The Breath of God (51 page)

“I like you, too, but fight is more important now,” Marcovefa said. Count Hamnet bit his lip, but he couldn't even tell her she was wrong. She looked around. “Can we fight more?”

“No,” Hamnet said bluntly. “Even with your magic, I don't think we could make the men stand and fight again soon. The stone knocked you out. You didn't feel the fear the Rulers threw at us.”

“I felt it. I held it off,” she said. What that would have been like hadn't occurred to Hamnet Thyssen. Maybe he was lucky. Marcovefa shook her head very, very carefully. “Don't think I can do it again now. Head hurts too much. All scrambled up in there.”

“I believe it. You almost got scrambled for good,” Hamnet said. “This much over”—he held his hands maybe three digits apart—“and the stone doesn't hit you sideways.”

“I know.” Marcovefa looked unhappy. “I fight the magic to a standstill,
and a stupid rock does for me. Not seem fair.” Count Hamnet wouldn't have argued. Where was God while all this was going on? Probably on holiday at the Golden Shrine—there was no sign of him here. Marcovefa went on, “What do we do now, then?”

“Well, I suppose I have to send messengers back to Nidaros and let Sigvat know we lost.” Hamnet sighed. “I'm really looking forward to that.”

“You did everything you could. We all did everything we could,” Marcovefa said. “We lost. It happens. Happens up on top of the Glacier, too.”

“When the Emperor sends someone he doesn't like out to do a job, that fellow better do it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If he doesn't, the Emperor will blame him. Otherwise, Sigvat would have to blame himself, and the next time he does that will be the first.”

“As long as I don't get my head knocked, we win,” Marcovefa said.

“But you did,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “And we didn't.”

 

“D
ON
'
T DO IT
,” Ulric Skakki said when Count Hamnet chose a messenger to deliver the bad news.

“I have to,” Hamnet said stolidly.

“No, don't,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “We'll go back to Kjelvik. If we hold there, everything will look a lot better.”

“How many of the towns in the woods held?” Hamnet said. “What does the Rulers' magic do to walls?”

“What will Sigvat do to you when he finds out you lost?” Ulric Skakki returned, which echoed Hamnet's thoughts uncomfortably well.

“Won't the wizard from the north hold those buggers off?” Runolf asked.

“Not for a while. She can't do anything much in the way of magic now,” Hamnet answered. “She came too close to getting her head broken like a dropped egg.”

“How long do we have to wait?” Runolf sounded suddenly apprehensive.

“No way to tell,” Ulric Skakki said before Count Hamnet could reply. “You get hit in the head, you could be all right in a day or two, or you could go on having headaches and such for weeks.”

“You sound like someone who knows what he's talking about,” Hamnet remarked.

“And don't I wish I didn't!” Ulric said. “I've got clobbered more times than I wish I had—I'll say that. Probably why I'm the way I am today.”

Hamnet, by contrast, had got hit in the heart too often. He reflected that he probably would again. Did you ever get used to such wounds? Could you? Liv hadn't hurt him so badly as Gudrid, but that wasn't because he'd got hardened in the intervening years. Far from it. The only difference was, Gudrid took a malicious glee in tormenting him, while Liv seemed sorry she'd decided she had to go.

Being sorry didn't stop her, of course. When did it ever?

Trasamund methodically cleaned blood from his sword and honed it against a whetstone to sharpen the edge and get the nicks out. He nodded to Hamnet. “We'll have another go at them,” he said. “We almost licked 'em this time, by God.”

“Yes.” Hamnet let it go at that. He didn't want to lower the spirits of anyone who stayed ready to carry on. But he couldn't help thinking that a horse which almost escaped a sabertooth got eaten just the same.

And, no matter what Ulric said, Count Hamnet sent the courier off to Nidaros. Sigvat II needed to know what had happened up in the woods. For better or for worse—for better
and
for worse—the fate of the Empire rested in his hands. And after that . . .

Hamnet hunted up Runolf Skallagrim. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we'll go down to Kjelvik, the way you said.”

