The Breath of God (17 page)

“Don't you think you should have worried about that
before
we started climbing?” Ulric Skakki asked.

“Maybe we'll die up there,” Hamnet said. “But maybe we won't. If we'd stayed down on the Bizogot plain, we'd all be dead by now.” That wasn't quite true; the Rulers might have let Liv and Arnora live for a while, but the women wouldn't have been glad if they did. Most of the time, people didn't know what they were talking about when they spoke of a fate worse than death. Serving the enemy's lusts till he decided to knock you over the head, though . . . That came much too close to the real thing.

He started climbing again so he wouldn't have to think about it. Liv went up the broken blocks of ice beside him. Her face was particularly grim. Maybe she was trying not to think about what the Rulers would have done to her, too.

After a while, Ulric pointed to the plain far below and said, “Look. You can watch sunset spreading over the land.”

Was it sunset or the shadow of the Glacier? After a moment, Hamnet Thyssen decided the two were one and the same. The sun wouldn't come up again till morning. And he could see the shadow or the sunset line or whatever it was stretching farther and farther till everything down there—the whole world he'd known up till now—was swallowed in deepening blue shadow. The sun kept on shining on his comrades and him for some little while. He watched the shadow creep up the avalanche from below them. At last, the sun set halfway up the Glacier, too, or however far they were.

“Well,” Trasamund said as it got darker and chillier, and then again, “Well.” He didn't go on; it was as if he couldn't go on.

When nothing came after those two false starts, Ulric Skakki nodded sagely and said, “I couldn't agree with you more.”

The Bizogot jarl glowered at him. “Your whole world has just turned to a steaming pile of mammoth turds. Go ahead. Tell me how you feel about it.”

“Well . . .” Ulric let it hang, too. Was he mocking Trasamund or sympathizing with him? Count Hamnet couldn't tell. By the way Trasamund
muttered to himself, neither could he. Hamnet wondered whether even Ulric Skakki knew.

Raw meat made an uninspiring supper. Hamnet Thyssen had gone without often enough, though, to know how much better it was than no supper at all. As a smith stoked a furnace, so he fueled himself.

He wished he could have found a furnace somewhere closer than hundreds of miles away. A cold wind wailed down off the top of the Glacier. Even wrapped in a mammoth hide, he was chilly. Like any traveler, he carried tinder and a way to start a fire. He used flint and steel; the Bizogots, who didn't work iron, made do with firebows instead. But how they would have got a fire going didn't matter now, for they had nothing to sustain it.

Liv sat up for a while, talking about wizardry with Audun Gilli. Count Hamnet was too weary to be jealous, or to wait for her to go to sleep, too. The rough ice on which he lay might have been a feather bed. Exhaustion clubbed him down.

 

S
UMMER MORNING CAME
soon in the north country. Hamnet Thyssen didn't want to wake up, but light sneaking in between his eyelids left him little choice. He yawned and stretched. Down below, on the steppe, night still reigned.

Methodically, Hamnet cut bite after bite from a chunk of cold raw horsemeat. He chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. He'd had breakfasts he relished more, but he knew he would miss the meat when it was gone. He ate now, while he still had the chance.

Not far away, Vulfolaic was doing the same thing. After swallowing a bite, he said, “I sat up a while in the night and watched.”

“Did you, by God? Well, more power to you. You're a stronger man than I am.” Count Hamnet made as if to tip the hat he wasn't wearing. “You didn't see the Rulers sneaking up on us—that's plain enough.”

“No.” Vulfolaic shook his head. He sent Hamnet a quizzical look. No Bizogot would have admitted another man was stronger than he, yet the Raumsdalian had fought bravely in all the battles and skirmishes just past. He scratched his head, then crushed something between his thumbnails.

When he didn't say anything more on his own, Hamnet prompted him: “Well, what did you see? You must have seen something, or you wouldn't bother telling me you did sentry duty.”

“True enough.” Now Vulfolaic seemed impressed at how clever he was. Count Hamnet wanted to pound his head against the Glacier. After another
pause, Vulfolaic went on, “I didn't see the Rulers, no, but a big snowy owl flew around us. It must have known men well, for it stayed out of bowshot.”

