The Breath of God (5 page)

It will be the way it is
. The hard life the Bizogots led made them into fatalists. Most of the time, Hamnet Thyssen admired that. Now it terrified him. “I don't want to lose you!” he exclaimed.

“I don't want to lose you, either,” Liv said. “You asked for the worst, and I told you. I do not think it will come to that. We are working on our home ground, with spells we know. I may not learn everything I want to, but I should be able to get away again afterward. Does that make you feel
better?” She sounded like a mother comforting a little boy who'd had a nightmare.

The way they chose to comfort each other a little later had nothing to do with little boys, though there was some small chance it might have made Liv the mother of one. Afterward, if the old jokes were true, Count Hamnet should have rolled over and gone to sleep. He didn't. He lay awake a long time, staring up at the darkness inside the mammoth-hide tent. Liv was the one who slipped quickly into slumber. He supposed that was all to the good; she would need to be fresh when morning came.

At last, he did sleep. He wished he hadn't—his dreams were confused and troubled. He hoped that didn't mean anything. He was no wizard, no foreteller. All the same, he wished they were better.

Liv broke her fast on meat and marrow. Through the winter, the Bizogots ate little else. She showed a good appetite. Hamnet Thyssen had to force his food down. “It will be all right,” she said again.

“Of course it will,” he answered, and hoped he wasn't lying.

The weather should have cheered him. It was bright and sunny, and not far below freezing—after what they'd been through, it felt like spring. The equinox couldn't be far away; the sun spent more time above the horizon every day. But even after winter formally died, the Breath of God would go on blowing for another month, maybe even six weeks. Only then would the snow melt, the land turn to puddles, mosquitoes and midges start breeding in mad and maddening profusion, and the landscape go from white to flower-splashed green.

Breathing didn't feel as if Hamnet were inhaling knives. Getting out of the stuffy, smelly tent was a relief to the nose, too. If any air was fresher and cleaner than that which came down off the Glacier, the Raumsdalian couldn't imagine what it might be.

He looked north. There stood the Glacier, tall as any other formidable mountains. He wished the Gap had never melted through. Then the Rulers would still be walled off from the Bizogot country—and from the Raumsdalian Empire to the south.

But if the Gap hadn't melted through, Trasamund wouldn't have come south to Nidaros looking for help exploring the land beyond the Glacier. Hamnet wouldn't have come north with him, which meant he wouldn't have met Liv.

He started to ask her if she thought the opening of the Gap was worth it
to her, if their meeting made everything else worthwhile. He started to, yes, but he wasn't fool enough to finish the question. Of course she would say no, and she would have good reason to. Because the Gap had melted through, the Rulers had crushed her clan. Her kinsfolk and friends, the folk she'd known all her life, were dead or exiled or living under the heel of the invaders.

No, she wouldn't think that was worth it. She might have found love among her fellow Bizogots. Even if she hadn't, they would still roam their grazing grounds as free men and women. Nothing right now meant more to Hamnet Thyssen than she did. As a Raumsdalian, he naturally thought nothing should mean more to her than he did. But Raumsdalians were, and could afford to be, more individualistic than Bizogots. To Liv, the clan mattered far more than the Empire did to Hamnet—and he was, by the standards of his folk, a duty-filled man.

Here came Audun Gilli, a somber look on his thin, scraggly-bearded face. And here came Odovacar, in his tufted and fringed shaman's costume. He carried a drum—a frame made of mammoth bone, with a musk-ox-hide drumhead. Tufts of dire-wolf fur and sparkling crystals attached with red-dyed yarn dangled from it.

“Are we ready?” he asked.

“If we aren't, what are we doing here?” Liv replied. Audun Gilli had picked up enough of the Bizogot tongue to understand the simple question, if not her reply. He nodded to Odovacar.

“Good. Good. Then let us begin.” The Red Dire Wolves' shaman tapped the drum—once, twice, three times. The tone was deeper and richer than Hamnet Thyssen had expected. The rhythm, to his surprise, didn't put him in mind of a dire wolf's howl. It was shorter and sharper; it might have been bird tracks in the snow.

Odovacar started to dance. However old and stooped he was, he moved with surprising grace and ease. Liv began dancing, too. Her steps perfectly fit the beat of the drum. Count Hamnet was almost taken aback that she left ordinary footprints in the snow, not marks with three toes forward and one behind. Her arms flapped as if she were a bird.

