The Breath of God (43 page)

“Yes, Your Splendor,” the servant said.

“But I don't want to go to my bedchamber,” Gudrid said, which would surely do for an understatement till a bigger one came along.

“Will you mind your manners, then?” Earl Eyvind asked with surprising firmness.

“I will do and say whatever I need to do and say,” Gudrid answered, as if no other reply were possible. Plainly, she thought none was.

“Rorik . . .” Eyvind said. The servant touched Gudrid on the shoulder.
She screamed at him, and at her husband. Hamnet Thyssen looked down at the tabletop. He'd seen Gudrid's temper kindle before. He'd been on the receiving end of it more often than he cared to remember. In a way, he still was. This fracas was about him, even if he didn't happen to be at the center of it.

Ulric Skakki yawned. “A little politeness would fix everything. Too bloody much to ask for, I suppose.”

Gudrid didn't intend to be polite. She grabbed a knife. Rorik knocked it away from her before she had the chance to try to stab him. That made Gudrid screech like a dire wolf with an arrow in its rump. For his part, Count Hamnet didn't blame the servant one bit. His former wife didn't take kindly to being thwarted by anybody.

“You may stay . . . if you'll stay civil,” Eyvind Torfinn told her. “Will you?”

Her eyes blazed. She wasn't about to forgive her husband any time soon, either. But she nodded and spat out three words: “Oh, all right.”

Earl Eyvind beamed, which struck Hamnet as misplaced optimism. He kept his mouth shut, though. “Thank you, my dear,” Gudrid's current husband said.

She answered with something low-voiced, something Count Hamnet couldn't quite make out. If Eyvind Torfinn did hear what it was, he affected not to. A certain amount of forbearance was an asset in any husband—or wife. The earl seemed to grasp that. Gudrid didn't, and probably never would. As for Hamnet himself . . . He felt he'd used all his forbearance and more besides, trying to stay married to Gudrid. Her opinion of that might have differed.

Gluttony seemed safe here. Gluttony, after the musty water and the small loaves of bad bread in Sigvat's dungeon, seemed all but obligatory. Hamnet might not have been able to match the Bizogots in his relentless pursuit of a full belly, but he did his level best.

Eyvind Torfinn reminded him of one of the reasons he was feasting so extravagantly, asking, “How soon do you expect to depart for the north?”

“As soon as I can,” Hamnet answered. “As soon as His Majesty gives me orders I can show people, orders that let them know I really do hold command there.”

Though Eyvind nodded, the cynical Ulric Skakki asked, “Will he give you orders like that in writing?”

“I don't know. I don't much care, either,” Count Hamnet said. “If he does
give me what I need, I'll go off and do my best with it. And if he doesn't, I'll go down to my castle instead—and wait for the Rulers to come to me.”

“What does he say?” Marcovefa asked. Both Ulric Skakki and Eyvind Torfinn started to translate Hamnet's words into her dialect. Each waved for the other to go on. After a moment, Ulric did. Marcovefa listened, frowning, then said, “Does he really think they can do that?”

She spoke mostly in the usual Bizogot tongue. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble following that. “You may think the Rulers are easy meat,” he told her, “but, if you do, you're the only one who does.”

“Too many
things
down below the Glacier.” Marcovefa said that in her own dialect, but Hamnet had heard it often enough to have no trouble understanding it. Believing it was another story.

Hamnet Thyssen ate for a while. Eyvind Torfinn's chefs, as always, set a high standard. And, because Hamnet was just out of the dungeon, good food seemed even better to him. After a while, though, he looked across the table and spoke to Gudrid: “May I ask a favor of you?”

Her eyes widened in surprise not, he judged, altogether feigned. “What is it?”

“Don't ask His Majesty not to give me the orders I need,” he said.

This time, the way she batted her eyelashes was much too familiar. “Why would I do that?” she cooed, as if she didn't know.

“To stop me. To make me go back to my castle. To make me fail,” Hamnet said bluntly. “We both know that would make you happy. By all the signs, though, I'm more likely to fail if I do go up against the Rulers than if I don't. But if by some chance I don't fail, that will be good for the Empire. What happens to me doesn't matter much, not on that scale of things. What happens to Raumsdalia does.”

