Breath of God g-2 Read online

  “I think we said the same thing,” Audun Gilli replied.

  “Well, maybe we did.” Hamnet looked north, towards the Gap that had finally melted through the great Glacier and towards the two enormous ice sheets that remained, one to the northwest, the other to the northeast. He couldn’t have seen the opening in the Gap anyway; it lay much too far north. Swirling clouds and blowing snow kept him from getting even a glimpse of the southern edge of the Glacier now. When the weather was clear, those frozen cliffs bestrode the steppe like the edge of any other mountains, but steeper and more abrupt.

  He’d had an odd thought not long before. There were mountains in the west. They ran north and north, till the Glacier swallowed them. Did any of their peaks stick out above the surface of the ice? Did life persist on those islands in the icebound sea? Were there even, could there be, men up there? No one had ever seen fires burning on the Glacier, but no one had ever gone up there to look at close range, either.

  This time, his shiver had nothing to do with the frigid weather. Trasamund had told him once that Bizogots had tried to scale the Glacier to see if they could reach the top. It had to be at least a mile – maybe two or three – almost straight up. The mammoth-herders hadn’t managed it. They were probably lucky they hadn’t killed themselves. One mistake on that unforgiving climb would likely be your last. You might have too long to regret it as you fell, though.

  Hamnet Thyssen imagined men roaming from one unfrozen mountain refuge to another. He imagined them trying to come down to the Bizogot country, stepping off the edge of the Glacier as if off the edge of the world. Descending might be even harder than reaching the top of the Glacier. Down near the bottom, you had at least some margin for error. Up above, the tiniest mischance would kill you, sure as sure.

  He suddenly realized Audun Gilli had said something to him. “I’m sorry. What was that?” he said. “You caught me woolgathering.”

  Above the woven wool that muffled his mouth and nose, the wizard’s eyes were amused. “I must have. You seemed as far away as if someone had dropped you on top of the Glacier.”

  That made Hamnet shiver again. Wizards . .. knew things. Sometimes they didn’t know how they knew or even that they knew, but know they did. “Well, ask me again,” Hamnet said. “I’m here now.”

  “How lucky for you.” Audun still seemed to think it was funny. “I said, what do we do when the Rulers strike the Red Dire Wolves?”

  “The best we can. What else is there?” Hamnet answered bleakly. “How good is the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman? How much help can he give you and Liv?”

  “Old Odovacar?” Audun Gilli rolled his eyes. “Liv’s got more brains in her little finger than he does in his head. He turned them all into beard.”

  Audun wasn’t far wrong about the shaman’s beard; it reached almost to his crotch. Even so, Count Hamnet said, “Are you sure? You can talk with Liv now – she’s learned Raumsdalian.” And why haven’t you learned more of the Bizogots’ tongue? But that was an argument for another day. Hamnet went on, “Odovacar might be clever enough with spells in his own language.”

  “Yes, he might be, but he isn’t,” Audun said. “I’ve talked with him through Liv. He has one spell down solid – he can take the shape of a dire wolf. But even when he’s in man’s form, he hasn’t got any more sense than a dire wolf. I’m surprised nobody’s caught him sitting on his haunches licking his ballocks.”

  That started a laugh out of Hamnet. Even so, he said, “Odovacar must be able to do more than that. Shamans can’t be shamans on so little. Whoever he learned from surely taught him other things, too.”

  “Oh, I suppose he can find lost needles and read the weather and do some other little tricks that won’t help us against the Rulers at all,” Audun said. “But the one thing the shaman of the Red Dire Wolves has to do is commune with dire wolves, and by God Odovacar can do that. And since he can, they forgive him for all the things he cursed well can’t do, starting with learning anything he didn’t get from his teacher a thousand years ago.”

  “Don’t exaggerate.” Mock severity filled Hamnet Thyssen’s voice. “Odovacar can’t be a day over eight hundred.”

  “Ha!” The Raumsdalian wizard laughed for politeness’ sake alone, because he plainly didn’t find it funny. “However old he is, he’s outlived his usefulness. If you don’t believe me, talk to your lady love. She’s as fed up with him as I am.”

