Authors: Harry Turtledove
“Perhaps I will—or perhaps I will come back to stay with you, where I know I am safe,” Pekka answered with a sassy grin.
She blessed Siuntio for letting it lie there. After a last chuckle, he said, “That might be for the best this time, too, as the lot of us will have a great deal to discuss when we assemble tomorrow.”
“Aye,” Pekka said. “I do not deny being surprised to learn that you duplicated my experimental results.”
“Every one of us has done so,” Siuntio replied. “Every one of us has done so repeatedly. If we repeated the experiment often enough, we might, I daresay, rid the world of a great many surplus acorns.”
He still sounded easy, amused, very much as he had when he’d teased her. Under that, she thought, eagerness quivered, the eagerness of a hound on a scent. Pekka could hear it. She felt it herself. Like called to like, as surely as under the law of similarity. She asked, “What do you think is causing it, Master?”
“Mistress, I do not know,” Siuntio said gravely. “You have found something new and unexpected. It is another reason, aside from purposes of lechery, that I wish I were younger: I would have more time to go down this track. For now, I know it is there, and that is all I know of it.”
“I have tried my best to account for it, but it fits into no theoretical model with which I am familiar.”
“All this means, my dear, is that we shall need some new theoretical models by and by,” Siuntio said. “There are dull times, when the sages were sure they know everything there is to know. The days of the Kaunian Empire were such a time, though it would not do to say so in Valmiera or Jelgava. We had another one a couple of hundred years ago, all over eastern Derlavai and on our island as well. Then we discovered ley lines, and nothing has been the same since. Now things will be different again, different in a different way.”
“Different in a different way,” Pekka echoed. “I like that. When will the others gather here?”
“Midmorning, or perhaps a bit before,” Siuntio answered carelessly. “Meanwhile, make yourself at home. It won’t be the Principality, not for the bed and not for the food, either, but you may perhaps find something or other to read here that the Principality does not offer.”
Pekka knew she’d been eyeing her host’s bookshelves. “You’d better search my bags before you take me back to the caravan station,” she said. “I am tempted to wreak havoc here, as the Sibian pirates used to do along our coast.” Boldly, she pulled out a classical Kaunian text on growth spells and began looking through it. Maybe someone had found the answer to her riddle back in the days of the Empire Siuntio had just mocked.
He had to call her twice to supper; she’d got engrossed. The text did not have the answer—she hadn’t really believed it would—but was interesting for its own sake. And Kaunian was such an elegantly precise language, even the most blatant nonsense sounded as if it ought to be true.
Supper turned out to be mutton chops and mashed parsnips with butter: closer to what she would have made at home than to the delicacies in which the Principality specialized, but far from bad. “You do me too much credit,” Siuntio said when Pekka praised him for it. “I stick to simple things, where even a bungler like me has trouble going wrong.”
“I don’t give you too much credit,” Pekka said. “You don’t give yourself enough.”
“Pah!” Siuntio waved that away, which annoyed her. Then he wouldn’t let her help him clean up, which annoyed her even more. “You are my guest,” he said. “You would not work for your supper at a hostel, and you will not work here.” With an old man’s mulishness, he got his way.
Next morning, she rose before he did (the bed wasn’t all that comfortable, and she wasn’t used to it) and had herrings grilling when he came into the kitchen. He glared at her. She smiled back sweetly. “Have some bread and honey,” she said, pointing to the table. “That will make you look less sour.”
It didn’t. Pekka made a point of eating faster than he did, and then springing up while he had a mouthful so she could set the kitchen to rights. He started glaring again, but took a swig from his pot of beer and laughed instead. “If you
must
do things, go ahead and do them,” he said. “I suspect it means your husband works you too hard, but it’s his affair, and yours.” Pekka refused to dignify that with even so much as a sniff.
Piilis came to Siuntio’s house first, followed a couple of minutes later by Alkio and Raahe. All the theoretical sorcerers were full of praise for Pekka. “You’ve given us something we’ll be arguing about for year,” Raahe said with a smile so wide, she didn’t seem capable of arguing about anything.
“Where is Ilmarinen?” Siuntio grumbled, pacing back and forth across his parlor. “If anyone can unravel a phenomenon too strange to be believed, he is the man. He thinks left-handed.”
“If anyone can unravel this, Master, I think you are the one,” Pekka said.
