The Golden Shrine g-3 Read online

  That probably made perfect sense to her. It made more sense to Hamnet than the way the Rulers counted, but not much more. He would never make any kind of wizard, and he knew it. The aptitude wasn’t there.

  “Do you want to go on, or do you want to make a magic?” Dashru asked in the Bizogot language.

  “We go on,” Hamnet replied in the Rulers’ speech. That seemed a simple enough answer, but Dashru’s wince told him he’d made a hash of it somehow. Resignedly, he asked, “What did I say wrong?”

  First, Dashru told him what he did wrong asking what he did wrong. Then the prisoner told him what he did wrong saying they would go on. He could hear the mistakes, too. He doubted he would ever speak without making them fairly often. If he could get the Rulers to understand him and could understand some of what they said, that would do.

  “I don’t aim to be a poet in their tongue,” he told Marcovefa.

  “It is an ugly language,” she agreed. “It is even uglier than Raumsdalian.” So there, Hamnet thought.

  Dashru was offended. “The Rulers’ tongue is not ugly!” he said. “It is full of strength, full of power. It is fit for . . . well, for rulers. No wonder you folk do not care for it. You are part of the herd, for us to milk and shear and slaughter as we please.”

  “If you think that way, if you act that way, you will make everyone on this side of the Glacier fight you to the death,” Hamnet said.

  “So what?” Dashru returned. “After we kill you all, we settle the land ourselves. We do what we want with it.” For a moment, he sounded like a proud warrior, part of a proud folk. But only for a moment. As he remembered where he was, he deflated like a pricked bladder. “I will not see that, I who am nothing.”

  “I can tell you what you will see,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “You will see the Rulers whipped back through the Gap, back beyond the Glacier, like the dogs and sons of dogs they are.”

  Dashru laughed in his face. “A bison may bellow before it goes over the cliff, but it goes over all the same. And even the bison here have small horns. They are weak, as the folk here are weak.”

  “Do not laugh too soon,” Marcovefa warned him.

  The prisoner laughed again. “You are another who pretends to be stronger than she is.”

  Marcovefa looked at him. She muttered something in her own dialect of the Bizogot language. It really was almost a separate tongue in its own right; Hamnet couldn’t recognize more than a couple of words. Her hands shaped quick passes, all of them aimed at Dashru.

  He stared defiantly back at her. After a moment, defiance changed to alarm. He shouted something in his own language. Hamnet Thyssen made out “Away with you!” in the midst of guttural gibberish. Dashru’s fingers twisted in a sign much like the one the Bizogots used to turn aside evil.

  That seemed to buy him a few heartbeats of relief, but no more. Marcovefa went on muttering. Dashru started to have trouble breathing. His face went a mottled purple above the edge of his beard.

  “Will you kill him?” Hamnet asked.

  “Unless he admits I am stronger, I will. And I will roast his heart afterwards and eat it, too.” Marcovefa would have sounded more excited talking about an unexpected shower. And when she spoke of roasting Dashru’s heart, she meant it. Up atop the Glacier, captives from another clan were meat, nothing more.

  The Rulers were a proud folk. Many of them would have died before yielding in a trail of strength, especially against someone from outside their own folk. But Dashru had already yielded once. Maybe that prompted him to drop to his knees. Or maybe getting sorcerously asphyxiated would have weakened almost anyone.

  Whatever the reason, he choked out, “Mercy!” with what had to be close to his last breath.

  By the look in Marcovefa’s eye, she would sooner have butchered and cooked him than given him what he wanted. But he’d done what she said he had to-or most of it, anyway. “I am stronger, yes?” she demanded in the Rulers’ language.

  “Mercy!” Dashru said again, and then, reluctantly, “Yes.”

  A moment later, he was sucking in great gulps of air. He got back his usual swarthy coloring. “You insult me again?” Marcovefa asked.

  Dashru shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, wizard lady.”

  “Better not.” Marcovefa made as if to spit in his face, but contemptuously turned her back instead.

  “Enough lesson of speech?” Dashru asked Hamnet Thyssen. He wasn’t going to have anything more to do with Marcovefa, not if he could help it. Count Hamnet had no trouble understanding that.

