“But what do they expect?” Cornelu asked his leviathan, as if it knew and could answer. “Will a few regiments throw all the Algarvians out of this kingdom? Will the Valmierans rise up and fight the occupiers? Will it be a great victory? Or are they only throwing their men away to no purpose?”
Columns of smoke rose into the sky from Dukstas. King Vitor’s thrust here had caught whatever Algarvian garrison the seaside hamlet held by surprise. For the moment, it belonged to the Lagoans. But now that they had it, what would they do with it?
“They do not think these things through,” Cornelu said. Now that the leviathan had served him well for a while, he talked to it almost as he would have to Eforiel. “Will they storm on to Priekule, chasing Mezentio’s men before them as they go? I have my doubts.”
Maybe the Lagoans didn’t have any doubts, because more and more men paddled ashore in small boats. Cornelu supposed the Lagoans had chosen to attack Dukstas because a ley line ran close by the beach. Even if naval vessels couldn’t come right up to the shore, they could let soldiers off close by. And they certainly had taken the Algarvians by surprise.
Even so, Mezentio’s men were fighting back. Eggs splashed into the water around the Lagoan warships. One of them burst alarmingly close to Cornelu. The shock wave buffeted him and the leviathan. The beast, which felt it far more acutely than a man would, quivered in pain. A burst too near a leviathan could kill, as Cornelu knew too well.
But Mezentio’s men didn’t even know he and his leviathan were there. They were after the ships, which they could see. The naval vessels fought back with eggs of their own, and with heavy sticks. Those set more fires on the shore. Despite everything the navy could do, despite the dragons, an Algarvian egg struck home. A ship staggered in the water, staggered and fell off the ley line. Whether any more eggs hit it or not, it wouldn’t be going home to Setubal.
Cornelu looked up into the sky. Dragons wheeled and twisted there now. The Lagoans weren’t having it all their own way, as they had when the attack on Dukstas began. The Algarvians were flying in beasts of their own from the interior of Valmiera. If they flew in enough of them-if they had enough of them to fly in-the ships here would be in a lot of trouble. One of the lessons of this war was that ships needed dragons to ward them from other dragons.
An older lesson, one dating from the Six Years’ War, was that ships needed leviathans to ward them from other ships and leviathans. How long would the Algarvians take to start moving patrol craft from ports along the Strait of Valmiera to attack the Lagoan interlopers? Not long-Cornelu was sure of that.
He urged his leviathan away from the little Lagoan fleet. If-no, when- Mezentio’s sailors moved to the attack, he wanted to be ready to give them an unpleasant surprise. He knew the ley line along which the ships would be coming. As for leviathans. . He grinned. With the beast he rode, he was willing and more than willing to take on any Algarvian leviathan around. He hadn’t thought he would feel that way about any beast save Eforiel, but he’d turned out to be wrong.
An Algarvian dragon dove on one of the Lagoan ships. Cornelu could see the eggs slung under the dragon’s belly. Beams from heavy sticks reached up for it. One of them found it before the dragonflier let the eggs drop. Burning and tumbling, the dragon fell into the sea. The ship kept gliding along the ley line.
“Up, my friend,” Cornelu told his leviathan, and it rose in the water. He, of course, rose with it. Taking advantage of that, he peered inland. He couldn’t see so much as he would have liked; smoke from the fires already burning in the seaside village obscured his view. But he could see that the Lagoan soldiers seemed to be making for some specific place in back of Dukstas, not fanning out all over the countryside. Maybe that meant they really did know what they were doing. He hoped so, for their sake.
Nobody’d bothered to tell him what they were doing, though. He sighed. That was no tiling out of the ordinary.
And, sure enough, here came an Algarvian ship from the east, the first, no doubt, of many to assail the Lagoan fleet. Cornelu’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. The Algarvians had come too fast. They were intrepid, sometimes intrepid to a fault. Having got the order to attack the Lagoans, they’d piled into their patrol craft and charged out of whatever harbor housed it, eager to be first on the scene and make King Vitor’s men pay.
“And here they are, out ahead of everyone,” Cornelu murmured, “and the next thought of leviathans they have will be their first.”
He’d sunk a ley-line cruiser. He had no trouble sneaking up on this smaller enemy ship: Mezentio’s men, their eyes on the target ahead, paid no attention to anything but the Lagoan ships on their ley line. The rest of the ocean? They worried about it not at all.
Cornelu secured an egg to the side of the Algarvian vessel, then urged his leviathan away from it. When the egg burst, the leviathan gave a startled jerk, then swam away harder than ever. After a while, it had to surface to breathe. Cornelu looked back toward the ship he’d attacked.
There wasn’t much to see, not any more. That egg could have put paid to another cruiser. It was ever so much more than enough to wreck a patrol craft. Only a few bits of flotsam floated on the water; only a few men struggled in it. If they kept their heads, they might be able to swim to shore. Most of their countrymen, though, had gone down and would never rise again.
Another Algarvian ship had been perhaps a mile behind the first one. Seeing it come to grief, Mezentio’s men frantically brought their vessel to a stop. Eggs from the Lagoan ships began landing near it, and quickly scored a couple of hits. Cornelu cheered. The Algarvian vessel reversed its course and limped away from the fight.
But more Algarvian ships were coming from the west, and more and more Algarvian dragons were overhead. A Lagoan ship caught fire and settled back to the surface of the sea, unable to ride on the ley line any more. Another ship, hit by several eggs, rolled over onto its side and sank.
When Cornelu glanced at the sun, he was surprised to see how far into the northwest it had slid. The fighting on land and sea around Dukstas had been going on for most of the day. The question was, how much longer could the Lagoans keep it up in the face of the superior forces Algarve was marshaling against them?
Though Cornelu hopefully peered south, he spied no new ships coming up from the direction of Setubal. Whatever he and his comrades were supposed to be doing, they were supposed to be doing it by themselves.
Soldiers started trotting back toward the beach and piling into the boats from which they’d gone forth to kill and burn. Oars flashing, they pulled out toward the ships that had brought them to Valmiera. But not so many of those ships were left, and some of the survivors were under attack. Cornelu cursed to see the punishment the soldiers took. It wasn’t as if they were Sibians, but they were fighting the Algarvians.
Sailors let down nets and rope ladders to help the ones who made it out to the ley-line ships come aboard. As soon as all the soldiers had been taken up, the ships glided east along their ley line till it crossed one leading south toward Lagoas. Cornelu urged his leviathan south, too, to cover their retreat.
No Algarvian warships pursued them, which surprised him-Mezentio’s men were not usually inclined toward half measures. But dragons from the mainland of Derlavai dogged the fleet almost all the way back to Setubal. Cornelu wondered how many men who’d landed at Dukstas would see their homes again. He would have been astonished if even half were that lucky.
The leviathan didn’t bring him to the Lagoan capital till after sunrise the next day. Exhausted almost beyond bearing, he staggered to the Sibian barracks and fell asleep without even wrapping the blanket on his cot around himself.
No one woke him. When he climbed out of the cot, the sun had crawled across the sky. Instead of barley mush, he ate fried prawns and washed them down with ale. Then he went out to learn what he could, not in the harbor but in the taverns next door to it.