The Breath of God (47 page)

 

T
HE SOLDIERS LINED
up in front of Hamnet Thyssen and Baron Runolf were a sorry-looking lot. Some of them were obviously hung over. Some were still drunk. Several were wounded, though none seemed seriously hurt—a man with a bad wound wouldn't have been able to come so far so fast. They all glared at him. They knew he wanted them to fight the Rulers again, and they were anything but keen on the idea.

Most of them still had swords. If he hadn't had the Bizogots and some of Runolf's archers backing him, he wouldn't have been surprised if they tried to mob him and mutiny. His guess was that bad odds were the only thing holding them back.

“So you've met the mammoth-riders,” he said.

“What do you know about it, you blue-blooded son of a whore?” one of the soldiers said. “Somebody told you they could do that, did he? Do you know what it
means
, though? Not bloody likely, not if you're coming up from Nidaros.”

“I fought them half a dozen times, up on the Bizogot plains,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He waved back towards Trasamund and the other big blonds. “So did they.”

The soldier blinked and shut up. Another one found a bitter question: “Why the demon didn't you whip them? Then they wouldn't have set on us.”

“We didn't because we couldn't.” As usual, Hamnet used the truth, however unpalatable it was.

“How come you think you'll do any better this time, then, curse you?” the second soldier demanded.

“Because this time we have a wizard who can beat anything the Rulers throw at her.” Count Hamnet waved to Marcovefa. She took a step forward and nodded to the soldiers as if they were first-rate fighting men, not the flotsam and jetsam of a campaign gone wrong.

“Another Bizogot twat—huzzah,” the second soldier said, slathering on his scorn with a trowel.

Maybe he thought Marcovefa didn't speak his language. Maybe he just didn't care. If he didn't, he made a bad mistake. As Gudrid could have told him, angering a wizard you couldn't kill on the instant was commonly a mistake.

It was here. Marcovefa murmured to herself. The soldier developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to disrobe. Once he was naked in front of his staring comrades, he acted like a jackass—literally. He brayed, got down on all fours, and started pulling scraps of dead grass up from between cobbles with his teeth. He also relieved himself like an animal, calmly and without shame.

Marcovefa murmured again. The soldier came back to himself—and cried out in horror as he realized what he'd done. Marcovefa suffered him to dress and return to the ranks with no further afflictions.

“Any other donkeys here?” Hamnet Thyssen inquired.

Nobody said anything. The unhappy survivors of one encounter with the Rulers looked apprehensively from him to Marcovefa and back again. Something like a sigh rippled through their ragged ranks.

Count Hamnet understood the sigh all too well. His nod was precisely calibrated between scorn and sympathy. “That's right,” he said. “You can turn around and have another go at the barbarians—this time with a real chance of winning—or you can face us now. Which one looks like a better bet?”

Even after Marcovefa's magic, the question didn't seem to have the quick and obvious answer he'd hoped for. He knew what that meant: the Rulers had beaten the Raumsdalian army even worse than he'd feared. They'd made the men afraid of them, sure another beating lay around the corner.

But they also looked at the soldier who'd done such a humiliating impression of an ass. If that could happen to him, what was liable to happen to them if they tried to tell Hamnet no?

“We'll go, I guess,” said a man with the look of a sergeant. “If the savages kill us, at least it's over with in a hurry.” Most of the men assembled with him nodded; he'd summed up what they were thinking.

“We fought them again and again on the Bizogot steppe,” Hamnet said again. “We lost more than we won—I won't tell you anything different, because I can't. But you can beat them. By God, you can! And we'll do it.”

He didn't expect them to break into frantic cheers. A good thing, too, because they didn't—that kind of thing happened only in bad romances. A few of them looked thoughtful, which was about as much as he'd hoped for.

He turned to Runolf Skallagrim. “What do you think?”

“They'll march. They'll fight . . . some,” the commander of Kjelvik replied. “If they win the first time out, they'll fight harder after that. If they lose the first time, they'll run away so fast, their shadows won't keep up with 'em.”

“Heh.” Hamnet hadn't remembered that Runolf had such a gift for pungent truth. Then he added the most he could: “We're better off with 'em than without 'em.”

