Authors: Harry Turtledove
“We’ll smash them like crocks! We’ll beat them like drums!” That was Lajos. He hadn’t been in Istvan’s squad when they’d eaten from that accursed stewpot. He’d never fought the Kuusamans; they were just a name to him. He was young and brave and full of confidence. Life looked simple to him. Why not? He didn’t know any better.
“We can beat them,” Szonyi agreed. He’d been with Istvan a long time, ever since the fighting on Obuda, which lay a good deal farther west, in the Bothnian Ocean—and which, these days, belonged to Kuusamo once more. The difference between his
can
and Lajos’
will
was subtle, but it was all too real.
Kun didn’t say anything. Behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes were sober. Years of war had taught Szonyi some few reservations. Kun seemed to have been born with more than most Gyongyosians ever needed to acquire.
And what about me?
Istvan wondered. Unlike Kun, he wasn’t a city man. His home village, Kunhegyes, shared a mountain valley with a couple of other similar hamlets. Had it not been for the army, he might never have left that valley his whole life long unless he went raiding into a nearby one. His horizons now were wider than he’d ever imagined they could be. Sometimes he thought that marvelous. Rather more often, he wished it had never happened.
Not much horizon here. Even when he climbed out of the trench, all he could see was the low, flat, muddy island and the surrounding sea, which looked bare of ships. He found another question for Frigyes: “Captain, are they bringing more dragons to Becsehely to keep the slanteyes from pounding us the way they’ve done before?”
“We’ll have plenty of dragons, Sergeant,” the company commander replied, and strode on down the line.
Istvan beamed in considerable relief… until Corporal Kun spoke in a low voice: “You do realize he didn’t answer your question, don’t you?”
“He said—” Istvan broke off and thought about what Captain Frigyes
had
said. He kicked at the muddy ground. “You’re right. He didn’t. He might have been a father telling a little boy not to worry.” The comparison angered him. He wasn’t a little boy. He was a man. If he weren’t a man, he wouldn’t have been here with a stick slung on his back.
But Kun’s voice held only calm appraisal: “He’s a pretty good officer. He doesn’t want people fretting about what they can’t help.”
“I wouldn’t have, either, if you hadn’t opened your mouth.” Now Istvan was ready to be angry at Kun rather than Frigyes.
“One thing being a mage’s apprentice taught me,” Kun said: “what words mean and what they don’t. I’d sooner find out the truth, whatever it is. And whatever it turns out to be, I expect I can look it in the eye. You can’t say that about everyone.”
“I suppose not,” Istvan said. How would Kun take it if somebody pointed out the truth about his immodesty? Istvan didn’t intend to do any such thing. Kun went on enough as things were.
And he had a gift for asking unpleasant questions. He found one now: “Suppose we look like we’re going to lose Becsehely. Do you think our mages will start sacrificing us to build the sorcery they need to drive back the Kuusamans?”
“That’s as the stars decide,” Istvan answered. “Nothing I can do about it one way or the other. And you did volunteer, the same as I did, the same as most of the men in the company did.”
“Oh, aye, I volunteered.” Kun’s eyes blazed from behind the lenses of his spectacles. “How could I do anything else, with everybody looking at me?”
“Aren’t you the fellow who doesn’t care what anybody else thinks?” Istvan returned. He usually enjoyed turning the tables on Kun, not least because he couldn’t very often. Today, though, the corporal didn’t rise to the bait. He just scowled at Istvan and strode off, silent and gruff as if he’d come from a mountain valley himself.
For the next couple of days, everything on Becsehely stayed quiet. Gulls wheeled overhead. So did other, bigger, seabirds, some of them with a wingspan twice as wide as a man’s outstretched arms. Those enormous birds spent most of their time in the air. Istvan had seen them on Obuda, too. When they did land, they often rolled and tumbled. Watching them crash to the ground—and watching them trying to get airborne again—was more entertaining than most of the things the Gyongyosian soldiers had to do on the island.
Alarm bells began clanging before dawn three days after Captain Frigyes delivered his warning. Troopers who weren’t sleeping in their trenches ran for them. “This is no drill!” the company commander shouted moments after the clanging started. “The dowsers see enemy ships out over the horizon.” He hesitated, then shouted one thing more: “Volunteers, remember your oath! You may be summoned.”
