The Golden Shrine Read online

  “We do,” Trasamund said. “We were there.”

  “Where? At the Golden Shrine or in the palace?” No, the tapman didn’t believe they’d set eyes on either place.

  “Both,” Marcovefa told him. He didn’t call her a liar—you had to be very bold or very stupid to do that—but disbelief still stuck out all over him. She nudged Hamnet. “Say the words again—the words you got from the Golden Shrine.”

  “Mene. Mene. Tekel. Upharsin.” He felt sure he was pronouncing them badly. But chances were no one else born into this age of the world could have done any better. These words were extinct—except, thanks to the priests and priestesses of the Golden Shrine, they weren’t.

  Marcovefa murmured a spell. Suddenly, Hamnet saw himself saying those unimaginably ancient words to Sigvat II. By the way the tapman’s jaw dropped, so did he. Hamnet also saw those words on the wall, saw the long-forgotten king’s awe and fear, and Sigvat’s as well, and saw the balance in which they were both weighed and found wanting.

  The vision faded fast, which was nothing but a relief. “Well?” Trasamund asked the tapman. “Were we there, or not?”

  “You were,” the man whispered. “I don’t know how, but you were. How did you come to be at the heart of—well, everything?”

  “Maybe it just worked out that way,” Hamnet said. “Maybe the Golden Shrine or God—if there’s a difference—meant it all along. I don’t know. I don’t expect I ever will. I’m beginning to think the how doesn’t even matter. However it happened, we were there, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t even say anything yet about Sudertorp Lake breaking free and drowning all the Rulers and their shamans,” Trasamund observed.

  If the tapman’s ears could have pricked erect like a dire wolf’s, they would have. “I didn’t think I should,” Hamnet said. “Marcovefa worked the magic. I only watched it.”

  “And keep me alive. And bring me back to myself,” Marcovefa said. The tapman’s eyes got bigger and bigger.

  “Anyhow, not quite all of them drowned,” Hamnet said. “But I don’t think they’ll kick up much trouble for a while.”

  “By God, you’re not making any of this up, are you?” the tapman said hoarsely. “You really saw those things. You really did those things, too.”

  “We saw them,” Hamnet agreed. “We did them.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” the tapman said. “Nothing ever happens here. No one who doesn’t live in Gufua knows it’s here or knows its name. Nobody cares to, either.”

  “That sounds plenty good to me, at least in a place where we’ll stop for the night,” Count Hamnet said. Marcovefa and Trasamund both nodded. Hamnet went on, “Sometimes, what you want most is not to need to worry. If, uh, Gufua can give us that, we’re glad to take it.” Till the tapman named the hamlet, he hadn’t known what to call it. His companions nodded again.

  “If you’ll tell your stories and work your spells for the folk here, you needn’t pay for food and lodging,” the tapman said.

  Hamnet looked at Marcovefa and Trasamund. Then he set silver on the bar. “I mean no disrespect, but paying’s the better bargain.” He got more nods from them.

  “Have it as you please.” The tapman didn’t seem sorry to scoop up the coins. “It was only a thought. The bedchambers are upstairs.”

  After filling his belly with roast pork and barley bread, Hamnet went up to one of those bedchambers. He made sleepy, lazy love with Marcovefa. Then he slept. Nothing bothered him till morning. If he hadn’t had somewhere else to go, he might have been tempted to stay in quiet, forgotten Gufua.

  AS THE ROAD came out from behind a stand of trees, Trasamund pointed. “Somebody up ahead of us.”

  “Well, so there is,” Hamnet said. “What about it? Are you worried about one man? Let him worry about us.”

  “I’m not worried about him,” the jarl replied with dignity. “A bit surprised to see him, is all. Not many people on the road these days, or so it seems.”

  “Would you go traveling if you thought the Rulers would kill you or ordinary bandits would knock you over the head?” Hamnet said.

  “If I had to,” Trasamund said stubbornly.

  “This fellow has to.” Marcovefa sounded as certain as only she could.

  “Who is he? You sound as though you know,” Hamnet said.

  “A traveler.” Maybe Marcovefa was being annoying on purpose. Or maybe whatever told her what she knew about that man also told her to keep it to herself. Hamnet shrugged. If they caught up with the stranger, he’d find out then. And if they didn’t, the fellow didn’t matter.

  They were gaining. Hamnet needed a bit to be sure, but eventually had no doubt. Neither did the lone man. He tried to get more out of his horse, but it seemed to have nothing left to give. Either it was a horrible screw to begin with or he’d already ridden it into the ground. By the way it carried itself, Hamnet guessed the latter.

  “Bugger me with a thornbush,” Trasamund said after a little while. “I know who that is.”

  “So do I.” Hamnet Thyssen clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I didn’t want to say anything. I kept hoping I was wrong. Well, no such luck.”

  Marcovefa raised an eyebrow. “After everything that happened, you still believe in luck?” Hamnet had no answer for her.

