Accidental War Mage

I sat bolt upright. I was breathing heavily, my heart racing, my body damp with sweat. With the blanket falling to my lap, the night breeze felt cold against my bare chest. Katya shifted, squirming to pull the blanket back over herself and blinking up at me sleepily.

The moon was full and high in the sky, so I knew that it was still night. The slow but broad rocking motion informed me that I was in the crow’s nest; I could remember having joined Katya after dinner. Perhaps it was irresponsible of us to sleep in the crow’s nest when it could have been used for a night watch, but we had determined that the crow’s nest had two particularly desirable properties: First, it had privacy, which was in short supply after Constantine had given me half a dozen personal servants as a reward for his rescue and return to Negroponte; and second, it did not smell of livestock and sailors, which is to say soldiers, many of whom had not bathed in some time.

What dream had set me bolt upright? I focused, trying to remember. There had been a cave? Or perhaps an old ruined castle on a mountain. Or both? Leathery membranous wings crossing over the full moon. Eyes glinting in the darkness. A ruby, so dark as to be royal purple – like a gem-prince of the lesser amethysts. General Ognyan Spitignov and his sword – that I had seen in countless nightmares about a massacred village.

But no, there was something more; the Butcher of Belz’s familiar face had lacked eyebrows and eyelashes, every last hair singed away by heat; and his grin was a stiff rictus rather than an expression of a maniac’s emotions. And his sword – I remembered his sword sunk halfway into the earth, a crucifix. And the intense gaze I saw reflected in the blade, it had not belonged to General Ognyan Spitignov. The general’s boots had dangled in the air behind the sword, on either side of a wooden pole.

As I sat there hyperventilating, Katya slipped her hand over my chest, driving the images away.

“The old nightmare again?” Her fingers were warm against my chilled chest.

“Yes… no, it was different.” I paused. A fleeting imagined scent like roast pork faded, the last lingering trace of the dream. “I think in this one, he was dead.”

“Hm,” Katya said. “Was I in this dream?”

“No,” I said.

“Am I with you now?” Katya asked. Finger by finger, her hand crawled up my chest and around the back of my neck.

“Yes,” I said, my hands slipping over soft skin as I pulled her into my lap.

“So the nightmare is over. It will not come back.” She kissed me with a sense of firm authority, denying me the opportunity to argue the point as she clung to me hungrily. It was not long before all thoughts of my dreams were pushed out of my mind by Katya; and then I fell asleep with her lying on top of me. The nightmare did not return.

Morning found me well-rested and giving a sunrise language lesson to the mermaid following us. It would have been better if one of the Swedes was giving her lessons instead of me, but I didn’t feel like testing Ragnar’s disbelief in the existence of mermaids yet again, Felix was preoccupied with logistical matters, and none of the other Swedes could get by adequately in Venetian (much less Greek or Dalmatian).

I heard a footstep behind me and then a crash. The mermaid giggled, slipping below the water; I found one of my new personal servants kneeling with a tray in her hands. Two damp pieces of toast and one tea-doused egg remained on the tray; a third piece of toast marked the original point of impact for the teapot. A teacup was lodged in her dress. As she addressed profuse polite apologies to my boots, I took in the shade and length of her hair (light brown, with a braid that reached down to her waist) and tried to recall her name.

“Zaneta,” I said as I gently took hold of the tray. “It’s okay if you’re a little clumsy.”

“I’m not clumsy,” she said to my feet. I could still see only the top of her head as she continued. “I just need more practice carrying things on trays. And on a moving ship.”

Holding the tray by one edge, I made a sandwich from the tea-soaked toast, putting the egg between the two slices, and then set the tray down on the deck. After taking a quick bite (I was, after all, hungry) I reached out my free hand. “Here. Stand up,” I said.

Her silky smooth hands, free of any callouses, gripped mine as she pulled herself up. Her face was streaked with tears. In the ensuing conversation, she insisted she had little practice with carrying trays; my ensuing questions revealed that she had some practice with painting, embroidery, playing cards, and supposedly some forms of magical entertainment.

Armed with knowledge from Georg about focus wizards, I asked if she was missing some necessary focus in order to succeed in her endeavor of recreating delightful music; she responded by flinging an angry slap in the direction of my face and accusing me of tormenting her with lies to further debase and humiliate her. As I stood there in surprise with my cheek stinging, she sank back down to her knees, rubbing the palm of her hand with a pained expression. Then she broke down crying again, begging me to punish only her for her insolence and not her family, which had already been punished sufficiently by their loss of triarchical status.

