The Breath of God (34 page)

And so he pushed past them without a word. Audun Gilli shrank from him. Liv didn't. She had as much courage as any Bizogot. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but she didn't do that, either. After their first spell of intoxication with each other, neither of them had been able to find enough to say to each other. That was part of the trouble, though Hamnet didn't realize it.

When he walked into the mean little room he'd thought he would share with Liv, he found she'd already taken her meager belongings out. He said something that should have made the roof cave in and the walls collapse. Everything stayed up, though, and the bed didn't collapse when he threw himself down on it, even if the frame did groan.

After losing Gudrid, he'd wept for days—weeks, in fact. He wept now, too, but even he knew the tears were more drunken self-pity than anything else. Gudrid had had a hold on him that Liv couldn't match. Knowing he would probably be all right before too long made him all the more mournful.

One good thing: Audun Gilli's chamber lay halfway down the hall. If he'd had to listen to the mattress in the next room creaking rhythmically, he really might have drawn his sword and done his best to slaughter the wizard and the shaman.

Instead, he fell asleep with his boots still on, sprawled out across the bed. After that, he didn't hear a thing.

 

W
HEN HE CAME
downstairs the next morning, some of the Bizogots were already eating breakfast. So was Ulric Skakki. He sat next to Trasamund. Both of them cautiously spooned up porridge of rye and oats and sipped from mugs of beer. By their sallow skins and red-tracked eyes,
they hoped the beer would soothe aching heads. By the way the corners of their mouths turned down, it hadn't done the job yet.

Trasamund stared at Count Hamnet. “By God, man, what ails you?” the jarl burst out. “You went to bed long before we did, but you look worse than either one of us.”

Ulric, by contrast, had a way of cutting to the chase. He did it now with two words: “He knows.”

Hamnet scowled at him. How long had they known? How long had everybody known? How long had people been laughing at him behind his back? Hadn't he had enough of that with Gudrid? Evidently not.

“What'll it be, friend?” The tapman sounded cheerful. Why not? He hadn't just lost his woman.

“Beer,” Hamnet said. “Porridge.” Even if part of him wished he were dead, his belly craved ballast.

“Sorry, Thyssen,” Ulric said when Hamnet sat down across from him. “It happens, that's all. It'll probably happen with me and Arnora before long.”

“Yes, but—” Hamnet began, and then stopped.

“But what?” Ulric asked, his voice deceptively mild.

“But you and Arnora aren't in love.”

“No. We just screw each other silly, which isn't bad, either. But you and Liv aren't in love any more, either, if you ever were,” Ulric said.

“I still love her!” Hamnet cried.

“Which has nothing to do with what I said.” Ulric was most dangerous when he was most accurate. “You may love Liv, but it's pretty plain she doesn't love you right now. And if she doesn't, you two aren't in love, no matter how much you may wish you were. Or will you tell me I'm wrong?”

Count Hamnet wanted to. He knew too well he couldn't. “No,” he mumbled. A serving girl who might have been the tapman's daughter brought him his breakfast.

“Dig in,” Ulric said cheerfully. “You may as well.”

And Hamnet did. The porridge had onions and bits of smoked sausage in it. No matter how the rest of him felt, his belly was happy. Arnora came down a few minutes later. Instead of sitting by Ulric, she made a point of plopping herself down at a far table and scowling at him. He grinned back, which only seemed to annoy her more.

Then Liv and Audun Gilli came down together. They were holding hands. Liv looked pleased with herself. The wizard looked happy and frightened at the same time. Hamnet's glower said he wished they would
both catch fire. Liv shook her head and Audun flinched, but they stayed unscorched.

They did have the courtesy to sit where Hamnet couldn't see them without twisting to do it. That helped a little, but only a little. Every time he heard Liv's voice, he felt vitriol dripping down his back.

Ulric Skakki waved to the serving girl and pointed at Hamnet. “Bring this man another mug of beer.”

“Are you sure that's a good idea?” Trasamund asked.

“I'm not
sure
of anything,” Ulric answered, “but I think one more will numb him. Three or four more . . . Well, three or four more wouldn't be a good idea right now.”

