The Golden Shrine Read online

  Some people still lived here. They peered from the doorways of buildings that survived. “Good God! More barbarians!” somebody shouted in what sounded like despair.

  “We’ll fight!” someone else yelled. An arrow arced through the air. It landed well short of the Raumsdalians and Bizogots, but served as a warning even so.

  “You idiots! We’re not invading you! We’re here to fight the God-cursed Rulers,” Hamnet Thyssen bellowed.

  “You always did know how to make friends,” Ulric Skakki said, much more quietly. Hamnet waved him to silence.

  The locals went back and forth with one another. At last, warily, one of them came out into the open and approached the newcomers. “You don’t talk like a damned foreigner,” the fellow said.

  “I’m not,” Hamnet answered. “We’re at war with the people who did this to you. Have you got any food at all you can spare us?”

  “Maybe a little,” the man said dubiously.

  “Or maybe more than a little,” Trasamund rumbled. “Do you want to see what damned foreigners can do if you make them angry?”

  “No,” the local said. “But we already had one set of robbers go through here. How much do you think they left us?”

  And you’re another set of robbers. He didn’t say that. Trasamund didn’t catch it in his voice. Count Hamnet did. By the way one corner of Ulric’s mouth quirked up, so did he. And, by the way Marcovefa raised an eyebrow, so did she.

  “Do what you can,” Hamnet said. “We came south off the Bizogot steppe to fight the Rulers. We can’t do it on empty bellies, though.”

  “Oh, joy,” the local told him. “Well, if you whip ’em, don’t chase ’em back this way. Don’t reckon we could live through it if they came through Lonsdal one more time—or if you were right behind ’em again.”

  The locals coughed up some bread and some flat rounds made from rye and oat flour and some smoked meat. Even more reluctantly, they produced a little beer. Hamnet would have bet they had more than they were showing. He couldn’t blame them too much for holding back, though. They had to go on living, too.

  They didn’t invite any newcomers to use their houses or their beds. In fact, they made it plain the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians with them had better keep clear unless they wanted a fight. Hamnet worked hard to keep the mammoth-herders from losing their tempers. More often than not, Bizogots responded to a challenge with a fist in the teeth.

  “We’ll post guards tonight around our own camp,” Trasamund declared, “the same as we would anywhere in enemy country.” He glared at Hamnet as if daring him to say they were anywhere else.

  Hamnet didn’t. All he said was, “Sounds like a good idea to me.”

  “If the people we’re trying to help are liable to jump on us in the dark, what’s the point of helping them?” the jarl asked.

  “They’ve already had a lot of trouble. They think we’re more of the same,” Hamnet answered.

  “If they do jump us, they’ll find out how right they are.” Trasamund made a fist.

  “That doesn’t do us much good. It doesn’t do them much, either,” Hamnet said.

  “Beats the demon out of getting ambushed by a bunch of skulking murderers in the night,” Trasamund retorted.

  “Set some obvious sentries,” Hamnet said. “And set some who aren’t so obvious. The locals won’t have the nerve to try anything.”

  “We’ll make them sorry if they do,” the Bizogot said.

  The folk of Lonsdal didn’t. Even more reluctantly than they had the evening before, they came up with some food in the evening. They didn’t cheer out loud when the Bizogots rode south, but they weren’t far from it. Hamnet could see that in their faces. If you lived in a place like this, you had to want the outside world to leave you alone most of the time. The folk of Lonsdal hadn’t got enough of what they wanted.

  RIDING SOUTH, HAMNET wondered what the Rulers would do to thwart him. The short-faced bear that had attacked his comrades; that, on dying, had proved not to be a natural bear at all but a shaman or wizard in sorcerous disguise . . . He asked Marcovefa if the enemy had anything like that in mind this time around.

  Her nostrils flared, as a lion’s might when it sought a scent. After a moment, she shook her head, saying, “I feel nothing.”

  “Can they be fooling you?” he persisted.

  Marcovefa’s nostrils flared again, this time in scorn. “Not likely!” she said. But then she hesitated. “Maybe not impossible,” she admitted, and Hamnet admired her for that. “Since the sickness spell, I think their shamans are not stupid and hopeless all the time.”

