"Just your wing, sir, or both of them at this farm?" a handler asked.
"Both," Sabrino answered. "But I'll wake Ambaldo myself." His face must have worn an evil grin, because several of the handlers snickered.
Colonel Ambaldo awoke with several loud, fervent curses. He also woke grabbing for the stick by his cot. Sabrino got it first. Grabbing and missing seemed to restore something like reason to Ambaldo. He glowered at Sabrino and asked, "All right, your Excellency, who's gone and pissed in the soup pot this time?"
"King Swemmel's little friends, who else?" Sabrino said. "Not that it doesn't sound like some hamfisted generalship from us went into the mix, too." He quickly explained what had gone wrong in front of Braunau.
Ambaldo grunted and rubbed his eyes. "This whole business of killing Kaunians is filthy, if anybody wants to know what I think," he said as he sat up. He looked defiance at Sabrino. "And I don't care what you may believe about it."
"No?" Sabrino said mildly. "I told King Mezentio the same thing before we really started doing it. His Majesty didn't care what I believed about it."
"Really? You said that to Mezentio? To his face?" Ambaldo asked. Sabrino nodded. Ambaldo let out a soft whistle. "I will be dipped in dung. I knew you for a brave man, your Excellency, but still, you surprise me."
"If I weren't a brave man, I wouldn't have come in here to get you," Sabrino said. "Shall we be at it?"
Ambaldo got to his feet and bowed. "I wouldn't miss it for the world."
When Sabrino went out to his dragon, he found it loaded with eggs. The handler was tossing chunks of meat to it. The dragon caught them out of the air one after another. "How's the cinnabar holding out?" Sabrino asked the handler.
He got no more reassuring answers, as he had earlier in the fight. The fellow spread his hands and said, "If they'd known this stinking battle was going to last so bloody long, they should've given us more." Before Sabrino could say anything to that, the dragon handler added, "Of course, maybe they didn't have any more to give." On that cheerful note, he went back to feeding the dragon.
Sabrino climbed aboard the great scaly beast and fastened himself into his harness at the base of its neck. Distracted by raw meat, the dragon didn't even raise a fuss. Then the handler stopped feeding it and undid its chain from the iron spike driven deep into the soil of Unkerlant. Sabrino whacked the dragon with his goad, urging it into the air.
The dragon bellowed in fury at the idea that it should work for a living. As far as it was concerned, it had been hatched to sit on the ground so people could feed it to the bursting point. No matter how often Sabrino tried to give it other ideas with the goad, it was surprised and outraged every time.
It sprang into the air as much from fury as for any other reason. As usual, Sabrino didn't care why. As long as the dragon rose, he'd take that. The other dragons in his wing were every bit as offended at having to earn their keep as was his. They all screeched as they spiraled upward.
Colonel Ambaldo's dragons were flying, too. Sabrino, of necessity his own crystallomancer while on dragonback, murmured the charm that attuned the emanations of his crystal with that of the other wing commander. When Ambaldo's image appeared in his crystal, Sabrino said, "Now that you're awake, your Excellency, how do you want to handle the strike at Braunau? If you like, we'll go in first and then fly cover for your wing."
"Aye, good enough," Ambaldo said, and Sabrino cursed under his breath. He'd made the offer for form's sake, no more. Ambaldo's dragons had been worked hard in this fight, but were still fresher than Sabrino's. They would have made a better covering flight than Sabrino's wing. Ambaldo should have been able to see that for himself. If he couldn't, though, Sabrino had too much pride to point it out to him. Ambaldo did say, "We'll cover you on the way in."
"Thank you so much." Sabrino knew how little he meant that. Ambaldo was brave, but bravery didn't matter much, not here on the western front. The Unkerlanters were brave, too. What really set the Algarvians apart from them was brains. Without a guiding wit behind the fighting, it turned into nothing but a slugging match. King Swemmel's men could afford that better than Algarve could.
