Page 27 of Into the West

“It actually worked!” she said. “I wasn’t sure it would, but it did!”

Ivar perked up at that. “That’s good news!” he exclaimed. “When it gets colder, you can come up ahead with me, and we can guarantee we’ll bring back a deer or something like one!”

“Why wait until it’s colder?” Delia asked, at the same time that Briada put in, “Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking of—”

“We haven’t encountered any hostiles yet, Sergeant,” Ivar replied to Briada first. “The most useful thing she can do is bag us a deer.” Then he turned to Delia. “Because right now we’re doing fine with the geese, ducks, and fish you’re catching, but when it gets colder, the geese and ducks will be gone, the fish will sink to the bottom of the river to sleep because there are no insects to eat, and we’ll need to find game that is active. Rabbits, yes, but a man can starve eating rabbit, even if he stuffs himself.”

She looked at him dubiously. Surely he was joking. . . . Briada had the same expression on her face.

“It’s true,” Alberdina verified. “There’s not enough fat. In about a week living only on rabbit, or on rabbit and grains, you’ll get sick, and if you don’t get some fat, you’ll die.”

“Huh.” Bret and Bart looked as stunned as if Alberdina had declared that she was the Emperor returned. Briada didn’t looked stunned, but she did look surprised.

“That’s why I am hoarding all the goose and duck fat,” Sai said.

“It’s your job to think about that,” Briada finally replied, as the flickering light illuminated all their faces. “It’s my job to think about defense. And now, in Delia, we have something better than all the Poomers in the world.” She grinned.

And Delia said nothing, but her heart swelled.

The convoy was almost—not quite—past the village they had first encountered when they crossed the Gate, and Kordas was about ready to put that potential source of problems out of his mind.

I am putting more furlongs on poor Arial than I ever did at home, Kordas thought, as he neared the midpoint of the convoy, after having ridden all the way to the end and back, making sure that everything was going according to plan. The only complaints that the people at the end had were that the herds in front of them had decimated the available browse by the time they reached a spot. But they admitted that their beasts were not suffering. The mages always made enough grass to grow to feed the herds overnight, and Kordas could see for himself that the horses and herds were still in good condition, so he just chalked the comments up to “people need something to complain about,” and was glad it was nothing worse than that.

If worse came to worst, so he had been told, some of the mages would be able to make grass grow even in the dead of winter. He didn’t know how to do that, but Sai had assured him that for the “green mages,” of which there were several, it was not only possible but trivial. At least, as long as they themselves had adequate rest and food. This was how the Imperial gardens at the Palace had been able to produce fruits, vegetables, and flowers all year around.

“Rose,” he said to the Doll riding behind him. “Ask the Dolls with the green mages to say I want them to do something about the grass all along the riverbank please. More of it, please, not less of it. People at the rear are complaining the ground has been eaten bare.”

“Certainly, Lord Baron,” the Doll replied pleasantly.

Kordas wanted the expedition’s pace to be brisk, not least because the faster they were, the less of a shock they would be on the ecosystems they passed through. One of Jonatan’s crude but true remarks was that most environmental-theater spellwork was like building a wagon, but good luck, you weren’t allowed to move from where you were standing. The act of building a spell kept the mage from observing all of its possible effects, because its structure as a spell at all was in the way of their senses. That, factored with the scale of some undertakings they had in mind—yes, a thing could be attempted with magic, but minor effects on a smaller scale became major ones that tipped over into entirely new dangers once they crested certain thresholds. “Inconvenient” side effects at room-scale, like glass breakage, became “the ground split open, and we’re losing cows” at village scale.

Non-mages don’t think of it much, but if a mage is there to talk with you, it means they’ve survived their own work, and you should be impressed. A universal truth of magic-casting was that if energy was being altered, formed, repurposed, or modulated, that meant heat would be a byproduct of the alteration, as much as a millstone made heat while doing its work.

Small wonder that magic is most practiced in the winter, when the heat is needed anyway.

The mark of mastery was if the mage was crafty with where to dump the heat. Snap spellcasting, like combat tactical spells, began with the mage stabbing a unseen “spear” of anchoring magic into the earth, and an instant later, the spell was castable without igniting one’s own clothes. Or fellow casters.

