Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Shut up,” Spinello said. The soldier didn’t argue. Spinello almost wished he would have.
I’ve got a ribbon with my wound badge,
he thought.
Do I really want another one?
He might easily get killed, too, but he refused even to think about that. He couldn’t do anything about it, anyhow.
You
could
dive into a hole, fool,
the rational part of his mind insisted. But then he spotted the wounded Algarvian and loped toward him. The trooper followed. It was, he saw as he stooped beside the hurt man, the crystallomancer who’d put him in touch with the egg-tossers.
“Belly,” the trooper said, glancing at the wound. “That’s not so good.”
“I know.” Spinello didn’t want to look at it. “Here, son.” He gave the crystallomancer a long draught of opium-laced spirits. It wasn’t much, but it was the best he could do. When he started to put a dressing on the wound, the crystallomancer, only half conscious, tried to fight him off.
The trooper grabbed the wounded man’s hands. “We’re going to have to get him to the healers,” he said as Spinello worked.
Spinello tapped his wound badge. “My pals didn’t let me down when I got hurt. Time to pay them back.” The common soldier only nodded. He wore a wound badge, too, and already had two ribbons under it.
When they lifted the crystallomancer, he shrieked like a cursed soul.
Then, mercifully, he did pass out. They half carried, half dragged him back to a battered building—more battered now than Spinello remembered it— where healers were hard at work. The place smelled of smoke and unwashed men and the butcher-shop odor of blood and the latrine stink of pierced entrails. Spinello did his best to hide his shudder. He’d been in places like this before, when he was the one who suffered. The smells made his body remember, and remember too well.
“Hey, quacks!” the trooper said, perhaps hiding his own unease with bravado. “We’ve got another one for you to practice on.”
A harried healer hurried over. He took one look at the crimsoned, soaking bandages and winced. “Belly wound, eh? We can’t do much with that here. We’ll have to put him on ice and ship him back to Algarve. Maybe they can help him back there, maybe not. He’ll have some kind of chance, anyway.”
With a nod, Spinello said, “That’s about what I thought.” A dragon had flown him out of Sulingen after a sniper put a beam through the right side of his chest. Now he could take a more detached interest in the proceedings.
A couple of eggs burst close enough to make the ground shake under his feet. Irritably, the healer said, “Don’t they ever run out of those cursed things?”
Almost on cue, the pounding of Eoforwic eased. “Who knows?” Spinello said in glad surprise. “Maybe they do.”
“Not bloody likely.” The healer put on a pair of long, thick, obviously insulated gloves. He called for a colleague, who did the same thing. The two men lifted the crystallomancer and set him down in a box that looked something like a coffin and something like a rest crate. Without the gloves, the spell inside the box would have sorcerously frozen their hands and arms in short order, too. The healer muttered a charm over the box. Then he scrawled on the outside a diagnosis in the much-abbreviated classical Kaunian medical men used. With a nod to Spinello, he said, “We’ll get him out of here. What happens after that is in the hands of the powers above.”
“I hope he comes through all right,” Spinello said. “We’ll need all the mages of any sort we can get our hands on.”
“I wish I could say you were wrong,” the healer answered. “When we start using our secret sorceries—”
“Aye, by the powers above!” Spinello broke in eagerly. “You’re a sorcerer yourself. How soon do you think that will be?”
“I don’t know,” the healer said. “I wish I did. But only Mezentio and, I suppose, a few of our first-rank mages could tell you for certain. I will say this, though—it had better be soon.”
“It certainly should,” Spinello said. “We’ve lost everything we ever got in Unkerlant, and so many men to go with that. We’re practically back to the point where we were when we started fighting Swemmel. And the east…” He didn’t want to think about the east. He didn’t want to think about the Unkerlanters’ not being checked here in the west, either—they were only gathering themselves for the next leap forward.
“All true, every word of it.” The healer sounded glum. “But that’s not the worst. The worst is, where are we going to get the blonds to make the secret sorceries work?”
“I don’t know,” Spinello answered. “I wish I did. We can start grabbing ordinary Forthwegians, I suppose—or Yaninans, those filthy traitors.”
On that gloomy note, he took his leave. He saw some ordinary Forthwegians going through the ruins of Eoforwic. Every so often, one of them would stoop and put something in a basket.