  “Enough language lessons, yes,” he answered. Dashru got out of there as fast as he could. Again, Hamnet would have done the same thing.

  “You are too soft on him,” Marcovefa said. “He is a captive, a rabbit on the fire. He should remember.”

  “He isn’t likely to forget, not now,” Hamnet said.

  “If he hadn’t got out of line, he wouldn’t have needed the lesson,” Marcovefa said, adding, “Did you see how useless his countercharm was?”

  “Yes.” Count Hamnet wondered whether the countercharm would have been useless against Liv’s sorcery, or Audun Gilli’s. He didn’t think so, though he wasn’t sure.

  “Now I know more of what the Rulers do. I know more of how they think. I want to fight them. I want to beat them,” Marcovefa said.

  “You’d better want to. And you’d better do it, too,” Hamnet said. “Without you, we haven’t got much chance.”

  “Foosh!” Marcovefa said-a dismissive noise. “Their magic is not so much. You shouldn’t have such trouble with it.” She paused. “Of course, the magic you people down here know isn’t so much, either.”

  “That’s why we need you,” Count Hamnet said. “If anything happens to you . . .” He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about that. He would lose his woman. In the ordinary run of things, with the sorrows he’d known in his love life, that would have been disaster enough and then some. Since the Bizogots and the Empire would likely go under the Rulers’ yoke in short order, his love life, for once, wasn’t his biggest worry.

  The lewd glint in Marcovefa’s eye said she thought he was thinking about it. “You find some other woman to give you what you want,” she teased.

  “Where will I find another woman who can give me the Rulers driven back beyond the Gap?” he asked.

  She pointed north. “Same place you found me-up on top of the Glacier.”

  “I didn’t want to make that trip once. We wouldn’t have tried to climb the ice then if the Rulers weren’t going to kill us if we stayed on flat ground.” Hamnet shuddered at the memory of that fearsome ascent. “We wouldn’t have had a chance if that big avalanche hadn’t made the slope less impossible than it usually is.”

  “It is not easy,” Marcovefa admitted. “If it were, my folk would have come down from the Glacier long ago. Our enemies drove us up there, too-so our songs say. I believe them. No one would have gone up there unless he had to.”

  “All right, then,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Don’t talk foolishness. Everyone on this side of the Gap needs you.” He slipped his arm around her waist. “I need you in a way the rest of the people don’t, though.”

  “You think so, do you?” She gave him a sidelong glance and a mocking smile. “So no other men on this side of the Gap would want me?”

  That wasn’t true. She was pretty enough that any man might want her. Hamnet answered with guile of his own: “You’d scare most of them off once they found out you might carve them into steaks if they made you unhappy.”

  “Foosh!” Marcovefa said again. “I don’t butcher anyone from my own clan-and a lover is about the same as a clansman.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” Hamnet was kidding, but kidding on the square. He and Marcovefa both started to laugh. The world might be coming to pieces around them. Might be? It was. If the Glacier hadn’t come to pieces, none of what happened since would have been possible. But you couldn’t keep looking at anything so large for very long, not wit
hout your mind snapping. If something funny came along close by, you’d laugh.

  Which didn’t mean the bigger troubles went away. Not looking at them for a little while helped them seem more tolerable, though. Whether they really were . . . was a question Hamnet ignored for the time being.

  A scout rode into the Bizogots’ camp. He pointed north and east. “There’s a band of those musk-ox turds riding south,” he said. “They won’t pass too far from us.”

  “How big a band?” Trasamund asked. That was the right question, sure enough. If it was too large, these remnants of half a dozen shattered Bizogot clans would have to fight shy of it for fear even a hard-won victory would leave them too weak to fight again.

  The scout considered. “Maybe half a dozen war mammoths,” he said. “More of the miserable mushrooms on their riding deer, of course, but not too many. I think we can take them.”

  “I bet he’s right,” Ulric Skakki said to Hamnet. “Scouts always see bigger forces than the ones that are really there.”

  “Most of the time, anyhow,” Hamnet said. He raised his voice to question the Bizogot: “Did they look like men who intended to settle down when they found good grazing, or did they seem on their way to somewhere else?”

