Authors: Harry Turtledove
“But don’t you see, my grandfather?” Vanai said, as if he stood beside her. “The Algarvians have done more to dilute Kaunianity in Forthweg than the Forthwegians could have done if they’d made half our maidens marry their young men.”
Her grandfather would have said something stuffy about that being beside the point. She didn’t think it was. Back before the war—that magical phrase—perhaps one in ten of King Penda’s subjects had been of Kaunian blood. How many Kaunians would be left alive by the time the war ended? Any at all? Even if there were some scattered handful, would they have any weight in Forthweg—assuming a Kingdom of Forthweg ever existed again? Penda had had to notice a tenth of his subjects. Would he have to notice a thirtieth, or a fiftieth, or whatever remnant of blonds was left?
Vanai laughed bitterly. Not being noticed by King Penda—if Penda ever came back from exile—was, at the moment, the least of her worries, and of the Forthwegian Kaunians’ worries, too. Surviving till he returned—if he returned—took pride of place there.
The baby kicked inside her, strongly enough to make her hand move on her belly. She nodded to herself. The baby kicked hard these days. Once or twice, it had kicked in just the wrong place and made one of her legs go weak beneath her for a moment. She counted herself lucky that she hadn’t fallen.
Patting her swollen stomach, she said, “And you ought to count yourself lucky that I didn’t fall, too.” The baby rewarded her with another kick and a wriggle. It wasn’t listening to her. She sighed. No one did, these days. The only person who’d ever really listened to her, as long as she could remember, was Ealstan.
Tears welled up in her eyes. She’d known terror after the Algarvians captured her. She’d expected that. What she hadn’t expected was the most crushing loneliness she’d ever known. She’d got used to having someone with whom she could talk, someone to whom she really mattered, someone to whom she wasn’t just a research assistant or a convenience (or, occasionally, an inconvenience).
She hadn’t realized how important, how marvelous that was, till she didn’t have it any more. She wiped the tears on her sleeve. Before she got pregnant, they would have embarrassed her. Now she almost took them for granted. They came more easily these days. She didn’t know why that was so, but she knew that it was so.
Even back in the days of the Kaunian Empire, people had noticed the same thing. A couple of quotations from the days of the Empire flashed through her mind. Her mouth twisted. That she knew such things was her grandfather’s doing. And what had it got her? A flat in the Kaunian district, a wait till the Algarvians caught her and took her away.
For that matter, what had Brivibas’ erudition got him? First, the attentions of Major Spinello, who’d had plenty of attentions to give Vanai, too, curse him. And last, a makeshift noose in an Algarvian gaol cell after he got recognized in spite of his sorcerous disguise as a Forthwegian.
“So much for scholarship,” she said, though she did wonder how her grandfather had been recognized. Had the magic worn off, as hers had done? She found that hard to believe: Brivibas was nothing if not careful and precise. Had someone known his voice in spite of the way he looked? That seemed more plausible. But who could have?
Major Spinello might have. Vanai shuddered. Spinello had gone off to the west to fight the Unkerlanters. She hoped he was dead, horribly dead. But even if he wasn’t, he was there, in the west, not in Gromheort. Who else? That plump constable? Would he have had any special reason to remember and recognize Brivibas? Vanai could only shrug. How could she know what had happened in Oyngestun after she left with Ealstan?
The baby wiggled and twisted inside her. The sensation was like none she’d ever known. She wondered how she could put it into words for someone who hadn’t known it. After a moment, she shook her head. She didn’t think there were any such words.
“Oh, stop,” she said, when the baby seemed to be trying to learn to dance inside a space that didn’t have room for fancy steps. “If it weren’t for you, I’d be back at my own flat, not here.”
She was sure the baby made the masking spell she’d devised fade away faster than it would have otherwise. She wondered how long the spell would hold if she tried it now, with the baby so much bigger. She’d probably have to renew it every half hour, maybe even more.
“I could,” she said. “I would. But…” Anyone who looked like a Forthwegian caught inside the Kaunian quarter would be blazed, no questions asked. “If it weren’t for that, I really could,” Vanai repeated. She had the dark brown strand of yarn and the yellow one. She even had a Forthwegian-style woman’s tunic. She’d found it going through a now-empty flat in the building. She sometimes wore it when the weather got warm. She’d always despised those baggy tunics, but they were a lot more comfortable for a pregnant woman than any trousers.
