The Golden Shrine Read online

  “They went and showed everybody else, too,” Ulric Skakki added. Did he sound amused? Hamnet thought so.

  Sigvat also must have, because he started to reply. Trasamund forestalled him, saying, “If you hustle, you’ve still got a chance to get out of the palace alive. Leave your robe for whoever needs it next, go somewhere a long way off, change your name, and try and pretend you never heard of Nidaros.”

  That struck Hamnet Thyssen as good advice: better than he would have given Sigvat. It must have struck the suddenly ex–Raumsdalian Emperor the same way. He slid down off the poor makeshift throne and made his way toward the entrance to the throne room. By the time he got there, he was trotting.

  Eyvind Torfinn bowed to Hamnet. “What is your will, Your Majesty?” he asked.

  “No!” Hamnet said sharply. “No, by God! You can’t make me wear the crown, and neither can anybody else. If you try, I’ll go up to the tallest tower and throw myself out on my head—or else I’ll just fall on my sword.” He’d tried that before, and failed. He didn’t think he would if he tried again. “I’d rather die than be Emperor of Raumsdalia, and I mean it. If you want the job, Your Splendor, you can have it.”

  Hamnet remembered that would make Gudrid Raumsdalian Empress. He couldn’t think of a better reason to go see what the hot countries in the distant south were like.

  But Earl Eyvind shook his head, even if Gudrid looked furious when he did. “Thank you, but no,” the scholarly noble replied. “The Emperor should be—in times like these, had better be—a stronger man than I.”

  “Maybe we can dice for the crown,” Ulric suggested. “Loser gets it.”

  “We should care more about the Empire than that.” Earl Eyvind’s voice was starchy with disapproval, but he said no more. How could he, when he’d just turned it down himself?

  “Somebody’ll grab it before too long,” Ulric said. Hamnet nodded, but he was thinking, As long as it isn’t me!

  XXII

  HAMNET THYSSEN DIDN’T linger long in the imperial palace. True, he’d brought bad news for Sigvat II straight from the Golden Shrine. But he had brought bad news for the Raumsdalian Emperor. The aura of glamour surrounding the first was enough to let him get out of the palace unscathed. He didn’t think he would have lasted more than a few hours at the outside had he tried to hang around.

  He didn’t see Sigvat alive or dead. Maybe the Emperor really had got away and was busy memorizing his new name. Stranger things had happened. Before Hamnet first met Trasamund, he would have irately denied the possibility. Since then, he’d gone beyond the Gap. He’d climbed to the top of the Glacier and met the folk who lived up there. He’d gone inside the Golden Shrine. All of those were at least a little stranger than the chance that Sigvat might act like a sensible human being.

  Ulric Skakki didn’t overstay his welcome, either. He waited impatiently with Hamnet for grooms to lead their horses out of the stables. “Well, Your Grace, what now?” he asked.

  “I’m going home,” Hamnet said simply. “Anybody who tries to drag me out again will have to lay siege to the place . . . if it’s still standing, anyhow.”

  “What if it’s not?” The adventurer was as full of annoying questions as ever. His twisted grin said he knew as much.

  “God knows, in that case.” Hamnet shrugged. “Maybe I’ll keep on going south, the way I’ve talked about. Or maybe I’ll turn around and go up onto the steppe and see what kind of Bizogot I make.”

  He was about to ask what Ulric intended to do, but Ulric beat him to the punch again: “And what about Marcovefa?”

  “What about me?” Marcovefa asked from behind them. They both jumped. She went on, “Why do you ask somebody else? Do you think I cannot take care of myself? Are you so foolish?”

  “Mm—I hope not.” For once in his life, Ulric sounded faintly embarrassed.

  “He asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him I was going home,” Count Hamnet said. “Then he asked about you, and you answered before I could. I didn’t know what you were going to say, anyhow.”

  “I will come with you. I will see your home. After all, you have seen mine,” Marcovefa said. “Whether I will stay after that”—she smiled—“we can both find out.”

  Ulric nudged Hamnet. “Take her up on it,” he stage-whispered. “You won’t get a better bargain.”

  “Do you think I’m too stupid to figure that out for myself?” Hamnet said.

