Authors: Harry Turtledove
The Zuwayzin did everything they could to hold the line of the Wadi Uqeiqa. Rathar had been sure they would; if he could secure a lodgement north of the dry riverbed, that would set him up to take a long step toward the valley in which Bishah lay. As he’d looked for the black men to do, they sent out a flanking column of camel riders to hit his reinforcements before the Unkerlanters could reach the front.
Dragons rose with a thunder of wings. For once, the Zuwayzin weren’t going to catch him with his drawers down in this desert country. He didn’t have so many crystals with the troops as he would have liked; with more, he could have done a better job of coordinating his attacks. The Algarvians had shown themselves dangerously good at that.
This time, though, he had enough. One of the dragonfliers reported raking the Zuwayzin with eggs and with the dragons’ own fire. The blacks pressed the attack anyhow, those who were left. His reinforcing column, forewarned, gave them a savage mauling and pressed on toward the Wadi Uqeiqa.
And, while the Zuwayzin threw everything they had into stopping Werpin’s army, they didn’t have enough to stop Gurmun’s force at the same time. Getting them to that point had taken longer and cost much more than Rathar expected, but now it was done. He ordered Gurmun to swing his advance to the west and come in behind the Zuwayzin who still stalled Werpin. Droctulf might have done brilliantly—or he might have botched things altogether. Gurmun handled everything with matter-of-fact competence, which, under the circumstances Rathar had worked so hard to create, proved more than adequate.
Studying the maps, Rathar smiled a rare smile. “We’ve broken them,” he said.
Ignoring the weight of the heavy pack on his back, Istvan watched in fascination as the dowser prowled the west-facing beach on the island of Obuda. The dowser, whose name was Borsos, aimed his forked branch out toward the sea. “I thought dowsers found water,” Istvan said. “Why did they bring you out here, into the middle of all the water in the world?”
Borsos threw back his head and laughed; his tawny yellow curls bounced in rhythm to his mirth. “A man from the days when the Thököly Dynasty ruled Gyongyos might have asked the same question,” he said, where a man from the far east of Derlavai would have spoken of the days of the Kaunian Empire. “Dowsers are much more than water-sniffers nowadays, believe you me.”
“Well, sir, I do understand
that,”
Istvan replied, a trifle testily. “Even in my little valley up in the mountains, we had dowsers who’d look for lost trinkets, and others who’d point herders after a lost sheep. But if things went missing in water or near it, they wouldn’t find them: the water kept them from sensing anything else. Why doesn’t that happen to you?”
“A different question altogether,” Borsos said. “A better one, too, if you don’t mind my saying so. You can understand I can’t give you all the details, not unless you promise to take off your head and throw it away after I’m done. Military sorcery has even more secrets than any other kind.”
“Aye, that’s plain enough,” Istvan said. “Tell me what you can, if you’d be so kind. It’ll be more than I know now, that’s sure.” He hadn’t been so curious before coming to Obuda. But there wasn’t much to do here, and his underofficers didn’t give him much time to do what he could. Without quite intending to, he’d picked up a lot of dragon lore. Learning about dowsing might be interesting, too.
Borsos said, “Ever since the early days, the days of stone and bronze, dowsing has stood apart from the rest of magecraft. Dowsers have done what they could do, and no one thought much about how they did it.
That isn’t so any more. The past few generations, people have started applying the laws of sorcery to dowsing, the same as they have to other kinds of magic.”
Istvan scratched his head. “How? If a magic works, aren’t you likely to ruin it by looking at it too close?”
Borsos laughed again. “You
do
come from back in the mountains, don’t you, soldier? That’s old doctrine, outmoded, disproved. It’s all in the
way
you look at things, not in the act of looking. And, by turning the law of similarity on its head, modern magecraft lets a dowser look for anything in water but the water itself, if you take my meaning.”
“Maybe,” Istvan said. “None of the dowsers in my valley knew anything about that, though. Water stymied them.”
“It doesn’t stymie me,” the dowser said. “All of this chatter, though, this is liable to be another story.”
He wore the three silver stars of a captain on each side of his collar, which meant he could have been much ruder than that. Knowing as much, Istvan shut up. Borsos went about his business. He aimed his dowsing rod—the straight length wrapped with copper wire, one fork with silver, the other with gold—at an Obudan fishing boat out near the edge of visibility. The rod quivered in his hand. He grunted, presumably in satisfaction.
