Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Master Ilmarinen …” Pekka repeated his name with such patience as she could muster. “Let me ask a different question, Master:
why
were you standing on your head while you waited for me to open the door?”
“You are a true theoretical sorcerer, Mistress Pekka,” Ilmarinen said, bowing. “No sooner do you observe an unexplained phenomenon than you seek the root cause behind it. Most commendable indeed.”
That kind of mocking praise infuriated Pekka as nothing else could have done. “Master,” she said tightly, “shall we see if the constabulary reckons your untimely demise an unexplained phenomenon? If you don’t start talking sense, we can experimentally test the notion very soon.”
Ilmarinen laughed, breathing spirit fumes into her face. She glared at him, really tempted to perform that experiment. Powers above, had he got drunk, hopped aboard a ley-line caravan coach, and traveled down to Kajaani in the middle of a Kuusaman winter for no better reason than to drive her mad? For anyone but Ilmarinen, the notion would have been absurd. Even for him, it should have been. The large rational part of her mind still insisted it was. But her large rational part also recognized that Ilmarinen’s rational part wasn’t anywhere near so large.
He kept on laughing for another couple of heartbeats. Pekka looked around for the blunt instrument nearest to hand. Maybe murder, or something like it, did show in her eyes, for Ilmarinen went from laugh to chuckle to a smile that only set her teeth on edge. Then he reached into a pocket. When he didn’t find what he wanted, the smile fell off his face, too. He started going through his other pockets, and growing more and more frantic as whatever he was after remained elusive. Now Pekka laughed, in sardonic delight.
Ilmarinen looked harried. “However much it may amuse you, Mistress, it is not funny, I assure you.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It seems funny enough to me.” Pekka pointed to a folded-up piece of paper behind the heel of Ilmarinen’s left boot. “Is that by any chance what you seek?”
He turned, stared, and scooped it up. “Aye, it is,” he answered, more sheepishly than she was used to hearing him speak. “It must have fallen out while I was standing on my head.”
“You still have not explained
why
you were standing on your head,” Pekka reminded him.
And Ilmarinen went right on not explaining, at least with words. Instead, with a flourish, he presented Pekka the paper, as a sommelier in a fancy eatery up in Yliharma might have proffered an expensive bottle of Algarvian wine.
“You were standing on your head because of this piece of paper,” she said in the now-tell-me-another-one tones she used after listening to Uto spin out some outrageous fabrication. Sure as sure, her son and Ilmarinen had the same imp indwelling in them.
But Ilmarinen, this time, seemed immune. “As a matter of fact, Mistress Pekka, I truly was standing on my head because of that piece of paper.”
Pekka studied him. He was serious. He sounded serious. That only made her distrust him more than ever. But, after so much farce, what choice had she but to unfold the sheet and see what was on it? Only later did she wonder what Ilmarinen’s expression would have been had she torn it up and thrown it in his face. There, in a nutshell—
not
an acorn—was the difference between the two of them. Ilmarinen would have had the thought at once, and might have acted on it.
Once opened, the sheet wasn’t blank, as she’d half expected it to be. Calculations in Ilmarinen’s sprawling script filled it. She glanced down at them for a moment. She started to look up at Ilmarinen again, but her eyes, of themselves, snapped back to the arcane symbols. Her mouth fell open. She held the paper in one hand and traced the logic, traced the symbolic path, with the forefinger of the other.
When, at last, she was finished, she bowed very low to Ilmarinen. “Master Siuntio had the right of it,” she said, her voice a breathy whisper. “He told me that if anyone could find the meaning hidden in my experiment, you would be the mage, for you have the most original cast of mind. And he knew whereof he spoke. I would never in a thousand years have thought as you did.”
Ilmarinen shrugged. “Siuntio is smarter than I am. Siuntio is smarter than anybody is, as a matter of fact. But he isn’t crazy. You need to be a little bit crazy—or it doesn’t hurt, anyhow.” He eyed Pekka like a master eyeing a student who might have promise. “And now do you understand why I was standing on my head?”
“Inversion,” Pekka answered, so absently that Ilmarinen clapped his hands together in delight.
“Just so!” He almost cackled with glee, sounding like a laying hen.
“I never would have thought of such a thing,” Pekka said again. “Never. When I began to try to learn whether similarity and contagion were related, I always thought the relationship I found, if I found any at all, would be a direct one. When I failed to show a direct one, I thought that meant there was none at all—only that didn’t work, either.”
