Out of the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  “Thanks, sir,” Captain Orosio said. “Don’t mind if I do.” The squadron commander drank while Sabrino shut the door. After drinking, Orosio made a horrible face. “Burn the hair off my chest, more likely. But still, better bad spirits than none at all.” He took another swig.

  “What can I do for you?” Sabrino asked.

  “Feels like a freeze is coming,” Orosio said as he walked over to stand in front of the fire. He was in his late thirties, almost as old for a captain as Sabrino was for a colonel. Part of that came from serving under Sabrino--a man under a cloud naturally put his subordinates under one, too. And part of it sprang from Orosio’s own background: he’d had barely enough noble blood to make officer’s rank, and not enough to get promoted.

  But that didn’t mean he was stupid, and it didn’t mean he was wrong. “I thought the same thing myself, walking back here after we landed,” Sabrino said. “If the ground firms up--and especially if the rivers start freezing over--the Unkerlanters will move.”

  “Aye,” Orosio said. The single word hung in the air, a shadow of menace. Orosio turned so that he faced east, back toward Algarve. “We haven’t got a lot of room left to play with, sir, not any more. Before long, Swemmel’s bastards are going to crash right on into our kingdom.”

  “Unless we stop them and throw them back,” Sabrino said.

  “Aye, sir. Unless.” Those words hung in the air, too. Orosio didn’t believe it.

  Sabrino sighed. He didn’t blame his squadron commander. How could he, when he didn’t believe it, either? The Derlavaian War was far and away the greatest fight the world had ever known--big enough to dwarf the Six Years’ War, which the young Sabrino who’d served in the earlier struggle would never have imagined possible at the time--and Algarve, barring a miracle, or several miracles, looked to be on the losing end of it, just as she had before.

  King Mezentio promised miracles: miracles of sorcery that would throw back not only the Unkerlanters but also the Kuusamans and Lagoans in the east. So far, Sabrino had seen only promises, not miracles. Mezentio couldn’t even make peace; things being as they were, no one was willing to make peace with him.

  What did, what could, a soldier trapped in a losing war do? Sabrino strode over and set a hand on Orosio’s shoulder. “My dear fellow, we have to keep doing the best we can, for our own honor’s sake if nothing else,” he said. “What other choice have we? What else is there?”

  Orosio nodded. “Nothing else, sir. I know that. It’s only. . . There’s not a lot of honor left to save any more, either, is there?”

  After we started massacring Kaunians to gain the sorcerous energy we needed to beat Unkerlant? After we mixed modern sophisticated sorcery and ancient barbarism and still didn ‘t get everything we wanted because Swemmel was willing to be every bit as savage as we were and an extra six inches besides? No wonder no one wants to make peace with us. I wouldn’t if I were our enemies.

  But he couldn’t tell Orosio that. He said what he could: “You know my views, Captain. You also know that no one of rank higher than mine pays the least attention to them. Let me have that flask again. If I drink enough, maybe I won’t care.”

  He hadn’t even raised it to his lips, though, when someone else knocked on the door. He opened it and discovered a crystallomancer shivering there. The mage said, “Sir, I just got word from the front. Unkerlanter artificers are trying to throw a bridge over the Skamandros River. If they do . . .”

  “There’ll be big trouble,” Sabrino finished for him. The crystallomancer nodded. Sabrino asked, “Aren’t there any dragons closer and less worn than this poor, miserable wing? We just came in from another mission, you know.”

  “Of course, sir,” the crystallomancer said. “But no, sir, there aren’t. You know how thin we’re stretched these days.”

  “Don’t I just?” Sabrino turned back to Orosio. “Do you think we can get them into the air again, Captain?”

  “I suppose so, sir,” the squadron commander answered. “Powers above help us if the Unkerlanters hit us with fresh beasts while we’re in the air, though--or even the Yaninans.”

  “Or even the Yaninans,” Sabrino echoed with a sour smile. Tsavellas’ small kingdom lay between Algarve and Unkerlant. He’d taken Yanina into the Derlavaian War as Algarve’s ally--not that Yaninan soldiers had covered themselves with glory on the austral continent or in Unkerlant. And, when Unkerlanter soldiers poured into Yanina, Tsavellas had switched sides with revoltingly good timing. With another sour smile, Sabrino went on, “As we said, we have to do what we can. Let’s go do it.”

