Through the Darkness d-3

by Harry Turtledove

  As soon as the Lagoan dragons let their eggs fall, they flew off toward the east, toward the great island from which they’d set out. They’d had to do a lot of flying to reach Sibiu, and few were up to the challenge of fighting fresher Algarvian beasts. Once they were gone, the Lagoan ships grew more vulnerable to attack from the air. But the ships didn’t pull back. Indeed, they pressed forward with astonishing boldness. Some of them drew close enough to the shore to start tossing eggs into the harbor.

  King Mezentio’s men had mounted egg-tossers of their own at the edge of the shore-or perhaps they’d simply taken over the ones Sibiu had emplaced. Cornelu wasn’t familiar enough with the defenses of Lehliu to say for certain one way or the other. He was certain the Algarvians defended the port as aggressively as they did everything else. Eggs burst all around the attacking Lagoan warships, and hit several of them.

  And here came the first Algarvian ships out of the harbor: little patrol craft, long on speed, short on weapons. A Lagoan egg hit one of them-hit it and crippled it, all in the same instant. But others dodged past and started blazing at the Lagoans. No, Mezentio’s men weren’t afraid to mix it up.

  “Come on, my beauty,” Cornelu told his leviathan. He would have spoken to Eforiel just the same way. (He thought of his old leviathan as he would have thought of a dead wife he’d loved. He’d loved his real wife, too, but she was still alive, and he loved her no more.)

  The patrol vessels were faster than the leviathan, of course, but the ley-line cruiser he’d sunk had been faster, too. All he needed to do was come alongside and stay alongside for less than a minute. After that, the patrol craft could glide away. It wouldn’t keep gliding long.

  But then his leviathan gave a startled twitch and began to turn aside from the path on which he’d set it. That had nothing to do with mackerel or squid, and he knew it. The great beast had sensed another of its kind close by, and was speeding to the attack.

  In a clash between leviathans, Cornelu was unlikely to be anything but a spectator. He did jettison the eggs the beast had brought from Lagoas. He regretted that, but did it without hesitation. Speed and maneuverability counted for more than anything else in this kind of fight.

  He wished he could have had more time to work with the leviathan. Sibian training enhanced the instincts inborn in the beasts, and gave them an edge over their counterparts from Lagoas and Algarve. But he hadn’t had the chance, and would have to rely on the leviathan’s speed and ferocity.

  Somehow-not even the finest mages knew how-leviathans and their dumpy cousins the whales could unerringly find their way through the sea. The first Cornelu knew of the beast his mount had sensed was when it twisted away to keep his leviathan’s fanged jaw from tearing a great hole in its flank.

  He got a brief glimpse of an Algarvian clinging to the other leviathan’s back as he was clinging to his. That other leviathan tried to bite his beast, too. It also missed, though Cornelu saw its teeth glitter. He pulled his knife from its sheath. He couldn’t do much against the Algarvian leviathan, but he might be able to harm the rider if the fight came to the surface.

  His own mount writhed in the water, almost as lithe and limber as a serpent. It butted the Algarvian beast with its closed beak. The enemy leviathan writhed in pain. Cornelu understood why; a leviathan could stave in the side of a good-sized wooden vessel with a blow like that.

  And, with the other beast hurt, Cornelu’s leviathan bit at it again. This time, the Algarvian’s mount could not escape. Blood gushed forth and darkened the water. All thought of fight forgotten, the other leviathan fled. Cornelu’s pursued, and bit another chunk out of its flank and one from a tail fluke. Either of those bites-to say nothing of the first one-would have been plenty to devour half a man, or maybe all of a man.

  Cornelu wouldn’t have wanted to be the Algarvian aboard that wounded leviathan. The fellow would have a cursed hard time getting the animal to pay attention to him rather than to its own torment. And the blood pouring from it would surely draw sharks. Normally, a shark wouldn’t dare come near a leviathan, but normal rules didn’t hold with blood in the water. And the rider would be in at least as much danger as his mount.

  How was the rest of the fight, the bigger fight, going? Cornelu needed a while to find out. Victory had made his leviathan nearly as hard to control as defeat had the Algarvian’s. Eforiel would have behaved better; the Sibian naval officer was as sure of that as he was of his own name. But Eforiel was dead, gone. He had to do the best he could with this less responsive beast.