“If the experiment works and the mathematics don’t, the mathematics are wrong,” Ilmarinen said. “I told you—I told all of you—as much before, but you did not heed me. Now we have numbers that suggest why your cursed acorns acted as they did, and what happened to them as well.”
That wasn’t explicit in the sheet he’d given Pekka. She looked through the sprawling lines of symbols again. She had to look twice; even the implications were subtle. Once she found what Ilmarinen was driving at, though, she could work them out for herself. She looked up from the sheet to the theoretical sorcerer. “But that’s impossible!”
“It’s what happened.” His voice was peculiarly flat. After a moment, she realized she’d angered him. She’d seen him play at anger before, when he ranted and blustered. This was different. This made her feel as if he’d caught her doing something vicious and rather nasty.
In a small voice, she said, “I suppose the classical Kaunians would have said the same thing if they saw the spells that went into making a ley-line caravan go.”
“Not if they had any sense, they wouldn’t,” Ilmarinen said, but now in something close to his usual sardonic tones. He reached out and tapped the paper with a gnarled finger. “If you can show me an alternative explanation, then you may tell me this one is impossible. Till then, wouldn’t it be more interesting to try to come up with more experiments to see whether we’re crazy or not?” He shook his head and held up that finger again. “Of course we’re crazy. Let’s see if we’re right or not.”
“Aye.” Ideas rose to the top of Pekka’s mind from below like bubbles in a pot of water coming to a boil. “If this is right”—she shook the paper—“we have a lifetime’s worth of experiments waiting ahead for us. Two lifetimes’ worth, maybe.”
“That’s so, Mistress Pekka.” Ilmarinen sighed.
He was old. He did not have a long lifetime ahead of him, let alone two. “I’m sorry, Master,” Pekka said quietly. “I was tactless.”
“What?” Ilmarinen stared, then laughed. “Oh, no, not that, you silly lass. I’ve known for a long time that I wouldn’t be here forever, or even too much longer. No. I was thinking that, if things keep going as they have over there, over yonder”—he pointed north and west, toward the mainland of Derlavai—“we’d better pack those two lifetimes’ worth of experiments into about half a year.”
Pekka though about that and slowly nodded. “And if we can’t?”
“We’d better do it anyway,” Ilmarinen said.
Leofsig dipped his straight razor into the bowl of hot water he’d begged from his mother to get the soapsuds off it, then went back to trimming the lower edge of his beard. With his head tilted so far back, he had trouble seeing the mirror he’d propped on the chest of drawers in the room he now had to share with Ealstan.
Sidroc stuck his head in, perhaps to find out of Ealstan was there. When he saw what Leofsig was doing, he grinned unpleasantly. “Don’t cut your throat, now,” he said, almost as if he meant to be helpful.
In one smooth movement, Leofsig was off the stool he’d been using and halfway across the room. “You want to think about what you say to a man with a razor in his hand,” he remarked pleasantly.
“Eep,” Sidroc said, and disappeared faster than he would have had a first-rank mage enspelled him. Had a first-rank mage enspelled him, though, he would have stayed disappeared. That, Leofsig thought, was too much to hope for.
Laughing a little, he went back to the mirror and finished shaving. Then he put on his best tunic and his best cloak. A fussy grammarian would have called it his better cloak, for he had only two. He’d had more before the war started, but they were on Sidroc and Uncle Hengist’s backs these days.
This one, of dark blue wool, would do well enough. His father had one very much like it, and so did Ealstan. “You can’t go wrong with dark blue wool,” Hestan had said, ordering all three of them at the same time. When the tailor delivered them, Ealstan had called them a proof of the law of similarity. Leofsig smiled, remembering.
“Let me see you,” his mother said before he could get out the door. Obediently, he stood still, Elfryth brushed away an almost-visible speck of lint, smoothed down the hair he’d just combed, and finally nodded. “You look very nice,” she said. “If your young lady isn’t swept off her feet, she ought to be.” She’d been saying that as long as he’d been taking young ladies out. She added something newer: “Don’t try sneaking in after curfew. It’s not worth the risk.”
“Aye,” he said. His father would have told him exactly the same thing, and his father’s advice, he knew, was nearly always good. Even so, he sounded at best dutiful, at worst resigned, rather than enthusiastic.