  “We ought to—” But Trasamund broke off, shaking his big, fair head. “Who the demon knows what we ought to do?”

  A little more time went by. The man in front of them turned in the saddle and shook his fist. “Weren’t you satisfied in Nidaros?” he shouted furiously. “Do you have to follow me and gloat, too?”

  “We didn’t,” Hamnet said. “Only a . . . chance meeting, Sigvat.” He wouldn’t look at Marcovefa. He’d talked about chance to the tapman in Gufua, too. But it was as dead a word as luck. And he’d never imagined calling the Emperor—the former Emperor, now—by his bare, unadorned name.

  “Likely tell,” Sigvat jeered. “Well, if you want to kill me, I suppose you can, but I’ll make the best fight I’m able to.” He started to draw his sword.

  How many times had Hamnet wanted to kill him? He’d thought he had plenty of reason to do it, too. Sigvat was right—it wouldn’t be hard. But what was the point now? “Go your way,” Hamnet said. “If I never see you again, that will suit me well enough. You might want to take the south fork, not the one that runs southeast. I’m bound for my castle, and I don’t promise you a warm welcome if you turn up there.”

  In a low voice, Sigvat said, “I heard Skakki was heading straight south.”

  “Too bad,” Trasamund said. “And you made more enemies than just our lot, you know.”

  Sigvat’s mouth twisted. “I did what I could.”

  “To make more enemies? I believe that,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “You wouldn’t have dared talk to me that way when I was on the throne,” Sigvat said, flushing angrily.

  “The demon I wouldn’t,” Hamnet retorted. “I tried to tell you the Rulers were more trouble than you thought, and I was cursed well right. But you didn’t want to listen, and finally you flung me in your dungeon so you wouldn’t have to. That didn’t make me wrong, though. You found out. Too bad you managed to run from Nidaros after the Rulers beat your armies. I was hoping they’d pitch you in there so you could see what it was like.”

  “We’d never had an invasion like that. I thought you were exaggerating things to make yourself seem more important,” Sigvat said.

  “You would have done that,” Marcovefa said. “So you judged Hamnet from yourself.”

  By the way Sigvat scowled at her, that shot struck too close to the center of the target. “I turned out to be wrong,” he said. “But I thought the chances were good that I was right.”

  “And so you almost pissed the Empire straight into the chamber pot,” Hamnet said. “If not for Marcovefa, you would have. No wonder the Golden Shrine didn’t think you measured up.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed that, either, if I had any ch
oice,” Sigvat said.

  “You have none. None at all,” Trasamund said. “That is not a judgment from man. It is a judgment from God. Everyone who was in your throne room knows it.”

  Sigvat wanted to call the jarl a liar. The urge was written all over his face. Only one thing stopped him, Hamnet judged: Trasamund was obviously telling the truth. Instead, Sigvat said, “Go ahead and mock. I hope it makes you happy.” As obviously, he hoped anything but.

  To Hamnet, Trasamund said, “We ought to knock him over the head. He’s too stupid to learn anything from all the mistakes he made.”

  “If the Golden Shrine had wanted him dead soon, it would have taken care of things,” Hamnet said. “This is worse. He was the Emperor of Raumsdalia. Now no one will hearken to him for the rest of his life, however long he lasts. If he doesn’t learn that much, he won’t live long. But I won’t stain my hands with his blood. As far as I’m concerned, he’s not worth killing.”

  Sigvat went from red to white. “Curse you, Thyssen,” he whispered.

  “You can’t,” Hamnet said matter-of-factly. “You’ve already cursed yourself. Nothing you throw at me will bite.” He gestured to his companions. “We may as well ride on.”

  “What if this—thing—tries to shoot us in the back?” Trasamund said. “He’s got a bow.”

  “He won’t. He can’t.” Marcovefa sounded sure, as only she could. Hamnet believed her. Sigvat’s grimace of impotent fury said he did, too.

  They rode past Sigvat. Hamnet didn’t look back. No arrows came hissing after him. He never saw Sigvat, once the second Emperor of Raumsdalia of that name, again. He never heard that anyone else did, either.

  A STONE KEEP warded by a wooden palisade. Fields and orchards around it. Woods of oak and elm and ash and hickory and chestnut off to the east, where Raumsdalia’s border petered out. Hamnet pointed toward the keep. “Hasn’t changed much since I went away,” he said.

  “Did you expect it to?” Trasamund asked.

  “You never can tell,” Hamnet answered. “If we’ve seen anything the past few years, we’ve seen that.”

  Farmers weeding in the fields looked up as the travelers rode by. Not many folk came this way, as Hamnet had reason to know. One of the peasants called, “That you, Count?”

  “I think so,” Hamnet said, which made the fellow grin.

  “You take care of whatever you needed to do out in the world?” another farmer asked.

  “Most of it. For a while,” Hamnet replied.