The girl set the mug in front of Count Hamnet. He drained it. Ulric was a nice judge of such things, no doubt from experience. The beer built a wall—a low wall, but a wall—between him and what he was feeling. A few more, though, and he wouldn't have cared what he did.

Marcovefa was one of the last travelers to come down to the taproom. When she did, she noticed right away how people were sitting. The clans atop the Glacier must have had their quarrels and squabbles and scandals, too. People were people, no matter where and how they lived. They would fall in love with one another.

They would fall out of love with one another, too.

Marcovefa sat down by Hamnet. “I am sorry,” she said in the ordinary Bizogot tongue. “It happens.”

He looked at her—through her, really. “Go away,” he said.

She looked back. “No.”

“Then keep quiet and leave me alone.”

She said something to Ulric Skakki in her own dialect. Hamnet could follow just enough of it to know it wasn't complimentary to him. He ignored it. He made a point of ignoring it. He made such a point of ignoring it, in fact, that Marcovefa thought it was funny. The only response he could find was to keep on ignoring her. She thought that was even funnier.

 

W
HEN THEY RODE
out of Malmo, Count Hamnet got fresh salt rubbed in his wounds. After Gudrid finally left him, she went off to Nidaros, and he hardly saw her till she came with Eyvind Torfinn on the journey up beyond the Glacier. He brooded that she was gone—brooded and brooded and brooded—but at least he didn't have to watch her with whatever lovers she'd had before latching on to the scholarly earl.

But he couldn't get away from Liv. There she was, not far away, talking animatedly with Audun Gilli, her face glowing the way it had not long before when she talked with him. Even when he rode too far away to make out what she was saying, he could hear the lilt in her voice. She talked to Audun the way a woman talked to a lover who pleased her. Hamnet knew the tone too well to mistake it. Now that she used it with someone else . . .

He ground his teeth till his jaw hurt. He wished a short-faced bear or a lion would spring out of the woods and devour Audun Gilli.
Slowly,
he thought,
so I can savor his screams.
Once the wizard was gone, he reasoned, Liv would come back to him. That she might have other choices didn't occur to him, which showed his reasoning wasn't all it might have been.

They rode on through the Empire's northern forests. The deeper they got, the more Marcovefa and the Bizogots who'd never before come down off the steppe marveled. That marveling wasn't always of a happy sort; they seemed to feel the trees pressing in on them more than ever. To Hamnet, it was only a forest: not the same kind as grew by his castle farther south, but close enough. The jays here had dark heads and blue bellies, not blue heads and white bellies. But their screeches weren't much different from those of any other jays.

Sedranc, the next town farther south, was larger and more prosperous than Malmo. As Marcovefa had before, she ate barley bread and oatcakes. In Sedranc, though, she really seemed to notice what she was eating and how unlike anything she'd known atop the Glacier it was. “What is this?” she asked. “How do they make it?” She sounded almost as wary as a Raumsdalian at one of her folk's cannibal feasts.

Some of the Bizogots also seemed curious. No crops grew on their plains, either. They gathered berries and roots and leaves, but they knew nothing of grain. Explaining how Raumsdalian farmers raised their crops and harvested them, how the seeds were ground into flour and the flour baked, took quite a while.

“A lot of work.” Marcovefa delivered her verdict. “Too much work, maybe.”

“Lots of food,” Count Hamnet said. “More than we could get from hunting and picking berries. That food lets us have towns.”
Lets us be civilized,
he thought. The two amounted to the same thing.

“What good is a town?” asked the shaman from atop the Glacier. “Why have this place? Why not wander?”

She wasn't being sardonic, or Hamnet didn't think so. “To let us have
beds. To let us have bathtubs. To let us build houses the Breath of God has trouble blowing away,” he replied.

“To let us buy and sell and trade,” Ulric Skakki added.

“Money.” Marcovefa used the Raumsdalian word as if it were a curse.

“Money.” It sounded different in Ulric's mouth.

“To stay safe behind the wall,” Audun Gilli said. He was right, too. Hamnet Thyssen glared at him anyway.

