Authors: Harry Turtledove
“I—I don’t know what to say, sir,” Garivald said.
Maybe I really can write down my songs, or write new ones.
That would have been a safer ambition in almost any other kingdom besides Unkerlant, but he had it even so.
“You don’t need to say anything,” Andelot told him. “You do need to know that I’m going to have you write more reports whenever you happen to need to. That will give you good practice writing, and I’ll have the fun of reading them.”
He had to mean it. He wouldn’t say something like that just to make Garivald feel good. Real officers didn’t much care how underofficers felt. Why should they? They could tell underofficers what to do, and what else mattered? Garivald said, “I’ll try it again, sir, but I don’t want the kind of surprise that stinking redhead gave me.”
“I don’t blame you a bit, Fariulf,” Andelot said. “The cursed Algarvians have given us too many surprises, all through this fight. That’s the way Algarvians are. They always come up with new things. But we gave them a surprise, too, you know. We did—we stodgy old Unkerlanters.”
“We did?” Garivald asked in honest amazement. “What kind of surprise?”
“We didn’t fall over and die when they hit us, and they thought we would,” Andelot said. “The Forthwegians did, and the Sibs, and the Valmierans, and the Jelgavans—and they chased the Lagoans right off the mainland of Derlavai with their tails between their legs. But they hit us, and we kept hitting back—and look where we are now.”
Garivald didn’t particularly want to be in a bridgehead in the middle of Forthweg. Even so, though, he nodded. Andelot had a point.
Fernao plowed through a Kuusaman news sheet as he ate an omelette for breakfast. By now, after a couple of years reading Kuusaman, he took it almost as much for granted as he did Lagoan. Some of the mages from his kingdom grumbled about it, but Lagoans always grumbled whenever they had to pay more attention to Kuusamo and its ways than they wanted to.
“Anything interesting?” Ilmarinen asked from across the table. He was working his way through a plate of smoked salmon and onions and capers and pickled cucumbers.
“I don’t know about interesting, but this report on something that went wrong on the island of Obuda is strange,” Fernao answered. He passed the sheet to Ilmarinen, who put on spectacles to read it. “It sounds like something happened there that was too big to ignore, and bigger than the writer really wanted to admit.”
“Oh. That.” The Kuusaman master mage’s voice went hard and flat. “I know about that.” Fernao believed him; he knew all sorts of things he had no business knowing. “Some of the people who ran our captives’ camp for the Gongs made a big mistake there. Most of them are too dead to court-martial now, but we would if we could. Stupidity is usually its own punishment. It was here.”
“Now you’re going to have to tell me, you know,” Fernao said.
“Or else what?” But Ilmarinen was grinning. He loved to gossip, and made no bones about it. After an odorous bite of salmon and onions, he went on, “Well, for one thing, they let some sort of mage get in with the ordinary captives.”
“Uh-oh,” Fernao said.
“Uh-oh, indeed,” Ilmarinen agreed. “And then they put some Algarvian leviathan-riders into the camp, too. And, just in case you haven’t heard, the Gongs have figured out how to work the sorceries that make me hope Algarve and Unkerlant end up destroying each other—but we’re never that lucky, are we?”
“Er—no,” Fernao said. “From what I know of the Gyongyosians, that surprises me. They’re warriors, aye, but not murderers.”
“You’re right. They aren’t murderers—not that kind of murderers, any-
how. But so what?” Ilmarinen paused for another bite. Fernao remembered to eat, too. The Kuusaman master mage continued, “They’re warriors, sure enough—and they volunteer, they really and truly do volunteer, to put their necks to the knife for the greater glory of Gyongyos and for the stars that don’t give a fart about them.”
“Oh.” Fernao wished he hadn’t started eating again. “And that’s what happened on Obuda?”
“That’s what happened on Obuda, all right,” Ilmarinen said. “Smashed things up pretty well—about like a real earthquake, say.” He shrugged. “Now we’re putting the pieces back together, and we won’t let it happen again. A bad nuisance, but only a nuisance.”
“And a lot of dead Gyongyosians,” Fernao said. “Dead for nothing.”
Ilmarinen nodded. “For nothing much, anyhow. I gather the officer who led this thought doing something was better than sitting around doing nothing and waiting for the war to end. Only goes to show that sometimes sitting around isn’t so bad.”
