The Breath of God (53 page)

She was still talking with them when Hamnet's band came to the battlefield. Ravens flew away, croaking like big, black frogs. A short-faced bear looked up from a meal of . . . well, Hamnet hoped the beast was eating a dead warrior of the Rulers. The bear growled a warning at the newcomers. When they took no notice of it, it loped away, long legs carrying it off at least as fast as a horse could trot.

Marcovefa came back to Count Hamnet.
Yes, she does now
—
but for how long?
he wondered. Would he ever be able to get these doubts out of his head? She said, “This is where we fought?”

“That's right.” He nodded.

“I remember the place. I remember the—the mammoths.” She had to cast about for the word. “I remember the fear the foe threw. But even after I talk, I don't remember the fight.” She slammed a fist down on her thigh in frustration. “I want to!”

“I don't know what to do about that,” Hamnet said, in lieu of,
I don't think anyone can do anything about that
.

They pressed on to the north. A strange truce held whenever they passed bands of Rulers coming down into Raumsdalia. Once, a fellow who was pretty plainly a wizard stared at Marcovefa. Even in her damaged state, he knew her for what she was. When she bared her teeth at him in what was almost a smile, he flinched. The Rulers were made of stern stuff, whatever else you said about them; that didn't happen every day.

The trees began to thin out. The customs post at the tree line was a burned ruin. To the north, as far as the eye could see—and, Hamnet knew, far beyond that—stretched the snow-covered, gently rolling terrain of the Bizogot steppe.

“Here we are again,” he said to Ulric Skakki.

“Never loses its charm, does it?” the adventurer returned.

“How can you lose what you haven't got?” Hamnet Thyssen said. Ulric laughed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

G
UNNLAUG
J
OFRID RODE
back towards the south. Count Hamnet didn't much want to let him go; he feared the courier would land Runolf Skallagrim in trouble. But the only other choice did seem to be slaughtering Gunnlaug, and Hamnet didn't have the stomach for it, not in cold blood.

“Don't worry. It will probably work out all right,” Audun Gilli told him.

“Easy for you to say,” Hamnet growled. “Runolf is a friend of mine. I don't like running out and leaving him in the lurch.”

“I don't think you are,” the wizard answered. “By the time Gunnlaug gets down to Nidaros again—if he ever does—how many Rulers will be between him and Kjelvik? With the worst will in the world, how much can Sigvat do to your friend?”

Hamnet Thyssen thought that over. His nod was grudging, but it was a nod. “Well, you've got something there,” he said, and worried about it less. Too late now to do anything but what he'd done, anyhow.

“Now we find our fellow Bizogots, our fellow sufferers,” Trasamund boomed. He seemed to have no doubts about what came next. “We fire them with our fury, and we lead them to victory against the accursed invaders.”

He made it sound easy. Had it been easy, the Bizogots would have done it when the Rulers first swarmed down through the Cleft. Trasamund was always one to overlook details like that. Ulric Skakki said, “Finding enough to eat through the winter here ought to be interesting all by itself.”

“We Bizogots don't starve,” Trasamund declared.

“Except when we do.” Liv had a better grasp on reality than the jarl did. Hamnet had known that for a long time. She went on, “Even with our herds, it isn't always easy. And we'll have to hunt without mammoths and musk oxen to fall back on.”

“Dire wolves do it. So can we,” Trasamund said.

“We can rob them, too,” Ulric said. “What's left of a musk ox or a baby mammoth or one of the Rulers' riding deer that strayed will feed us for a while.”

For a while
, Hamnet thought. When the Breath of God blew hard from the north up here, folk needed more food than they did down in Nidaros, with fireplaces and braziers and double walls handy to hold cold at bay. You had to keep the hearth inside you burning hot, or else the Breath of God would blow it out.

Peering north, then northeast, then northwest, Count Hamnet saw . . . snow. No mammoths. No musk oxen. No riding deer. No geese or swans. No ducks or ptarmigan. No white-pelted hares. No voles or lemmings, either. He knew game of all sizes lived on, in, and under the snowdrifts, but finding any wouldn't be easy.