He blinked when not only Hamnet but also Liv, Audun Gilli, and Ulric Skakki exclaimed. “That was the Rulers, looking us over,” Liv said.

“They won't be back, either—that's a sure thing,” Ulric said.

“Why not?” Audun didn't follow.

The adventurer clicked his tongue between his teeth, as if surprised such naïveté could exist. “Don't be silly,” he said. “The owl will have taken one look, laughed till it almost fell out of the sky, and flown away. Why bother coming back? I'm surprised they bothered checking at all. A ragged bunch like us won't give the Rulers any trouble even if we don't end up frozen for our trouble.”

“Oh,” the wizard said in a small, unhappy voice. He didn't try to argue.

Hamnet Thyssen wouldn't have, either. He saw things the way Ulric did. He and his comrades were likely just putting off the inevitable—and, chances were, not for very long, either.

Trasamund sucked horse blood out of his mustache. “Let's get going,” he said. “If we have to do this, we'll
do
it.”

Hamnet admired his determination. Living up to it was something else again. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back groaned when he got moving. He'd done too much the day before, and he hadn't slept on a feather bed after all. “I feel my age,” he said.

“If you weren't old when you started this climb, you would be by the time you finished,” Ulric Skakki said, which also held a painful amount of truth.

Whether they could finish the climb grew less and less certain as the day wore along. The slope got steeper as they neared the top of the Glacier. They had to try several different ways to get around or over tilted blocks of ice. They'd taken harness trappings from the horses they killed. Those helped, but Hamnet wished the leather lines were longer.

“Careful!” he called when he saw a block shifting under Trasamund's bulk. “You don't want to start another avalanche.”

Trasamund held very still, then backed down instead of climbing on. The chunk of ice—bigger than he was—didn't move any more. He nodded to Count Hamnet. “Thanks. I wouldn't have had the chance to start more than one—that's for sure.”

“Mm, no,” Hamnet said. “And what you started, the avalanche would finish.” Trasamund nodded again.

As they climbed higher, though, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians had to
take more and more chances. It was either take them or have no way to go forward. They used what precautions they could. No one climbed right behind anyone else except when the going was uncommonly good or when there was no other choice. That way, if they did start an avalanche, it wouldn't wipe out all of them. They hoped it wouldn't, anyhow.

The long northern day helped. Even down in Nidaros, the sun would have set before they got close to the top of the Glacier. A mist coming off the frozen surface veiled the plains far below. “You know what someone looking up towards us would see?” Ulric Skakki said, pausing to pant atop an ice boulder as clear and sparkling as a jewel.

“He wouldn't see anything. If we can't see him, he can't see us.” Hamnet Thyssen was panting, too. The air felt as thin as a cheap tapman's beer after he'd watered it. He couldn't get enough into his lungs to let him move as freely as he wanted. He felt weary unto death, and had a pounding headache.

He knew his logic was good, and started to get angry when the adventurer shook his head. But Ulric had an answer of his own: “He'd see clouds. We're above those clouds, looking down on them. Isn't that something you thought only birds and God could ever do?” No matter how cynical he was, awe filled his voice.

“Well, you're right,” Hamnet said. “I hope they're not the last thing we see.”

“So do I. I'd sooner look down on the Rulers than on clouds,” Ulric said. Maybe because of the thin air scrambling his brains, Count Hamnet needed longer than he should have for the pun to sink in. When it did, it made his headache worse—or he thought so, anyhow.

“Come on!” Trasamund pushed himself to his feet again. “We're almost there. Let's finish the job. Up on top of the Glacier, by God! No one from down below has ever done that, or we'd have tales to tell of it. They'll remember us forever!”

In a low voice, Ulric said, “No one from down below's ever done it and then made it back to start tales. Will we?”

“Well, the Bizogot's right about one thing: we won't if we don't get moving.” Hamnet Thyssen heaved himself upright, too. “And we
are
almost there.”

They had one last bad stretch: nearly vertical, with the ice alarmingly shaky under them. Then they clawed their way up out of the scarp the avalanche had bitten from the edge of the ice sheet. Hamnet's breath smoked as he stared across the top of the Glacier.

