Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

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 keepHabakkuk 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 onHabakkuk ’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 asHabakkuk 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, Iam an idiot!” he said-still in classical Kaunian. The dragonsHabakkuk 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 KingMezentio and restoredKingBurebistu 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 ofHabakkuk’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 ofHabakkuk, 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 restoreHabakkuk’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 keepHabakkuk 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. ButHabakkuk 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.”