As Pekka and Fernao rode out toward the crater, an exhausted little bird—a linnet—came fluttering down out of the sky and landed on their sleigh. When Pekka reached out for it, it flew off again, and was soon lost to sight. She stared at Fernao in no small consternation. She’d never seen a linnet in wintertime. They flew north for the winter, to escape the cold. Maybe this one hadn’t escaped the cold. Maybe it hadn’t escaped the sorcery, either.
And if it hadn’t, what did that mean?
Hajjaj’s carriage rolled up to the dragon farm outside Bishah, the capital of Zuwayza. When the carriage stopped, the Zuwayzi foreign minister descended to the sandy soil: a skinny man with dark brown skin and gray, almost white hair he’d earned by lasting close to seven decades—and also by guiding Zuwayza’s relations with the other kingdoms of the world ever since his homeland regained its freedom from Unkerlant in the chaos following the Six Years’ War.
General Ikhshid came bustling up to greet him. Ikhshid was paunchy, with bushy white eyebrows. He carried almost as many years as Hajjaj; he’d been a captain in the Unkerlanter army during the Six Years’ War, one of the few men of Zuwayzi blood to gain officer’s rank there.
Like Hajjaj, Ikhshid wore sandals and a broad-brimmed hat and nothing in between. In Zuwayza’s fierce desert heat, clothes were nothing but a nuisance, however much Zuwayzi nudity scandalized other Derlavaians. Ikhshid had rank badges on his hat and marked with greasepaint on his upper arms.
He bowed to Hajjaj, wheezing a little as he straightened. “Good day, your Excellency,” he said. “Always a pleasure to see you, believe me.”
“You’re too kind,” Hajjaj murmured, returning the bow. “Believe me, the pleasure is mine.” Aimed at a lot of men, Hajjaj would have meant that as no more than the usual pleasant hypocrisy. With Ikhshid, he meant it. He’d never been convinced Zuwayza’s senior soldier was a great general, though Ikhshid was a good one. But Ikhshid, like Hajjaj himself, commanded the respect of every Zuwayzi clanfather. Hajjaj could think of no other officer of whom that was true.
“You do me too much credit, your Excellency,” Ikhshid said.
“By no means, sir,” Hajjaj protested. Zuwayzi forms of greeting and politeness, if uninterrupted, could go on for a long time.
Here, an interruption arrived in the person of Marquis Balastro, the Algarvian minister to Zuwayza. To Hajjaj’s relief, Balastro was not nude, but wore the usual Algarvian tunic and kilt, with a hat of his own to keep the sun off his head. His bow, unlike Ikhshid’s, was deep and flamboyant—Algarvians didn’t do things by halves. “Good day to you, your Excellency,” he said in his own language.
“And to you as well, your Excellency,” Hajjaj replied in the same tongue. He’d been fluent in Algarvian for a long time: back before the Six Years’ War (an era that seemed so distant and different, it might have been a thousand years ago), he’d spent his university days in Trapani, the Algarvian capital.
Balastro struck a pose. “Now, sir, you will see that Algarve stands by her allies in every way she can.”
“I shall be glad to see it, very glad indeed,” Hajjaj said.
That gave the Algarvian minister the chance to strike another pose, and he made the most of it, pointing to the sky and exclaiming, “Then look now at the dragons summoned to Zuwayza’s aid!”
Hajjaj looked. So did Ikhshid. So did the writers from a couple of Zuwayzi news sheets summoned to the outskirts of the capital for the occasion. Sure enough, half a wing of dragons—thirty-two in all—painted in Algarve’s gaudy green, red, and white spiraled down toward the dragon farm.
“They are indeed a pleasure to see, your Excellency,” Hajjaj said, bowing once more. “Bishah shall be safer because of them. After the last raid, when the Unkerlanters pounded us from the air almost as they pleased, dragons to fly against those in Swemmel’s rock-gray are most extremely welcome.”
“I can see how they would be,” Balastro agreed. “Till lately, Zuwayza has enjoyed all the advantages of the Derlavaian War, but only a few of the drawbacks: you won land from Swemmel, yet paid relatively little for it because he was more heavily involved against us.”
