The Golden Shrine Read online

  “Says you,” the mammoth-herder exclaimed. “I sure don’t think so.”

  “Well, if you want to fight me, we can do that,” Ulric said easily. “Just let me know what you want me to do with your body once you’re dead.”

  That took longer to sink in than Hamnet thought it should have. This Bizogot plainly wasn’t overburdened with brains. And if he had as much pride as a lot of his comrades, he would fight Ulric on general principles. For a moment, Count Hamnet thought he would do just that—in which case, he would have died, and in short order, too.

  Instead of charging, though, he jerked his horse’s head around and rode away. Hamnet didn’t reckon him a coward; few Bizogots were. But he must have heard the anticipation in Ulric Skakki’s voice. Ulric didn’t just know he could kill; he looked forward to it. And that was plenty to put the Bizogot’s wind up.

  It made Tahpenes thoughtful, too. “You act more like a man of the Rulers than one from the herd,” she remarked.

  A moment later, she let out another shrill, irate squeal. “Tell you what—you don’t insult me, and I won’t feel you up,” Ulric said. “Deal?”

  Tahpenes was silent for some little while. At last, she said, “I did not think I was insulting you. I meant it for praise.”

  “I know,” the adventurer said. “That’s part of what’s wrong with you. You need to understand that your new neighbors don’t love you. We don’t admire you. We don’t want to be like you. And we’re strong enough to make what we want matter. If we weren’t, would we have caught you?”

  She looked unhappy—no, unhappier. “I thought I could spy on you without drawing notice. It seems I was wrong.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Ulric Skakki’s tone of voice suggested she was an idiot for thinking any such thing.

  “It’s all of a piece,” Hamnet said, more to Ulric than to their captive. “The Rulers think they can do whatever they want, get away with whatever they want. Sooner or later, they’ll find out they’re wrong.” They’d better, or they’ll end up winning this fight after all.

  “They all think like that, don’t they?” Ulric had a knack for embellishing other people’s thoughts. “Maybe they should have called themselves the Herd, not the Rulers. They all act the same, like so many, uh, riding deer.”

  “How dare you speak of us like that? How dare you?” Tahpenes snarled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Doesn’t stop you from talking about us,” Hamnet said. “Why should it stop us from talking about you?”

  The answer blazed in her black eyes. Hamnet Thyssen read it there. The Rulers had the right to do as they pleased, because they were the Rulers. Lesser folk existed only on sufferance. When those “lesser” folk had captured you, though, bragging about how wonderful and mighty you were could prove inexpedient. For a medium-sized wonder, Tahpenes was smart enough to see that.

  Hamnet pointed ahead. “There are the houses the Leaping Lynx Bizogots built. Yes, those are the houses where your precious wizards met. They died right in front of them.”

  Were he speaking Raumsdalian, he would have called the stone structures huts. He always thought of them that way when he used his own language. Here, though, he wanted to make them seem impressive to Tahpenes. She was a nomad herself; any permanent buildings were bound to be large and imposing in her eyes.

  “Here comes Trasamund.” Ulric pointed to the burly jarl.

  Tahpenes knew the name. “We beat his clan when we first came here,” she said.

  “So you did,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Why don’t you tell him all about it? Don’t you think he’d want to know just how you embarrassed the Bizogots he led?”

  Tahpenes didn’t answer. She didn’t boast to Trasamund, either. Pretty plainly, she was clever enough to see the obvious. Just as plainly, that put her several lengths ahead of most of the Rulers.

  MARCOVEFA HAD TROUBLE with the idea of prisoners. “This woman doesn’t know very much,” she complained to Hamnet Thyssen. “We’ve got most of what she does know. Keeping her alive is nothing but a waste of food.”

  “We can spare it,” Hamnet said. “Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry? No, by God!” Marcovefa laughed. “So much food right now—all these waterfowl—I’m getting fat. No one up on top of the Glacier gets fat. No one, not unless you have something wrong with you and you die soon.”

