Authors: Harry Turtledove
The spot proved barely wide enough for two. That meant Felgilde had to squeeze in close behind him. He didn’t mind. She leaned her head on his shoulder. He didn’t mind that, either. She was wearing a floral scent that tickled his nose. When he slipped an arm around her, she snuggled closer. He should have been very happy. Most of him
was
very happy. Even the small part that wasn’t very happy made excuses for Felgilde: if she didn’t care for Kaunians, how was she different from most Forthwegians? She wasn’t, and Leofsig knew it.
“Ah,” she said as the lights dimmed and the curtains slid back from the stage. Leofsig leaned forward, too. He’d come here to forget his troubles and his kingdom’s, not to dwell on them.
Out came an actor and actress dressed as Forthwegian peasants from a couple of centuries before: stock comic figures. “Sure is hard times,” the actor said. He looked at the actress. “Twenty years ago, now, we had plenty to eat.” He looked at her again. “Twenty years ago, I was married to a good-looking woman.”
“Twenty years ago, I was married to a young man,” she retorted.
He winced, as from a blow. “If I had red hair, I bet my belly’d be full.”
“If you had red hair, you’d look like an idiot.” The actress looked out at the audience, then shrugged. “Wouldn’t change things much, would it?”
They took things from there, poking fun at the Algarvian occupiers, at themselves, and at anything else that happened to get in their way. The villain of the piece was a Kaunian woman—played by a short, squat, immensely fat Forthwegian actress in a blond wig; she looked all the more grotesque in tight-fitting trousers. Leofsig wondered what the real Kaunians in the rear of the balcony thought of her. Felgilde thought she was very funny. So did Leofsig, when he wasn’t think about how laughing at her helped estrange Forthwegians and Kaunians.
In the end, she got what she deserved, being married off to a drunken swineherd, or perhaps to one of his pigs. The Algarvians in the paly went
off
to harass some other fictitious village: the sort of relief Gromheort wanted to see but never would. And the two peasants who’d opened the show stood at center stage. The man of the pair addressed the audience:
“So you see, my friends, things
can
turn out all right.”
“Oh, shut up, you old fool,” said the actress who’d played his wife. The curtain slid out and hid them both, then parted so they and the rest of the company could take their bows and get their applause. The loudest cheers—and a lot of howls of counterfeit lust—went to the fat woman who’d played the Kaunian. She twitched her hips, which raised more howls.
“That was fun,” Felgilde said as she and Leofsig filed out of the playhouse. “I enjoyed it. Thank you for taking me.” She smiled up at him.
“You’re welcome,” he answered, more absently than he should have. He’d enjoyed the play, too, enjoyed it and at the same time been embarrassed at himself for enjoying it. He’d never known that peculiar mix of feelings before, and kept at them in his head, as a child will pick at a scab until it bleeds anew.
Out on the street, Felgilde said, “I’m cold,” and shivered, as fine a dramatic performance as any back at the theater. Leofsig spread his cloak so it covered both of them, as he knew she wanted him to do. Under that concealment, they could be bolder than they would have dared without it. She put her arm around his waist, so they walked as close together as they had sat during the play. He caressed her breast through the fabric of her tunic. She hadn’t let him do that before. Now she sighed and put her other hand on top of his, squeezing him against her soft, firm flesh.
Walking thus, they hardly walked at all, and got back to Felgilde’s house only a few minutes before curfew. In front of the door, where her family might see, she let Leofsig chastely kiss her on the cheek. Then she hurried inside.
Leofsig hurried, too, back toward his own home. As he trotted through the dark streets of Gromheort, half of him wanted to ask her out again as soon as he could.
Maybe I’ll get my hand
under
her tunic next time,
that half thought. The other half never wanted to see her again. On he ran, at war within himself.
Fernao reveled in the pleasure of a ley-line caravan. Traveling through Setubal in a snug, water-tight coach with a stove at the far end was infinitely preferable to a caravan across the land of the Ice People on camelback, to say nothing of his journey across the ocean on leviathanback. Fernao was perfectly willing to say nothing of that journey; he kept trying to forget it. Its sole virtue, as far as he was concerned, was that it had brought him back to Lagoas.
