Accidental War Mage

On the last day of our voyage from Venice to Negroponte, Fyodor’s wife woke halfway between dawn and midnight to feed their complaining baby and expressed her dissatisfaction with the roll of the ship in the waves, the perpetual presence of salt spray, and the quality of the food available to her aboard ship. In our cook’s defense, he did provide her with two of our limited supply of fresh eggs from the chickens we had aboard as part of her breakfast.

Shortly thereafter, a strong and steady wind from the south propelled us with rapidly increasing speed until sails strained, masts creaked, and ropes flexed tautly, threatening to snap under the tension. By mid-morning, the blonde mermaid found she needed to either stay entirely beneath the water or entirely above with her tail skimming the water, splashing up a thin vee-shaped wave behind her; if she was half in and half out of the water, the force of tension between water and air was too much. The novel experience of skimming along entirely outside of the water was something she found exhilarating at first, but she told me it grew uncomfortable if she did it for more than a few minutes at a time.

We arrived at the port city of Karystos on the southern tip of the island called Negroponte around mid-day. It was clear and sunny in spite of the intensity of the wind. Even with the wind rapidly dying down as we approached shore, Banneret Teushpa ordered the sails raised and the rowing-engine readied for braking action, which is to say oars digging into the water to slow our approach. (The Cimmerian had retained his appointment as principal helmsman; I could hardly do otherwise given the total success of his ramming maneuver.)

I should explain that the port of Karystos is sheltered in a semicircular bay that faces south. With a powerful and steady wind from the south, the local fishing boats (nearly all sail-powered) were unable to leave, and Venetian galley captains (conservative about risk) were concerned that even if they could row into the strong wind, its strength and constancy seemed an unnatural harbinger of ill weather.

In addition to the presence of a convoy of galleys scheduled to return to Venice and the local fishermen, a motley assortment of fishing boats and independent merchant vessels traveling either east or west had blown into the harbor, choosing to dock at Karystos rather than risk being blown further off course or having their sails torn off their masts. Thus, the docks at Karystos were quite crowded when we arrived; in fact, we had not crossed the whole bay by the time a small boat rowed out to greet us, a well-dressed young man standing in the prow while weathered seamen rowed steadily.

“There is no room, the wind has pinned all the ships!” The young man shouted in Venetian through cupped hands. “We are all crowded as not even the fishermen are out! You must beach your vessel to the east of town or turn about under oar and seek a different harbor!”

I frowned, moistening one finger and holding it up in the air. The strong wind from the south had tapered to a mere gentle breeze. I cupped my hands in front of my mouth and shouted back down. “I believe the wind has shifted!” I shouted back. “It will probably blow back the other way soon enough! We can wait a little while, surely someone will want to leave port.”

Natural philosophy dictates that for every perturbation of the natural order by magic, there is an opposed and equal, if less ordered, perturbation imposed in the absence of magic. With the weather-witch having called wind from the south, that would have placed a greater pressure of wind across the island of Negroponte, and the natural relaxation of that order would tend to result in an opposite flow of wind. (Or, as I later learned, circular flows of wind. The natural order of wind is one involving cycles, which I did not well understand at the time.)

The young man, who had clearly been given a message verbatim without considering that conditions might change as his boat was rowed out to greet the incoming vessel. He rubbed his fingers inside his ears with a pained expression. “It’s been blowing from the south all day long,” he said, speaking in a normal speaking tone rather than shouting. “What kind of dullard am I speaking with? And what manner of ship is this? Who paints eyes upon the sides of ships?”

As the other men in the boat denied familiarity with the style of my ship, I adjusted my cerulean cape and twirled my trident before tapping its butt on the deck. “A dullard with valuable cargo and no interest in damaging my ship’s hull on unseen rocks in unfamiliar waters,” I said, no longer shouting as loud as possible but still speaking in the sort of carrying tone officers must use on the battlefield. “Are you the harbormaster?”

“I came from the harbormaster,” the young man shouted. “But his instructions were clear!”

“Conditions have changed,” I told him, waving my hand in the air as Banneret Teushpa ordered the oars put into the water. Our forward momentum shortly came to a halt, the wave from the oars’ braking action sending the rowboat bobbing wildly up and then back down. “Besides, my ship is smaller than a single Venetian great galley. Surely you can make room for just one more ship.”

I wasn’t actually sure of the comparison, as size can be tricky to measure by look alone without resorting to mathematical calculation. Our ship was taller with three separate oar decks above the waterline crowned with a full deck on top of that, with the forecastle rising even higher. Most of the Venetian galleys looked to be the same length as our ship, and most of the ones that were the same length looked to be wider, but all of them had only one oar deck.