“You should have thought of that before you went to the blockhouse by yourself,” Fernao said.
After impressive deliberation, Ilmarinen made a face at him. “If we were all as smart as we knew how to make everyone else … very likely the world would be as much of a mess as it is right now.”
“Aye, very likely.” Fernao had wondered if the old man would be able to get an aphorism out of his cynical start. He’d had his doubts when Ilmarinen paused there, but the theoretical sorcerer had come through. “Are you ready for the experiment tomorrow?”
“I am always ready for experiments,” Ilmarinen answered. “Sometimes, unfortunately, experiments are not ready for me.” He popped more onions and capers and soft pink-orange fish into his mouth. “I tell you this: I’d a hundred times sooner experiment than stand in front of a chamber full of eager second-raters and tell them what I know.”
“I rather like to teach,” Fernao said.
“I haven’t minded teaching
you”
Ilmarinen said; Fernao realized only later the size of the compliment he’d got. The old man went on, “But these people who want it spelled out and have to have it that way because they can’t see it if it isn’t… They’d make a lovely rock garden, don’t you think? Don’t
they
think? They don’t, and that’s the trouble.”
Fernao finished his own breakfast and went off to teach a class of mages—mostly Lagoans, with a few Kuusamans to fill out the twenty. Sure enough, the questions he got were of the sort Ilmarinen disliked: “Show me how these two verses work.” “What does this formula mean?” “Do we really need to know that?”
“No, you don’t really need to know that,” he answered, his own temper fraying. “If you want to kill yourself when you try this spell, go ahead and forget it.”
“You’re not being very helpful,” complained the woman who’d asked the question.
“You’re not being very imaginative,” Fernao said. “Would I have talked about this if you didn’t need to know it?”
“Well, you never can tell,” the woman said.
Later, Fernao did some complaining of his own to Pekka: “I wanted to pound my head against the wall. We’ve made this as simple as we can. Have we really made it simple enough for the people who’ll have to use it?
Can
we make it simple enough for these people to use it?”
Instead of giving him the sympathy he craved, she annoyed him by laughing. “I’ve spent years trying to pound sorcery into the heads of people who don’t much want to learn it,” he said. “The ones we have here are pretty bright.”
“Powers above help our kingdoms!” he exploded.
“I hope they will. I hope they do,” she answered, and he found nothing to say to that. Then she added, “They must be looking out for me. Otherwise, how would I have met you?”
Fernao’s annoyance evaporated. His ears heated. That must have been visible from the outside as well as palpable from within, for Pekka giggled. Fernao bowed. “You do me too much credit, I think.”
Pekka shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “If I did, would you make me so happy?” Before his head swelled to the point where her chamber couldn’t hold it, she added, “If I didn’t think so, would I have let my life get so complicated when I didn’t intend to?”
He found nothing to say to that, either. His life wasn’t complicated. His life had been complicated before they found themselves together, because he’d wanted to be with her when she hadn’t wanted to be with him. Now, as far as he was concerned, everything was fine. Of course, he wasn’t torn in two directions at once. However much he wished Pekka weren’t, he knew she was.
They lay close together on her narrow bed after making love that night when she suddenly said, “It’s snowing.”
“How can you tell?” he asked.
“The way the air feels—all still and quiet,” she said, and turned on the bedside lamp. “There—you see?” Sure enough, the light showed snowflakes softly striking the double-glass window that helped hold cold at bay.
“It doesn’t have to be still and quiet for snow,” Fernao said. “Down in the land of the Ice People, it blows like this.” He held his forearm parallel to the mattress. Then he added, “And I’d sooner look at you than at snow any day.” Pekka kissed him. He gathered her in. Before too long, he sighed. “Ten years ago, I could have promised you twice in a row. Now I have to be lucky for that—not that I’m not lucky, you understand.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Pekka said. “The holding is fine, too, all by itself.” She reached out to turn off the lamp. They fell asleep in each other’s arms—and woke up a couple of hours later, Fernao with an arm asleep, Pekka with a leg that seemed dead below the knee. As they untangled themselves and Fernao got into his clothes to go back to his own room, he yawned and thought,
So much for romance.
