Surely King Mezentio had been doing what he wanted to do when he launched the Algarvian armies against Unkerlant. Until then, Algarve had gone from one triumph to another: over Forthweg, over Sibiu, over Valmiera, over Jelgava. Sabrino sighed again. The first summer's campaigns against the Unkerlanters had been triumphant, too. But Cottbus hadn't quite fallen. A year later, Sulingen hadn't quite fallen, and neither had the quicksilver mines in the Mamming Hills. And now Mezentio's men did what they had to do in Unkerlant, not what they wanted to do.
No sooner had that gloomy thought crossed Sabrino's mind than dour Captain Orosio's face replaced Domiziano's in the crystal. "Look down, sir," Orosio said. "Curse me if our soldiers aren't pulling out of Durrwangen."
"What?" Sabrino exclaimed. "They can't do that. They've got orders to hold that town against everything the Unkerlanters can do."
"You know that, sir," Orosio answered. "I know that. But if they know that, they don't know they know it, if you know what I mean."
And he was right. Durrwangen was an important town, and the Algarvians had put a sizable army into it to make sure it didn't fall back into Unkerlanter hands. And now that army, men and behemoths, horse and unicorn cavalry, was streaming out of Durrwangen through the one hole in the Unkerlanter ring around it, tramping north and east along whatever roads the soldiers and animals could find or make in the snow.
"Have they gone mad?" Sabrino wondered. "Their commander's head will go on the block for something like this."
"I was thinking the same thing, sir." But Orosio hesitated and then added, "At least they won't be thrown away, like the men down in Sulingen were."
"What? I didn't hear that." But Sabrino was arch; he'd heard perfectly well. And he could hardly deny that his squadron commander had a point. So far as he knew, not a man had come out of Sulingen. The Algarvians down here would live to fight another day-but they were supposed to have been fighting in Durrwangen.
"What do we do, sir?" Orosio asked.
Sabrino hesitated. That needed thought. At last, he answered, "We do what we would have done even if they'd stayed in the city. We go back, get more eggs, and then come and give them whatever help we can. I don't see what else we can do. If you've got a better answer, let me hear it, by the powers above."
But Orosio only shook his head. "No, sir."
"All right, then," Sabrino said. "We'll do that."
News of the Algarvians' retreat from Durrwangen had already reached the dragon farm by the time Sabrino's wing got back to it. Some of the dragon handlers said the commander in Durrwangen hadn't bothered asking for permission before pulling out. Others claimed he had asked for permission, been refused, and pulled out anyway. They were all sure of one thing. "His head will roll," said the fellow who tossed meat covered with powdered brimstone and cinnabar to Sabrino's dragon. He sounded quite cheerful about the prospect.
And Sabrino could only nod. "His head bloody well deserves to roll," he said. "You can't go around disobeying orders."
"Oh, aye," the dragon handler agreed. But then, after a pause, he went on, "Still and all, though, that's a lot of boys who can do a lot of fighting somewhere else."
"Everybody thinks he's a general," Sabrino said with a snort. The dragon handler tossed his mount another big gobbet of meat. The beast snatched it out of the air and gulped it down. Its yellow eyes followed the handler as he took yet another piece of meat from the cart. The dragon was far fonder of the man who fed it than of the man who flew it.
Despite his snort, Sabrino remained thoughtful. He and Orosio had said about the same thing as the dragon handler had. Did that mean they were on to something, or were they all daft the same way?
In the end, it probably wouldn't matter. Regardless of whether his move proved foolish or brilliant, the general in charge of the Algarvian forces breaking out from Durrwangen would be in trouble with his superiors. Being right was rarely an excuse for disobeying orders.
As soon as his beasts were fed and had fresh eggs slung beneath them, Sabrino ordered them into the air once more. He hoped they wouldn't meet Unkerlanter dragons. They'd been flying too much lately. They were tired and far from at their best. He wished they could have had more time to recover between flights. But there were too many miles of fighting and not enough dragons to cover them. The ones Algarve had needed to do all they could.
