The Breath of God (23 page)

“Do what?” Hamnet asked.

She looked at him even before Ulric turned the dour question into words
she could understand. He thought she would be angry at him for presuming to talk back, but amusement glinted in her eyes. She said a few words. Ulric asked her something. She nodded. “Do to keep the Glacier under our feet,” he reported. “That's what she says.”

“Well, where else would it be?” Trasamund rumbled. “Up our—?” He didn't finish that, but went far enough to leave no doubt of his meaning.

Hamnet Thyssen waited for Marcovefa to get angry at him. Instead, the shaman started to laugh. When she spoke, so did Ulric. “She says you're welcome to put it there if that makes you happy.” She added something else: “She'd like to watch if you try.”

Trasamund turned red. “Never mind,” he muttered. “I'll keep my mouth shut from now on.” Hamnet didn't believe he would—or could. That he said he would was surprising enough.

They set stones on the Glacier and dried dung on the stones so they could make fires and cook their meat. Marcovefa carried cuts that did not come from a hare or vole. Now that Hamnet had got used to the smell of that flesh roasting, he decided it didn't quite smell like pork after all. It smelled better than pork, as if it were perfectly right for the nose, for the mouth, for the belly. He supposed it was—in a way. In every other way, though . . . He'd done a lot of things for which people could blacken his name. Better to walk off the edge of the Glacier than to earn the name of cannibal.

It didn't bother Marcovefa. Man's flesh was only food to her. Count Hamnet couldn't match her detachment, and didn't want to try.

Twilight lingered long even after the sun went down. Trasamund posted sentries. “Never can tell who saw the fires,” he said. He looked to Marcovefa to see if she had anything to say about that. She didn't. She was getting ready to sleep. Lying on the Glacier was like lying on frozen rock. Hamnet Thyssen didn't care. When you were tired enough, frozen rock felt like a mattress stuffed with eiderdown.

Morning twilight was already turning the eastern sky gray when a Bizogot shook him awake for sentry duty. “Anything look funny?” he asked around a yawn.

“Everything up here looks funny,” answered the Bizogot, whose name was Magnulf. “Nothing looks any worse than it did before, though.”

“All right.” Hamnet climbed to his feet. His back and shoulder and one knee creaked. Maybe frozen rock wasn't so wonderful to sleep on after all. The Bizogot pointed northeast to show Hamnet where he should go. Knee still aching, he trudged in that direction.

After taking his place out there, he looked back towards the camp. In happier times, in easier times, Liv would often come out to keep him company while he stood watch. Not now. She lay there sleeping. She might have done that anyway. Hamnet Thyssen knew as much. But he chose to resent it this morning.

In due course, fire struck the edge of the world in the northeast: the sun climbing over the horizon. For the moment, Hamnet could look at it without hurting his eyes. That wouldn't last long; the higher it climbed, the hotter it would seem. And the day would be warm, too. How long could the Glacier last if weather like this came every year?

It'll last longer than I do, by God
, Hamnet Thyssen thought, and he turned away from the sun. His shadow stretched out before him across the glacier-top, many times taller than he was. It would shrink as the day advanced and then advance as the day shrank, and finally darkness would swallow it.
As the shadow goes, so the man
.

Come morning, his shadow would be reborn. Himself? He had much less hope about that.

Looking away from the sun meant looking in the direction from which he'd come. People there were starting to stir. Someone waved in his direction: Ulric. Even at a couple of bowshots' distance, the adventurer's sinuous grace made him stand out. Ulric gestured to him to come back in. With the sun in the sky, anyone could see trouble coming.

Ha!
Count Hamnet thought.
If people could see trouble coming as easily as that, we'd all have less of it
.

Small plumes of smoke rose from dried dung on flat stones. The air above the fires shimmered with heat. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians cooked small animals. Marcovefa roasted the abominable meat she liked better.

“Now what?” Hamnet asked, carefully licking all the grease from his fingers.

Ulric's head swiveled as he surveyed the Glacier all around. “As far as I can tell, the plan is for us to sit here till we starve.” He didn't sound like a man who was joking, but he did sound absurdly cheerful at the prospect.

