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 of Habakkuk, 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 restore Habakkuk’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 keep Habakkuk 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. But Habakkuk 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.”
“Powers below eat the Algarvians,” Obilot repeated. But then she added, “And powers below eat King Swemmel ’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.”
“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.