  “By your track record, yes,” Ulric answered. The worst of it was, Hamnet could hardly tell him he was wrong.

  Marcovefa glared at the palace guards and grooms. “Where is my horse?” she demanded. “Do I have to start turning people into voles to get the rest of you to do what you should be doing anyhow?” The servitors all but stumbled over one another in their haste to do what she wanted.

  “This is how it ends,” Ulric said, not sadly but in a matter-of-fact way. “We did what we set out to do—enough of it, anyway—and now we go back to taking care of things for ourselves.” He sketched a salute. “Luck, Thyssen. Maybe we’ll run into each other again one of these years.”

  “Maybe we will. Nothing would surprise me any more.” Hamnet clasped the adventurer’s hand while grooms led out their horses—and Marcovefa’s.

  “Me, I’m heading south myself. I’ve had enough of ice to last me a long time,” Ulric said. He’d made noises like that before. Maybe he meant them. Or maybe he aimed to throw any possible pursuers off his trail.

  He did ride south, which soon separated him from Hamnet and Marcovefa, who made for the east gate. Hamnet could have gone out the south gate just as well; his keep and the lands surrounding it lay far to the southeast. But Ulric Skakki had it right: breaking apart was how things ended.

  Or so Hamnet thought, till somebody let out a deep bass yell behind him. He looked back over his shoulder. Here came Trasamund, bulling his horse through traffic so the locals glared at him. “You won’t get away from me like that,” the jarl boomed. “I guested you as long as I could up on the plains. About time you pay me back, the way a guest-friend should by rights.”

  Hamnet laughed and sketched a salute. “At your service, Your Ferocity.”

  Trasamund bowed in the saddle and started to laugh himself, but abruptly choked it off. “You may as well forget the title. Without a clan to rule, I don’t deserve it any more. The world’s a miserable place.”

  “You’ve seen the Golden Shrine—you’ve gone into it—and you say that? Shame on you,” Marcovefa told him.

  “It is,” Trasamund insisted. “We never would have seen the Golden Shrine if the Rulers hadn’t wrecked the Bizogots, and they started with my clan.”

  “More to the world than your clan,” Hamnet said. “More to the world than Raumsdalia, too.”

  “Oh? Then why aren’t you riding off to God knows where with Ulric Skakki?” Trasamund said. “You’re going back to the one little piece of ground that belongs to you. I’d go back to the tents of the Three Tusk clan, except they aren’t there any more.” He wiped away a tear, whether real or rhetorical Count Hamnet wasn’t sure.

  “You’re welcome to come along with us if you care to,” Hamnet said, as a guest-friend should. “My home is yours for as long as you care to stay there.”

  The jarl bowed in the saddle again. “Well, I do thank you for that. And, like I said, I’ll take you up on it—for now, anyway. If I wander off one of these days, it won’t be on account of anything you’ve done. I don’t expect it will, I mean. But I don’t know if I can stay in one place the rest of my days.”

  “Neither do I,” Marcovefa said.

  “Well, neither do I,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “We’ll all find out. As long as I stay away from Nidaros—and as long as Nidaros’ troubles stay away from me—I suppose I’ll get along wherever I am.” He reached out and set a hand on Marcovefa’s arm. “The company is pretty good.”

  “Are you trying to sweet-talk me?” she asked.

  “Not right this moment,” Hamnet said. “Wh
en we stop to rest tonight, we’ll see how I do then.” By the way she laughed, he had a good chance of doing well.

  But her laugh cut off as shouts and screams and the clash of blade against blade rang out behind them, from the direction of the palace. “Oh, God!” Trasamund said. “It’s starting already, isn’t it? Cursed fools didn’t waste any time.”

  “What happens in a Bizogot clan when the jarl dies and nobody’s set to succeed him?” Hamnet asked. Trasamund grunted: as much of a concession as Hamnet was likely to get.

  “What do we do now?” Marcovefa asked. The martial racket was getting louder and coming closer.

  “We get out of here, quick as we can.” Hamnet urged his horse up into a trot. “The only thing worse than getting stuck in the middle of a war is getting stuck in the middle of a civil war.”

  “That makes more sense than I wish it did,” Trasamund said. He and Marcovefa booted their horses forward, too.