“Seems to be performing as it should,” he said. “I got rushed out here in a hurry, you know, after Algarve jumped on Sibiu with sailing ships. Nobody wanted anyone pulling the same trick on us. The ordinary mages are good enough to spot ships coming down the ley lines, but those galleons slid right past them. They won’t get past me.”
“That’s good,” Istvan answered easily. “Of course, I don’t expect a lot of Algarvian warships out here in the Bothnian Ocean.”
Borsos wheeled on him and started to scorch him for an idiot. Then the dowser caught the gleam in his eyes. “Heh,” Borsos said. “Heh, heh. You’re a funny fellow, aren’t you? I’ll bet all your friends think you’re the funniest fellow around. What does your sergeant think when you get funny?”
“Last time it happened, sir, he put me to shoveling dragon shit for a week,” Istvan answered, doing his best not to gulp. He really did have to remember to keep his mouth shut. Borsos wasn’t merely a sergeant. If he so desired, he could make Istvan’s life most unpleasant indeed.
But all he did was grunt again. “Sounds about like what you would have deserved,” he said. “Were you as clever then as you were with me just now?”
“I’m afraid so, sir,” Istvan admitted, his voice mournful. One way to duck punishment was to sound as if you’d already figured out you’d been a cursed fool.
It didn’t always work. This time, it did. Borsos turned away from him and aimed the forked staff at another Obudan fishing boat. It quivered again. As far as Istvan was concerned, the rod acted the same way for the second boat as it had for the first. That was why Borsos was a dowser and he wasn’t. The newcomer to Obuda pulled out a pen and tablet and scribbled some notes.
“What are you writing, sir?” Istvan reckoned it safe to remind Borsos of his existence. And he truly was curious. Unlike a lot of the young men from his valley, he could read and write, provided no one expected anything too hard along those lines from him.
“I’m beginning to compile a distance and bearing table,” the dowser replied. “I have to do that every place I go, for the waters are always different, and I get a different feel in the rod, depending on the waters.” He raised an eyebrow. “And if you crack wise about the feel your rod gives you, soldier, I’ll kick your arse off this beach and into the ocean. Have you got that?”
“Aye, sir.” Istvan made himself into the picture of innocence—no easy feat. “I didn’t say a thing, sir. I wasn’t going to say a thing, sir, and you can’t prove I was.”
“And a good thing for you I can’t, too.” Borsos pointed to the pack on Istvan’s back. “Turn around, if you please. I want to get something out of there.”
“Aye, sir,” Istvan repeated, and turned his back on the dowser. He suspected Sergeant Jokai had assigned him as Borsos’s beast of burden to make his life miserable. There, for once, the sergeant had miscalculated. Istvan enjoyed being able to shoot the breeze with the dowser, even being able to pick his brain a little, more than the ordinary routine of soldiering. Lugging Borsos’s equipment about was the price he paid for the privilege.
Borsos rummaged through the pack till he found whatever he was looking for. After the dowser closed up the oiled-leather pack, Istvan turned back around to see what he’d taken. Borsos was stripping the bright copper wire from most of its length of his dowsing rod. He replaced it with wire with a green patina.
Seeing Istvan’s eye upon him, he condescended to explain: “I think the greened wire here will give me better accuracy for a couple of reasons. For one, its color, like that of the sea, enhances the effects -both positive and negative—of the law of similarity. And, for another, it got that color by being soaked in seawater. That also gives it a greater affinity for the ocean here.”
“I see,” Istvan said, which was more or less true. “If all that’s so, though, sir, why didn’t you have the sea-soaked wire on the rod from the start?”
Borsos’s eyes were green as the wire he’d wrapped around the rod. They widened slightly now. “You’re
not
a fool, are you?” the dowser said in some surprise. “I didn’t have that wire on the rod because I’ve been doing lake work, and because, as I said before, they rushed me out here in a tearing hurry. I didn’t have the chance to adjust everything perfectly.”
And, unless I miss my guess, you were hoping the regular wire would do well enough.
But Istvan didn’t say that out loud. He’d already tried Borsos’s patience once. He might not get by with it twice.