Elfryth stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. “Go on, then,” she said. “If you must get home sooner than you’d like, you won’t want to waste your time standing around chattering with the likes of me.”
That being true, Leofsig nodded and left. He’d walked half a block before he realized he should have denied it for politeness’ sake.
Too late now,
he thought, and kept going.
By then, he’d already pulled the cloak tight around him and fastened the polished brass button that closed it at the neck. A raw wind blew up from the southwest. There might be frost on the windows, maybe even on the grass, come morning. As Gromheort went, that made it a chilly evening.
A couple of Algarvian soldiers on patrol rode past him. They didn’t look twice. To them, he was just another subject. Maybe they knew how much he hated them. If they did, they didn’t care.
The sun was low in the northwest when he knocked on a door a few blocks from his own. A plump man a few years older than his own father opened it. “Good day, Master Elfsig,” Leofsig said. “Is Felgilde ready?”
“She won’t be but a moment,” his companion’s father said. “Step on in, Leofsig. You have time for a cup of wine, I think, but only a quick one.”
“I thank you, sir,” Leofsig said. Elfsig led him to the parlor and brought the wine himself. Felgilde’s little brother, whose name Leofsig always forgot, made faces at him from the doorway—though only when Elfsig’s back was turned. Leofsig ignored him. Ealstan had been only a bit too big to play such games when young men started coming to Hestan’s house to take Conberge out.
Leofsig hadn’t quite finished his wine when Felgilde came into the parlor. Elfsig said. “You’ll want to bring her home before curfew, so we don’t have trouble with the redheads.” His eyes twinkled. “Maybe you won’t want to do it—I recall what it’s like being your age, believe it or not—but you will, for her sake.”
“Aye, sir,” Leofsig said, so mournfully that Elfsig laughed. He would cheerfully have disobeyed his own mother; evading the wishes of Felgilde’s family was harder. Putting the best face on it he could, he turned to her. “Shall we be off?”
“Aye.” She kissed Elfsig, who wore rather a bushy beard, on the end of his nose. Leofsig offered her his arm. She took it. Her maroon cloak went well with his blue one. She’d done up her black hair in a fancy pile of curls. She looked like her father, but in her Elfsig’s rather doughy features were sharply carved. She said, “I hope the play is good.”
“It’s supposed to be very funny,” Leofsig answered as they headed for the door. Most of the plays that ran in Gromheort these days were farces. Real life was grim enough to make serious drama less attractive than it would have been in better times.
People streamed toward the playhouse, which stood a couple of doors down from the public baths. Leofsig saw two or three couples come right out of the men’s and women’s wings of the baths, meet, and head for the theater. One such pair all but ran to get in line ahead of Felgilde and him. “I hope we’ll have decent seats,” Felgilde said.
If you’d been ready when I got there, we’d have a better chance.
But Leofsig, like any other swain with an ounce of sense in his head, knew better than to say that out loud. He paid for two seats. He and Felgilde both held out their hands so a fellow could stamp them to prove they’d paid. Thus marked, they went inside.
Leofsig bought wine for both of them, and also bread and olives and roasted almonds and cheese. A stew of some sort bubbled in a pot, too, but he knew it wouldn’t be much more than gruel. The playhouse had no easier time getting meat than anyone else in Gromheort. Spitting out olive pits as they walked, he and Felgilde headed for the benches in front of the stage.
At the entranceway, a sign that hadn’t been there the last time he came to the theater announced, KAUNIANS IN REAR BALCONY ONLY. “Oh, good!” Felgilde exclaimed. “More seats for the rest of us.”
He looked at her. Most of what he wanted to say, he couldn’t, not unless he also wanted to betray himself. Felgilde and her family didn’t know he’d escaped from the Algarvian captives’ camp, or how he’d escaped, or with whose help. Like most people, they thought the redheads had released him. The fewer folk who knew any different, the better.
He did say, “They’re people, too.”
“They’re not Forthwegians, not truly,” Felgilde said. “And the trousers their women wear—well, I mean really.” She tossed her head.
As he’d grown toward manhood, Leofsig had eyed a good many trousered Kaunian women. He didn’t know of a Forthwegian man who hadn’t—including, he had no doubt whatever, Felgilde’s father. Saying anything about that also struck him as unwise. He pointed. “There’s a spot wide enough for two, I think,” he said. “Come on—let’s hurry.”