Breath of God g-2 Read online

  “Why? Just because we’ll be one jump ahead of the Rulers again – one jump ahead if we’re lucky?” Ulric had a knack for knowing where the worst troubles lay, all right. He went on, “Well, I’ll try. She’s not going to understand about riding, you know, not till she sees somebody doing it.”

  He spoke slowly to Marcovefa. He had to keep backing up and starting over. At last, he had Hamnet get down on hands and knees and straddled him to show what riding meant. Marcovefa went into gales of giggles; it might have been the funniest thing she’d ever seen. “Why didn’t you let me do the riding?” Hamnet asked irritably.

  “Because I didn’t want to look like an idiot?” Ulric suggested, and Hamnet tried to buck him off. Marcovefa laughed harder than ever. Un-fazed and unthrown, Ulric went on, “Besides, you’re bigger than I am, even if you make a fractious horse. I wanted to show her people ride bigger brutes.”

  “Thank you so much,” Hamnet ground out. “Now that you’ve shown her, get the demon off me.”

  Ulric did, which was lucky for him. Count Hamnet’s next move would have been to stand. Ulric couldn’t very well have ridden him then, any more than he could have sat in someone’s lap after the former lapholder rose.

  “Well?” Hamnet said, an ominous rumble in his voice. “Does she understand what riding’s all about now?”

  After more back-and-forth between Ulric and Marcovefa, the adventurer nodded. “She understands it, all right,” he said. “She isn’t sure she believes it. She isn’t sure it’s any good. But now she knows what the word means, and she didn’t before.”

  Hamnet Thyssen had to think about that for a little while. He’d made cracks about how impoverished the men of the Glacier were. Now he saw he’d barely begun to understand that. Even their language was a poor, starveling thing. So many things they couldn’t do … and if you couldn’t do something, you didn’t need words to talk about it. So the words had fallen out of their vocabulary, and taken the ideas with them.

  He looked back towards the Glacier, and then up towards the top. Both the layer of clouds through which he’d descended and gathering darkness kept him from seeing all the way up. But he didn’t really need to. He knew where he’d been and what he’d done. And if the rest of the world didn’t want to believe him, that was the world’s lookout, not his.

  Then he looked south. “I suppose we ought to be glad the Rulers weren’t waiting for us when we got to the ground again,” he said.

  “And I suppose you’re right,” Ulric said. “Don’t lose any sleep over it, though. They aren’t likely to leave us alone very long.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Hamnet said.

  Nothing could have made him lose sleep that night. Slightly muddy ground made a better mattress than ice or bare rock. But he suspected he could have lain down on a porcupine the size of a glyptodont and still started snoring two heartbeats after he closed his eyes.

  The sun had to climb up over the Glacier before morning came to the land by its base. That won him more sleep than he would have had a little farther south. He woke grabbing his sword hilt when Trasamund shook him. “We need food,” the Bizogot said. “We need to find out whose land this is, too, and turn them against the Rulers if they aren’t already.”

  “Are we still on the White Foxes’ grazing grounds?” Hamnet asked. “Or have we come farther west than that? Which clan lies west of theirs?”

  “West of the White Foxes are the Snowshoe Hares,” Trasamund answered. He knew, and had to know, the Bizogot plain the way a native of Nidaros knew the capital’s streets. “They chase the Foxes more often than the Foxes chase them.”

  “For all we know, the Rulers are here ahead of us,” Liv said. “Everything that’s held true on the steppe for generations is scrambled now. Even if we beat the Rulers, sorting things out afterwards will take years.”

  “We’ll spill a lot of blood doing it, too.” Trasamund sounded matter-of-fact about that, not dismayed the way a Raumsdalian would have. “But at least that will come by our own choosing, not on account of these God-cursed invaders.”

  “Not that the people who get maimed and killed will care,” Ulric said.

  “Of course they’ll care,” Trasamund insisted. “In a fight, doesn’t who wounds you matter?”

  “I’d rather not let anybody wound me, if it’s all the same to you,” Ulric said.

