The Breath of God (49 page)

A couple of the men who'd run from the invading barbarians stirred. “There's a wide place in the road two, maybe three miles up,” one of them said. “You're going to face those bastards anywhere, that's a pretty good spot.” The other soldier nodded.

“If I remember straight, they're right,” Ulric Skakki said. Had he been
everywhere
in the northern reaches of the Empire? Count Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised. And hearing him agree with the soldiers who'd been so unenthusiastic about going north again came as no small relief.

“All right. We'll do that, then,” Hamnet said, nodding. He called to the trumpeters who directed the army's movements: “Blow
Forward!
”

The martial notes rang out. Count Hamnet urged his own horse ahead with pressure from his knees and with the reins. He reached down to make sure his sword was loose in the scabbard. It was, of course. He felt foolish for checking. But he wasn't the only man making sure his weapons were ready. When you'd go into battle soon, you wanted to be certain your tools wouldn't fail you.

He found the clearing where the soldiers and Ulric said it would be. It wasn't so wide as he might have wished, but it would do. He didn't think he would come across any better place to fight, anyhow. He put his armored lancers in the center, with horse archers on either wing. He also kept a reserve brigade he could rush to wherever it was most needed.

He was just getting his line the way he wanted it when a scout came galloping into the clearing. “They're coming!” the Raumsdalian shouted. “They aren't far behind me!” As if to prove him right, more frightened-looking horsemen emerged.

“Be ready!” Hamnet shouted. “We'll want to knock them back as soon as they start to deploy.” He turned to Marcovefa. “Do they know we're here?”

“They know the scouts are,” she answered.

His exasperated snort sent steam from his nostrils, as if he were a hard-running horse. “I know
that
,” he said. “Do they know this army is here?”

She laughed. “Of course not, darling,” she said. “I keep telling you and telling you—they are not very smart.”

Maybe they weren't. Hamnet Thyssen wasn't so sure about that, but maybe they weren't. But they were very strong, or they wouldn't have come so far so fast. As arrogance could ape stupidity, so strength could do duty for wisdom.

More and more riders burst into the clearing. One was wounded, while another rode a horse with an arrow in the rump. Then a man on a riding deer trotted into the open space. All the way across it, Hamnet could see his leather armor and his thick, dark, curly beard—he was a man of the Rulers, sure enough.

Marcovefa proved right—he hadn't known a Raumsdalian army was on its way north. At the sight of so many soldiers drawn up in neat ranks, the enemy rider reined in frantically. Hamnet could read his thoughts—he had to get away and warn his friends.

“Loose!” Hamnet shouted. A good many archers had already strung their bows. Almost in one motion, they nocked and let fly. The arrows sang
through the air. The warrior of the Rulers had time to throw up his shield, but it did him no good. The iron-headed shafts pierced both him and his riding deer. Together, they crumpled to the snow. Their blood streaked the clean whiteness and sent steam up into the air.

“Well, there's one of the buggers down,” Runolf Skallagrim said. “He didn't seem so tough.”

“No,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “One by one, or even a few at a time, they're nothing special. But when you put a few of them together, or more than a few . . .”

For the next little while, the Rulers' outriders drifted into the clearing by ones and twos and threes. Plainly, their wizards had no idea an army awaited them there. The Raumsdalians started cracking jokes as they shot down the invaders. If the Rulers kept blundering into them in driblets, they could keep killing barbarians till they ran out of arrows.

But it wouldn't last, as Hamnet knew too well. A couple of warriors saw the carnage in the clearing soon enough to wheel their riding deer and bucket off to the north before the Raumsdalians could slay them. Before long, Marcovefa said, “They know, curse them.”

“Now the real fight starts,” Hamnet Thyssen said. Marcovefa nodded. The shaman from atop the Glacier would bear a lot of the burden on the Raumsdalian side. Hamnet bit his lip. That was a great deal to ask of anyone, and especially of a lover. Liv hadn't been able to shoulder such a weight, try though she did. The Rulers proved too strong for her up on the Bizogot plains. Hamnet had to hope the same thing wouldn't happen with Marcovefa here.

