Authors: Harry Turtledove
Tealdo looked east across the Soretto River, into land that had belonged to the Kingdom of Valmiera since time out of mind. On the far bank, Algarvian dragons dropped eggs on the enemy. Tealdo felt like cheering each flash of released sorcerous energy and each cloud of dust that rose from it.
Sergeant Panfilo had other things on his mind. “Curse the trousered swine for sending all the bridges into the river,” he growled. “If they hadn’t done that, we’d be halfway to Priekule by now.”
“More than halfway,” Tealdo said. “We went through Rivaroli like a dose of castor oil. The yellow-heads still don’t know what landed on ‘em.”
Captain Galafrone was trotting by, as usual more energetic than troopers half his age. Hearing Panfilo and Tealdo, he stopped, threw back his head, and laughed. “Powers above, boys, we only got to the river a couple of hours ago. We’ll be over it by this time tomorrow.
Then
we drive for Priekule.” He paused, listening to what he’d just said. “We really
are
moving, aren’t we? Things weren’t like this during the Six Years’ War, believe you me they weren’t.”
“I only hope those bastards coming down from the north don’t beat us to King Gainibu’s palace,” Tealdo said.
Galafrone laughed again. “Those bastards coming down from the north are your fellow soldiers, you know. And they couldn’t be doing what they’re doing if we hadn’t drawn the Valmierans’ notice away from them.”
“Doesn’t seem fair, sir,” Sergeant Panfilo said. “We’re doing as much work—maybe even harder fighting—and they’ll get all the glory. No, that doesn’t seem fair at all.”
He sounded like a little boy with a case of the sulks. Tealdo understood that. He felt much the same way, and chimed in, “That’s right. What’s the point of fighting if you can’t swagger and boast afterwards? Those fellows will be able to, while we’re nothing but afterthoughts.”
“Well, anyone who listened to you would guess you’re an Algarvian, all right,” Galafrone said. “Here’s the way I see it, though: if we lick the Kaunians, there’s plenty of glory for the whole cursed kingdom. When we lost the last war, back when I was your age, there was plenty of shame to go around, I’ll tell you that. But if you get to put on a
Conquest of Valmiera
ribbon, none of the pretty girls will care whether you fought in the northern army or the southern one.”
Panfilo pointed back toward the west. “Here come the rafts, looks like.”
Sure enough, soldiers aboard a couple of horse-drawn wagons started throwing what looked like large leather pancakes down on to the ground. They also threw down some pumps. Galafrone set his men to inflating the rafts.
“No paddles,” Tealdo observed. “Do they expect us to get across by twiddling our fingers in the river?”
“Use your head, not your mouth,” Panfilo suggested. Tealdo sent him an injured look. Panfilo ignored it. Never in the history of the world had a sergeant proved sensitive to an injured look.
About an hour later, a fellow wearing the insignia of a captain, a badge of the lesser nobility, and a mage’s badge came up, looked over the soldiers at work, and shook his head. “This won’t do,” he said in fussy tones. “No, this won’t do at all. You’ll have to move upstream about a mile, and take these rafts with you.”
“Why?” Galafrone growled. He might have gained captain’s rank himself, but still thought like the common soldier he’d been for so many years. “What in blazes is wrong with where we’re at?”
The mage sniffed at his grammar, and then again when he noted that Galafrone, though also an officer, sported no badge of nobility of any sort. But his answer was not only civil but also informative: “Because, my dear fellow, that’s where the nearest ley line across the Soretto lies.”
“Ah,” Galafrone said, and light also dawned inside Tealdo. Galafrone went on, “No wonder they didn’t issue us any paddles.” He raised his voice: “Come on, boys, time to pack up and move. We have to get to the right doorway before we can pay the Valmierans a call.” Now that he understood the reason for the mage’s order, he complied without the least fuss.
The Valmierans knew that ley line crossed from the Marquisate of Rivaroli into their kingdom proper. They’d flung eggs across the Soretto to keep the Algarvians from concentrating near it till Algarvian dragons put their tossers out of action. More dragons kept working over the eastern bank of the river to make sure the Valmierans didn’t cause any more trouble.
Colonel Ombruno’s whole regiment and a couple of others were assembling near the ley line. So were a couple of companies of heavily armored behemoths. Tealdo smiled when he saw them. The big, ugly beasts pulled their weight and then some. He’d seen how they spread terror and confusion among the Valmierans. He favored fighting foes who were already afraid.
