them might live. If not. . . Fernao grimaced.
“How long till we near the land of the Ice People?” he asked at breakfast the next morning. Tables and benches in the galley were mounted on gimbals, to minimize the chance of porridge and smoked pork and wine flying every which way.
Commander Diniz was in charge of the
Fernao admired his easygoing good humor. He also admired the way the officer ate. His own stomach seemed uncertain whether it was supposed to cower between his feet or crawl hand over hand up his throat. The mage finished his own porridge and pork with grim determination. Food in the Royal Lagoan Navy was made to be tolerated, not relished. Compared to what lay ahead on the austral continent. . .
“Have you ever eaten boiled camel’s flesh?” he asked Diniz.
“No, sir mage, can’t say that I have,” the officer replied. “Of course, I won’t be going ashore, so it’s a treat I’ll just have to do without.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Fernao said in a hollow voice. He’d forgotten that. Misery loved company, and here he had to be alone. His gloom didn’t last long. Few others from the
He wondered what the Ice People themselves would make of the Lagoan expeditionary force. From everything he’d seen, civilization meant little to them. But his brief contempt faded. No one would deny Algarve was a civilized kingdom, but the Ice People could never have done what King Mezentio s mages had used the tools and spells of civilization to accomplish.
He also wondered how Algarve would respond to the Lagoan thrust. Mezentio couldn’t well afford to lose his main source of cinnabar, but could he well afford to send an army across the Narrow Sea to help Yanina fight the Lagoans?
There was plenty of dark in which to whistle. This far south, just past the winter solstice, the sun hardly peeped above the northern horizon before setting again. Clouds turned what little light it sent into dusk.
And yet, the Lagoan fleet came up to the edge of the ice shelf jutting out from the austral continent on schedule and without further mishap. Fernao tipped his hat to Colonel Peixoto and the colonel’s comrades back in Setubal. He wouldn’t have believed such a thing had he not seen it with his own eyes.
“Over the side you go.” Captain Fragoso seemed happy about the business. As Commander Diniz had said, he didn’t have to climb down that rope ladder.
Fernao did. Once he got down on the ice, he promptly slipped and fell despite the spiked shoes he was wearing. The sight of a fair-sized army descending from the freighters--and of the soldiers there also stumbling on the ice--went further to console him than he’d expected. Sure enough, misery did love company.
He had plenty of company. He was plenty miserable, too. Night had already begun to fall by the time the Lagoan army began its slow, awkward slog across the ice in the direction of the Barrier Mountains. The army didn’t reach land till dawn the next day. A couple of men of the Ice People sat mounted on their hairy, two-humped camels, watching the Lagoans approach. Fernao peered at them through a spyglass he borrowed from an officer. They were laughing. Fernao fell down on the ice for about the twentieth time. He decided he couldn’t blame them..
Marshal Rathar was used to smelling wood smoke and coal smoke as he walked through the streets of Cottbus. For the past couple of days, he’d been smelling a new, sharper odor with diem: paper smoke. Frightened clerks in the Unkerlanter capital were starting to burn their records lest they fall into Algarvian hands. They thought Cottbus would fall. Even if they proved right, Rathar doubted getting rid of their files would do them much good. King Mezentio’s men would still have them, after all.
Some of the clerks--and some higher officials, too--seemed to have come to the same conclusion, and seemed determined not to let the Algarvians catch them. Every ley-line caravan heading west was full of important-looking people with official-looking orders urgently requiring their presence away from Cottbus. Some few of those orders might even have been genuine. Rathar wouldn’t have bet more than a couple of coppers on it, though.
He kicked his way through a knee-high snowdrift as he neared the great open plaza around the royal palace. As far as he was concerned, Cottbus was better off without functionaries who skedaddled when trouble came near. He wanted people around him who could keep their heads. But if King Swemmel ever found out how many people were fleeing, a lot of them were liable not to keep their heads, in the most literal sense of the words imaginable.