That was imperfectly diplomatic, no matter how much truth it held. Hajjaj felt obliged to reply, “Do remember, your Excellency, that Unkerlant attacked my kingdom a year and a half before yours went to war against King Swemmel.”
“Oh, no doubt,” Balastro said. “But ours is the bigger fight with Unkerlant, even reckoning in the relative sizes of your kingdom and mine.”
Another undiplomatic truth. When Hajjaj started to answer this time, a landing dragon’s screech drowned out his words. Normally, that would have annoyed him. At the moment, it gave him the excuse he needed to say to Balastro, “Walk aside with me, your Excellency, that we might confer together in something a little closer to privacy.”
Balastro bowed again. “With all my heart, sir. Nothing could please me more.” That might well not have been true, but it was diplomatic.
When General Ikhshid started to follow the two of them away from the other dignitaries and the writers and the folk concerned with the mundane needs of dragons, Hajjaj sent him a quick, hooded glance. He and Ikhshid had served Zuwayza side by side for many years. The veteran officer stopped after a step and a half and began fiddling with a sandal strap.
Had Hajjaj and Balastro sought privacy among Algarvians, everyone close by would have swarmed after them: the redheads were powerfully curious, and also powerfully convinced they had the absolute right to know everything that went on around them. Hajjaj’s countrymen showed more restraint. They could hardly show less restraint than most Algarvians, the Zuwayzi foreign minister thought.
“How now, your Excellency?” Balastro asked once he and Hajjaj had put a little distance between themselves and the other folk who’d come out to see the Algarvian dragons fly into the dragon farm.
“If you have a grievance with my kingdom, please come out with it,” Hajjaj replied. “Your little hints and gives do nothing but make me nervous.”
“All right, that’s fair enough; I will,” Balastro said. “Here’s the grievance, in a nutshell: you expect Algarve to make you a perfect ally and come to your aid whenever you need something from her, and yet you refuse to return the favor.”
“Zuwayza is a free and independent kingdom,” Hajjaj said stiffly. “You sometimes seem to forget that.”
“And you sometimes seem to remember it altogether too well,” Marquis Balastro said. “I tell you frankly, your Excellency, those Kaunian exiles you harbor have sneaked back to Forthweg and done us a good deal of harm there.”
“And I tell you frankly, I have trouble blaming them when I consider what you Algarvians have done to the Kaunians in Forthweg,” Hajjaj answered.
“When you consider what Kaunians have done to Algarve down through the centuries, you might well say they have it coming,” Balastro said.
Hajjaj shook his head. “No, your Excellency, I would never say that. Nor would King Shazli. I have made my views, and his, quite clear to you.”
“So you have,” Balastro agreed. “Now I am going to make something quite clear to you, and I am sure you will have no trouble making it quite clear to your king: if the Kaunians keep hurting us in Forthweg, they make it likelier that we lose the war against Unkerlant. If we lose the war against Unkerlant, you will also lose the war against Unkerlant. It is as simple as that. The more you want to deal with King Swemmel afterwards, the more you should look the other way when the blonds climb into their boats and sail east to Forthweg.”
“We do not look the other way,” Hajjaj insisted. “Our navy is far from large, but we have turned back or sunk several of their boats.”
Balastro snorted. “Enough to show us a few: no more than that.”
The trouble was, he was right. Hajjaj’s sympathies, and those of his king, lay with the blonds who’d escaped from Algarvian occupation, and from the massacres the redheads inflicted on those blonds. As far as he was concerned, wars h
ad no business being fought that way. Not even Swemmel of Unkerlant had fought that way till the Algarvians forced it on him. Waging war on the same side as the redheads made Hajjaj want to go sweat himself clean in the baths.
But when the choice was having Unkerlanters overrun Zuwayza …
Hajjaj shook his head. When he and Ikhshid were young, an Unkerlanter governor had ruled in Bishah. If the Algarvians lost, if Zuwayza lost, that could happen again. Algarve, however monstrous its warmaking, didn’t threaten Zuwayza’s freedom. Unkerlant did, and always would.
Bitterly, Hajjaj said, “I wish we were an island in the Great Northern Sea, so we would not have to make choices such as these.”
“Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Balastro answered. “The world is as it is, not as you wish it were. But do you wonder that we hesitate to give you more help against Swemmel when we see how you repay us?”
