The Breath of God (9 page)

“God should help the Bizogots, too—and if he doesn't, we should lend a hand,” Count Hamnet said. “Do you know whether Totila and Trasamund aim to send messengers to the other clans and tell them what's happened to the Red Dire Wolves?”

“I know they haven't done it yet. I know I haven't heard them talk about doing it,” Ulric answered. “Whether the thought has trickled through their beady little minds . . . that I can't tell you.”

“Beady little minds,” Hamnet echoed sourly. The phrase fit much too well. “All right, then. We'd better make sure they do think of it. And we'd better make sure they don't just think of it, too. We'd better make sure they do it.”

“You don't have much faith in them, do you?” Ulric said.

Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

S
PRING.
D
OWN IN
the Empire, it was a time of renewal, return, rebirth. In the Bizogot country, it was all of that and more, jammed into a few frantic weeks. When the snow up on the northern plains melted, everything turned to mud and marshes and ponds. Getting from here to there became a challenge. Getting from here to there in a hurry became a joke.

Bare mud and shallow water didn't last long. (There was no deep water on the frozen steppe, which stayed frozen a few feet down regardless of the season.) Plants came to mad life, coating the ground with green and bursting into bloom. And in the marshes and puddles, the eggs mosquitoes and flies and midges had laid the year before thawed out and hatched and gave birth to a new generation of buzzing biters.

Hamnet Thyssen squelched and slapped and swore. The air was thick not only with bugs but also with the birds that battened on them. The birds grew fat and nested and laid eggs so their succeeding generation could feast off bugs yet unborn. But far too many bugs remained uneaten.

“Can't you do anything about it?” Hamnet asked Liv, not for the first time.

“Bear grease on your face and hands helps some,” she answered. She was bitten, too. So were all the Bizogots. So were their dogs and musk oxen and mammoths, all of which shed their winter coats just in time to give the mosquitoes tempting targets.

“You should have a magic to keep the bugs away,” he said.

She looked at him. “You Raumsdalians like to think you're stronger than the world around you. Up here, shamans know better. God lets us live on
the plains . . . as long as we don't push our luck too hard. How could one shaman hold off all the bugs that spawn every spring?”

Put that way, it was a different kind of question. Count Hamnet said, “Can't you hold off
some
of the bugs?”

That only made Liv smile. “What if we did? Don't you think the rest would be plenty to drive men and beasts wild?”

“Umm . . . Probably.” Hamnet Thyssen managed a smile of his own, a crooked one. “You're telling me to give up and leave this alone, aren't you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes—except for the bear grease,” Liv said. “That helps—as much as anything, anyhow.” With a sigh, Hamnet smeared some on. Maybe it helped a little. On the other hand, maybe it didn't.

The Rulers didn't try to drive the Red Dire Wolves to destruction—not right away, anyhow. They could have pursued much harder than they did. Maybe the spring thaw slowed them down. Maybe they awaited reinforcements from beyond the Glacier. Maybe they just didn't care what the beaten Bizogots did. Hamnet had no way of knowing. He welcomed the respite, whatever the reason for it.

It also gave the Red Dire Wolves' messengers the chance to warn other clans. It gave them the chance, yes. How seriously the rest of the Bizogots took those messengers . . . One of the horse men came back to the Red Dire Wolves' camp that evening. Days got long faster in springtime up here in the north than they did in the Empire; already the sun's setting point had swung far to the northwest, and twilight lingered late.

The slowly gathering gloom descending on the camp didn't come close to matching the gloom on the messenger's face. He bit into a leg from a roasted partridge and swigged from a skin of smetyn, but neither the food nor the fermented mammoth's milk did much to lighten his mood.

“They wouldn't believe me,” he told Totila and anyone else who would listen. “By God, Your Ferocity, they wouldn't! They laughed at me. They asked me if I was chewing mystic mushrooms.”

“They have their nerve!” Odovacar said indignantly—somehow, the deaf old shaman heard that fine. “Mystic mushrooms are shamans' food. The visions they send drive ordinary men mad.”

Liv smiled behind her hand. “That doesn't stop ordinary men from eating them now and then,” she whispered to Count Hamnet.

