Authors: Harry Turtledove
Szonyi set a stake on the board. Lajos, young and eager, matched it. Szonyi threw first: a six. Lajos took the dice and threw another six. They each put down more coins, doubling the stake. Szonyi threw a nine.
Before Lajos picked up the dice, Corporal Kun nudged Szonyi and held out a silver coin in the palm of his hand—a side bet. “This that he’ll beat Lajos by two or better.”
“No, thanks.” Istvan shook his head, and then had to brush curly, dark yellow hair out of his face. “Betting on the side is how you make your money. I’ve seen that.”
Lajos threw an eight. Szonyi collected the twofold bets. Behind his gold-framed spectacles, Kun assumed an injured expression. “There,” he said. “You see? You would have won.”
“This time I would have, aye.” Now Istvan nodded. “But anybody who takes a lot of side bets against you ends up without any money in his belt pouch, so go find yourself a new fish. You’ve hooked me too often already.”
Szonyi won the next duel of dice, too. He said, “I don’t make side bets against you, either, Kun. The sergeant’s right—you win ‘em often enough to make some people wonder whether you magic the dice.”
“Oh, rubbish,” Kun said, or perhaps something rather more pungent. Unlike most of the men in the squad, including Istvan, he wasn’t a peasant or herder from a little mountain valley. Such sturdy soldiers gave the Gyongyosians reason to reckon themselves a warrior race. But Kun had been a mage’s apprentice in Gyorvar, the capital, before taking service in Ekrekek Arpad’s army. He knew little bits and pieces of sorcery himself. Enough to ensorcel dice? Istvan had sometimes wondered himself.
But he said, “Kun’s luck’s no better than anybody else’s when he’s got the dice in his own hand. I’ve noticed that. It’s only when he’s making side bets that he cleans up. I can’t see how he’d put a spell on somebody else’s dice but not on his own.”
“Rubbish,” Kun repeated—or, again, words to that effect. “I’ll tell you what makes the difference: I know what I’m doing, and you back-country boys don’t. There’s no more magecraft in it than there is to cooking a goose.”
“If there’s no magecraft, we ought to be able to do it, too, once you tell us how—isn’t that right?” Szonyi said. He and Kun often banged heads like mountain sheep.
Kun nodded now. “Aye, if you can remember a few simple things.” He raised an eyebrow. By Gyongyosian standards, he was on the scrawny side; Szonyi came close to making two of him. But he had no fear, for he added, “For simple people, even simple things come hard.”
Szonyi bristled. Istvan said, “Never mind the insults. If you can teach us, teach us. I wouldn’t mind learning something to help me put a little extra silver in my belt pouch.”
“All right, by the stars, I will, even if it’ll cost me money,” Kun said, and spent the next little while talking about how to figure odds while rolling dice.
By the time he got through, Istvan was frowning and scratching his head. “Are you sure that’s not magecraft?” he asked.
“Anything somebody doesn’t know how to do looks like magecraft to him,” Kun said impatiently. “This isn’t. It’s nothing but a … fancy kind of arithmetic, I guess you’d call it.”
“How can it be arithmetic?” Szonyi demanded—he was never content with anything Kun said. “Two and two is always four. With this, you’re right some of the time and you’re wrong some of the time. If you run out of silver and bet your tunic, you’re liable to walk home naked.”
“Over the long run, though, you won’t.” Kun’s smile grew rather nasty. “And if you don’t believe me, why won’t you make side bets with me?”
Before Szonyi could answer, horns blared out an alarm from the high ground, such as it was, at the center of Becsehely. “Scoop up that money, boys. Grab the dice,” Istvan said. “Dowsers must’ve spotted another wave of Kuusaman dragons coming to pay us a call.”
“Dowsing, now, dowsing is real magecraft,” Kun said. “Sensing motion at a distance farther than you can see—how could you possibly do that without sorcery?”
Istvan nodded. “Well, that’s true enough. I was a dowser’s helper for a while, over on Obuda. They gave me the job for a punishment, because he had a heavy sack of rods to carry, but I ended up enjoying it—Borsos was an interesting fellow to talk to. Remember?—he showed up in the Unkerlanter woods, too.”
“That’s right.” Szonyi also nodded. “He was trying to spy out something Swemmel’s stinking goat-eaters were up to.”
The horns cried out again. Booted feet thudded on wet ground as Gyongyosian soldiers who weren’t already in trenches ran for shelter. “Take cover!” shouted Captain Frigyes, the company commander. “Take cover, and be ready to come up blazing if the Kuusamans bring boats up onto the beach.”
