he--and his king--didn’t want them to find out he’d been talking with the Unkerlanters. The redheads would seek to become even more overbearing allies than they were already.
He wished Zuwayza could have gone on without any allies at all. Then he sighed one more time. That
Along with the rest of the Lagoan force on the austral continent, Fernao trudged west toward Heshbon, the easternmost colony the Yaninans had carved out for themselves on the northern coast of the land of the Ice People. He’d visited Heshbon before, after spiriting King Penda of Forthweg out of Yanina. He would willingly--eagerly--have forgone visiting the place again, but nobody’d asked his opinion.
“Well, you were right about one thing,” Affonso said as the two mages kicked their way through the snow.
Fernao eyed his colleague and tentmate. “I’m right about any number of things,” he said with a sorcerer’s almost unconscious arrogance. “Which one have you got in mind?”
“I wouldn’t eat camel meat if I had any choice,” Affonso answered, “and neither would anyone else in his right mind.”
“The Ice People like it.” Fernao paused meditatively. “Of course, that proves your point, doesn’t it?”
“Aye.” The younger mage’s sigh sent a foggy cloud out in front of him. “Cinnabar.” He made the word into a curse. “No one would ever come here if it weren’t for that. I wish I never had, I’ll tell you that.”
“There are furs, too,” Fernao said, as the Lagoans did whenever discussions of why anyone bothered coming to the land of the Ice People began. Affonso proceeded to tell him, in great detail, what he could do with the austral continent’s furs. His argument made up in intensity what it lacked in coherence. Fernao laughed loud and long.
After Affonso regained some of his temper, he said, “Do you suppose the Yaninans will come out and fight us this side of Heshbon?”
“Trying to figure out what the Yaninans will do is always foolish because half the time they don’t know themselves till they do it,” Fernao answered. That was how Lagoans usually thought of Yaninans. Having been in Patras, the capital of Yanina, Fernao understood how much truth the cliche held.
“Can they hire enough Ice People to give us a hard time?” Affonso asked.
That was a better question, and one with a less certain answer. Fernao only shrugged and kept walking. The idea worried him. By what he’d seen in Heshbon, King Tsavellas’ men hadn’t gone out of the way to endear themselves to the natives of the austral continent. On the other hand, gold could be endearing all by itself. And the Yaninans hadn’t had much luck attacking the Lagoan army on their own.
Two evenings later, just as the Lagoans were making camp, half a dozen Ice People rode up to them on camels plainly a cut above the common stock. One of them proved to speak Yaninan. Not many Lagoans did, so Lieutenant General Junqueiro summoned Fernao to interpret for him. Fernao’s Yaninan was also less than perfect, but he thought he could make himself understood in the language.
The man of the Ice People who spoke Yaninan said, “Tell your chief I am Elishamma the son of Ammihud, who was the son of Helori, who was the son of Shedeur, who was the son of Izhar, who was the son of...” The genealogy went on for some time, till Elishamma finished, “... who was the son of a god.”
He necessarily used a word from his own language for that last. Instead of abstract powers, the Ice People believed in men writ large on the face of the universe. Fernao found the notion ludicrous, to say nothing of barbarous. He hadn’t come to argue such notions with Elishamma, though, but to translate for Junqueiro. Having done so, he added in Lagoan, “Give him all your forefathers, too.” He started to say,
Junqueiro did him proud, naming a dozen generations of ancestry. If any of them was fictitious, Fernao couldn’t have proved it. The lieutenant general said, “Ask him what he wants from us.”
Fernao did. Elishamma told him, complete with histrionics centuries out of fashion anywhere but the austral continent: not even the Algarvians indulged in so much boasting and bragging. Fernao couldn’t try to hurry it along, not without mortally insulting the chieftain.
At last, Elishamma ran down. That let Junqueiro ask once more, “And what do you want with us?”
“The mangy ones”--so Ice People spoke of men less hairy than themselves--“of Yanina will pay us gold to fight you. How much gold will you pay us to stay calm?”
“Before I answer, you will allow me to speak with my wise man here,” the Lagoan commander said, pointing to Fernao.