  To Hamnet’s relief, nobody at the eastern gate recognized him. “What’s going on back there?” a guard asked, pointing in the direction from which he and his companions had come. “Sounds like the whole world’s going crazy.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Hamnet looked as blank and innocent as he could. “All we want to do is get on our way before whatever it is catches up with us.”

  “Smart,” the guard said solemnly.

  One of the other soldiers at the gate said, “Somebody who went through a few minutes ago said the Emperor was leaving town again. That doesn’t seem right, does it? I mean, those stupid Rulers or whatever the demon they are haven’t given us so much trouble lately. Why would His Majesty want to leave now, then?”

  Count Hamnet, Marcovefa, and Trasamund looked at one another. As if animated by the same puppeteer, they shrugged at the same time. Hamnet Thyssen lied straight-faced: “I don’t know anything about that, either.”

  “We’ll all find out, I guess.” The guard eyed his colleagues, who nodded. He waved to Hamnet. “Pass on through.”

  “Thanks.” This time, Hamnet was altogether sincere. Probably no one since the Golden Shrine had done him a bigger favor than this gate guard who waved him out of Nidaros. What was liable to happen in the capital over the next few days wouldn’t be pretty.

  He and Marcovefa and Trasamund hadn’t got more than eight or ten yards out of the gate before one of the guards howled in dismay. Looking back over his shoulder, Hamnet saw the man had clapped a hand to his forehead: a theatrical gesture, but plainly heartfelt. “Those idiots! Those God-cursed idiots!” the guard cried. “They’ve started a fire!”

  That only made Hamnet ride harder. He neither knew who they were nor wanted to find out. Whoever they were, he agreed with the guard: anybody who started a fire inside a city was an idiot.

  “At least the Breath of God isn’t blowing,” Trasamund said.

  If it were, whatever the Rulers hadn’t ruined in Nidaros might go up in flames. And . . . “I don’t think the maniac with a torch cared,” Hamnet said.

  “Somebody ought to cut him in half and leave the pieces where people can see them,” Trasamund said. “That’s what we’d do up on the steppe. Anybody else who gets ideas can see what they’d cost him.”

  “I hope somebody does,” Count Hamnet said. “But it isn’t my worry, thank God. Raumsdalia can sort it out without me.” He sat straighter on his horse, as if a heavy weight had lifted from his shoulders. “Have you got any idea how good it feels to be able to say that?”

  “You can stay in your castle place for a while,” Marcovefa said shrewdly. “Sooner or later, though, the world will come looking for you again.”

  Hamnet Thyssen didn’t argue with her; she was much too likely to be right. He just said, “Later, I hope.” He and Marcovefa and Trasamund rode away from Nidaros, and from the new plume of black smoke climbing above it.

  SWEAT RAN DOWN Marcovefa’s face. “Does it get this hot every summer down here?” she asked.

  “Most summers, anyhow,” Hamnet said. He didn’t find the weather especially hot. But then, he hadn’t spent most of his life atop the Glacier.

  “How do you stand it?” Marcovefa asked.

  “It’s pretty warm, all right,” Trasamund added.

  “All what you’re used to.” Hamnet left it there. “People who grow up south of here wouldn’t be able to stand the winters in the Bizogot country.” He didn’t say anything about the winters in Marcovefa’s homeland. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand those himself.

  “More and more of these broad-leaved trees. I think they look funny.” Suddenly, Marcovefa turned into a connoisseur of forests, although she’d never so much as imagined a tree, broad-leaved or otherwise, till she descended from the Glacier. “What good are they?”

  “There’s always the wood,” Hamnet said. He took that for granted, but Marcovefa wouldn’t; even Trasamund might not. “And some of them have nuts that are good to eat. And in the autumn, before the leaves fall off, they turn red and orange and gold. For a little while, the forest looks as if it’s on fire—not in a bad way, you understand. It’s beautiful, but it never lasts.”

  “I’ve seen a little of that,” Trasamund said, and Marcovefa nodded. The jarl went on, “I’ve never understood why the leaves change colors before they die.”

  “I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone else can, either,” Hamnet said. “My best guess is, it just happens, the way a man’s hair goes gray when he gets older.”

