“What was that?” the leviathan-rider asked.
“Reindeer dung,” Bento answered in Lagoan, which jerked a startled laugh from Cornelu. Returning to the language of scholarship, Bento continued, “It is not so. I like roast beef as well as any man, and I like looking at pretty women-and doing other things with them-as well as any man, too.”
“Some of the Jelgavan women are pretty enough,” Cornelu observed.
Bento shrugged. “You would be likelier to think so than would I, because Kaunian women look more like those of Sibiu than like those of Kuusamo. To me, most of them are too big and beefy to be appealing.”
Cornelu shrugged, too. He’d been married to a woman who suited him fine. The trouble was, she’d suited the officers the Algarvians billeted in his house, too. Of course, Sibians and Algarvians were closest kin. Maybe that proved Bento’s point. Cornelu wished he could stop thinking about Costache. Thinking about Janira helped. But even thinking about the new woman in his life couldn’t take away the pain of the old one’s betrayal.
He couldn’t ask Bento much about what he’d been doing in Jelgava. Instead, he chose a question that had to do with occupation, which was also on his mind whenever he thought of Costache: “How do the Kaunians up here like living under Algarvian rule?”
“About as well as you would expect: they do not like it much,” Bento answered. “Kaunians like it even less than other folk, because of what the redheaded barbarians in kilts are doing to their people in Forthweg.” He raised an eyebrow. “No offense intended, I assure you.”
“None taken,” Cornelu said dryly. Redheaded barbarians in kilts could apply to Sibians as readily as to Algarvians. The Kaunians of imperial days doubtless had applied it impartially to Cornelu’s ancestors, and to Lagoans, and to other Algarvic tribes that no longer kept their separate identities. Cornelu said, “Were you helping them feel even happier about living under Algarvian rule?”
“Something like that, perhaps,” Bento said, smiling at the irony. “If Mezentio needs more men to garrison Jelgava, he will have a harder time getting enough for Unkerlant. And what is the latest from Unkerlant, if I may ask? The news sheets in Jelgava have been very quiet lately, which I take to be a good sign.”
“By what I heard before I left Setubal, Swemmel’s men have cut off the Algarvians in Sulingen from the rest of their forces,” Cornelu answered. “If they cannot force their way out-or if the Algarvians farther north cannot force their way in-Mezentio’s dragon will have a big fang pulled from its jaw.”
“I am surprised you did not say, ‘Mezentio’s leviathan,’ “ Bento remarked.
“Not I,” Cornelu said. “I care what happens to leviathans. Dragons are nasty beasts. For all of me, they can lose plenty of fangs.”
“Fair enough.” The Kuusaman looked back over his shoulder. “No one pursues. Aye, I may have got away clean.”
“Did you expect otherwise?” Cornelu wondered how close he’d come to sticking his head into a trap.
“One never knows,” Bento said primly.
“That is true,” Cornelu agreed. He thought of everything in the war that hadn’t gone the way people-people outside Algarve, anyhow-expected. And now, down in southern Unkerlant, Mezentio’s men were learning the same hard, painful lesson. “One never knows.” The leviathan swam on, south toward Setubal.
“Come on, lads,” Colonel Sabrino called to his men. “We’ve got to get into the air again. If we don’t, our chums down in Sulingen are going to give us a hard time once we finally win this stinking war.”
If his wing of dragons didn’t get into the air-and if a lot of other important things didn’t happen-the Algarvians in Sulingen would be massacred, and in no position to give anybody a hard time about what he did or didn’t do. And if a lot of those other important things didn’t happen, the war would become that much harder to win.
That was as close as Sabrino cared to come to thinking the war might be lost. He didn’t think that. He wouldn’t think that. “Come on,” he said again, and his dragonfliers hurried out to their beasts.
He shivered as he went, though his clothes were warm enough even for southern Unkerlant in winter-dragons flew high enough to make warm clothing a necessity. That was one of the few advantages to being a dragonflier he could see. But the cold made the beasts he and his fellow fliers rode even more bad-tempered than they were in warm weather.
He’d been flying his own mount since the days when the war was new. That was more than three years now. It wasn’t long enough to make the miserable beast sure it recognized him as he came up to it. He could have waited an eternity for that, and been disappointed at the end of it. The dragon screamed and lifted its head on the end of its snaky neck and made as if to flame him.
But, of all the training it had got, being forbidden to flame except on command had been beaten into it most thoroughly. And Sabrino whacked it on the nose with his goad and shouted, “No! No, you stupid, vicious, brainless thing!”
Still screeching, the dragon subsided and suffered Sabrino to perch at the base of its neck. All over the makeshift dragon farm, fliers were cursing and beating their beasts into submission. Sabrino hated dragons with the intimacy of long acquaintance. He didn’t know a dragonflier who felt otherwise.
A handler trotted up and released the chain that held the dragon to its stake. The beast shrieked at him, too, even though he fed it. Looking around, Sabrino saw most of the flight free. He whacked his dragon with the goad, once to the left, once to the right. For a wonder, the dragon remembered what the signal meant. Its great batwings thundered as it beat them again and again until it hurtled itself into the sky.
Sabrino’s wing numbered thirty-one. Back in Trapani, the generals who’d never been to the fighting front no doubt assumed he led sixty-four men and beasts. He did on paper, after all. And, when the generals back in Trapani gave him orders, they assumed paper and reality matched, and told him to do things he would have had trouble doing even with a full complement of men and dragons. He wished wars were fought on paper. They would have been a lot easier.
This war was being fought on the pocked, battered, snow-streaked plains of southern Unkerlant. Swemmel’s men had a ring around Sulingen, and the Algarvians were trying to scrape together enough men to break through the ring and either get reinforcements to the army pinned down there or, that failing, to get the soldiers out before the noose tightened unbearably.
Looking down, Sabrino saw scattered units of footsoldiers and behemoths who flew banners of red and green and white to keep Algarvian dragonfliers from flaming them and dropping eggs on them by mistake. Where they were going to magic up enough soldiers for an attack, especially in this weather, was beyond him. They’d have to come from somewhere, though. He couldn’t imagine Sulingen left to wither on the vine.
On flew the dragons. The sun came out from behind a cloud, spreading a cold, clear light over the countryside. Clad all in white, the Unkerlanters and their behemoths were hard to see from any height. They couldn’t do anything about the long shadows they cast, though. Sabrino spotted a column of behemoths moving north and west from the Presseck River, as intent on widening the ring around Sulingen as the Algarvians were on breaking it.
He pulled out his crystal and spoke to his squadron commanders: “See ‘em down there, boys? Let’s cook up some of those ambling roasts in their own pans.”
“Aye, Colonel.” Captain Domiziano still sounded boyish. A bold swoop down on the foe was just his meat.
But the Unkerlanters had seen the Algarvian dragons, too. Sabrino bore a healthy respect for the heavy sticks Unkerlanter behemoths carried. One of them could blaze a dragon out of the sky-if the crew aboard the behemoth could bring it to bear. Down on the ground, the crews of those behemoths were going to try.