Through the Darkness

by Harry Turtledove

  He wasn’t the only one there to try. The Algarvian officer who’d told him the name of the village stood staring across the Presseck. The redhead couldn’t see anything, either. “Whose beasts are those?” he called urgently to the men on the south side of the stream. When they didn’t answer fast enough to suit him, he ran across the bridge to see for himself. His boots clattered on the stone.

  He hadn’t got more than halfway across when a glad cry rang out: “They’re ours, sir.” The Algarvian kept running. A moment later, he too shouted happily.

  Staring through the fog, Sidroc saw several great shapes moving toward him on the bridge. Sure enough, the lead behemoth wore Algarvian-style chainmail and was draped in banners of green, red, and white. So was the second. The third . . .

  With sunrise, the breeze picked up. The mist swirled and billowed. When Sidroc got a good look at the third behemoth, he froze for a moment in horror worse than any he’d ever imagined. Then he shouted, as loud as he could: “It’s a trick! They’re Unkerlanters!”

  He was right. It did him no good whatever. By then, the first behemoth, which wore captured armor and false colors, had almost reached his end of the bridge. Its crew—who, he saw, had even dyed their hair to make the imposture better—started tossing eggs into Presseck. Those bursts woke men Sidroc’s shout hadn’t: woke them, too often, to terror and torment.

  Sidroc blazed at the Unkerlanters. But they, like their behemoths, were well armored. The beast thundered forward, onto the north bank of the Presseck. Then the one behind it, also disguised, gained the northern bank. After them came a long column of behemoths honestly Unkerlanter. A heavy stick started a fire in one of the huts in Presseck.

  The men of Plegmund’s Brigade fought the Unkerlanters as hard as they could. They slew a good many of the men aboard the behemoths, and even a couple of the massive animals themselves. But they had no hope of holding the bridge or driving the foe back over the Presseck. Along with his comrades, Sidroc battled on till hope, and a good many of the men, died. And at the last, he and the rest of the troopers still alive did what they had to do: they fled.

  Cornelu patted his leviathan: not a command, a gesture of affection. “Do you see how lucky we are?” he said to the beast. “We get to go north for the winter.”

  Back in the lost and distant days of peacetime, many people from Lagoas and Kuusamo—aye, and from Sibiu, too—had gone on winter holiday to the subtropic beaches of northern Jelgava, to lie on the sand burdened by a minimum of clothing if by any at all and to drink the citrus-flavored wines for which the kingdom was famous. Love affairs in Jelgava had filled the pages of trashy romances. But if anyone went on holiday there these days, it was Algarvian soldiers recuperating from the dreadful cold of Unkerlant.

  As far as the leviathan was concerned, cold wasn’t dreadful. It preferred the waters of the Narrow Sea to those off the coast of Jelgava. Why not? Plenty of blubber kept it warm. And the Narrow Sea swarmed with fish and squid. Pickings were thinner in these parts.

  But the leviathan didn’t go hungry here. When a fat tunny swam past, it gave chase and ran the fish down. It was a big tunny; the leviathan had to make two bites of it. The water turned red. That might draw sharks, but they would be sorry if they came.

  At Cornelu’s signal, the leviathan stood on its tail so he could see farther. Two mountains were visible to his right, one to his left. One of the mountains to his right had a notch in its slope. He nodded and signaled that the leviathan might relax back into the water.

  “We are where we’re supposed to be,” he said, urging his mount closer to the shore. Before long, he could hear waves slapping the beach.

  He halted the leviathan at that point, not wanting to get so close as to risk stranding it. He hadn’t come all the way to the far north; with luck, the beach would be deserted—except for the man he was supposed to pick up.

  After inflating a small rubber raft, he told the leviathan, “Stay,” and used the taps on the animal’s smooth, slick hide that turned the order into something it could grasp. Such a command wouldn’t hold it there indefinitely, but he didn’t intend to be gone long. Then he struck out for the shore.

  At first, he thought the beach altogether empty. That wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. He wondered if something had gone wrong. If the Algarvians had nabbed the man he was supposed to get, they were liable to be lying in wait for him, too. He wished his line of work had no risks attached, but things didn’t work that way. He kept on pushing the raft toward the beach.

