Into the Darkness (96 page)

Some—quite a few, in fact—chose to do just that. No one had ever said the Unkerlanters were cowards: no one who’d fought them in the Six Years’ War, certainly. But many Valmierans had been brave, too, and it hadn’t helped them any. King Mezentio and his generals had out-thought them before they outfought them. The same drama looked to be unfolding on the plains of eastern Forthweg.

Every once in a while, the Unkerlanters would hole up in a village or a natural strongpoint too tough to be easily taken. Then, again as in Valmiera and Jelgava, the dragons would come in, dropping eggs on the enemy, softening him up so the men on the ground could finish him off.

When Sabrino’s wing came spiraling down to land at a hastily set up farm in what had been, up till that morning, Unkerlanter-occupied Forthweg, the keepers shouted, “How’s it going? How are we doing, up ahead there?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Sabrino said as he slid off his dragon once it was securely chained to a stake. “By the powers above, I really don’t see how anything could look finer. If we keep going like this, we’ll get to Cottbus almost as fast as we got to Priekule.”

The keepers cheered. One of them took a chunk of meat, rolled it in a bucket full of ground cinnabar and brimstone, and tossed it to the dragon. A snap, and the meat was gone. The dragon ate greedily. It had worked hard today. It would work hard again tomorrow. As long as it got enough food and close to enough rest, it would be able to do what was required of it.

“Eat, sleep, and fight,” Sabrino said. “Not such a bad life, eh?”

One of the keepers looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What about screwing?”

“A reward for good service,” Sabrino answered easily. “That’d pull ‘em into the army, wouldn’t it? ‘Serve your kingdom bravely and we’ll put you out to stud.’ Aye, they’d be storming to join up once they heard that.” He laughed. So did the keepers. Why not laugh? The enemy fled before them.

Captain Domiziano came up. “What’s so funny, sir?” he asked. Sabrino told him. He laughed, too. “Can I quit and join up again?”

“Up till now, my dear fellow, I haven’t noticed you having any problems finding a lady—or, in a pinch, merely a woman—who was interested, or at least willing, when you were,” Sabrino said.

“Well, that’s true enough,” Domiziano said complacently. “The hunting was better when we were on the eastern front, though. Those Valmieran and Jelgavan wenches acted almost the way the ones in the historical romances do. Most of the Kaunian women here won’t give us the time of day, and half the Forthwegians are built like bricks.

“It won’t get any better,” Sabrino said. “When we break into Unkerlant, they’ll be even dumpier than the Forthwegians.”

“My lord count!” Domiziano said in piteous tones. “Did you have to make me think in such doleful terms?”

“What’s so doleful about breaking into Unkerlant?” Captain Orosio asked. He’d come up too late to hear how the conversation started.

Domiziano needed only two words to fill him in: “Homely women.”

“Ah.” Orosio nodded. He looked west. “You had better get used to it, my dear comrade. Not even the powers above, I shouldn’t think, can keep us from smashing the Unkerlanters once for all. You can watch them crumble as we hit them.”

“They’re trying hard to fight back,” Sabrino said, giving credit where he thought it due. “They may even be fighting back harder than the Kaunian kingdoms did in the east. The Jelgavans just quit once we got the jump on them; they had no use for their own officers. The Valmierans did a little better, but they still haven’t figured out what hit them.”

“Do you think the Unkerlanters have, sir?” Orosio asked, his eyes wide.

Sabrino considered the day’s action, the column flamed on the road and the dragon farm caught with its animals still chained to the ground. A slow smile stole across his face. “Now that you mention it, no,” he said.

Orosio and Domiziano both laughed and clapped their hands. Domiziano said, “We’ll be in Cottbus, burning King Swemmel’s palace down around his crazy ears, before harvest time.”

“Aye.” Captain Orosio nodded again. “He’s going to have a lesson in what efficiency really means.” He paraded around very stiffly, as if he were afraid to make any movement not prescribed for him by some higher authority.

“You look like you’ve got a poker up your arse,” Sabrino said.

“Feels that way, too.” Orosio relaxed into a more natural posture. “But go ahead and tell me it’s not how Unkerlanters are.”

“I can’t do that,” Sabrino admitted. “Can’t even come close. “They’re the sort of people who wait for permission to come through on a crystal before they blow their noses.”

“And they haven’t got enough crystals to go around, either,” Domiziano added.

“Makes things easier for us,” Orosio said. “I’m in favor of whatever makes things easier for us.”

“What I’d be in favor of right now is some wine and some food,”

Sabrino said. “Our dragons are stuffing themselves”—he glanced back to where the keepers tossed more gobbets of meat to the great beasts—“and I want to do the same.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but brimstone and cinnabar give me heartburn,” Domiziano said with a grin.

“What would the back of my hand give you?” the wing commander asked, but he also grinned. Aye, grins were easy to come by in an army moving forward. Sabrino looked toward the west again. Faces would be long in the Unkerlanter encampments. He hoped they would get longer, too, in the days ahead. In a low voice, he murmured, “The tide is flowing our way.”

“Aye, it is,” Captain Orosio said. For his part, he looked toward the tents set to one side of the dragon farm. He was grinning, too. “And it looks like supper is finally flowing our way.”

Supper, plainly, had been foraged from the Forthwegian countryside. Sabrino gorged himself on crumbly white cheese, almost preserved with salt and garlic, olives even saltier than the almonds, and breads with wheat and barley flour dusted with sesame seeds. Had anyone back at his estate presumed to serve him such a rough red wine, he would have bitten the luckless fellow’s head off. Here in the field, he drank it without complaint. It might even have gone better with his simple fare than a more subtle vintage would have done.

As he ate, the stars came out. The Gyongyosians made them into powers, powers that could control a man’s destiny. Foolishness, as far as Sabrino was concerned. Powers or not, though, they were beautiful. He watched them for a while, till he caught himself yawning.

He sought his bed without the least embarrassment or the least desire for company. If young Domiziano had the energy to look for a companion and to do something with her once he found her, that was his affair. Sabrino needed sleep.

Some time in the middle of the night, Unkerlanter dragons dropped eggs not too far from the dragon farm. Sabrino woke up, cursed the Unkerlanters in a blurry voice, and fell asleep again. The next morning, the attack went on.