“About the best thing we can do,” agreed the commandant of that town. “At least we'll have somewhere to fight from. The wall's in tolerable shape—you've seen it, for God's sake. And we've still got a lot of food in the granaries . . . and we'll be bringing back some more in the supply wagons.”

“That was my next question,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

How good were the Rulers at siege warfare? They were nomads like the Bizogots. He couldn't imagine them settling down around Kjelvik and building catapults and siege towers, the way a Raumsdalian army would. But, after a little thought, he could imagine them knocking down the walls with sorcery. How soon would Marcovefa be able to stop them if they tried?

Runolf had a different thought: “What if they just go on by us, go deeper into the Empire?”

“They wouldn't do that!” Hamnet exclaimed—by which he meant he wouldn't do that himself. But the Rulers? They might be a different story. So what if they had enemy soldiers behind them? If they were confident they could beat any force that came up against them, why would they worry? And wouldn't they have more warriors moving down into Raumsdalia off the Bizogot plains?

I'm full of cheerful notions today
, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Nothing like losing a battle to bring such ideas bubbling to the surface like noxious gases from the asphalt pits of the far southwest.

Wounded men's moans did nothing to lift his spirits. He spotted Audun Gilli doing what he could to help some of the worst-hurt men with his magic. After a while, Audun looked up and nodded to him. The wizard looked weary, and who could blame him?

A yawn that surprised Count Hamnet told him how weary he was himself. He also realized how hungry he was. He had a couple of hard rolls in a belt pouch—they were even harder now than they had been when they went in there. Men were carving steaks from dead horses and roasting them.

If you were used to beef and mutton, horsemeat tasted like glue. If you'd eaten all kinds of strange things to keep your belly full, horsemeat wasn't half bad. Count Hamnet took out his belt knife and haggled a chunk off the haunch of an animal dead on its side in bloody snow. The meat, burnt on the outside, raw in the middle, wasn't good even of its kind. He ate it anyway.

Then he got a chunk for Marcovefa. She didn't show her usual wolfish appetite. That worried him. “Head hurts too much,” she said. He grimaced. He couldn't do anything about that, however much he wished he could.

They slept Bizogot-style, with furs over them and snow heaped up to the north to hold away the Breath of God. The wind didn't blow too hard. It was as if even God had forgotten about Raumsdalia. And as for Hamnet Thyssen, he'd never spent a lonelier night in someone else's arms.

 

W
HEN MORNING CAME
, he asked for volunteers to go north and spy out what the Rulers were doing. He wondered if he would get any. More than a little to his own surprise, he did. “We're like fleas,” one of them said. “A lot of the time, we aren't worth smacking.” He grinned. He couldn't have been more than eighteen; to him, it had to seem more like an adventure, a game, than something where he could lose his life.

With the bulk of the army—with the bulk of what was left of the army—Count Hamnet marched south and east towards Kjelvik. He rode close by Marcovefa, in case she needed help staying in the saddle. Up till this summer, she'd never ridden, or even imagined riding was possible. She didn't look happy now—who with a nearly broken skull would have? But she rode.

And Kjelvik didn't seem particularly happy to see the returning soldiers, either. Fleeing men had got there before the army did, and had spread word
of the disaster it suffered. “Why did you go out there to lose?” someone yelled at Hamnet Thyssen when he rode back into the town.

Were his bow strung, he would have shot the obnoxious, leather-lunged pest. No one went out to lose a battle. Half the commanders who fought, though, ended up with what they didn't want. Hamnet had wound up in that unhappy number, even if not on purpose.

A stone in the house behind the heckler's head suddenly sported a mouth. In a vicious, whiny imitation of his voice, it squawked, “Why did
you
screw that broad next door?”

“What? I never—” But the local looked horrified. And the man standing next to him, who was both larger and better muscled, looked first suspicious and then furious.

Hamnet Thyssen rode on before he learned how that drama turned out. He looked around for Audun Gilli. When he spotted the wizard, he nodded his thanks. He'd never thought he would do that, not after Audun took Liv from him, but he did. Life was full of surprises, not all of them as nasty as one would think.