He stretched luxuriously—so luxuriously that he brushed against the man who shared the bench with him. “Your pardon, I crave,” he murmured.
“It’s all right,” the fellow said, hardly raising his eyes from his news sheet.
To Fernao, that casual forbearance felt like a luxury, too. King Penda would have complained endlessly about being bumped. King Penda, as the mage knew to his sorrow, complained endlessly about everything. These days, King Vitor and his courtiers were nursemaiding Penda; the fugitive King of Forthweg was no longer Fernao’s worry.
Setubal seemed little changed from the way it had looked before Fernao set out for Yanina to pluck Penda from King Tsavellas’s palace. Had he not already known, he would have been hard pressed to tell Lagoas was a kingdom at war. Or so he thought, till he saw one of his favorite restaurants and several other buildings on the same block reduced to charred rubble.
His exclamation must have held surprise as well as dismay, for his seat-mate gave him a quizzical stare. “Where have you been, pal?” the man asked. “Mezentio’s stinking dragons gave us that little present a couple months ago.”
“Out of the kingdom,” Fernao answered mournfully. He sighed. “The best fried prawns, the best smoked eel in Setubal—gone.”
“You won’t find eel any more smoked than it was the night those eggs fell, and that’s a fact,” the other man said before starting to read again.
He got out of the caravan coach a couple of stops later. No one took his place. Out here past Vinhaes Park, fewer people were traveling away from the center of the city. More would be going back when the caravan returned.
“University!” the conductor called. “All out for the university.”
The mage hurried across the campus of Varzim University toward its beating heart: the library. Having finally put his own affairs in order after his long absence, he could begin to find out how his profession had changed, had grown, while he wasn’t looking.
Students in their yellow tunics and light blue kilts eyed him curiously as he passed them. “What’s that old man doing here?” one of them muttered to another, although Fernao was hardly old enough to have sired either of them.
“Maybe he’s a lecturer,” the other student said.
“Nah.” The first one shook his head. “When did you ever see a lecturer move so fast?” That seemed an incontrovertible argument, or maybe Fernao had just hurried out of earshot before the second student replied.
In front of the library stood an excellent reproduction of a classical Kaunian marble statue of a philosopher. The original had been carved in a sunnier clime; in his light tunic and trousers, the philosopher looked miserably cold. The little icicle hanging off the end of his nose only added to the effect.
Two guards at the top of the stairs leading into the library looked miserably cold, too. If they’d had icicles on the ends of their noses, though, they’d knocked them off recently. Fernao started to stride past them, but one moved quickly to block his way. “Here, what’s this?” he demanded, drawing himself up in indignation.
“A library is a weapon of war, sir,” the guard said. “You’ll need to show us what manner of man you are before you pass within.”
“You don’t suppose the Algarvians have libraries of their own?” Fernao asked, acid in his voice. But perhaps they did not have any one that matched Varzim University‘s. And worrying about knowledge as a weapon of war was, he supposed, better than ignoring it. From his belt pouch he took the small card certifying him as a first-rank member in good standing of the Lagoan Guild of Mages (he was glad he’d bought a life membership after making first rank; otherwise, his affiliation would have lapsed while he was on his journey, and he surely wouldn’t have got round to renewing it yet). “Here. Does this satisfy you?”
Both guards solemnly studied the card. They looked at each other. The one who hadn’t tried to block his way nodded. The one who had tried stepped aside, saying, “Aye, sir. Pass on.”
Pass on Fernao did. Had he been an Algarvian spy, he might have forged or stolen his card. He did not mention that to the guard. Had he done so, odds were that no one would ever have been admitted into the library again.
He hurried upstairs to the third floor. When he got there, he was glad to discover the librarians hadn’t gone through one of their periodic
reshelving frenzies while he was far away. Otherwise, he would have had to hurry right back down again, to find out where the journals he wanted were hidden. Reshelving probably would have done as much as the guards did to keep Algarvians from ferreting information out of the library.