Something closer to romance came the next day, when they rode out to the blockhouse under furs in a sleigh, as they’d done when they first began experimenting down in the Naantali district. He’d been conscious of Pekka as an attractive woman even then. Now … If his hands wandered a bit, and if hers did, the furs kept the driver from noticing.
But when they and the other theoretical sorcerers got down from the sleighs and went into the blockhouse, Pekka was all business. “You know what we’re going to try today,” she said. “We’re going to use the energy from the sorcery we’ve developed to touch off a landslide and close off a pass in the Bratanu Mountains, to make the Algarvians have a harder time moving men and supplies from their kingdom east into Jelgava. I don’t think anyone has ever projected so much sorcerous power so far and so precisely in the history of the world.”
That’s bound to be true,
Fernao thought.
It’s a demon of a long way from here to the border between Jelgava and Algarve.
Some of the excitement of what they’d been doing came back to him. Making everything cut and dried so people with no spark, no flair, of their own could use it had drained away a lot of that excitement. He was glad to feel it return; he’d wondered if it would.
“I begin,” Pekka said, and chanted the ritual phrases Kuusamans used before every conjuration. Fernao had snickered behind his hand when he first heard them. He’d heard them so many times by now, magecraft undertaken without them would have felt strange, unnatural.
He’d only half understood them when he first heard them. He’d understood hardly anything of the Kuusaman cantrips that followed. He did these days. He wouldn’t have wanted to try drafting an original spell in Kuusaman, but he had no trouble following one now. If anything went wrong, he knew much more than he had about how to repair it.
Ilmarinen and Piilis joined the incantation. So did Raahe and Alkio. Fernao felt the power build. Part of it was his, flowing from him through Pekka, whose hand he held. It put him in mind of pleasure building when they made love. But when his eyes flicked her way, her face was serious, intent, nothing at all like the way she looked when the two of them were alone. She didn’t glance at him. She kept on chanting, doing what she had to do.
That’s all any of us are doing,
he thought.
What else is there?
If not for the world’s energy grid more commonly used in traveling along ley lines, they never could have located the mountain pass so precisely. An alert Algarvian mage somewhere between the Naantali district and the pass might have detected the sorcery when at last it burst forth. He might have detected it, but that would have done him no good. By the time he knew it was there, he would have been far too late to stop it.
Fernao felt the spell seize the stones and the already-drifted snow along the sides of the pass, felt it seize them and jerk them and send them crashing down onto the road and the ley line at the bottom. Mezentio’s mages might have achieved the same effect by killing a camp full of Kaunians, but never from this range: never, probably, from a quarter of this range. And this spell was clean—no murder attached to it.
Afterwards, all the mages sighed. Now Fernao could squeeze Pekka’s hand without distracting her. She smiled and nodded. “We did it,” she said. “I could feel that we did it.”
“Aye.” Fernao nodded, too. “The Algarvians will have harder work now in Jelgava.”
And it’s likelier your husband will come through safe. Should I be happy about that? Aye, curse it, I should. Leino’s not my enemy. He’s fighting my enemies.
He kept his face straight. He
didn’t
want Pekka to know what he was thinking there.
We do have to be civilized about these things … curse it.
Ever since she’d spied Spinello stalking through the wreckage of Eoforwic, Vanai had known she would try to kill him if she ever saw even the slightest chance. She hadn’t known how badly she needed to go looking for that chance till the day before Pybba’s rebels surrendered to the Algarvians, the day the redheads agreed to treat the Forthwegians as proper war captives instead of butchering them for bandits.
Ealstan had slipped out of the pocket Pybba’s men still held. He’d slipped into and out of that pocket a good many times before then. Vanai had always hated it, but she couldn’t deny he knew what he was doing. And, when he’d come home full of gloom, she’d thought she understood. However foolish she reckoned Forthwegian patriotism, Ealstan felt it in his heart, in his belly, just as she felt her own Kaunianity.
But she hadn’t understood, or hadn’t understood everything, even if she’d thought she had. She’d found that out a couple of hours later, after putting Saxburh down for a nap. Ealstan, by then, had gone through a good deal of the wine in the flat. She hadn’t even worried about that, though Kaunians often sneered at Forthwegians for drunkenness. She’d long since seen Ealstan didn’t let wine and spirits rule him, and that day he’d had more sorrows to drown than usual.