Istvan wished Frigyes hadn’t said that. How was he supposed to concentrate on staying alive against the Kuusamans if his own side was liable to kill him to drive back the invaders?
“Dragons!” That shout seemed to come from everywhere at once. Istvan hunkered down in his trench. Becsehely had been hit before. It had been hit hard, too. But Gyongyosian dragons flying off the little island had also struck back hard at the enemy. Not this time, or not for long. Kuusamo seemed to have gathered every dragon in the world and put all those beasts in the air above the island.
That was how it felt to Istvan, anyhow. The rain of eggs was the hardest he’d ever known. There were almost as many as if they’d been real raindrops, or so it seemed to him. The ground under him jerked and quivered, as if in torment. Dirt flew into the air and thudded down onto him and his squadmates—so much dirt, he feared being buried alive.
And the dragons swooped low, too, flaming whenever the men who flew them found targets they judged worthwhile. Shrieks rose from the trenches, punctuating the roar of bursting eggs and the alarm bell’s brazen clamor. Before long, Istvan smelled charred meat. He cursed. He knew what meat that was.
Then the bells redoubled their fury. “Boats offshore!” The cry reached Istvan as if from very far away. But he understood what it meant. It meant the Gyongyosian crystallomancers had had the right of it. This time, the Kuusamans were going to try to take Becsehely away from Gyongyos.
He stuck his head up out of the trench. He’d seen enemy boats approaching a Gyongyosian-held island before, back in the days when he was fighting on Obuda. It had meant trouble then. It meant trouble now, too. And he saw no Gyongyosian ships attacking the Kuusaman vessels from which those invasion boats came.
“It’s up to us,” he said. “If we don’t throw the enemy back, nobody will.”
“If we don’t throw the enemy back, the mages will cut our throats and hope they can do it,” Kun said. Istvan glared at him. But Kun hadn’t spoken loud enough to demoralize any of the other soldiers, so Istvan did no more than glare.
The sea was full of boats. All of them seemed to be coming straight toward Istvan. The Kuusaman naval vessels started throwing eggs at the beaches of Becsehely. Istvan ducked down into the trench again. But he couldn’t stay down there. If the Kuusamans got soldiers ashore, he was a dead man. That their eggs might easily kill him, too, was only a detail.
“Make them pay!” Captain Frigyes shouted, though his voice sounded small and lost amidst the endless roars of the bursting eggs. “By the stars, it’ll cost them if they want to shift Gyongyosian warriors.”
As soon as the incoming boats got close enough, Istvan started blazing at them. The Kuusamans blazed back, though the bobbing waves made most of their beams go wild. “We’ll slaughter them,” Szonyi said happily.
“I hope so,” Istvan answered.
And the Gyongyosians did slaughter their foes, at least those who tried to come ashore in front of the trench where Istvan and his comrades crouched. A good many enemy soldiers never made it to the beach alive. None of the small, dark, slant-eyed men made it off the beach alive, not there.
But, even while Istvan’s company beat back the Kuusamans, shouts of alarm rose elsewhere on Becsehely: “They’ve landed!” The soldiers’ cheers turned to cries of alarm. If the Kuusamans had gained a foothold on the island, they would prove far harder to dislodge—by any ordinary means, that is.
No sooner had that thought crossed Istvan’s mind than Captain Frigyes called, “Back toward the mages, my brave men. We are warriors—we can give all that warriors have to give. For Gyongyos and Ekrekek Arpad!”
“For Gyongyos and Ekrekek Arpad!” Istvan echoed. He followed Frigyes from the trenches without hesitation. If Gyongyos needed his life from him, Gyongyos would have it. And if fear made his legs feel as if they were made of gelatin and not flesh and solid bone … he would pretend it didn’t.
“I told you this would happen,” Kun said furiously. Istvan only shrugged. He’d thought it might happen, too. It bothered him less than it did the former mage’s apprentice. Getting burnt to nothingness by a bursting egg before his life energy could serve his kingdom worried him more. Plainly, he would die on Becsehely one way or another. That being so, he wanted to choose the way.
But then even that choice was denied him, for a swarm of Kuusamans— a regiment’s worth, at least—came rushing up from the south. They must have swept all before them there. “To surrender!” one of them shouted in bad Gyongyosian.
