Breath of God g-2 Read online

  Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. Hamnet had trouble putting what he wanted to say into words. Ulric, as usual, didn’t. “Do you have to do this thing right now, Your Ferocity?” he asked.

  “And why not?” Trasamund demanded.

  “Because we’ll need you for the fight against the Rulers.” Now Count Hamnet found the words he needed. “Because if you kill yourself it will be the same as if they won a great battle.”

  “They ride woolly mammoths to war,” Trasamund said. “I swore I would do the same. I will ride this beast. You shall not stop me.”

  Maybe Hamnet and Ulric could have tackled him and sat on him. But, even if he didn’t try to draw his great two-handed sword and kill them both, what good would that do? He would only come out and try to ride a mammoth while they weren’t around. If he fell, if he was thrown clear, they might be able to save him before the beast crushed the life out of him. Hamnet didn’t believe it, but it was possible.

  “Now,” Trasamund said, and advanced on the mammoth. Its hairy ears flapped – what was this man-thing up to? Trasamund was a big man, but seemed tiny beside the cow mammoth.

  When he took hold of two big handfuls of mammoth hair and started scrambling up the beast’s side, Hamnet thought he would die, and about as unpleasantly as a man could. The mammoth’s trunk flew up into the air and blared out a startled note. The animal could have used the trunk to pluck off Trasamund and throw him down to the snow-covered ground. One of its great feet descending on his head or his chest, and that would be that.

  “If I were mad enough to try to ride a mammoth, I wouldn’t be mad enough to try it that way,” Ulric Skakki said. “By God, I hope I wouldn’t, anyhow.”

  “I don’t think there’s enough gold in the world to get me up on a mammoth’s back,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Not unless I’m up there with somebody who knows what he’s doing, I mean. And since the Rulers are the only ones who ride mammoths . .. Well, there you are.”

  “No, there Trasamund is,” Ulric said. “I’m here where I belong – on the ground, and far enough away from that shaggy monster.”

  But in spite of trumpeting in surprise and alarm, the mammoth didn’t dash Trasamund to the ground and trample him. The Red Dire Wolf Bizogots said they’d chosen the gentlest animal in their herd, and they seemed to mean it. Count Hamnet wouldn’t have let a cat climb him. That had to be what it was like for the mammoth.

  With a shout of triumph, the jarl straddled the beast’s broad back. “I’m here!” he roared. “I really am up here! Look at me!” He let out a loud, wordless whoop almost as discordant as the mammoth’s trumpeting.

  “By God, I don’t think I got that excited the first time I went into a woman,” Ulric said. “Of course, if you’d seen the woman I did it with the first time, you wouldn’t have got very excited, either.”

  Hamnet Thyssen had a hard time not laughing. “What did she think of you?”

  “She thought I’d paid her, and she was right.” Ulric raised his voice to a shout. “Now that you’re up there, Your Ferocity, how do you make the mammoth go?”

  “You think I haven’t got an answer,” Trasamund yelled back. “Shows what you know.” He pulled a stick from his belt. “The Rulers use a goad to make the beasts obey, and I can do the same.” He thwacked the mammoth’s right side. “Get moving!”

  “The Rulers probably start training their mammoths when they’re calves,” Hamnet said. “The animals know what the signals are supposed to mean. This mammoth’s never run into them before. What will it do?”

  “You can see that, and I can see that, but do you really expect a Bizogot to see that?” Ulric Skakki answered. “Well, the beast’s hair is thick. Maybe it won’t think he’s hitting it hard enough to be really annoying. He’d better hope it doesn’t, because otherwise the last thing he’ll ever say is ‘Oops!’“

  After Trasamund belabored the mammoth for a bit, it did start to walk. He whooped again – too soon. The mammoth was going where it wanted to go, not where he wanted it to go. And it was going there faster and faster, too, first at a trot, then at what had to be a bone-shaking gallop. Trasamund had no saddle and no reins. All he could do was hang on to handfuls of mammoth hair for dear life – and he did.

  Ulric and Hamnet mounted their horses and rode after the mammoth. They made sure not to come too close. Spooking it might mean killing Trasamund. It might also mean getting killed themselves. Discretion seemed the better choice.