  Some of the waves were bigger than they’d looked from out to sea. Riding them on the raft gave him some hint of what a leviathan felt like when gliding effortlessly through the water. Certain savages on the islands of the Great Northern Sea, he’d read, rode the waves upright, standing on boards. He’d thought that barbaric foolishness when he saw it in print. Now he realized it might be fun.

  Then a wave curled over him and plunged him into the water, knocking away the raft. Had he not been fortified with a leviathan-rider’s spells, he might have drowned. He clawed his way to the surface and recaptured the raft. Maybe those wave-riding savages weren’t so smart after all.

  Water dripping from his rubber suit, he splashed up onto the beach. Overhead, a gull mewed. Sandpipers scurried by the ocean’s edge, now and then pecking at something or other in the wet sand. As far as he could tell, he had the beach to himself but for the birds.

  “Hallo!” he called, ready to fight or to dive back into the sea and try to escape if Algarvians answered him. On that wide, empty strand, his cry seemed as small and lost as the gull’s.

  And then, a moment later, an answering “Hallo!” floated to his ears. Almost a quarter of a mile to the north, a small figure came up over the top of a sand dune and waved in his direction. Waving back, he walked toward the other man. He waddled awkwardly because of the rubber paddles on his feet.

  “Call me Belo,” he said, the Lagoan phrase he’d been given back in Setubal.

  “Call me Bento,” the other man replied, also in Lagoan. Cornelu didn’t think the other fellow was a Lagoan, though. Small and slight and swarthy, with black hair and slanted eyes, he looked like a full-blooded Kuusaman. Whatever he was, he was no fool. Recognizing the five-crown emblem on the left breast of Cornelu’s rubber suit, he said, “Sib, eh? How much Lagoan do you speak?”

  “Not much.” Comelu switched languages: “Classical Kaunian will do.”

  “Aye, it generally serves,” the man who called himself Bento said in the same tongue. “Leaving will also do, and do nicely. I don’t think they are on my track, but I don’t care to wait around and find out I am wrong, either.”

  “I can see how you would not.” Cornelu pointed back toward the raft. “We can go. You are sorcerously warded against travel in the sea?”

  “I came here by leviathan,” Bento said. “I have not been here long enough for the protections to have staled.” Wasting no more time on conversation, he stripped off his tunic and trousers and started toward the raft.

  Pushing it out through the booming waves proved harder than riding it to the beach had been, but Cornelu and Bento managed. After they’d reached the calmer sea farther from shore, Cornelu helped the smaller man into the raft, then swam toward the waiting leviathan, pushing Bento ahead of him. As he swam, he asked, “Why did they send a Kuusaman down into Jelgava?”

  “Because I knew what needed doing,” Bento answered placidly. That might even have been his real name; it sounded almost as Kuusaman as Lagoan.

  “Could they not have found someone of Kaunian blood who knew the same things, whatever they are?” Cornelu said. He knew better than to ask spies about their missions. Still . . . “You are not the least conspicuous man in Jelgava, looking as you do.”

  Bento laughed. “In Jelgava, I did not look this way. To eyes there, I was as pale and yellow-haired as any Kaunian. I abandoned the sorcerous disguise when I needed it no longer.”

  “Ah,” Cornelu said. So Bento w
as a mage, then. That came as no real surprise. “I hope you put sand in the Algarvians’ salt.”

  A Lagoan might have bragged. Even a Sibian might have. Bento only shrugged and answered, “I sowed some seeds, perhaps. When they will come to ripeness, or if they will grow tall, is anyone’s guess.”

  “Ah,” Cornelu said again, this time acknowledging that he recognized he wouldn’t get much out of Bento. He looked around for the leviathan, which obligingly surfaced just then, not more than fifty yards away.

  “A fine animal,” Bento said in tones that implied he knew leviathans. “But Lagoan, not Sibian—or am I mistaken?”

  “No, that is so,” Cornelu said. “How did you know?” How strong a mage are you? was the unspoken question behind the one he asked.

  But Bento only chuckled. “I could tell you all manner of fantastic lies. But the truth is, the animal wears Lagoan harness. I have seen what Sibiu uses, and it attaches round the flippers rather differently.”