Here came that Algarvian constable and his partner, back along the street. They were both talking and gesturing animatedly, as Algarvians did. The plump constable laughed at something the other one said.
How can you do that? How can you laugh?
’Vanai wondered.
You must know what goes on here. How can you not care?
Bells began to clang then, not just in the Kaunian quarter but all over Eoforwic. The two Algarvian constables stopped laughing. The plump one shouted a phrase Vanai didn’t understand—one she judged unlikely ever to have appeared in polite literature—and shook his fist at the sky. Then he and his partner stopped strolling along and started hurrying away from the Kaunian quarter.
Blonds on the street started hurrying, too: hurrying toward those blocks of flats that had cellars. From the gossip at the feeding stations the Algarvians maintained, Vanai had heard that her own people had killed a couple of constables rash enough to go down into a cellar with them. She didn’t know if that was true—it sounded almost too good to be true—but she hoped so.
There wasn’t quite the desperate dash and scramble there would have been a few months before. For one thing, the redheads’ dowsing techniques had improved, which gave people a little more time to take shelter. And, for another, Unkerlanter dragons over Eoforwic were no longer a horrid surprise. They’d come often enough by now to let folk know what to expect.
One of the things to expect was disaster, if you had the misfortune to be on the upper story of a building that a bursting egg leveled. Vanai started for the door, intending to go downstairs into a cellar herself. As pregnant as she was, she couldn’t go anywhere very fast, and so was grateful for the extra warning time the Algarvian dowsers gave.
Not that they’re doing it for the likes of me,
she thought.
With a hand on the latch, though, she checked herself. She’d seen those constables leave the Kaunian quarter. She suspected the pair she’d seen hadn’t been the only ones getting out, either. How likely was it that the guards around the edge of the district were all staying at their posts? Not very, unless she missed her guess.
Which meant … “Which means that, if I’m lucky, if they’re in cellars, if an Unkerlanter egg doesn’t tear me to pieces, this is the best chance I’ll ever have to get out of the quarter,” Vanai breathed.
Once the idea came to her, she didn’t hesitate for a moment. She grabbed the long, Forthwegian-style tunic, then checked her pockets to make sure she had the brown yarn and the yellow. It was death to look like a Forthwegian inside the Kaunian quarter. It was also death to look like a Kaunian out of it. But if no one saw her appearance change from the one to the other…
I have to try,
she thought.
What have I got to lose?
She left the block of flats and came out onto the street just as the first eggs began bursting in Eoforwic. Looking up, she saw rock-gray dragons wheeling in the blue sky. “Get into a cellar, you cursed fool!” somebody shouted to her.
But Vanai had no intention of getting into a cellar, and didn’t think herself at all foolish. At the awkward waddle that was the fastest gait she had, she hurried toward the edge of the Kaunian quarter, only a few blocks away. More and more eggs fell, some of them quite close. She moaned with fear, but kept going.
Someone else behind her shouted something. She looked over her shoulder and moaned again—an Algarvian constable, a plumpish one. But he wasn’t close, and he might not have been shouting at her. She still had a chance.
She ducked into a doorway, tore off her Kaunian clothes, and threw on the Forthwegian tunic. Then she raced through the spell that let her look Forthwegian, too. She stepped out onto the sidewalk and trotted—a lumbering trot, but a trot nonetheless—toward safety (barring eggs, of course) now only half a block away.
Another shout rang out behind her—another shout, and the thud of boots on flagstones. However much she didn’t want to, she turned her head. A stick in his hand, that Algarvian constable came thundering after her.
Ealstan felt as if he’d been running for a hundred miles. His heart sledged in his chest. He’d been wrong before, so often that hope was almost dead. He didn’t think he could stand to be wrong again.
But I have to try,
he thought, and kept running as hard as he could.
He rounded a corner… and saw no one ahead of him. Panting, he cursed loudly—in Algarvian. Then somebody ducked out of a doorway and hurried toward the edge of the Kaunian district. Ealstan cursed again, louder and more furiously—but still in Algarvian. He’d been running after a blond woman, and this was a Forthwegian. If she hadn’t been so very pregnant, she would have looked a lot like his sister, Conberge … He started running as if he’d never run before.
