The Breath of God (42 page)

“Which, I have no doubt, is an understatement the size of a mastodon.” Eyvind Torfinn smiled to show he'd made a joke. He was a good-hearted man. He was also a man who'd seen a dungeon cell from the outside but never, so far as Count Hamnet knew, from within. Despite that lack—or that luck—he did have a certain grasp on essentials: “Even if the Emperor did give you a meal, I daresay you'll be thirsty for something better than musty water.”

“Yes, by God!” Again, Kormak spoke before Hamnet could. Hamnet didn't mind; he couldn't have put it better himself.

 

E
YVIND
T
ORFINN
'
S RECEPTION
hall would not have been too small for the imperial palace. With all the Bizogots guesting at his home, he'd given one servant tapman duty. A couple of dozen Bizogots would be plenty to keep a tapman busy at all hours of the day and night, or so it seemed to Count Hamnet. With beer and wine and mead to choose from in place of fermented mammoth and musk-ox milk, the Bizogots might drink even more than they did up on the frozen plain, too.

Trasamund had a drinking horn—actually, a silver rhyton in the shape of a mountain sheep's horn—of beer in his hand when he saw Hamnet. “It is you!” the jarl boomed, rushing over to fold Hamnet into an embrace that made him think of a hug from a short-faced bear. “Ulric said Eyvind had got you loose, but Ulric lies the way most people fart—he can't help himself.”

“I know some people who break wind through the mouth, but I'm not one of 'em,” Ulric Skakki said with dignity. He sent Hamnet one of his crooked grins. “I hope I'm not, anyhow.” His cup was smaller and plainer than Trasamund's, but he chose wine to fill it. He could rough it with the best of them, but he didn't when he didn't have to.

Liv was also there, and she came up to Hamnet, too. Taking both his hands in hers, she said, “I am glad to free you again. I wish you no harm, no ill—only the best. I am sorry we didn't end up fitting together the way you hoped. I hoped we could, too. Sometimes things don't work out the way you wish they would, that's all.”

How was he supposed to answer that? It was gracious, and he believed it, but it still felt like a sawblade thrust through his liver. “Sometimes things
don't,” he agreed in a voice rough as shagreen. He squeezed her hands once, then let them go.

“That was well done,” Ulric Skakki said quietly. Liv nodded.

For a moment, knowing how useless and how foolish it was, Hamnet hated both of them. “Well done or not . . .” he said, and made for the tapman. As he came up, the fellow raised a politely curious eyebrow. “Wine,” Count Hamnet told him. “Whatever you've got that's sweet and strong.”

“Coming up, sir,” Eyvind Torfinn's servant said as he filled a cup. If Earl Eyvind was making his bountiful cellars available to his guests, Hamnet, like Ulric, aimed to take advantage of them. And wine was stronger than beer and ale and smetyn; even a determined drinker needed to pour down less to make the world go away.

Of course, the determined drinker would still regret it the next morning or whenever he finally sobered up. Right now, the morning seemed a million years and a million miles away from Hamnet Thyssen. The wine in his cup might not have been a great vintage, but it was sweet and it was strong. Hamnet wondered what the southern wine growers got that they thought worth as much as their marvelous elixir.
A poet could do something with that conceit
, he thought. No poet himself, he made do with savoring the smooth, blood-red richness as it slid down his throat.

“So what are you going to have to do for Sigvat to keep from decorating his dungeons again?” Ulric Skakki asked, sidling up to him.

“Nothing much,” Hamnet asked. Unlike the tapman's a moment before, Ulric's elevated eyebrow was redolent of skepticism. “Nothing much, by God,” Count Hamnet said again. “Just drive off the Rulers, that's all. They're inside the Empire, in case you haven't heard, and they've beaten the stuffing out of an imperial army and a bunch of imperial wizards. Believe it or not, that even got His Majesty's attention.”

“And they said it couldn't be done!” Ulric said in mock—Hamnet supposed it was mock—astonishment. “He won't do anything to you if you don't manage it, either, I'm sure. Maybe cut off your fingers and toes one at a time and then start in on anything else that still happens to stick out. Like I say, nothing much. D'you suppose your balls'd count as one cut or two?”