  Hamnet Thyssen’s eyes slid towards Liv. He’d given her the power to wound him. He’d done the same with Gudrid all those years before, only to discover he’d made a mistake. That kept him from doing it again . . till he did. He couldn’t prove Liv would make him sorry, too. No, he couldn’t prove it – but he worried about it.

  She could have reassured him. She could have . . and she hadn’t. He feared she was as out of sorts with him as he was with her. That wouldn’t do anybody any good. It was, in fact, a recipe for disaster. Sitting down and talking with her might help – if they ever found a moment to sit down together, and if he could figure out what to say if they did. They hadn’t yet, and he hadn’t yet, either, and the silence between them was starting to fester.

  And Trasamund got to his feet, saying, “We have to find a herd, and we have to find the folk in charge of it. We need food, and we need mounts, and we need to get back into the fight against the invaders. Come on. Let’s get going.”

  As Count Hamnet wearily rose, too, and started trudging across the Bizogot plain, he almost hated the jarl. The nobleman needed other things, too, and Trasamund wasn’t giving him a chance even to figure out how to find them. The things he needed were much less important in the grand scheme. He knew as much. Knowing was scant consolation, if any at all, because what he needed was no less important to him.

  They were onthe Snowshoe Hares’ grazing grounds. They found out when two horsemen pulled away from a herd of musk oxen and rode up to look them over. Marcovefa stared at them. Then she stared at Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen. And then she started to laugh. She said something.

  Hamnet thought he understood it. When Ulric translated, he proved right: “So you weren’t making it up after all.” Ulric said something in reply, something on the order of, Did you really think we were? And Marcovefa answered, “Well, you never know. Who would have thought beasts could truly grow so big?” Again, Hamnet followed her well enough to get meaning from her words before Ulric turned them into the ordinary Bizogot speech.

  “Who are you ragamuffins?” one of the Snowshoe Hares shouted. “What the demon are you doing on our land?”

  “We escaped the Rulers,” Trasamund answered. “We had to climb up onto the Glacier and then come down again, so we did that.”

  The Snowshoe Hare laughed in his face. “By God, I’ve heard some liars in my time, but never one who came close to you.”

  Marcovefa stepped forward to get a better look at him. She said something in her language. “She says you’re a noisy fool even if you can ride a horse,” Ulric translated, helpfully adding, “She’s never seen anybody ride before, so that impresses her more than it does us.”

  “What do you mean, she’s never seen anybody ride a horse before?” the Snowshoe Hare demanded.

  “I usually mean what I say. You should try it. It works wonders,” Ulric said. “And she’s never seen anybody ride a horse because the biggest animals up on top of the Glacier – except for people – are foxes.”

  “More of those lies!” the Bizogot from the Snowshoe Hares jeered.

  Marcovefa spoke again. Hamnet Thyssen was afraid he understood what she said. Ulric’s translation confirmed it: “She says she’s eaten better men than you, and she doesn’t mean it any way you’d enjoy. Believe me, she doesn’t.”

  The expressions on the faces of the other Raumsdalians and the Bizogots with them told both riders from the Snowshoe Hares exactly how Marcovefa did mean it. As soon as they understood, they looked revolted, too. “Why don’t you kill her, then, if she does things like that?” asked the one who’d done the talking.

  “Because she’s
a shaman, for one thing,” Ulric answered. “Because two-legged meat is a good bit of what they’ve got to eat up there, for another. It’s a hardscrabble life on top of the Glacier, believe you me it is.”

  “Maybe.” The way the Snowshoe Hare said it made it sound like an enormous concession. In his mind, it probably was.

  “Now will you answer what I asked you?” Trasamund demanded. “Are you still free of the Rulers? Have the White Foxes gone down before them yet?”

  That made the two horsemen put their heads together. When they separated, neither one looked happy. “Something’s happened to the White Foxes, anyway,” admitted the one who liked to hear himself.

  “We thought it was a feud inside the clan,” the other one said, proving he wasn’t mute after all.

  “It’s worse than that, by God.” Trasamund gave his own name, continuing, “You may have heard of me. I am the jarl of the Three Tusk clan – and what’s left of the free Three Tusk clan stands here in front of you. The Rulers are that bad.”