  Hamnet reminded himself that the magicians she mocked were far stronger than the best Bizogot shamans and Raumsdalian wizards. “Well, if you do sense anything, don’t keep it a secret,” he said.

  “I will not do that,” she said. It didn’t have the Don’t worry, little boy flavor it might have before she learned the Rulers could be dangerous to her. Or maybe she was just getting better at not hurting his feelings.

  They hadn’t gone much farther before they discovered the Rulers were doing their best to stay annoying. The road suddenly ended. Actually, no: it didn’t end, but it stopped being usable. Trees had fallen across it in wild disorder, tangled together worse than jackstraws. Going forward—going straight forward, anyhow—was impossible.

  “Magic?” Hamnet asked Marcovefa.

  “Magic,” she agreed. “But not new magic. They did this a while ago.”

  “I’m surprised the folk from Lonsdal didn’t know,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “How do you know they didn’t?” Hamnet said. “Maybe they did, but they weren’t about to tell the likes of us.” Ulric grunted and gave back a reluctant nod.

  “What do we do about it?” Trasamund asked. “I don’t know much about trees.” He proved he didn’t—he was speaking the Bizogots’ language, but he used the Raumsdalian word for trees. He had to; his own tongue lacked a name for them. “Can we clear them out of the way with magic and go on?”

  “Likely easier to slip into the forest and go around the jam,” Ulric said.

  Marcovefa nodded. “Yes. This is so. Often magic can make a mess better than it can clear a mess.”

  “Well, all right.” By the way Trasamund said it, it wasn’t. “Trees all around? Not even a path through them?” He muttered something under his breath.

  “There, there.” Ulric clicked his tongue between his teeth in mock—and mocking—sympathy. “You can hold my hand if it bothers you.”

  The jarl suggested several other things he could do with his hand. None of them had much to do with holding someone else’s . . . or with trees, come to that. Ulric Skakki only grinned. Still swearing, Trasamund plunged into the forest. Where one Bizogot would go, others would follow. They might not like it much, but they would do almost anything to keep from seeming cowards.

  To Hamnet Thyssen, it was only a forest. The one down by his castle in southeastern Raumsdalia had more broad-leafed trees than evergreens, while this one was almost all conifers. As far as he was concerned, though, the difference was one of degree, not of kind. He didn’t mind having trees all around him. He took it for granted. Roads were fine when you were traveling, but not when you were hunting.

  Although the day was cool, sweat poured off Marcovefa. She liked trees, and being among trees, even less than Trasamund did. “We’ll get back to the road soon,” Hamnet assured her.

  “Not soon enough!” she said.

  “You know, the Rulers come from treeless country, too,” Ulric remarked. “Maybe they don’t like being closed in, so they have a pretty good notion our Bizogots won’t like it, either.”

  “Do they wonder about how herd animals think?” Hamnet used the Rulers’ name for other people.

  “As little as they can get away with, I suspect, or likely something less than that,” Ulric said, which struck Hamnet as cynical and probable at the same time.

  Whatever the reason, the Rulers didn’t harass their foes in
the forest except for the fallen trees. The Bizogots breathed loud sighs of relief when they came out into open country once more. Pointing to an apple orchard ahead, Trasamund said, “A few trees every now and then are all right. We can go around them—we don’t have to get stuck amongst ’em.”

  Another Bizogot added, “It won’t be like they’re trying to eat us up.”

  Count Hamnet and Ulric and even Audun Gilli exchanged amused glances. Only someone who didn’t know trees was likely to imagine them as predators. Hamnet thought of the plums near his castle. He tried to imagine one of them waylaying passersby. The picture didn’t want to form.

  “Remember,” Trasamund said, “if you see anybody riding a deer, he’s the enemy. Kill the bastard before he kills you.”

  “Always a good idea with enemies,” Ulric agreed. “They hardly ever give you a hard time once they’re dead.”

  “Hardly ever?” Hamnet Thyssen said. “What do you do with the ones who haunt you?”

  “Exorcise ’em,” Ulric answered at once. “Everybody needs a little exorcise now and then.” Hamnet gave him a reproachful stare, which he ignored.