“May the stars hold that idea out of their heads,” Istvan said, and made a sign to avert the evil omen.
Becsehely was big enough to support a dragon farm. Wings thundering, Gyongyosian dragons painted in bold stripes of red and blue and black and yellow flew out to meet the enemies the dowsers had spotted. Kuusaman colors were sky blue and sea green, which made their dragons hard to see but easy to tell apart from the Gyongyosian beasts once noted.
“I wonder if this really will be the invasion,” Kun remarked, making sure dirt didn’t foul the business end, the blazing end, of his stick.
“They’ve pounded us before when we thought they would land, and they didn’t,” Istvan said. “Here’s hoping they stay away again.”
“Oh, aye, here’s hoping.” But Kun seemed unable to look on the bright side of things. “The trouble is, they’ve taken a lot of islands away from us, too. If they hadn’t, our regiment would still be fighting the Unkerlanters in those woods that went on forever and ever.”
“I’m not sorry to be out of the forest,” Istvan admitted. “Of course, I’d’ve been happier if they’d sent us somewhere besides this miserable flat place. I miss having a horizon with mountain teeth in it.”
“If the Kuusamans do come ashore …” Kun hesitated, plainly wondering how to go on. “If they do come ashore, I wonder if our officers will have to hold us to the oath we swore. The oath about… the strong sorcery, I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Istvan said. Algarve and Unkerlant used the life energy from sacrificed people to power their sorcery. The Algarvians killed Kaunians they’d conquered; King Swemmel’s sorcerers sacrificed those of their own folk they reckoned useless. Both those answers revolted the Gyongyosians. But they’d seen they might need such wizardry. With a shrug, Istvan continued: “We’re a warrior race.” Most of the company had volunteered to be sacrificed if the need ever arose. Istvan had, without thinking twice. Kun had, too, much more hesitantly.
“The stars already know,” Szonyi said.
“They always know,” Kun said. “But /don’t.”
That thin hiss in the air wasn’t the stars telling Corporal Kun what would be. It was an egg falling, to burst in the sea just off the muddy, west-facing beach of Becsehely. Some dragonflier overhead had been too eager. But other bursts of sorcerous energy walked up the beach toward the trenches where Istvan and his comrades huddled. He hated taking a pounding from dragons more than any other part of war. He knew exactly why, too: he couldn’t hit back. An egg falling out of the sky didn’t care whether he belonged to a warrior race or not.
He looked up. Sure enough, the Kuusaman dragons were harder to see than those his countrymen flew. But, by the way eggs carpeted Becsehely, by the way Gyongyosian dragons tumbled out of the sky one after another, he had no trouble figuring out the Kuusamans outnumbered them. The Kuusamans had been the first to figure out how to transport dragons on board ship, and they’d got better and better at it since.
But they didn’t have things all their own way here. The Gyongyosians had brought heavy sticks to Becsehely, sticks that could blaze through a behemoth’s chainmail and through the behemoth, too—and sticks strong enough to blaze down a dragon no matter how high it flew.
Istvan whooped when a Kuusaman dragon faltered in midair. He whooped again when it started down toward the island. Nor was he the only one. “We nailed that son of a strumpet!” Szonyi shouted.
“He looks like he’s coming straight toward us,” Kun said, and people stopped whooping. Finishing a wounded, furious dragon with hand-held sticks was anything but a morning’s pleasant sport.
This one landed on the muddy beach not a hundred yards in front of Istvan’s trench. Its shrieks tore at his ears. Then, all at once, they stopped. Cautiously—a few eggs were still bursting—he stuck up his head to see what had happened. The dragon lay dead. The Kuusaman dragonflier was holding the stick he took into the air with him. He must have put a beam through the dragon’s eye at close range.
Seeing Istvan, he threw the stick down on the beach and held his hands high. “I—to surrender!” he shouted in horrible Gyongyosian.
Istvan hadn’t expected to capture a dragonflier, but he wouldn’t complain. “Come on, get in this trench before your own people drop an egg on you,” he called.
“I—to thank,” the dragonflier said, and jumped down and ran over to Istvan. “You—no—to kill?” he asked anxiously as he slid into the trench.
In his boots, Istvan would have sounded anxious, too. But the Gyongyosian sergeant shook his head. “No. You Kuusamans, you’ve got captives from my kingdom, too. Once you start killing captives, where do you stop?”