After the harbormaster’s messenger climbed back into his boat, we waited for a while. When a gentle breeze came in from the north, a flurry of activity on the docks followed.

It was still early afternoon when I exercised the privilege of rank to put myself at liberty and left the Rimehammer cousins in charge of the ship. Katya followed closely; Yuri changed his mind after considering the climb down the rope ladder required to exit the ship. I had not yet set foot on dry land when a bandy-legged and half-blind old man greeted me with effusive and unexpected affection.

“Such wonderfully rhythmic rowing! It is so good to see a Roman ship,” the old man said in Greek as he rushed forward to hug me. His accent was unfamiliar to me. As he hugged me, he whispered in my ear. “Your oarsmen are very good. Guard them. We Romans, we must stick together. The Latins are worse than the Franks were, nearly as bad as the Turks – they will steal your men away with coin or siren spell.”

I cleared my throat, pushing the man out to arm’s length as I checked that my belt pouch remained tied shut and attached to my belt. In my best schoolbook Greek, I thanked the old man for his concern politely, wished him well, and found myself immediately invited to dinner. I attempted to demur, but as I did not wish to be rude and he was willing to follow me both to and from the harbormaster’s office, I found myself obliged to accept.

Katya followed silently at a distance.

“He speaks like a proper Roman,” the bandy-legged old man said pointedly to a weathered old woman, speaking past a bandy-legged younger man who was the actual target of his comment as he waved his hand pie in the air. “Good polished old-fashioned Greek like they spoke at the court of Alexios the First, if I am not mistaken.”

“Dad, who is this stranger?” The younger man was not easily distracted.

I opened my mouth to answer, but the old man was faster. As interrupting him would be rude, I shut my mouth without a word while he provided an explanation.

“This is Markos the Crow,” the old man said. “Captain of the dromond with the triple oar deck and bane of the Latins.” By now, I knew that ‘Latin’ to the old man meant ‘Venetian,’ while when he said ‘Roman,’ he was referring to Greek-speaking people like himself.

The younger man frowned. “You’re from the funny-looking galley? The one that called up the storm to punish the harbormaster?”

“We didn’t call up any storms,” I said, ignorance leading me astray. “But I am the captain of the triple-decked galley that came in today.”

Later, I would learn from the weather-witch that the truth was slightly more complicated. An equal and opposite perturbation returning the natural order of an unnatural clear south wind could (and in that case did) involve the rapid movement of a tempest from east to west, such as the one that raked the mouth of the bay just as the Venetian convoy was leaving. While she hadn’t intended to call up that particular storm, its arrival was an indirect consequence of her actions.

The old man cleared his throat loudly. “And when the rest of your fleet of triple-deck dromonds arrives, the Latins will pack up and leave Euboea without a fight. They can’t go to war with a new Roman Navy, not squeezed as they are between the French and the Turks.”

I shook my head. “I’m not Roman,” I said, holding up a hand. Before I could tell him that my ship was alone, he continued, overruling my attempt at interruption.

“Not by blood, no, but Rome has always had its adopted auxiliaries. And you, you’re a Varangian,” he said confidently. “For generations, you Varangians served as the most trusted guards of the Roman Emperor in Constantinople. Your people may have come from somewhere up the Slavutich originally, but you of the Varangian Guard are true Romans at heart now.”

For a moment, there was only the sound of the old woman smacking her lips as she chewed on her own hand pie. My intention to speak was halted by confusion; I had been thrown off my mental course by the old man’s reference to the Slavutich River. Did he know that I came from the Golden Empire? Or did he think merely that my ancestors came from there? Then I heard distant shouting in Swedish. Ragnar sounded both unhappy and drunk… and should have been still aboard the ship according to the orders I had left behind.

“Thank you for the meal,” I said as I stood, bowing to the old woman first and then to the old man. “However, I believe matters have arisen that require my urgent attention.”

The old woman must have been pleased by my politeness, for she slipped a hand pie in my coat pocket as I squeezed past her, ducking low to go through a door that was only a handspan taller than the old man himself. Jogging down the street with one hand on my belt to keep my sword from bouncing too much, I could see across the harbor to where the crowd from a dockside taverna had spilled out into the open. Several men were standing around outside with lanterns, one of them still wet from the sea and the other two looking like they could be his brothers.

By lantern-light, I could clearly see three other fishermen. The first held tightly onto a twitching tail tied in rope and wrapped in a net; the second held a wheelbarrow supporting the weight of their catch; and the third held the rope around her wrists. The mermaid’s golden hair gleamed in the lanternlight as she whimpered around the knot of fabric stuffed in her mouth.