As things were, he found new numbers of such tomes as
The Royal Lagoan Journal of Pure and Applied Magecraft, Kaunian Sorcery
(the past year’s last two fascicules were missing: either the fall of Priekule had prevented their publication or copies hadn’t been able to make it across the Strait of Valmiera), and the
Annual Sorcerous Compendium of the Seven Princes of Kuusamo.
Having found them, he carried them to a battered old chair behind the shelves, a chair in which he’d done a lot of reading over the years.
There in Fernao’s hideaway, he flipped rapidly through the journals, slowing down when he found an article that interested him. After he’d put aside the
Annual Sorcerous Compendium,
he noticed he’d hardly slowed down at all while going through it.
“That’s odd,” he murmured, and turned to the table of contents at the rear of the volume to see if he’d missed something. He hadn’t, and scratched his head. Before he’d gone away, the Kuusamans had been doing some very interesting work at the deep theoretical level. Siuntio—who was world-famous, at least among mages—and younger theoreticians like Raahe and Pekka had asked some provocative questions. He’d hoped they might have come up with some answers by now, or at least some more new and interesting questions.
If they had, they weren’t publishing them in the
Annual Sorcerous Compendium.
Its pages were full of articles on horticultural magecraft, ley-line engineering, and improvements in crystallomancy: interesting, significant, but not at the cutting edge of the field. With a shrug, he set the volume aside and went on to a Jelgavan journal, which also proved to cut off abruptly with the previous spring’s fascicule.
He was three articles into the
Royal Lagoan Journal
when he suddenly sat up very straight and slammed the heavy volume closed. It made a loud, booming noise; someone somewhere else in the third floor exclaimed in surprise. Fernao sat still; to his relief, nobody came looking to see what had happened.
“If they’ve found any new answers, if they’ve found any new questions, they aren’t publishing them,” he muttered under his breath. He set his hand on the leather binding of the
Annual Sorcerous Compendium.
His first assumption was that the Kuusamans hadn’t found anything, but how likely was that? Would all of their best theoretical sorcerers have fallen silent at once?
Maybe. He didn’t know. He couldn’t know. But maybe, too, maybe they’d found something interesting and important: so interesting and so important, they didn’t care to tell anyone else about it.
“And maybe your head’s full of moonbeams, too,” Fernao told himself, his voice barely above a whisper.
But could he afford to take the chance? Kuusamo and Lagoas, once upon a time, had fought like cats and dogs. They hadn’t fought in a couple of hundred years. He knew that didn’t mean they couldn’t fight again, though. If the Kuusamans ever decided to stop the halfhearted island war they were waging against Gyongyos, what would keep them from jumping on Lagoas’s back? Nothing Fernao could see, the more so as his own kingdom couldn’t give over the war against Algarve without becoming King Mezentio’s vassals.
Reluctant as a lover having to leave his beloved too soon, he set the journals on their shelves and went downstairs. “The Guild may know more about this than I,” he muttered under his breath, and then, “I hope the Guild knows more about this than I.”
Both guards nodded to him as he hurried past them. Now that he was going away, they were content. He didn’t laugh till they couldn’t see his face. They might be better than nothing; he remained unconvinced they were a lot better than nothing.
He waited at the caravan stop for a car to take him back to Setubal. He had to change to a different ley line downtown, not far from the harbor. His second journey was shorter: less a mile. He got out of the caravan car across the street from the Grand Hall of the Lagoan Guild of Mages.
It
was
a grand hall, built of snowy marble in severe neoclassical style. The statuary group in front of it might have been snatched straight out of the heyday of the Kaunian Empire, too. The only thing that would have been odd to a veritable classical Kaunian was that the statues, like the hall, remained unpainted. Temporal sorcery had proved that the Kaunians, in the old days, slapped paint on everything that didn’t move. But builders hadn’t known that in the days when the guild hall went up. Most people still didn’t realize it. And, by the time anyone at all knew it, pristine marble had become as much a neoclassical tradition as painted stone had been in Kaunian days.
Inside the hall, Fernao exchanged greetings with half a dozen mages. Some had heard he was back and were glad to see him; others hadn’t, and were astonished to see him. Lagoans weren’t inveterate gabbers like Algarvians or Yaninans, but he still needed longer than he’d wanted to make his way to the guild secretary’s office.