As if drawn by a lodestone, Sabrino led his dragonfliers back toward the Algarvian soldiers breaking out of Durrwangen. They were doing better than he'd thought they would be. Their retreat, plainly, had caught the Unkerlanters by surprise. Swemmel's men were swarming into the city they'd lost the summer before. Most of them seemed willing to let the soldiers who'd defended it go.
Sabrino and his dragonfliers punished the Unkerlanters who did attack the retreating Algarvians. Corpses, some in long, rock-gray tunics, others in the white smocks that made them harder to see against the snow, sprawled in unlovely death. Sabrino snorted at that, this time mocking what passed for poetry in his mind. He'd seen too much fighting in two different wars, and the next lovely death he found would be the first.
Down below, the Algarvian army kept falling back. It retreated in excellent order, without the slightest sign of disarray from the men. But if they were in such good spirits, why had their leader ordered them out of Durrwangen in the first place? Couldn't they have held the important town a good deal longer? Sabrino had plenty of questions, but no good answers to go with them.
***
On the defensive. Sergeant Istvan didn't like the phrase. Gyongyosians were by training and (they said) by birth a warrior race. Warriors, by the nature of their calling, boldly stormed forward and overwhelmed the foe. They didn't sit and wait inside fieldworks for the foe to storm forward and try to overwhelm them.
So said most of the men in Istvan's squad, at any rate. They'd come into the army to force their way through the passes of the Ilszung Mounts and through the endless, trackless forests of western Unkerlant. They'd done a good job of it, too. Unkerlant was distracted by her bigger fight with Algarve thousands of miles to the east, and never had put enough men into the defense against Gyongyos-never till recently, anyhow. Now...
"We just have to wait and see if we can build up reinforcements faster than those stinking whoresons, that's all," Istvan said. "If you haven't got the men, you can't do the things you could if you did."
"Aye, he's right," Corporal Kun agreed. Kun always looked more like what he had been-a mage's apprentice-than a proper soldier. He was thin-downright scrawny for a Gyongyosian-and his spectacles gave him a studious seeming. He went on, "Istvan and I had to put up with this same kind of nonsense of Obuda, out in the Bothnian Ocean, when the Kuusamans had enough men to get the jump on us."
"And me," Szonyi said. "Don't forget about me."
"And you," Istvan agreed. They'd all been on Obuda together. Istvan went on, "We've seen the kinds of things you have to do when you haven't got enough men to do everything you want. You sit and you wait for the other bugger to make a mistake and then you try and kick him in the balls when he does."
Kun and Szonyi nodded. The two of them-weedy corporal and burly common soldier with tawny hair and curly beard that made him look like a lion-understood how to play the game. So did Istvan. The rest of the men in the squad... he wasn't so sure of them. They listened. They nodded in all the right places. Did they really know what he was talking about? He doubted it.
"We are a warrior race. We shall prevail, no matter what the accursed Unkerlanters do." That was Lajos, one of the new men. He was as burly as Szonyi, a little burlier than Istvan. In the small bits of action he'd seen since coming up to the front, he'd fought as bravely as anyone could want. He was nineteen, and sure he knew everything. Who was there to tell him he might be wrong? Would he believe anyone? Not likely.
Istvan took off his gloves and looked at his hands. His nails were raggedly trimmed, with black dirt ground under them and into the folds of skin at his knuckles. He turned his hands o
ver. Thick calluses, also dark with ground-in dirt, creased his palms. Scars seamed his hands, too. His eyes went, as they always did, to one in particular, a puckered line between the second and third fingers of his left hand.
Kun had a scar as near identical to that one as made no difference. So did Szonyi. So did several other squadmates, the men who'd served under Istvan for a while. Captain Tivadar had cut them all. The company commander would have been within his rights to kill them all. They'd eaten goat stew. They hadn't known it was goat; they'd killed the Unkerlanters who'd been cooking it. But knowledge didn't matter. They'd sinned. Istvan still didn't know if his expiation was enough, or if the curse on those who ate of forbidden flesh still lingered.