Istvan had to repeat himself with simpler words to get the enemy dragonflier to follow that, but the fellow finally nodded. “Good,” he said. “I— yours—to be.” For a little while, Istvan wondered what was so good about being a captive, but only for a little while. The Kuusaman had come through the war alive. Istvan wondered if he would be able to say the same.
Skrunda wasn’t a big city. Jelgava held dozens, probably hundreds, of towns like it. As in so many of those towns, the people of Skrunda liked to think of it as bigger than it really was. News-sheet vendors hocked their wares as zealously as they did in Balvi, the capital, down in the southeast.
“Habakkuk explained!” one of them shouted, waving a sheet with great abandon. “Floating home of air pirates!”
Talsu couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought a news sheet. They’d been full of lies ever since the Algarvians overran his kingdom. But he’d seen graffiti praising Habakkuk all over Skrunda. He’d also seen that the redheads didn’t love them: they gathered work crews together to wash them off or paint over them. And so he dug into a trouser pocket and came up with a couple of coppers for the news-sheet vendor.
“Here you go, pal,” the fellow said, and handed him the sheet he’d been waving.
“Thanks,” Talsu answered. He kept his nose in the news sheet all the way back to the tailor’s shop where he worked with his father.
That almost got him into trouble, for he noticed a couple of Algarvian constables just in time to get out of their way. He scowled after they swaggered past. Jelgava, like Valmiera to the south, was a Kaunian kingdom. Redheads in a land of blonds, kilts in a land of trousers, seemed shockingly out of place even though King Donalitu had fled to Lagoas and exile more than three years before, even though King Mezentio of Algarve had promptly named his younger brother Mainardo as King of Jelgava in Donalitu’s place.
A whitewashed patch on a fence probably told where a graffito shouting HABAKKUK! had been painted. Talsu walked past it with a thoughtful grunt. He also nearly walked past the tailor’s shop, and the rooms above it where he and his family lived.
His father was working on a tunic of Algarvian military cut in a fabric too heavy for Jelgava’s weather when Talsu walked in. Traku frowned to see the news sheet—Talsu’s father, in truth, spent a good deal of time frowning. “What sort of nonsense are the redheads spouting today?” he asked. He might make uniforms for the occupiers—especially, as now, for Algarvians sent west to fight in freezing Unkerlant—but he didn’t love them.
Neither did Talsu. He’d fought them before his kingdom collapsed, and he’d tried to fight them here in Skrunda, too. He’d spent some months in a Jelgavan dungeon from trusting the wrong people then. No, he had no reason to love Algarvians.
He set the news sheet on the counter. “I bought the miserable thing because it said it would tell me what Habakkuk was.”
“Ah.” That interested Traku, too. He reached for the news sheet. “And does it?”
“It
says
Habakkuk is an iceberg, or a swarm of icebergs, fixed up with sorcery so they’ll sail the ley lines like regular ships and carry a whole great load of dragons while they’re doing it,” Talsu answered.
Traku skimmed through the article. “Aye, that’s what it
says,
all right,” he remarked when he was through. “The next question is, do you believe it?”
“I don’t know,” Talsu answered. “We’ve had dragons from Kuusamo or Lagoas or wherever they’re from drop more eggs on Skrunda lately than they did in the whole war up till now, so they’ve got
something new,
I expect.”
“Maybe.” Traku nodded. “I’ll give you that much, anyhow. But giant chunks of ice with dragons on top of them? I doubt it.” He wadded up the news sheet and flung it in the trash can. “My guess is, the redheads came up with this fancy nonsense because they can’t build real ships as fast as Lagoas and Kuusamo can, and they’re making all the news sheets print it to distract people.”
“You’re probably right,” Talsu agreed. He’d got good at searching out the truth buried in Algarvian lies. This story sounded more like a lie than anything he could easily swallow. He went on: “I saw one other thing in the news sheet—or rather, I didn’t see it.”
“What’s that?” his father asked.
“No more boasting about how the redheads were going to chase the Unkerlanters right out of that town down in the south—Herborn, that’s the name of the place,” Talsu said. “When the Algarvians stop bragging about something, it’s because they haven’t done it or they can’t do it.”
Traku’s opinion of that needed only one word: “Good.”
Talsu nodded. He pointed to the tunic his father was working on. “Do you need any help with that?”
“No, thanks,” Traku answered. “I’ve done just about all the handwork it needs.” He showed the stitches he’d applied himself. “After that, it’s just a matter of laying out the rest of the thread and putting on the finishing touches. You can do some more work on that kilt over there, if you feel like you’ve just got to get some work in this very minute.”