  Talk to your lady love, Audun Gilli had lost his wife, too, in circumstances more harrowing than Hamnet s. But he didn’t seem jealous that the other Raumsdalian had won Liv’s love. Hamnet was glad he wasn’t. Audun might have made a rival, since he and Liv had sorcery in common.If I thought she cheated on me the way Gudrid used to, I’d worry about Audun now. Hamnet shook his head. If you let thoughts like that grow, they would poison whatever good you’d found in your life.

  When he pulled his mind away from that notion, it lit on a different one. “Odovacar communes with real dire wolves, you say?”

  “Well, he doesn’t smoke a pipe with them or anything like that, but he goes out wandering when he wears wolf shape,” Audun Gilli answered. “He must meet real dire wolves when he does, and they haven’t eaten his scrawny old carcass yet.”

  “That’s what I’m driving at,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you suppose he could go out as a dire wolf and rally the real ones against the Rulers?”

  Audun started to shake his head, but then caught himself. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might be worth a try. The Rulers wouldn’t like packs harrying their riding deer, would they? Harrying them, too, come to that, if Odovacar can bring it off. And if he goes out in a wolfskin and doesn’t come back, the Red Dire Wolves might be better off.”

  “Are you sure you ‘re not wearing Ulric Skakki’s skin?” Hamnet asked; the adventurer was more likely to come out with something that cynically frank.

  Audun pulled off a mitten and lifted his cuff. “Nothing up my sleeve but me,” he said, and thought for a little while. “You know, Your Grace, that could work. The Rulers wouldn’t like dire wolves worrying at their animals – or at them.”

  “Who would?” Count Hamnet said. “The other nice thing about this is, they may have a harder time returning the favor.”

  “Why?” Audun Gilli frowned. Then his face cleared. “Oh, I see what you mean. No dire wolves on the far side of the Glacier, just those smaller, skinnier beasts.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Maybe the dire wolves would be friendly to a wizard in the hide of one of those other wolves. But maybe they’d have him for supper instead. That’s how I’d bet.”

  “Well, we’ll see what Odovacar thinks.” Audun frowned again. “For that matter, we’ll see if Odovacar thinks.”

  Like every other Bizogot shaman Count Hamnet had seen, Odovacar wore a ceremonial costume full of fringes and tufts. His were all made from the hides and furs of dire wolves. Some were dyed red with berry juice, others left their natural brown and gray and cream. Even old and bent and thin, he was a big man; he must have been enormous, and enormously strong, when in his prime.

  Getting anything across to him wasn’t easy, for he’d grown almost deaf as he aged. He used a hearing trumpet made from a musk-ox horn, but it didn’t help much. Audun Gilli, with his problems with the Bizogot language, didn’t try to talk to the shaman – he left that to Hamnet and to Liv.

  She bawled into the hearing trumpet while Hamnet Thyssen shouted into Odovacar’s other ear. The racket they made surely disturbed some of the other Red Dire Wolf Bizogots, but it bothered Odovacar very little because he heard very little of it.

  “A wolf? Yes, of course I can shape myself into a wolf,” he said. Many old men’s teeth were worn down almost flat against their gums. Not his – they were still long and sharp and white, suggesting his ties to the Red Dire Wolves’ fetish animal.

  Getting him to understand what to do after he went into dire wolf’s shape took the best – or maybe the worst –
part of an afternoon. It wasn’t that Odovacar was stupid. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t think it was, anyhow. But he heard so little that getting anything across to him was an ordeal.

  With Audun Gilli or another Raumsdalian wizard, Count Hamnet could have written down what he wanted. Nothing was wrong with Odovacar’s eyes, but writing didn’t help him, for the Bizogots had no written language. Hamnet and Liv had to keep shouting over and over again till, one word at a time, one thought at a time, they tunneled through the wall deafness built between Odovacar and the folk around him.

  “Ah,” he said at last, his own voice too loud because he wanted to have some chance of hearing himself. “You want me to lead the dire wolves against the invaders from the north.”

  “Yes.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped it was yes. Or did Odovacar think he and Liv meant they wanted him to take command of the Red Dire Wolves’ human warriors? By then, nothing would have surprised Hamnet overmuch.

