Into the Darkness (72 page)

Seven main passes pierced the Bradano Mountains. Cut the Jelgavan army west of the mountains off from the kingdom that supported it … do that and, with any luck at all, the Algarvians would be able to roll it up and then parade through the rest of the kingdom. The plan was audacious enough to work. Whether it was good enough to work, his men and Cilandro’s would soon find out.

Over the lines they flew, not so high as Sabrino might have liked. A squadron of Jelgavan dragons with only their own fliers aboard could have wreaked havoc among the heavily laden Algarvian beasts. Almost all of them were freighted with soldiers, leaving only a scant handful to serve as escorts.

One dragon did tumble out of the sky, blazed from below. But the rest of the men and mounts in Sabrino’s flight kept going, up into the Bradano Mountains and through the pass Colonel Cilandro and his soldiers were charged with sealing. Sabrino’s head swiveled back and forth as he gauged the landmarks. Even before Cilandro shouted at him, he was urging his dragon downward. The others in the flight followed. As soon as the dragon’s claws touched the stone of the road through the narrowest part of the pass, Cilandro and his fellow soldiers sprang off. Other flights brought in the first companies of other regiments.

“We’ll go back for your friends now,” Sabrino shouted to Cilandro.

“Aye, do,” Cilandro answered. “And we’ll start plugging the pass here.” He waved.

Waving back, Sabrino urged his dragon into the air once more. How swiftly, how effortlessly, he and his unburdened comrades flew back to the dragon farm outside Tricarico. Three more companies of infantry boarded them, to be leapfrogged over the Jelgavans and into the pass. Then they, almost all of them, returned yet again, and transported the rest of their assigned regiments.

Once the last contingent of footsoldiers was on the ground astride Jelgava’s lifeline, Sabrino ordered his flight into the air once more. By now, the Jelgavans were beginning to wake up to what Algarve had done. Egg-carrying dragons came winging out of the east to attack the men the Algarvians had placed behind most of Jelgava’s army. But they were, in Sabrino’s judgment, far too few, and, being burdened with eggs, no swifter than the tired mounts he and his men were flying. Not more than a handful got to drop those eggs on the Algarvians.

Sabrino howled with glee and shook his fist. “The bottle is corked, curse you!” he shouted to the foe. “Aye, by the powers above, the bottle is corked!”

“Buggered!” Talsu said bitterly. “That’s what’s happened to us. We’ve been buggered.”

“Aye.” His friend Smilsu sounded every bit as bitter. “That’s what happens when you keep looking straight ahead. Somebody sneaks around behind you and gives it to you right up the—”

“Pass,” Talsu broke in. Smilsu laughed, not so much because it was funny as because it was either laugh or weep. Talsu went on, “We’d better do something about it pretty cursed quick, too, or this war goes straight into the chamber pot.”

“You think it hasn’t gone there already?” Smilsu demanded.

Talsu didn’t answer right away. He did think it had gone there already. As long as the redheads held the passes—held all the passes, by what panicky rumor said—how were the Jelgavans to get food and other supplies and charges for their weapons up to the soldiers who needed them? The plain and simple answer was, they couldn’t.

At last, Talsu said, “Maybe we should have pulled more men out of the front-line trenches to break through the Algarvian cork.”

Smilsu gave him an ironic bow. “Oh, aye, General, that’d be splendid. Then they’d have pushed us back even farther than they already have.”

Talsu waved his arms in exasperation. He stood behind a boulder big enough to make the gesture safe: no Algarvian could see him do it and blaze him for it. “Well, what did you expect? Of
course
the fornicating whoresons hit us from the front, too. They don’t want to just cut us off—they want to bloody well massacre us.” He lowered his voice. “And odds are we’d have done a lot better and gone a lot further in this stinking war if our own officers thought the same way.”

“Only one I ever saw who even came close was Colonel Adomu,” Smilsu answered, “and look what it got him.”

