their foolish gods,” Fernao said, the last word necessarily being in the language of the Ice People. “But they do know strength, and they know weakness, too. If we don’t get some dragons here, strength will not lie on our side.”

  He waited for Junqueiro to burst like an egg. No dragon could fly all the way from Lagoas even to the eastern edge of the land of the Ice People, let alone all the way to the neighborhood of Heshbon. But, to his surprise, the commanding general only nodded and said, “It’s being taken care of.”

  “It is?” Fernao blinked. “How?”

  Junqueiro chuckled. “Ah, so you mages don’t know everything there is to know, eh?” Fernao gave him a dirty look: while talking with Affonso, he’d accused the general of being none too bright and didn’t enjoy having the charge flung back in his face. Junqueiro went on, “While you weren’t looking, sorcerous sir, the Kuusaman navy built ley-line transports to haul dragons out to where they needed them. They used them against the Gongs out in the Bothnian Ocean. Now we have some, too, and a couple of them are on their way to the Narrow Sea, to give us a hand against Mezentio’s dragons.”

  “We have? They are?” Not for the first time, Fernao found he really didn’t know everything. The discovery never failed to annoy him. “When will they get here? Have they made it past Sibiu safe?”

  “Aye, they have, or so my crystallomancer tells me,” Junqueiro answered. “Now that a good deal of the ice has melted, they could follow ley lines farther south than any we dared use in dead of winter. No Algarvian dragons or leviathans out of Sibiu spied them. They’ll be here in a couple of days, and then we’ll have dragons of our own
, powers above be praised.”

  “Powers above be praised indeed,” Fernao agreed. “Nothing like giving Mezentio’s men a nasty surprise the next time they come calling.”

  “Aye.” Looking pleased with himself, the Lagoan general whuffled out air through his white-streaked mustachios. “They may have made us stop for a little while, but we’re not down for good.” He puffed out his chest and looked strong and brave. Fernao had always thought he was strong and brave. What the mage had wondered was whether Junqueiro had any brains. Now Fernao began to hope he did.

  But the Lagoan dragons didn’t get there to give the Algarvians a nasty surprise the next time the Algarvians flew overhead, for Mezentio’s dragonfliers returned later that evening, not long before sunset would usher in the brief spring night. This time, they had more eggs than on their first visit. Huddled in a hole in the ground, Fernao hurled curses at them that he knew would not bite. He also cursed the mosquitoes that kept harassing him. The mosquitoes bit. Again, the curses didn’t.

  This time, a couple of dragons did swoop low to flame the Lagoan soldiers. A heavy stick on a behemoth’s back blazed one of them out of the sky. Fernao cheered himself hoarse, even though the dragon’s thrashing death throes did as much damage to the Lagoans on the ground as had its fiery breath.

  After the Algarvians flew off again, a runner came shouting Fernao’s name. On following the man, he discovered that three of the hostages had taken advantage of the chaos to flee. The ones who hadn’t got away looked as if they expected to be blazed for their comrades’ transgressions. Fernao wondered whether they were grateful to be spared or despised the Lagoans for their mercy.

  When morning returned, so did the Algarvian dragonfliers. Going forward while eggs fell was impossible for the Lagoans. Scattering to minimize the damage from the enemy’s eggs was a better ploy. It wouldn’t have been had Junqueiro feared an attack from Yanina’s footsoldiers, but the Yaninans had shown they had no stomach for such assaults.