The horses would have to keep going, too. Unlike musk oxen or mammoths, they didn't always know enough to dig through the snow to find fodder underneath. Sooner or later—most likely sooner—the travelers would probably end up killing and eating the pack horses. Once the supplies they carried were gone, what point to fussing over them? He wasn't fond of horsemeat, but he wasn't fond of hunger, either.

“Come on!” Trasamund said. “Let's ride!”

He booted his horse forward as if he had not a care in the world. Up here in the Bizogot country, maybe he didn't. Whether he should or not . . . wasn't the same question. Count Hamnet urged his mount forward, too.

When he came north the winter before, he'd looked forward to running into people. The Bizogots guested strangers generously, knowing they might need guesting themselves one day before long. The Rulers, though, would be enemies no matter what. He made sure his sword stayed loose in its scabbard.

Nothing . . . Only snow and chill and rolling ground under the horse's hooves. Trasamund started singing a song about how splendid the countryside was. The jarl couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. He didn't care, but Count Hamnet didn't feel like listening to him.

“How are you?” Hamnet asked Marcovefa.

“I've been better,” she answered. “My head still feels . . .” She made a face. “Things in there aren't right.”

“A slingstone will do that,” Hamnet said.

“But to knock out working magic?” She made another face, an angrier one. “It did that. I don't like it. I feel stupid.”

“I can't work magic at all,” Hamnet said. “Am I stupid?”

By her expression, the question was. “Suppose you go blind. Are you the same as you were before? I feel like I am blind in there.” She carefully touched the right side of her head.

Liv pointed northwest and called, “A herd that way!”

Hamnet Thyssen saw nothing out of the ordinary when he looked that way. “How can you tell?” he asked. Even so simple a question hurt.

“Look at the air.” Liv sounded as matter-of-fact as if they were strangers. “You can see the fog of all the animals breathing together.” She pointed again. Once Count Hamnet knew where to look and what to look for, he could see it, too. That made him feel a little better, but not much. Liv went on, “I think they're musk oxen, but I'm not sure. The air doesn't look quite right.” Hamnet couldn't tell the difference between fog from musk oxen and that from any other beasts. Could Liv, really? Maybe she could. The Bizogots had to learn such things if they wanted to go on living.

“
I
think they're musk oxen,” Trasamund said. “I think we ought to slaughter one or two of them, too. We can use the meat. It will keep us going longer than the bread we brought north. Bread is all very well when you have no meat, but when you do. . . .”

Hamnet wondered who was watching that herd or flock or whatever the word was. If the outriders were Bizogots, there probably wouldn't be any trouble. If they were Rulers, there certainly would. His hand fell to his sword hilt again. He was ready for trouble, or hoped he was.

“Let's ride,” Trasamund said once more. Nobody told him no. Ulric Skakki looked dubious, but Ulric looked dubious about half the time. He very often had good reason to look dubious, but Hamnet chose not to remember that.

Before long, the herd itself came into sight: a brown smudge on the horizon. The travelers hadn't gone much farther before Liv exclaimed, “Those aren't musk oxen!”

“I don't know what the demon they are,” Trasamund said. Hamnet Thyssen still wasn't convinced they weren't musk oxen. But he had to believe the Bizogots knew better than he did.

Still, it wasn't a Bizogot who said, “They're riding deer, aren't they?” It was Ulric Skakki. He might look dubious, but he was also an adaptable man. Before long, Hamnet could see he was right here.

“What do we do?” Audun Gilli asked: all things considered, a more than reasonable question.

“I'm in the mood for roast venison,” Hamnet said. His comrades bayed agreement.

“What if the Rulers have herdsmen with their deer?” Audun asked.

“Then in a little while they won't,” Hamnet answered grandly. That got him more cheers. He began to string his bow. So did Ulric.

Sure enough, a herdsman rode out towards them . . . on a riding deer rather than a horse, which said by itself that he was a warrior of the Rulers. “You goes away!” he shouted in the Bizogot tongue, his accent and pronunciation terrible. “Goes away! Thises our deers is!”

“We ought to kill him just so we don't have to listen to him,” Ulric murmured.