Gathering mushrooms,
he thought, and made a face at the very idea. Algarvians didn’t eat mushrooms. As far as Spinello was concerned, people who did deserved whatever happened to them.
Snow already lay thick on the ground in the Naantali district. Pekka wasn’t surprised; it would be snowing down in Kajaani, too, and Kajaani had the sea to moderate its climate. Some of the mages from the northern, more temperate parts of Kuusamo and Lagoas complained about the weather. They couldn’t do anything about it—what mage could?—but that didn’t stop them from complaining.
“Me, I’ve come to like it better this time of year,” Fernao said. “You can go outside without the mosquitoes’ eating you alive.”
“It’s only weather,” Pekka said, ignoring snowstorms in mid-autumn with the ease of someone who took hard winters for granted. “What I have to complain about isn’t the snow. It’s
those!’
She pointed first to one of the heavy sticks now emplaced around the hostel and the blockhouse, then to another and another. When she looked up to the sky, she caught a glimpse of a patrolling dragon through a break in the clouds overhead. The dragon was painted in a pattern of sky blue and sea green, the colors of Kuusamo.
“We have a saying in Lagoas.” Fernao paused, probably translating it into Kuusaman from his own language. “Trying to make soup after the dog has stolen the bone.”
“Exactly,” Pekka said. “How are the Algarvians going to reach us now? They’ve left most of Valmiera. Their dragons can’t possibly fly here from the lands they still hold. And none of these things were in place when that cursed dragon
did
attack us.”
Fernao took her hand. She squeezed his. When Leino came home, she would have a lot of things to worry about, a lot of choices to make. She knew as much. Meanwhile, she enjoyed each day—and each night—as if tomorrow would never come. Later? What was later?
Slowly, Fernao said, “Saying what the Algarvians can’t possibly do worries me a little. They’ve already done too many things nobody thought they could do.”
“Too many things nobody thought they
would
do,” Pekka said, which wasn’t quite the same thing. “Too many things nobody thought anyone would do.”
Now Fernao squeezed her hand. “What we’ve done here has gone a long way toward keeping people from doing things like that again. That’s mostly thanks to you, you know, to you and your experiments.”
Pekka shook her head. “Master Siuntio is the one who really deserves the credit. And Master Ilmarinen. I just did the work. They were the ones who saw I’d stumbled onto something important and figured out what it meant.”
“You don’t give yourself enough credit,” Fernao said. “You never have.”
“Nonsense,” Pekka said, and then, “I got a letter from my sister this morning.”
She’d wanted to change the subject, and she succeeded. Fernao walked along in silence for a little while, kicking up snow at every step. At last, he asked, “And what does she have to say?”
“Nothing too much,” Pekka answered. “Olavin’s solicitors paid a call on her. She wasn’t very happy about that.”
“I believe it.” In Fernao’s long, pale Lagoan face, his slanted eyes were usually a reminder that he had a little Kuusaman blood in him, too. Now, though, they just made his expression harder to read. After a few more silent paces, he said, “Are we going to have to worry about that one of these days?”
Pekka had forced the future out of her purview. Now Fernao brought it back. She wished he hadn’t. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.” She kicked up some snow of her own—kicked it at Fernao, in fact. “Let’s go back to the hostel.” She turned and started off without waiting to see whether he followed.
He did, and went up the steps only a pace behind her. “Whatever happens, we’ll see it through,” he said.
“What else can we do?” she said, wishing he would keep quiet. Weren’t men supposed to be the ones who didn’t want to commit themselves? That didn’t fit Fernao. He wanted to run away with her. She was the one full of doubts, full of complications. She sighed. Why couldn’t things be simpler?
Going into the hostel certainly made things no simpler. There stood Ilmarinen, just inside the front entrance. He had been talking with a couple of the workmen still busy repairing the hostel after the Algarvian attack. But when he saw Pekka and Fernao together, he broke off and came over to them. “And what were the two of you doing out there?” he purred.
By the way he said it, the question could have only one possible answer. But Pekka replied, “Don’t be silly. It’s much too cold outside for
that.”
Ilmarinen looked disappointed. Fernao asked him, “And what have you been doing in here?”
“Aye, what
have
you been doing?” Pekka echoed. “Have you finished the calculations I asked you for the other day?”