  Only the rich got fat down in the Empire. That was one way you could tell they were rich: they always had plenty to eat. Hardly any Bizogots grew fat. In the springtime, the Leaping Lynxes had been the exception. So many ducks and geese and swans and other birds bred at Sudertorp Lake, what the Bizogots took barely dented the abundance.

  Now Trasamund’s band was reaping the same benefits. Hamnet could smell duck grease on his own mustache. He said, “You aren’t fat. You’re just right.” He hoped Marcovefa believed him, because he meant it.

  “How do I know that?” she asked.

  “Well, if I haven’t shown you, I must be older and feebler than I thought I was,” he said. He knew exactly what he could do. For a man his age, it wasn’t bad at all. Of course, he did get magical help every now and then, too.

  “You are only a man. Men will say anything so they can do that.” Marcovefa dismissed half the human race with a wave of the hand.

  Instead of arguing with her, Hamnet changed the subject: “Have you learned anything worthwhile from Tahpenes?”

  “Maybe a little,” Marcovefa said grudgingly. “Not much, but a little.”

  “Like what?” Hamnet asked.

  “I have learned I would not want to be a woman among the Rulers,” Marcovefa answered. “They are for screwing, for birthing warriors, for doing what men tell them to do. And that is all, poor fools.”

  To Hamnet Thyssen, that sounded a lot like women’s life among the Bizogots—or, for that matter, down in the Empire. Women took their revenge with adultery and other betrayal. He knew more about that than he’d ever wanted to find out. If he said something along those lines, he would only make Marcovefa angry. So he asked, “How are things different up on the Glacier?”

  “My folk don’t think a woman with a working brain is poison,” Marcovefa answered. “They like clever women, in fact. If women are shamans, then more men can hunt and fight. It is so here, too, I have seen.”

  Slowly, Hamnet nodded. That was true enough. Liv filled the bill. His mouth tightened, as it often did when he thought of her. He knew he’d tried too hard to hold on. Knowing didn’t tell him how to stop doing things like that. He wished it would have.

  He couldn’t even blame Liv too much, the way he did with Gudrid. Liv hadn’t sneaked around behind his back. She’d warned him what she was going to do, and then she’d done it. And if Audun Gilli made her unhappy—or, more likely, when Audun Gilli made her unhappy—she’d leave him the same way.

  As for Gudrid . . . No, he didn’t want to think about her at all. And so he asked Marcovefa, “It’s different with the Rulers?”

  “I should say it is!” Indignation snapped in her eyes. “To them, a woman is nothing but a twat with legs. That is how you say it, yes?”

  “If that’s what you want to say, that’s how you say it, all right,” Count Hamnet agreed gravely.

  “As long as a woman has the brains to lie down and open up”—Marcovefa demonstrated lewdly—“that is all the Rulers want.”

  That was all quite a few men from this side of the Glacier wanted in a woman, too. “No woman shamans among them, though?” Hamnet said.

  “None,” Marcovefa answered. “This Tahpenes chit, she didn’t think it was possible. Even when Liv worked magic in front of her stupid pointed nose, she still didn’t think it was possible. Some people are so stupid, you wonder how they stay alive. Some people are so stupid, you wonder why they stay alive.”

  Count Hamnet wanted whatever weapons he could find against the Rulers. “Do you think we could stir up trouble between their men and women?” he asked. “Once the women find
out we let women do more things here, will they squabble with their menfolk? Will that turn into anything we can use?”

  Marcovefa kissed him. “You have a sneaky, wicked way of looking at the world—do you know that?”

  “It all depends,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki thought he was a natural-born innocent. Hamnet feared the adventurer was right. Otherwise, how could he have stayed blind to so many things for so long? But even an innocent by imperial standards might look like a sophisticate to someone who’d come down from the Glacier not long before. “Do you think that might work?”

  “It might—no way to know till we try,” Marcovefa said. “But how do we even begin?”

  “Not hard.” Sure enough, Hamnet did feel like a sly sophisticate. He cherished the feeling, knowing it might not come again any time soon. “Let Tahpenes see how things are here. Maybe even play things up while she’s watching. Then let her get away. She takes trouble for the Rulers with her, stuck inside her own head.”