  At last, he got the leviathan to rear up in the water, lifting him so he could see farther. Few Lagoan dragons were still in the air; most had indeed flown back toward the dragon farms from which they’d set out. But the Algarvian dragons, flying close to the conquered islands, kept on attacking the Lagoan warships that had come to raid Sibiu. A couple of more Lagoan ships had already lost ley-line power, and drifted helplessly in the water. Before long, either dragons or leviathans would sink them.

  The Algarvians were getting more and more ships out of Lehliu harbor, too. They had fewer in the fight than the Lagoans, but plenty to be dangerous, especially with so many dragons overhead. Cornelu had heard the Lagoans were building ships that could carry dragons and from which the big scaly beasts could fight. That struck him as a good idea, though he didn’t know whether it was true. If it was, none of those ships had come to Sibiu.

  He scowled. More and more, this was looking like a losing fight. The thought had hardly crossed his mind before a couple of Lagoan ships hoisted the red pennant that meant retreat. Every Lagoan vessel in the flotilla turned away from Sigisoara. “Curse you for cowards!” Cornelu cried. Sibiu wasn’t the Lagoans’ kingdom. Why should they fight hard for it?

  And he had no choice but to turn away from his own native islands, either. His salt tears mingled with the salt sea. He wondered why. The life he’d had back in Tirgoviste had taken more wounds than the Algarvian leviathan. Even if the war ended on the instant, he had nothing to come home to.

  But still he grieved. “It is my kingdom, curse them,” he said, as much to hear the sounds of his own language-different from both Algarvian and Lagoan-as for any other reason.

  When he brought his leviathan back into Setubal, he found the Lagoan sailors who’d returned before him celebrating as if they’d won a great victory. He wanted to kill them all. Instead, he found a bottle of plum brandy that wasn’t doing anyone any good, took it back to the barracks set aside for Sibian exiles, and drank himself into a stupor.

  “Ham,” Fernao said reverently. “Beefsteak. Mutton. Endive. Onions.” Longing filled his sigh.

  “Don’t!” Affonso’s voice was piteous. “You’re breaking my heart.” The other Lagoan mage did look as if he were about to weep.

  “I’m breaking my belly.” Fernao sat on a flat rock. The first-rank mage stared in distaste-aye, that’s the right word, he thought-at the charred chunk of camel meat and the half a roasted partridge on his tin plate. The camel would be fatty and gamy; the ptarmigan would taste as if Fernao were eating pine needles, which were the bird’s favorite food and imparted their flavor to its flesh.

  Other Lagoans scattered over the bleak landscape of the austral continent looked bleak themselves. Affonso had on his plate a supper every bit as unappetizing as Fernao’s. He said, “The worst part of it is, it could be worse. We might not have anything to eat at all.”

  “I know.” Fernao used his belt knife to cut a chunk off the camel meat. He impaled it and brought it to his mouth. “Those few days when we had no supplies coming in were very bad. Lucky this new clan of Ice People likes us better than the last one did.” He chewed, grimaced, swallowed. “Or maybe it’s just that this clan hates the Yaninans more than the other one did.”

  “Probably,” Affonso said. The second-rank mage glanced warily up toward the sky. “What I hate are Algarvian dragons overhead at every hour of the day and night.”

  “Aye, even if they haven’t been quite so m
uch trouble since we smashed up their farm,” Fernao said. “Until we have more of our own, though, they’re going to keep on pounding us from the air.”

  “Where are we going to get them?” Affonso asked.

  “If I could conjure them up, I would,” Fernao answered. “But I can’t. In this miserable country, who knows what any of my fancy magic would be worth?”

  “You could talk to a shaman of the Ice People.” Affonso laughed to show he was joking.

  Even if he was, he left Fernao unamused. “I could do all sorts of things that would waste my time, but I won’t,” he snapped. Then he scratched at his coppery beard, which was at least as scraggly as Affonso’s.

  “All right.” The other mage placatingly spread his hands. “All right.”

  Fernao took a resinous-tasting bite of ptarmigan. He thought of Doeg the caravanmaster, whose fetish bird was the ptarmigan. Fernao had eaten one as soon as he’d escaped Doeg’s clutches, to show what he thought of traveling with the man of the Ice People. Every time he ate another one, he took more revenge.