Someone approached the timber-reinforced redoubt in which Istvan and his squad waited. "Who comes?" he called softly.
"The fairy frog in the fable, to gulp you all down."
With a chuckle, Istvan said, "Come ahead, Captain."
Tivadar did, slipping from tree to tree so he didn't show himself to any Unkerlanter snipers who might be lurking nearby. Nodding to Istvan, he slid down into the redoubt. "Anything that looks like trouble?" he asked.
"No, sir," Istvan answered at once. "Everything's been real quiet the past couple of days."
"That's good." Tivadar checked. He wasn't much older than Istvan-he couldn't have been thirty-but he thought of everything, or as close to everything as he could. "I hope that's good, anyhow. Maybe Swemmel's boys are brewing up something nasty out of sight." He turned to Kun. "Anything that feels like trouble, Corporal?"
Kun shook his head. "Nothing I can sense, Captain. I don't know how much that's worth, though. I was only an apprentice, after all, not a mage myself." In the squad, he put on airs about the small spells he did know. Putting on airs with the company commander didn't pay.
"All right," Tivadar said. "The last time they struck us with sorcery, even our best mages didn't know what they'd do till they did it, curse them."
He was all business. Having purified Istvan, Kun, Szonyi, and the rest, he acted as if they were ritually pure, and never mentioned that dreadful night. Neither did any of them, not where anybody not of their number might hear. The shame was too great for that. Istvan thought it always would be.
Kun usually mocked whenever he saw the chance. He was a city man, and his ways often seemed strange and slick and rather repellent to Istvan, who like most Gyongyosians came from a mountain valley where the people were at feud with some neighboring valley when they weren't at feud among themselves. But Kun didn't mock now. In tones unwontedly serious, he said, "That was an abomination. The stars will not shine on men who murder their own to power their magecraft."
"Aye, you're right," Lajos boomed. "The Unkerlanters fight filthy. It's worse than eating goat's flesh, if you ask me."
He waited for everyone to nod and agree with him. In most squads, everybody would have. Here, the agreement was slow and halfhearted. It was badly acted by men who wanted to seem normal Gyongyosians but had trouble doing so. Lajos didn't realize that. Istvan hoped the motions of the stars would grant that he never did. The young trooper grunted and shifted uncomfortably, knowing things had gone wrong and not understanding why.
Szonyi said, "Captain, when can we take the fight to Swemmel's men again? We drove 'em through the mountains and we drove 'em through the woods. We can still do it, any time we get the orders."
Tivadar answered, "If the men set over me tell me to go forward, go forward I shall, unless I should die serving Gyongyos, in which case the stars will cherish my spirit forevermore. But if the men set over me tell me to wait in place, wait in place I shall. And if the men set over you, Trooper, if they tell you to wait in place, wait in place you will. And they do. I do."
"Aye, sir." Szonyi dipped his head in reluctant acquiescence. He was a man of his kingdom-and, like Istvan, a man of the countryside. Given his way, he would go straight at a foe, without subtlety but without hesitation, and keep going till one or the other of them couldn't stand up anymore.
"Remember, boys, you have to stay alert all the time," Tivadar warned. "The Unkerlanters are better in the forest than we are. We couldn't have come so far against 'em if we didn't have 'em outnumbered. They don't always need magic to have a go at us-sometimes sneakiness serves 'em just as well."
He climbed out of the redoubt and headed off along the line to the next Gyongyosian strongpoint. Istvan wished his countrymen had enough men to cover all the line through the forest they held. They didn't, especially in winter, where staying out alone might so easily lead to freezing to death.
"The captain is a pretty good officer," Lajos said.
"Aye, he is," Istvan agreed, and all the other veterans in the squad chimed in, too. Lajos let out a small sigh of relief. Not everyone thought he was an idiot all the time, anyhow.