  Even now, the woolly mammoth didn’t try to pull the obstreperous human off its back. It was a good-natured beast; the Red Dire Wolves had chosen well. And Trasamund, to Hamnet Thyssens surprise, had the sense not to be too obstreperous. After goading the mammoth into running, he let it go till it wore itself out, without trying to urge it on any more. When it finally stopped, breath smoking and great shaggy flanks heaving, Trasamund slid down and off over its tail, nimble as one of the monkeys that sometimes came up in trade from lands in the distant south.

  Monkeys never lasted long in Nidaros; when the weather turned cold, chest fever carried them away. Hamnet hadn’t thought Trasamund would last long on the mammoths back, either. He was glad to find himself wrong. The Bizogot trotted away from his enormous mount before it could decide to turn on him for revenge.

  “Bravely done – you idiot,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “Call me whatever you please. I don’t care.” Trasamund’s grin was as wide and foolish and wondering as if he were just coming away from his first woman. “But you can’t call me an oathbreaker, by God. I swore I would do this, and I cursed well did. And I’ll do it again, too.”

  “I have a question for you,” Count Hamnet said.

  “What was it like?” Trasamund said. “I’ll tell you what it was like. It – ”

  But Hamnet shook his head. “No, that wasn’t what I wanted to ask.”

  Trasamund glowered at him; it was what the Bizogot jarl wanted to talk about. Pretending not to notice, Hamnet Thyssen went on, “You might have done better – smoother – if you’d asked one of our captives from the Rulers how they ride their mammoths. Why didn’t you? That’s what I want to know.”

  Trasamund went from scowling to flabbergasted in the blink of an eye. “I never thought of it. I wanted to find out for myself.”

  “Is that a Bizogot, or is that a Bizogot?” Ulric Skakki said, not loud enough for Trasamund to hear. Hamnet Thyssen nodded.

  “Do you think the captives would give good advice or bad?” Trasamund asked. “They might want to see anyone from this side of the Glacier who gets on a mammoth die. If we have mammoth-riders, too, that gives us a better chance against their brethren.”

  “If we were talking about Bizogots or Raumsdalians, I’d say you were right,” Hamnet answered. “But if the Rulers get captured, they’re disgraced. They’re cast out from their own folk. They can never go back – the sin, or whatever they think it is, clings to them.”

  “That’s why a lot of them try to kill themselves,” Ulric added.

  “It is,” Hamnet agreed. “But it’s also why I think you can rely on what they tell you. In their eyes, they aren’t of the Rulers anymore, because they know their own folk don’t want them back and won’t take them back. If they’re going to live any kind of life at all, they have to do it with us.”

  “They’re queer birds, all right,” Trasamund said. “Well, maybe I will talk to them, then. If I like what they say, I’ll try it. And if I think they are lying to me, they’ll die, but not so fast as they’d want to.”

  The cow mammoth lifted her trunk, bugled once more, and strode off with an air of affronted dignity. You got away with that, but if you think I’m happy about it you’d better think again – every line of her body told how she felt. She might have been a frumpy matron down in Nidaros offended because her soup was cold.

  “I’m just glad the Rulers have held off from hitting us as long as they have,” Ulric Skakki said. “If they’d come after the Red Dire Wolves right aft
er they hit the Three Tusk Bizogots, I don’t know how we could have stopped them.”

  “My guess is, my brave clan hurt them badly even in defeat,” Trasamund said. “They haven’t pressed farther south because they can’t.”

  “It could be.” Hamnet Thyssen doubted it was, but he was willing to let the Three Tusk jarl keep as much pride as he could. “But it could also be that they’re building strength up there, bringing men and mammoths and riding deer down through the Gap and getting ready for a big campaign.” If he were a chieftain of the Rulers, that was what he would have done.

  “Makes sense to me,” Ulric said. “I wish we’d had more luck getting the Bizogots to fight as one army and not by clans. If they’re not careful, they’ll all go down separately, one clan at a time.”

  “Getting Bizogots to do anything together with other Bizogots is like herding mosquitoes,” Trasamund said. “They fly where they want, they bite where they want, and if they feel like biting the herder, they do that, too.”