The ground trembled beneath his horse's hooves. The beast snorted and shied as a low rumble filled the air and then vanished again. Some snow fell from the branches of the trees lining the clearing.

“Just what we need,” Kormak Bersi said: “a little earthquake right at the start of the battle.”

“Somehow, I don't think that was supposed to be a
little
earthquake,” Count Hamnet answered.

Marcovefa nodded. “They want to squash us.” Her teeth flashed as she grinned. “They not get what they want.” She looked towards the north. “Now they come down on us. They think we all—” She ran out of words, but gestured.

“Flattened?” Hamnet said.

“Flattened, yes. I thank you.” Marcovefa smiled again, for all the world as if a forgotten verb were the only thing she had to worry about.

A rumble came from the north. More snow fell from tree branches on that side of the clearing. The ground seemed to shake again. This time, Marcovefa couldn't do anything about it, but Hamnet Thyssen didn't expect her to. With cries like horns full of spit, the mammoths with warriors aboard them thundered into the clearing.

“Loose!” Hamnet shouted once more, pointing towards the great beasts.

Hundreds of arrows hissed through the air. As the mammoths had up on the Bizogot plains, they wore armor of leather dipped in boiling wax. That kept most of the Raumsdalian shafts from biting, but not all.

Wounded mammoths' screams were even more blood-curdling than their usual cries. Some of the great beasts pulled riders off their backs with their trunks and dashed them to the ground, as if blaming them for the pain they suffered. And if they thought that, were they far wrong? Others broke formation. One or two trampled down the riding deer on either flank, smashing swaths of chaos through the Rulers' ranks.

But most of the mammoths kept coming in spite of the barrage of arrows. “Forward!” Hamnet Thyssen shouted. The Raumsdalian trumpeters amplified the command. Momentum of your own was the best way to meet a charge.
Even of mammoths?
Hamnet wondered. But by then his horse was already getting up into a gallop.

He knew he didn't want to try to withstand a line, even a disarrayed line, of charging mammoths on a horse that was standing still. He also knew men on horseback could beat men on riding deer. He'd seen that up in the Bizogot country. It ought to be even more surely true here, the Raumsdalians being better trained, better armored, and better disciplined than the big blond barbarians who lived north of them.

Nothing on this side of the Glacier could withstand a charge by heavy cavalry. Those big horses . . . suddenly didn't seem so big, when men on mammothback shot down at riders from above and speared them out of the saddle with long, long lances.

Still, the Rulers didn't have it all their own way—not even close. Count Hamnet slashed at a mammoth's leg, hoping to hamstring the monster. It didn't topple, but a squall of torment rewarded him. Another rider thrust his lance deep into a mammoth's unarmored belly. Even on so huge a beast, that was bound to be a mortal wound. Blood poured from it in great gouts. The mammoth sank to its knees, then rolled over on its side.

Something buzzed past Count Hamnet's head like an angry wasp. That wasn't an arrow—it was a slingstone. The realization made him want to
duck. Especially if made of lead, those could be worse than arrows. Sometimes they sank into the wounds they created and disappeared.

You couldn't use a sling from horseback or mammothback or even, he supposed, deerback, not if you hoped to hit anything. Hamnet looked around till he spotted the detachment of enemy slingers, who had just come out of the forest and into the clearing, where they had the room they needed to set up.

“Get them!” he shouted, pointing their way. But a lot of enemy warriors stood between the slingers and the Raumsdalians. He looked around for Marcovefa. “Can you take out the slingers?” he asked her.

She didn't even know what they were. “I have other things to worry about,” she answered. “Muchly magickings!”

Hamnet Thyssen hadn't felt any magic from the Rulers. Now he realized why he hadn't. Keeping their wizards busy was much more important than knocking out their slingers, who, in the big scheme of things, were no worse than nuisances.

So he told himself, not knowing how bad a nuisance could be.

But he had other things to worry about, too. An unhorsed—or undeered, or unmammothed—warrior of the Rulers cut at him. He took the blow on his shield and slashed back. His stroke caught the enemy warrior in the side of the neck. The warrior groaned and toppled, spouting blood.

“To me, Three Tusk clan! To me, Bizogots!” Trasamund roared. “Revenge is ours! Death to the Rulers!”