  The man nodded. “About what you can hope for.” He went back to weeding.

  Marcovefa eyed Hamnet. “Yes, this is your country. These are your people.”

  “I never tried to tell you anything different,” he said.

  A shout rolled out from the palisade: “Who comes?”

  “Hamnet Thyssen, with friends,” Hamnet answered. “Is everything well, Gris?”

  “You’ll see for yourself soon enough,” his seneschal said, and then, not to Hamnet, “Open the gates, by God!”

  They creaked open. They’d creaked before Hamnet rode away, too. His retainers stared at his companions. “Are those what they call Bizogots?” a man asked doubtfully. He might have been talking about glyptodonts or other beasts he didn’t look to see in this part of the world.

  “We’re Bizogots, sure enough,” Trasamund rumbled. Marcovefa stirred, but she didn’t argue. Her folk sprang from the Bizogots, even if they didn’t think of themselves as belonging to them any more. Mischief in his pale eyes, Trasamund went on, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a Raumsdalian.”

  “That’s right,” the man said automatically. His friends realized Trasamund was joking half a heartbeat before he did. They laughed at him. He went red.

  Hamnet looked around. Everything looked pretty much the way it had before he rode off to answer Sigvat’s summons. He hadn’t thought he’d stay away so long or do so much while he was gone. As he dismounted, all the time between then and now might have fallen away.

  Or it might not have. “How much trouble did you have this past year?” he asked.

  “Well, there was some,” Gris admitted. “We heard some new barbarians got loose up in the north. Don’t think we saw any ourselves, but plenty of people running from them came by. They going to cause more trouble?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Hamnet answered.

  “Thanks to you,” Marcovefa said, and slipped an arm around his waist. The men and women in the courtyard murmured—more at the gesture, Hamnet judged, than at the news. They wanted him wed, or at least attached. They wanted an heir, so things would stay smooth after he was gone.

  He put his arm around Marcovefa’s shoulder. “Thanks more to you,” he said. She nodded. She wasn’t shy about taking praise. The locals murmured on a different note. Hamnet went on, “Sigvat’s off the throne.”

  That brought surprised exclamations—the news hadn’t got here, anyhow. “Did you cast him off it?” Gris asked.

  “No, not really,” Hamnet replied, and the last couple of words brought fresh muttering. Ignoring it, he continued, “The Golden Shrine had more to do with it.”

  Outcry this time. He’d known there would be. He told the story, and spoke the words in the forgotten language he’d delivered to Sigvat II. Marcovefa worked her magic again, so his retainers could get some sense of the power those words had. Gris said, “Who’s Emperor, then, if Sigvat isn’t?”

  “How come you’re not?” another man asked Hamnet before he could say anything.

  “Because I don’t want the throne. Because I’d rather come home,” he answered. Several of the locals nodded. They understood that urge to return to the familiar. It wasn’t always a good urge—Hamnet thought of the trouble he could have missed if Gudrid hadn’t drawn him like a lodestone for so long—but it was strong. He turned back to Gris. “When we left Nidaros, nobody was on the throne. They’ll likely fight it out to see which greedy fool gets to set his fundament there. But we’re so far from the center of things, I don’t think any civil war will touch us here. Hope not, anyhow.”

  The seneschal considered. “Odds are decent,” he said at last. “So what will you do now that you’re back?”

  “About what I was doing before,” Hamnet replied. “I liked it well enough, except when . . . things got in the way.” Things. Gudrid. Sigvat’s summons. The Gap, melted through. The Rulers. The invasion. The war. The dungeon. Sudertorp Lake, pouring out as if God were pushing it—and maybe God was. The Golden Shrine. Mene. Mene. Tekel. Upharsin .

  Things.

  “What about you people?” Gris asked Trasamund and Marcovefa. By the way he used the last word, he was giving them the benefit of the doubt.

  Trasamund spoke first: “I’ll stay here a while, anyway. I’ve got nothing to go back to up on the plains—the Rulers made sure of that.”

  Marcovefa eyed Hamnet as she answered, “I will stay as long as I am happy. If I am not, it will be time to go.”

  He nodded. “That’ll do. I hope you stay a long time. I’ll try not to make you unhappy—but you never can tell. If I’ve learned anything since I went away, that’s it. You never can tell.”

  “And I will try not to make you too unhappy with me,” Marcovefa said. Hamnet nodded again. That was as close to a promise as he’d ever got from her, and more than he’d come to expect. She looked around. “This is not much like the top of the Glacier, but it is not a bad place.”

  “Most of the time, it isn’t,” Hamnet agreed. What more could you say of any place? Not much, not as far as he could see.

  “Good to have you back, lord,” Gris said. Heads bobbed up and down in the courtyard. As long as people thought it was good, they would help make it so. Hamnet didn’t know how long he could stay here peacefully—no, you never could tell—but he aimed to make the most of it, however long it turned out to be.

 

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