Breath of God g-2 Read online

  “They’re good, God curse them,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “They’re better than good. They’re smoother than we are, let alone the Bizogots,” Count Hamnet said. “We couldn’t lose a captain and shrug it off like that.” He didn’t even talk about what would happen if Trasamund or Totila were badly wounded here. He knew, and so did Ulric – the Bizogots would fall to pieces.

  Even without losing their chieftains, they fell to pieces anyhow. It didn’t happen all at once, the way it might have if a jarl fell. No one could deny the Bizogots’ courage. But when courage without much direction ran up against courage with discipline, and against war mammoths and superior sorcery, it came up short.

  At first by ones and twos, then in small groups, then in clusters, the Red Dire Wolves – those who could – broke free of the press and rode off to the southwest. They knew where their herds roamed. If they were to survive as a clan, they had to protect the beasts. Men from the Three Tusk clan rode with them. Fierce and desperate as Trasamund’s Bizogots were, they were made of flesh and blood; they had limits. The Rulers inflicted enough punishment on them to push them to those limits and beyond.

  “Cowards!” Trasamund roared, watching his own clansmen retreat with the Red Dire Wolves. “Where are your ballocks?”

  “Your Ferocity, what more can we do here but get killed to no purpose?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. “Can we beat the Rulers in this fight?”

  Trasamund sent him a look full of hate. “Not you, too? Well, run away if you want to. I came here to fight, by God!” He’d done plenty of that; his great two-handed sword was smeared and splashed with blood all along the blade.

  “Did you come here to throw yourself away?” That wasn’t Count Hamnet – it was Liv. “We’ve lost this battle. We’re beaten. If we try again, when we try again, it will have to be somewhere else. We still must have our revenge. But can’t you see we won’t win it here?”

  Plainly, Trasamund didn’t want to heed her. Just as plainly, she was right. Totila called, “We’ve got to get away, save what we can!”

  Seeing his fellow jarl flee the field seemed to bring Trasamund to his senses. “Away, then,” he said bitterly. “Away! Will we spend the rest of our lives running away from the accursed Rulers?”

  It’s possible, Count Hamnet thought. If the invaders could bring in enough men and mammoths through the Gap, they would be very dangerous indeed. Hamnet had feared they would fight well. They turned out to fight even better than he’d expected.

  How hard would they pursue? If they pressed the chase with everything they had in them, they might shatter the Red Dire Wolves forever. But they didn’t seem willing – or, more likely, able – to do that. They’d won, yes, but not easily. And so the Bizogots escaped them and broke off the fight. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how much difference it would make.

  Not many thingsin the world were grimmer than the camp of an army that had just lost a battle. The wounded were sullen, feeling they suffered pointlessly. The men who’d got away safe were angry and embarrassed, having done their best to no purpose. And everyone was apprehensive, fearing the enemy would fall on them while their spirits were at a low ebb.

  The warm weather around the camp made the snow melt, and the drips reminded Hamnet Thyssen of tears shed for the cause. That was more fanciful than he usually got, but he couldn’t help it.

  Several Bizogots screamed at Trasamund and Totila when their chieftains tried to get them to go on sentry duty. Trasamund had to knock one of the nomads down and kick him before he would. “Are we still warriors?” the jarl roared furiously. “Or are we made into voles and lemmings, sport for any weasel that would bite our throats?”

  “Do you feel squeaky?” Ulric Skakki asked Count Hamnet. Somehow, the adventurer made his whiskers seem remarkably like a vole’s.

  Hamnet knew he should have smiled. He couldn’t make himself do it, try as he would. “They beat us,” he said gloomily.

  “So they did,” Ulric agreed. “Did you really look for anything different? The Bizogots haven’t figured out this is no game yet.”

  “What will it take before they do?” Hamnet asked. “War mammoths trampling the lot of them?”

  “Maybe.” Ulric Skakki didn’t sound as worried or as wearied as most of the men around him. “That would bring the Rulers down to the Empire’s northern border – and Sigvat II hasn’t realized this is no game, either.”

  “Marvelous,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “By your logic, almost everyone ought to be almost ready to fight just when it’s too late to do any good.”