“I hadn't worried about it—up till now.” Hamnet spoke the last three words in as shrill a falsetto as he could muster.

He caught Ulric Skakki by surprise. The adventurer's laugh was high-pitched, too—almost a giggle. “
You're
not supposed to do things like that,” Ulric said severely.

The others who understood Raumsdalian were laughing, too. Marcovefa chose that moment to walk into the dining hall. “What is the joke?” she asked. “Why do I always come in right after the joke?”

Some of that was in her own tongue, some in the regular Bizogot language. “Hamnet made it,” Ulric said, and pointed to the newly released nobleman.

“Say it again,” Marcovefa told him.

He did, in the Bizogot tongue this time. It sounded stronger in that language than it did in Raumsdalian. Hamnet wondered why that should be so, but had no doubt it was. Marcovefa laughed and laughed. Pointing to her, he said, “When I do go against the Rulers, I'll need you beside me.”

She batted her eyes at him, for all the world like a coquette of the kind he couldn't stand. “Why, darling, I didn't know you cared,” she murmured in surprisingly good, if still accented, Raumsdalian.

People in the dining hall laughed much harder at that than they had at Count Hamnet's joke. Ulric Skakki dropped his cup. Quick as a cat, he caught it before it smashed, but wine spilled on the floor. A servant scurried away and came back with a rag. Hamnet groped for an answer, even after the fellow was down on his knees wiping up the wine. Just then, he would sooner have embraced a rattlesnake than a woman, but he could see how Marcovefa might not appreciate that kind of reply.

“I want you for your magic, not for your—” he began, and then broke off again. His mouth seemed determined to land him in trouble whether he wanted to end up there or not.

“Twat?” Marcovefa suggested, in the regular Bizogot language—maybe she hadn't learned how to say that in Raumsdalian yet.

“Well, yes,” Hamnet muttered, which brought on fresh gales of merriment from the Bizogots—Liv very much included—and Ulric Skakki. Where was Audun Gilli? Count Hamnet didn't see him, which spared him
complete
humiliation . . . but only by the tiniest of margins.

Or so he thought, anyhow, but then Marcovefa leaned up and forward and brushed her lips across his as if they were old lovers. “Don't worry,” she said. “I promise not to give you anything you don't want.”

“Ah, but will you give him everything he does want?” Trasamund bellowed. He thought his own sally was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, funnier than whatever had gone before. Hamnet Thyssen had rather a different opinion.

If he showed Trasamund he was angry, he lost. He saw that much. “I want to beat the Rulers,” he said. “I want to drive them out of Raumsdalia. I want to drive them off the Bizogot plains.”

“You do all that, and so many women will want to say thank-you with their legs open, you'll need a club to keep them off,” Ulric said.

“Maybe not,” Trasamund said before Hamnet could answer. “Maybe the sour look on his face will do it.” He guffawed.

“You're your own best audience,” Hamnet told him.

“Drive off Rulers? Not so hard,” Marcovefa said. “Everyone makes big fuss about Rulers. Feh! This to Rulers.” She snapped her fingers.

“The reason everyone makes a fuss about them is that they keep beating everyone,” Ulric said. “It's a reprehensible habit, I know, and one from which they should be discouraged by any means necessary.”

“What is
reprehensible
?” Marcovefa asked.

“Why, deserving of reprehension, of course,” Ulric answered blandly.

“And what does
reprehension
mean?” Was her patience wearing thin? Hamnet Thyssen knew his would have been.

But Ulric went right on playing. “Reprehension is that which is reprehensible.”

Maybe Marcovefa would have turned him into a newt. More likely, since there were no newts atop the Glacier, she would have chosen something like a pika instead. Before she could do anything she might—or might not—regret later, Hamnet said, “What Ulric is doing now is reprehensible. It deserves reprehension.”

“Ah. I understand. Thank you,” Marcovefa said.

Ulric Skakki sent Hamnet a jaundiced stare. “
You're
no fun.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” Hamnet said. “But then, I've just come out of His Majesty's dungeons. The sport down there isn't everything it might be.”

“Well, that's true enough,” the adventurer agreed. “I didn't enjoy the stretch I put in under the throne room, either.”

“You never told me you got jugged.” Count Hamnet didn't know whether to believe him, either. Ulric had done a lot of things, but he hadn't done everything . . . had he?