  “And the swifts and the swallows swoop down and eat them as they please,” Hamnet said. Trasamund sent him a sour stare, but couldn’t very well claim he was wrong. “We need more spies up at the edge of the country the Rulers hold,” Hamnet went on. “I wish Odovacar’s wolves could tell us more, because it’s hard to get men up there without letting the Rulers know.”

  “Maybe magic would serve where spies can’t,” Ulric said.

  “It had better, by God,” Trasamund said. “Liv and Audun Gilli have been going on for a while now about how their toenails itch, and that means the Rulers have a hangover. Let’s see what they can do when they set their minds to it, and when old Odovacar tosses in whatever he can.”

  “If the Rulers’ wizards catch them spying, it may do us more harm than good,” Hamnet Thyssen said. Did he fear what the Rulers’ wizards might do to Liv if they caught her working magic against them? He knew he did.

  By the glint in Ulric Skakki’s eye, he knew the same thing. “A goldpiece is no good if it sits in your belt pouch. You’ve got to spend it,” he said. “A soldier is no good if he sits in a tavern pinching the barmaids. He’s got to go out into the field and fight. A wizard’s not worth much if he can’t work magic.”

  “That’s all true, every word of it,” Trasamund said. “Let’s see what our shamans can do.”

  Count Hamnet wanted to hate both of them. They aimed to send his beloved into danger. But he found he couldn’t, for he knew they were right. And he knew Liv would say the same thing when anyone got around to putting the question to her. And so he nodded heavily, and hated himself instead.

  Audun Gilli looked worried, which would have alarmed Hamnet Thyssen more if Audun didn’t look worried so much of the time. Liv looked serious, which again was nothing out of the ordinary. Odovacar looked like a man who wanted a skin of smetyn. But, as far as Hamnet could tell, the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman was sober.

  Deciding what the three of them wanted to do hadn’t been easy. Audun Gilli still knew much less of the Bizogot language than Hamnet wished he did. Liv’s temper frayed with translating for him and for Odovacar. And the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman’s deafness meant she had to shout the same thing over and over, which did nothing to make her any happier.

  After a lot of shouting – not all of it having to do with Odovacar’s bad ears, by any means – the three sorcerers decided to send a spirit animal to what had been the Three Tusk Bizogots’ lands to see what the Rulers were doing there. Liv’s spirit would make the spearhead of the magic; Audun Gilli and Odovacar would lend her strength and help ward her against anything the invaders tried.

  “What can go wrong?” Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv the night before they tried the spell.

  She shrugged. “All kinds of things. Shamanry is not a certain business, especially when the enemy’s shamans fight against what you do.”

  That much the Raumsdalian noble knew for himself. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked.

  “Maybe they can kill me,” Liv answered. “Maybe they can kill my spirit and leave my body alive without it. Which is worse, do you think?” She sounded as if it were an interesting abstract question, one with nothing to do with the rest of her life – however long that turned out to be.

  “Should you go on with this, then?” Yes, Hamnet feared for her.

  “Warriors go into battle knowing they may not see the sun rise again,” Liv said. “You have done this yourself. You know it is so. We need to find out what the Rulers are doing. I’m best suited to look out over the lands that were my clan’s – that are my clan’s, by God – and see what the Rulers are doing there. It will be all right, Hamnet. Or if it isn’t, it will be the way it is.”

  It will be the way it is. The hard life the Bizogots led made them into fatalists. Most of the time, Hamnet Thyssen admired that. Now it terrified him. “I don’t want to lose you!” he exclaimed.

  “I don’t want to lose you, either,” Liv said. “You asked for the worst, and I told you. I do not think it will come to that. We are working on our home ground, with spells we know. I may not learn everything I want to, but I should be able to get away again afterward. Does that make you feel better?” She sounded like a mother comforting a little boy who’d had a nightmare.

  The way they chose to comfort each other a little later had nothing to do with little boys, though there was some small chance it might have made Liv the mother of one. Afterward, if the old jokes were true, Count Hamnet should have rolled over and gone to sleep. He didn’t. He lay awake a long time, staring up at the darkness inside the mammoth-hide tent. Liv was the one who slipped quickly into slumber. He supposed that was all to the good; she would need to be fresh when morning came.