  His dragon-handler squawked in dismay when he reappeared. His dragon screamed in brainless fury--the only kind it had--when he took his place once more at the base of its long, scaly neck. More handlers brought a couple of eggs to fasten under its belly. It didn’t claw at them, though Sabrino couldn’t figure out why.

  “Keep feeding it,” he told the handler, who tossed the dragon chunks of meat covered with crushed brimstone and cinnabar to make it flame hotter and farther. Algarve was desperately short of cinnabar these days. Sabrino wondered what his kingdom would do when it ran out altogether. What will we do? We’ll do without, that’s what.

  Before long, all twenty-one dragonfliers were aboard their mounts. The wing had a paper strength of sixty-four, and hadn’t been anywhere close to it since the opening days of the war against Unkerlant. Stretched too thin, Sabrino thought again. He nodded to the handler, who undid the chain that held the dragon to an iron stake. Sabrino whacked the beast with an iron-tipped goad. With another scream of fury, the dragon sprang into the air, batwings thundering. The rest of the men he led followed, each dragon painted in a different pattern of Algarve’s green, red, and white.

  With low clouds overhead, the wing had to stay close to the ground if it wanted to find its target. You can’t let Unkerlanters gain a bridgehead. Sabrino knew that as well as every other Algarvian officer. King Swemmel’s men were too cursed good at bursting out of such abscesses in the front when they judged the time ripe.

  Orosio’s image appeared, tiny and perfect, in the crystal Sabrino carried. “There’s the bridge, sir,” he said. “On the bend of the river, a little north of us.”

  Sabrino turned his head to the right. “Aye, I see it,” he said, and guided his dragon toward it. “The wing will follow me in the attack. With a little luck, the rain will weaken the beams from the Unkerlanters’ heavy sticks.” They would know the Algarvians had to wreck a bridge if they could, and they would want to stop Mezentio’s men from doing it. That meant blazing dragons from the sky, if they could manage it.

  As Sabrino guided his dragon into a dive toward the bridge snaking across the Skamandros, the Unkerlanters on the ground did start blazing at him. He was the lead man: he drew the beams. He could hear raindrops and sleet sizzling into steam as beams burned through them. When one passed close, he smelled a breath’s worth of lightning in the air. Had it struck . . . But it missed.

  Below him, the bridge swelled with startling speed. He released the eggs under his dragon’s belly, then urged the beast higher into the air once more. He saw the flashes of sorcerous energy and heard the roars as the eggs burst behind him. More flashes and roars said his dragonfliers were striking the bridge, too.

  He twisted in his harness, trying to see what had happened. He let out a whoop on spotting what was left of the bridge: three or four eggs had burst right on it. “You bastards will be a while fixing that!” he shouted, and turned his dragon back toward the farm in what passed for triumph these days. Only eighteen dragons landed with his. The bridge had cost the other two, and the men who flew them. It was, unquestionably, a victory. But how many more such “victories” could Algarve afford before she had no dragonfliers left?

  Lieutenant Leudast stared glumly east across the Skamandros River. The river, running harder than usual because of the late-fall rains and not yet ready to freeze over, had stalled Unkerlant’s armies longer than its commanders would ha
ve wanted. Artificers were supposed to have bridged it by now, but Algarvian dragons had put paid to that. Now the artificers, or those of them the attack from the air hadn’t killed, were trying again.

  Captain Drogden came up to Leudast. Drogden was a rugged forty; like Leudast himself, he’d seen a lot of war. He headed the regiment of which Leudast commanded a company. Both of them wore hooded capes over their tunics, and both of them had the hoods up to fight the freezing rain. Both of them also wore wool leggings, wool drawers, and stout felt boots. Cold was one thing Unkerlanter warriors knew how to beat.

  “Maybe we’ll get it across this time,” Drogden said, peering through the nasty rain at the artificers at work.

  “Maybe.” Leudast didn’t sound convinced. “But not if the stinking redheads send more dragons and we haven’t got any on patrol. That wasn’t what you’d call efficient.” King Swemmel had tried mightily to make efficiency Unkerlant’s watchword. His subjects mouthed his slogans--inspectors made sure of that-- but they had a good deal of trouble living up to them.

