Other Lagoans scattered over the bleak landscape of the austral continent looked bleak themselves. Affonso had on his plate a supper every bit as unappetizing as Fernao’s. He said, “The worst part of it is, it could be worse. We might not have anything to eat at all.”
“I know.” Fernao used his belt knife to cut a chunk off the camel meat. He impaled it and brought it to his mouth. “Those few days when we had no supplies coming in were very bad. Lucky this new clan of Ice People likes us better than the last one did.” He chewed, grimaced, swallowed. “Or maybe it’s just that this clan hates the Yaninans more than the other one did.”
“Probably,” Affonso said. The second-rank mage glanced warily up toward the sky. “What I hate are Algarvian dragons overhead at every hour of the day and night.”
“Aye, even if they haven’t been quite so much trouble since we smashed up their farm,” Fernao said. “Until we have more of our own, though, they’re going to keep on pounding us from the air.”
“Where are we going to get them?” Affonso asked.
“If I could conjure them up, I would,” Fernao answered. “But I can’t. In this miserable country, who knows what any of my fancy magic would be worth?”
“You could talk to a shaman of the Ice People.” Affonso laughed to show he was joking.
Even if he was, he left Fernao unamused. “I could do all sorts of things that would waste my time, but I won’t,” he snapped. Then he scratched at his coppery beard, which was at least as scraggly as Affonso’s.
“All right.” The other mage placatingly spread his hands. “All right.”
Fernao took a resinous-tasting bite of ptarmigan. He thought of Doeg the caravanmaster, whose fetish bird was the ptarmigan. Fernao had eaten one as soon as he’d escaped Doeg’s clutches, to show what he thought of traveling with the man of the Ice People. Every time he ate another one, he took more revenge.
He threw the bones down by the rock. Ants swarmed over them. Like everything else in the austral continent, they tried to cram a year’s worth of life into the scant time spring and summer gave them.
Leaning back on the rock, Fernao looked up into the heavens again. The sun was below the northern horizon, but not very far below; the sky there glowed white and bright. Only a few of the brightest stars shone through the deeper twilight near the zenith. Fernao narrowed his eyes (they were already narrow, for he had a little Kuusaman blood in him) to try to see more. He was sure he could have read a news sheet, if only he’d had a news sheet to read.
And then the dreaded shout went up: “Dragons!”
Cursing, Fernao ran for the nearest hole dug between rocks. He and Affonso jumped into it at essentially the same instant. He peered west. He hadn’t expected the Algarvians to come back to torment his countrymen so soon.
He saw no dragons, not to the west. Turning his head, he spied them coming out of the northeast. He frowned. What point to attacking from a different direction? It wasn’t as if they needed to surprise the Lagoans; Lieutenant General Junqueiro couldn’t do much about them except hunker down.
Only when the cheering began among men who paid more attention to dragons than he was in the habit of doing did he realize they weren’t Algarvian dragons. Some were painted in Lagoas’ bright red and gold, others in the sky blue and sea green of Kuusamo, which made them hard to see. Fernao started cheering, too.
Down came the dragons, one after another. Lagoan soldiers rushed toward them, cheering still. They weren’t experienced groundcrew men, but, at the dragonfliers’ shouted orders, they started putting together a makeshift dragon farm.
Along with Affonso, Fernao also ran toward the dragons. “Keep some beasts in the air!” he shouted. “Powers above, the Algarvians might come back any time.”
A Lagoan dragonflier pointed up to the deep blue sky. Craning his neck, Fernao saw several of the great creatures wheeling overhead. He bowed to the dragonflier, who grinned as if to say he forgave him.
Affonso asked, “How did you get here? Or should I say, how did you get here without the Algarvians’ attacking you?”
The Lagoan dragonflier’s grin got wider yet. “We kept ‘em too busy to notice us,” he answered. “We laid on a big attack against Sibiu. While Mezentio’s men there were busy fighting it, our dragon transports sneaked down south past the Sibs’ islands and made it here.”
“Nicely done,” Fernao said, bowing again. “What else have you brought along? Any real food?” After camel meat and ptarmigan, that was a matter of sudden, urgent concern.
But the dragonflier shook his head. “Just us, the dragons, and some eggs. No room for anything else.” A Kuusaman came up. The Lagoan grinned again. “Well, we brought some friends along, too.”
“I see.” Fernao nodded to the short, swarthy, Kuusaman. “Do you speak Lagoan?”
“Little bit,” the fellow replied. He shifted languages: “But I am more at home in classical Kaunian.”
“Ah. Excellent,” Fernao said in the same tongue. “Most of our officers will be able to talk with you. Some of them will speak Kuusaman, too, of course. I wish I knew more of it.”
“You wear the badge of a mage, is it not so?” the Kuusaman asked. Fernao nodded. The Kuusaman held out his hand, saying, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, sorcerous sir. This war will be won with magic as well as with footsoldiers and dragons and behemoths. I am called Tauvo.”
Clasping the proffered hand, Fernao gave his own name, and added, “My colleague here is Affonso.”
“I am pleased to know you both,” Tauvo said after shaking hands with Affonso, too. “Lagoan mages have made a good name for themselves.”
“So have those from the land of the Seven Princes,” Fernao said. Tauvo smiled, his teeth very white against his yellow-brown skin. Fernao’s praise hadn’t been altogether disinterested; he went on, “Kuusaman mages have done some very interesting work in theoretical sorcery lately.” It was work about which he knew less than he wanted, and work about which he’d tried without success to find out more. Maybe this Tauvo knew a little something.
If he did, he didn’t let on. His voice was bland as he answered, “I am sure you honor us beyond our worth. If you ask me about dragons, I can speak with something approaching authority.” He looked around, seeming to take in the grim, almost empty landscape for the first time. “What do dragons eat in this part of the world?”
“Camel meat, mostly,” Fernao answered. “That is what we eat, too, for the most part, unless you prefer ptarmigan.”
People called Kuusamans impassive. No matter what people called Kuusamans, Tauvo looked revolted. “I prefer neither.” His dark, narrow eyes went from Fernao to Affonso. “Do I guess that I may not have a choice?”
“Well, you could eat gnats and mosquitoes instead,” Affonso said. “But they are more likely to eat you.” Right on cue, Fernao slapped at something crawling on the back of his neck.
Tauvo slapped at something, too. “There do seem to be a good many bugs here,” he admitted. “They put me in mind of Pori, not far from the family home back in Kuusamo.”
“You should have seen them a month ago,” Fernao said. “They were three times as bad then.” Tauvo nodded politely, but Fernao wasn’t deceived: the dragonflier didn’t believe him. He wouldn’t have believed anyone who said such things, either, not without going through it.
Someone came running from the tent where Junqueiro’s crystallomancers worked. “Dragons!” he shouted. “Scouts to the west say Algarvian dragons are coming!”
Tauvo forgot Fernao and Affonso. He ran back to his dragon, shouting in his bad Lagoan at the soldiers who’d just helped him chain it to a spike driven into the ground so they’d help get the chain off. All the dragonfliers were scrambling aboard their mounts. They fought their way into the air one after another.