He waited with his comrades till darkness fell. A couple of Valmieran dragons got through the Algarvian squadrons in the air, but the eggs they dropped for the most part fell wide of the gathering force of Mezentio’s men. And, as soon as they had dropped them, the Valmieran dragonfliers fled back to the east as fast as their mounts could carry them.
“Now we take the war to the enemy,” Colonel Ombruno declared magniloquently. “Now we avenge their invasion of our soil, now we avenge their robberies after the Six Years’ War, now we avenge the wicked plots by which they won that war. For King Mezentio!”
Tealdo shouted “Mezentio!” with the rest. So did his friend Trasone, who stood close by, but Trasone raised an eyebrow while he was shouting. Tealdo felt like raising an eyebrow, too. He cared more about living through the next few days than about the king of Algarve. He suspected most Algarvian soldiers felt the same way. Most Valmieran soldiers probably cared more about living through the next few days than about King Gainibu, too.
With any luck at all, a lot of the trousered Kaunians were going to be disappointed.
“Take to your rafts,” Galafrone ordered the men of his company. “We want to hit the yellow-haired whoresons as hard as we can, drive ‘em back from the river so we can set up proper bridges—meaning no disrespect to the mage here, of course.”
“Of course,” that worthy said in a voice like ice. He got into the leather raft with the company commander. After that, Tealdo didn’t see him again for a while. He sat in his own raft, doing his best not to wonder what the Valmierans had waiting for him on the other side of the Soretto. All too soon, he’d find out. The rest of the soldiers in Sergeant Panfilo’s squad—most veterans of the conquest of Sibiu, a couple of new men replacing casualties—also sat hunched and quiet.
Whatever they were thinking, they kept it to themselves.
Tealdo heard the waves in the Soretto begin to slap at the sides of some other leather raft. Then his own began to move, pulled straight across the river by the energy the mage was drawing from the ley line.
He wondered what would happen if some Valmieran, alert or just lucky, blazed the mage in the middle of the stream. That was something he would sooner not discover for himself. He looked across the river, toward the side the Valmierans still held. Flashes showed where Algarvian dragons were dropping eggs on the enemy. “Paste ‘em,” Tealdo muttered under his breath. “Paste ‘em hard.”
Other, smaller flashes showed that not all the Valmierans were slain or cowering in their holes. A beam from a stick struck the water not far from Tealdo’s raft. It raised a hiss and a brief cloud of steam.
Shouts from the eastern bank of the Soretto and more beams stabbing out announced the arrival of the first Algarvians. If the Valmierans could respond quickly, they’d give Tealdo’s comrades a thin time of it. But the one thing the Valmierans hadn’t yet shown they could do was respond quickly.
Gravel grated under the leather raft. It stopped so hard, it almost pitched Tealdo out on his face. “Come on!” Panfilo screamed. “Get moving, curse you! You want to sit around and wait for the Valmierans to blaze you for the pot?” Tealdo’s boots splashed in shallow water. Then he was pounding through gravel-strewn mud, and then up on dry land.
“Mezentio!” he shouted, not so much to demonstrate his love for his sovereign as to keep any other Algarvians from blazing him in the dark. Speed and confusion had worked in the assault on Sibiu. They’d worked thus far in the fight against Valmiera. “Mezentio!” he shouted again. He didn’t want them working against him, especially when he might have to pay with his neck.
He fell in the crater a bursting egg had dug, and then into a trench he hadn’t seen in the dark. Picking himself up, he realized he could break his neck as well as paying with it any other way. A couple of dead Valmierans lay in the bottom of the trench. Had any live enemy soldiers been there with him, he would have stretched out cold and dead himself. But the Kaunians who hadn’t perished had fled. “Mezentio!” Tealdo shouted once more, and stumbled forward.
Before long, he heard thunderous footsteps behind him. A behemoth pounded past, heading east, and then another and another. He cried out the king of Algarve’s name again and again. The behemoth crews, not wanting their own men to blaze them in the night, were also yelling, “Mezentio!”
When dawn came, Tealdo found himself picking his way along the side of a gravel road. Valmierans, some of them soldiers but more civilians, had been retreating down it when Algarvian dragons hit them. The results weren’t pretty: dead Valmierans, dead horses and unicorns that had been drawing carts, the carts themselves and all sorts of other worldly goods scattered and burned and wrecked.