  He threw the bones down by the rock. Ants swarmed over them. Like everything else in the austral continent, they tried to cram a year’s worth of life into the scant time spring and summer gave them.

  Leaning back on the rock, Fernao looked up into the heavens again. The sun was below the northern horizon, but not very far below; the sky there glowed white and bright. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the deeper twilight near the zenith. Fernao narrowed his eyes (they were already narrow, for he had a little Kuusaman blood in him) to try to see more. He was sure he could have read a news sheet, if only he’d had a news sheet to read.

  And then the dreaded shout went up: “Dragons!”

  Cursing, Fernao ran for the nearest hole dug between rocks. He and Affonso jumped into it at essentially the same instant. He peered west. He hadn’t expected the Algarvians to come back to torment his countrymen so soon.

  He saw no dragons, not to the west. Turning his head, he spied them coming out of the northeast. He frowned. What point to attacking from a different direction? It wasn’t as if they needed to surprise the Lagoans; Lieutenant General Junqueiro couldn’t do much about them except hunker down.

  Only when the cheering began among men who paid more attention to dragons than he was in the habit of doing did he realize they weren’t Algarvian dragons. Some were painted in Lagoas’ bright red and gold, others in the sky blue and sea green of Kuusamo, which made them hard to see. Fernao started cheering, too.

  Down came the dragons, one after another. Lagoan soldiers rushed toward them, cheering still. They weren’t experienced groundcrew men, but, at the dragonfliers’ shouted orders, they started putting together a makeshift dragon farm.

  Along with Affonso, Fernao also ran toward the dragons. “Keep some beasts in the air!” he shouted. “Powers above, the Algarvians might come back any time.”

  A Lagoan dragonflier pointed up to the deep blue sky. Craning his neck, Fernao saw several of the great creatures wheeling overhead. He bowed to the dragonflier, who grinned as if to say he forgave him.

  Affonso asked, “How did you get here? Or should I say, how did you get here without the Algarvians’ attacking you?”

  The Lagoan dragonflier’s grin got wider yet. “We kept ‘em too busy to notice us,” he answered. “We laid on a big attack against Sibiu. While Mezentio’s men there were busy fighting it, our dragon transports sneaked down south past the Sibs’ islands and made it here.”

  “Nicely done,” Fernao said, bowing again. “What else have you brought along? Any real food?” After camel meat and ptarmigan, that was a matter of sudden, urgent concern.

  But the dragonflier shook his head. “Just us, the dragons, and some eggs. No room for anything else.” A Kuusaman came up. The Lagoan grinned again. “Well, we brought some friends along, too.”

  “I see.” Fernao nodded to the short, swarthy, Kuusaman. “Do you speak Lagoan?”

  “Little bit,” the fellow replied. He shifted languages: “But I am more at home in classical Kaunian.”

  “Ah. Excellent,” Fernao said in the same tongue. “Most of our officers will be able to talk with you. Some of them will speak Kuusaman, too, of course. I wish I knew more of it.”

  “You wear the badge of a mage, is it not so?” the Kuusaman asked. Fernao nodded. The Kuusaman held out his hand, saying, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, sorcerous sir. This war will be won with magic as well as with footsoldiers and dragons and behemoths. I am called Tauvo.”

  Clasping the proffered hand, Fernao gave his own name, and added, “My colleague here is Affonso.”

  “I am pleased to know you both,” Tauvo said after shaking hands with Affonso, too. “Lagoan mages have made a good name for themselves.”

  “So have those from the land of the Seven Princes,” Fernao said. Tauvo smiled, his teeth very white against his yellow-brown skin. Fernao’s praise hadn’t been altogether disinterested; he went on, “Kuusaman mages have done some very interesting work in theoretical sorcery lately.” It was work about which he knew less than he wanted, and work about which he’d tried without success to find out more. Maybe this Tauvo knew a little something.

  If he did, he didn’t let on. His voice was bland as he answered, “I am sure you honor us beyond our worth. If you ask me about dragons, I can speak with something approaching authority.” He looked around, seeming to take in the grim, almost empty landscape for the first time. “What do dragons eat in this part of the world?”