“No.” That wasn't Hamnet Thyssen; it was Audun Gilli. The wizard shook his head. “Oh, no.”

“You know something.” Count Hamnet sounded accusing, even to himself. “What is it?”

“
Something
is about what I know,” Audun agreed. “
Something
is going to happen, and happen soon. What?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.”

“Will it happen before we starve?” Hamnet asked. “That would be nice, because Ulric's right—we're going to.”

“By God, we won't starve to death up here,” the wizard said. “I don't know what will happen to us, but not that.”

“You so relieve our minds,” Ulric said.

“You notice Marcovefa isn't coming over here and slapping him silly—well, sillier,” Hamnet said, which won him a wounded look from Audun Gilli. That worried him not at all. He went on, “Must mean she thinks he knows what he's talking about.”

“Happy day,” Ulric said. “Which of them is crazier, do you suppose?”

“Both of them,” Count Hamnet answered. That confused the wizard, but Ulric nodded in perfect understanding. Marcovefa eyed Hamnet as if wondering whether to say anything. When she didn't, he was more relieved than he hoped he showed.

“What
are
we going to do today?” Trasamund demanded. “Sit around here freezing our arses off?”

“If you do much sitting around here, you
will
freeze your arse off,” Count Hamnet said. “On the other hand, where do you propose to go?”

“Back to the edge of the Glacier?” But Trasamund didn't sound sure of himself—almost a first for the big, rambunctious Bizogot.

“Why?” Ulric asked. “What can you do there besides jump off? How long do you suppose you'd have to regret that before you went
splut
?”

He picked a particularly expressive noise to describe how Trasamund would sound when he hit. The jarl glared and muttered into his beard. Then he walked away shaking his head.

“Sometimes the worst thing you can do to somebody is tell him the truth,” Count Hamnet remarked.

“No doubt,” Ulric said. “And do you have any idea how many people get old and gray without ever once figuring that out?”

“Too many, or I miss my guess,” Hamnet said.

Marcovefa seemed happy enough sitting around doing nothing. Once, halfway through the day, a raven flew up and landed on her shoulder. It sat there as if it belonged, preening and making soft croaking noises and peering around with disconcertingly clever beady black eyes. Marcovefa took its
presence for granted. She scratched its head. Instead of pecking her with its formidable bill, it bent forward like a cat so her hand could better find its itches.

“A familiar?” Ulric wondered out loud.

“Not exactly, or I don't think so,” Audun Gilli said. “Seems more like a friend.”

The longer Count Hamnet watched, the more he thought Audun was right. Marcovefa croaked, too, as if she and the raven shared a language where she didn't share one with the Bizogots and Raumsdalians all around her. The big black bird seemed to understand what she was saying, and she also seemed to follow it. Hamnet told himself nothing the shaman could do surprised him much any more. He'd already told himself the same thing several times, and been wrong every one of them.

After a while, the raven flew off towards the edge of the Glacier. Ulric's eyes followed it. “Good bit of meat on a bird that size,” he remarked. “Those cursed things have got fat off us on every battlefield since the beginning of time. We could start paying them back.”

Even as he spoke, his gaze slid to Marcovefa. He might have known she would understand the essence of what he was saying. She came over to him and pulled his ear, exactly as if he were a naughty boy. Then she gave him a piece of her mind in her own language.

“She eats man's flesh, but she draws the line at raven.” Audun Gilli shook his head.

“Maybe she does. She's sure making Ulric eat crow, though,” Count Hamnet said, deadpan.

Audun started to nod. Then he caught himself and drew back from Count Hamnet as if the Raumsdalian noble had some rare, dangerous, and highly contagious disease. Chances were he did, too. At any rate, people often treated foolishness that way.

An hour or so later, the raven came back. No one tried to catch it or kill it. It perched on Marcovefa's shoulder again and croaked in her ear. One of the croaks sounded like
soon
to Hamnet Thyssen. He scratched his ear, wondering if he'd heard that or only imagined it. He knew ravens could be trained to speak, but he had trouble believing this one had been. He had even more trouble believing it had been trained to speak a language he understood.