  But Odovacar had it right. “I can do it,” he said in that loud, cracked, quavering old man’s voice. He began to sway back and forth, chanting a song that sounded as if it was in the Bizogot language but that Hamnet couldn’t follow. Liv’s nod said she could.

  He slowly rose and started to dance, there inside his tent. At first, the dance seemed little more than swaying back and forth while on his feet, more or less in rhythm to the song he chanted. But it got more vigorous as the song went on. The chant grew more vigorous, too. Hamnet still couldn’t understand it, but growls and snarls began replacing some of the sounds that seemed like Bizogot words. The tune, though, stayed the same.

  Odovacar’s fringes shook. His long white beard whipped back and forth. In the lamplight, his eyes blazed yellow.

  Yellow? Hamnet Thyssen rubbed at his own eyes. Like almost all Bizogots, Odovacar had ice-blue eyes. But was this still Odovacar the man? Hamnet shook his head. No, not wholly, not any more.

  Liv was nodding in understanding and, Hamnet thought, in admiration as she watched the change sweep over the other shaman. She was used to seeing such things. She’d probably shifted shape herself, though Count Hamnet didn’t think she’d done it since he’d known her. She might take it for granted, but it raised the Raumsdalians hackles.

  Odovacar dropped down onto all fours. His wolfskin jacket and trousers and his own beard all seemed to turn into pelt. His teeth, already long and white, grew whiter and much longer while his tongue lolled from his mouth. His nose lengthened into a snout. His ears grew pointed and stood away from his head. He wore a wolf’s tail attached to the seat of his trousers. As the spell took hold, it was still a wolf’s tail – it was his tail, attached to him as any beast s tail was attached to it. As if to prove as much, it lashed back and forth.

  “Can you hear me?” Hamnet Thyssen asked in a small voice. Odovacar the dire wolf was doubtless still old, but seemed much less decrepit than Odovacar the man. And he swung his fierce head towards Hamnet and nodded somewhat as a dog might nod, but also somewhat as a man might. Shapeshifters kept some of their human intelligence in beast form. How much? Hamnet wasn’t sure even they could answer that question once they returned to human shape.

  “You know what you are to do?” Liv sounded far more respectful of the shaman as a dire wolf than she had of him as a man.

  Odovacar nodded again. A sound that wasn’t a word but was agreement burst from his throat. Hamnet Thyssen had heard an owl that was also a wizard use human speech, but that was under the influence of the magic Liv used to capture it, not through the spell the wizard used to transform himself.

  “Good,” Liv said. “Go, then, and God go with you.”

  One more nod from Odovacar, who bounded out through the south-facing tent flap. He made another sound once he was out in the open air, a canine cry of joy pure and unalloyed. To a dire wolf’s senses, the inside of the tent had to be cramped and smelly. Unlike people, wolves weren’t made to be confined in such places. Hamnet Thyssen stuck his head out into the cold. Odovacar trotted purposefully off to the west, wagging his tail as he went. Yes, he was glad to get away.

  “He seems happier as a dire wolf,” Hamnet said.

  “I suppose he is,” Liv answered. “But he will die sooner if he keeps that hide and not the one he was born with. He knows that. Even as a wolf, he knows it. He will do what needs doing – what he can recall of it in beast shape. And we will see how much good it does us.”

  “Quite a bit, I hope.” Hamnet Thyssen stuck his head out into the cold again. Like Odovacar, he was sometimes glad to get free of the Bizogot tents himself. Living through the long northern winters in the enforced close company of the mammoth-herders wasn’t easy for a man of his basically solitary temperament. If he weren’t in love with Liv, he wondered if he could have done it.

  “Don’t get frostbite,” she told him – in this climate, an even more serious warning than it would have been down in the Empire.

  “I won’t.” He wanted to twist around so he could look north towards the Gap, north towards the grazing grounds of the Three Tusk clan, the grazing grounds the Rulers had stolen. In his mind’s eye, he saw swarms of dire wolves raiding those grounds, feasting on the Rulers’ riding deer, dragging down musk oxen that couldn’t keep up with the herds, maybe even killing mammoth calves if they wandered away from their mothers. And he saw something else, even if it wasn’t so clear as he wished it were.