  “Yes, that sounds about right,” Ulric agreed. “Or don’t you think so?”

  The trouble was, Hamnet did think so, even if he didn’t want to. “We have to find some way to beat them. If we don’t, we’re ruined.”

  “No one has to do anything. Haven’t you noticed that yet?” Ulric Skakki said. “It would be nice if we did, but there’s no guarantee.” He gestured at the misery all around. “You can see for yourself there isn’t.”

  Hamnet Thyssen winced. “You know what I mean.”

  “So what?” Ulric said. “Where’s the connection between what you mean and what is? If you can’t find one, what does what you mean have to do with the price of peas? We’re in trouble. Wishing we weren’t won’t get us anywhere. Am I right or wrong?”

  “Oh, you’re right, sure enough,” Hamnet said. “Do you suppose wishing you’d shut up anyway would get me anywhere?” Ulric Skakki laughed, for all the world as if he were joking. Any sort of cheery sound made most of the people who heard it stare at him, plainly wondering if he’d lost his wits.

  Totila came up to Count Hamnet and Ulric. “Is it true that you Raumsdalians know more about curing wounds than we do?”

  To Hamnet’s way of thinking, it was hard to know less about curing wounds than the Bizogots did. All the same, his nod and Ulric’s were both cautious. Battlefield surgery was a risky business for anybody. “What do you want us to try to do?” Hamnet asked.

  “Come see the wound. Judge for yourself,” the Red Dire Wolves’ jarl answered.

  A Bizogot warrior writhed and groaned. He had an arrow embedded in his calf. When Hamnet made as if to touch it, the big, burly man said, “Don’t. The point is barbed. You can’t pull it out.”

  “Push it through?” Hamnet wondered aloud. The Bizogot groaned again. Count Hamnet understood why. That would add fresh torment and make the wound worse. But they couldn’t leave the arrow where it was, either.

  “You see?” the jarl said.

  “I see,” Hamnet said glumly. “I see, but I don’t know what I can do. How about you, Ulric?”

  Ulric Skakki took from a belt pouch a bronze contraption with a long, flat handle and a curved tip with a small hole in the center. “What’s that?” Totila asked.

  “Arrow-drawing spoon,” the adventurer answered. “I slide it down the shaft, get hold of the point with the hole, and pull up. It lets me bring out the point, but keeps the barbs from doing too much more tearing when they leave the wound.”

  “Try it,” the injured Bizogot said. “That God-cursed thing has to come out.”

  Hamnet Thyssen and Totila held his leg to make sure he couldn’t twist away. “Have you ever used this thing before?” Hamnet asked in Raumsdalian.

  “I’ve seen it done,” Ulric answered in the imperial tongue. That wasn’t the same thing. He switched back to the Bizogot language to speak to the wounded man: “I’m going to start. Do your best to hold still.”

  “I’ll try.” The mammoth-herder braced himself.

  Despite that, he gasped and tried to jerk free when Ulric Skakki pushed the arrow-drawing spoon into the wound. The injured warrior groaned and cursed, none of which did him any good. He gasped again when Ulric tried to slide the very tip of the arrowhead into the hole in the spoon. “I’m sorry,” Ulric said. “Remember, I’m doing this by feel. I’m not hurting you on purpose.”

  “I know,” the Bizogot got out. “But that doesn’t mean you�
��re not hurting me.”

  “I’m close, curse it. It should be right about – ” Ulric moved the spoon a little. The Bizogot groaned on a different note. “There!” Ulric exclaimed. “I’ve got it. I can feel it.”

  “So can I, by God!” the wounded man said.

  “I’m going to bring it out now,” Ulric told him. “I’ll go slow, as slow as I can. Try to hold still. It will help. Are you ready?”

  “No,” the Bizogot said honestly. “But go ahead. Waiting won’t make it any better.”

  “Hold him tight,” Ulric warned Hamnet and Totila. “He won’t like this, but I’ve got to do it. Here we go.”

  The wounded Bizogot bit down hard to keep from screaming. He spat red into the slushy snow, so he was chewing on his lips or tongue. His bunched fists pounded the snow again and again. Hamnet had taken battle wounds. He knew what the younger man was going through. The less he thought about that, the better.