Now that I understood that she came from a noble family fallen upon hard times, I thought I understood her anxiety. I meant to reassure her by telling her that if she had second thoughts about entering my service, I would be happy to let her off at the next port to pursue an alternate career or take passage home; however, I only got as far as telling her that she could disembark in Constantinople before her eyes opened wide in fear. She bowed low and started wailing again, clutching my feet and begging me to give her a second chance before dragging her to the dreaded markets of the Turks.

Never before had I met anyone with such a terror of going shopping in a foreign city that the mere mention of bringing her to a city (not even of any intention to take her shopping there) was enough to raise such objections. That said, the seeming paradox of emotion she presented by alternating between attachment and anger was concerning, and I suspected that Katya would become concerned if Zaneta spent a great deal of time kneeling in front of me. I bade her stand and calm herself, and then dismissed her from my presence, sending her to Georg.

We had very good fishing all the way to the Hellespont, a fact that was no more natural than the wind that blew us directly there. Being on friendly terms with mermaids and dolphins helped; the blonde mermaid in particular was excited to experience the novelty of fire-based cuisine and often took the lead in herding fish into our nets. The dolphins were more mercenary in inclination, interested mostly in cooperating on the basis of the fact that with a net on one side of their hunting formation, they could ensure that an entire school of fish was eaten all at once rather than most of them escaping.

While she was interested in the greater variety in taste, the mermaid’s motivations in helping herd a diverse range of fish into our nets were not strictly culinary. One of Ragnar’s poems mentioned an edible fish known as a torsk, and she was eager to try to impress Ragnar by getting his favorite fish to him.

As I have no familiarity with torsk, I was unable to describe them in detail to the mermaid, which made this quest difficult. With each new species of fish she herded into our nets came inevitable disappointment, as one or another Swede on deck answered my question in the negative. While it is difficult to prove that there are no torsk anywhere in the waters of the Aegean, I soon came to believe they are strictly a fish of the north.

Within the Hellespont, however, the wind was no longer at our command; and, further, we did not wish to stop to fish. It is a narrow strait, a busy one, and due to the unusual nature of our vessel, we were assessed a passage toll that gave me pause. The logic the Sultan’s men employed was that since our ship had three times as many decks of oars as a regular galley, we should pay three times the usual tariff.

Even given that logic, the toll seemed high, and I convened a quick advisory council belowdecks including Captain Rimehammer and those members of my crew who were more local to the area – mainly Greeks and Venetians. Unfortunately, the single Venetian whose judgement I trusted best (Maestro Zilioli) deferred along with the rest of the Venetians once one of my new personal servants, Zaneta, told me that I should respond to their insulting attempt to extort me by razing Troy to the ground.

Were I an intemperate and uneducated man, I might have followed that advice; however, from my studies, I knew that the mighty fortress city of Troy overlooking the strait is no mundane fortress. Its reconstruction involved some of the most advanced magics of the Augustinian era, the foundation laid into warding patterns designed by no less than Virgil, one of the greatest Roman archmages.

Even if I was inclined to halt our voyage to lay siege to Troy with a single battalion of soldiers, I was not experienced in tunnel-magic to undermine walls (as was the case with the Burgundian abbot we had met in Batavis). Additionally, Troy’s walls were well-warded against magical attack, and those wards had been reinforced repeatedly over the centuries after Virgil’s great project was complete. Indeed, those wards were why we did not have a favorable wind – the wards that extended into the rock cliffs effectively shielded the whole Hellespont from weather magic.

At that point in the discussion, Zaneta had another emotional outburst (something about lies, extortion, and fraud) and was swiftly removed from the proceedings by an alarmed-looking Maestro Zilioli whispering fiercely in her ear.

Further discussion with the Greek seamen we’d taken aboard established that the proposed tariff was more than triple the actual usual tariff for most merchants, and that the tolls charged were ordinarily related to the value of goods carried. That council complete, I returned to the forecastle, hailing the firebox-powered steamship that had blocked our path.

While not as large or as impressive as a French cruiser – it rode quite low in the water and its hull was sheathed in lead rather than Corsican brass – the Turkish warship had two sidewheels, bombards both fore and aft on elevated firing platforms, and smaller guns lining its sides. If forced to fight, perhaps I could shield us from their guns, and perhaps our return fire would give us the edge; but then we would be shelled from the looming fortress of Troy. Picking a fight instead of paying a toll seemed unreasonable.

Instead, I discussed the matter with them reasonably, asking for a more reasonable tariff, discussing some of the particulars of our cargo, listing the rates I had been told were normal for merchant ships passing through, and so on. Clearly there was no fixed rate, and while there were no alternate routes to take a ship through to the other side of the strait, perhaps we were not so interested in passing through the strait today after all.

Once several merchant ships had queued up behind us, waiting for their own exchange with the Turkish warship, the fee lowered slightly; and I paid, sailing through without assaulting the walls of Troy.