Sabrino's mouth turned down in discontent as he steered the dragon east toward Braunau. By the look of the battlefield far below, it had already turned into a slugging match. No more lightning thrusts around Unkerlanter positions to flank them out. The Algarvian attack had gone straight into the heart of the toughest and deepest set of field fortifications Sabrino had ever seen-on the eastern side of the Durrwangen salient and, by all the signs, on the western side as well.
No wonder progress was so painfully slow. No wonder so many dead men and horses and unicorns and behemoths lay on the ground. Where, Sabrino wondered, would their replacements come from? One thought ran through his mind. We'd better win here. If we don't, if we've thrown all this away with nothing to show for it, how are we going to carry the war to the Unkerlanters from here on out?
"Powers above," he muttered as his wing flew over what would have been the place where the Kaunians were sacrificed in front of Braunau, "we're even running out of blonds." King Swemmel's mages had helped there, too. Sabrino cursed softly, and the wind blew his words away. All things considered, maybe he should have called on the powers below instead.
And then he had no more time for such worries, for there lay battered Braunau, corking the Algarvians' advance. He spoke into his crystal again, this time to his own squadron leaders: "We'll dive to drop our eggs on the village, then climb quick as we can and cover Ambaldo's wing while they do the same."
"Here's hoping the Unkerlanters don't hit us," Captain Orosio said. "We've got tired beasts. We'll have trouble giving our best."
Because Sabrino knew that, too, he made his voice harsh as he answered, "It's what we're going to do." He never asked his dragonfliers to do anything he wouldn't do himself, so he was the first to urge his own mount into a dive over Braunau. Footsoldiers down there blazed at him. So did the crew of heavy sticks. If one of those hit his dragon, the beast wouldn't gain height again, and Sabrino's mistress and his wife might miss him. Just above rooftop height, he loosed his eggs, then beat his dragon as hard as he could to make it pull up.
He cursed again when a couple of dragonfliers didn't follow him back up into the sky. Maybe Ambaldo's fresher, faster dragons would have made the men at the heavy sticks miss. No way to know. Sabrino looked back over his shoulder. Ambaldo's dragons were delivering their load of death over Braunau, going in with as much indifference to danger as any Algarvian could want to show.
Sabrino thought he was the first one to spot the swarm of rock-gray Unkerlanter dragons racing toward Braunau from the southwest. He hadn't even the time to grab for his crystal and shout out a warning before the Unkerlanters swooped down on Ambaldo's wing, slicing through his own almost as if it didn't exist.
The Unkerlanters treated Ambaldo and his dragonfliers about as rudely as the Algarvians had treated the Unkerlanter attack on their dragon farms earlier in the battle. Dragon after dragon painted in green and red and white tumbled out of the sky, beset from above. Sabrino wasted no time ordering his own men back into the fray. But the enemy, having struck hard and fast, flew off. Sabrino's dragons were too weary to make much of a pursuit.
Worse, he feared flying into another Unkerlanter trap. With the tired beasts his men were flying, that would be the end of them. Ambaldo's dragons, or those of them that were left, aligned on his. When he shouted the other wing commander's name through the crystal, he got no answer. He didn't think anyone would get answers from Ambaldo again.
"Back to our dragon farm," he told his own squadron leaders. "We'll put the pieces back together as best we can and go on." He didn't know where more dragons-or, for that matter, more dragonfliers-would come from. He didn't know how long the wing could keep going without them, either. All at once, without warning, he felt old.
***
"Come on!" Major Spinello shouted as he led his troopers east. "We can still
do it. By the powers above, we can! But we've got to keep moving."
He wasn't commanding his own regiment anymore. The battered formation he headed was about as big as his regiment had been at the start of the battle of Durrwangen, but it consisted of the mixed-up remnants of three or four different regiments. As cooks threw leftovers together to get another meal out of them, so
Algarvian generals stirred together broken units to get one more fight from them. Battle Group Spinello, they called this one. Spinello would have been prouder if he hadn't been so tired.