“You hope,” Runolf said.

“That's right.” Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I hope.”

 

H
E
'
D COME INTO
Kjelvik with a troop of Bizogots. He rode out of it with an army of Raumsdalians. It wasn't exactly the army he would have wanted, not when it was made up of garrison troops and men who'd already run away from the Rulers once. But it was an army, and it could fight. It could. Whether it would . . .

“We're going in the right direction,” he told Ulric Skakki. “We're moving towards the enemy.”

“So we are,” the adventurer said. “If only we had to move father before we bumped into those bastards.”

Runolf Skallagrim said, “What I don't understand is, why didn't the Emperor do something about these Rulers sooner?” He seemed glad to be out of Kjelvik. He kept reaching for his sword and pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, as if ready to go into battle then and there. If all the soldiers who followed were as eager as the baron, the Rulers really might have something to worry about.

“You'd have to ask His Majesty about that,” Hamnet replied. “I really couldn't tell you.” He didn't want to shout that Sigvat was a purblind idiot, even if that explanation made more sense than any other.

“Well, it's too bad any which way,” Runolf said.

Count Hamnet nodded—that too was an understatement. The sky was gray and lowering, with clouds that seemed almost close enough to the ground to let him reach up and touch them. Snow swirled through the air—not a lot, but enough to compress the horizon to not much farther than bowshot. The wind blew out of the north. It didn't have the howl of the true Breath of God, but it was no gentle zephyr, either. The season felt like what it was: autumn well north of Nidaros, heading towards winter.

Sheep and cattle huddled in the fields, scraping up what fodder they could from under the snow. Army outriders scooped them up as they came across them. Outraged herders howled protests. Hamnet paid them for the animals the army took. That made them less angry, but didn't end all their rage.

Scowling down at the silver in his mittened palm, one shepherd snarled,
“Why shouldn't we pull for the stinking barbarians, when the soldiers who're supposed to be protecting us pull a stunt like this?” By the way he said it, Count Hamnet might have been paying him for the corpses of his family.

“Why? I'll tell you why,” Hamnet answered. “Because the Rulers, if they come this far, will take your sheep, they won't give you even a copper, and they'll cut your throat if you complain, or maybe just if they spot you. That's why.”

“You say so, anyhow,” the shepherd growled, calling the noble a liar without quite using the word.

“Yes, by God, I do say so,” Hamnet replied. “I've fought them before, which is more than you have. You don't know anything about them.”

“I sure don't,” the shepherd said. “But I know more than I want to about the likes of you.” He spat in the snow at Hamnet Thyssen's feet and stumped off, his oversized Bizogot-style felt boots leaving equally oversized footprints behind him.

“Nice to know you've charmed the natives, isn't it?” Ulric Skakki remarked.

“We need the meat,” Hamnet said. “He really doesn't know how lucky he is.”

“And it's our job to make sure he doesn't find out, too.” Ulric winked. “Aren't
we
lucky?”

“Speak for yourself,” Count Hamnet said, which only made Ulric laugh. Annoyed, Hamnet went on, “If I were really lucky—”

“You wouldn't have me bothering you,” the adventurer put in.

Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “Well, that, too, but it isn't what I was going to say. I was going to say, if I were really lucky, I'd have an honest-to-God army with me, not a garrison that doesn't know how to fight and a bunch of odds and sods who've already run away once and don't want to fight.”

“I don't follow that at all,” Marcovefa said. “Say in the Bizogot language, please.”

“Why not?” Hamnet translated his own words.

The shaman from atop the Glacier rode up alongside him and kissed him on the cheek. “Sometimes you get what you wish for,” she said, as if she were personally responsible for arranging it. No matter how much Hamnet looked around, though, he saw only the men he'd mustered in Kjelvik. They were better than nothing—but, as far as he was concerned, not nearly enough better.

On he rode. They might not have been enough better than nothing, but they were what he had. The storm got stronger. Now the wind did start to feel like the Breath of God. The snow swirled thicker. Just staying on the road towards the northern woods was anything but easy.