  “Hard to know for sure,” the scout said, and Hamnet Thyssen nodded impatiently. After more thought, the man went on, “If they wanted to stop, the grazing was good where they were. They were moving pretty steady.”

  “Heading for the Empire,” Ulric murmured.

  Count Hamnet nodded again. The Rulers already had an army down there fighting against Sigvat II’s soldiers. Hamnet wondered whether Sigvat wished he’d taken all the warnings he’d got more seriously. Too late to worry about that now, for Sigvat and for everybody else.

  Trasamund made a fist and slammed it into his thigh. “Let’s hit them!”

  Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. “What do you think?” Ulric asked.

  “We might as well,” Hamnet asked. “If we can break the links between the Rulers’ big army down in the south and the Gap, we’ve done something useful. They’d better have a tough time reinforcing their men down in the Empire.”

  “I suppose so.” Ulric didn’t sound thrilled. After a moment, he explained why: “Any time you say something that starts with ‘If we can . . . ,’ I start worrying about it.”

  “Me in particular, or anybody?” Hamnet inquired.

  “Anybody,” the adventurer replied.

  “Well, good. I wouldn’t want to be singled out,” Count Hamnet murmured.

  Trasamund went on shouting, trying to fire up the Bizogots and get them moving that very moment. A crack squadron of imperial cavalry would have had trouble riding off to war as fast as he wanted the mammoth-herders to move. When the Bizogots didn’t get cracking fast enough to suit him, he yelled louder than ever.

  A Bizogot who wasn’t from the Three Tusk clan complained, loudly and profanely. Trasamund knocked him down and kicked him. The man came up with a knife in his hand. Trasamund kicked him again, right where it did the most good. The other Bizogot crumpled, clutching at himself.

  “He isn’t going to ride to war,” Hamnet said.

  “I don’t think so,” Ulric agreed in shrill falsetto. He lowered his voice in two different ways to continue, “Trasamund’s going to get killed if he keeps doing that. One of these days, the other fellow will stick him before he can kick.”

  “Well, you don’t see Bizogots living to get old very often, do you?” Hamnet said. “It’s a rough life up here, and they don’t make it any easier on themselves.”

  “They never make anything easy on anyone, including themselves.” Ulric shrugged. “It makes them tough-if the Empire had to take the beating the nomads have, it would have gone belly-up to the Rulers a long time ago. But you’re right-they pay the price for it.”

  They rode east as if they never once thought about the price. Hamnet and Ulric rode with them. If Ulric worried, he didn’t show it. Hamnet Thyssen looked worried even when he wasn’t. He was now. He rode close to Marcovefa, to protect her if he could. He understood she was more likely to protect him than the other way around, but he would do what he could.

  Audun Gilli and Liv also rode together. Which one of them would protect the other was anyone’s guess. A couple of other Bizogot shamans, dressed like Liv in clothes all fringed and decorated with little bells, rode with the fighters, too. Maybe they could help, maybe not. Hamnet didn’t think they could do any harm.

  The land was as flat as if a heavy weight had lain on it not long before. And so one had: the Glacier had lingered far longer here than down in the Empire. Every so often, Hamnet rode past a boulder left behind by the retreating ice.

  If the Rulers had a scout up on top of a frost heave-a pingo, the Bizogots called such a thing-he could spot the oncoming horsemen from a long, long way. Count Hamnet didn’t think they would. That was a ploy for an army staying in one spot, not for men moving south as fast as they could.

  “Here’s hoping they’re just warriors, with no wizard along,” he said to Ulric Skakki.

  “Yes, here’s hoping,” Ulric replied. “We could use an easy fight for a change.”

  Snowshoe hares bounded away from the Bizogots. Ptarmigans flew off, wings whirring. The hunting up here was marvelous, especially in the brief burgeoning season of the year. Hamnet thought it was a shame he was hunting a quarry that could hunt him, too.

  “They they are!” An outrider pointed due east.