“I'm not surprised,” he answered. “If smetyn were against the law, people would still drink it.” She nodded.

Totila scowled at the messenger. “Did you manage to persuade 'em you had all your wits about you?”

“I showed 'em this.” The messenger pulled up his sleeve and showed off a long cut on his arm, which was still held closed by several musk-ox-sinew stitches. “Even then, they had the nerve to ask me if I did it to myself when the mushrooms made me crazy. I told 'em I'd fight the next fool who asked me a question like that. They heard me out after that, anyhow. But even when they listened, they wouldn't believe.”

“Why not?” Totila's face was a study in helpless rage. “Almost makes you wonder if the Rulers have a spell in the air to turn Bizogots' wits to horse manure,” Ulric Skakki said. His usual view was that Bizogots' wits weren't far removed from horse manure anyhow, but nothing in his tone or attitude suggested that now.

“Could it be so?” Trasamund asked.

“Not likely, Your Ferocity,” Ulric said. “People can be plenty stupid all by themselves. They mostly don't need magic to help 'em along.”

“I wasn't asking you,” the Three Tusk jarl said. “I was asking the shamans here.” He looked from Liv to Odovacar to Audun Gilli.

“I don't think it's likely, either, Your Ferocity,” Liv said. Audun nodded; he'd finally picked up enough of the Bizogot language to get by in it, though he still butchered the grammar and threw in Raumsdalian words when he spoke it himself. As for Odovacar, he didn't seem to have heard Trasamund this time.

Trasamund looked dissatisfied. He'd seldom looked any other way since learning of the disaster that had overwhelmed his clan, but he seemed even less happy than usual now. “I don't want to know what you think,” he rumbled. “I want to know what your magic tells you.”

“Don't take me seriously here, for heaven's sake,” Ulric Skakki said. “I was only joking.”

“You Raumsdalians have a saying, don't you, about true words spoken in jest?” Trasamund said. “I think you did that here. You are a clever Raumsdalian. Sometimes you are too clever for your own good. I know you think Bizogots are nothing but a pack of fools.”

“I never said that,” Ulric protested. “I don't care what you said. I wasn't talking about what you said. I know what you think here,” Trasamund said. Ulric Skakki looked innocent. It wasn't easy, not when he was bound to be guilty as charged, but he brought it off. Hamnet Thyssen thought the Bizogots could be fools, too, and he
knew his opinion of them was higher than Ulric's. Trasamund went on, “You think we are fools, yes. But without magic, could we be fools enough to ignore an enemy already beating our clans and stealing our grazing grounds?”

By the look on Ulric's face, he saw nothing too improbable in that, even if he didn't come right out and say so. But the way Trasamund put the question made Hamnet Thyssen wonder. Yes, the Bizogots could be fools, especially from a Raumsdalian point of view. Were they likely to be idiots?

“Maybe we ought to find out, if we can,” he said.

Audun Gilli blinked. Liv said, “Not you, too!” Even Odovacar looked at Count Hamnet in surprise, and Hamnet was convinced the Red Dire Wolves' shaman had no idea what was going on.

“It's possible Ulric's right without meaning to be,” Hamnet said stubbornly. “If the Bizogots farther south would rather believe in mystic mushrooms than in the Rulers, don't you think that says something's wrong with them?”

Liv looked exasperated. Odovacar went on looking blank. But Audun Gilli looked thoughtful. “It could be so,” he said. “I don't say it is, but it could be.” He turned to Liv. “Do you know a spell for seeing if someone is using magic?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “We need a charm like that, for we often have claims that someone is bewitching someone else. We need to find out where the truth lies.”

“If the truth lies, how do you find it?” Ulric Skakki inquired.

Audun Gilli didn't get the pun. Liv did, and winced. Trasamund muttered something under his breath. “We use that kind of spell in Nidaros, too,” Audun said, taking no notice of what he couldn't follow. “Maybe we ought to try it here.”

Liv sighed. “I think it's a waste of time, but if it makes you happy. . . .”