Eyvind Torfinn nodded. So did Trasamund. So, rather grudgingly, did Ulric Skakki, who worried about himself ahead of most things. So did Liv, without the least hesitation. And so did Audun Gilli, although Count Hamnet made a point of not looking at him.

Gudrid? Gudrid stared at Hamnet as if he'd started speaking in Marcovefa's dialect. “Why on earth should I care what happens to Raumsdalia?” she demanded. “I care about what happens to me . . . and I care about what happens to you.” The way she bared her small white teeth said she didn't want anything good happening to him.

Eyvind Torfinn took a sip of wine before speaking. The white-bearded scholar didn't usually have any idea how to control Gudrid.
As if anyone does
,
Hamnet thought. He feared whatever Eyvind said would only make things worse. Appealing to Gudrid's patriotism was like appealing to a dire wolf's sense of poetry. You could if you wanted to, but it wasn't likely to do you any good.

But all Earl Eyvind said was, “If you wish disaster upon your former husband, my sweet, the surest thing to do is let him go north and find it. That the Rulers have crossed the Bizogot plain in one campaigning season, that they have invaded the Empire, clearly shows anyone who stands against them is unlikely to stand for long.”

His words held more truth than Hamnet Thyssen might have wished. Hamnet wanted to beat the Rulers, not to throw himself away as so many Bizogots—and, now, a Raumsdalian army—had done before him. Whether he could do what he wanted was a different question.

With Eyvind Torfinn's help, Gudrid saw that, too. She sent Count Hamnet one of her poisonously sweet smiles. “All right,” she said, and then, “All right,” again, her soft red lips and moist tongue giving the words a lewd caress as they escaped. “Sometimes the worst you can do to someone is to give him what he thinks he wants and then stand back and watch him ruin himself with it. If you want to play the hero going after the Rulers, be my guest. I won't tell Sigvat to stop you. I'll just laugh when you come back after you've made a fool of yourself. So will everyone else.”

“I wouldn't be surprised,” Hamnet said. “I'll have to do my best not to make a fool of myself, then, won't I?”

Gudrid's laugh was loud and rich. “But darling, we all know your best is nowhere near good enough, don't we?”

He shrugged. “All I can do is all I can do.”

“This is true of all of us,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “For myself, I think doing our best against the Rulers is more important than anything that has faced the Empire for many, many years. I am so convinced of this that, if I see anyone operating on a contrary principle, I shall feel compelled to change my will.”

The Bizogots, even the Bizogots who spoke Raumsdalian, might have followed his words, but they didn't grasp the thought behind those words. Hamnet Thyssen did. And so did Gudrid. If she kept trying to turn Sigvat against Hamnet, Eyvind would cut her off after he died. Maybe she could get around that, but it wouldn't be easy. She looked daggers at him. He smiled in return, which did nothing to reassure her.

She put the best face on things she could: “If dear Hamnet wants to go north and kill himself, he's welcome to for all of me.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Marcovefa set a hand on his arm. “You do what you do. It will be all right. I will help,” she said.

“Good. Thank you, too,” he said.

Gudrid laughed again. “Your lovers get more barbarous every time, sweetheart. The next one will be a jungle ape.”

“No, you taught me all I need to know about those,” Hamnet replied. “Besides, she's not a lover—only a friend. Not that you would know much about friends, or what they mean.” Gudrid bared her teeth at him. He thought his shot actually went home. That wouldn't be a first, but it didn't happen very often, either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
IGVAT II DITHERED
two more days before sending Hamnet Thyssen the orders he wanted. Hamnet wondered whether Gudrid was trying to talk the Emperor out of it in spite of Eyvind Torfinn's warnings, or whether Sigvat simply disliked and distrusted him that much. The nobleman swallowed a sigh: either one seemed possible.

At last, though, a palace servitor fetched the required parchment to Eyvind Torfinn's home. Count Hamnet unrolled it to make sure it was what it was supposed to be. He didn't need Ulric Skakki to warn him against going north with a document he hadn't examined, a document that was liable to order any officer who read it to arrest him and kill him on sight.

