Harry Turtledove - Jaws of Darkness

“Powers below eat the Algarvians,” Obilot repeated. But then she added, “And powers below eatKingSwemmel ’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 better 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.”

“Itcould.” 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.

That didn’t make Garivald unhappy. He said, “For the next few weeks, nothing is going to happen very fast, not till things dry out.”

“Good,” Obilot answered, and he nodded.

But, day by day, the barley and rye and the little bit of wheat inside the hut dwindled. Before long, it wasn’t a question of having enough left to make a crop. It was a question of how much longer they would have enough to eat. The next time Garivald said, “Maybe I ought to try to make a spell,” Obilot didn’t remind him of Sadoc’s disasters.

What she said instead was, “Well, be careful, by the powers above.”

“I will,” Garivald said, though any magecraft at all was for him a long leap into the unknown. It will be all right, he thought. Why shouldn‘t it? I’m not trying to kill anybody or do anything big, the way Sadoc always did. It’ll work. He had trouble making himself believe it.

But Obilot, he discovered, hadn’t quit trying to talk him out of it: “Have you ever, in all your born days, used magic to try to find things that were hidden under the ground?”

To what was surely her surprise-indeed, to his own, for he’d almost forgotten till she asked-he nodded. “Aye. Two springs ago, it was. Waddo-he was firstman in Zossen-and I had buried the village’s crystal to keep the redheads from getting their hands on it. I dug it up because I was afraid he might betray me on account of it. I gave it to some irregulars operating in the woods not far from there. I hope they got some use out of it.”