“Happy?” Trasamund spoke before Hamnet, Ulric, or Audun could. “Wise lady, nothing that has passed here since we traveled south into the Empire makes me happy. But if we find here a tool to use against our foes, or a way to keep them from using a tool against us, then I say we have done something worthwhile. Is this so, or is it not so?”

“If we find something, Your Ferocity, it is so,” Liv answered. “Otherwise, we do nothing but waste time and strength. This last strikes me as more likely.”

“Sometimes finding out the enemy isn't doing something counts for as much as finding out he is would,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If he isn't spreading confusion—”

“Then our neighbors truly are as idiotic as you Raumsdalians make them out to be,” Trasamund broke in.

“You said it. I didn't,” Hamnet said. “But if the Rulers
are
fuddling the rest of the Bizogots, we need to know that. And if they are, we need to stop them if we can.”

“I said I would make the spell. I will,” Liv said. “But I wouldn't bother if Trasamund hadn't decided Ulric Skakki meant what he said when he was only making one of his jokes.” She sent the adventurer a severe stare.

Ulric looked embarrassed, a startling and unnatural expression on his face, whose normal bland expression could conceal anything. “I
said
I was joking,” he protested. “No one wanted to believe me.”

“See what happens when you tell so many lies?” Trasamund said. “Nobody wants to hear the truth from you.”

“I'll find the truth, whatever it is.” Liv nodded to Audun Gilli. “Tell me about your magic-sniffing spells.” When he did, in a mixture of her tongue and Raumsdalian, she frowned for a moment, considering. Then she nodded to herself. “Those are not bad, but I think I'll use one I already know. It's simpler, and I won't have to worry about slipping with something new and unfamiliar.”

“That makes sense,” Audun agreed.

“She'll do it anyhow,” Ulric Skakki said, as if to prove he didn't intend all his words to be taken seriously.

Then Liv explained to Odovacar what she intended to do. That took so much shouting, she might almost have told the Rulers what she had in mind, too. At last, the Red Dire Wolves' shaman said, “Anybody would think you figured the Rulers were using magic to make us stupid.”

Liv sighed. “Yes. Anyone would think that.”

She took from a pouch on her belt an agate, dark brown banded with white. Audun Gilli suddenly grinned when he saw the stone. “Oh, very nice!” he said. “Agate overcomes perils, strengthens the heart, and helps against adversities.”

“We have them, sure enough,” Trasamund said.

Her face a mask of concentration, Liv took no notice of either of them. She drew forth the dried foot of a snowshoe hare, bound it to the agate with a length of sinew, and tied them both to her left upper arm. “This to help me go where I will, in our world or that of the spirit, and to return without peril,” she said.

“May it be so,” Hamnet Thyssen murmured. He worried whenever she
worked magic, for he knew the danger it put her in. That it was needful only made him worry more, since that meant he couldn't stop her.

She began to chant. Some of the strange little tune was in the Bizogot language. The rest might have been in the speech mammoths used among themselves—if mammoths used any speech among themselves.

As magic had a way of doing, the spell seemed to reach Odovacar. He pricked up his ears and followed her charm with all the attention he had in him. That his ears pricked was literally true; even in human shape, they were unusually large, unusually pointed, and unusually mobile. A bit later, he began to chant. His tune was much like the one Liv used, though not identical. Some of what he sang was in the Bizogot tongue. The rest might have been the speech dire wolves used among themselves—if dire wolves used any speech among themselves.

“The truth!” Liv and Odovacar sang the same thing at the same time, perhaps by chance, perhaps . . . not. “We must have the truth!” Then their songs went different ways again, into mammoth maunderings for Liv and dire-wolf woolgathering for Odovacar.

Both shamans began to dance, Liv plodding after the truth and Odovacar chasing with lolling tongue and hungry eyes. Hamnet Thyssen watched Audun Gilli watching them in fascination. The Raumsdalian wizard seemed altogether absorbed in the workings of a sorcery from a tradition different from the Empire's. If Liv was a mammoth and Odovacar a dire wolf, he might have been a bright-eyed mouse, taking everything in.

“We must have the truth!” Odovacar called again.

“Do lies and deceit stalk the Bizogots?” Liv sang, and then something muffled and mammothy that, Hamnet felt, somehow meant the same thing.