“Knives have two edges,” Hajjaj said. “If you want to keep us in the fight against Unkerlant, we need the tools and the beasts to go on fighting. If we go out of the war, how much likelier is it that Algarve will lose?”
Balastro looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon. Hajjaj had turned his argument around on him. At last, the Algarvian minister said, “The marriage in which we’re trapped may be loveless, but it is a marriage, and we’d both be hurt if we divorced. Whether we love you or not, your Excellency, we have sent you a present that costs us dear, for our own substance these days is not so large as we would wish, and we have, do believe me, no dragons to spare. We have nothing at all to spare.”
Hajjaj bowed. “Is it so bad as that?”
“It is bad, and it does not get better,” Balastro replied.
“That is not good news,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister said.
“Did I tell you it would be?” Balastro said. “Now, sir, you may not love us, but you are wed to us no less than we are wed to you. Even if you do not think us as fresh and lovely as you did when you first went to bed with us, will you not give us a present for a present, to keep us from quarreling and throwing dishes at each other after supper?”
With some amusement, Hajjaj said, “You sound like an old husband, sure enough. And what present would you have from us, as if I don’t know?”
Balastro nodded. “Aye, that one, sure enough. No gauds, no jewels—just do as you say you’ve been doing all along. I am not even asking that you give over harboring Kaunians here. If you will harbor them, you will. But, your Excellency, harbor them here. If they want to go back to Forthweg, stop turning a blind eye to them. You can stop them, and I hope you will not do me the discourtesy of claiming otherwise.”
“I shall take your words to King Shazli,” Hajjaj said. Hating himself, hating what the war made him do for the sake of his kingdom, he added, “I shall take them to him with the recommendation that he follow your suggestion.”
Balastro bowed. “I can ask no more.” When Hajjaj recommended something to the king, whatever it was had a way of happening. Here, Hajjaj wished that were not so. Zuwayza’s marriage to Algarve was indeed loveless. But, as the Algarvian minister had pointed out, it was indeed a marriage, too. Both sides would be worse off if it fell apart. And so, to keep it going, Zuwayza needed to give Algarve a present in return for the present she’d got. Almost, Hajjaj wished the Algarvian dragons had not come. Almost.
Sergeant Istvan and some of the Gyongyosian soldiers in his squad squatted in a muddy trench on the miserable little island called Becsehely, whiling away the time shooting dice. Istvan sent the bone cubes rolling across the flat board the big, tawny-bearded men used for a playing surface. When he saw a pair of one’s staring at him, he cursed.
Szonyi laughed. “Only two stars in your sky there, Sergeant. I can beat that easy enough.” He scooped up the dice and proved it—a throw of five wasn’t anything much, but plenty to take care of a two. Szonyi gathered up all the coins on the board.
Still cursing his luck, Istvan leaned back and let the next trooper in the game take his place. Lajos hadn’t been with him as long as Szonyi had. Istvan and Szonyi and Corporal Kun had been together since the fighting on Obuda, an island in the Bothnian Ocean some distance west of Becsehely. They’d fought the Kuusamans there, then gone back to the Derlavaian mainland to battle the Unkerlanters in the Ilszung Mountains on the border between Gyongyos and Swemmel’s kingdom and in the trackless forests of western Unkerlant. That was where Lajos had joined the squad. Now, with the stars not shining on the Gyongyosian cause in the fight against Kuusamo, they’d come back to island duty again.
Szonyi set a stake on the board. Lajos, young and eager, matched it. Szonyi threw first: a six. Lajos took the dice and threw another six. They each put down more coins, doubling the stake. Szonyi threw a nine.
Before Lajos picked up the dice, Corporal Kun nudged Szonyi and held out a silver coin in the palm of his hand—a side bet. “This that he’ll beat Lajos by two or better.”
“No, thanks.” Istvan shook his head, and then had to brush curly, dark yellow hair out of his face. “Betting on the side is how you make your money. I’ve seen that.”
Lajos threw an eight. Szonyi collected the twofold bets. Behind his gold-framed spectacles, Kun assumed an injured expression. “There,” he said. “You see? You would have won.”