The dowser aimed the forked staff at the Obudan fishing boats once more. He nodded, as if he’d proved himself right. Then he scrawled more notes on the pad. “I did think so,” he said, more to himself than to Istvan. “The correction factor makes enough difference to be worth taking into account.”
“I’m glad you did it, then, sir,” Istvan said.
His speaking recalled him to the dowser’s mind. “Magecraft isn’t like carpentry, soldier,” Borsos said. “If you don’t vary your methods depending on where you are, you won’t get the results you should. My own view is, the laws of magecraft change a little, too, from one place to another.”
“How could that be?” Istvan asked. “A law is a law, isn’t it?”
Borsos was aiming the dowsing rod at yet another little fishing boat, and didn’t answer right away. At last, he said, “Carpentry just deals with things. Magecraft deals with forces, and some forces have minds of their own. If you don’t keep that in your own mind, you may start out to be a mage, but you won’t last long in the craft. Everyone will tell your widow and your clan head how sad it was you had an accident.”
“I see,” Istvan said again. What he thought he saw was the mage making his work out to be harder and more dangerous than it really was. A carpenter might do something like that, or a blacksmith. Soldiers would do it, too, especially when they were bragging in front of civilians. Istvan knew how deadly dull most of a soldier’s life really was.
Farmers, now, farmers never made their work out to be harder than it was. Istvan understood why, too, having grown up on a farm. No matter what a farmer said about his work, he couldn’t make it seem harder than it was.
Borsos pointed the rod due west. Seeing no fishing boats in that direction, Istvan asked, “Are you searching out past the horizon, sir?”
“That’s right.” The dowser’s head bobbed up and down, very much as his rod was doing in his hand. “I can feel boats out there—out farther than I can see, I mean—but they all move like the fishing boats I can see, so I don’t have to worry about them much. If I felt them heading straight toward this island from out of the west, I’d be shouting my head off.”
Istvan pointed to a dragon wheeling high overhead. “They’re on watch up there, too,” he remarked. His stints with dragons had given him a certain sympathy with—and for—the men who flew them. He wondered whether Borsos had been sent out to Obuda because he was valuable or because some officer back on the mainland had had a brainstorm.
“They’re watching up there, too,” the dowser agreed. “They have their uses, but I also have mine. They can’t see at night, but I can still sense danger then. When winter weather closes down, they won’t be able to see so well by daylight, either. I don’t need good weather.”
“Ah,” Istvan said, one syllable that meant,
Maybe he’ll be worth having here after all.
Borsos laughed out loud, which embarrassed Istvan, for he hadn’t wanted the translation of that one syllable to be so obvious. Trying to make amends, he remarked, “There’s a place up in Sorong—the village, I mean, not the mountain—where the girls are friendly. I’ll take you there, if you like.”
“Duty first,” Borsos said, stern as if he were a true Gyongyosian warrior and not a dowser wearing the stars of rank to give him authority over ordinary soldiers like Istvan. “Duty first. But then …”
Pekka scribbled a calculation. With the inexorable logic of mathematics, the next step was plain before she wrote it down. She didn’t write it down, not then. Instead, she looked out the window at the snow dancing in the wind. In her mind’s eye, she saw not the next step, but where the whole sequence was leading.
“It
does
all fit together,” she breathed. “When you get to the bottom of it, the very very bottom of it, all of magic everywhere has the same essence.”
She couldn’t prove that, not yet. She didn’t know if she would ever be able to prove it. Seeing where the mathematics led and getting there were two different things. Even if she did get there, she didn’t know for certain what she might do with the knowledge. Leino’s magecraft was concrete, definite, practical; if her husband and his colleagues discovered something new, they could quickly apply it.
But Pekka couldn’t escape the feeling that, if she ever got down to the bottom of her theoretical sorcery, the yield would be a lot bigger than improved armor for behemoths. Her mouth twisted wryly. She couldn’t prove that, either, and everything about it depended on proof.
She abruptly realized her teeth were chattering. That proved something, all right: it proved she was a fool. She’d been so far off in the world of theory, she hadn’t noticed she was starting to freeze. She got up, scooped coal out of the scuttle, and fed the stove in the corner of her office.