  “It’s out!” Ulric said. Not much flesh clung to the barbs on the point; the drawing spoon really had shielded the wound from most of the damage it would have taken otherwise.

  “Thank you,” the wounded Bizogot said. “Easier to bear now that that cursed thing isn’t sticking into me anymore.”

  “That’s what she said,” Ulric answered, which made the wounded man laugh.

  “Let me see that spoon,” Totila said. “Could we make it from bone or horn?”

  “I don’t see why not. Here, keep this one if you want to.” Ulric cleaned it in snow and slush before handing it to the Bizogot. Totila studied it and nodded thoughtfully.

  Count Hamnet, meanwhile, bandaged the wounded man’s leg. Down in the Empire, bandages would have been made of linen. Here, the Bizogots used musk-ox wool and dried moss to close wounds and soak up blood. If anything, those worked better than their Raumsdalian equivalents.

  “I thank you,” the wounded man said. “Do you think it will heal clean?”

  “That’s in God’s hands, not mine,” Hamnet answered. “But I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.”

  “Those strangers really do fight from mammothback,” the Bizogot said in wondering tones. “Who would have believed it?”

  “We’ve been telling you about it all winter,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out with more than a touch of asperity.

  “And so?” The wounded nomad seemed glad to have something to talk about besides the darkening bandage on his leg. “I can tell you about a sky-blue mammoth with pink horns that honks like a goose, but will you expect to see one if I do?”

  “It depends,” Count Hamnet said judiciously. “If I know you’re a reliable man, I might. Why would we lie to you? By God, why would what’s left of the Three Tusk clan lie to you? They fought the Rulers. They saw them using war mammoths.”

  To his surprise, the man from the Red Dire Wolves had an answer for him: “We all thought you were making them out to be worse than they really are so we’d join you and do what you wanted. We thought it was nothing but a trick to scare us, to make us fall in line behind you. We’re Bizogots. We’re free men. We didn’t aim to do that.”

  “And so you had to get crushed before you decided we might know what we were talking about after all?” That sounded like something a Bizogot would do. Hamnet Thyssen counted himself to be lucky in a country where the closest walls – those of the stone houses the Leaping Lynx clan’s summer homes by Sudertorp Lake – were many miles away. Otherwise, he would have been sorely tempted to pound his head against one.

  The wounded man nodded. “Sure. Except we didn’t expect to get crushed. We thought we’d do the crushing.”

  After rubbing snow on his hands to get the blood off them, Hamnet Thyssen walked away. He put on his mittens to warm himself up again. Ulric Skakki came after him. “This is what we came north for?” Ulric said.

  “This is what we came north for,” Hamnet answered stolidly. “The Bizogots are fools, but at least they’re fighting fools. Down in Nidaros, Sigvat II is a blind fool. If you ask me, that’s worse.”

  “Well, maybe,” Ulric Skakki said. “But where are we going to find some people who aren’t fools? That’s what we really need.”

  “We really need to beat the Rulers. Fighting fools can do that – may be able to do that, anyhow,” Hamnet said. “Blind fools won’t.”

  They were both using Raumsdalian again; it let them speak their minds without worrying that the Bizogots would overhear and get angry. Ulric Skakki rolled his eyes. “All the Bizogots in the world couldn’t stop the army that beat us today. God knows the Bizogots are brave. But God knows they’re stupid, too. And the more I see of the Rulers, the more I see that they aren’t. They’re cruel bastards, but they aren’t dumb bastards.”

  “And that sorcery .. .” Count Hamnet let the words hang in the air.

  “That was pretty bad,” Ulric agreed. “Some of those flying icicles almost skewered me. And some of them did skewer Bizogots – or else distracted them so the Rulers had an easy time killing them.”

  “Do you suppose our best wizards could have stopped the spell?” Ham-net asked.

  “I don’t know,” the adventurer said. “One day before too long, chances are we’ll find out.”

  “God help the Empire if its wizards don’t have better luck than the Bizogot shamans up here,” Hamnet said.

  “God help the Empire. That’ll do,” Ulric Skakki said. “Somebody’d better, and it’s not as if Sigvat’s up to the job.”

