The Breath of God (13 page)

“No!” the Bizogots yelled back. Their spirits still seemed high. Hamnet Thyssen admired them for that, at the same time wondering where they'd left their memories. The Rulers already held the heart of the Red Dire Wolves' grazing lands. The invaders had already beaten the clan once. Why did Totila think his countrymen could beat the Rulers now?

Maybe he didn't. Maybe he just thought they had to make the fight. If they didn't, if they fled, they would be invaders themselves, trying to take land from other Bizogots. And they would have a brand new war on their hands if they did. Sometimes you needed to fight even when the odds were bad.

“Well, well.” Ulric Skakki looked up from the methodical examination he was giving the arrows in his quiver. “Doesn't this sound like fun?” His bright, cheery voice matched the wide smile on his foxy features.

Count Hamnet just shook his head. “No.”

“What do you suppose the Bizogots will do if things go wrong again?” Ulric spoke Raumsdalian, so most of the mammoth-herders wouldn't understand. “What do you suppose
we'll
do if things go wrong?”

“Try to stay alive,” Hamnet said, also in Raumsdalian. “What else can we do? What can anybody do when things go wrong?”

“A point. Yes, a distinct point.” The adventurer tapped one of the points sticking up from the quiver. “Not too sharp a point, I hope.”

The Bizogots and the Raumsdalians who'd come north rode out behind the scouts a little later. Women and old men stayed behind to tend the herds, though some women carried bows to battle. Arnora rode beside Ulric Skakki, and seemed as ready to fight as any of the men howling out battle songs.

If the Rulers broke the Red Dire Wolves again, would the herd guards be able to keep the Bizogots' animals out of the invaders' hands? Nobody could know something like that ahead of time, but Hamnet had his doubts.

“There!” The shout rose from up ahead. “There they are, the God-cursed rogues!”

“Are you ready?” Hamnet asked Liv.

“I'd better be, but how much difference would it make if I weren't?” she said.

He had no good answer for that. “
Can
you do anything about their mammoths?” he asked.

She smiled at him the way a mother might smile at a fussy child. “We can do things,” she replied. “I don't know whether they'll work the way we hope, but we can do them.”

He had to be content, or not so content, with that. He worried as he rode forward with the Bizogots. If Liv and Audun and Odovacar couldn't stop or slow down the mammoths, this battle was lost before it began. They had to see that, didn't they?

Liv did. Audun probably did. Odovacar? Hamnet Thyssen wasn't sure how much Odovacar saw, or how much it mattered.

Closer now. The mammoths loomed up ahead like perambulating mountains. The riding deer out to the flanks weren't nearly so formidable. Where were the Rulers' wizards? What new deviltry were they planning?

The Bizogots shouted Totila's name, and Trasamund's. They shouted for vengeance. They roared out their hatred of the Rulers. They shook their fists. They yelled curses that probably wouldn't bite. And the Rulers yelled back. Hamnet Thyssen still knew next to nothing of their harsh, guttural
speech. All the same, he doubted that the invaders were praising the Bizogots or passing the time of day.

Arrows started to fly. “Do you see?” Ulric Skakki said. “They've put more armor on their mammoths.”

Hamnet hadn't noticed, but Ulric was right. The thick leather sheets did cover more of the enormous beasts. “I don't care how much they put on,” Hamnet said. “Leather won't turn a square hit.” As if to try to prove the point, he nocked an arrow and let fly.

Ulric Skakki also began shooting. “I don't think they
can
armor their deer, or not very much,” he said. “Those have all they can do to carry men. They don't have any weight left over for armor, too.”

Down in the Empire, heavy cavalry horses would carry a trooper, his coat of mail, and iron armor of their own. Charges of such knights were irresistible . . . except, perhaps, by mammoths. But the Bizogots had neither such big horses nor such armor. Their warriors wore cuirasses of leather boiled in oil—when they wore armor at all. Their horses had no more protection than the Rulers' riding deer.

Deer and horses, then, made larger, easier targets than warriors. Wounded animals shrilled out cries of pain that reminded Hamnet Thyssen of women in torment. Listening, he wanted to stuff his fingers in his ears to block out the horrid sounds. But his hands had other things to do.