  “Well, they haven’t troubled us,” the talkier Snowshoe Hare said. The other one nodded.

  “They’re probably heading south instead,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “Toward the Empire,” Audun Gilli added.

  How much would that matter to the Snowshoe Hares? Not much, not unless Count Hamnet missed his guess. The Raumsdalian Empire seemed barely real to most Bizogots up here by the Glacier, just as their world was strange and alien to the folk who dwelt below the tree line, and especially to those who lived south of the great forests.

  “Let us talk to your jarl,” Trasamund said. “Feed us, if you will – we’re not your foes. If you don’t help us, you help the God-cursed Rulers.”

  Hamnet Thyssen hoped he didn’t ask the other Bizogot for horses for all his comrades. The Snowshoe Hares were unlikely to have enough to give them to him. They were less likely to want to do it even if they did have horses to spare.

  But Trasamund must have made the same mental calculation himself. Instead of barking out more demands, he stood there waiting with as much calm dignity as he could muster, doing his best to seem like a man who’d asked for no more than he was entitled to.

  Calm and dignity were in short supply among the Bizogots, and so all the more impressive when they did get used. The two Snowshoe Hares put their heads together again. Then the mouthier one said, “Yes, come with us. We’ll feed you, and we’ll take you to Euric, and he’ll decide what to do next. I’m Buccelin; this is my cousin, Gunthar.”

  One by one, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians with Trasamund named themselves. Marcovefa came last – or Count Hamnet thought she would, anyhow. But after she told Buccelin and Gunthar her name, the raven on her shoulder croaked out a few syllables, too. Was that a coincidence, or was it also naming itself? Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure. By the way Buccelin and Gunthar muttered, they weren’t, either.

  Marcovefa? She smiled and scratched the big black bird’s formidable beak. The raven couldn’t very well smile back, but Hamnet got the feeling that was what it was doing.

  The Snowshoe Hares led the travelers who’d come down from the Glacier off towards the southwest. They traveled at what was a slow walk for their horses, so the men and women on foot wouldn’t fall behind. Marcovefa watched them intently. After a couple of miles, she spoke up.

  “She says she’d like to try to ride for a little while – she’s never done it before,” Ulric said.

  Plainly, the mounted Bizogots wanted to say no. Just as plainly, they didn’t have the nerve. Their eyes kept going from her face to the raven and back again. Gunthar reluctantly reined in and dismounted. He showed Marcovefa how to set her left foot in the stirrup and swing up over and onto the horse’s back.

  She managed more smoothly than Hamnet would have expected. When she was in the saddle, she smiled again. “She says she feels so tall!” Ulric said. “She says she can see as far as the raven can.”

  Gunthar laughed. “Is she witstruck?”

  “Not the way you mean,” Hamnet answered. “Everything down here is new to her. They haven’t got much, there up on top of the Glacier.”

  “You’re still going on about that, are you?” the Snowshoe Hare said.

  “It’s the truth,” Hamnet Thyssen said stonily. “If you don’t believe it, try crossing Marcovefa and see what happens.”

  “No, thanks,” Gunthar said. “I don’t know where the demon she’s from. For all I can say, she fell from the back side of the moon. But I know a shaman when I see one. We’ve had a witstruck shaman or two in our clan. It doesn’t mean they can’t use spells well enough.”

  Buccelin showed Marcovefa how to use the pressure of her legs to urge the horse forward, and how to guide it to the right and left with the reins. She proved an apt pupil. The first question she asked was, “How do you make these big beasts your slaves?”

  “We train them, starting when they’re small,” Buccelin answered.

  After Ulric translated, the shaman nodded. Then she asked, “And what do you do when they rebel?”

  “She really doesn’t know anything about this business, does she?” Buccelin remarked. With a shrug, he went on, “We train them some more. We punish them. If we still can’t break them, we can always kill them and eat them.”