  When he ducked back into the big black tent again, some of what he imagined he’d seen must have shown on his face, for Liv said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “But we’ve thought a lot about how we can hit back at the Rulers. What have they been thinking about all this time? I don’t know that, either, and I wish I did. Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re going to like it.”

  The sun had turned in the sky. Days were still short, shorter than they ever got in Nidaros, but they were getting longer. Each day, the sun rose a little farther north and east of due south, swinging away from the tiny arc it made in the southern sky around the solstice. Each day, it set a little farther north and west of due south. And each day became more of a day, not just a brief splash of light punctuating the long hours of darkness.

  Hamnet Thyssen would have hoped the longer daylight hours meant warmer weather. In that, he was disappointed but not much surprised. Down in the Empire, the worst blizzards usually came after the turning of the year, but before longer days finally led to the spring thaw. Those blizzards started here, when the Breath of God howled down off the Glacier. Spring would take longer to get here, and would have a looser grip when it finally did.

  Odovacar returned to the Red Dire Wolves’ tents. Hamnet Thyssen saw him ambling in, still in dire-wolf shape. He was heavier than he had been when he set out, but he walked with a limp. A long, half-healed gash scored his left hind leg.

  For a moment, the shaman didn’t seem to know Count Hamnet. Lips lifted away from those formidable fangs. A growl sounded deep in the Odovacar-wolf’s throat. The Bizogots told of shamans who turned beast so fully, they couldn’t come back to man’s shape again.

  But Odovacar hadn’t gone that far. With a human-sounding sigh, he went into the tent that had been his. A moment later, Totila joined him. Word must have spread like lightning, for Liv and Audun Gilli ducked in together inside of another couple of minutes.

  By then, Odovacar the dire wolf was already swaying back and forth in a beast’s version of the dance the shaman had used to change shape. The growls and barks and whines that came from the animal had something of the same rhythm as the song Odovacar had used when he was a man.

  And he became a man again. His muzzle shortened. His beard grew out on his cheeks and chin – he had a chin again. His ears shrank; the light of reason came back to his eyes. The hair on his back and flanks was a pelt no more, but fringed and tufted wolfskin jacket and trousers. His dire wolf’s tail now plainly had been taken from a wolf, and was a part of him no more.

  He let out a long, weary sigh – mor
e regret than relief, if Hamnet Thyssen was any judge. “Well, I’m back,” he said, his voice as rusty as a sword blade left out in the rain. “I’m back,” he repeated, as if he needed to convince himself. After so long in beast shape, chances were he did.

  “Have you harried the foe?” Totila asked. “Can you do it again at need?”

  “We have . . . done what we could,” Odovacar answered slowly. Speech still seemed to come hard for him. “It is less than I hoped, better than nothing.” He shrugged stooped shoulders – yes, he was old. “Such is life. And the Rulers . . . The Rulers are very strong, and very fierce, and they are gathering. They are mustering. The time is coming, and coming soon.” His eyes – blue again, not wolf-amber – found first Liv and then Count Hamnet. “Well, you were right, the two of you. I wish you were wrong, but you were right. They are a danger. They are a deadly danger.”

  “What did you do … when you were a dire wolf?” Hamnet asked in a low voice.

  Odovacar heard him without trouble; maybe some of the dire wolf’s sharper senses stayed with him for a little while. “Hunted. Killed. Mated. Slept. Ran. Those are the things a dire wolf does,” he said. “Harried the Rulers’ herds. Fled when they hit back at us. I told you – they are strong and fierce. I smelled – watched, too, but scent matters more – too many wolf-brothers die. I was still man enough inside the dire wolf’s head to sorrow, not just to fear. And I watched the foe gather, and I smelled their muster, and I came back. And it might be better had I stayed a wolf.” A tear ran down his cheek.

  II

  By God, I will do this thing, or I will die trying,” Trasamund said. The mammoth from the Red Dire Wolves’ herd pawed at the ground with a broad, hairy forefoot, looking for whatever forage it could find under the snow. The hump on the mammoths back was far flatter than it would have been in warm weather; the beast had burned through most of the fat reserve it carried from the good times. It couldn’t understand what the Three Tusk Bizogots’ jarl was saying, which was just as well.