Through the Darkness

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.