“This time I would have, aye.” Now Istvan nodded. “But anybody who takes a lot of side bets against you ends up without any money in his belt pouch, so go find yourself a new fish. You’ve hooked me too often already.”
Szonyi won the next duel of dice, too. He said, “I don’t make side bets against you, either, Kun. The sergeant’s right—you win ‘em often enough to make some people wonder whether you magic the dice.”
“Oh, rubbish,” Kun said, or perhaps something rather more pungent. Unlike most of the men in the squad, including Istvan, he wasn’t a peasant or herder from a little mountain valley. Such sturdy soldiers gave the Gyongyosians reason to reckon themselves a warrior race. But Kun had been a mage’s apprentice in Gyorvar, the capital, before taking service in Ekrekek Arpad’s army. He knew little bits and pieces of sorcery himself. Enough to ensorcel dice? Istvan had sometimes wondered himself.
But he said, “Kun’s luck’s no better than anybody else’s when he’s got the dice in his own hand. I’ve noticed that. It’s only when he’s making side bets that he cleans up. I can’t see how he’d put a spell on somebody else’s dice but not on his own.”
“Rubbish,” Kun repeated—or, again, words to that effect. “I’ll tell you what makes the difference: I know what I’m doing, and you back-country boys don’t. There’s no more magecraft in it than there is to cooking a goose.”
“If there’s no magecraft, we ought to be able to do it, too, once you tell us how—isn’t that right?” Szonyi said. He and Kun often banged heads like mountain sheep.
Kun nodded now. “Aye, if you can remember a few simple things.” He raised an eyebrow. By Gyongyosian standards, he was on the scrawny side; Szonyi came close to making two of him. But he had no fear, for he added, “For simple people, even simple things come hard.”
Szonyi bristled. Istvan said, “Never mind the insults. If you can teach us, teach us. I wouldn’t mind learning something to help me put a little extra silver in my belt pouch.”
“All right, by the stars, I will, even if it’ll cost me money,” Kun said, and spent the next little while talking about how to figure odds while rolling dice.
By the time he got through, Istvan was frowning and scratching his head. “Are you sure that’s not magecraft?” he asked.
“Anything somebody doesn’t know how to do looks like magecraft to him,” Kun said impatiently. “This isn’t. It’s nothing but a … fancy kind of arithmetic, I guess you’d call it.”
“How can it be arithmetic?” Szonyi demanded—he was never content with anything Kun said. “Two and two is always four. With this, you’re right some of the time and you’re wrong some of the time. If you run out of silver and be
t your tunic, you’re liable to walk home naked.”
“Over the long run, though, you won’t.” Kun’s smile grew rather nasty. “And if you don’t believe me, why won’t you make side bets with me?”
Before Szonyi could answer, horns blared out an alarm from the high ground, such as it was, at the center of Becsehely. “Scoop up that money, boys. Grab the dice,” Istvan said. “Dowsers must’ve spotted another wave of Kuusaman dragons coming to pay us a call.”
“Dowsing, now, dowsing is real magecraft,” Kun said. “Sensing motion at a distance farther than you can see—how could you possibly do that without sorcery?”
Istvan nodded. “Well, that’s true enough. I was a dowser’s helper for a while, over on Obuda. They gave me the job for a punishment, because he had a heavy sack of rods to carry, but I ended up enjoying it—Borsos was an interesting fellow to talk to. Remember?—he showed up in the Unkerlanter woods, too.”
“That’s right.” Szonyi also nodded. “He was trying to spy out something Swemmel’s stinking goat-eaters were up to.”
The horns cried out again. Booted feet thudded on wet ground as Gyongyosian soldiers who weren’t already in trenches ran for shelter. “Take cover!” shouted Captain Frigyes, the company commander. “Take cover, and be ready to come up blazing if the Kuusamans bring boats up onto the beach.”
“May the stars hold that idea out of their heads,” Istvan said, and made a sign to avert the evil omen.
Becsehely was big enough to support a dragon farm. Wings thundering, Gyongyosian dragons painted in bold stripes of red and blue and black and yellow flew out to meet the enemies the dowsers had spotted. Kuusaman colors were sky blue and sea green, which made their dragons hard to see but easy to tell apart from the Gyongyosian beasts once noted.
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