The expedition’s mages were being as safe as they could, and the spellcasting standards they’d agreed upon built firm anchors, like lances stabbed into hay bales, and sent the thermal recoil from magic manipulation deep into the ground, to simply warm up stone. Now, scale that up a hundred times, and that’s a lot of heated earth, which could be devastating to the life cycles within a land. Bugs, fish, and worms don’t take well to being boiled in their bathwater while some mage makes plants grow furlongs away. Kordas had placed the natives’ and the expedition’s survival into the mages’ hands, and muttered a short prayer of thanks for the cadre of mages with them—and that so far, they all liked and backed him.

I wouldn’t take kindly to boiling in my bathwater, either.

The convoy wasn’t moving any faster than a leisurely stroll, but that was to be expected. They were moving through a broad shallow, and boat piloting was all about dodging sandbars against the current—a sluggish current, but it was definitely still a factor—and the ratio of barges to horses was definitely a big factor. Some of the narrower barges were simply used as floating piers, and wagon ferries were employed to get livestock through past unsympathetic terrain, and were shuffled to wherever they were needed. This slow pace meant that the barnyard fowl could forage and still keep up with their shelter-barges, and the swine, sheep, and goats easily could do the same. It also meant that people stuck as “passengers” could do some frog hunting and fishing, and for the time being, the management of the kitchen barges wouldn’t need to think about slaughtering more animals than they needed for a single communal meal. It was all part of Isla’s carefully calculated organizational plan. There were so many barges and people per kitchen; so many supply barges for each kitchen; and methods for splitting or filling rosters when a boat got stuck, or some accident disrupted progress. Each kitchen got a set amount of fresh meat for the morning meal, depending on whether people in that group had hunted or fished for it, or if they’d drawn lots over who was going to supply it from their herds. Breakfast was usually the biggest meal, and the one that featured things that could be baked or stewed overnight in the coals of a small fire. Dinner was flatbread, cheese, and pickled or raw vegetables; as part of the stockpiling, Kordas and his people had been storing waxed wheels of cheese for two generations, and there was a lot of cheese on those supply barges. Supper was flatbread, and soup or pottage. For a treat, there was flatbread and jam, jelly, or honey. Anything that turned up besides that, well, the people who found it got to decide what was done with it. They’d waited until the weather had turned cold to start their journey, so the bees were all sleeping in their hives and the hives could be closed up and packed together on their own special barges.

At this point, if anyone was hoarding treats, the amounts were insignificant, and wouldn’t matter to anyone’s survival in a crisis. The only exception to the “each kitchen gets meat from the barges assigned to it” was when Kordas, who had more farm beasts than anyone else, allotted one of his to some part of the convoy that was animal-poor. And so far, no one was complaining about the food, or the way the food had been allotted. Isla is an unsung genius at this.

Just as Ceri had advised he get others to do, Kordas had been spending every bit of free time thinking of every possible disaster he could, and trying to work out a way to prevent it or at least soften the effects.

“Kordas,” said Rose into his ear, making him jump. The Doll was so quiet that even though she was riding pillion behind him on Arial, he often forgot she was there. “Villagers have come running to the rear of the convoy, begging for help.”

At first, what she said didn’t quite register. The villagers? Begging for help? But—

Idiot. There was only one reason they would come running to the convoy for help. Oh gods. They’re being attacked by something they can’t fend off by themselves. Or worse. Something, maybe, that farm implements couldn’t drive off.

Or we attracted it with our noise. None of what we do has been quiet, and for good reason—we don’t know what kinds of creatures are ahead, so making a commotion should scare away predators that might otherwise have a go at them. But, there are no guarantees out here—we could attract things too.

He considered not helping only for a fraction of a moment. There really was no choice; if nothing else, he had to set an example to the rest of his people that standing aside and doing nothing when others were in trouble was not going to be looked on with favor. His actions, fortunately, spoke louder than his inner monologue.

Oh gods. I’ve never actually fought anything deadly but the Emperor.