But Siuntio shook his head. “I think more widely than Ilmarinen. I think more deeply than Ilmarinen. Ilmarinen, though, Ilmarinen thinks more strangely than I do. Ilmarinen thinks more strangely than anyone does. Ilmarinen”—he sighed—“likely thinks it amusing to be late.”
After most of an hour, the missing mage did arrive. He offered no apologies. Pekka thought he smelled of wine. If the others thought so, too, they said nothing.
“Well, here we are,” Ilmarinen said loudly. “Theoretical sorcerers without any theories. Isn’t that grand? And it’s
your
fault.” He leered at Pekka. “You turned the world upside down, and you didn’t even know you were going to do it.”
“If anyone knew he was about to turn the world upside down, he would not do it,” Siuntio said. “I hope he would not do it.”
“You’re right,” Alkio said. “When we look for things that extend what we know, we take small steps. It’s only when we stumble and almost fall that we need long strides to help us get our balance.”
“Very pretty,” Ilmarinen said. “It would be all the better if it meant something, but very pretty just the same.”
“Speaking of meaning,” Piilis said with acid in his voice, “I suppose you’re ready to tell us now what Mistress Pekka’s experiment means.”
“Of course I am,” Ilmarinen said, which made everyone stare at him. Pekka wondered if Siuntio had known exactly what he was talking about. Ilmarinen went on, “It means we aren’t so smart as we thought we were before she made it. I already told you that, but you weren’t listening.”
Piilis glowered. Ilmarinen grinned, no doubt having hoped to provoke him into glowering. Siuntio said, “In my opinion, we shall advance faster by discussing what we do know of this phenomenon than what we do not.”
“Since we don’t know anything about this cursed phenomenon, we haven’t got anything to discuss,” Ilmarinen pointed out. “In that case, this meeting has no point.” He turned as if to go.
Raahe, Alkio, and Siuntio all exclaimed. When Ilmarinen turned back, he was grinning again. Pekka said, “Now that you’ve had your sport, Master, have we your leave to get on with things?”
“I suppose so,” Ilmarinen answered, something like approval in his eyes. Now Pekka smiled. So Ilmarinen needed to be handled like Uto, did he? She knew how to take a firm line, whether with a crotchety four-year-old or an even more crotchety theoretical sorcerer.
“Unfortunately, Master Ilmarinen is too close to being right,” Raahe said. “We know what happens in Mistress Pekka’s fascinating experiment, but we do not know why, which is of the essence. Nothing in present theory indicates that one of those paired acorns should disappear.”
“Nothing in the theory unifying similarity and contagion we have been struggling to develop indicates such an outcome, either,” Piilis said.
Ilmarinen laughed. “Time to stand theory on its head, then, wouldn’t you say? That’s what you do when things like this happen.”
“I should also point out that there is no proof similarity and contagion can be unified,” Siuntio said. “If anything, Mistress Pekka’s experiment seems to argue against unification.”
“I fear I must agree with you,” Pekka said sadly. “I thought the mathematics showed otherwise, but anyone who chooses mathematics over experiment is a fool. With no unity underlying the two laws, there seems little point even to these informal gatherings.”
She waited for Ilmarinen’s sardonic agreement. The sour mage said, “Anyone who chooses mathematics over experiment has done the mathematics wrong or the experiment wrong. The experiment is right. That means the mathematics have to be wrong. Sooner or later, somebody will find the right mathematics. The only reason I can see that it shouldn’t be us is that we’re too stupid.”
“Maybe,” Siuntio said, “just maybe, we aren’t so stupid as all that. Whether we are or not might be worth finding out, don’t you think?”
Maybe,
Pekka thought,
just maybe, what I feel is hope.
Lagoans had a saying:
out of the pot and on to the stove.
That would have fit the way Fernao felt about Mizpah, save only that he did not believe in stretching metaphor far enough to compare the land of the Ice People with anything having to do with heat. Even if Mizpah did lie under Lagoan domination, it was even smaller and slower and duller than Heshbon, something the mage would have had a hard time imagining had he not seen it with his own eyes.
Where he was bored and restive, King Penda, having gone from exile to exile, seemed not far from snapping. “Will we have to spend the winter here?” he demanded.
