Then, to his vast relief, a light-a hand-held lamp-pierced the gloom. A woman called out in classical Kaunian: “Mages-follow me! Damage-control parties are forming!”
“Here!” Leino shouted, first in Kuusaman and then in classical Kaunian. He pushed past sailors toward the lamp, using his elbows to force his way through them when nothing else worked. When he saw the sorcerer holding the light was Xavega, he didn’t stop to admire her. He just asked, “What needs doing most?”
“Everything,” she said at once, which was probably true but wasn’t very helpful. Then she got more specific: “You have worked on protecting the ship from rain damage, is it not so?”
“Aye,” Leino answered. “I wrote that spell, as a matter of fact.”
“Good.” Xavega stayed altogether businesslike, for which he was duly grateful. She gestured with her free hand. “Come with me.”
She led him back to one of the work rooms. A Kuusaman mage there used a little of her power and skill to keep another lamp faintly lit. Two more mages sat with her: two Lagoan men, neither of whom Leino knew well. One of them had a cut on his cheek, but hardly seemed to know it. “Rain repair?” Leino asked.
Everyone nodded. Xavega left again, shouting for more mages. The other wizards in the chamber went back to their sorcery. Leino sat down and began to chant. The lamp was so dim, he could hardly see his colleagues. But his mind’s eye reached up to the ice-and-sawdust surface ofHabakkuk, reached up to the little bit of ice every raindrop melted. He was glad to the very core of his being that the iceberg-turned-ship remained on the ley line. He drew energy from it and used that energy to preserve and restoreHabakkuk’s proper structure. He could feel the other mages doing the same thing, resisting the rain, refusing to let it harm the vessel that carried them.
Peripherally, he also sensed other mages doing more things to keepHabakkuk intact. Now that the first moments of surprise and dismay had passed, they found things weren’t so very bad after all. Cheers rang out when the lights went back on all over the ship.
“Knocked a good-sized chunk out of the ice on our bottom,” a sailor reported. “Smashed up some stuff, but nothing we can’t live with.”
“Habakkuk’s not so bad,” another sailor said. “Any regular ship, and we’d be sunk. But ice floats no matter what.”
Unless it melts, of course, Leino thought. The sailor hadn’t worried about that. He took it for granted that such things wouldn’t happen. Leino, who knew better, didn’t. ButHabakkuk did go on, and that was all that mattered.
Garivald threw more wood onto the fire in the hearth. He and Obilot both stood close to the flames, enjoying the warmth. He said, “We got lucky here.”
Obilot shook her head. “This isn’t our good luck. It’s somebody else’s bad luck. How many peasant huts are standing empty in Grelz these days? How many peasant huts are standing empty all over Unkerlant? Powers below eat the stinking Algarvians.”
“Aye.” Garivald would always say aye to that. But he went on, “Plenty of wrecked huts. Plenty of burnt huts. But not so many huts just standing empty like this one, I don’t think. Nobody even plundered it.”
“Powers below eat the Algarvians,” Obilot repeated. But then she added, “And powers below eatKingSwemmel ’s inspectors, too. If it weren’t for them, you could go on with your life again. We could go on with our lives again.”
“Maybe we can, now,” he answered, and set a hand on her shoulder. “Nobody knows we’re here. This place is in the middle of nowhere. After the thaw, we’ll see what kind of planting we can do. Maybe we’ll see if we can scare up some better tools, some livestock. Maybe. And we’ll get used to wearing new names, so nobody’ll find out who we used to be.”
“Who we used to be.” Obilot tasted the words. She nodded. “I’ve been a couple of people by now. I’m ready to turn into somebody else.”
“I never much wanted to be an irregular,” Garivald said. “I just wanted to go ahead and live my life.” He’d had a family. He didn’t any more. He glanced at Obilot. Maybe she’d had one, too. Maybe the two of them would again.
She snorted. “What? Do you think what you want has something to do with what you get? If the war hasn’t taught you what a cursed stupid idea that is, I don’t know what would.”
