Authors: Harry Turtledove
Well, if she was, she had her answer. Fernao had gone on and on about magecraft without the slightest concern for anything else. He supposed he could repair that the next time they met. He supposed he could, but he didn’t really intend to, because the truth was, he wasn’t interested.
He muttered a low-voiced curse, then started to laugh. Life would have been so much simpler if he were.
Summer on Obuda meant long, misty days—it never got very hot—and mild, misty nights. Istvan remembered that from his days on the island as a Gyongyosian warrior. He was, he supposed, still a Gyongyosian warrior in some technical sense, but he thought of himself as a captive of the Kuusamans much more often.
Not everyone in the large captives’ camp on Obuda shared that view. As far as Captain Frigyes was concerned, for instance, the war remained a going concern. Frigyes was ready to sacrifice himself and all the other captives to loose potent magecraft against the Kuusamans, just as he’d been ready to sacrifice the men under his command back on Becsehely.
“He’s daft, you know,” Kun said one morning as he and Istvan squatted over stinking latrine trenches. “Even if our sorcerous energy knocks this island out of the Bothnian Ocean and up onto the peaks of the Ilszung Mountains, it won’t change how the war turns out by even a copper’s worth.”
“You know that.” Istvan grunted. “I know that.” He grunted again. Kuusaman guards strode the palisade not far away. Having to take care of his needs without privacy had left him badly constipated for a while. He didn’t even notice any more. “The captain doesn’t know it, or else he doesn’t care.” He tore off a handful of grass.
“Aye, well, no doubt you’re right.” Kun grabbed some grass, too. Fortunately, it grew very fast. “But I care. I don’t much fancy having my throat cut for nothing.”
Since Istvan didn’t, either, he just threw the grass down into the trench, got to his feet, and set his clothes to rights. “What are we going to do, then?” he asked. “We can’t very well go and tell the Kuusaman guards. That would get our throats cut, too, and not for nothing—when our friends found out.”
“My dear boy,” Kun said, as if he were Istvan’s father rather than his comrade. “My dear boy, if we ever had to do such a thing, we would also have to make sure our friends never, ever, found out.” That was so obvious, Istvan felt like a fool for not having seen it himself. In the nastier ways of the world if not in years, Kun
was
a good deal older than he.
They queued up for breakfast. They queued up for everything in the captives’ camp: The Kuusamans regimented them even more thoroughly than the Gyongyosian army had done, which was saying a good deal. A few of the cooks were Kuusamans; more were Obudans—the occupiers put the natives to work for them. One of the Obudans, a medium-sized, medium-brown man—larger and darker than a Kuusaman—wore a dragon’s tooth on a leather thong around his neck. As Istvan, mess tin in hand, came up to him, the Gyongyosian pointed to the fang and said, “You might have bought that from me, once upon a time.” A lot of Obudan men were eager to get their hands on dragon’s teeth, thinking they reflected well on their virility.
The cook fingered the heavy tooth. “Maybe I did,” he replied. No reason he shouldn’t understand Gyongyosian; Istvan’s kingdom had had a couple of spells of ruling Obuda before the Kuusamans finally seized the island. Plunging his ladle into the kettle of fish-and-barley stew—heavy on the barley, light on the fish—he gave Istvan a bigger helping than usual.
“You lucky son of a goat,” said Kun, who hadn’t got any more than the usual. Istvan only smiled and shrugged. He knew some things about getting along with people that his sour-tempered friend had never figured out.
Once they finished eating, they washed their mess tins in big tubs of water set out for the purpose. Istvan’s spoon clanked in his tray. He had another spoon hidden under the mattress of his cot, the handle scraped down to make a knife blade of sorts. He’d never mentioned that to Kun, or to anyone else, but you never could tell when a weapon might come in handy. As he carried the mess kit back to his bunk for the daily inspection, he stole a glance at Kun. Maybe Kun had a ground-down spoon knife stashed away somewhere, too. That hadn’t occurred to Istvan till now.
A Kuusaman lieutenant strode through the barracks as the Gyongyosian captives stood at attention by their cots. A sergeant would have done a better, more thorough job. So thought Istvan, at any rate, and never once stopped to wonder if his own underofficer’s rank had anything to do with his opinion.
