Authors: Harry Turtledove
Traku drummed a fingernail on the three-legged stool that was the sole bit of real furniture in the tent. After Talsu finished measuring the Algarvian, his father said, “What with things being the way they are right now”—his wave encompassed the canvas walls and the blankets on bare ground—”I think maybe you’d better pay up front.” He named his price.
The Algarvian raised an eyebrow. Talsu expected him to raise a fuss—Mezentio’s men, to a Jelgavan, were some of the fussiest people ever born. But, instead of turning red and throwing a tantrum, or even haggling, the captain dug into his belt pouch and set silver on the stool. “Here,” he said, and started to walk out. As he reached for the tent flap, he looked back over his shoulder. “Two days’ time?”
“Three,” Talsu said.
“Three,” the redhead agreed. “I am seeing you in three days’ time, then.” He ducked out of the tent and strode away.
Once he was gone, Talsu and his father stared at each other. “Did you hear that?” Talsu breathed. “Did you
hear
that? By the powers above, there’s a redhead who doesn’t think Algarve can hang on in Jelgava!”
“King Donalitu’s back,” Traku said. “We’re going to be free again.”
“Aye,” Talsu said, but then, quite suddenly, “No. We’re going to have our own king back again. It’s not exactly the same thing.” His father made a questioning noise. Talsu explained: “When the redheads arrested me and threw me in the dungeon, the fellow who interrogated me wasn’t an Algarvian. He was a Jelgavan, doing the same job for King Mainardo as he’d done for King Donalitu. And if King Donalitu’s giving orders in Balvi again, what do you want to bet that same son of a whore will go right on doing his job in the dungeon, except with different prisoners?”
Traku grunted. “Gaolers are all bastards, no matter who they work for.”
“Oh, aye.” Talsu nodded. “But you have to be a
particular
kind of bastard to do your job without caring who you work for.” He hesitated, then added, “And you have to be a particular kind of bastard to want your dungeons full of people—if you happen to be a king, I mean.”
Traku looked around, as if fearing people were leaning up outside the tent with hands cupped to their ears. Even in the days before the war, such words incautiously spoken could cause a man to disappear for months, for years, sometimes forever. “If it’s a choice between our bastard and the Algarvians’ bastard, I’ll take ours,” he said at last.
“Oh, aye,” Talsu said again, and then sighed. “That’s the choice we’ve got, sure enough. I wish we had another one, but I don’t know what it would be. Most kings are whoresons, nothing else but.”
They got supper that evening from kettles full of slop not much better than he’d eaten in his army days. After they brought their bowls back to the tent, Gailisa said, “Somebody who came into the grocery shop today said that Mainardo was going to run away from Balvi and back to Algarve. That would be wonderful.”
“Even the redheads don’t think they can go on holding our kingdom down,” Traku said, and recounted the Algarvian captain’s words earlier in the day.
Talsu bent down to spit a bit of gristle onto the ground. Then he said, “The redheads may not think they can hold Jelgava, but they’ve got to keep trying.”
“Why?” his wife asked. “Why don’t they just go away and leave us alone?”
“I wish they would,” his sister added.
“So do I, Ausra,” Talsu said. “But if they go away, the Lagoans and Kuusamans—and I suppose our own army, if we have an army again—will follow them right on into Algarve. And so they’ve got to fight here, to hang on to their own kingdom.”
“We’ll just have to help throw them out, then,” Ausra said, not quite so quietly as Talsu would have liked. He didn’t answer that. He’d tried to help throw out the redheads, and what had it got him? Time in the dungeon and an undeserved name as a collaborator. Of course, his timing had been bad.
If I saw the chance, would I fight the Algarvians again?
he wondered. He gnawed on another piece of gristly meat. That helped hide the fierce smile on his face.
Of course I would. If only I could kill them all.
Ilmarinen looked at Fernao as if he hated him. He probably did. “You miserable pup,” Ilmarinen said. “I was after experimental proof.”
Fernao shrugged. “You wouldn’t have got it. Even you’ve admitted you ignored that indeterminacy. All you would have done was take out a big piece of the landscape, and you have to admit that, too.”
“I don’t have to do any such thing, and I’m not about to, either,” Ilmarinen retorted. “It might have worked fine. We’ll never know now— thanks to you.”