He methodically drew and shot, drew and shot. His bowstring didn't break, as it had in the last fight against the Rulers. Liv had set a spell on it, and on many others, to ward against the enemy's sorcerous mischief. Audun and Odovacar had also seen to the Bizogots' bows. So far, their charms seemed to be working.

Bizogot horse men were at least a match for the warriors of the Rulers on riding deer. But horse men could not withstand the Rulers' war mammoths. Fight as the Bizogots would, the mammoths drove a great wedge into the center of their line, threatening to split their force in two.

“If you can do anything at all about those God-cursed beasts, this would be a mighty good time!” Hamnet shouted to Liv.

“I'll try,” she answered, and said something to Audun Gilli, who rode close by. The Raumsdalian wizard nodded. He began what Hamnet recognized as a protective spell, to keep Liv from having to guard herself while she made a different kind of magic.

Count Hamnet wouldn't have wanted to cast a spell while riding a bucketing horse and hoping no enemy arrow struck home. That was what Liv
had to do, though, and she did it as if she had years of practice. Her voice never wavered, and her passes were, or at least seemed, quick and reliable. Hamnet admired her at least as much for her unflustered competence as for her courage.

And suddenly the ground in front of and under the Rulers' war mammoths began to boil with . . . with what? With voles, Hamnet realized, and with lemmings, and with all the other mousy little creatures that lived on the northern steppe. Some of them started running up the mammoths' legs. Others squeaked and died as great feet squashed them. Still others started up the mammoths' trunks instead of their legs.

The mammoths liked that no better than Hamnet would have enjoyed a sending of cockroaches. They did odd, ridiculous-looking dance steps, trying to shake free of the voles and lemmings. If they also shook free of some of the warriors on their backs, they didn't care at all. The Rulers might, but the mammoths didn't.

And those mammoths particularly didn't like the little animals on their trunks. They shook them again and again, sending lemmings flying. They didn't pay any attention to the battle they were supposed to be fighting.

Where the war mammoths had forced their way into the center of the Bizogots' line, now they suddenly halted, more worried about vermin than violence. The Bizogots whooped and cheered and fought back hard. Had the confusion in the enemy ranks lasted longer, and had they met with no confusion of their own . . .

Hamnet Thyssen often thought about that afterwards. Much too late to do anything about it then, of course.

In the battle, he shouted, “Ha! See how you like it!” He shot an enemy warrior who'd fallen from his mammoth, and then another one. They would have done the same to him. They'd tried to do the same to him. But he'd succeeded against them. And Liv and Audun and Odovacar had succeeded against their wizards.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he discovered it did not do to count the Rulers' wizards out too soon. The air suddenly darkened around the Bizogots. Hamnet had thought he knew everything there was to know about bugs in the north when the steppe unfroze. He quickly found out how naive he'd been.

As Liv and her comrades called voles and lemmings to the Rulers' mammoths, so the enemy wizards called insects to the Bizogots and their horses. Some always buzzed about; all you could do was slap and swear. But
now the mosquitoes and gnats and flies descended in a cloud as thick and choking as if woven from the long hairs of the woolly mammoth. Horses bucked and thrashed in torment, lashing their tails against the overwhelming onslaught.

Fighting was next to impossible with so many bugs assailing every unclothed inch of skin. Even breathing wasn't easy. Hamnet Thyssen coughed and choked. Something nasty that wiggled and tasted of blood crunched between his teeth. Gnats kept getting in his eyes. He rubbed frantically.

The bugs didn't seem to bother the Rulers or their animals, or no worse than usual.
Why am I not surprised?
Hamnet thought bitterly. The enemy's war mammoths were still distracted, but the warriors on riding deer seemed unaffected by either side's sorcery.

Not far from Hamnet, Liv was slapping and scratching and spitting as desperately as he was. “Make it stop!” he shouted to her. “By God, you have to!”

“If we do, we'll have to let go of the spell that calls the little animals to their mammoths,” she answered.

He might have guessed that. “I think you'd better do it anyhow,” he said. “They're hurting us worse than we're hurting them.” Saying that tasted bad . . . but not so bad as the insects that filled his mouth and furred his teeth.

