As she nibbled a dried apricot, she looked out the window and down onto the street below. Not many Kaunians could have escaped in this neighborhood, but she saw a fair number of people heading for the feeding stations the Algarvians had set up. She grimaced. If they’re that stupid, they deserve to be caught. Then she grimaced again, this time at herself. Why do they deserve to get caught for having empty stomachs?
And then she spotted the Algarvian constable who came down the street chatting up every young woman who passed. She muttered the foulest curses she knew, and wished she knew worse ones. Even though she couldn’t hear him, she could guess what he’d be saying. Come with me, sweetheart. Give me what I want, and you won’t go west, the same sort of vicious bargain Major Spinello had struck with her back in Oyngestun. The redheads were great ones for deals like that. Vanai shrank back from the window, lest he see her. When she peeked out again, a few minutes later, he was gone. She let out a long, heartfelt sigh of relief.
Five
Night in the Strait of Valmiera: a nasty night, with rain and even a little sleet beating down. Wind-whipped waves slapped against the Habakkuk’s port side as she slid north along a ley line toward the Derlavaian mainland. Secure in the bowels of the great, sorcerously enhanced iceberg, Leino hardly noticed the motion.
When the Kuusaman mage remarked on that, Xavega raised a scornful, elegant eyebrow. “In a proper ley-line ship, we would not feel the waves at all,” she said, using classical Kaunian as he had. “We would glide above the water, and not be subject to it.” She didn’t add, You ignorant Kuusaman oaf, but she might as well have.
Leino sighed and didn’t answer. Why did my fancy fix on someone who despises me and all my people? He wondered. One of his own eyebrows quirked, in wry amusement. Because I’ve been away from Pekka too long, that’s why. And because Xavega packs her bile in such a nicely shaped container.
Ramalho was every bit as Lagoan as Xavega, but he shook his head. “In a proper ley-line ship, those waves might capsize us or push us off the ley line and then sink us,” he said. “Plenty of hulks on the bottom of the sea hereabouts, and not all of them from the days when ships went by sail.”
Xavega glared at him. She didn’t just disagree with Leino; she was ready to take on the whole world. “What do you know about it?” she demanded of Ramalho.
“Before the war, I was a ship’s mage,” he said calmly. “My father spent some time as a ship’s mage, and so did his father before him. I might ask you the same question.”
He might ask it, but Xavega didn’t answer it. She just tossed her head, sending wavy, copper-colored locks flying back from her face, and went over to the tea kettle to pour herself a fresh cup. She slammed the kettle back onto its iron stand almost hard enough to shatter it.
“Rain is a worse nuisance for Habakkuk than for ordinary ships,” Leino said, trying to find something the mages could talk about without quarreling. “We always have to work to keep the sea from melting us, but worrying about the air, too, makes the sorcery twice as complicated.”
“Well, that is true enough,” Ramalho said. Xavega just sniffed and sipped at her tea. She couldn’t very well argue with what Leino had said, but she didn’t care to agree with it, either. Ramalho went on: “If we sailed Habakkuk into Setubal harbor back in the days of the Six Years’ War, all the mages in Lagoas would be going mad trying to figure out how we have done all this.”
“Now, there is a picture,” Leino said, rather liking it. “The same would have been true in Kuusamo a generation ago—or, for that matter, any time before the Derlavaian War started.”
“A picture of nonsense,” Xavega said. “A daft conceit.” Ramalho had offered the conceit, but she sounded as if she blamed Leino for it.
With another sigh Leino said, “I hope the dragonfliers will be able to leave the ship in this weather.” How would Xavega take exception to that?
“The storm will help shield them from the Algarvians,” she said, which was disagreement, but of a relatively tepid sort. She continued, “Dowsers start tearing their hair when they have to find moving dragons in the midst of millions of moving raindrops.”
“True,” Leino said.
“Also less true than it would have been in the days of the Six Years’ War, though,” Ramalho said. “Our motion-selectivity spells are much better than they used to be.”
Leino waited for Xavega to start squabbling about that, too. Instead, to his astonishment, she burst into tears. “No one ever lets me say anything without arguing!” she wailed, and fled the chamber in which they’d been sitting.
