Authors: Harry Turtledove
“I have no idea, your Excellency,” his secretary replied. “I am pleased, however, that you find me useful.”
“I find you rather more than useful, as you know perfectly well,” Hajjaj said. “If you would be so kind as to put this in a plain pouch and deliver it …”
“Of course,” Shaddad said. Only a slight flaring of his nostrils showed his opinion as he went on, “I suppose you will expect me to clothe myself, too.”
“As a matter of fact, no,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said, and Shaddad smiled in glad surprise. Hajjaj continued, “You will be less conspicuous without mufflings, and there are times—and this is one of them—when discretion seems wisest. Just take this over to the Algarvian minister like the good fellow you are.”
Shaddad’s smile, now perhaps one of anticipation, grew broader. “Just as you say, your Excellency.”
Garivald squelched through the mud to return a sharpening stone he’d borrowed from Dagulf. “Thanks,” he said when the other peasant opened his door. “Did my sickle a deal of good when I needed it the most.”
Dagulf’s scar pulled the smile on his face into something like a leer. “Aye, you need sharp tools at harvest time,” he said. “Bloody work’s hard enough without you doing more than you need.”
“Aye,” Garivald said. “We did pretty well, we did, even if I do wish the rain would have held off for another couple of days.”
“Don’t we both? Don’t we all?” Dagulf peered through drizzle toward the prison cell he and Garivald had helped to build. Lowering his voice, he went on, “Wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to feed the captives and guards and that worthless, drunken mage through the winter.”
“We’d get by easy then,” Garivald agreed. Under his cape, his shoulders sagged as he sighed. “Would have been better if they—well, the guards, anyhow—would have helped with the harvest. Then they’d’ve earned their keep, you might say.”
Dagulf’s laughter was short, sharp, and bitter. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for it, is all I’ve got to tell you.”
“I wasn’t,” Garivald said. “Those miserable, lazy bastards just take. If you asked ‘em to give, they’d fall over dead.”
“But we’ve got a crystal connecting us to Cottbus.” Dagulf seemed more disgusted than delighted.
“Oh, aye, so we do,” Garivald said. If he was delighted, he concealed it so well, even he didn’t know about it. “When Waddo gets a brainstorm nowadays, he tells us it’s Cottbus’s idea, so we have to go along with it. Isn’t that grand?”
Dagulf spat. “You ask me, he doesn’t talk on the crystal half as much as he says he does. He just tells us what to do and says it’s an order from the capital. How can we prove any different? You have a crystal in
your
house so you can talk to King Swemmel and ask him what’s going on?”
“Oh, of course I do,” Garivald answered. “Two of ‘em, matter of fact. The other one’s attuned to Marshal Rathar, so he can send in the army when I tell him what a big liar Waddo is.”
Both men laughed. Neither’s laugh was altogether comfortable, though. Truth was, Waddo could talk to Cottbus and they couldn’t. And if he wasn’t talking to Cottbus, they had no way of knowing that, either. They’d always been powerless when measured against inspectors. Now they were powerless against their own firstman, too. Garivald shook his head. That wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
He shook his head again. It wouldn’t really matter till spring. Not even the most energetic firstman, which Waddo wasn’t, would be able to accomplish much during winter in southern Unkerlant. The peasants would stay indoors as often as they could, stay warm as best they could, and drink as much as they could. Anyone who expected anything different was doomed to disappointment.
Interrupting Garivald’s caravan of thought, Dagulf said, “I hear tell Marshal Rathar got on Swemmel’s bad side some way or other. Don’t know how much good your crystal attuned to him will do you.”
“Now that I think on it, I heard that, too.” Garivald threw his hands in the air. “Isn’t that the way things turn out? You go to all the trouble to get the cursed crystal, and then it’s not worth anything.” He spoke with almost as much regret and resentment as if a crystal really did sit on the mantel above his fireplace.
Dagulf played along with him. “Ah, well, maybe you can attune it to the new marshal, whoever he turns out to be—and then to the one after him, too, when Swemmel decides he won’t answer.”
Garivald looked back toward the gaol again. No, the guards couldn’t possibly have heard that. He didn’t even think Dagulf’s neighbors could have heard it. Still … “You want to be careful what you say,” he told Dagulf. “Now word really can get back to Cottbus, and you won’t be happy if it does.”