He also spoke quietly, which was wise on his part, for Colonel Balozhu, who had taken over for the able, energetic, but unlucky Adomu, came walking by to look over their position. Talsu shook his head.
Walking
was probably too strong a word to describe what Balozhu was doing.
Wandering
came closer. Balozhu looked dazed, as if somebody had clouted him in the side of the head with a brick. Talsu had the nasty suspicion that most Jelgavan officers looked the same way these days. Algarve had clouted the whole kingdom in the side of the head with a brick.

Balozhu nodded to him and Smilsu. “Courage, men,” he said, though he hadn’t shown any enormous amount of it himself. “Before long, the Algarvians’ attacks must surely lose their impetus.”

“Aye, my lord count,” Talsu answered, though Balozhu hadn’t given any reason why the Algarvians should slow down. Talsu and Smilsu both bowed low; Balozhu might not have been a bold soldier, but he was a stickler for military punctilio. Satisfied, he went on his way, that mildly confused expression still spread across his bland features.

Very, very softly, Smilsu said, “Aye,
he’ll
lead us to victory.” In a different tone of voice, that might have been praise for Balozhu. As things were, Talsu looked around to make sure no one but him had heard his friend.

He too spoke in a whisper: “I don’t know why we bother keeping up this fight when it’s already lost.”

“Another good question,” Smilsu allowed. “Another question you’d better not ask our dear, noble colonel. The only answer he’d come up with has a dungeon in it somewhere, you mark my words.”

“I can do better than that for myself, thanks,” Talsu said. “Staying alive comes to mind. You throw down your stick and throw up your hands in front of an Algarvian, it’s not better than even money he lets you surrender. He’s about as likely to blaze you down instead.”

“Aye, the redheads are savages,” Smilsu said. “They always have been. I expect they always will be.” He spat in glum emphasis.

“That’s the truth,” Talsu said. But he recalled slitting Algarvian’s throats when sticks needed charging. Not all the savagery lay on the Algarvian side.

And then he stopped caring where the savagery lay, for the Algarvians started tossing eggs at his regiment’s position. Dragons appeared overhead, dropping more eggs and also swooping low to flame Jelgavans rash enough to be caught away from cover. Shouting like demons in their coarse, trilling tongue, the redheads swarmed forward.

They flitted from rock to rock like the mountain apes of the distant west. But mountain apes were not armed with sticks. Mountain apes did not bring heavy sticks and egg-tossers forward on the backs of armored behemoths. Mountain apes did not have dragons diving to their aid.

Along with the rest of the regiment, Talsu retreated. It was that or be outflanked, cut off, and altogether wrecked. Spotting Vartu not far away, a cut on his forehead sending blood dripping down the side of his face, Talsu called, “Don’t you wish you’d gone home to serve Dzirnavu’s relations?”

“Powers above, no!” the former regimental commander’s servant answered. “There, they’d be paying me to let them abuse me. Here, if these stinking Algarvians want to do me a bad turn, I can blaze back at them.” He dropped to one knee and did just that. Then he retreated again, falling back like the veteran he’d become.

Talsu was unhappily aware that his comrades and he couldn’t retreat a great deal farther, not with the Algarvians still blocking the pass through which the main line of the retreat would have to go. He wondered what Colonel Balozhu and the men above him would have them do once they were well and thoroughly trapped. Whatever it was, it would probably be some half measure that didn’t come close to solving the real problem, which was that the Algarvians had more imagination than they knew what to do with and the Jelgavans … the Jelgavans didn’t have nearly enough.

More eggs rained down on the beleaguered regiment. More Algarvians pushed forward against its crumbling front, too. Talsu began to wonder whether the officers above Balozhu would have much chance to do anything with the regiment at all. It seemed to be breaking up right here. Maybe his chances of living through an attempted surrender were better than those of living through much more fighting after all.

Dragons stooped like falcons, flaming, flaming. Not far away from Talsu, a man turned into a torch. He kept running and shrieking and setting bushes ablaze till at last, mercifully, he fell. Talsu made up his mind to yield himself up to the first Algarvian who wasn’t actively trying to kill him the instant they saw each other.

