Jaws of Darkness (22 page)

“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.”

“It
could.”
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.”

“Did
you?” She nodded, too, more than half to herself. “All right, then. Maybe you do have
some
idea of what you’re up to.” She still didn’t sound as if she thought he had much idea of what he was doing.

He wasn’t altogether sure he did, either, but he knew he had to make the effort. He put some wheat, some barley, and some rye in a little clay pot, then tied a length of twine to the handles and swung it pendulum-fashion. Then, doing his best not to let Obilot fluster him by watching, he began to chant:

“Like calls to like
—
so magic’s found.
Let like show like, down under ground.
Show me now the grain that’s hidden.
Do it now, as you are bidden
…”

On he went. He knew it wasn’t an outrageously good song—he knew it was likely a long way from a good song—but he hoped it would serve. And it did serve, or he thought it did. The direction in which the pot of grain was swinging suddenly changed, and he’d done nothing to change it. Obilot let out a small, surprised exclamation. Garivald felt like doing the same thing. Instead, he moved from one side of the hut to the other. The arc in which the pot swung changed as he moved, so that it kept indicating the same direction.

Garivald went outside into the rain and chanted again. The swinging pot led him away from the hut and off beyond a low swell of ground a furlong or so away. He nodded to himself. The fellow who’d lived here thought like a peasant, all right. He didn’t want to make things easy for King Swemmel’s inspectors.

As soon as Garivald started down the other side of the slope, the pot stopped swinging and pointed straight down. He hadn’t found a spade in the hut. He dug in the mucky ground with the edge of an iron pan. If it hadn’t been soaked and soft, he couldn’t have made much progress. As things were …

As things were, the edge of the pan clanked off fired clay before he’d got down much more than a foot. He set down the pan and softly and wonderingly clapped his hands together. “I did it,” he breathed, and breathed in raindrops. Then he dug as if he were digging himself a hole while the Algarvians tossed eggs at him. Grunting with effort, he pulled out the great jar, which weighed more nearly as much as he did. Pitch sealed the lid. He had to hope the seal had stayed good.

He dragged the jar back to the hut. Inside, he scraped away the pitch with a knife and levered up the stopper. “Ahh!” He and Obilot stared down at the golden wheat. “We won’t go hungry,” she said.

“We’ll have something to plant,” he added, and then, “This isn’t likely to be the only hidden jar, either. Maybe I can find more the same way.”

“Maybe you can,” Obilot agreed. “Why not? You
can
work magic.” She sounded awed.

“By the powers above, so I can.” Garivald sounded awed, too. Awed or not, he hedged that, as any canny peasant would: “A little, anyhow.” But a little had proved enough.

Colonel Spinello was not a happy man as he rode east toward division headquarters to confer with his fellow brigade commanders. The rain that pelted him and his driver did little to improve his spirits. Neither did the fact that even the local wagon, with its curved, boatlike bottom and high wheels, had trouble negotiating the bottomless river of mud badly miscalled a road.

At last, just outside the northern Unkerlanter town called Waldsolms, cobblestones reappeared. The wagon wasn’t really made to cope with them. It rattled and jounced abominably. Spinello didn’t mind that so very much. “Civilization!” he exclaimed, and then, “Well, of sorts, anyhow. This
is
Unkerlant.”

His driver seemed less impressed. “A few miles of this jerking and we’d both be pissing blood,” he said. “Sir.”

Like most towns in Unkerlant that had gone through the fire of war, Waldsolms had seen better days. Brigadier Tampaste, who commanded the division, made his headquarters in what had probably been a merchant’s house; what had been the local governor’s castle was no longer standing.

Tampaste was young for a brigadier, as Spinello was young for a colonel. No: they would have been young for their ranks before the war. Nowadays, a man could rise quickly … if he lived. Like Spinello’s, Tampaste’s wound badge and ribbon showed he’d been hit twice.

“You’re the first one who’s made it here,” he told Spinello. “I’ve set out smoked fish and black bread and spirits. Don’t be bashful.”

“That’s never been one of my vices, sir,” Spinello answered, and helped himself. The smoked fish was tasty, but full of tiny bones. The spirits packed enough punch to make his hair stand on end. “Good,” he wheezed through a charred throat. “Good, but strong. If we’re truly short on cinnabar, we ought to feed the dragons this stuff, to make them flame farther.”

“By what I hear, people
are
talking about doing something along those lines,” Tampaste said, which took Spinello by surprise. “The drawback, of course, is that drunken dragons are even wilder and stupider than they would be otherwise, if such a thing is possible.” He sipped his own spirits without flinching; Spinello wondered if he’d copper-plated his gullet. “How do you view the situation in front of us, Colonel?”