Was he becoming like Marcovefa, then, and gaining the ability to grasp meaning even without knowing a language? He had an enormous amount of trouble believing that.

The shaman scratched the base of the raven's beak with a forefinger. That beak might have been able to bite the finger off. Instead, the raven nuzzled her like a lovesick pup. Getting it to do something like that—getting it to want to do something like that—probably wasn't magic in any ordinary sense of the word, but Hamnet had a hard time deciding what else to call it.

A warm breeze ruffled his beard and the raven's feathers. For the moment, maybe even for the season, the Breath of God, the cold, ravening wind from the Glacier, had failed. It would blow again when the year turned; Hamnet was sure of that. But for now, even here, the wind came up from the south.

Liv and Audun Gilli both stiffened at the same time, like two hunting dogs taking a scent. Liv stared at Marcovefa. Audun exclaimed, “She really did!”

Hamnet Thyssen felt the Glacier shudder under his feet.
Earthquake
, he thought. He was safer here than he would have been in Nidaros. In bad earthquakes, people died when heavy things fell on them. The only thing that could fall on him here was the sky.

Along with the shaking came a deep bass rumble from the south, a rumble and a crashing and a roar. When Hamnet looked that way, he didn't see anything. Maybe his wits were slow, because he didn't grasp what the noise might mean.

Clever as usual, Ulric did. His trouble was different: he tried hard not to believe it. “She couldn't have known an avalanche was coming . . . could she?” he said, his own doubt showing in the last two words.

Although the raven fluttered its wings when the shaking and rumbling started, it stayed on Marcovefa's shoulder. The shaman stroked the bird, calming it. Did she look pleased with herself? If she didn't, Hamnet lacked the words to describe the way she did look.

At last, the commotion subsided. Marcovefa said something in her language. Everyone else looked towards Ulric for a translation. Reluctantly, he gave one: “She says we can go down now.”

“She knew. She
knew
.” Audun Gilli made it sound more like an accusation than praise. “Even back on the mountainside, she saw the avalanche coming.”

“He's right,” Liv said, not something Hamnet wanted to hear from her but not something he could disagree with, either. “She must have known.”

“She's a shaman, not a sham, sure enough,” Ulric said. “The only thing she didn't know was just when it would happen—and I don't think she cared.”

Marcovefa said something else. Even Hamnet thought he understood it: when didn't matter. Maybe she was right, maybe she was wrong. Either way, she sounded very sure. She didn't wait to give Ulric a chance to translate. She just started walking south. Every line of her body made it plain that she didn't care whether the Bizogots and Raumsdalians went with her. No matter what they did, she would try to descend from the Glacier.

They did follow, of course. Something occurred to Count Hamnet as they tramped along over the Glacier. He caught up with Ulric, who was walking not far from Marcovefa, and said, “Ask her if she knows of the Golden Shrine.”

“Well, I will, but what are the odds?” Ulric said.

Before he could ask the question in Marcovefa's dialect, she stopped dead and stared at Hamnet Thyssen. A flood of words burst from her. Ulric held up his hands, as if to dam the flow. He didn't have much luck. A moment later, he started to laugh. “What is it?” Hamnet asked.

“You impressed her—that's what,” Ulric replied. “Up till now, she thought we were a bunch of godless savages. But if we know about the Golden Shrine, we can't be so bad after all.”

“She understood me before you translated,” Hamnet said slowly, and the adventurer nodded. Hamnet went on, “What does she know, then?”

Again, Marcovefa started talking without waiting to hear the question in her tongue. She pointed north, then south. Ulric said, “She knows it's somewhere not under the Glacier. It's a salve for the good and a snare for the wicked, she says. You get from it what you bring to it. It makes you even more what you are already. I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure she's sure what she means, come to that.”

Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff. “I think she is,” Count Hamnet said. “Eyvind Torfinn talked about the place the same way, and he knows more about it than anybody.”
Anybody except maybe a cannibal savage
, he thought. How strange was that? Stranger than anything else here atop the Glacier? Hamnet doubted it.