“Oh, hush,” he said roughly-it wasn’t so much that he thought she was wrong as that he just didn’t want to hear about it. Then he kissed her: that was one way to keep her from telling him things he didn’t want to hear. They ended up making love in front of the fire. Obilot didn’t tell him anything he didn’t want to hear then, either. Afterwards, they fell asleep. If anyone told Garivald anything he didn’t want to hear in his dreams, he didn’t remember it when he woke up.
What woke him was rain beating on the roof-and rain dripping through the roof and splatting down in little muddy puddles on the rammed-earth floor. The hut was amazingly sound for one that had stood abandoned for who could say how long before Garivald and Obilot found it, but that also meant nobody’d tended to the thatching for who-could-say-how-long.
Have to fix it when I get the chance, was Garivald’s first, still sleepy thought. Then he sat up and spoke his second thought aloud: “Rain.”
“Rain,” Obilot echoed. She sounded blurry, too. But her gaze quickly grew sharp. “Rain. Not snow.”
“That’s right,” Garivald said. “It really is spring. Before long, we’re going to be knee-deep in mud. And then we’ll have to try to get some crops in the ground. Either that or we starve, anyhow.”
“We’d have starved already if we weren’t eating the seed grain this fellow brought into his hut before whatever happened to him happened,” Obilot said.
“I know.” Garivald shrugged. “I thought of that, too. I didn’t know what to do about it, though. I still don’t. When you’re hungry now, you worry about later later.”
Obilot nodded. “You have to. Once the snow all melts, maybe we’ll be able to find more grain buried somewhere not far from here. We did that in my village whenever we thought we could get away with it, to try to keep the inspectors from stealing quite so much.”
“Aye. We did the same thing in Zossen,” Garivald said. “I bet there’s not a single village in Unkerlant where they don’t. Of course, if the peasant who had this place hid his grain so the inspectors couldn’t get their thieving hands on it, we won’t have an easy time finding it, either.” He walked over to the jug they were using as a chamber pot. “We’ll have to try, though. You’re right about that. If we don’t find some more, we can’t stay here. And the way things look, the way that cursed Tantris came after me, I’m a lot safer in the middle of nowhere than I am in a village or a town.”
“I know.” Skirting puddles, Obilot got breakfast ready: she poured crushed barley and water into a pot and hung it over the fire for porridge. Sometimes she would make unleavened bread instead. She’d found the jar in which the vanished peasant’s wife had kept her yeast, but the yeast was dead and useless- not that barley bread ever rose much anyhow. Garivald had got sick of tasteless flatbread and equally tasteless porridge, but they kept him going.
“Maybe I can kill a squirrel or two,” he said. “Not as good as pork, but a lot better than nothing. And I’ll start making rabbit traps, too.”
“Birdlime,” Obilot suggested. “Now that it’s really spring, the birds will be coming back from the north.” Neither of them said anything about finding other people and getting chickens or pigs or other livestock from them. Maybe one of these days, Garivald thought once more, but no, he wasn’t ready to try it any time soon.
As Obilot put more wood on the fire to boil up the porridge, another thought struck Garivald. “Maybe we could use sorcery to help us find the buried grain-if there’s any buried grain to find,” he said. “We’ve got grain here, and like calls to like. I’m no mage, but I know that.”
Obilot raised a dark and dubious eyebrow. All she said was, “Remember Sadoc.”
“I’m not likely to forget him,” G
arivald said with a shudder. A member of the band of irregulars he’d led, Sadoc was a peasant who’d fancied himself a wizard. And he’d succeeded in casting spells, too. The only thing he hadn’t succeeded in doing was getting them to perform the way he intended. Each one seemed to go wrong more spectacularly than its predecessor.
“Well, then,” Obilot said, as if she needed to say no more.
And perhaps she didn’t. But Garivald said, “Sadoc liked big spells. This would just be a little one. And I can make songs, after all. That’s an important part of casting a spell. It could work.”
“Itcould.” Obilot still didn’t sound convinced. “It could burst like an egg, too, and scatter you all over the landscape the way an egg would.”
“I’d be careful.” Listening to himself, Garivald started to laugh. He sounded like a small boy trying to convince his mother he could do something she thought dangerous. He sounded a lot like his own son Syrivald, in fact. His laughter broke off as if cut by a knife. Syrivald was almost surely dead. So was his mother.