He pointed ahead. "If we get over that ridge line and onto the flat land up there, we can tear Swemmel's whole position open. It's only a couple of miles now. We can do it!"
Was anybody listening to him? Was anybody paying any attention at all? He looked around to see. What he saw were men as filthy and unshaven and weary as he was. He looked ahead. Even the Algarvian behemoths seemed worn unto death. A couple of wedges of them led Battle Group Spinello ahead. Without them, every footsoldiers would have been wounded or killed by now.
More behemoths led more Algarvian footsoldiers toward that ridge line. Here and there, they dueled at long range with Unkerlanter behemoths. Spinello had never imagined that Unkerlant had bred so many behemoths. He'd never imagined that Swemmel's men would handle them so well, either.
When a well-placed Algarvian egg knocked over one of those behemoths, he let out a cheer. "See, boys?" he said. "We can still lick 'em. No point in running if you see a couple of enemy beasts and you haven't got any of your own close by."
That had happened a few times in this battle. The Algarvians were used to sending their foes fleeing in panic with their behemoths. They were anything but used to being on the receiving end of panic. But any army's nerve wore thin if its men were fought as hard as they could be and then three steps more besides. Every so often, troops would scream, "Behemoths!" and run the other way when a couple of Unkerlanter beasts showed themselves over the top of a rise.
Captain Turpino limped up to Spinello. His left calf was bandaged; he'd taken a blaze between the top of his boot and the bottom of his kilt. But he refused to leave the field. Spinello was glad to have him here. Turpino was about as far from lovable as a man could get, but he knew his business.
Now he said, "Sir, looks like that little tiny rise there" -he pointed-"will screen us from the worst of what the Unkerlanters can throw at us and still let us move east toward the real high ground."
Spinello considered. His nod, when he gave it, was hesitant. "Aye, unless the Unkerlanters see that, too, and they've got a brigade lying in wait for us."
With a shrug, Turpino answered, "Sir, they've been lying in wait for us ever since we started this attack. You want to know what I think, somebody's head ought to roll for that."
"I'm not saying you're wrong, but you ought to have a care there," Spinello told him. "People I believe tell me this attack went in at the orders of his Majesty himself."
"Mezentio's a good king. That doesn't necessarily make him a good general," Turpino said. "And what's he going to do to me? Boil me alive the way Swemmel might? Not likely! Besides, what can he do to me that's worse than what we've gone through these past two weeks?"
"Good question," Spinello admitted. "The sort of question, though, where you may not want to find out the answer."
"I'll worry later," Turpino said. "Right now, the only thing I'm going to worry about is staying alive through this cursed fight. If I manage that, King Mezentio is welcome to whatever's left of my carcass afterwards."
Nodding, Spinello shouted for a crystallomancer. When an officer-by-courtesy with a crystal trotted over to him, he said, "Can you get hold of the fellow commanding the behemoths in front of us?"
"I can try, sir," the crystallomancer said. "You've got to remember, though, in a field as crowded as this, that Swemmel's men are liable to pick up some of our emanations, the same way we steal theirs every chance we get."
"I'll keep it in mind," Spinello said. "Now get him."
"Aye, sir." The crystallomancer murmured the charm. After his crystal flared with light, an officer on a behemoth appeared in it. Actually, Spinello couldn't see much of him, for the brim of his iron helmet almost covered his eyes, while cheekpieces hid most of the rest of his face. Spinello knew he'd be wearing chain and plate on his body, too. He didn't have to haul the weight around; his behemoth did.
He listened to Spinello, then eyed the ground ahead himself. After a moment, he nodded. "All right, Major, we'll go that way. Once we make it up to the top of the big rise, then we'll see what we see."
"How do you like our chances?" Spinello asked.
"We're short a few behemoths, or maybe more than a few, down in the southeast," the other officer answered. "Swemmel's whoresons held 'em up longer than we expected. But we ought to be able to do the job just the same."
"Good," Spinello said.
"It'll have to do," said the fellow on the behemoth. "And now-farewell." He vanished from the crystal. The crystallomancer put it back into his pack.