“Wall is not so much, either,” Marcovefa said.

“What would you do different? How would you do better?” If Hamnet argued with her—if he argued with anyone but Audun—he wouldn't have to dwell on his own misery.

For the first time, a question seemed to give her pause. “I don't know,” she said at last. “Something not like this, though.”

“These are just country towns, and back-country towns at that,” Ulric Skakki said in the ordinary Bizogot tongue. Then he had to go back and forth with Marcovefa, no doubt explaining what a back-country town was and why it wasn't so much of a much. When he dropped back into speech Hamnet could understand, he added, “Plenty of places farther south much finer than this.”

“It's true,” Liv said. “When I first came down to Raumsdalia, I thought each place was the finest one I'd ever seen. Then the next one down the road would be grander still.”

Hamnet remembered that, remembered it with heartbreaking clarity. She'd shared her amazement and delight with him only the autumn before. Now, if she still had them, she'd share them with Audun Gilli. Hearing her voice stabbed Hamnet in the memory, and what wounds hurt worse than that?

He'd felt the same way about Gudrid last year. She'd gone out of her way to bait him, too, which Liv didn't seem to be doing—a small mercy, but a mercy even so. And yet, when a short-faced bear burst out of the forest, killed Gudrid's horse, and menaced her, he'd ridden to her rescue without a thought in his head except driving the bear away or killing it. Even at the time, he'd wondered why. Did he hope she'd be grateful? If he did, she disappointed him yet again.

What would he do if a short-faced bear came after Liv now? He was lucky—if it was luck—he didn't have to find out.

The forest's northern edge was clear-cut: there was a line past which trees simply could not grow. Its southern border was more ambiguous. Men
could farm on south-facing slopes even in the midst of the trees. In good years, in warm years, in years when the Breath of God didn't blow too hard, they'd bring in a crop. Chances were they could bring in enough to last out one bad year. Two long, hard winters in a row, though, and they would start to starve.

More farmers seemed to be trying to carve out steadings up here than had been true before Count Hamnet's beard started going gray. More seemed to be making a go of it, too. In his grandfather's day, the forest's lower edge lay miles to the south.

Go back enough generations and it hadn't been forest here at all, but frozen steppe. Go back further than that, and the Glacier had ground forward and back, and who could say what it ground into oblivion? Only a few legends and—maybe—the Golden Shrine survived from those days.

If I found the Golden Shrine, could I make Liv love me again?
Hamnet wondered.
God, could I make
Gudrid
love me again? Could I make myself not care if I couldn't make either one of them love me again?
Without love, poppy juice for the soul seemed plenty good.

He looked around, as if he would find the Golden Shrine in the middle of this frontier district. That would have been funny if it weren't so sad. He hadn't found the Golden Shrine even beyond the Glacier. What chance of stumbling over it in these mundane surroundings did he have? None, and he knew it.

What chance do I have?
he wondered bitterly. The question was hard enough to answer all by itself.

He looked back over his shoulder, back past the forest, back towards the Bizogot steppe. He wondered why he cared so much about beating the Rulers. What did he care if they smashed the Bizogots and hurled Raumsdalia down in ruins?

Part of the answer to that seemed plain enough. If the Rulers smashed the Empire, he was all too likely to get caught and killed in the collapse. Even if he didn't, he would have to bend the knee to the invaders from beyond the Glacier. Every fiber in his being rebelled against that. Better to fight them for . . .

For what? For the love of a woman? Gudrid lay in Eyvind Torfinn's arms—and in any other arms she happened to fancy. And now Liv had thrown Hamnet over, too—and for whom? For a wizard lost in the real world. Why care whether he lived or died himself, let alone the Bizogots or the Raumsdalian Empire?

Another question easier to ask than answer.

Big, sharp-nosed, rough-coated dogs that looked to be at least half dire wolf ran snarling at the travelers from a farm cabin near the woods. Almost without thinking, Hamnet strung his bow and let fly. The arrow caught a wolf-dog in the flank. Its snarls turned to yelps of pain. It ran off faster than it had come forward. The other beasts, hearing their friend wounded, seemed to think twice.