The Breath of God (22 page)

“Maybe there's more to it than you think,” Count Hamnet said slowly.

“Maybe.” Ulric didn't sound as if he believed it, but now he didn't sound as if he dared disbelieve it, either. That left him sounding . . . confused. He went on speaking Raumsdalian: “Maybe up here there's so little going on that
now
and
then
can blend like salt and garlic in a stew. Nothing up here would surprise me very much any more. I mean, what is time but a way to keep everything from happening at once?”

Hamnet Thyssen half—more than half—expected Marcovefa to slap him again for being flip. He wouldn't have been surprised if she was crazy, at least by the standards that prevailed at the bottom of the Glacier. This was too strange and too harsh and too different a world to expect standards to stay the same. But instead of being insulted, the shaman nodded vigorously. She let out what was, to Hamnet, mostly a stream of gibberish.

By the bemused look on Ulric 's face, he understood a good deal more of it, but was none too happy that he did. “What was that all about?” Hamnet asked when Marcovefa finally fell silent.

“She says I get it after all,” Ulric replied, shaking his head. “She says she thought I was as vacant as a vole—which is a demon of a phrase, even in her weird dialect—till I made my snide joke. But everything I said was true, she told me. She feels it in her heart.”

Marcovefa laid a hand over her left breast. She might not understand Raumsdalian in any ordinary sense of the world, but she could sense truth and falsehood . . . or she thought she could, anyhow. By what Hamnet was seeing here, he would have had a hard time telling her she was wrong.

Then she said something else, something that sounded very self-assured. Ulric's jaw dropped. “What
now
?” Hamnet asked. “Do I really want to know?”

“Well, I'm damned if I want to be the only one who does,” Ulric answered. “She says she's going with us, to the edge of the Glacier and over it.”

“But what about her clan?” Hamnet said. “Won't they end up a feast for some of the others up here if she leaves them? How can she do it?”

The adventurer spoke to her. She pointed to a young man scraping flesh from the inside of a pika hide with a sharpened bit of flint. “That's Dragolen,” Ulric said. “He's well on his way to turning into a shaman himself. By what she can tell, nothing too horrendous happens—not
will happen
, but
happens
—to the clan till he finishes learning the things he needs to know.”

“Tell her we don't eat man's flesh down below,” Hamnet said. “Maybe that will make her want to stay here.”

But Marcovefa only shrugged at the news. Like a lot of shamans and wizards, she could be imperious when she chose. “I go,” she said, and even Hamnet couldn't misunderstand her—however much he might have wanted to.

 

N
O MATTER WHAT
Marcovefa thought of Dragolen as an up-and-coming shaman, Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether the clan chief—he didn't have enough people under him to count as a jarl in the Raumsdalian's mind—would be eager to let her leave. But he said not a word against her. He was probably so glad to get rid of the dangerous strangers that losing his shaman seemed small by comparison.

Hamnet asked both Liv and Audun Gilli if they foretold trouble by bringing Marcovefa along. Liv simply shook her head. On matters that didn't touch their private lives, she and Hamnet still worked well together. On those that did . . . they didn't.

“We're already in so much trouble, what's a little more?” Audun said. Having no good answer for that, Hamnet walked away shaking his head.

Ulric dickered with the clan chief over how many hares and pikas and voles the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would take with them when they left. When he didn't like the deal the chief proposed, he sweetened it by offering to leave a couple of swords behind with the men of the Glacier. That made the chief cheer up.

“Swords won't help them catch rabbits,” Audun said, a puzzled note in his voice.

Ulric eyed him with something approaching pity. “Rabbits aren't the only meat they hunt, and swords
will
help them with the other.”

“The other . . . ? Oh!” Light—a revolted light—shone in the wizard's eyes.

Marcovefa led them off the mountainside and down onto the surface of the Glacier. Count Hamnet shook his head in wonder. He'd never dreamt he would need to descend to travel over the Glacier. He'd never dreamt of a lot of the things that happened to him till they did. A good many of them, he would have been happier to avoid. That was afterwards, though, and afterwards was always too late.