By the time the rain stopped, it had melted a lot of the snow. The sun came out from behind the clouds and went on with the job. The ground couldn’t possibly hold all the water thus released. As it did during every spring thaw, it turned to porridge itself.
That didn’t make Garivald unhappy. He said, “For the next few weeks, nothing is going to happen very fast, not till things dry out.”
“Good,” Obilot answered, and he nodded.
But, day by day, the barley and rye and the little bit of wheat inside the hut dwindled. Before long, it wasn’t a question of having enough left to make a crop. It was a question of how much longer they would have enough to eat. The next time Garivald said, “Maybe I ought to try to make a spell,” Obilot didn’t remind him of Sadoc’s disasters.
What she said instead was, “Well, be careful, by the powers above.”
“I will,” Garivald said, though any magecraft at all was for him a long leap into the unknown. It will be all right, he thought. Why shouldn‘t it? I’m not trying to kill anybody or do anything big, the way Sadoc always did. It’ll work. He had trouble making himself believe it.
But Obilot, he discovered, hadn’t quit trying to talk him out of it: “Have you ever, in all your born days, used magic to try to find things that were hidden under the ground?”
To what was surely her surprise-indeed, to his own, for he’d almost forgotten till she asked-he nodded. “Aye. Two springs ago, it was. Waddo-he was firstman in Zossen-and I had buried the village’s crystal to keep the redheads from getting their hands on it. I dug it up because I was afraid he might betray me on account of it. I gave it to some irregulars operating in the woods not far from there. I hope they got some use out of it.”
“Didyou?” She nodded, too, more than half to herself. “All right, then. Maybe you do havesome idea of what you’re up to.” She still didn’t sound as if she thought he had much idea of what he was doing.
He wasn’t altogether sure he did, either, but he knew he had to make the effort. He put some wheat, some barley, and some rye in a little clay pot, then tied a length of twine to the handles and swung it pendulum-fashion. Then, doing his best not to let Obilot fluster him by watching, he began to chant:
“Like calls to like-so magic’s found.
Let like show like, down under ground.
Show me now the grain that’s hidden.
Do it now, as you are bidden…”
On he went. He knew it wasn’t an outrageously good song-he knew it was likely a long way from a good song-but he hoped it would serve. And it did serve, or he thought it did. The direction in which the pot of grain was swinging suddenly changed, and he’d done nothing to change it. Obilot let out a small, surprised exclamation. Garivald felt like doing the same thing. Instead, he moved from one side of the hut to the other. The arc in which the pot swung changed as he moved, so that it kept indicating the same direction.
Garivald went outside into the rain and chanted again. The swinging pot led him away from the hut and off beyond a low swell of ground a furlong or so away. He nodded to himself. The fellow who’d lived here thought like a peasant, all right. He didn’t want to make things easy forKingSwemmel ’s inspectors.
As soon as Garivald started down the other side of the slope, the pot stopped swinging and pointed straight down. He hadn’t found a spade in the hut. He dug in the mucky ground with the edge of an iron pan. If it hadn’t been soaked and soft, he couldn’t have made much progress. As things were…
As things were, the edge of the pan clanked off fired clay before he’d got down much more than a foot. He set down the pan and softly and wonderingly clapped his hands together. “I did it,” he breathed, and breathed in raindrops. Then he dug as if he were digging himself a hole while the Algarvians tossed eggs at him. Grunting with effort, he pulled out the great jar, which weighed more nearly as much as he did. Pitch sealed the lid. He had to hope the seal had stayed good.
He dragged the jar back to the hut. Inside, he scraped away the pitch with a knife and levered up the stopper. “Ahh!” He and Obilot stared down at the golden wheat. “We won’t go hungry,” she said.
“We’ll have something to plant,” he added, and then, “This isn’t likely to be the only hidden jar, either. Maybe I can find more the same way.”
“Maybe you can,” Obilot agreed. “Why not? Youcan work magic.” She sounded awed.
“By the powers above, so I can.” Garivald sounded awed, too. Awed or not, he hedged that, as any canny peasant would: “A little, anyhow.” But a little had proved enough.