  At last, he did sleep. He wished he hadn’t – his dreams were confused and troubled. He hoped that didn’t mean anything. He was no wizard, no foreteller. All the same, he wished they were better.

  Liv broke her fast on meat and marrow. Through the winter, the Bizogots ate little else. She showed a good appetite. Hamnet Thyssen had to force his food down. “It will be all right,” she said again.

  “Of course it will,” he answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying.

  The weather should have cheered him. It was bright and sunny, and not far below freezing – after what they’d been through, it felt like spring. The equinox couldn’t be far away; the sun spent more time above the horizon every day. But even after winter formally died, the Breath of God would go on blowing for another month, maybe even six weeks. Only then would the snow melt, the land turn to puddles, mosquitoes and midges start breeding in mad and maddening profusion, and the landscape go from white to flower-splashed green.

  Breathing didn’t feel as if Hamnet were inhaling knives. Getting out of the stuffy, smelly tent was a relief to the nose, too. If any air was fresher and cleaner than that which came down off the Glacier, the Raumsdalian couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  He looked north. There stood the Glacier, tall as any other formidable mountains. He wished the Gap had never melted through. Then the Rulers would still be walled off from the Bizogot country – and from the Raumsdalian Empire to the south.

  But if the Gap hadn’t melted through, Trasamund wouldn’t have come south to Nidaros looking for help exploring the land beyond the Glacier. Hamnet wouldn’t have come north with him, which meant he wouldn’t have met Liv.

  He started to ask her if she thought the opening of the Gap was worth it to her, if their meeting made everything else worthwhile. He started to, yes, but he wasn’t fool enough to finish the question. Of course she would say no, and she would have good reason to. Because the Gap had melted through, the Rulers had crushed her clan. Her kinsfolk and friends, the folk she’d known all her life, were dead or exiled or living under the heel of the invaders.

  No, she wouldn’t think that was worth it. She might have found love among her fellow Bizogots. Even if she hadn’t, they would still roam their grazing grounds as free men and women. Nothing right n
ow meant more to Hamnet Thyssen than she did. As a Raumsdalian, he naturally thought nothing should mean more to her than he did. But Raumsdalians were, and could afford to be, more individualistic than Bizogots. To Liv, the clan mattered far more than the Empire did to Hamnet – and he was, by the standards of his folk, a duty-filled man.

  Here came Audun Gilli, a somber look on his thin, scraggly-bearded face. And here came Odovacar, in his tufted and fringed shaman’s costume. He carried a drum – a frame made of mammoth bone, with a musk-ox-hide drumhead. Tufts of dire-wolf fur and sparkling crystals attached with red-dyed yarn dangled from it.

  “Are we ready?” he asked.

  “If we aren’t, what are we doing here?” Liv replied. Audun Gilli had picked up enough of the Bizogot tongue to understand the simple question, if not her reply. He nodded to Odovacar.

  “Good. Good. Then let us begin.” The Red Dire Wolves’ shaman tapped the drum – once, twice, three times. The tone was deeper and richer than Hamnet Thyssen had expected. The rhythm, to his surprise, didn’t put him in mind of a dire wolf’s howl. It was shorter and sharper; it might have been bird tracks in the snow.

  Odovacar started to dance. However old and stooped he was, he moved with surprising grace and ease. Liv began dancing, too. Her steps perfectly fit the beat of the drum. Count Hamnet was almost taken aback that she left ordinary footprints in the snow, not marks with three toes forward and one behind. Her arms flapped as if she were a bird.

  Audun Gilli set semiprecious stones in a circle around the two Bizogot shamans. He murmured his chant so as not to interfere with the drum. “Ward spell,” he told Hamnet, who nodded.

  Liv suddenly sat down in the snow. Her arms went on flapping. “I fly,” she said in the Bizogot language. “Like the snowy owl, I fly.” Her eyes seemed wider and more unwinking than they had any business being. They didn’t go yellow, as Odovacar’s had when he took wolf shape, nor did she sprout feathers and fly in the flesh. All the same, she gave an overwhelming impression of owlishness.