Here and there, puddles dotted the top of the Glacier. Marcovefa eyed them dubiously. She said something. When Hamnet looked a question at Ulric, the adventurer translated: “In her grandfather's grandfather's days, this didn't happen, she says.”

“Is she sure she's not talking about her grandchildren's days?” Hamnet asked. “She's the one who can't keep time straight.”

Before Ulric could render that into Marcovefa's dialect, she sent Hamnet a severe look, as if he were a child acting snippy around grownups. That shouldn't have been easy to bring off; he thought he was older than she was. But when she wanted to, she could assume as many years and as much dignity as she pleased. It was an unusual gift, and not a small one, either.

She led the Bizogots and Raumsdalians south and west with a fine display of confidence. Count Hamnet wondered what lay behind it. He wondered if anything did. Maybe she was willing to sacrifice herself to strand them on the Glacier and rid her clan of the threat they posed. But when that thought bubbled up from the dark places at the bottom of his mind, he shook his head. He could imagine it, but he couldn't believe it. She acted like someone who knew what she was doing and where she was going.

Of course, a madwoman would act that way, too. Hamnet was much less certain Marcovefa and the real world touched each other very much.

Why are you following her, then?
he asked himself. But the answer to that was all too plain: even if she was leading them to disaster, what did they have to lose? Staying up here was only disaster of a different kind. The miserable cannibal life the men of the Glacier led showed that all too clearly.

He skirted another puddle atop the Glacier. “What do you suppose would happen if it all melted?” he asked.

“Never happen,” Trasamund said. “Not while we still live.”

Those two things weren't the same, though the jarl didn't seem to understand it. Even if he and Hamnet Thyssen lived to grow long white
beards—which seemed most unlikely at the moment—they would die in an eyeblink of time as far as the world went. Not so far long ago, as far as the world went, the Glacier had pushed down to not far north of Nidaros. The country around the present capital was much like the Bizogot steppe in those days. If the Glacier disappeared, this northern land might turn out not to be so useless, too.

But Trasamund wouldn't be here to see it. To him, nothing else mattered. Well, that made a certain amount of sense, or maybe more than a certain amount. But Hamnet tried to take a longer view.

Marcovefa said something. Ulric answered. She said something else. Ulric translated: “ ‘The day is coming,' she says, or maybe, ‘The day is here.' ”

“Not here yet, by God,” Hamnet said. “Or what are we walking on?”

Again, Ulric turned that into words Marcovefa could understand. She gave back one word. “Illusion,” Ulric said.

“Well, as long as it fools my feet, I'm not going to worry about it,” Hamnet said.

The Bizogots caught a few voles in patches of greenery. Marcovefa had a bird net and a chant that seemed to lure birds into it. But there weren't many to lure. They steadily went through the meat they'd got from the shaman's clan. Count Hamnet began to wonder if they would have enough to get back to the crag at need. Before long, he stopped wondering: they wouldn't. Marcovefa led them towards the edge of the Glacier—the rim of the world, she called it—with perfect and sublime certitude.

When they got there, they could look down at a sea of curdled white clouds that hid the Bizogot country from the eye. Count Hamnet and Ulric stared at each other, both appalled, but neither, somehow, enormously surprised. Liv glanced over towards Marcovefa as if wondering what her fellow shaman would do now. Audun Gilli, by contrast, only shrugged, as if to say,
Well, this is interesting, isn't it?

But Trasamund exploded like a tightly shut pot forgotten atop a fire. He didn't just curse Marcovefa—he screamed at her. He pulled his two-handed sword from the sheath he wore on his back and brandished it, bellowing, “We ought to carve steaks off you, you worthless, mangy trull!”

Marcovefa answered more calmly than Hamnet Thyssen thought he could have managed under such circumstances. She said something that set Ulric giggling helplessly. “What was that?” Hamnet asked.

“Something like, ‘Why didn't your mother spank you when you were little?' ” the adventurer answered.

Trasamund didn't ask for a translation. He kept on raving. When Count Hamnet thought he really might swing that sword, his feet went out from under him and he sat down, hard, on the Glacier. He was lucky the sword didn't skewer or slice him. Marcovefa looked the slightest bit smug—enough to convince Hamnet that the Bizogot's pratfall was no accident.