Kun said, "If we can keep what we hold now when the war is over, we'll have won the greatest victory against Unkerlant in almost three hundred years."
"Is that a fact?" Istvan said, and Kun nodded in a way that proclaimed it was not only a fact, it was a fact anyone this side of feeblemindedness should have known. Istvan sent his corporal a look a little less than warm. Kun returned it:
not quite so openly this time, for Istvan outranked him, but unmistakably nonetheless.
Szonyi sniffed, for all the world like a hound taking a scent. "More snow coming," he said. "Won't be long, either. You can taste the wind."
Istvan had plenty of practice gauging the weather himself. He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, as if he were taking bites out of the air. The chill of the wind-a wind that had suddenly picked up-the feel of the moisture it carried... He nodded. "Aye, we're for it. Coming out of the west, from behind us."
"Blowing right into the Unkerlanters' faces," Szonyi said. "Seems a shame not to hit 'em when we've got that kind of edge. We could be like mountain apes, gone before they even knew we were there."
"Aye, I see the resemblance, all right." Kun planted the barb with a self- satisfied smirk. Szonyi glowered at him. Istvan kept the two of them from quarreling any worse than they usually did.
Whether right about striking or not, Szonyi was right about the storm. It blew in that night, snow swirling around the trees and through their branches till Lajos, on sentry-go, complained, "How am I supposed to see anything? King Swemmel and his whole court could be out there drinking tea, by the stars, and I wouldn't know it unless they invited me to have some."
"If Swemmel was out there, he'd be drinking spirits." Istvan spoke with great conviction. "And the son of a whore wouldn't invite anybody to share." But he could see no farther than Lajos. If the Unkerlanters were gathering in the forest not far away, he might not know it till too late. He might not, but Kun would. He shook the onetime mage's apprentice out of his bedroll.
"What do you want?" Kun asked irritably, yawning in his face.
"You've got that little magic that tells when somebody's moving toward you," Istvan answered. "Don't you think this would be a good time to use it?"
Kun eyed the snowstorm and nodded, though he warned, "The spell won't say whether the men it spies are friends or foes."
"Just work it," Istvan said impatiently. "If they're coming toward us from out of the east, they're no friends of ours."
"Well, you're bound to be right about that," Kun admitted, and worked the tiny spell. A moment later, he turned back to Istvan. "Nothing, Sergeant. Remember, the snow gives the Unkerlanters as much trouble as it gives us."
"All right." Istvan used a brisk nod to hide his relief. He knew he shouldn't have been so relieved; it wasn't proper for a man from a warrior race. But even a man of a warrior race might have been excused for being unwilling to wait and receive a blow from the enemy.
Kun said, "We'll get through another day. That will do." He sounded none too fierce himself, but Istvan didn't reprove him.
***
Now that Vanai dared go out onto the streets of Eoforwic once more, she wis
hed she could find some books written in classical Kaunian. But they'd long since vanished from all the booksellers' shops, those dealing in new and secondhand
volumes alike: the Algarvians forbade them. The redheads had aimed to destroy Kaunianity even before they'd started destroying Kaunians.
Vanai suspected she might have been able to get her hands on some had she known which booksellers to trust. But she didn't, and she didn't care to ask questions that might draw notice to herself. She made do with Forthwegian books.
My magecraft makes me look like a Forthwegian, she thought. Even Ealstan sees me this way almost all the time. I speak Forthwegian almost all the time. People call me Thelberge, as if I really were a Forthwegian. Am I still Vanai?
Whenever she looked in a mirror, her old familiar features looked back at her. Her sorcery didn't change the way she saw herself. In the mirror, she still had fair skin, a long face with a straight nose, and gray-blue eyes. But even in the mirror, her hair was black. Like any Kaunian with a grain of sense, she'd dyed it to make it harder for the Algarvians to penetrate her disguise.
Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness Page 10