“Oh, we've got better reasons than that,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

He and Ulric reached over their shoulders and nocked arrows at the same time. The enemy warrior seemed astonished that anyone on the frozen steppe would presume to disobey him. They'd both let fly before he even started to reach for an arrow. He hadn't finished drawing his bow before one shaft caught him in the chest and the other in the face. He slid out of the saddle and crashed down in the snow.

“Well shot!” Hamnet and Ulric shouted at the same time. Marcovefa pounded Hamnet on the back.

Another herdsman rode around from the far side of the flock to find out what was going on. Seeing his comrade down, he wheeled his deer and galloped off as fast as it would run.

Liv pointed at the deer and murmured . . . something. Suddenly, though the deer seemed to be running as hard as ever, it was hardly moving at all. The warrior of the Rulers beat it and cursed it, none of which did him any good. When the invaders had no shaman with them, they were vulnerable to Bizogot magic. Hamnet had seen that before.

The warrior leaped down from the ensorceled riding deer as the travelers drew near. He must have seen he had no hope for escape, for he charged them with drawn sword. Trasamund dismounted and met him blade-to-blade. “The Three Tusk clan!” the jarl cried.

He beat down his foe's guard with a few fierce cuts. The killing stroke
almost took off the enemy fighter's head. The warrior of the Rulers staggered, blood gushing from a wound he couldn't hope to stanch. After a few lurching steps, he crumpled, the sword slipping from his fingers.

“If only there were one neck for the lot of them!” Trasamund cleaned his blade in a snowdrift.

“Would make things simpler, wouldn't it?” Ulric Skakki said. Hamnet Thyssen nodded.

The riding deer shifted nervously, half spooked by the shouting and by the stink of blood. But the beasts were more nearly tame than so many musk oxen would have been. The travelers had little trouble cutting several of them out of the herd and leading them downwind so the smells of their slaughtering wouldn't frighten the others so much.

“Maybe we ought to use them for pack animals and slaughter the extra horses,” Audun Gilli said. “They fend for themselves better than horses do up here.”

“But we can ride the horses if we have to.” Trasamund was a staunch conservative. “We don't know how to do that with them.”

“And they are beasts of the Rulers,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe, if they stay alive, Rulers can use magic to track them.”

Audun pursed his lips. “Yes, that could be,” he said. “I should have thought of it myself.”

And so they slaughtered the deer, wrapped the meat they wanted to take in the animals' hides, and loaded it onto the pack horses. Then they pressed north, up towards Sudertorp Lake and what had been Leaping Lynx country. But the Leaping Lynxes, these days, were as shattered as Trasamund's own clan.

“What can we do up here?” Hamnet said. “What hope have we got of putting a piece of this clan and a chunk of that one together and making an army that can stand up to the Rulers?”

“I don't know,” Ulric answered. “But I do know Sigvat can't put you in a dungeon up here, so that leaves us ahead of the game right there. Or do you think I'm wrong, Your Grace?” He used Hamnet's title of respect with irony.

“I only wish I did,” Hamnet said. They rode on.

 

M
ARCOVEFA LOOKED AT
the snow. She frowned in concentration, and maybe in a little pain, as she whistled a strange tune in a wailing, minor key. Then she muttered to herself. “That's not right,” she said.

“Try it again,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. “Your magic's bound to come back to you sooner or later, isn't it?” He fought not to show his fear.

“Well, I hope so. I don't want to be mindblind the rest of my days,” she answered.
Mindblind
wasn't really a word in Raumsdalian, which didn't keep Hamnet from understanding it—and from understanding that he wasn't the only fearful one here.

Marcovefa eyed the drifted snow again. She nodded to herself, as if to say,
I
can
do this
. Then she whistled again. The tune was almost the same as it had been before—almost, but not quite. Hamnet couldn't have defined the difference, but he knew it was there.

Suddenly, a vole popped out of the snow. It stared at Marcovefa with small, black, beady eyes. Then, as if recognizing her as one of its own kind, it scurried towards her. Her smile blazed brighter than the weak northern sun. She stopped whistling. The vole let out a high-pitched squeak of horror, almost turned a somersault spinning around, and scooted away.