Once the Kuusaman was satisfied, Frigyes pointed to Istvan and the men who’d served in his squad. “Wood-chopping detail,” he said, as if Istvan didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing. “This is something that needs to be done properly. Without enough wood, we don’t eat hot food.”
“Aye, Captain,” Istvan said resignedly. Still, he understood what Frigyes meant. Some of the work the Kuusamans gave their captives was designed to keep them busy, nothing more. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to mind the captives’ going through the motions on that sort of job. But firewood, as Frigyes had said, was serious.
It was, in fact, serious in several ways. The Kuusaman corporal who issued the captives their axes kept careful count of just how many he was issuing—no chance of stealing an axe and stowing it under a mattress. If the number turned in at the end of the day didn’t match the number given out at the start, there would be trouble.
Kun grumbled at chopping wood. Kun grumbled at a good many things, but he was particularly vain about his hands, which, for a soldier’s, were soft and fine. “How am I supposed to cast a proper spell with them all rough and bruised and battered?” he complained.
“You couldn’t cast much of a spell any which way,” Szonyi said. “You were only a mage’s apprentice, not a mage yourself.” Kun gave him a look full of loathing and swung his axe as if he would have liked to bring it down on Szonyi’s neck.
To Istvan, chopping wood was just a job. He’d been doing it since he was a boy. Back in his home valley, chopping wood meant staying warm through the harsh winter as well as having hot food in your belly.
He was raising his axe to split another chunk of beech when the gates to the captives’ camp, not too far away, swung open. “More poor buggers coming in,” Szonyi predicted.
“Aye, no doubt.” Istvan lowered the axe without chopping; he was willing to pause for a little while to see some new faces.
And new faces he saw—newer than he’d expected. “Who are
those
fellows?” Szonyi’s deep voice cracked in surprise. “They sure aren’t Gyongyosians.”
The Kuusaman guards led in four men who towered over them, as Gyongyosians would have, but who, as Szonyi said, plainly did not come from Istvan’s kingdom. The newcomers were slimmer of build than most Gyongyosians, and their hair was coppery, not tawny. They wore Kuusaman military clothing, which did not fit them well at all.
“I know who they have to be,” Kun said. “They’re Algarvians.”
“Stars above, I think you’re right.” Istvan stared at the redheads, the only real allies his kingdom had. “But what are they doing out here in the middle of the Bothnian Ocean? Algarve is … way over on the other side of the world somewhere.” What he knew of geography would have filled the heads of perhaps two pins—even though, thanks to his army service, he’d seen much more of the world than he’d ever expected (or wanted) while growing up in the little village of Kunhegyes.
“Let’s ask them when we get off our shift,” Szonyi said.
Kun smiled a sour smile. “And what language will you ask them in?” he inquired.
Szonyi had only one answer for that, which was no answer at all. A typical Gyongyosian peasant, he spoke only his own language. Sheepishly, he said, “I don’t suppose they know Gyongyosian.”
“About as much as you know of Algarvian, probably.” Aye, Kun enjoyed making Szonyi look like a fool.
The new captives, naturally, noticed everybody staring at them. They waved to the Gyongyosians and bowed from the waist as if they were visiting nobles. “Show-offs,” Szonyi muttered.
Then one of the Algarvians, waving again, called out, “Hello, friends! How are you?” in almost unaccented Gyongyosian.
“So they don’t speak our language, eh?” Istvan said. Just as Kun enjoyed making Szonyi look like a fool, Istvan enjoyed turning the tables on clever Kun. He got fewer chances than he would have liked, but made the most of the ones he did find.
Kun, as usual, looked furious at getting caught in a mistake. Doing his best to discover how such a disaster might have happened, he asked the Algarvian, “Where did you learn to speak Gyongyosian?”
“My father was on the staff of the minister to Gyongyos years ago,” the redheaded man answered, “and I was born in Gyorvar. So you could say I learned your language in your capital.”
That was more than Istvan could say himself. His own upcountry accent sometimes made him feel self-conscious when he spoke to officers or others who had a more elegant turn of phrase—sometimes even to Kun, who sprang from Gyorvar. But Istvan knew what he wanted to find out: “Why are you here, so far from Algarve?” Asking the question that way let him disguise his own geographical shortcomings, too.
With a wave to his comrades, the Algarvian said, “We crewed two leviathans that were bringing … oh, one thing and another from Algarve to Gyongyos. We would have brought other things back from Gyongyos to Algarve: the kinds of things you have more of than we do, and that we could use in the war.”