Even Trasamund seemed convinced after trying four times to stand and failing again and again. “Give over!” he told Marcovefa, holding up a hand in token of surrender. “I'll put the blade away. By God, I will!”

The shaman didn't speak the ordinary Bizogot tongue. What Trasamund said couldn't have meant much to her. But she seemed to grasp the essentials behind or under language. She knew what the jarl meant even if she didn't know what he said. With a nod whose somber dignity the Raumsdalian Emperor might have envied, she signaled that he was free from her spell. When he tried to get to his feet once more, he succeeded.

He shuddered. “She knows somewhat of shamanry, all right,” he said to Hamnet Thyssen. “But why the demon didn't she know the Glacier here is just like the Glacier everywhere else except at that one big avalanche?”

“If I could tell you, I'd be on my way towards making a pretty fair shaman myself,” Count Hamnet answered.

Liv shook her head. “I am a fair shaman, or I like to think I am,” she said. “I have no idea why we're here.” Then she turned to Audun Gilli and asked, “Do you?” Hamnet wished she hadn't, even if he understood why she had.

Audun started to shake his head, too, but hesitated. “Nooo,” he said slowly, “not unless . . .” He did shake his head then, firmly and decisively. His voice firmed as he repeated, “No,” and continued, “The whole idea is too ridiculous.”

“And what about this mess isn't?” Ulric asked. “Come on—out with it.”

But Audun wouldn't talk. All he said was, “If we know, we'll know without any doubt. And if we don't, we'll be too busy starving to worry about it.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Ulric said. Not even his sly mockery could pry any more words out of the Raumsdalian wizard. Marcovefa looked on with what Hamnet would have called innocent amusement if he hadn't already figured out that she was much less innocent than she seemed, and in a way that had nothing to do with her taste for cannibal feasts.

Arnora came over and linked her arm with Ulric 's. “We may as well camp here,” she said. “We're not going anywhere—that's for sure.”

Marcovefa asked a question. Hamnet Thyssen would have bet it was,
What did she say?
The shaman didn't understand everything that went on
around her. Words spoken without strong emotion behind them remained opaque. Ulric translated for her. She said something else. Ulric asked her a different question. She repeated herself—Hamnet could hear that—more emphatically.

“What now?” he asked Ulric.

“She says we all die before our time if we camp here,” the adventurer replied.

Arnora tossed her shining head. “What does she know?”

“More than you do, sweetheart, when it comes to things up here,” Ulric said. Arnora pulled her arm free and glared at him.

“I think maybe the woman from the men of the Glacier is right. Maybe.” Audun Gilli always spoke the Bizogots' language slowly and clumsily. Now something new was in his voice. Only the way he looked at Marcovefa helped Hamnet Thyssen give it a name. Awe. Without a doubt, it was awe.

“Where do we camp if we don't camp here?” Trasamund asked, eyeing the westering sun. “Wherever it is, we'd better take care of it before too long. I know twilight lingers, but not forever.”

Marcovefa led them away from the edge of the Glacier, back in the direction of the mountain refuge from which they'd come. She still had an imperious certainty that made anyone else doubt her at his peril.

“Why didn't she just tell us to stop where she wanted us to stop?” Arnora grumbled. “Instead, she almost led us off the tallest cliff there is.”

“I don't think she knew the cliff was still there,” Ulric answered.

“You don't think she knew?” the Bizogot woman said shrilly. “And you followed her anyway?”

Ulric only shrugged. “Have you got a better idea?”

Arnora opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Up here atop the Glacier, there were few good ideas to have. The best one, to Hamnet Thyssen's way of thinking, was not to get stuck here in the first place. But when the only other choice was staying where you were and getting slaughtered, trying to reach the top of the Glacier suddenly looked a lot better. It had to Hamnet not long before, and it must have to the ancestors of the men of the Glacier some time in the dim and vanished past.

Marcovefa stopped without warning in the middle of an icefield which looked no different from the rest of the Glacier that stretched as far as the eye could see. She spoke. As usual, Ulric translated: “This will do, she says.”