That mattered very much to a Kuusaman. Picking her way around the puddles, Pekka really noticed the buildings that more often just formed the backdrop before which she played out her life. Most of them were wooden: Kuusamo was a land of wide forests. Some of the timber was stained, some pale with weathering. Very little was painted, not on the outside; gaudy display was alien to her people. The handful of bn'ck buildings harmonized with the rest. They were brown or yellow-brown or tan - no reds or oranges to jar the eyes.
"No," she said softly, but with no less pride than that, "we are no branch from the Algarvic stem, nor the Kaunian, either. Let them swagger and preen. We endure."
She hardly knew when she left the college grounds and went into Kajaam itself. The people on the streets here were a little older, a little more sober looking. The Lagoans and men from the Kaunian countries who leavened the mix were more apt to be sailors than students. Shops showed their wares, but the shopkeepers didn't rush out, grab her by the arm, and try to drag her inside, as happened in Jelgava. That would have been gaudy display, too.
A public caravan hummed by her, the wind of its passage ruffling the rainwater in the gutters. The two coaches were also of wood, with their roofs overhanging the windows to either side to ward against the weather. In Lagoas or Sibiu, they would have been metal. In Valmiera or Jelgava, they would have been painted to look like marble, whatever they were made of.
Pekka paid a couple of coppers for a news sheet and walked along reading it. She made a clucking noise of dismay when she saw that the
Gongs had thrown back the fleet trying to retake Obuda. Admiral Risto was quoted as saying, "They had more dragons up their sleeve than we expected. We'll regroup and have another go at them sometime later."
Swemmel of Unkerlant would have had Risto's head for a failure like that. The Naval Ministry issued a statement over the signature of the Seven Princes expressing full confidence in the adrmiral. Lopping off heads was not the Kuusaman style. Pekka wondered, just for a moment, whether the war would have gone better if it had been.
In the war on the mainland of Derlavai, Valmiera and Jelgava and Forthweg all claimed smashing victories over the Algarvians. Algarve reported smashing victories over her foes, too. Somebody was lying.
Pekka smiled wryly. Maybe everybody was lying.
She walked up into the hills that rose swiftly from the gray, boorming sea.
Gulls wheeled screeching, high overhead. Ajay in a pine sapling screeched, too, on a different note. A bright yellow brimstone butterfly fluttered past.
This time, genuine pleasure filled Pekka's sniffle. Butterflies had only a brief stretch of summer to be on the wing, down here in Kajaami.
Pekka turned off the road and down a narrower one. Her sister and brother-in-law dwelt next door to her, in a weathered wooden house with tall pines behind. Elimaki opened the door when she saw Pekka coming up the walk. Pekka's son dodged past her and ran to his mother with a shout of glee.
She stooped down and took him in her arms. "Were you good for Aunt Elimaki, Uto?" she demanded, doing her imperfect best to sound severe. Uto nodded with grave four-year-old sincerity. Elimaki rolled her eyes, which surprised Pekka not at all.
Pekka took the egg of terror disguised as a small boy by the hand and led him to their own home, making sure he did nothing too drastic along the way. When she went inside, she said, "Try to keep the house halfway clean until your father comes home from the college." Leino, her husband, was also a mage. This term, his last lecture came several hours later than hers.
Uto promised. He always promised. A four-year-old's oaths were written on the wind. Pekka knew it. She took a duck from the rest crate.
The Kaunians had developed that spell, and used it for paralyzing their foes - till both they and their neighbors found countermeasures for it.
After that, it lay almost forgotten for centuries until, with greater understanding of exactly how it worked, modem researchers began applying it both to medicine and to preserving food. In the rest box, the plucked and gutted duck would have stayed fresh for many weeks.
Glazed with cranberry jam, it had just gone into the oven when some thing fell over with a crash. Pekka shut the oven door, splashed water on her hands, and hurried off to see what sort of atrocity Uto had committed this time. [..ka er..] her and Garivald was weeding - exactly what he was supposed to be doing - when King Swemmel's inspectors paid his village a visit. The inspectors wore rock-gray tunics, as if they were Unkerlanter soldiers, and strode along as if they were kings themselves. Garivald knew what he thought of that, but letting them know wouldn't have been efficient. Very much the reverse, in fact.
One of the inspectors was tall, the other short. But for that, they might have been stamped from the same mold. "You!" the tall one called to Garivald. "What's the harvest going to look like here?"
"Still a little too early to tell, sir," Garivald answered, as any man with an ounce - half an ounce - of sense would have done. Rain as the barley and rye were being gathered would be a disaster. It would be an even worse disaster than it might have otherwise, because the inspectors and their minions would cart off Swemmel's share no matter what, leaving the village to get by on the remainder, if there was any.
"Still a little too early to tell," the short one repeated. His accent said he came night out of Cottbus, the capital. In Garivald's ears, it was harsh and choppy, well suited to its arrogant possessor. Southerners weren't in such a big hurry when they opened their mouths. By talking slower, they made asses of themselves less often, too - or so they said when their over lords weren't around to hear.
"If this whole Duchy of Grelz were more efficient all the way around, we'd be better off," the tall one said.
If Swemmel's men, and Kyot's, hadn't burned about every third village in the Duchy of Grelz back around the time Garivald was born, Unkerlant would have been better off. Being efficient was hard without a roof over your head in a southern winter. It was even harder with your fields trampled and your livestock stolen or killed. Even now, a genera tion later, the effects lingered.
The short inspector glared at Garivald, who had stayed on his knees and so was easy to look down on. "Don't think you can cheat us by lying about how much you bring in, either," he snapped. "We have ways of knowing. We have ways of making cheaters sorry, too."
Garivald had to answer that. "I am only one farmer in this village, sir," he said, genuine alarm in his voice now. He knew Villages had vanished off the face of the earth after trying to hold out on Cottbus: that was the excuse King Swemmel's men used once the dirty work was done, any how. He went on, "I have no way of knowing how much the whole village will bring in. The only one who could even guess would be Waddo, the firstman. " He'd never liked Waddo, and didn't care what the-, inspectors did to him.
They both laughed, nastily. "Oh, he knows what we can do," the tall one said. "Never fret yourself about that. But we want to make sure everyone else knows, too. That's efficient, that is." He folded his arms across his chest. "Everybody needs to know King Swemmel's will, not just that ugly lump of a Waddo."
"Aye, sir," Garivald said, more warmly than he'd expected. If Swemmel's inspectors could see that Waddo was an ugly lump, maybe they weren't asses after all. No. That, surely, gave them too much credit.
Maybe they weren't such dreadful asses after all.