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.