  Most of the time, travelers coming down from the south would have seen horses and cattle and sheep in the fields. Not now. Count Hamnet was saddened but not surprised. The Rulers would have stolen or killed as many animals as they could get their hands on. And the local farmers would have fled with the rest: off to the west or east or south, any direction but the one from which the invaders were coming.

  Even without livestock, the land seemed rich to the Bizogots. Something else about it surprised them, too. “You use some of the land for one thing and some for another,” a mammoth-herder said. He might have been talking about a clever piece of sorcery. “I can tell by what grows and the way you have fences.” Up on the broad, trackless steppe, fences were only a waste of time and work.

  “We have the notion that land belongs to the person who works it,” Hamnet said. Things were more complicated than that, but it would do for a start.

  And it was plenty to shock the Bizogot. “Land belongs to the clan,” he declared. He might have been stating a law of nature. He probably thought he was.

  “Different peoples have different customs,” Count Hamnet said. “Not always right. Not always wrong. Just different.”

  “Land belongs to the clan,” the Bizogot repeated. His folk, for instance, rejoiced in stubbornness—mulishness, a Raumsdalian would have called it.

  “Never argue with a blockhead,” Ulric Skakki said in Raumsdalian. “You won’t convince him, and it only irks you.”

  “Who are you calling a blockhead?” the Bizogot demanded, also in Raumsdalian.

  “You,” Ulric answered calmly. “Just because you can be a blockhead in more than one language doesn’t mean you’re not a blockhead.”

  “By God, I ought to cut your liver out for that,” the mammoth-herder said.

  “We need Skakki.” Trasamund’s voice went hard and flat. “Anyone who wants to fight him has to fight me first.”

  “I don’t have to hide behind your skirts. If this unwashed ruffian thinks he can take me—” Ulric began.

  Trasamund cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture while the offended Bizogot shouted angrily. “I know you don’t need to hide,” the jarl said. “I know you can cut Ottar here into dogmeat, too.” The Bizogot—Ottar—shouted again. Trasamund took no more notice of him than Ulric had of Hamnet not long before. He went on, “We need you, too, Ottar, only not so much. If I have to choose between the two of you, I choose Skakki.”

  “He’s not even of our blood,” Ottar said. “Since when do you choose people who sit around all the time over proper nomads?”

  Before Trasamund could say anything to that, Ulric laughed in Ottar’s face. “You go back and forth over the same range all the bloody time, and you call yourself a nomad? Have you traveled beyond the Gap? Have you gone up onto the Glacier? Have you ever seen the deserts in the far southwest? Have you been through the jungles beyond the desert? Nomad? Ha!” He laughed again.

  Count Hamnet eyed Ottar, wondering what he’d do next. When Ulric went after a man, he flayed him with his tongue. Would Ottar try to wipe out the insult with blood? Or would he go off somewhere and lick his wounds?

  He did neither. He tried to fight back with words, jeering, “Talk is cheap. Just because you say you’ve been to those places doesn’t mean you have.”

  “I’ve been through the Gap with him. I’ve been up on the Glacier with him, too,” Trasamund said. “The hot places I don’t know, but they wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “I’ve been in the desert,” Hamnet Thyssen added. “It is the way Ulric says it is. I haven’t been in the jungle myself—I haven’t fared that far south. But what I’ve heard about it from other people makes me believe Ulric’s been there, too.”

  Ottar looked at him. He looked at Trasamund. And he looked at Ulric Skakki. Then, shaking his head, he rode away from the adventurer. Hamnet thought that was one of the smarter things he could have done.

  A SQUAD OR SO of Raumsdalian soldiers sat around a fire, roasting a sheep they’d probably lifted. They looked up in alarm when the Bizogots rode down on them. A couple of men stared to run, but they really had nowhere to run to. “Hold it right there!” Trasamund bawled, and hold it they did.

  “You aren’t the new barbarians. You’re the other barbarians.” The Raumsdalian who spoke sounded almost indignant, to say nothing of confused.

  “Yes—that’s us, the other barbarians,” Count Hamnet said. Hearing perfect Raumsdalian come from his lips, seeing a swarthy man among the blond mammoth-herders, only confused the soldiers more.

  “Who the demon are you?” one of them asked.

  “Count Hamnet Thyssen,” Hamnet answered, and waited to see what would happen next.