“Sir, I don’t like it,” Spinello said at once. “Swemmel’s men are up to something, but I don’t know what. I don’t like it whenever they try to get cute with us; it means they’ve got something up their sleeves.”

“Do you think we can throw in another spoiling attack and disrupt them?” Tampaste asked.

Spinello shook his head. “Not my brigade, anyway. We’re in no shape for it, not after the attack on Pewsum failed.”

“You handled your men well there, Colonel,” Tampaste said. “No blame to you that the try didn’t succeed. Just … too many Unkerlanters in the neighborhood. We’ve sung that song before.”

“If we sing it again too often, we’ll have too bloody many Unkerlanters in Algarve, sir,” Spinello said.

Tampaste grimaced. “You shouldn’t say such things.”

“Why?” Spinello asked. “Because they’re not true? Or because nobody wants to think about them even if they are true?”

The division commander plainly didn’t want to answer that. At last, he said, “Because saying them makes them more likely to come true. A mage would tell you the same thing.” Spinello thought that held an element of truth, but only an element. Too many things got said all over the world for any one of them to have much chance of swinging things one way or another. Before he could say as much, Tampaste changed the subject, asking, “Where in blazes are the rest of my brigade commanders?”

“Stuck in the mud, unless I miss my guess,” Spinello replied. “Whatever the Unkerlanters are doing, they won’t do it right away.” He took another pull at his spirits, which made it easier for him to sneer at anything and everything Unkerlanter. “It’s not as if they bothered paving their roads so they could move on them all year long.”

Tampaste said, “Captives claim one of the reasons Swemmel didn’t pave more of the roads was for fear we could move on them.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Spinello admitted. “If it’s true, we must have taught them quite a lesson during the Six Years’ War.”

“Maybe now they’re teaching us some things we’d rather not learn,” the brigadier said, and then, before Spinello could call him on it. “And now who’s speaking words of ill omen?” The gesture Tampaste used to turn aside the omen dated back to the days when the Algarvians skulked through the woods in the far south and the Kaunian Empire bestrode most of eastern Derlavai. Spinello had seen it reproduced on classical Kaunian monuments, and on pottery in the museum at Trapani.

Two of his fellow brigade leaders did eventually show up. The meeting that followed wasn’t worth having, not as far as Spinello was concerned. Both other colonels, like him, had seen more going on among the Unkerlanters opposite them than they would have liked. But both of them, also like him, claimed to lack the force to do anything about it. “Can you get us more men, sir?” one of them asked Tampaste.

The division commander unhappily shook his head. “I’ve got everything I can do to hold what strength I have,” he answered. “The bigwigs keep trying to rob me and send men south. That’s all they can think of. That’s where the worst of the fighting has been, so they think it always will be.”

“They’re a pack of fools, in that case,” Spinello burst out.

“As may be,” Tampaste said dryly. “But they’re a pack of fools with fancier rank badges than yours, Colonel, and fancier badges than mine, too. Any other comments?” After his depressing remarks, nobody said a thing. He nodded as if he didn’t seem surprised. “Very well, gentlemen. Dismissed.”

Spinello headed back toward his brigade, east of Pewsum, thinking dark thoughts. His mood did not improve when an Unkerlanter dragon dove at his wagon. He and the driver both leaped off into the mud. Had the enemy dragonflier timed his beast’s burst of flame as well as he might have, that would have done them no good. As things were, the Unkerlanter waited too long, and the flame kicked up steam east of the wagon. He didn’t come back for a second attack, but flew on, looking for another target.

Dripping and cold and filthy, Spinello scrambled back up into the wagon. “He didn’t think we were important enough to bother finishing off,” he said. “He went off to find something bigger and juicier.”

His driver was every bit as wet and cold and dirty as he was. “Are you complaining, sir?” the fellow asked.

“Not complaining, exactly,” Spinello admitted. “But my self-importance is tweaked. I want the Unkerlanters to think I’m
worth
killing, if you know what I mean.”

“Aye, sir.” The driver nodded. An Algarvian who didn’t think himself the center of the world was hardly an Algarvian at all.

By the time Spinello got back to the tumbledown hut in the village of Gleina that he was using for his own headquarters, he was shivering and his teeth were chattering. The soldiers in the village made sympathetic noises. So did Jadwigai, the brigade’s pretty little Kaunian mascot. “What can we do to make you feel better, Colonel?” she asked.

Come to bed with me. That’d do a proper job of warming me up.
He thought it—he thought it very loudly—but he didn’t say it.
What I do
—
or don’t do
—
-for my men.
The really annoying thing was, he didn’t think he would have to force her to slip between the sheets with him. If he broached the idea, he thought she’d lie down beside him gladly enough. Vanai would never have opened her legs for him if he hadn’t set her grandfather to building roads, but Jadwigai genuinely seemed to like him.