ColonelSpinellowas not a happy man as he rode east toward division headquarters to confer with his fellow brigade commanders. The rain that pelted him and his driver did little to improve his spirits. Neither did the fact that even the local wagon, with its curved, boatlike bottom and high wheels, had trouble negotiating the bottomless river of mud badly miscalled a road.
At last, just outside the northern Unkerlanter town called Waldsolms, cobblestones reappeared. The wagon wasn’t really made to cope with them. It rattled and jounced abominably. Spinello didn’t mind that so very much. “Civilization!” he exclaimed, and then, “Well, of sorts, anyhow. Thisis Unkerlant.”
His driver seemed less impressed. “A few miles of this jerking and we’d both be pissing blood,” he said. “Sir.”
Like most towns in Unkerlant that had gone through the fire of war, Waldsolms had seen better days. Brigadier Tampaste, who commanded the division, made his headquarters in what had probably been a merchant’s house; what had been the local governor’s castle was no longer standing.
Tampaste was young for a brigadier, as Spinello was young for a colonel. No: they would have been young for their ranks before the war. Nowadays, a man could rise quickly… if he lived. Like Spinello’s, Tampaste’s wound badge and ribbon showed he’d been hit twice.
“You’re the first one who’s made it here,” he told Spinello. “I’ve set out smoked fish and black bread and spirits. Don’t be bashful.”
“That’s never been one of my vices, sir,” Spinello answered, and helped himself. The smoked fish was tasty, but full of tiny bones. The spirits packed enough punch to make his hair stand on end. “Good,” he wheezed through a charred throat. “Good, but strong. If we’re truly short on cinnabar, we ought to feed the dragons this stuff, to make them flame farther.”
“By what I hear, peopleare talking about doing something along those lines,” Tampaste said, which took Spinello by surprise. “The drawback, of course, is that drunken dragons are even wilder and stupider than they would be otherwise, if such a thing is possible.” He sipped his own spirits without flinching; Spinello wondered if he’d copper-plated his gullet. “How do you view the situation in front of us, Colonel?”
“Sir, I don’t like it,” Spinello said at once. “Swemmel’s men are up to something, but I don’t know what. I don’t like it whenever they try to get cute with us; it means they’ve g
ot something up their sleeves.”
“Do you think we can throw in another spoiling attack and disrupt them?” Tampaste asked.
Spinello shook his head. “Not my brigade, anyway. We’re in no shape for it, not after the attack on Pewsum failed.”
“You handled your men well there, Colonel,” Tampaste said. “No blame to you that the try didn’t succeed. Just… too many Unkerlanters in the neighborhood. We’ve sung that song before.”
“If we sing it again too often, we’ll have too bloody many Unkerlanters in Algarve, sir,” Spinello said.
Tampaste grimaced. “You shouldn’t say such things.”
“Why?” Spinello asked. “Because they’re not true? Or because nobody wants to think about them even if they are true?”
The division commander plainly didn’t want to answer that. At last, he said, “Because saying them makes them more likely to come true. A mage would tell you the same thing.” Spinello thought that held an element of truth, but only an element. Too many things got said all over the world for any one of them to have much chance of swinging things one way or another. Before he could say as much, Tampaste changed the subject, asking, “Where in blazes are the rest of my brigade commanders?”
“Stuck in the mud, unless I miss my guess,” Spinello replied. “Whatever the Unkerlanters are doing, they won’t do it right away.” He took another pull at his spirits, which made it easier for him to sneer at anything and everything Unkerlanter. “It’s not as if they bothered paving their roads so they could move on them all year long.”
Tampaste said, “Captives claim one of the reasons Swemmel didn’t pave more of the roads was for fear we could move on them.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” Spinello admitted. “If it’s true, we must have taught them quite a lesson during the Six Years’ War.”
“Maybe now they’re teaching us some things we’d rather not learn,” the brigadier said, and then, before Spinello could call him on it. “And now who’s speaking words of ill omen?” The gesture Tampaste used to turn aside the omen dated back to the days when the Algarvians skulked through the woods in the far south and the Kaunian Empire bestrode most of eastern Derlavai. Spinello had seen it reproduced on classical Kaunian monuments, and on pottery in the museum at Trapani.
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