  Captain Drogden rubbed his nose. Like Leudast--like most Unkerlanters-- he boasted a fine hooked beak, one that was sometimes vulnerable to cold weather. He said, “I hear there’s a new commander at the closest dragon farm. The old commander’s gone to a penal battalion.”

  “Oh,” Leudast said, and said no more. Once in a while, the men who fought in a penal battalion escaped it by conspicuous, death-defying heroism. Far more often, they simply died softening up tough Algarvian positions so the soldiers who followed them in the attack got a better chance of success.

  “Chief dowser almost went with him,” Drogden added.

  “Rain must have saved the mage,” Leudast said. His superior nodded. Dowsers spotted dragons at long range by sorcerously detecting the motion of their wingbeats. Finding that motion in the midst of millions of raindrops taxed dowsing rods, spells, and the men who used them.

  A gang of Yaninan peasants squelched by, carrying timbers for the Unkerlanter artificers and their bridge-building. The Yaninans were as swarthy as Unkerlanters, but they were mostly lean men with long faces, not stocky men with broad cheekbones. They grew bushy mustaches, where Leudast and his countrymen shaved when they got the chance. They wore tight tunics, trousers so tight they were almost leggings, and, absurdly, shoes with pompoms on them. They also wore unhappy expressions at being shepherded along by a couple of Unkerlanter soldiers with sticks.

  “Our allies,” Leudast said scornfully.

  Drogden nodded. “As long as we don’t turn our backs on them, anyhow. Powers below eat them for kicking us when we were down, and for getting away with switching sides when they did. We could have smashed them right along with the redheads.”

  “Probably, sir,” Leudast agreed. “But the way I look at it is like this: their whole fornicating kingdom is a penal battalion these days. And they know it, too--look at their faces.”

  The regimental commander thought about that, then laughed and nodded and slapped Leudast on the back. “A penal kingdom,” Drogden said. “I like that, curse me if I don’t. You’re dead right. King Swemmel will find a way to make them pay.”

  “Of course he will,” Leudast said. Both men took care to speak as if they were paying the king a huge compliment. No one in Unkerlant dared speak of Swemmel any other way. You never could tell who might be listening. One of the oldest sayings in Unkerlant was, When three men conspire, one is a fool and the other two are royal inspectors. It held a lot of truth under any king who ruled from Cottbus. Under Swemmel, who’d had to win a civil war against his twin brother before taking the throne, and who scented plots whether they were there or not, it might as well have been a law of nature.

  A few eggs burst, perhaps a quarter of a mile away: Algarvian egg-tossers, feeling for the new bridge. The bursts weren’t particularly close to it, either. A couple of the Yaninans in the work gang dropped the log they were carrying and made as if to run. One of the soldiers with them blazed a puff of steam from the wet ground in front of them. They probably didn’t understand his curses, but that message needed no translation. They picked up the log and went back to work.

  “Surprised he didn’t blaze ‘em,” Drogden remarked.

  “Aye,” Leudast said. “Back when the war was new--when we moved into Forthweg, or we’d just started fighting the Yaninans--I’d’ve taken cover when I heard bursts that close. I know better than to bother now. Those dumb buggers don’t.”

  “You’ve been in it from the start?” Drogden asked.

  “I sure have, sir,” Leudast answered. “Before the start, even--I was fighting the Gongs in the Elsung Mountains, way out west, when Algarve’s neighbors declared war on her. I was in Forthweg when the redheads jumped on our back, and I’ve been trying to kill those whoresons ever since. They’ve been trying to kill me, too, but they only blazed me twice. Add it all up and I’ve been pretty lucky.”

  “Matter of fact, they’ve got me twice, too,” Drogden said. “Once in the leg, and once--” He held up his left hand. Till he did it, Leudast hadn’t noticed he was missing the last two joints of that little finger.

  “Were you in from the very beginning, too?” Leudast asked him.

  “I’ve been in the army since then, aye, but I only went to the front a year and a half ago,” Drogden said.

  “Really?” Leudast said. “You don’t mind my asking, sir, how did you manage to stay away so long?” Who kept you safe? went through his mind. So did, Who finally got angry enough at you to make you come work for a living like everybody else?