“You’re a good fellow to have around, Garivald,” Dagulf said. “You brought back my hone, and I didn’t even have to come over and tell you I was going to burn down your house to get it. And you’re right about this other nonsense, too. It’s like having somebody peeking in your window all the time, is what it is.”
“You’re too ugly for anybody to want to peek in your window,” Garivald said, not wanting an unfounded reputation as a paragon to get out of hand.
“My wife says the same thing, so maybe you’ve got something there,”
Dagulf answered. “But I still get some every now and then, so I must be doing something right.”
Snorting, Garivald turned and headed back toward his own house. As he passed the cell he’d helped build, he paused in the drizzle to listen to one of the captives singing. It was a song about a boy falling in love with a girl—what else was there to write songs about, except a girl falling in love with a boy?—but not one Garivald had heard before. People had been singing most of the songs he knew for generations.
The captive had a fine, resonant baritone. Garivald didn’t. He liked to sing anyway. He listened attentively, picking up tune and lyrics. Sure enough, it was a city song: it talked about paved streets and parks and the theater and other things he’d never know. It had an odd feeling to it, too, a feeling of impermanence, as if it didn’t really matter whether he got the girl or not: if he didn’t, he could always find another one. Things weren’t like that in Zossen, or in any of the countless other villages dotting the broad plains and forests of Unkerlant.
“City song,” Garivald muttered. He didn’t walk away, though, even if he and Dagulf had just spent the last little while running down Cottbus and everything it stood for. He stood listening till the captive finished, and wasn’t sorry when the fellow started over again. That gave him the chance to pick up the words to the first part of the first verse, which he’d missed while talking with Dagulf.
He was singing the song—not loudly, feeling his way through it—when he came in the door. His wife didn’t need to hear more than a couple of lines before she said, “Where did you pick that up? It’s new.”
“One of the captives was singing it,” Garivald answered. He groped for the next line and discovered he couldn’t find it. “Ahh, curse it, you made me mess it up. Now I have to go back to the beginning.”
“Well, do, then.” Annore turned away from the dough she was kneading. Her arms were pale almost to the elbows with flour. “Been a while since we’ve had a new song. That one sounded good, even if you haven’t got the best voice in the village.”
“I thank you, dear,” Garivald said, though he knew she was right. He thought for a moment—how
did
that first verse go?—then plunged back in. He wasn’t so good a singer as the captive, but he remembered all the words and didn’t do too much violence to the tune. Annore heard him out without a sound. Her lips moved a couple of times as she fixed phrases in her mind.
“That’s a good song,” she said when he was through, and then, thoughtfully, “Well, a pretty good song. It’s … strange, isn’t it? I bet it come out of Cottbus.”
“I bet you’re right,” Garivald agreed. “If we hadn’t got married for one reason or another, I’d still be a bachelor, and I’d be frantic about it. But the fellow in the song? ‘Another boat at the dock, Another bird in the flock.’” After singing the lines, he shook his head. “Anybody wants to know, that’s not the way people ought to think.”
Annore nodded. “We have too many men chasing women who aren’t their wives the way things are.”
Garivald could think of only a couple of such cases in Zossen since he’d started paying attention to what men and women did. Maybe even a couple seemed too many to Annore. He could also think of a couple of women who’d gone after men not their husbands. If he brought them up, he was sure his wife would find something to say in their defense. Since he was sure, he didn’t bother. They found enough things to quarrel about without looking for more.
He did say, “Even if the words are peculiar, I like the tune.”
“So do I.” Annore hummed it. Her voice was high and pure, a good deal better and more pliable than Garivald’s. After a verse or so, she clicked her tongue between her teeth. “I do wish it had better words. Somebody should put better words to the tune.”
“Who?” Garivald asked—a good question, since no one in Zossen had ever shown any signs of talent along those lines. “Waddo, maybe?” He rolled his eyes to make sure Annore knew he was joking.
“Oh, aye, he’d be the perfect one.” His wife rolled her eyes, too.
“‘Another story on his house,’” Garivald sang to the tune of the captive’s song. ‘“A fancy crystal for the louse.’”
He and Annore both laughed. She looked thoughtfully at him. “Do you know, that’s not bad,” she said. “Maybe you could make a real song, not just a couple of lines poking fun at Waddo.”