Then Smilsu shouted, “Over here! This way!” Talsu, just then, would have taken any way out of the trap in which the regiment found itself. The stink of his comrade’s charred flesh in his nostrils, he ran toward the little path leading up into the mountains that Smilsu had found.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Vartu and half a dozen others sprinted toward that path. None of them, Talsu was sure, had the least idea where it led, or if it led anywhere. None of them cared, cither; he was equally sure of that. Wherever it went could not be worse than here.

That was what he thought till another dragon painted in white and green and red swooped toward his comrades and him. On that narrow track, they had nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He threw his stick up to his shoulder and blazed away. He gave a sort of mental shrug even as he did so. If he was going to die, he’d die fighting. Given a chance, he would have far preferred not dying at all. Soldiers didn’t always get choices like that.

Sometimes—not nearly often enough, especially not among Jelgavans these days—soldiers did get lucky. Talsu wasn’t the only one blazing at the dragon, but he always insisted his was the beam that caught the great beast in the eye and blazed out its tiny, hate-filled brain. Instead of turning him into another human torch, the dragon and its flier slammed into the ground not twenty feet from him, cutting off the mouth of the path. The dragon’s carcass began to burn then. The flier didn’t move; the fall of his dragon must have killed him.

Talsu was not about to complain. He had his life back when he’d expected to lose it in the next instant. “Let’s go!” he said. He still didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care, either. He could go, and so he would.

“Blazed down a dragon!” Smilsu cried. “They’d give us a decoration for that, if only they knew about it.”

“Bugger the decorations,” Talsu said. He looked around. No, he had no officers, nor even any sergeants, to tell him what to do. He felt absurdly free, cut off not only from whatever was left of the rest of the regiment but also from the army and Jelgava as a whole. “Come on. Let’s see if we can get away.”

“We’ve already gotten away,” Vartu said, which also held a great deal of truth. The ex-servant turned an eye to the sky, no doubt fearing another dragon might turn that truth into a lie.

But the Algarvians had more to worry about than a few fleeting foot-soldiers. Their dragons rained death down on the Jelgavans still trying to push through their force plugging the pass. Talsu and his companions, out of the main tight, were quickly forgotten.

“Do you know,” Smilsu said after they trudged east, or as close to east as they could, for a couple of miles, “I think this track is going to let us out into the foothills on the other side of the mountains.”

“If you’re right,” Vartu said, “it sure as blazes doesn’t look like anybody in a fancy uniform knows it’s here. If the dukes and counts and what have you did know, they’d be moving men along it.”

Smilsu nodded. “Aye. If we come out the other side, we could be heroes for letting the dukes know about it.”

They walked on a while longer. Then Talsu said, “If I had my choice between being a hero and being out of the cursed war …” He took another couple of steps before realizing that might be exactly the choice he had. He spat. “What have the dukes and counts and what have you ever done for me? They’ve done plenty
to
me. They’ve done their cursed best to get me killed. Let them sweat.” He kept going. None of the others said a word to contradict him.

Sixteen

T
EALDO AND his company tramped down a road through fields fragrant with fennel. The Jelgavans used the spice to flavor sausage. Tealdo gnawed on a hard, grayish length of the stuff he’d taken from a farmhouse a few miles back. At first, he hadn’t been sure he liked it; it gave the chopped and salted meat a slightly medicinal taste. Now that he’d grown used to it, though, it wasn’t bad.

Here and there in the fields, Jelgavan farmers stood staring at the Algarvian soldiers advancing past them. Tealdo pointed to one of them, a thickset, stooped old man leaning on a hoe. “Wonder what’s going through his head right now. He never expected to see us on this side of the Bradanos, I’ll lay.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting laid myself,” his friend Trasone answered. That wasn’t what Tealdo had meant, but it didn’t strike him as the worst idea in the world, either. Trasone went on, “I bet the Kaunian bastard is hoping he locked up his daughters well enough so we can’t find ‘em or maybe”—he took another look at the farmer—“maybe his granddaughters.”