Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Good day to you, Garivald,” the firstman said, his voice almost as slick and greasy as if he were speaking to an inspector.
“And to you,” Garivald answered. He had less trouble sounding cheerful than he’d thought he would. The closer he got to Waddo, the more easily he could see how hard a time the firstman had making his way through the mud. After breaking his ankle, Waddo still walked with the help of a cane. Here in the spring thaw, the cane didn’t help much. Instead of letting the firstman gain purchase, it sank deep into the mud.
“May the coming year be bountiful for you and yours,” Waddo said. “May the harvest be abundant.”
May you shut up and leave me at peace,
Garivald thought. Aloud, he replied, “May all these things prove true for you as well.” He was not even wishing falsely, or not altogether falsely. Anything that went wrong with Waddo’s harvest—a blight, locusts, rain at the wrong time—was only too likely to go wrong with everyone’s harvest, including his own.
Waddo inclined his head, which made water run off the front of his hat instead of the back for a moment. “You have always been a well-spoken man, Garivald,” he said.
Only because you don’t know what I say behind your back.
But Garivald had always been careful to whom he said such things. Some of the people in the village were as much Waddo’s inspectors as the men in rock-gray were King Swemmel’s. Evidently, Garivald had been careful enough, for no one had betrayed him. “I thank you,” he told the firstman, doing his best to match Waddo for hypocrisy.
It worked; under the wide brim of his hat, Waddo beamed. “Aye,” he said, “it’s thanks to folk like you that Zossen will be going places.”
“Eh?” Garivald looked politely interested to conceal the stab of alarm he felt. He liked the village where and as it was just fine.
But the firstman repeated, “Going places.” His eyelid rose and fell in an unmistakable wink. “We may—we just may, mind you—have a way to bring a crystal into Zossen after all. And if we bring a crystal into the village, we bring the whole world into the village.” Under his cloak, he threw his arms wide with excitement, as if to say that would assuredly be a good thing.
Garivald was anything but assured. It hadn’t been so long before that he and Annore had concluded Zossen was better off without a crystal. He saw no reason to change his mind. Being an Unkerlanter peasant like most Unkerlanter peasants, he seldom saw reason to change his mind. “How?” he asked, giving no sign of what he thought. “We have no power points close by. No ley line runs anywhere near us. As far as magic goes—well, magic might as well be gone, as far as we’re concerned.”
“Aye, and isn’t it a pity?” Waddo said. “So much we could do if more sorcery worked around these parts. And it may. Before too long, it really may.”
“How?” Garivald asked again. “You can’t squeeze water out of a stone—there’s no water to squeeze. You can’t get magic out of a land with no power points, either.”
“I don’t know just how it’s done,” Waddo answered. “I’m no mage. But if it
is
done, wouldn’t it be fine? We’d know what happened all over the world, and wouldn’t have to wait till some trader came to Zossen with the news.”
“That might not be so bad,” Garivald said; coming right out and telling the firstman he hated the idea struck him as foolish. But he did give some hint of his own notions: “Of course, it’s still news here whenever it gets to us.”
“But that’s not good enough!” Waddo exclaimed. “When traders and neighbors come to Zossen, I want us to be able to give them the news. I don’t want to always be begging for it, the way old Faileuba has to beg for bread because her husband and her daughter are dead and her other daughter ran away with that tinker.”
“Doesn’t matter to me one way or the other,” Garivald said. It mattered very much to him, but his hopes were opposite Waddo’s. With a shrug that flung drops of water from the shoulders of his cloak, he went on, “It’s not like we’re Cottbus, or anything of the sort.”
“But wouldn’t it be fine if we were?” the firstman said. “Zossen—the Cottbus of the south! Doesn’t that have a fine sound to it?”
Garivald took a couple of shuffling steps to keep from sinking into the mud. He shrugged again, in lieu of roaring at Waddo that he didn’t want his home village to be anything like Cottbus. That one crystal, even if it could be made to function here, wouldn’t turn Zossen into a copy of the capital of Unkerlant occurred to him no more than it did to the firstman.
Waddo also shifted position. He almost fell while he was doing so. Had he gone down into the muck, Garivald would have been tempted to hold him there till he stopped struggling. If Waddo drowned, Zossen would stay as it had always been. To Garivald’s disappointment, the firstman caught himself. “We’ll see what we see, that’s all,” Waddo said. “Nothing’s sure yet.” He might have been firstman, but remained a peasant under the petty rank.