The servitor only waited impassively while Hamnet read through the parchment. It was, in fact, everything he'd hoped for and more besides. A calligrapher had inscribed it in red and purple ink. It was bedizened with not one but three imperial seals, each stamped into wax of a different color. Sigvat II's scribbled signature at the bottom seemed almost an afterthought.

And it said everything it should have. It gave Hamnet powers just short of imperial to fight the invading barbarians “said to be known as the Rulers.” All commanders in the north were ordered in no uncertain terms to subordinate themselves and their soldiers and wizards to him. Whether they would obey, and how well, might prove interesting questions. But Sigvat's orders seemed clear enough.

Ulric Skakki read over Hamnet's shoulder without the slightest trace of
embarrassment. “What more do you want?” he said when he finished. “Egg in your beer?”

“I want to get moving,” Count Hamnet answered. “Do you think the Rulers are standing still?”

“Tomorrow is soon enough, unless you think they're going to land on Nidaros with both feet tonight,” Ulric said. “Do you?”

Part of Hamnet did—a large part, too. But he recognized that the Rulers wouldn't descend on the imperial capital before he could go out and face them. The Raumsdalian Empire was bigger than that. Odds were that the invaders remained in the northern forests. That would be strange country for them, and they probably wouldn't be able to push their mammoths through very fast.

“Tomorrow is soon enough,” Hamnet agreed—grudgingly, but it was agreement all the same.

“There you go.” Ulric set a hand on his shoulder. “Besides, who knows? Somebody else may go up against them before you get there. Probably will, in fact. If he loses, what will Sigvat think? That he needs you more than ever, that's what. And if he wins—well, so what? You're still out of the dungeon, and that's what really counts.”

A lot of Raumsdalians would have held a decidedly different view of things. For them, a victory in which they had no part would have seemed worse than a thrashing. It would have marked the death knell of their ambitions. Hamnet Thyssen didn't feel that way, not least because he had few ambitions.

“Well, you're right,” he said. Ulric Skakki knew him better than most, but looked surprised all the same. The adventurer had his own fair share of hope for himself, and naturally expected other people to have theirs, too.

A little later that day, Audun Gilli came up to Hamnet. “I will go north if you'll have me,” the wizard said. “I want to do whatever I can against the Rulers.”

There were ambitions, and then there were ambitions. Count Hamnet had hoped to live out his days happily with Liv. That wouldn't happen now. But did Audun deserve the blame because it wouldn't? Wouldn't Liv have taken up with someone else if Audun hadn't been one of the travelers in the north? Hamnet feared she would have.

“You can come,” he said gruffly. “I don't love you, by God. Nothing could make me love you. But I won't sneak up to your bedroll and stick a dagger in you while you're sleeping, either.”

Audun looked relieved. “Thank you, Your Grace!”

“For what?” Hamnet growled. “Now you've got a better chance of getting killed than you would have if I told you to go to the demons. So does Liv, for that matter.”

“Do you really want to see her dead?”

“No, curse it.” Count Hamnet's voice grew harsher yet; he hadn't imagined it could. Audun, for the most part, wouldn't have known a hint if it walked up and bit him in the leg. He took this one, though. Bobbing his head in an awkward gesture of thanks, he retreated in a hurry.

Part of Hamnet wanted to get blind drunk after that. He didn't, though, which went a long way towards proving how serious he was about setting out the next morning. He went to bed, if not sober, then close enough so that he wouldn't have more than a mild headache come the new day.

His bedchamber was as luxurious as any he'd ever known. A fireplace and two braziers held the cold at bay. His mattress was soft and thick, the furs that lay atop it even thicker. He had no excuse for not sleeping well.

But sleep didn't want to come. Count Hamnet lay in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling he could barely see. He muttered to himself. When muttering didn't do anything, he swore out loud. That didn't help, either. He groped under the bed till he found the chamber pot. After using it, he lay down again. Sleep still stayed away.

When it finally came, it took him by surprise. He drifted into a dream without realizing he was dreaming. He didn't remember much about it: only that it was one of those busy, complicated dreams that make waking life seem simple by comparison.