Another road, a broader highway, came up from the southeast to join the one Hamnet and his men were on, which ran almost straight north. If Runolf Skallagrim hadn't warned Count Hamnet the crossroads was coming up, he never would have known it. “Which road do we take?” Runolf asked.

Hamnet wanted to laugh, or maybe to cry. “You'd do better to ask some of the men who came south,” he answered. “They have a better notion where the Rulers are than I do. And they have a
much
better notion where the Rulers are than Sigvat does, not that that's saying much.”

Runolf's coughs sent steam rising from his lips and nostrils. They also suggested that Count Hamnet had said quite enough, or maybe too much.

Before Runolf could ask anything of the soldiers, Hamnet heard hoofbeats—lots of them—off to the right. He would have caught them sooner if the falling snow hadn't muffled them. He peered in that direction, but the snowflakes dancing on the north wind kept him from seeing much.

His first thought was that a caravan of merchants was coming to the crossroads on the other highway. That was close to laughable, too. The traders would be sorry if they got in front of his force and found the Rulers first. And they would slow him down if they blocked the road. He didn't want to have to swing out into the fields to get around them.

And then a peremptory shout came through the howling wind: “You there! Strangers! Clear the road for His Majesty's soldiers!”

“What?” If Hamnet hadn't been wearing mittens, he would have dug a finger in his ear to make sure he'd heard straight. When he decided he had, he shouted back: “The demon you say!
We're
His Majesty's soldiers!”

“D'you know what'll happen to you for lying?” In case he didn't, the still invisible man at the head of the—other army?—went into grisly detail.

“I'm no liar, you—” Hamnet Thyssen shouted back something even nastier. It seemed to shock the other side's herald into silence. Hamnet gestured to Runolf Skallagrim, Ulric Skakki, and Trasamund, and, a moment later, to Marcovefa. “Ride with me,” he told them. He raised his voice and called “Hold up!” to the rest of his force.

He and his handful of companions trotted towards the challenge. He wasn't overwhelmingly surprised to find a party coming out from the other
host to see who he was. An officer wearing the hame of a dire wolf as a headpiece shouted, “What do you think you're doing, interfering with His Majesty's army?”

“I told you—
we're
His Majesty's army!” Hamnet produced the orders he had from Sigvat II and thrust them at the other man. “Here. Do you read?”

“Yes,” the officer in the wolfskin said angrily. He snatched the parchment away from Count Hamnet. Then fear filled Hamnet for a moment. What if Sigvat had reneged on his promises? What if this force had orders to ignore one Hamnet Thyssen, or to clap him in irons? If Gudrid had been working to get her way with the Emperor, it wasn't impossible. It wasn't even unlikely, as Hamnet knew all too well.

But, by the way the other officer's eyes widened, it hadn't happened. Hamnet blew out a fog-filled sigh of relief. “You see?” he said.

“I see,” the other officer said unhappily. “You'd better come with me and show this . . . this thing to Count Endil.”

“Endil Gris?” Hamnet asked.

“That's right,” the officer said. “You know him, uh, Your Grace?”

“We've met,” Hamnet answered. Endil Gris was a warrior with a considerable reputation for his wars against the savages who raided Raumsdalia's southwestern frontier. So far as Hamnet knew, Endil had never fought in the north before. Sigvat must have figured a capable general on one border would prove just as capable on another. Maybe the Emperor was right. On the other hand, maybe he wasn't.

“Come with me, then,” the officer said, “you and your, ah, friends.” His gaze lingered longest on Trasamund and Marcovefa when he said that. After a moment, though, he added, “You have some experience against these new barbarians, I've heard. Is that right?”

“Yes, it is,” Hamnet answered. “Not happy experience, not a lot of wins, but experience. I gather that puts me one up on Count Endil?”

Instead of answering, the man in the wolf-hame only grunted. Endil Gris' army put him one up, or more than one, on Count Hamnet. Endil had more soldiers than Hamnet did, many more, and they were men with the look of regulars, tough and composed and ready—they thought—for whatever lay ahead of them. Quite a few of Endil's men also had suntans that said they'd come up from the south with him. They couldn't have turned so brown on northern duty, anyhow.