Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Anything interesting?” Ilmarinen asked from across the table. He was working his way through a plate of smoked salmon and onions and capers and pickled cucumbers.

“I don’t know about interesting, but this report on something that went wrong on the island of Obuda is strange,” Fernao answered. He passed the sheet to Ilmarinen, who put on spectacles to read it. “It sounds like something happened there that was too big to ignore, and bigger than the writer really wanted to admit.”

“Oh. That.” The Kuusaman master mage’s voice went hard and flat. “I know about that.” Fernao believed him; he knew all sorts of things he had no business knowing. “Some of the people who ran our captives’ camp for the Gongs made a big mistake there. Most of them are too dead to court-martial now, but we would if we could. Stupidity is usually its own punishment. It was here.”

“Now you’re going to have to tell me, you know,” Fernao said.

“Or else what?” But Ilmarinen was grinning. He loved to gossip, and made no bones about it. After an odorous bite of salmon and onions, he went on, “Well, for one thing, they let some sort of mage get in with the ordinary captives.”

“Uh-oh,” Fernao said.

“Uh-oh, indeed,” Ilmarinen agreed. “And then they put some Algarvian leviathan-riders into the camp, too. And, just in case you haven’t heard, the Gongs have figured out how to work the sorceries that make me hope Algarve and Unkerlant end up destroying each other-but we’re never that lucky, are we?”

“Er-no,” Fernao said. “From what I know of the Gyongyosians, that surprises me. They’re warriors, aye, but not murderers.”

“You’re right. They aren’t murderers-not that kind of murderers, any- how. But so what?” Ilmarinen paused for another bite. Fernao remembered to eat, too. The Kuusaman master mage continued, “They’re warriors, sure enough-and they volunteer, they really and truly do volunteer, to put their necks to the knife for the greater glory of Gyongyos and for the stars that don’t give a fart about them.”

“Oh.” Fernao wished he hadn’t started eating again. “And that’s what happened on Obuda?”

“That’s what happened on Obuda, all right,” Ilmarinen said. “Smashed things up pretty well-about like a real earthquake, say.” He shrugged. “Now we’re putting the pieces back together, and we won’t let it happen again. A bad nuisance, but only a nuisance.”

“And a lot of dead Gyongyosians,” Fernao said. “Dead for nothing.”

Ilmarinen nodded. “For nothing much, anyhow. I gather the officer who led this thought doing something was better than sitting around doing nothing and waiting for the war to end. Only goes to show that sometimes sitting around isn’t so bad.”

“You should have thought of that before you went to the blockhouse by yourself,” Fernao said.

After impressive deliberation, Ilmarinen made a face at him. “If we were all as smart as we knew how to make everyone else… very likely the world would be as much of a mess as it is right now.”

“Aye, very likely.” Fernao had wondered if the old man would be able to get an aphorism out of his cynical start. He’d had his doubts when Ilmarinen paused there, but the theoretical sorcerer had come through. “Are you ready for the experiment tomorrow?”

“I am always ready for experiments,” Ilmarinen answered. “Sometimes, unfortunately, experiments are not ready for me.” He popped more onions and capers and soft pink-orange fish into his mouth. “I tell you this: I’d a hundred times sooner experiment than stand in front of a chamber full of eager second-raters and tell them what I know.”

“I rather like to teach,” Fernao said.

“I haven’t minded teachingyou” Ilmarinen said; Fernao realized only later the size of the compliment he’d got. The old man went on, “But these people who want it spelled out and have to have it that way because they can’t see it if it isn’t… They’d make a lovely rock garden, don’t you think? Don’tthey think? They don’t, and that’s the trouble.”

Fernao finished his own breakfast and went off to teach a class of mages-mostly Lagoans, with a few Kuusamans to fill out the twenty. Sure enough, the questions he got were of the sort Ilmarinen disliked: “Show me how these two verses work.” “What does this formula mean?” “Do we really need to know that?”

“No, you don’t really need to know that,” he answered, his own temper fraying. “If you want to kill yourself when you try this spell, go ahead and forget it.”

“You’re not being very helpful,” complained the woman who’d asked the question.

“You’re not being very imaginative,” Fernao said. “Would I have talked about this if you didn’t need to know it?”

“Well, you never can tell,” the woman said.

Later, Fernao did some complaining of his own to Pekka: “I wanted to pound my head against the wall. We’ve made this as simple as we can. Have we really made it simple enough for the people who’ll have to use it? Can we make it simple enough for these people to use it?”

Instead of giving him the sympathy he craved, she annoyed him by laughing. “I’ve spent years trying to pound sorcery into the heads of people who don’t much want to learn it,” he said. “The ones we have here are pretty bright.”

“Powers above help our kingdoms!” he exploded.

“I hope they will. I hope they do,” she answered, and he found nothing to say to that. Then she added, “They must be looking out for me. Otherwise, how would I have met you?”

Fernao’s annoyance evaporated. His ears heated. That must have been visible from the outside as well as palpable from within, for Pekka giggled. Fernao bowed. “You do me too much credit, I think.”

Pekka shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she answered. “If I did, would you make me so happy?” Before his head swelled to the point where her chamber couldn’t hold it, she added, “If I didn’t think so, would I have let my life get so complicated when I didn’t intend to?”

He found nothing to say to that, either. His life wasn’t complicated. His life had been complicated before they found themselves together, because he’d wanted to be with her when she hadn’t wanted to be with him. Now, as far as he was concerned, everything was fine. Of course, he wasn’t torn in two directions at once. However much he wished Pekka weren’t, he knew she was.

They lay close together on her narrow bed after making love that night when she suddenly said, “It’s snowing.”

“How can you tell?” he asked.

“The way the air feels-all still and quiet,” she said, and turned on the bedside lamp. “There-you see?” Sure enough, the light showed snowflakes softly striking the double-glass window that helped hold cold at bay.

“It doesn’t have to be still and quiet for snow,” Fernao said. “Down in the land of the Ice People, it blows like this.” He held his forearm parallel to the mattress. Then he added, “And I’d sooner look at you than at snow any day.” Pekka kissed him. He gathered her in. Before too long, he sighed. “Ten years ago, I could have promised you twice in a row. Now I have to be lucky for that-not that I’m not lucky, you understand.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Pekka said. “The holding is fine, too, all by itself.” She reached out to turn off the lamp. They fell asleep in each other’s arms-and woke up a couple of hours later, Fernao with an arm asleep, Pekka with a leg that seemed dead below the knee. As they untangled themselves and Fernao got into his clothes to go back to his own room, he yawned and thought, So much for romance.

Something closer to romance came the next day, when they rode out to the blockhouse under furs in a sleigh, as they’d done when they first began experimenting down in the Naantali district. He’d been conscious of Pekka as an attractive woman even then. Now… If his hands wandered a bit, and if hers did, the furs kept the driver from noticing.