The garrison cooks came up with meals tastier than charred horseflesh. A bed in a room off the barracks made a better place to sleep with Marcovefa than snow-covered ground. A charcoal brazier gave the chamber at least a little warmth.

“How are you?” he asked as the two of them sat down on the bed.

“Hurts,” Marcovefa answered matter-of-factly.

Not tonight
—
I have a headache
. Hamnet wondered if he was losing his wits or just too tired to see straight. He'd seldom felt less lecherous. He might want to hang on to Marcovefa through the night for reassurance—and warmth, which was in short supply despite the brazier. Anything more could wait . . . for the next year or two, by the way his eyelids sagged.

Sometimes things looked better after you woke up in the morning. This wasn't one of those times for Count Hamnet. The brazier had run out of fuel during the night, which left the room as cold as the inside of a snowball, almost as cold as the inside of Sigvat's heart. Hamnet still remembered defeat much too well. And when he looked over at Marcovefa lying there beside him, the bruise on the side of her head was much too plain.

He lay quiet, letting her sleep as long as she would. Her eyes opened about half an hour later. She smiled at him and said, “I need to piss.”

“So do I,” he answered. “I didn't want to bother you. How do you feel?”

“Not so bad,” Marcovefa said, but she winced when she sat up and then
stood. “Not so good, either.” She used the pot first. As usual, she was much less self-conscious about such things than Raumsdalians, or even ordinary Bizogots. On that mountain up above the Glacier, privacy wasn't even a word. “What do we do now?” she asked as Hamnet got up and eased himself.

Lick our wounds
, was the first thought that came to mind. “Try to find out what the Rulers are doing,” he said out loud: it had the virtue of sounding better, anyhow. “See if we have to stand siege here.”

“Can we?” Marcovefa asked—a much too pointed question.

“For a while, anyhow,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Till we're relieved, or till their magic knocks down the wall, or till your magic comes back. If yours comes back soon, we can last a lot longer.”

She frowned in concentration, then shook her head, then winced again, regretting that. With a sigh that puffed fog from her mouth even indoors, she said, “Not there yet. Like my head all clogged up inside.”

“You're lucky you really don't have a rock in there,” Hamnet said.

“This is luck?” Marcovefa started to shake her head once more, but thought better of it. “With luck, the stone misses. With luck, we win the fight.”

Hamnet had had those thoughts when someone told him something bad was really lucky. All it boiled down to was,
Well, things could be worse
. He supposed they could. That didn't make them wonderful the way they were.

“Let's go get something to eat,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, but the thought of breakfast didn't cheer her up, either. “Food makes me . . .” She couldn't find the word, but mimed puking.

“Nauseated,” Hamnet supplied.

“Nauseated. Yes. I thank you,” she said. “But I try to eat. I am a fire inside. I need dung to burn.”

A plains Bizogot would have said the same thing. It still sounded odd in Hamnet's ears. “Come on,” he said. “Let's see what they've got.”

As in most towns where armies have suddenly arrived, breakfast was uninspiring. Oat-and-rye porridge with not enough butter or salt and a mug of sour beer didn't satisfy Hamnet's tongue. His stomach, though, quieted down. There was enough for the moment, anyhow.

Marcovefa ate without complaint, even though the food was strange to her. “You have so much,” she said. “You get food, and you don't have to hunt for it even in wintertime. Do you know how lucky you are?”

Plains Bizogots said the same thing. They had enough themselves to
appreciate how much more the Raumsdalians enjoyed, and to want it for themselves. Marcovefa's tone was different. Her folk had so little up there atop the Glacier, she might have come to the Empire from the dark side of the moon. She was beyond jealousy. Everything she saw surprised her.

She didn't always admire it: “Because you don't hunt so much, I see some of you sit around and get fat. You had better watch out. Such people are good only for roasting. Your foes will feast on you if you are not careful.”

Count Hamnet's stomach did a slow lurch. He'd managed to make himself forget his prized shaman, his prized lover, had eaten enemy clansmen. No doubt those foes had also devoured men from her clan. Did that mean what she'd done was any better?
Maybe a little
, Hamnet thought.