They
could
find out. Ilmarinen could go off and repeat his experiment. Fernao kept his mouth shut. If he suggested any such thing, the Kuusaman mage was altogether too likely to take him up on it. He could think of nothing he wanted less. To keep Ilmarinen from coming up with the same notion, he changed the subject: “Our armies are pushing farther into Jelgava. So far, the Algarvians haven’t started killing people to try to stop them.”
“So far,” Ilmarinen echoed. He leaned across the refectory table. “But I have friends in interesting places. One of them said the redheads—the other redheads, I mean: not your lot—moved a lot of Kaunians from Forthweg down to the edge of the Strait of Valmiera, because they thought the blow would fall there. How long will it take to drag those poor whoresons to Jelgava, or else to start hauling Jelgavans off the street?”
“Not long,” Fernao said.
Ilmarinen grunted. “There—you see? You’re not as foolish as you look. And I was trying to go back and change all that—change everything that’s happened since this war started—and you and Pekka had the nerve to try to stop me? You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” His eyebrow rose. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves for all kinds of reasons, but that’s the one I’ve got in mind right now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fernao replied, and Ilmarinen laughed raucously. Ignoring him, the Lagoan mage switched to classical Kaunian: “And suppose—just suppose, mind—that you were right about what you tried to do. Suppose the sorcery does have a true timelike component. I do not think it does, but suppose as much for the sake of argument.”
“I have supposed as much,” Ilmarinen said in the same language. “That is why I tried to do what I did. And if I had succeeded, the world would be a different place, and a better place, right now. Because of Pekka, that wouldn’t make you so happy, I know, but it’s still true.” He spoke the language of scholarship as fluently and idiomatically as he used Kuusaman.
“Different? Aye. Better?” Fernao shrugged. “Perhaps you would have changed things to your heart’s desire. But what would the next person who meddled in the past have done? What about the fellow after
hint!
How long before we had no true past at all, only an endless war of changes? If the Kaunian Empire had beaten the Algarvians at the Battle of Gambolo, would it have fallen? If Sibiu had beaten Lagoas in our sea wars two hundred and fifty years ago, the Sibs would have got more from Siaulia and the islands in the Great Northern Sea than they did, and we less. And so on, with every kingdom trying to set its lost cause to rights. Do you see?”
He spoke classical Kaunian like most scholars and mages: well enough, but without real liveliness. But that didn’t matter so much here. All he wanted to do was get his point across. And he did. Ilmarinen didn’t answer right away. “You’ve given this a good deal of thought, haven’t you?” he said at last.
“Aye,” Fernao answered. “Pekka and I had little else to do while going out to the blockhouse but think and worry. The other thing we worried about was how much energy your spell would release if it went wrong.”
“Nothing you could have done about that—except jumping on me and stopping me the way you did, I mean,” Ilmarinen said. He added, “I saw the carriage you came in. You should have spent your time screwing—the driver wouldn’t have known. If you were going to die, at least you would have died happy.”
Fernao got to his feet. “You are impossible,” he said. “Fortunately, the spell you tried is also impossible.” He wanted to warn Ilmarinen not to try it again, but refrained once more. He wished he could have strutted away with his nose in the air. His permanent limp and the stick he used prevented that. He did the best he could, given his physical limitations. It was good enough to make Ilmarinen laugh at his retreating back.
And he got his nose high enough in the air to keep him from paying much attention to where he was going. He almost ran over Pekka before he realized she was there. “What did I do to you?” she asked.
“You?” he replied. “Nothing, sweetheart.” Her expression warned him not to say such things. It always had, ever since he’d fled his own bedchamber after they’d made love. But this time, he was able to go on. “Ilmarinen, on the other hand …”
Pekka’s face cleared. She was always ready to be annoyed at the elderly theoretical sorcerer, even if he was her own countryman. “What now?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing new,” Fernao said. “But he still thinks he’s right in spite of the evidence, and—” He broke off again.
“And what?” Pekka asked. When Fernao didn’t answer right away, she drew her own—accurate—conclusion. “He’s teasing you about what we did, is he?” Fernao nodded. Pekka wagged a finger at him. “You see? Going to bed didn’t stop the gossip. It didn’t slow it down. It didn’t solve anything.”
“But it was wonderful,” Fernao said.