Audun Gilli set semiprecious stones in a circle around the two Bizogot shamans. He murmured his chant so as not to interfere with the drum. “Ward spell,” he told Hamnet, who nodded.

Liv suddenly sat down in the snow. Her arms went on flapping. “I fly,” she said in the Bizogot language. “Like the snowy owl, I fly.” Her eyes seemed wider and more unwinking than they had any business being. They didn't
go yellow, as Odovacar's had when he took wolf shape, nor did she sprout feathers and fly in the flesh. All the same, she gave an overwhelming impression of owlishness.

“Fly north, hunting owl,” Odovacar sang in a loud, unmelodious voice. He thumped the drum. “Fly north, fly north. Spy out our foes.” He went on dancing, as Liv went on flapping. If she was the arrow, he was the bow that loosed her.

Audun Gilli stood ready just inside the ward circle. He was still completely human, and completely alert, too. If Liv was arrow and Odovacar bow, he was the shield protecting them both.
The shield that's supposed to protect them, anyhow
, Hamnet Thyssen thought uneasily. Audun had been the first to admit that the Rulers' magic was stronger than any known on this side of the Glacier.

“I fly,” Liv said again. “Like the snowy owl, I fly.”

“Fly north, hunting owl. Spy out our foes,” Odovacar sang to her. “What do you see, hunting owl? Tell us what you see.”

“I see the lands of the Three Tusk clan, the grandest grazing and hunting lands in all the Bizogot country,” Liv answered. In calling them that, owl-Liv saw with her heart, not with her head. The lands hard by the Glacier were poor even by the sorry standards of the frozen steppe.

“Tell us more, tell us more,” Odovacar sang. “Spy out our foes. Fly north, fly north. Spy out our foes.”

“I see herds.” Liv sounded dreamlike, or perhaps owllike, as her spirit soared far from her body. “I see herds of musk oxen. I see herds of mammoths. The herds seem large. I see herds of . . . deer?” All at once, doubt came into her voice. Those riding deer had traveled down through the Gap with the Rulers. They weren't native to the Bizogot country.

“You begin to find the foe,” Odovacar assured her. “Tell us what you see, before the foe finds you.”

“I see an encampment,” Liv said. “It is wide. It is broad. All the tents are laid out in square array.” That surely marked it for a camp of the Rulers. The Bizogots were not an orderly folk. They scattered their tents every which way across the ground. The Rulers, as Count Hamnet had seen beyond the Glacier, had far more discipline.

“Tell us more, tell us more, before the foe finds you.” Even if they understood Odovacar in a Raumsdalian tavern, they would have thrown things at him. But he wasn't singing to entertain; he worked with the charm to remind Liv what to do.

“I see men of the Rulers tending to mammoths. Some of the mammoths must be theirs. Some are stolen from the Bizogots.” Though her spirit had flown far, anger still fired her voice. She went on, “I see women of the Rulers. They are ugly bitches.” That wasn't anger—it was scorn.

“Does the foe ride to war? Does he mount mammoths and ride to war?” Odovacar sounded more urgent now. He probably couldn't hear her answers, but he was bound to know others could.

“I see . . . I see . . . I think I see . . .” For the first time, Liv hesitated. Were the Rulers' wizards working to thwart her? Her arms flapped faster, as if she was flying away from the encampment. Her eyes widened. “I do see them. By God, I do! They ready their host! Mammoths and deer without number. Soon they will sweep down on the Red Dire Wolves! How did they bring so much through the Gap?”

“Tell us more!” Odovacar sang. “More! We must hear more!” He thumped the drum harder, as if to pull words from Liv.

“They are in a place we always called the Four Breasts because of the big frost heaves there,” she said. “That is a fine place to move south from—the forage is always good there. Even horses have no trouble finding grass under the snow in winter. It is easy for mammoths and musk oxen—and I see it is easy for the riding deer the Rulers use, too.”

Then she gasped. Her body twisted. She might have been banking in flight. She let out an angry cry, a cry that might have burst from a true owl's throat. Her hands stretched into what were plainly meant for talons, visible even through her mittens.

Audun Gilli gasped at the same time. “Spirit hawks!” he said in Raumsdalian, and then, “Drum her home, Odovacar! Quick!”