Istvan started to ask what sorts of things those were, but decided not to. Some of the Kuusaman guards were bound to speak his language, and he didn’t want to give them the chance to learn anything interesting. Instead, he said, “And something went wrong, did it?”
“You might say so,” the redheaded man replied. “Aye, you just might say so. Some Kuusaman dragons were flying east to drop eggs on some island or other that belongs to you, and they saw our leviathans and dropped their eggs—or enough of their eggs—on them instead. They hurt the animals too badly to let them go on. After that, it was either surrender or try to swim home by ourselves.” He shrugged. “We surrendered.”
Istvan tried to imagine guiding a leviathan—no, a couple of leviathans— from Algarve all the way to Gyongyos. From one side of the world to the other. He couldn’t very well tell the foreigners that they should have fought to the death, not when he’d wound up in a captives’ camp, too.
Eyeing the barracks and the yard with something less than delight, the Algarvian asked, “What do you people do for fun around here?”
“What do we do for fun?” Istvan returned. “Why, we chop wood. We dig latrines. When we’re very lucky and we haven’t got anything else to do, we sit around and watch the trees out beyond the stockade grow.”
The Algarvian had a marvelously expressive face. Hearing Istvan’s reply, he looked as if he’d just heard his father and mother had died. “And what do you do for excitement?” he inquired.
“If you want excitement, you can try to escape,” Istvan answered. “Maybe you can get out of the camp. Then maybe you can steal a ship. Then maybe you wouldn’t have to swim home.”
“I am always glad to meet a funny man,” the redhead said. Istvan started to puff out his chest, till the Algarvian added, “Too bad I am not so glad to meet you.” His smile took away most of the sting; it might have taken away all of it had Kun not sniggered. Istvan gave him a dirty look, which only made him snigger again, louder this time.
Even when he’d commanded a company as a sergeant, Leudast hadn’t been allowed to attend officers’ conferences. He was still commanding a company, but, thanks to luck and Marshal Rathar, he was a lieutenant these days. That entitled him to know what would happen before it happened to him.
Here, he and Captain Recared and a couple of dozen officers commanding units much larger than their ranks properly entitled them to lead sat in a barn that still stank of cow and listened to a colonel who was probably doing a lieutenant general’s job explaining the details of what the Unkerlanter army would try next in the south. “And so,” the colonel was saying, “if we succeed, if all goes as planned, we shall finally drive the cursed Algarvians from the soil of the Duchy of Grelz, exactly as our glorious comrades in arms have driven them out of northern Unkerlant. High time, I say—high time indeed.”
A low-voiced rumble rose from the officers: “Aye.” Leudast joined it, but had other things on his mind.
So they’ve driven the redheads out of the north altogether, have they? That means my home village belongs to Unkerlant again.
The thought would have cheered him more had he not paused to wonder if any of it was still standing. It would have been fought over at least twice, and, for all he knew, more often than that.
“Have you any questions?” the colonel asked. A couple of majors did, and even a brash captain. Leudast kept his mouth shut. He was without a doubt the most junior officer in the barn, and didn’t want to remind anyone else that he was there at all. The colonel efficiently disposed of the queries; unlike a good many commanders Leudast had known, he actually had some notion of what he was talking about. He finished, “We’ve wanted to pay those whoresons back for years. Now we put them in a sack and then pound the sack to pieces.”
Somebody said, “We’ll find all sorts of strange things in the sack, too.”
“So we will,” the colonel agreed. “Algarvians, Yaninans, Forthwegians, even blonds from out of the far east.” He shrugged. “So what? It only shows the redheads are scraping up everything they can to try to hold us back. But it won’t work. Glory to King Swemmel! Glory to Unkerlant!”
“Glory to Swemmel! Glory to Unkerlant!” the officers chorused. The meeting broke up.
Leudast and Captain Recared walked back to their position together. Leudast pointed. “Look at all the egg-tossers we’ve got waiting for the redheads.”
“Egg-tossers and behemoths and dragons and men,” Recared said. “The river is running our way now. They’ll try to dam it up—they always fight hard—but we should have our way with them.”
“Aye.” Leudast nodded. “They threw everything they had at the Durrwangen bulge last year. They haven’t done any throwing since. They’ve been catching instead.”