That didn’t solve anything, either; it just brought the annoyed look back to Pekka’s face. “It made things more complicated,” she said. “We don’t need things to be more complicated right now. The most important thing we can do is work on this magecraft. Anything that gets in the way—anything at all—we have to push aside.”
She didn’t deny that they’d had a good time in bed. She’d never denied it. But she did keep on behaving as if it hadn’t happened. That might not have been calculated to drive Fernao out of his mind, but it certainly had that effect.
“What are we going to do?” he said.
“When I get the chance, I’m going back to my husband and my son,” Pekka answered. “As for you, I hope you find a wonderful Lagoan woman—or even a wonderful Kuusaman woman, if you find your tastes running that way.”
“I already have,” Fernao told her.
“One without encumbrances,” Pekka told him. When she saw he didn’t understand the word in Kuusaman, she translated it into classical Kaunian. He could have done without such thoughtfulness. She added, “And I’m not feeling any too wonderful right now, either.”
Fernao looked around. By some accident, nobody was staring at them as they stood just outside the refectory. That wouldn’t last long, though. It couldn’t, by the very nature of things. While he had the chance, Fernao kicked at the boards of the floor—after carefully positioning his stick so he didn’t fall on his face. “What’s the use?” he muttered. “What’s the cursed use?”
“You see?” Pekka set a hand on his arm. It was a sympathetic gesture, not an affectionate one—or not an affectionate one of the sort he craved. “It complicated your life, too, even without encumbrances.” Now she used the Kuusaman word without explanation.
“It wouldn’t have, if…” he said.
“If I’d decided to keep doing what we did once,” Pekka said, and he nodded. She shook her head. “The complications would just have taken longer to get here and been worse when they finally did. I’m sorry, Fernao; by the powers above, I’m very sorry. But I can’t imagine anything that would make me change my mind now.”
“All right,” he said. But it wasn’t all right, nor anywhere close. He limped off toward his room. Pekka didn’t come after him or try to call him back. He hadn’t really expected her to. He’d hoped—but expectation had the encumbrance of truth, while hope lived its own life, wild and free.
Once he got back to his chamber, he wondered why he’d come. All he had here was the chance to be alone with his misery. He sat down on the bed, then wished he hadn’t. Sitting there made him think of those frantic few minutes when he’d got everything he wanted … only to discover that, once he’d got it, he couldn’t keep it. That felt worse than not getting it, for now he could look back on what he’d had, know it was real, and know—or at least be certain enough for all practical purposes—it wouldn’t happen again.
Muttering something pungent under his breath, he got up and left his room. He did, at least, know where he was going: to the crystallomancers’ chamber, where the mages and their crystals kept the hostel in the Naantali district connected to the outside world throughout the year. As spring gave way to summer, getting here was easy enough, but that didn’t hold in fall or early spring or through the seemingly endless winter blizzards.
“I want a crystal for private communication with my Grandmaster,” he told the Kuusaman mage in charge of the chamber.
“Of course,” she said. It hadn’t always been
of course;
he’d had to make a nuisance of himself to gain the privilege. Only by pointedly asking whether Lagoas was truly an equal ally to Kuusamo had he prevailed. The chief crystallomancer took him to a crystal in the corner. The couple of Kuusamans closest to that crystal moved away so they couldn’t listen to him. “Here you are,” the chief said. “Do remember that the Algarvians are always trying to spy on our emanations.”
“I will,” Fernao said. Looking discontented, the Kuusaman mage went back to her desk. Fernao murmured the charm that would link this crystal to the one in Grandmaster Pinhiero’s office back in Setubal. As the crystal activated, light flared inside it. A moment later, Pinhiero’s image filled the glass globe.
“Who’s that?” the Grandmaster said, peering into his own crystal. Then he recognized Fernao. “Ah, it’s you. What do you want? What sort of trouble are you in?”
So far as Fernao knew, Pinhiero hadn’t heard about his entanglement with Pekka. Fernao hadn’t told him, anyway, which might not have been the same thing. Pinhiero could learn things from all sorts of unlikely places. Fernao said, “When will the first contingent of Lagoan mages come here for training? We really need our own wizards familiar with the new magecraft now that we’re fighting on the Derlavaian mainland.” Speaking his own tongue with Pinhiero felt odd after using classical Kaunian and Kuusaman for so long.