The Red Dire Wolves' shaman spoke no Raumsdalian. Even if he had, he wouldn't have been able to hear Audun. But he too could sense what needed doing. The rhythm of his drumming changed. So did his chant. “Back to safety!” he sang. “Back to the tents of your folk! Evade all evil! Back to the tents you know so well!”

How well did Liv know the Red Dire Wolves' tents? Well enough to home on them? Hamnet Thyssen watched in an agony of suspense, that being the only thing he could do. Liv twisted again, as if sliding away from something. Spirit hawks, Audun called whatever the Rulers were mustering against her. What did that mean? No wizard himself, Hamnet didn't know.

Then, without warning, Liv reached out and grabbed with the claws that were really fingers. “Ha!” she cried. “That one will trouble me no more!”

Audun Gilli's face twisted in pain. Whatever she'd done, he felt it. “They might as well slay that wizard's carcass, for his soul is dead,” he said somberly. Hamnet remembered what he'd asked Liv before her spirit flew. One of the things she'd feared most for herself, she'd just visited upon the Rulers.
Good
, Hamnet thought.
Do it again!

But, by the way she moved, she went back to trying to escape. How many enemy sorcerers were flying against her, riding the winds of the world and whatever equivalents the spirit world knew? Defeating one might be—was—bold and brave, but a shaman flying alone surely couldn't hope to outfly and outfight a flock of foes.

“Here is the circle! Come back to the circle!” Audun, for once, had the sense to speak the Bizogot language, not his own. Odovacar's drumming also—Count Hamnet hoped—helped guide Liv's spirit back towards her body.

“Fly like the Breath of God,” Hamnet whispered harshly. “Fly straight, fly hard, fly fast. Oh, fly fast!”

And then Liv came back to her body once more. No more than a couple of heartbeats after she sprang to her feet, reason on her face once more and all owlishness banished from it, two of the wardstones in Audun's circle flared to brilliant life. Liv winced, but stood steady. Odovacar lurched in his dance, though he also stayed on his feet. Audun Gilli grunted as if he'd taken a punch in the belly. But the circle held.

“I saw—enough,” Liv said, panting as if she'd run—or flown—a long way.

“Can they strike you even with your spirit back in your body?” Count Hamnet asked, still anxious for her.

“I don't see how,” she answered. “I know we couldn't. They were trying to hold my body and spirit apart. Now that I've returned to myself, they've failed.”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she staggered. Odovacar cried out and dropped to one knee. Audun Gilli shouted, too, in what seemed to Hamnet mixed pain and surprise. Liv's left hand shaped a Bizogot gesture against evil. Audun pulled out an amulet he wore under his fur jacket and brandished it like a sword.

Hamnet Thyssen did draw his sword. He slashed the air all around Liv, hoping to cut any influence lingering close by. He had no idea whether that did any good. He didn't see how it could hurt, though.

“Begone!” Liv said, and her hand twisted into that sign again. “
Begone
, by God!” She sounded fierce and frightened at the same time. Hamnet had heard a lot of soldiers going into battle sound the same way.

Odovacar barked and snarled and bared his teeth. They always seemed long and sharp for a mere man's. Now they looked more than halfway wolfly. Hamnet Thyssen didn't think he was imagining that.

He was sure he wasn't imagining things when the tension broke, as quickly and cleanly as if he had severed it with his sword. Odovacar nodded and grinned, and his teeth went back to normal again, or as normal as they ever were. Audun Gilli breathed a noisy sigh of relief. He returned the amulet to its hiding place.

Liv sighed, too, and shook her head. “Every time I say what the Rulers can't do, I turn out to be wrong. I won't say anything like that anymore.”

“They did strike you, then—the, uh, spirit hawks?” Hamnet asked.

“Oh, yes.” Now she nodded, shakily. “They chased me here, and they struck me—they struck me hard. I don't know how they did, but I do know I came off lucky to get away with nothing worse than scrapes and scratches on my spirit.” She paused, visibly reconsidering that. “No, not just lucky. I had good friends and comrades who came to my aid.” She bowed to Odovacar, to Audun, and to Hamnet. “I thank you all.”

“I don't think I did anything to be thanked for.” Hamnet wished he knew more of magic. Loving a shaman made him feel foolish and ignorant.