He slapped the surface of the water in the leviathan pen. That let the beast know who he was and that he was allowed, even required, to be here. Had he got into the water without the slaps, the leviathan might have recognized him; they'd been working together for a while now. Had the arrogant Valmierans got into the water without the recognition signal, their end would have been swift and unpleasant.
Up to the surface came the leviathan. It pointed its long, toothy snout at Cornelu and let out a surprisingly shrill squeak. He patted the slick, smooth skin, then reached into a bucket on the pier and tossed it a couple of fish. They disappeared as if they had never been, fast enough to make anyone watching glad the leviathan was tame and well trained.
Smiling an unpleasant smile, Cornelu threw the beast another mackerel. As its great teeth closed on the tidbit, he turned that smile on the Valmierans he was to ferry across the strait and back to their own kingdom. "Shall we go, gentlemen?" he asked as he slid down into the water.
They looked at each other before answering. At last, one of them said, "Aye," and they both got in.
They weren't leviathan-riders; if Cornelu had to guess, he would have said they'd never done this before, not even once. He had to show them how to secure themselves in harness, and how to lie still along the leviathan's back and not give the beast even inadvertent signals. "It would be unfortunate if you did that," he remarked.
"How unfortunate?" one of the Valmierans asked.
"That depends," Cornelu replied. "You might live. On the other hand…" He was exaggerating, but he didn't want his passengers annoying or confusing the leviathan.
When he was sure everything was ready, he waved to the Lagoans who handled the nets that formed the pen. They waved back and let down one side; the leviathan swam out of the pen and into the harbor channel that led to the sea.
Cornelu wasn't quite so happy as usual to be leaving Setubal. The reason for that was simple: he wasn't alone with his thoughts, as he so often was on leviathanback, and as he craved to be. He had company, and not the best of company, either.
They weren't seamen, despite the rubber suits and spells that kept them from freezing or drowning in the chilly waters of the Strait of Valmiera. And they were Valmieran nobles, which meant that to them even a minor noble of Algarvic blood like Cornelu wasn't far removed from a savage hunting wild boar in the forest. They kept talking about him in Valmieran. He didn't speak it, but enough words were recognizably similar to their classical Kaunian ancestors for him to have no trouble figuring out they weren't paying him compliments.
By the powers above, Valmiera deserved to have the Algarvians run over it, Cornelu thought. If Mezentio's men were only a little smarter, they might have slaughtered all the nobles there- and even more so in Jelgava- and won the commoners to them forever. But they hadn't. They'd worked through the nobles who would work with them and replaced others with men more cooperative but no less nasty. And so both kingdoms still had rebellions simmering against the occupiers.
Maybe these fellows would help bring the rebellion in Valmiera from simmer to boil. That would be good; it would distract the Algarvians from their even bigger troubles elsewhere. But Cornelu wouldn't have bet much above a copper on it. He didn't want anything to do with them. Why would anyone with a dram of sense in their own kingdom think any different?
He knew nothing but relief when he saw the coast of the Derlavaian mainland crawl up over the horizon. It had been an easy trip across the Strait: no enemy ley-line ships, no leviathans, only a couple of dragons off in the distance- and neither of their dragonfliers had spotted the leviathan.
"Is this the place where you are to land us?" one of the Valmierans demanded. "Are you sure this is the place where you are to land us?" He sounded as if he didn't think Cornelu could find his way across the street, let alone across a hundred miles of ocean.
"By the landmarks, by the configuration of the ley lines, this is the place where I am to land you," the leviathan-rider answered with such patience as he could muster. "Swim to shore and twist the Algarvians' tails for them."
The two blonds struck out awkwardly toward the land a couple of hundred yards away. Cornelu would go no closer, for fear of beaching his leviathan. The Valmierans couldn't drown, no matter how hard they tried, not with the spells laid on them. If they had to, they would walk across the seabottom to the shore, breathing as if they were fish. Cornelu felt a little guilty about not wishing them good luck, but only a little.
They didn't bring him any luck, not on the way back to Setubal. An Algarvian dragonflier spotted his leviathan and dropped a couple of eggs close enough to it to panic the beast- and very nearly close enough to hurt or kill it. The leviathan swam at random, deep underwater, till at last it had to surface once more.
That might have been the best thing it could have done. When it did spout, the dragon was far away; the Algarvian aboard it must have assumed that Cornelu would run straight south for Setubal. And so he might have, but he hadn't anything to do with it. The leviathan had swum almost due west- in the direction of Algarve itself. Cornelu would have loved to attack Mezentio's land, but he had no weapons with which to do it, not this time.
He regained control over the leviathan during its next dive, and did manage to lead it away from the Algarvian dragon. The search spirals the dragon flew worked against it this time, carrying it farther and farther from Cornelu. At last, when he was sure the dragonflier couldn't possibly see him, he waved a courteous good-bye. It was a relieved good-bye, too. He hesitated to admit that, even to himself.
About halfway across the Strait, he spied a great many dragons ahead. That meant only one thing: the Lagoans and Algarvians were fighting at sea. On a leviathan not carrying eggs, Cornelu should have stayed away. He knew that. He could do nothing. But the spectacle of the fight would be riveting in itself. He steered the leviathan toward it.
A Lagoan ley-line cruiser was engaging two lighter, swifter Algarvian vessels. They tossed eggs at one another and blazed away with sticks that drew their sorcerous energy from the world's grid over which the ships traveled: sticks far larger and heavier and more powerful than any that could have been made mobile on land.
More eggs fell from the dragons overhead. But they couldn't swoop to drop them with deadly accuracy, as they might have against footsoldiers. Those potent sticks would have blazed them out of the sky had they dared. And so the dragons wheeled and fought among themselves high above the bigger fray on the surface of the sea. The eggs their dragonfliers dropped churned the Strait, but few struck home.
Someone aboard the Lagoan cruiser spotted Cornelu atop his leviathan. A stick swung his way with terrifying speed. "No, you fools, I'm a friend!" he shouted, which of course did no good at all.
The beam missed, but not by much. A patch of ocean perhaps fifty yards from the leviathan turned all at once to steam, with a noise as of a red-hot iron behemoth suddenly falling into the sea. The leviathan didn't know that was dangerous. Cornelu did. He urged the beast into a dive and took it away from the fight he shouldn't have approached.
When he got back to Setubal, he learned the cruiser had sunk, as had one of its Algarvian foes. The other, badly damaged, was limping toward home with more Lagoan ships in pursuit. No one really owned the Strait. Cornelu doubted anyone would, not till the Derlavaian War was as good as won. Till then, both sides would keep struggling over it.
A new man in Istvan's squad, a fellow named Hevesi, came up to the front from regimental headquarters with orders to be alert because of a possible Unkerlanter attack and with gossip that had his hazel eyes bugging out of his head. "You'll never guess, Sergeant," he said to Istvan after relaying the order. "By the stars, you couldn't guess if you tried for the next five years."