  “Oh.” Well, Cornelu had already seen that Bento didn’t miss much: the fellow tabbed him for a Sibian right away. “You notice things quickly.”

  “They are there to be noticed,” Bento replied. Cornelu grunted in response to that. The Kuusaman laughed at him. “And now you are thinking I am some sort of sage, subsisting on melted snow and—” He spoke a couple of words of classical Kaunian Cornelu couldn’t catch.

  “What was that?” the leviathan-rider asked.

  “Reindeer dung,” Bento answered in Lagoan, which jerked a startled laugh from Cornelu. Returning to the language of scholarship, Bento continued, “It is not so. I like roast beef as well as any man, and I like looking at pretty women—and doing other things with them—as well as any man, too.”

  “Some of the Jelgavan women are pretty enough,” Cornelu observed.

  Bento shrugged. “You would be likelier to think so than would I, because Kaunian women look more like those of Sibiu than like those of Kuusamo. To me, most of them are too big and beefy to be appealing.”

  Cornelu shrugged, too. He’d been married to a woman who suited him fine. The trouble was, she’d suited the officers the Algarvians billeted in his house, too. Of course, Sibians and Algarvians were closest kin. Maybe that proved Bento’s point. Cornelu wished he could stop thinking about Costache. Thinking about Janira helped. But even thinking about the new woman in his life couldn’t take away the pain of the old one’s betrayal.

  He couldn’t ask Bento much about what he’d been doing in Jelgava. Instead, he chose a question that had to do with occupation, which was also on his mind whenever he thought of Costache: “How do the Kaunians up here like living under Algarvian rule?”

  “About as well as you would expect: they do not like it much,” Bento answered. “Kaunians like it even less than other folk, because of what the redheaded barbarians in kilts are doing to their people in Forthweg.” He raised an eyebrow. “No offense intended, I assure you.”

  “None taken,” Cornelu said dryly. Redheaded barbarians in kilts could apply to Sibians as readily as to Algarvians. The Kaunians of imperial days doubtless had applied it impartially to Cornelu’s ancestors, and to Lagoans, and to other Algarvic tribes that no longer kept their separate identities. Cornelu said, “Were you helping them feel even happier about living under Algarvian rule?”

  “Something like that, perhaps,” Bento said, smiling at the irony. “If Mezentio needs more men to garrison Jelgava, he will have a harder time getting enough for Unkerlant. And what is the latest from Unkerlant, if I may ask? The news sheets in Jelgava have been very quiet lately, which I take to be a good sign.”

  “By what I heard before I left Setubal, Swemmel’s men have cut off the Algarvians in Sulingen from the rest of their forces,” Cornelu answered. “If they cannot force their way out—or if the Algarvians farther north cannot force their way in—Mezentio’s dragon will have a big fang pulled from its jaw.”

  “I am surprised you did not say, ‘Mezentio’s leviathan,’ ” Bento remarked.

  “Not I,” Cornelu said. “I care what happens to leviathans. Dragons are nasty beasts. For all of me, they can lose plenty of fangs.”

  “Fair enough.” The Kuusaman looked back over his shoulder. “No one pursues. Aye, I may have got away clean.”

  “Did you expect otherwise?” Cornelu wondered how close he’d come to sticking his head into a trap.

  “One never knows,” Bento said primly.

  “That is true,” Cornelu agreed. He thought of everything in the war that hadn’t gone the way people—people outside Algarve, anyhow—expected. And now, down in southern Unkerlant, Mezentio’s men were learning the same hard, painful lesson. “One never knows.” The leviathan swam on, south toward Setubal.

  “Come on, lads,” Colonel Sabrino called to his men. “We’ve got to get into the air again. If we don’t, our chums down in Sulingen are going to give us a hard time once we finally win this stinking war.”

  If his wing of dragons didn’t get into the air—and if a lot of other important things didn’t happen—the Algarvians in Sulingen would be massacred, and in no position to give anybody a hard time about what he did or didn’t do. And if a lot of those other important things didn’t happen, the war would become that much harder to win.