  To Hamnet Thyssen, those wiggles on the horizon might have been anything. His eyes weren’t particularly bad, but they weren’t particularly good, either. Before long, he made out mammoths, mammoths with men atop them. Those could only be Rulers. The Bizogots herded mammoths and used them, but didn’t ride them. Till they saw the Rulers in action, riding mammoths had never occurred to them. Now they were wild to learn the art. If they survived and stayed free, maybe they would.

  If.

  Before long, the Rulers spied the Bizogots, too. They stopped heading south and swung toward the west. They used their common battle formation: mammoths anchoring the center of their line, with warriors on riding deer out to either wing. Horses were better riding animals than deer, even if they lacked antlers. But fighting against mammoths was like fighting the Glacier.

  The Glacier is melting, Hamnet reminded himself. The Bizogots could beat mammoths. They could, yes, but it wouldn’t be easy.

  II

  As little armies closed with each other, Trasamund harangued the Bizogots: “This is our chance for revenge! We can hurt them! We can kill them! It doesn’t matter that they beat us before! We are the Bizogots, the lords of this land! Time to offer up some blood to God!”

  The blond barbarians cheered. They wanted to believe they could beat the Rulers. They wanted to forget their clans were shattered and they were pounded together into a makeshift fighting force the way bits of meat got stuffed into a sausage casing. At least till the arrows-and the spells-started flying, they could.

  But Ulric Skakki caught Count Hamnet’s eye. “How often have we heard that speech?” he asked.

  Hamnet shrugged. “What’s he supposed to say? ‘We might as well give up, because they’re going to wallop the snot out of us’? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, when you put it that way, maybe not,” Ulric allowed. “But I’ve listened to the same bluster too often before a losing battle.”

  “We won’t lose. We’ll win.” That wasn’t Hamnet Thyssen. It was Marcovefa, who sounded even more sublimely confident than Trasamund did.

  “With you working magic for us, we have a chance, anyhow,” Hamnet said. She made a face at him. He wasn’t a confident man. He didn’t shrink from a fight against the Rulers, but he’d seen too many of them go wrong.

  Marcovefa only laughed. “Now they try a spell to throw insects at us. They think we cannot beat the likes of that?” She laughed again.

  She might have thought it was funny, but alarm tri
ckled through Hamnet. The Rulers had used that spell in a battle the year before, and the swarms of bugs they threw at the Bizogots and their animals drove them mad and paved the way for the invaders’ victory. Liv and Audun Gilli had had to abandon their own magic to weaken the enemy sorcery even a little. Would Marcovefa be able to do anything else while she fought it?

  Even if she couldn’t, Liv and Audun rode with the Bizogots today. If Marcovefa could keep the Rulers’ wizards busy, the two of them might work magic on the enemy. That Liv had once worked a different kind of magic on Hamnet . . . he shoved down in his mind. He didn’t have time to fret about Liv now, any more than he had time to fret about Gudrid.

  A gnat flew into his left eye. He rubbed his face and sent Marcovefa a reproachful look. Maybe it was a natural gnat, not one the Rulers had inspired. Maybe Marcovefa was just weakening the spell, not blocking it altogether. He supposed he could forgive her a gnat or two. But why did this one have to find his eye?

  Trasamund drew his blade and brandished it over his head. It was a two-handed sword, which meant he needed a well-trained horse to use it. He couldn’t hang on to the reins and swing it at the same time. While he used it, he had to guide his mount with knees alone.

  Arrows started flying. Hamnet shot again and again, emptying his quiver as fast as he could. The Rulers had used spells to break bowstrings, too. Not this time, or, if they were trying that magic, Marcovefa wasn’t letting it get anywhere.

  Here and there, invaders and riding deer crashed to the ground. Some lay still, others writhed and thrashed in pain. Bizogots also went down. Whatever Marcovefa was doing, she wasn’t interfering with the Rulers’ archery. Therein lay her greatest danger: one of those flying shafts might find her.

  No sooner had that thought crossed Hamnet’s mind than Marcovefa caught an arrow out of the air. She kissed the tip and threw it back at the Rulers-maybe at the man who’d shot it. Hamnet was able to watch, because it glowed as it flew . . . and it flew faster than any shaft ever launched from a horn-backed bow. It caught an enemy warrior square in the chest, and he didn’t move after he slid off over his riding deer’s tail.