It might have been spring down below, but winter still reigned here. Or maybe not. In the midst of all that white and blue, enough dirt had blown into crevices in the ice to let plants sprout here and there. And not too far away in the distance was what seemed an oasis in this frozen desert: a mountaintop that climbed out of the Glacier and showed green streaked with snow.

“Well, we know where we're going,” Hamnet said. No one disagreed with him.

“Never mind where we're going for now,” Liv said. “We're here. We did it! Isn't that enough of a marvel?”

“Before I started up, I thought it would be. Now I'm not so sure,” he answered. She made a questioning noise. He explained: “Looking at what it's like up here, seems to me getting down again will be the real marvel.”

She thought about that, then nodded. “You're bound to be right.”

He wished she had told him he was wrong. He wished she had convinced him he was wrong. The more likely he was to be wrong, the better their chances were.

He wanted to ask her to sleep with him, to make love with him, that evening. But he held back, not so much for fear she would say no as for fear she would say yes and find him unable to perform. After all the fighting and climbing he'd done the past few days, he was far from sure he could. And the thin air up here atop the Glacier only made things worse. He felt as if he were moving under water, with every step costing far more effort than it should have.

He and Liv did sleep in each other's arms once the sun went down. But sleep was all they did. Hamnet woke once in the middle of the night. When he looked up at the sky, he wondered if he was seeing things. It was blacker than he'd ever known it to be, and a whole host of stars blazed down—far more than he'd seen on a clear night down on the ground.

People who came from the mountains talked about how many stars they could see. He'd always nodded when he heard talk like that, nodded without taking it very seriously. Now he saw he'd been wrong. So many shone here, he had trouble picking out the brighter ones that marked the outlines of the constellations. The Milky Way was a glisten of mother-of-pearl.

And then, despite the beauty, despite the wonder, he fell asleep again. He could admire the night sky for as long as he stayed atop the Glacier. Sleep, though, sleep he needed now.

He didn't want to wake up come morning, even with the sun smacking
him in the face. He yawned and stretched and groaned. Then he saw Ulric Skakki gutting a snowshoe hare. For a heartbeat, that meant nothing special to him, which only proved how tired he was. Then he blinked. “Where did you get that?” he asked through another yawn.

“Oh, I looked in my pocket, and there it was,” Ulric answered airily. Hamnet Thyssen growled, down deep in his throat. Ulric laughed. Then, before Hamnet attempted mayhem on his exasperating person, he went on, “It just came hopping along, happy as you please. It stopped to nibble on one of those little patches of plants they have up here, and I put an arrow through it.”

“I wouldn't eat raw rabbit down below,” Trasamund said. “I've known too many who got sick after they did. Up here . . . Up here I'll eat anything I can kill, and worry about getting sick later on.”

They still had horseflesh and musk-ox meat, too. Hamnet Thyssen wasn't hungry any more when he started trudging towards the peak that stuck up through the Glacier. Tired, stiff, sore, trying to suck in more air than he readily could . . . all of that, but not hungry.

He saw more rabbits hopping across the Glacier, and other little creatures he couldn't name so readily. “Do they go from one mountaintop to another, like boatmen in the Southeastern Sea sailing from one island to the next?” he wondered.

“Seems so,” Audun Gilli said. “Those mountains
are
islands here, islands of life.”

“Islands of life,” Count Hamnet echoed. It was a pretty phrase, and one also likely to be true. The two didn't go together all that often. “What would we do if one of them weren't close by?”

Ulric Skakki had a one-word answer for that: “Starve.”

That wasn't very pretty, but it too was likely to be true. Hamnet trudged along the top of the Glacier. They might starve anyway, once their food ran out. How many hares and voles and whatever other little creatures that lived up here could they catch? Enough to live on? He would have been surprised.

A fox trotted past, unfortunately well out of bowshot. Spit flooded Hamnet's mouth as he watched it go. Fox meat was bound to be rank, but it was meat. He got the feeling that if he stayed up here long he wouldn't sneer at anything even remotely edible. In this thin air, in this cold, a man needed to eat like a sabertooth to keep going.