Not all the Valmierans who’d been assailed on the road were dead yet, nor all the beasts of burden, either. Tealdo paused to give a moaning old woman who plainly wouldn’t last much longer a swig of wine from his water bottle. She had trouble swallowing, but at last managed to choke some down. What she said in her own language sounded like thanks. He wondered if she knew he was an Algarvian soldier or took him for a fellow Kaunian.
“Keep moving!” someone called in Algarvian from behind him. “We’ve got to keep moving! If we push them now, maybe we can break them.”
Tealdo shoved the cork back into his water bottle. His knees clicked as he rose from a squat. When he spied dragons flying west a moment later, he threw himself flat again. But the Valmieran dragons paid him no attention. They were streaking toward the Soretto, toward the river crossing the Algarvians had forced. If they could drop some eggs on the ley line, they could put it out of action for a while and trap the Algarvians on this side of the river.
“Keep moving!” someone else yelled—Captain Galafrone this time. “They won’t stop us. They can’t stop us. Nothing Valmiera can do will stop us now.” Tealdo slogged east. He hoped his company commander was right.
Sabrino was working harder these days than he had when the Algarvian army broke through into northern Valmiera the week before. King Gainibu’s men had finally figured out that, if they didn’t halt the Algarvian thrust before it reached the Strait of Valmiera, it would cut off their large force still in eastern Algarve and western Valmiera—and would also keep more help from Lagoas from reaching the mainland of Derlavai.
But the Lagoans, curse them, had already put dragons and behemoths and footsoldiers into southern Valmiera. Lagoan dragonfliers carried a reputation earned in the Six Years’ War. From everything Sabrino had seen, they still lived up to it, too. They were certainly better in the air than their Valmieran counterparts, far better than the Forthwegians Sabrino had fought as last summer passed into autumn.
At the moment, Sabrino was wondering whether the Lagoan he was fighting was better in the air than he was. The fellow put his red-and-gold-painted dragon through maneuvers that should have tied it in knots. He kept trying to get on Sabrino’s tail at a range close enough to let his dragon flame Sabrino’s out of the sky. He kept coming close to doing it, too.
He also had a way of leaning far over his dragon’s neck to make himself as small a target as he could. Sabrino wouldn’t have cared to lean over that far himself, not with so much empty, empty air between him and the ground. He wondered whether the islander had more balls than brains, or whether the Lagoans had come up with a new kind of harness that made falling off harder.
However that was, the enemy dragonflier made a nasty foe. Sabrino felt his own dragon begin to fade beneath him. The beasts could put forth their greatest effort only in short spurts—although the dragon the Lagoan flew seemed tireless. Sabrino blazed at the enemy again, and missed again, too. He cursed, then threw his dragon into a twisting dive to evade the Lagoan.
As he leveled off, the islander still pursuing him, one of the fliers from his wing dove at the Lagoan. The enemy had to break off his attack on Sabrino to defend himself. Algarvian doctrine stressed always keeping an eye on what was happening in back of you. Faster than the Lagoan must have imagined he could, Sabrino resumed the attack himself. His dragon roared to see the one painted in red and gold straight ahead of it.
Behind Sabrino, the dragon’s powerful wings beat hard. Closer and closer it drew to the Lagoan’s mount, which was part of a smaller force than the Algarvian count’s. The embattled Lagoan could not fight two at once. Sabrino tapped the side of his dragon’s neck. Flame burst from its mouth, enveloping the flank and right wing of the Lagoan dragon.
“That’s my beauty!” Sabrino cried. For the moment, he didn’t despise dragons at all. His, surely, was the best of the breed ever hatched.
The Lagoan flew a fine dragon, too. Even as it shrieked, horribly burned, even as it began to tumble out of the sky, it twisted its long, limber neck and sent a blast of flame back at Sabrino and his mount. He felt the heat against his cheek, but the fire fell short. Shrieking still, the Lagoan dragon fell.
Sabrino looked around for more foes. Seeing none close by, he waved to the Algarvian flier who’d fatally distracted his opponent. The dragon-flier blew him a kiss, as if to say it was all part of the game.
Down plummeted the Lagoan dragon. Sabrino tried to mark just where it fell. If he got the chance, he wanted to look at the harness the enemy had used. If it turned out to be better than the ones he and his comrades had on their dragons, the saddlers’ guild needed to know about it, and quickly.