  “Let her get away?” Marcovefa’s eyes widened. “I would never think of that, not in ten thousand years. When you have a captive, you keep a captive. Maybe you fatten up a little, if you can spare the food, but you keep.”

  Once it formed, the picture of Tahpenes’ butchered carcass turning on a spit didn’t want to leave Hamnet Thyssen’s mind. He remembered the smell of roasting man’s flesh. He’d been hungry for it till he realized what it was. To the folk who lived up on the Glacier, people from other clans were, quite literally, fair game.

  He scowled at Marcovefa, partly joking, partly not. “You did that on purpose, to make me imagine things I don’t want to think about.”

  “As long as you don’t imagine eating Tahpenes while she is still alive.” Marcovefa shrugged. “Not much worry there. Not a pretty woman.”

  “No. Not,” Hamnet said, and then, “You make me sound like a man of the Rulers.” He did think the invaders’ strong, harsh features suited their men better than their women.

  “I am sorry,” Marcovefa said. “I meant to insult you, but I did not mean to insult you that much.”

  “Er—right,” Count Hamnet said. His more-or-less beloved from atop the Glacier could be—and usually was—devastatingly frank. To keep any more arrows from flying his way, he asked, “How can we let Tahpenes escape without her knowing she isn’t doing it all on her own?”

  “That is a hard question,” Marcovefa answered. “The Rulers are such fools. They think everything is over if you are a captive. The men don’t try to get away because they know their own folk won’t want them back. Maybe it is different for a woman. We can hope so.”

  “Yes.” Hamnet nodded. “Otherwise, it would be like a dog you couldn’t chase away even if you wanted to.”

  “Dogs.” Marcovefa made a face. “What good are they? They help with the herding, but is that enough to be worth the food they eat? You people down here don’t eat them unless you are starving. They are nothing but a waste of time.”

  There were no dogs up on the Glacier. There wasn’t enough food up there to support them. There was barely enough to support people. Hamnet Thyssen wondered what Marcovefa thought of pampered lap dogs—dogs that didn’t even pretend to earn their keep—down in the Raumsdalian Empire. He also wondered what she made of cats.

  But back to dogs . . . “People like them,” Hamnet said. “And they like people. Knowing somebody or something likes you—that’s worth a lot to a lot of people.”

  “Maybe. If you can’t find people to like you, though, you have to be pretty hard up to care about a stupid dog,” Marcovefa said.

  “A lot of people are pretty hard up,” Count Hamnet said. He didn’t add that he’d been that way himself. Sometimes dogs were easier to deal with than people. Dogs expected so much less from you. Again, he didn’t say anything about cats. Cats didn’t particularly like people. They just exploited them. Parasites with purrs, he thought.

  “Dogs are slaves. They’re bred to like people. They have no choice,” Marcovefa said, which was true enough. Then she surprised Hamnet by adding, “Cats, now, cats are free. I liked cats when I saw them in your Empire. Cats do what they want, not what you want. I would make a good cat.”

  Count Hamnet needed no more than a moment to nod. “Yes,” he said. “I think you would.”

  NOT QUITE ARTFULLY enough, Tahpenes contrived to meet Hamnet away from everybody else. “Will you answer some questions?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” he answered. “It depends on what they are.”

  “This Bizogot folk, it truly has shamans who are women?” she asked.

  “You’ve seen that. Why do you even need to ask?” he said.

  “But I can’t believe it’s real,” Tahpenes said. “The Rulers say only men can work magic.”

  He shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about that? People can say anything they please. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s nonsense.”

  “We are the Rulers. We do not speak nonsense,” Tahpenes said stiffly.

  He laughed in her face. “Everybody talks nonsense. Not all the time, but sometimes. Your folk are people, like anybody else. You’re full of nonsense, too.”

  “We are not like anybody else. We are the Rulers. You have seen our might.” Tahpenes was full of herself, and full of pride for her folk.

  “I’ve seen that you’re a prisoner. I’ve seen that you have found some things here you didn’t know about before. If you don’t want to believe them, what does that make you? Besides a fool, I mean.”