“I never told you it snowed in the wintertime up in the Bizogot country, either. I never saw the need.” He spoke with exaggerated patience. And then he went on to talk about what things were like in the dungeons. He'd been there; he left Hamnet Thyssen in no possible doubt about that. He knew more about what went on in the bowels of the imperial palace than Hamnet
did himself. He knew guards by name and by habit. He knew those cells as if he'd lived in them for years. Maybe he had.

“How did you get out?” Count Hamnet asked when he finished.

“Same way you did,” Ulric answered. “His Majesty found something where he thought I might be useful. As a matter of fact, it was that bit of business we did together six or eight years ago.”

“You didn't tell me you were just out of the dungeon!” Hamnet exclaimed.

“You didn't ask me,” Ulric said. “I'd washed most of the stink off, same as you did. I thought you'd get all sniffy if you knew I was coming up for air for the first time in . . . well, in a while, anyway. I'd say I was right, too.”

Was he? Looking into himself, Hamnet thought he might well have been. “I'm sorry,” the Raumsdalian noble mumbled.

“What? For being what you are? That's foolish,” Ulric said. “Besides, you're . . . a little better now. And you've done a stretch yourself, which doesn't hurt.”

Count Hamnet bowed. “Thank you so much.”

Ulric Skakki also bowed, with a sinuous elegance Hamnet couldn't hope to match. “My privilege, Your Grace.”

Before Hamnet could take the next step in the politer-than-thou dance, a servant came in and said, “His Splendor requests that I announce a meal is being served. If you will be so kind as to accompany me . . .”

All things considered, Hamnet Thyssen would rather have gone on sparring with Ulric. It wasn't that Eyvind Torfinn didn't set an elegant, even an extravagant, table. No, the problem was who would be sitting at it.

And, sure enough, Gudrid waited there when he walked in.

 

I
GNORING HER WOULD
have been rude, especially since he was a guest in her present husband's home. Glancing over towards Earl Eyvind, Hamnet thought the older noble awaited this meeting with more than a little apprehension of his own.
If there's a fight, I won't start it
, Hamnet decided. That being so, he bowed to Eyvind Torfinn and to Gudrid and took his seat without speaking to either of them.

Trasamund sat down to his left, Marcovefa to his right. Liv was some little distance down the table, between Ulric Skakki and a Leaping Lynx Bizogot Count Hamnet barely knew. Gudrid never failed to notice things like that. And of course she already knew Liv and Audun Gilli were sleeping together. Her mouth stretched into what looked like a smile of genuine pleasure.

“How does it feel to have lost another woman?” she asked.

“These things happen,” Hamnet said stolidly.

“Oh, indeed.” Gudrid's smile widened. “Anything can happen to anybody—once. If something happens to someone again and again, though, chances are it's his own fault.”

You can't please a woman.
She didn't shout it, not in so many words. She let the guests of her husband's generosity figure it out for themselves instead. And what she said might well have held a cruel barb of truth. But it was a barb that could also have stung her. Count Hamnet could have made some pointed gibes about her sport of infidelity . . . if he'd wanted to insult the man who'd got him out of Sigvat's dungeon. Since he didn't, he just shrugged.

Gudrid drew in another anticipatory breath. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how long he could go on giving mild answers if she kept baiting him. Not long enough, he feared. But Eyvind Torfinn beat Gudrid to the punch. “That will be enough of that, my dear,” he said in tones that brooked no argument.

Gudrid blinked. She wasn't used to hearing such tones from her husband—or anyone else. “But he—” she began.

“That will be enough of that,” Eyvind Torfinn repeated. “We are none of us perfect. Reminding one another how we fall short does nobody any good. And the Empire needs Count Hamnet, whether he is perfect or not. You may think what you please, of course, but I will thank you to stay courteous in what you say.”

Servitors began bringing in the meal. Trays of mutton and spicy pork and goose filled the table. An edge sharper and more dangerous than the one on any carving knife filled Gudrid's voice: “And if I don't?”

If she intimidated Eyvind Torfinn, he didn't show it. Waving to one of the servants, he said, “My wife won't be dining with us after all, I'm afraid. Be so kind as to escort her to her bedchamber.”