  “Camel meat, mostly,” Fernao answered. “That is what we eat, too, for the most part, unless you prefer ptarmigan.”

  People called Kuusamans impassive. No matter what people called Kuusamans, Tauvo looked revolted. “I prefer neither.” His dark, narrow eyes went from Fernao to Affonso. “Do I guess that I may not have a choice?”

  “Well, you could eat gnats and mosquitoes instead,” Affonso said. “But they are more likely to eat you.” Right on cue, Fernao slapped at something crawling on the back of his neck.

  Tauvo slapped at something, too. “There do seem to be a good many bugs here,” he admitted. “They put me in mind of Pori, not far from the family home back in Kuusamo.”

  “You should have seen them a month ago,” Fernao said. “They were three times as bad then.” Tauvo nodded politely, but Fernao wasn’t deceived: the dragonflier didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t have believed anyone who said such things, either, not without going through it.

  Someone came running from the tent where Junqueiro’s crystallomancers worked. “Dragons!” he shouted. “Scouts to the west say Algarvian dragons are coming!”

  Tauvo forgot Fernao and Affonso. He ran back to his dragon, shouting in his bad Lagoan at the soldiers who’d just helped him chain it to a spike driven into the ground so they’d help get the chain off. All the dragonfliers were scrambling aboard their mounts. They fought their way into the air one after another.

  The Algarvians came over the Lagoan army before many of the newly arrived dragons had got very high. King Mezentio’s dragonfliers didn’t seem to be expecting any interference. The little force of dragons the Lagoans had had before had stayed out of their way. No longer. The scouts from the new arrivals attacked the Algarvians before King Mezentio’s men knew they were there. A couple of Algarvian dragons tumbled out of the sky. The cheers from the Lagoans on the ground made Fernao’s ears ring.

  But the surprise didn’t last long. The Algarvians quickly rallied. They dropped their eggs-they’d been cursed quick about getting resupplied after the Lagoan raid-without bothering to aim. Some struck home among the Lagoan soldiers on the ground anyhow. Others tore up the grass and low bushes-many of which would have been trees in a warmer part of the world- all around the encampment.

  Without the eggs, the Algarvian dragons were swifter and more maneuver-able. Their fliers had more experience in battle than the Lagoans or the Kuusamans. Before long, some of the newcomers went down. Th
e others kept fighting, though, and the Algarvian dragons did not linger, but flew back off toward the west.

  Fernao turned to Affonso, who’d again dived into the same muddy trench as he had. “Pretty soon, it won’t just be the Algarvians dropping eggs on us. We’ll be dropping eggs on them and the Yaninans, too.”

  His fellow mage laughed. “If we drop eggs on the Yaninans, they’ll run away. That’s all they know how to do.”

  “It’s all they’ve shown, anyhow,” Fernao agreed. “But the Algarvians, whatever else you say about them, stand and fight.”

  “We’ll just have to lick them, then,” Affonso said. “Now we can do it, and there are more of us down here than there are Algarvians.” He laughed and shook his fist toward the west. “On to Heshbon!”

  “More of us than Algarvians now, aye,” Fernao said. “But they can bring in reinforcements easier than we can.”

  “Not if we take Heshbon before they do it,” Affonso returned.

  Fernao thought his friend was unduly optimistic, but said, “Here’s hoping we can bring it off. If we have enough dragons, maybe …”

  Leudast counted himself lucky to be alive. He’d had that feeling any number of times when fighting the Algarvians, but rarely more so than now. The summer before, he knew he’d been fortunate to escape from a couple of the pockets the redheads had formed on the plains of northern Unkerlant. But getting out of the pocket south of Aspang hadn’t taken just good fortune; it had required something uncommonly like a miracle.

  He chewed on a lump of black bread, then turned to Captain Hawart and said, “Sir, we’re in trouble again.”

  “I wish I could say you were wrong,” Hawart answered around his own mouthful of bread. Both men sat on somewhat drier high ground in the middle of a swamp along with perhaps a hundred Unkerlanter soldiers-so far as Leudast knew, all the survivors from Hawart’s regiment. Mournfully, the captain said, “If only we’d known they were getting their own attack ready back there.”