  She glared at him. Then she wiped the glare off her face and gave him a smile instead. That made him sure what game she was playing. “I don’t want to be a prisoner any more,” she said, softening and sweetening her voice as much as she could.

  “Your other choice was getting killed, probably after some unpleasant preliminaries,” Hamnet reminded her. “Don’t you think this is better?”

  “Going back to my own folk—that would be better,” Tahpenes said. “I would do almost anything for help to get back to my own folk.” She looked at him from under lowered eyelids.

  She was about as seductive as a dire wolf. She would only have got angry if he told her so; realizing as much persuaded him not to bother. “I have a woman I’m happy with,” he said, and let it go at that.

  “One of those yellow-haired sluts,” she said scornfully. “They aren’t much—skinny, whey-faced . . .”

  “Don’t let Marcovefa hear you say that. She’ll turn you into a vole,” Hamnet said.

  “She is strong,” Tahpenes admitted. “Wizards from the herd are not supposed to be strong. How does she get that way?”

  By living on top of the Glacier with nothing, Hamnet thought. He didn’t intend to explain to Tahpenes.

  “Will you help me get away?” Tahpenes persisted. “All I have to give you is myself. I will do that, and gladly.”

  Count Hamnet found himself in a strange position. He wanted Tahpenes to escape, but he didn’t want her. And he had—and had earned—a horror of infidelity. He also had a suspicion he thought well-founded that telling a woman he didn’t want her was an insult that would have called for seconds had its like passed between two men. And so, as sternly as he could, he said, “I didn’t capture you just to let you get away again.”

  She bit her lip. “I thought you were a kind man. You could have killed me. The way we look at things, you should have killed me.”

  “Taking prisoners when we can is our custom,” Hamnet said.

  “A foolish custom,” Tahpenes said. Count Hamnet wondered what she would have thought if she knew Marcovefa felt the same way. Or maybe she did know. Marcovefa wouldn’t hold back about something like that. She would use it for a weapon, to make a captive afraid and to make her talk.

  “Foolish or not, it’s what we do,” Hamnet said. “And I’m afraid you picked the wrong man.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to ask that Ulric Skakki,” the woman from the Rulers said tartly. “I could suck him till the inside of my cheeks turned
to leather, and he’d still break every promise he made me. If you made one, I think you would keep it.”

  “Maybe I would, but I’m not making any.” Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t resist asking, “Does Ulric know what you think of him?”

  “If he doesn’t, it’s not because I haven’t told him,” Tahpenes answered.

  “What did he do?”

  “He laughed and said, ‘You say the sweetest things, darling.’ He’s a rogue. He’s proud he’s a rogue.” Tahpenes sighed. “And the honest man is too honest. And the Bizogots . . . They would screw me and then cut my throat so I couldn’t tell any stories about them.” She shuddered.

  “Then you might as well get used to being a captive,” Hamnet said.

  “It is a disgrace. Even for a woman, it is a disgrace,” Tahpenes said. “Lying down with a man from the herd is as nothing beside it.”

  “Nice to know what you think of me,” Hamnet remarked.

  “Not just you. Any of your folk. Any of these blond Bizogots, too,” she replied.

  Nothing personal, he thought. Oh, good. Does that make it better or worse? He couldn’t decide. The truth was, the only thing she wanted was to get away from here, and she’d do anything she needed to do—anything at all—to get what she wanted.

  She eyed him. “Will you tell the others now? Tell them I want to go back to my own folk?”

  “Do you think I need to? Do you think they don’t already know?” Easier to parry questions with more questions.

  “Who can guess what folk of the herd know or don’t know?” Tahpenes said. “Maybe they think I am docile, the way they are.”

  Hamnet Thyssen burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been so surprised or heard anything so funny. “Bizogots docile?” he said. “Tell that to Trasamund, by God! You’ll leave here, all right, but you won’t be able to tell your people what you found out.”

  Tahpenes frowned. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

  “He’ll kill you for the insult, that’s what,” Hamnet answered. “And I will tell you how docile Trasamund is. He beat one of your men, a fellow named Parsh, at Bizogot stand-down on the other side of the Glacier a couple of years ago.”