  “Ah,” Marcovefa said. “You are men, sure enough.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the Bizogot demanded. The woman from atop the Glacier said not another word. After a few more minutes, she dismounted, and did so with more grace than she’d used getting up on the horse. Buccelin mounted. Marcovefa sketched a salute. He gave back a brusque nod, then made a point of not riding anywhere near her.

  In midafternoon, they approached a herd of musk oxen. Marcovefa pointed towards them. “So many large animals! Do you get up on top of these, too?”

  “Maybe we could, but we don’t.” By then, Buccelin seemed resigned to playing guide. “We use them for their meat and hides and milk and wool and bones and horn.” He chuckled. “Everything but the grunt.”

  Marcovefa thought that was funny, which proved she came from the back of beyond. A couple of other Snowshoe Hares rode out from the herd. “Who are these ragamuffins?” one of them shouted. “Where did they come from? Down off the Glacier?” He threw back his head and laughed at his own wit.

  “Yes, I think they really did,” Buccelin answered, which made the other Bizogot’s jaw drop. “We’re taking them to Euric. They know what the mess to the east is all about. This one” – he aimed a thumb at Trasamund – ”used to be jarl of the Three Tusk clan.”

  “And I still am, by God.” Pride rang in Trasamund’s voice … for a little while. But he seemed to deflate as he continued, “It’s just that the clan . . has run into a few problems lately.”

  “A few problems have run over the clan, he means,” Ulric whispered to Hamnet Thyssen, who nodded.

  “We need to feed them,” Buccelin said. “They seem hungry like they just came down off the Glacier, that’s for sure. Any beast in bad shape?”

  “We’ve got a cow that’s limping,” the other Bizogot said. “It’s not slowing up the herd or anything, but we can kill it.”

  They did, and butchered it, and got a big fire of dried grass and dung going to cook the meat. Meanwhile, Trasamund and his clansmates and the Raumsdalians told what they knew of the invasion of the Rulers. They also told how they’d climbed the Glacier and what they’d found on top of it. None of them, though, mentioned some of Marcovefa’s dining habits. Maybe that was coincidence. Maybe it was shared revulsion. Maybe it was some subtle spell from the shaman. Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t be sure.

  He was sure he stuffed himself like a Bizogot, gobbling down meat and fat and breaking big bones to reach the marrow. His hands and face got all greasy. He didn’t care. He’d been empty a lot lately. Not having the fist of hunger pounding his stomach felt wonderful.

  So did not needing to worry about standing watch. The Snowshoe Hares insisted that was their job. None o
f the travelers tried to argue with them. “We’re out of danger for a little while, anyhow,” Hamnet said.

  “Danger from the outside, anyhow,” Liv said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

  “I’m like you and Ulric – I usually say what I mean,” she answered. “We have trouble – you and I have trouble – because you can’t get over being jealous.”

  “Can you blame me?” Hamnet said.

  But Liv nodded. “Yes, by God, I can blame you, because I haven’t done anything to make you jealous.”

  “The demon you haven’t.” Hamnet didn’t like arguing in a near-whisper to keep the others from hearing what was going on. He wanted to shout and raise a fuss and pound on things. He wondered why he didn’t. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know about his squabbles with Liv. But he went on quietly: “If you haven’t been clinging to Audun Gilli – ”

  “I haven’t!” Liv’s voice was also soft, but fire filled it all the same.

  “You sure haven’t clung to me lately. God only knows the last time we made love – I have trouble remembering,” Hamnet said.

  “I could say I’m not your toy. I could say we’ve had a few other things going on lately. I could even say you’ve been spending a lot of time around Marcovefa.”

  “Her?” Hamnet Thyssen clapped a hand to his forehead. “You are out of your mind! She’s a barbarian, a savage.”

  “You mean you don’t think the same thing about me?” Liv retorted. “And why am I out of my mind for doubting you when you’re not out of yours for doubting me?”

  “Because nothing’s going on between me and the cannibal,” Count Hamnet answered. She couldn’t accuse him of thinking that about her. “I’m just trying to learn a little of her language and teach her some of yours.”

  “Well, what do you think I’m doing with Audun?”

  “I don’t know what you’re doing with Audun. That’s what worries me.”