He’d been demanding that since the day Doeg’s caravan reached Mizpah. Fernao had expressed his own opinion of the caravan journey by buying a dressed ptarmigan carcass, roasting it, and devouring it, even if the flesh did taste of pine needles. By now, though, he was as sick of Penda’s nagging as he had been of Doeg’s swaggering savagery. He pointed to the harbor that was Mizpah’s reason for being and said, “Jump right in, your Majesty. You shouldn’t need more than a month to swim to Setubal, provided the Algarvians patrolling out of Sibiu don’t catch you as you splash past.”
Penda was slower on the uptake than he might have been; as king, he probably hadn’t been exposed to much irony. He answered, “Lagoas should send out a ship to take us to Setubal instead of leaving us here to rot.”
“It’s cold enough that we’re rotting very slowly,” Fernao said.
“Enough—powers above, a surfeit—of your feeble jests and japes!” Penda cried.
That did nothing to endear him to Fernao. Nothing could have done much to endear him to Fernao, not when they’d had as much trouble putting up with each other as was the case. The mage snapped, “Your Majesty, Lagoas knows we are here. Getting a ship here is another matter. My kingdom is, I remind you, at war with Algarve. I also remind you—again, since you did not seem to hear me the first time—that Algarve holds Sibiu. Getting a ship into and out of Mizpah would be very difficult even in the best of times—and, as you point out, winter is coining, which will add drift ice to other difficulties.”
Penda’s shiver struck Fernao as overdramatic. But then, Forthweg was a northern kingdom with a mild northern climate. Contemplating ice in any liquid larger than a bowl of sherbet had to feel wrong to Penda. “What
is
winter like here?” the exiled king whispered.
“I do not know for a fact,” Fernao said, “for I have never been here before. But I have heard it said that winter in this country makes an Unkerlanter winter balmy by comparison.”
Was that a whimper, down there deep in King Penda’s throat? If it was, he quickly choked it back. Fernao felt more sympathy for him than he was willing to show. In Forthweg, in Jelgava, in northern Algarve and Valmiera, summer lingered yet. Even in Sibiu, in Lagoas, in Kuusamo, the weather would still be mild, perhaps even warm.
Here at Mizpah, days remained above freezing and nights, as yet, seldom dropped far below it. A hearty Lagoan merchant, a few days before, had stripped to his drawers, gone swimming in the Narrow Sea, and emerged from the chilly water to find a crowd of Ice People, men and women both, gathered on the rocky beach staring at him. It wasn’t so much that he was nearly naked in a land where the natives swaddled themselves: far more that he had plunged into the water and not come out a block of salty ice.
But Penda, as Fernao had already seen, was not interested in a dip in the Narrow Sea. He said, “You being a first-rank mage, can you not whisk us over the water to your homeland by sorcery?”
“If I could do that, so could many other mages,” Fernao answered. “If many others could do it, all our wars would have seen soldiers popping out of midair in unexpected places. I work magic, not miracles.”
He’d known Penda would scowl at him, and the king did. Like most laymen, Penda did not distinguish between the two. Some arrogant mages didn’t, either. Because of those who refused to acknowledge the distinction, sorcery had advanced since the days of the Kaunian Empire. The vast majority of them, though, had failed, and a lot had paid for their arrogance with their lives.
Sulkily, Penda said, “What do you suggest that we do, then, sir mage?”
Fernao sighed. “When there’s nothing we can do, your Majesty, we may as well make the best of doing nothing.”
“Bah!” Penda said. “I had nothing to do in Patras, for I might as well have been a prisoner. I had nothing to do in Heshbon, for there was nothing to do in Heshbon. I have nothing to do here, for there is less than nothing to do here. In Setubal, I would still be an exile, aye, but there, at least, I could work toward the liberation of my kingdom. Do you wonder that I pine?”
Do you wonder that I tire of your pining?
Fernao could not give the answer that first sprang to mind. Aloud, he said, “You cannot swim to Lagoas. You cannot hire a caravan to take you thither. Lagoas cannot send a ship hither, as I have already said. That leaves nothing I can think of. I assure you, I am also anxious to return.”
Penda exhaled in exasperation; no doubt Fernao wore on his nerves, as he wore on Fernao’s. “You are but a Lagoan,” he said, as if to a backwards child. “I am not merely a Forthwegian: I am Forthweg. Do you now see the difference between us?”