  The name meant nothing to some of them. Others, though, jerked as if stung by wasps. “Hamnet Thyssen!” exclaimed the soldier who’d asked his name. “There’s a fat price on your head. Did you know that?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised,” Hamnet said. “Since the Emperor sent a man”—he waved toward Per Anders—“to bring me back to Raumsdalia, I don’t think you could collect that price right now.”

  “Of course, you could be wrong,” Ulric Skakki said silkily.

  “I suppose so,” Count Hamnet said. With Sigvat II, being wrong was easy. His ingratitude towered higher than the Glacier and sank deeper than the bottom of Sudertorp Lake. If you trusted him, you had only yourself to blame.

  “What do we do with them?” Trasamund asked—a good, practical question.

  “What are they doing here?” Ulric added—another good question. Hamnet suspected the soldiers were there because they’d been part of an army the Rulers shattered. A few questions proved he was right. Ulric asked the stragglers, “Are you ready for another go at the bastards who beat you before?”

  Some of the Raumsdalians nodded without hesitation. Others just sat there looking unhappy. They didn’t want another go at the Rulers. All they wanted was to stay where they were, run away from danger, and scavenge as they got the chance. They might as well be coyotes, Hamnet thought scornfully.

  “Come on,” he told them. “If Raumsdalia loses, none of this will do you any good. You’ll just be part of the Rulers’ herd, and they’ll cull you whenever they feel like it. Is that any way for a man to live?”

  “Beats getting an arrow through your brisket or some nasty magic coming down on your head,” a soldier said.

  “That will happen anyhow,” Hamnet said. “It won’t happen today, maybe, because the Rulers are busy farther south. But if they win down there, they’ll clean you out up here, too. Or do you think I’m wrong, too?”

  By the miserable, hangdog expression on the soldier’s face, he didn’t think Count Hamnet was wrong, however much he wished he did. “I don’t ever want to fight those buggers again,” he mumbled.

  “Would you rather they came hunting you after they cleaned ou
t everybody else?” Hamnet asked. The Raumsdalian trooper looked unhappier yet.

  Trasamund lost patience with him, as the jarl was apt to do: “Or would you rather we rolled over you and then went on and fought the Rulers ourselves? We’ll use you people if we can, but we won’t waste time on account of you.”

  That persuaded the Raumsdalians. Hamnet Thyssen might have known it would. They couldn’t hope to fight the host in front of them. How well they’d fight against the Rulers . . . Hamnet and Trasamund would just have to wait and see. But if they were going to build their fighting tail, they would have to use odds and sods like these. How many bands, some only four or five men, some perhaps a couple of dozen, wandered through the northern part of the Empire these days? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? Hamnet couldn’t know, but he thought his guesses were pretty good.

  “You can persuade people to do nearly anything,” Ulric Skakki remarked, “as long as all their other choices seem worse.”

  “If that’s not philosophy, it ought to be,” Hamnet said.

  “Ha!” the adventurer said. “Save that kind of nonsense for Earl Eyvind. There are tricks to riding a horse, and there are tricks to driving people. That’s one of them—or it sure looks like one to me.”

  “To me, too,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Why else are we here?”

  Trasamund answered that before Ulric Skakki could: “We’re here to beat the Rulers. If we don’t do that, we’re just pissing into the wind.”

  A Raumsdalian would have talked about spitting into the wind. That made the jarl crude by imperial standards. It didn’t make him wrong, however much Count Hamnet wished it would have.

  He glanced over to Marcovefa. Without her, this motley band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians had little chance against the invaders beyond the Glacier. Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. He laughed at his own foolishness. Without Marcovefa, this ragtag band had no chance against the Rulers, none whatsoever. Were it possible to have less than no chance, the band without Marcovefa would have.

  Yet she herself was almost as alien to her comrades as the Rulers were. In some ways, she was more alien. Yes, Rulers who failed at anything important or who found themselves about to be captured often killed themselves to escape what they saw as disgrace. But they didn’t devour the corpses of their defeated foes. Hamnet knew why Marcovefa’s folk had become cannibals. Up atop the Glacier, meat of any sort was too scarce, too precious, to let any of it go to waste. It made her no less strange, no less appalling, to those who didn’t share her customs.