Istvan looked to Captain Frigyes. Had the company commander been ready to fight to the death, he would have fought, too. But Frigyes, though ready to die to aid Gyongyos, didn’t care to perish to no purpose. He let his stick fall and raised his hands. And Istvan discovered he was not a bit sorry to do the same. A crazy grin spread across his face. That he’d been ready to die made living all the sweeter.
Pekka breathed a sigh of relief as she put a pad inside her drawers. Aye, she’d done something she wished, looking back on it, she hadn’t. But she wouldn’t have to face the consequences nine months from now.
A frown made a small vertical line appear between her eyebrows. It had nothing to do with the dull ache in her lower back, or even with the cramps that would follow. Try as she would, she couldn’t make all of her wish she hadn’t gone to bed with Fernao. Despite the tears and regrets afterwards, it had felt too good while it was going on.
It would have been just as good with Leino. It would have been even better with Leino.
She nodded to herself while she finished dressing. That was probably true. But her husband, however much she missed him and wanted him, was far away, and had been for much too long. If she wanted Fernao, she had only to walk to his chamber and knock on the door.
She hadn’t done it, not since that first time. And Fernao hadn’t come knocking on her door, either. More than anything else, that made her believe he hadn’t planned on seducing her when he invited her to his room. She shook her head as she walked to the door. It hadn’t been a seduction, curse it. She couldn’t claim it hadn’t also been her fault, not even to herself. She’d wanted the Lagoan mage as much as he’d wanted her.
And he still wanted her. She knew as much. What she wanted … “is nobody’s affair but my own,” she murmured, stepping out into the hallway. She hadn’t taken more than two steps toward the refectory before she stopped and kicked at the carpet. She wished she hadn’t used the word
affair,
even if she didn’t mean it like
that.
When she got down to the refectory, she saw Fernao sitting at a table with Raahe and Alkio, animatedly talking shop. The table had four chairs around it. Alkio saw her and waved her to the empty one, which was by Fernao’s. She didn’t see that she had any choice but to go sit there. She would have before the two of them made love: that was certain.
“Good morning,” Fernao said. Like her, he did his best to pretend in public that nothing too much out of the ordinary had happened.
“Good morning.” Pekka made a particular kind of sour face. “Fair morning, anyhow.” Fernao looked baffled. So did Alkio. Raahe softly chuckled into her cup of tea. She understood that—but then, she was a woman, too.
Linna came bustling up. “What can I get you?” she asked. Her eyes traveled speculatively from Pekka to Fernao and back again.
“Tea,” Pekka said, ignoring that glance. Going to Fernao’s room hadn’t stifled the gossip—no indeed. It just spawned more. “Oatmeal with berries and plenty of honey.” She didn’t feel like anything heavier. Linna nodded and went away.
Fernao returned to the conversation he’d been having with the husband-and-wife team of theoretical sorcerers: “I still say that instance we sensed yesterday felt …
odd Is
the only word I can find for it.”
Alkio shook his head. “I don’t think so. It’s just that we’ve got too used to feeling those murderous sacrifices. They don’t jolt us the way they once did.”
Nodding, Pekka said, “I know for a fact that that’s true with me. And if it’s not a judgment on us all, and on this whole sorry world, powers below eat me if I know what would be.”
“A judgment? Aye, no doubt.” Fernao nodded, too, and so did Raahe and Alkio. But, stubbornly, the Lagoan mage went on, “It didn’t feel right, though, I tell you.”
“Of course not,” Alkio said. “If it
was
wrong, how could
it feel
right?”
Fernao exhaled through his nose in exasperation. “That is not what I meant,” he said, switching from Kuusaman to classical Kaunian so he could get across exactly what he did mean. “I meant it did not feel like Algarvian magecraft, and it did not feel like Unkerlanter sorcery.”
Alkio gestured dismissively. “Who else could it have been? No one but Mezentio’s mages and Swemmel’s uses those spells, and powers above be praised for that.”
Before Fernao could answer—and, for that matter, before he could get any angrier, for he was already irked—Piilis came into the refectory. As he paused in the doorway, Pekka waved to him. He waved back and walked toward the table where she was sitting. She hooked a chair from another table with her ankle and scooted over to give Piilis room to join her colleagues and her.
Only after she’d done it did she realize she’d scooted closer to Fernao. Was that wise?
It’s what I would have done before… what happened, happened,
she told herself. Whether that answered her question was a question in and of itself.