To her surprise, Ilmarinen nodded. “They’re finished, all right.”
“And?” Pekka asked when he said no more.
“And it’s just what we thought it was,” the master mage answered grimly. “Did you think the calculations would show it wouldn’t work? Not bloody likely, not after we’ve spent all this time tearing up the landscape around here.”
“You don’t sound happy,” Fernao observed.
Though much the shorter of the two, Ilmarinen contrived to look down his nose at Fernao. “Should I? What the Algarvians visited on Yliharma, now we can visit on Trapani. Shall I throw my hat in the air? Shall I shout huzzah? Now we can match the barbarians in barbarism. Huzzah indeed!”
“Better that we be able to match them than that we
not
be able to match them,” Pekka said. “That’s the assumption we’ve been working on.”
“No.” Ilmarinen shook his head. “The assumption we’ve been working on is that they had better not be able to match our new sorcery. And they bloody well can’t, not so far as we can tell. But that we use what we have for the same purposes as they use what they have …” He shook his head again. “No, by the powers above.”
“We can do many more things with ours,” Fernao said. “Once the war is over, it will turn the world upside down. But for now …” He shrugged. “For now, we do what needs doing, and that means beating Algarve.”
“They’re using it the right way up in Jelgava, throwing the Algarvians’ spells back in their faces,” Ilmarinen said. “Mezentio’s mages deserve that, and so do his soldiers. But the other? No.” He sounded very certain.
“How is it any different from sending dragons over their cities to drop eggs on them?” Pekka asked.
“That’s just war,” Ilmarinen said. “Everybody does it. The other—you wouldn’t, we wouldn’t, just be hurting a city if that ever happened, and you know it.”
Pekka grimaced. He wasn’t wrong, however much she wished he were. But she didn’t think she was wrong, either, as she answered, “We have to do what needs doing.”
“Do we?” Ilmarinen said. “Don’t you suppose the Algarvian mages say the same old thing—the same old lie—just before their soldiers start blazing Kaunians, or however they go about killing them to get their life energy?”
“That’s not fair,” Pekka said. “We’re not killing anyone to get the energy for our magecraft.”
“No, that’s true—we’re not. And so what?” Ilmarinen said. “If we use it the way you have in mind, we’ll be killing plenty on the other end.”
“That’s different,” Fernao said. “If you can’t get a man to listen to you, you hit him. If he hits you, you get a club. If he hits you with a club, you get a sword. If he hits you with a sword, you get a stick. If he blazes at you with a stick, you go after him with a behemoth, and so on.”
“I don’t like thinking of myself as a murderer,” Ilmarinen said. “I’ll do it, mind you, but I don’t like it.”
“Think of the Algarvians as murderers, then,” Pekka said. “They are, you know. Even Master Siuntio thought this fight was worth making—and Mezentio’s mages killed him, remember.”
“I’m not likely to forget, not when they came so bloody close to killing me, too,” Ilmarinen replied. “But I’m sick of war. I’m sick of killing. Aren’t you?”
“Of course I am,” Pekka said. “But the fastest way to win it is the way Fernao said: to knock the Algarvians down till they can’t get up any more. Do you truly think anything else would do the job?”
“I’m not surprised you agree with him,” Ilmarinen said, and then laughed. “Ah, there—I’ve gone and made you angry. I wonder why.”
“You’ve made me angry, all right,” Pekka said tightly. “And I’ll tell you why: because you didn’t try to answer my question, that’s why. You just took a cheap blaze at me. Now answer, if you’d be so kind.
Do
you think anything else would do the job, or not?”
This time, Ilmarinen hesitated before speaking. Even so, he didn’t quite answer her question. What he said was, “There’s more to you than meets the eye. Do you know that?”
“I don’t much care,” Pekka said. “I’m going to ask you a third time, and I expect a straight answer. Can we beat the Algarvians and the Gyongyosians any other way than by knocking them flat?”
Asking Ilmarinen for a straight answer could easily prove as frustrating as asking a toddler to stop making a nuisance of himself. Pekka didn’t get one now, either. The master mage smiled at her till she wanted to punch him in the teeth. He said, “I’ll give you the calculations tonight.” Then, irrepressible, he leered. “I’ll just slide them under the door, so I’ll be sure not to interrupt anything.” With a sweet, carnivorous smile, he strode away.