“Aye, nothing’s ever sure,” Garivald agreed. So would everyone else in the village. So would everyone else through vast stretches of Unkerlant.
“Well, then,” Waddo said, as if everything were all settled.
He said it so convincingly, Garivald believed for a moment everything was all settled and started to go on his way. The firstman wasn’t firstman for nothing. But then Garivald turned back. “This is the third time I’ve asked you, and you haven’t told me yet: how would we make a crystal work here without a power point or a ley line anywhere close by?”
Waddo looked unhappy. Garivald thought that was because he had no answer, because the whole scheme lived in his head and nowhere else. But he discovered he was wrong, for Waddo said, “Power points and ley lines aren’t the only ways to get sorcerous energy, you know. There is another source it would be more efficient to use here in Zossen.”
“Oh, aye, I’ll bet it would,” Garivald said with a laugh. “Well, when you line people up to sacrifice ‘em to make your precious crystal, you can start with my mother-in-law.” He laughed again. All things considered, he got on pretty well with Annore’s mother, her chief virtue being that she stayed out of his hair.
Then he watched Waddo’s expression change. His own expression changed, too, to one of horror. He’d thought he was joking. He’d been sure he was joking. Just how badly did the firstman want a crystal here? What would he do—what would King Swemmel’s inspectors, and maybe King Swemmel’s soldiers, too, help him do—to get a crystal here?
“Powers above,” Garivald whispered, thinking he
ought
to drown Waddo in the mud right this instant.
Waddo’s arms fluttered under the cloak, as if he was making brushing-away motions. “No, no, no,” he said. “No, no, no. We would never sacrifice anyone from Zossen to power the crystal. That would upset people”—which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along—“and be inefficient. But there are plenty of criminals in the kingdom, especially in the cities, where people haven’t got any morals at all. Who’d miss them if they had their throats cut? And they’d be doing something useful, wouldn’t they? That’s efficiency.”
“Aye … so it is,” Garivald said grudgingly. He didn’t mind the idea of unpleasant strangers getting their throats slit—no doubt they had it coming. He did wish it would be for a better cause than bringing a cursed crystal to the village.
Waddo said, “Now do you see why I didn’t want to come right out and talk about sacrifices and such? Everybody in the village would want to get rid of everybody else, or else be sure everybody else wanted to get rid of him. Things won’t settle down till folks see it’s only bad eggs from far away who get what they deserve.”
“I suppose so,” Garivald said. He knew whom people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He was standing here talking with the fellow people in Zossen would want to sacrifice. He almost said as much, to see the look on Waddo’s face. But the firstman would remember a crack like that. If something chanced to go wrong with the crystal—Garivald didn’t know how he could arrange that, but figured it was worth a try—he didn’t want Waddo thinking of him first. Come to that, he didn’t want Waddo thinking of him at all.
Tealdo approved of Captain Galafrone, the late Captain Larbino’s replacement as company commander. Galafrone was a thick-shouldered veteran of the Six Years’ War, his hair, mustaches, and side whiskers more gray than auburn. He was also a rarity in the Algarvian army—in those of Valmiera or Jelgava, he would have been an impossibility—an officer risen from the ranks.
“This one’s for revenge, boys,” he said as Tealdo and his comrades stood in the forwardmost trenches and waited for the trumpets to signal them into action. “The cursed Kaunians stole our land when I was a lad your age, near enough. Now we get to pay the stinking whoremasters back. It’s that simple.”
He couldn’t have timed things better had he been a first-rank mage. No sooner had he finished speaking than eggs started falling on the Valmieran positions in front of Tealdo’s company. Egg-tossers behind the line flung some of them. More fell from beneath the bellies of the swarms of dragons Tealdo could make out against the lightening sky.
Here and there along the line, Valmieran egg-tossers tried to answer, but the dragons, or so Tealdo had heard, were concentrating on them. In that duel, the Algarvians had the better of it.
Trumpets rang out. The notes were harsh and blaring, not the smooth tones of the royal hymn. “Follow me!” Captain Galafrone shouted. He was the first one out of the trench. If he’d done the same thing during the battles of the Six Years’ War, Tealdo wondered why he remained among the living.