  “God should help the Bizogots, too – and if he doesn’t, we should lend a hand,” Count Hamnet said. “Do you know whether Totila and Trasamund aim to send messengers to the other clans and tell them what’s happened to the Red Dire Wolves?”

  “I know they haven’t done it yet. I know I haven’t heard them talk about doing it,” Ulric answered. “Whether the thought has trickled through their beady little minds .. . that I can’t tell you.”

  “Beady little minds,” Hamnet echoed sourly. The phrase fit much too well. “All right, then. We’d better make sure they do think of it. And we’d better make sure they don’t just think of it, too. We’d better make sure they do it.”

  “You don’t have much faith in them, do you?” Ulric said.

  Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”

  IV

  Spring. Down inthe Empire, it was a time of renewal, return, rebirth. In the Bizogot country it was all of that and more, jammed into a few frantic weeks. When the snow up on the northern plains melted, everything turned to mud and marshes and ponds. Getting from here to there became a challenge. Getting from here to there in a hurry became a joke.

  Bare mud and shallow water didn’t last long. (There was no deep water on the frozen steppe, which stayed frozen a few feet down regardless of the season.) Plants came to mad life, coating the ground with green and bursting into bloom. And in the marshes and puddles, the eggs mosquitoes and flies and midges had laid the year before thawed out and hatched and gave birth to a new generation of buzzing biters.

  Hamnet Thyssen squelched and slapped and swore. The air was thick not only with bugs but also with the birds that battened on them. The birds grew fat and nested and laid eggs so their succeeding generation could feast off bugs yet unborn. But far too many bugs remained uneaten.

  “Can’t you do anything about it?” Hamnet asked Liv, not for the first time.

  “Bear grease on your face and hands helps some,” she answered. She was bitten, too. So were all the Bizogots. So were their dogs and musk oxen and mammoths, all of which shed their winter coats just in time to give the mosquitoes tempting targets.

  “You should have a magic to keep the bugs away,” he said.

  She looked at him. “You Raumsdalians like to think you’re stronger than the world around you. Up here, shamans know better. God lets us live on the plains … as long as we don’t push our luck too hard. How could one shaman hold off all the bugs that spawn every spring?”

  Put that way, it was a different kind o
f question. Count Hamnet said, “Can’t you hold off some of the bugs?”

  That only made Liv smile. “What if we did? Don’t you think the rest would be plenty to drive men and beasts wild?”

  “Umm . . . Probably.” Hamnet Thyssen managed a smile of his own, a crooked one. “You’re telling me to give up and leave this alone, aren’t you?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes – except for the bear grease,” Liv said. “That helps – as much as anything, anyhow.” With a sigh, Hamnet smeared some on. Maybe it helped a little. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t.

  The Rulers didn’t try to drive the Red Dire Wolves to destruction – not right away, anyhow. They could have pursued much harder than they did. Maybe the spring thaw slowed them down. Maybe they awaited reinforcements from beyond the Glacier. Maybe they just didn’t care what the beaten Bizogots did. Hamnet had no way of knowing. He welcomed the respite, whatever the reason for it.

  It also gave the Red Dire Wolves’ messengers the chance to warn other clans. It gave them the chance, yes. How seriously the rest of the Bizogots took those messengers . .. One of the horsemen came back to the Red Dire Wolves’ camp that evening. Days got long faster in springtime up here in the north than they did in the Empire; already the sun’s setting point had swung far to the northwest, and twilight lingered late.

  The slowly gathering gloom descending on the camp didn’t come close to matching the gloom on the messenger’s face. He bit into a leg from a roasted partridge and swigged from a skin of smetyn, but neither the food nor the fermented mammoth’s milk did much to lighten his mood.

  “They wouldn’t believe me,” he told Totila and anyone else who would listen. “By God, Your Ferocity, they wouldn’t! They laughed at me. They asked me if I was chewing mystic mushrooms.”

  “They have their nerve!” Odovacar said indignantly – somehow, the deaf old shaman heard that fine. “Mystic mushrooms are shamans’ food. The visions they send drive ordinary men mad.”