  “Maybe.” Trasamund lost interest in the question. He pointed toward something at the edge of the woods. “Good God! What’s that?”

  “A mastodon,” Hamnet answered. “Haven’t you seen them before, coming down into Raumsdalia?”

  “I’ve had glimpses, but that’s all.” The Bizogot stared and stared. “It looks like a woolly mammoth, if you can imagine a woolly mammoth made by somebody who’s heard about them but never seen one. Its back is too flat—it ought to slope down like this.” He gestured.

  “I’ve seen woolly mammoths,” Hamnet pointed out.

  He might as well have saved his breath. Trasamund went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “Its ears are the wrong shape. They’re too big, too. And look at the funny way its tusks curl. And mammoths are supposed to be almost black, not that . . . that tree-bark brown, I guess you’d call it.”

  “They can be pests,” Hamnet said. “They raid orchards and they trample down grain fields.”

  “You don’t bother to tame them, do you?” Trasamund asked.

  “I’ve heard that lumbermen sometimes do. Mastodons are big enough and strong enough to shove tree trunks around better than just about any other beasts. But apart from that, no,” Hamnet replied. “We hunt them, though. We use the meat and the hides and the ivory and the hair.”

  “Woolly mammoth hair is better,” Trasamund said. “It’s longer and thicker. I like the color better, too.”

  “Which is all very well, I’m sure, only we haven’t got any woolly mammoths in Raumsdalia. Plenty of mastodons in the forests near my castle. They’re nuisances there. That’s the other reason we hunt them: to keep them from tearing up the crops.”

  “How much farther to your castle?” Marcovefa asked. To her, mastodons were only a little stranger than mammoths; she’d come to know both beasts since descending from the Glacier.

  “Maybe a week’s travel: a little less if we were in a tearing hurry,” Hamnet answered.

  “How long do you aim to stay?” Marcovefa asked, and then, “How long will we stay?”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll stay. A while, anyhow. Till things settle down a bit—if they ever do,” Hamnet said. “And I can’t really say how long you’ll stay, can I?”

  “You have something to do with it. If I decide you make me angry and don’t make me happy, I go,” Marcovefa said. But she added, “So far you haven’t—quite.”

  Trasamund guffawed. “High praise, Thyssen!”

  “Better than I’ve done with women up till now,” Hamnet said, as
calmly as he could. “Maybe I’ve learned something. Maybe Marcovefa just puts up with more than Gudrid or Liv did.” He glanced over at her. “What do you think?”

  “Me? I think you know me better than to think I put up with much,” Marcovefa replied. “So far you are not too bad, in bed or out.”

  Trasamund started laughing again. Hamnet’s ears felt as if they’d caught fire. He made the most of it he could, saying, “Thank you—I think.”

  “You’re welcome—I suppose,” Marcovefa told him. But she was smiling when she said it. Now Trasamund laughed at both of them. They took no notice of him; lacking encouragement, he eventually ran down. They all rode on in what was—Hamnet hoped—a companionable silence.

  SOMEHOW, NEWS OF Sigvat’s fall spread faster than Hamnet had imagined it could. He thought he and Marcovefa and Trasamund would be the outermost ripple of news from the pebble that had dropped in the palace at Nidaros. But they weren’t. Whenever they stopped in a village or a town, people had heard that the Emperor was Emperor no more. Some of them had even heard that he’d fled because the Golden Shrine judged him unworthy to rule.

  “I heard that, all right,” said the tapman at a serai about halfway to Hamnet’s keep. “Don’t know that I believe it, but I heard it. Till all this talk started, I don’t know that I believed there was any such thing as the Golden Shrine. People talk about it, sure, but people talk about all kinds of things that aren’t real. But I’ve never heard ’em talk about it the way they do nowadays, so maybe there’s something to it after all.”

  “It’s true,” Hamnet said solemnly. Marcovefa and Trasamund nodded. Hamnet went on, “I wouldn’t mind another mug of ale. It’s tasty.”

  “I thank you for that—I brew it myself,” the tapman said, not without pride. As he dipped up another mug for Hamnet, he continued, “You folks sound like you know what you’re talking about.” Hamnet had listened to a lot of tapmen in his time. He knew this fellow wasn’t necessarily saying he believed them.