“Follow me!” Sergeant Panfilo echoed. “For King Mezentio!”
“Mezentio!” Tealdo cried, and awkwardly climbed the sandbag steps so he could expose his precious body to the Valmierans’ beams and eggs. He wished he’d stayed on occupation duty in Sibiu instead of getting shipped back to southeastern Algarve to join in the assault against Valmiera. The powers that be back in Trapani had decided otherwise, though, and here he was.
“If Mezentio wants to lick the Valmierans so much, let him come fight them!” Trasone shouted. But he, like Tealdo, dashed toward the trenches the blond robbers had dug on Algarvian soil.
One or two men went down as beams smote them, but only one or two. The egg-tossers and dragons had done their work well. Behemoths advanced with the Algarvian infantry, to bring more egg-tossers and heavy sticks to the edge of the fighting. Other behemoths hauled supplies and bridging gear forward.
Tealdo sprang down into the forwardmost Valmieran trench. A couple of blond men in trousers threw down their sticks and threw up their hands. “No fight!” one of them said in bad Algarvian.
“Send the captives back!” Captain Galafrone shouted, somewhere not far down the line. “Don’t waste time going through their pockets, just send ‘em on back. We’ve got plenty of plunder waiting ahead of us, lads—we won’t go without. But the faster we move now, the sooner we kick the Kaunians out of our kingdom. Forward!”
Rather reluctantly, Tealdo didn’t take the time to rob the Valmierans. No doubt Galafrone was right, in a strictly military sense. Still, Tealdo resented the certainty that the trousered Kaunians’ money and trinkets would end up in the hands of behind-the-lines types who’d done nothing to earn them.
But with Galafrone already running on, Tealdo didn’t see how he could do anything less. His comrades followed the veteran captain, too. The Valmierans fought back, but not so hard as he’d expected. The pelting they’d taken from egg-tossers and dragons seemed to have left a lot of them stunned. Others threw down their sticks the moment they first spied Algarvian soldiers.
“Our stinking nobles led us into a losing war,” a blond man said bitterly as he went off into captivity. His Algarvian was already pretty good. He’d get the chance to improve it further in a camp.
Then Tealdo dove behind a pile of rubble as some Valmierans in a little stone keep showed themselves far from ready to quit. Their beams scorched the tender spring grass. Tealdo tried to sneak one of his own beams through their blazing slits. By the way they went on fighting, he knew he wasn’t having much luck.
Galafrone and his crystallomancer sprawled in back of similarly makeshift shelter a few yards away. The company commander looked at a map, then yelled something—Tealdo couldn’t make out what—to the man with the crystal. The fellow spoke urgently into his sorcerous apparatus; again, Tealdo caught tone without words.
Hardly more than a minute later, a couple of dragons with eggs under their bellies dove on the Valmieran strongpoint. Watching, Tealdo wondered if their fliers intended to take them straight into it. But they released the eggs at little more than treetop height, from which they had no chance of missing. The ground shook under Tealdo as the eggs burst. The Valmierans in that small stone fortress suddenly stopped blazing.
Galafrone jumped to his feet. “Come on, let’s get moving!” he shouted. “Those bastards won’t bother us any more.”
He was right about that. Tealdo trotted past the ruins of the stone keep. The sharp stink of new-burst eggs still lingered; it always put him in mind of thunderstorms. Other odors lingered with it: burnt meat and the iron smell of blood.
Out ahead of the advancing footsoldiers, he spied a large band of behemoths. Like the dragons, they and their crews were busy smashing up the places from which the Valmierans fought hardest. By the time Tealdo and his comrades got to those places, they rarely needed to do more than mop up.
By the time that first day ended, Tealdo was more worn than he’d ever been in his life. He and his comrades had also come farther than he’d imagined they could. And, somehow, the field kitchens had kept up with them. The stew a cook with a dragon tattoo on his forearm ladled into his tin bowl wasn’t anything over which a gourmet back in Trapani would have gone into ecstasies, but it was a lot better than anything he and his pals could have come up with by themselves.
Galafrone ate like a wolf. He looked dazed, and not from the hard marching and fighting he’d done. “I can’t believe how fast we’ve moved,” he said with his mouth full. He’d said that before, too. “We never advanced so fast in the Six Years’ War, not even in the last push toward Priekule. Powers above, we’ve already taken back half of what the blondies stole from us up till now.”