Liv said something that should have made every insect in the world burst into flames. It should have, but it didn't. She shouted to Odovacar, who didn't hear her, then to Audun Gilli, who did. Audun nodded—indistinctly, through the curtain of bugs.

A Bizogot right in front of Hamnet caught an arrow in the throat, gurgling when he tried to scream and drowning in his own blood.
That could have been me
, the Raumsdalian thought, and shuddered, and got another gnat, or another three, in his eye. He ducked to rub at himself, and an arrow hissed past just above his head. If he were sitting straight on his horse, it would have caught him in the forehead. Sometimes whether you lived or died was nothing but luck.

He could tell when Liv and Audun and possibly Odovacar began to fight the mad swarm of insects the Rulers' wizards had summoned. The bugs went from impossible to intolerable all the way down to extremely annoying. He could spit bugs out of his mouth faster than they flew in. He wasn't swallowing or inhaling so many. He could even see, sometimes for a minute or two at a time.

And what he could see was that everything had its price. As soon as the
Bizogot shamans and Audun Gilli abandoned their spell to fight the one the Rulers were using, the lemmings and voles they'd called to the battlefield did what anyone would expect little animals to do in the presence of big ones—they ran away. And the war mammoths, no longer bedeviled, surged forward once more.

“We can beat them!” Trasamund shouted again and again. He went on shouting it after he pulled an arrow out of his left hand. He went on shouting it after the Bizogots, having fought as hard as anybody could fight, had to retreat anyhow. He went on shouting it as retreat turned to rout. He went on shouting it—roaring it out at the top of his lungs—long after he must have stopped believing it.

Ulric Skakki was bleeding from a gashed ear—the kind of wound that splattered gore all over the place without meaning much. “How come we're going the wrong way if we can beat them?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.

“Oh, shut up,” Count Hamnet explained.

Ulric nodded gravely, as if the explanation meant something. “Makes as much sense as anything I could have come up with myself,” he said.

Hamnet pointed south—actually, a little west of south. “Are those riding deer?” he asked.

“Well, they aren't glyptodonts—that's for sure,” Ulric said.

“They're cutting us off from the other half of the army. They're cutting us off from the Red Dire Wolves' herds, too,” Hamnet said.

“They're good at war. They're better than the Bizogots, because they come into fights with a plan,” Ulric said. “They're going to be a lot of trouble.”

“They're already a lot of trouble,” Count Hamnet said. “And they're herding us the way you'd herd musk oxen—or even sheep.”

“Baaa,” Ulric said—or was it
Bah!
? Hamnet couldn't tell. The adventurer went on, “What do you think we can do about it?”

“Right now? Not a cursed thing,” Hamnet answered.

“Well, that's what I think we can do about it, too,” Ulric Skakki said. “Nice to see we agree about something, isn't it? And it's nice to see the Rulers
can
run a pursuit when they feel like it, eh?”

“Fornicating wonderful,” Hamnet said. Ulric laughed, for all the world as if that were funny . . . for all the world as if anything were funny.

“Where's Totila?” Ulric Skakki asked after looking around.

Count Hamnet also looked for the Red Dire Wolves' jarl. “Don't see him.”

“He must be with the other bunch—if he's still anywhere,” Ulric said. Glumly, Hamnet nodded. He didn't see Odovacar any more, either. Was the shaman still alive? Hamnet wondered if he would ever know.

Then he had more urgent things to worry about. A warrior of the Rulers, shouting something unintelligible, slashed at him with a sword. He parried and gave back an overhand cut. The enemy fighting man turned it with a little round leather buckler he wore on his left arm. His riding deer tried to prod Hamnet's horse with its antlers. The Raumsdalian cut again. He wounded the deer's snout. The animal let out a startled snort and started to buck, just the way a horse would have. The man on it had everything he could do to stay in the saddle. Hamnet Thyssen got a good slash home against the side of his neck. Blood spurted. The warrior let out a gobbling wail and crumpled.

A tiny victory—too tiny to mean anything in the bigger fight. The Rulers went right on driving this band of Bizogots north and west, away from the larger group farther south. Every so often, an arrow would bite, and a man or a horse would go down.