“What on earth—?” Leino said to Ramalho.
“I was hoping you might explain it to me,” the Lagoan mage answered. “You are the married man, after all. Does that not mean you understand more of women than we bachelors do?”
“I understand my wife fairly well, I think,” Leino said. “Understanding one woman, though, does not mean I understand all women, any more than understanding one man means I understand all men.”
“Too bad,” Ramalho said. “I was hoping it would be simpler than that.” He shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Of course, asking anyone to understand Xavega is probably asking too much.”
“Ah?” Leino said, his voice as neutral as he could make it. “I wondered if it was just me.”
“Oh, no,” Ramalho assured him. “She can be difficult. In fact, there are times when I wonder if she can be anything else. I knew her in Setubal, and she was the same way there.”
“Was she?” Leino asked. Ramalho nodded solemnly. Leino said, “How interesting,” and left the icy chamber.
Interesting, he jeered at himself as he walked down an equally icy corridor. Is that really the word you want to use? The woman is trouble, nothing else but. Even if you got her into bed, she’d be nothing but trouble. She’d be more trouble then, most likely. The only reason you care about her is the way she looks.
And isn’t that reason enough? a different, rather deeper, part of his mind asked in return.
He shook his head, as if he were arguing with someone else and not with himself. No, it isn’t, he insisted. Pekka would laugh at you if she knew you were mooning over a bad-tempered Lagoan, just because she has long, shapely legs and fills out her tunic nicely.
That deeper part of his mind didn’t answer. Maybe that meant he’d convinced it. Somehow, he didn’t think so. Those legs and the way Xavega filled out her tunic stayed with him no matter how bad-tempered she was. Aye, Pekka would laugh at him, but Pekka wasn’t a man.
And a good thing, too, he thought. There, at least, both parts of his mind agreed completely.
He headed toward one of the chambers where the mages worked to keep Habakkuk going—as opposed to the chambers where they gathered when they weren’t working. He wasn’t due back on duty for another couple of hours, but he had the feeling they would welcome him if he came in early. Rain really did put a lot of extra strain on Habakkuk’s structural integrity, and he’d done a lot of work while the ship was building to find out how best to foil the raindrops.
He’d almost got there when the iceberg-turned-dragon-hauler jerked and shuddered under his feet, as if it had run into a wall. The next thing he knew, he was on his backside in the hallway and all the lights had gone out. Somewhere in the distance, an urgent bell began clanging.
“What in blazes—?” Leino exclaimed as he scrambled to his feet, his spiked shoes biting into the ice. He laughed at himself once upright again. He was a true mage, all right: even then, he’d spoken in classical Kaunian. All around him, though, men and women were crying out in Lagoan and Kuusaman. Pain filled some of those cries. He realized he was liable to be lucky to have come away with nothing worse than a bruised bottom.
He hadn’t thought about why something as immense as Habakkuk might stagger in midocean. That also proved him a mage: a mage, not a sailor. Some of the outcries in the dark had words in them, too. When those words were in Kuusaman, he could follow them. Two he heard most often
were, “Egg!” and, “Leviathan!”
“Powers above, I am an idiot!” he said—still in classical Kaunian. The dragons Habakkuk carried had done nothing but give Algarve grief ever since the strange craft first went into action when Lagoas and Kuusamo took Sibiu away from King Mezentio and restored King Burebistu to the rule over his own island kingdom. Of course the Algarvians would strike at the sorcerously enhanced iceberg if they got the chance—and an Algarvian leviathan-rider evidently had got it.
Now Leino knew he urgently needed to make his way to the chambers where his fellow wizards worked. But how? The darkness in the bowels of Habakkuk’was absolute. He hadn’t thought about how completely the strange vessel depended on magecraft to sustain it in every way till it was suddenly deprived of that magecraft.
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 of Habakkuk, 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 restore Habakkuk’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 keep Habakkuk 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. But Habakkuk 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 eat King Swemmel’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 bett
er 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,” Garivald 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.”
“It could.” 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.
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