  But Drogden said, “For a long time, I was in charge of one of the big behemoth-breeding farms in the far southwest. It was crazy there, especially after the redheads started overrunning so many of the farms here in the east. We were getting breeding stock and fodder out as best we could, and sending the animals and everything else across the kingdom so we could go on breeding them in places where the enemy’s dragons couldn’t reach. We did it, aye, but it wasn’t easy.”

  “I believe that,” Leudast said. There had been plenty of times, the first year and a half of the war, when he’d wondered if the kingdom would hold together. There had been more than a few times when he’d feared it wouldn’t. He went on, “You had an important job, sir. What are you doing here?”

  With a shrug, Drogden replied, “They replaced me with a man who knew behemoths but who’d lost an arm. He couldn’t fight any more, but he could be useful in my old slot. That freed me up to go into battle. Efficiency.”

  “Efficiency,” Leudast echoed. For once, he didn’t feel like a hypocrite saying it. The move Captain Drogden described made good sense, even if he might have preferred to stay thousands of miles away from the war. On the other hand . . . “Uh, sir? Why didn’t they put you in among the behemoth-riders, if you were in charge of a breeding farm?”

  “Actually, I trained as a footsoldier,” Drogden answered. “Raising behemoths was the family business. I joined the army because I didn’t feel like going into it.” He laughed a brief, sardonic laugh. “Things don’t always work out the way you plan.”

  “That’s true enough,” Leudast agreed. A couple of more Algarvian eggs burst. These were a little closer, but not enough to get excited about. He went on, “If things had worked out the way the redheads planned, they’d have marched into Cottbus before the snow fell that first winter of the war.”

  “You’re right,” Drogden said. “From what I’ve seen, Mezentio’s men are almost as smart as they think they are. That makes them pretty cursed dangerous, on account of they really are a pack of smart buggers.”

  “We’ve seen that, curse them,” Leudast said.

  His regimental commander nodded. “Sometimes, though, they think they can do more than they really can. That’s when we’ve made ‘em pay. And now, by the powers above, they’ll pay plenty.”

  “Aye.” Savage hunger filled Leudast’s voice. Like almost all Unkerlanter soldiers who’d seen what the Algarvians had done with--do
ne to--the part of his kingdom they’d occupied, he wanted Algarve to suffer as much or more.

  Drogden looked up to the dripping sky. A raindrop hit him in the eye. He rubbed at his face as he said, “I hope the weather stays bad. The worse it is, the more trouble the Algarvians will have hitting that bridge--and however many others we’re building across the Skamandros.”

  “When the bad weather comes, that’s always been our time.” Leudast started to say something more--to say that, if not for Unkerlant’s dreadful winters, the redheads might well have taken Cottbus--but held his tongue. Drogden might have reckoned that criticism of King Swemmel. The fewer chances you took, the fewer risks you ran. Leudast looked across the Skamandros again. Facing the enemy, he had to take chances. Facing his friends, he didn’t.

  Sunshine greeted him when he woke up the next morning. At first, he took that with a shrug. But then, remembering Captain Drogden’s words, he cursed. The business ends of some large number of heavy sticks poked up to the sky on the west bank of the Skamandros. Any Algarvian dragons that did dive on the bridge wouldn’t have an easy time of it. Mezentio’s dragonfliers hadn’t had it easy the last time they attacked, either, but they’d wrecked the bridge.

  Leudast ordered his own company forward, all the way up to the edge of the river. The beams from their sticks couldn’t blaze a dragon from the sky without the wildest luck, but they might wound or even kill a dragonflier. That was worth trying. “The Algarvians will throw everything they’ve got at us,” he warned his men. “They can’t afford to let us get a foothold on the far side of the Skamandros.”

  As if to underscore his words, a flight of Unkerlanter dragons, all painted the same rock-gray as his uniform tunic and cloak, flew low over the river to pound the Algarvian positions on the eastern side. The soldiers nodded approvingly. If the redheads were catching it, they would have a harder time dishing it out.

  And when the Algarvian strike at the bridge came, Leudast didn’t even notice it at first. One dragon, flying so high that it seemed only a speck in the sky? He was tempted to laugh at Mezentio’s men. A few of the heavy sticks blazed at it. Most didn’t bother. They had no real hope of bringing it down, not from that height.