The behemoths turned to use the track Captain Turpino had suggested. Spinello blew his whistle. "Follow me!" he shouted-a cry that made Algarvian footsoldiers respect and obey the men who led them. Then he added another cry that was more likely to keep the men of Battle Group Spinello alive: pointing to the behemoths, he yelled, "Follow them!"
For half a mile or so, everything went very well-so well, in fact, that Spinello started to get suspicious. His eyes went back and forth, back and forth. He kept expecting hordes of drunken Unkerlanters to leap from trenches on either flank and rush toward his men with shouts of, "Urra!"
But the trouble, when it came, came from the front. The Unkerlanters crouched in their holes and waited till the wedges of behemoths were almost upon them. Some of those holes were so hard to spot, Spinello guessed they had sorcery covering them. When Swemmel's men did pop up and start blazing, even they weren't so rash-or so drunk-as to charge. Instead, they ducked down again and waited for the Algarvian onslaught.
They didn't have long to wait. The behemoths tossed eggs into their trenches. "Forward!" Spinello shouted again. "Loose order!" The men he led probably could have done the job without commands. They'd done it before, some of them countless times. Having behemoths along to help was, if anything, an unusual luxury. They advanced by rushes, some soldiers blazing while others moved ahead. The Unkerlanters had an unpleasant choice: keep their heads down till they were slaughtered in their holes or come out and try to get away.
More often than not, most of them would have died in place. Here, rather to Spinello's surprise, most of them fled. Maybe it's the behemoths, he thought. If we can be twitchy about theirs, no reason they shouldn't be twitchy about ours.
Whatever the reason, running did the Unkerlanters little good. More eggs from the Algarvian behemoths burst among them, flinging them this way and that like broken toys. When the beam from a heavy stick caught a man in the back, he didn't just go down. He also went up-in flames.
"Forward!" Spinello shouted. Every step took Battle Group Spinello-and the behemoths with it-closer to the high ground at the heart of the salient. If the Algarvians could get up there in numbers, if they could move quickly once they did, this great, bloody grapple might yet turn out to have been worthwhile.
But one of the Unkerlanter officers must have had a crystal, and must have used it before he fell. The Algarvians hadn't gone far past the Unkerlanter trench line before eggs began dropping among them. Spinello curled himself into a ball behind a boulder. The big gray rock shielded him from the energies of eggs bursting in front of it. It would do him no good if eggs burst in back of it. He preferred not to dwell on that.
Somewhere not far away, an Unkerlanter was down and shrieking for his mother in a high, shrill voice. His cries went on and on, then cut off abruptly. Somebody, Spinello supposed, had put him out of his agony. He hoped someone would do the same for him if the need arose. Even more, he hoped it never would. He
aimed to die in bed, preferably with company.
Despite the eggs falling among its men and behemoths, Battle Group Spinello fought its way forward. Spinello noticed the ground rising more sharply under his feet than it had before. "We're getting where we need to go," he called, pointing ahead. "If we can get up there in strength, if we can drive the Unkerlanters back once we do it, nothing we've been through will have mattered. We'll rip Swemmel's boys a new arsehole, and then we'll go on and win this war. Mezentio and victory!"
"Mezentio and victory!" the soldiers shouted. They were veterans. They knew he was telling them the truth. As long as they could keep going forward, they would finally battle their way past the last Unkerlanter defensive line. Then it would be fighting in open country, and Swemmel's soldiers had never been able to match them in that. Destroy the Durrwangen bulge, destroy the Unkerlanter armies here, and who could say what might happen after that?
The Unkerlanters might have drawn the same conclusion. If they had, they liked it less than Spinello had. More eggs fell on the advancing Algarvians, forcing footsoldiers to go to earth and separating them from the behemoths, which made life more difficult for all of Mezentio's men. Algarvian egg-tossers and Algarvian dragons went hunting the enemy's tossers.
Turtledove, Harry - Darkness 04 - Rulers Of The Darkness Page 46