He let out another great shout—”Vanai!”—as he thudded toward her. She glanced back over her shoulder and came to a stop, every inch of her sagging, her face full of hopeless despair. “Vanai!” he yelled again, and then, “Thelberge!” and then, most important of all, “Darling!”
She stared. She swayed. For a moment, he thought she would faint. An egg burst only a block or so away. Ealstan hardly noticed it. He didn’t think Vanai noticed it at all. “Ealstan?” she whispered as he dashed up and swept her into his arms. “I don’t believe it,” she went on, though the words were muffled because he was doing his best to smother her with kisses.
“It’s true, by the powers above,” he said in the brief moments when he wasn’t otherwise occupied.
“But you’re an Algarvian,” she said. “I mean, you look like an Algarvian. How can you be—?”
“You Too Can Be a Mage,”
Ealstan said solemnly. “I’m an Algarvian the same way you’re a Forthwegian.” He took her by the elbow and steered her in the direction she was already going. “Come on. Let’s get you out of the quarter here. As soon as we’ve done that, we can worry about everything else.”
If he ran into any guards at the edge of the quarter, Ealstan intended to talk his way past them. The constabulary uniform he was wearing, which Pybba had got him despite grumblings, would give him a long head start toward that. But there was no need. Like any men of sense, the guards had sought shelter from the Unkerlanter eggs. So had everybody else; but for the two of them, the streets were empty.
“Out!” he said triumphantly as they passed into the part of Eoforwic where Forthwegians could go and Kaunians—at least Kaunians who looked like Kaunians—couldn’t.
“Out,” Vanai echoed. She raised an eyebrow in an expression unmistakably hers, no matter how much the magic made her look like Conberge. “I could have done this myself, you know.”
“I know, sweetheart,” Ealstan said. “Now I know. But I didn’t know before I started coming into the quarter looking for you.” His chuckle was grim. “Any Algarvian constables who saw me—any real Algarvian constables, I mean—must have figured I had a Kaunian girlfriend.” He squeezed her hand. How fine the touch of her flesh felt! “And they were right, but not the way they thought.”
Eggs burst only a couple of blocks away. Ealstan waved to the Unkerlanter dragons still circling overhead, still looking for targets in Eoforwic. The longer they stayed up there, the better his chances of getting back to his flat with Vanai.
He poked his head into the lobby of a block of flats just outside the Kaunian quarter. As he’d hoped, it was empty. Everyone there had run for a cellar. He pulled Vanai inside and stripped off his constable’s uniform. After pulling out a proper Forthwegian tunic from a pouch on his belt, he stuffed the Algarvian-style tunic and kilt and hat into the pouch. “Pybba may need them again,” he told Vanai.
“Pybba!” she said. “But Pybba’s got no use for Kaunians. I don’t know how many times you’ve told me that.”
“No, but he hasn’t got any use for Algarvians, either,” Ealstan answered. “And he has got some use for me, and so I managed to persuade him to get me this.” He hugged his wife. “I know what’s important, by the powers above.”
From another, smaller, pouch he took a length of coppery yarn and one of dark brown. He went through the spell he’d devised to shift him back from looking like an Algarvian to his usual self. Vanai clapped her hands together, which told him he’d succeeded. She said, “You patterned that charm after the one I made.”
“Well, of course I did,” he answered. “I know what works—and having a model helps when I compose in classical Kaunian.”
“You did splendidly,” Vanai said, which warmed him all over. “You must have done splendidly twice, in fact, or you wouldn’t have been able to look like an Algarvian in the first place.”
He kissed her. Even as he did, though, something else struck him. “You’d better renew your spell, too, while you’ve got the chance. No telling how long you’ll keep looking Forthwegian. We need to be back to the flat before you go back to looking like your regular self.”
“You’re right,” she said, and did just that. Her looks didn’t change, but she would keep on looking a lot like his sister for a while longer. Long enough?
Maybe I’ll have her renew it again before we get home, if I see a chance,
Ealstan told himself. Vanai’s thoughts were running along a different ley line: “I’ll have to get a new bottle of hair dye. No point to dyeing it—no way, either—when I was caught there.”