“Death!” cried his clansmates and the other Bizogots from clans all across the frozen steppe. “Death to the Rulers!”

They dealt out plenty of death, too. They steered clear of the mammoths, at which Hamnet Thyssen could hardly complain. But, big men on big Raumsdalian horses, they worked a fearful slaughter against the archers mounted on the Rulers' riding deer. The enemy warriors were brave enough and to spare; no one ever questioned the Rulers' courage. The horses towered over the deer, though, and gave the Bizogots a decided close-range advantage over their foes.

Shouting out his orders, urging his men forward on the flanks, and doing what he could to keep the mammoths from smashing through in the center, Count Hamnet began to sense a certain agitation among the Rulers, even if their courage did not falter. They were used to prevailing by strength of sorcery as well as strength of arms. Whatever they were used to, though, they weren't having their magical way today.

Off behind the enemy line to the right, Hamnet watched one of the Rulers who carried himself with even more arrogance than was usual for that arrogant breed screaming at four or five other men. They had to be wizards, even if they didn't deck themselves out in fringes like Bizogot shamans or in the fancy gowns Raumsdalian sorcerers sometimes wore. And, at the moment, they were mightily unhappy wizards, too.

One of them pointed towards the Raumsdalian line—pointed in Marcovefa's general direction, in fact. Hamnet Thyssen couldn't hear what he said and didn't speak his language anyhow. That didn't mean Hamnet didn't understand—oh, no.
They've got a wizard who's holding us up. That's what the trouble is
.

The enemy officer didn't buy a word of it. He did some more screaming. He did everything but jump up and down in the trampled snow. When screaming didn't satisfy him, he slugged the wizard who'd dared tell him the truth. He kicked him when he was down, too, then stepped away in magnificent contempt.

Hamnet watched the wizard slowly and painfully rise. He wasn't so sure he would have wanted to be that officer. High-ranking men who made their subordinates hate them suffered a startling number of unfortunate accidents. That was true among Raumsdalians and Bizogots, anyway. If the Rulers partook of ordinary human nature, it was probably so for them, too.

He glanced over to Marcovefa, who seemed to be enjoying herself in the thick of the fighting. “Maybe you should get back,” he told her. “They know what you're doing. They'll try to get you.”

“Let them try,” she said gaily.

Hamnet Thyssen would have argued with her more, but Endil grabbed him by the arm and pointed to the closest mammoth. “Come on, Thyssen!” the other count yelled. “If we swing in behind that bugger, we can hamstring it.”

“Do you think so?” Hamnet said, but he was already booting his horse forward alongside Endil Gris'.

He slashed at the mammoth's hairy column of a leg. So did Endil. The mammoth didn't crumple, as he'd seen one of the great beasts do. But it did scream in pain and lumber away from its tormentors. The warriors of the Rulers on top of the mammoth shouted in their guttural, incomprehensible tongue. They tried to get it to return to its duty. A mammoth was not like a man, though. It understood nothing of such notions. All it wanted to do was get away from what pained it.

“Not bad,” Endil Gris said, and then, “Why do these curly-bearded maniacs ride deer instead of horses?”

“I don't think there are any horses beyond the Glacier,” Count Hamnet answered. “I don't remember seeing any, anyhow. I suppose they tamed the best beasts they could find, that's all.”

“You may be right. You sound like you make sense, anyhow,” Endil said. “They aren't as good as horses, though. We can whip these bastards. How did they beat us before? We must have messed up.”

“Magic,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “They have better wizards than we do—or they did, till Marcovefa.”

He looked around to make sure she was all right. She'd never seen a horse till she came down from the Glacier, either. She'd never seen any beast larger than a fox. She made a pretty good rider, though. And she had no trouble staying away from the Rulers—and, much more to the point, fending off the spells their wizards threw at her.

As long as Hamnet saw her well and unhampered, he could go back to the business of fighting the enemy without a worry. If he fell, Endil Gris or Runolf Skallagrim would take over and make about as good a general as he did. He was valuable to the Raumsdalian cause. Marcovefa was indispensable. He understood the difference. He hoped she did, too.