“I couldn’t do that,” Garivald exclaimed.
“Why not?” Annore asked. “You started to.”
“But I’m not a person who makes songs,” Garivald said. “People who make songs are—” He stopped. He had no idea what people who made songs were like, not really. Every so often, a traveling singer would come through Zossen. The only thing he knew about them was that they drank too much. Once, back before he was born, a traveling singer passing through Zossen had left with a peasant’s daughter. People still gossiped about it; the girl seemed to get both younger and more beautiful every year.
“Well, if you don’t want to …” Annore shrugged and went back to kneading dough. She also went back to humming the new song.
Garivald stood there rubbing his chin. Words crowded his head. Some of them were words from the song. The first verse was fine, and anybody could lose a girl he’d thought would be his for good. But what he did afterwards, what he thought afterwards, how he felt afterwards … Maybe someone up in Cottbus would do those things, would think and feel those things, but nobody in Zossen or any other peasant village would.
A line occurred to Garivald, and then a word that rhymed with it. He had to cast about for the rest of the line that would go with the word. He wished he could read and write. Being able to put things down so they didn’t keep trying to change in his head would have helped. Waddo could do it. So could a couple of other men in the village. Garivald had never had time to learn.
But he had a capacious memory—partly because he couldn’t read and write, though he didn’t realize that. He kept playing with words, throwing away most of them, keeping a few. Leuba woke up from a nap. He hardly noticed Annore taking her out of the cradle: he was looking for a word that rhymed with
harvest.
Half an hour later, he said, “Listen to this.” Annore came in from the kitchen again. She cocked her head to one side, waiting. Garivald turned away, suddenly shy in front of her. But, even if he couldn’t face her, he loosed his indifferent voice.
Only when he was through did he look back toward her. He tried to read the expression on her face. Surprise and … was she crying? He’d tried to make a sad song—it had to be a sad song—but … could she be crying? “That’s good,” she sniffed. “That’s very good.”
He stared, astonished. He’d never imagined he could do such a thing. Maybe a young swallow felt the same way the first time it scrambled out of its nest, leaped off a branch, and spread its wings. “Powers above,” Garivald whispered. “I can fly.”
*
Bembo lifted a long-stemmed wine glass. “Here’s to you, pretty one,” he said, beaming across the cafe table at Saffa.
The sketch artist raised her own glass. “Here’s to your good notion, and to the bonus Captain Sasso gave you for it.”
Since he was spending some of that bonus to take her out, Bembo drank to the toast. He hoped the bonus wasn’t the only reason she’d finally let him take her to supper. If she was that mercenary … he didn’t want to know about it right now. He took another sip of his own wine—better than he usually bought. “I’m a man on the way up, I am,” he said.
Something glinted dangerous in Saffa’s eyes. Whatever the egg of her thought was, though, she didn’t drop it on his head, as she assuredly would have before. “Maybe you are,” she said after no more than the slightest pause. “You didn’t start pawing me the instant I came out of my flat. That’s certainly an improvement.”
“How do you know?” he said, and pressed a hand to his heart, the picture of affronted dignity. “You never let me meet you at your flat before.”
“Do I look like a fool?” Saffa asked, which made Bembo go through another pantomime routine. Her laugh showed very sharp, white, even teeth. He wondered if she’d finally chosen to go out with him in hope of a good time (either vertical or horizontal) or in the expectation of sinking teeth and claws into him later on. That might mean a good time for her, but he didn’t think he would enjoy it.
To keep from thinking about it, he said, “Good to see Tricarico lit up again at night.”
“Aye, it is,” Saffa agreed. “We’re too far north for any dragon from Lagoas to reach us here, and we’ve beaten our other enemies.” Pride rang in her voice. She glanced at Bembo with more warmth than he was used to seeing from her. “And you helped, spotting those cursed Kaunians with their dyed hair.”
Before Bembo could go on for a while about what an alert, clever fellow he was, the waiter brought supper, which might have been just as well. Saffa had trout, Bembo strips of duck breast in a wine-based sauce. He didn’t usually eat such a splendid meal; he couldn’t usually afford such a splendid meal. Since he could tonight, he made the most of it. He and Saffa emptied another bottle of wine during supper.