  That was as close as Sabrino cared to come to thinking the war might be lost. He didn’t think that. He wouldn’t think that. “Come on,” he said again, and his dragonfliers hurried out to their beasts.

  He shivered as he went, though his clothes were warm enough even for southern Unkerlant in winter—dragons flew high enough to make warm clothing a necessity. That was one of the few advantages to being a dragonflier he could see. But the cold made the beasts he and his fellow fliers rode even more bad-tempered than they were in warm weather.

  He’d been flying his own mount since the days when the war was new. That was more than three years now. It wasn’t long enough to make the miserable beast sure it recognized him as he came up to it. He could have waited an eternity for that, and been disappointed at the end of it. The dragon screamed and lifted its head on the end of its snaky neck and made as if to flame him.

  But, of all the training it had got, being forbidden to flame except on command had been beaten into it most thoroughly. And Sabrino whacked it on the nose with his goad and shouted, “No! No, you stupid, vicious, brainless thing!”

  Still screeching, the dragon subsided and suffered Sabrino to perch at the base of its neck. All over the makeshift dragon farm, fliers were cursing and beating their beasts into submission. Sabrino hated dragons with the intimacy of long acquaintance. He didn’t know a dragonflier who felt otherwise.

  A handler trotted up and released the chain that held the dragon to its stake. The beast shrieked at him, too, even though he fed it. Looking around, Sabrino saw most of the flight free. He whacked his dragon with the goad, once to the left, once to the right. For a wonder, the dragon remembered what the signal meant. Its great batwings thundered as it beat them again and again until it hurtled itself into the sky.

  Sabrino’s wing numbered thirty-one. Back in Trapani, the generals who’d never been to the fighting front no doubt assumed he led sixty-four men and beasts. He did on paper, after all. And, when the generals back in Trapani gave him orders, they assumed paper and reality matched, and told him to do things he would have had trouble doing even with a full complement of men and dragons. He wished wars were fought on paper. They would have been a lot easier.

  This war was being fought on the pocked, battered, snowstreaked plains of southern Unkerlant. Swemmel’s men had a ring around Sulingen, and the Algarvians were trying to scrape together enough men to break through the ring and either get reinforcements to the army pinned down there or, that failing, to get the soldiers out before the noose tightened unbearably.

  Looking down, Sabrino saw scattered units of footsoldiers and behemoths who flew banners of red and green and white to keep Algarvian dragonfliers from flaming them and dropping eg
gs on them by mistake. Where they were going to magic up enough soldiers for an attack, especially in this weather, was beyond him. They’d have to come from somewhere, though. He couldn’t imagine Sulingen left to wither on the vine.

  On flew the dragons. The sun came out from behind a cloud, spreading a cold, clear light over the countryside. Clad all in white, the Unkerlanters and their behemoths were hard to see from any height. They couldn’t do anything about the long shadows they cast, though. Sabrino spotted a column of behemoths moving north and west from the Presseck River, as intent on widening the ring around Sulingen as the Algarvians were on breaking it.

  He pulled out his crystal and spoke to his squadron commanders: “See ’em down there, boys? Let’s cook up some of those ambling roasts in their own pans.”

  “Aye, Colonel.” Captain Domiziano still sounded boyish. A bold swoop down on the foe was just his meat.

  But the Unkerlanters had seen the Algarvian dragons, too. Sabrino bore a healthy respect for the heavy sticks Unkerlanter behemoths carried. One of them could blaze a dragon out of the sky—if the crew aboard the behemoth could bring it to bear. Down on the ground, the crews of those behemoths were going to try.

  “Dive!” Sabrino shouted. He thwacked the dragon with the goad.

  The dragon folded its wings and plummeted. The order to dive was one it obeyed with a better temper than most others, because even its feeble brain had learned that the order to flame would soon follow. If the dragon enjoyed doing anything, it enjoyed killing.

  Wind whipped past Sabrino’s face. Without his goggles, it would have blinded him. He steered the dragon toward a behemoth with a heavy stick. The Unkerlanters riding that behemoth frantically slewed the stick toward him. If they got it pointed in the right direction before he came close enough to flame . . . In that case, his mistress would have to find someone else to keep her in her fancy flat, and his wife might be unhappy, too. On the other hand, she might not.