The Golden Shrine g-3

by Harry Turtledove

  The way she poured the fermented milk down today said she wasn’t worrying about the next morning. Hamnet didn’t suppose he could blame her. She’d just had a brush with a very nasty death. So had he, come to that. He drank more than a slug himself.

  Marcovefa sent him an owlish stare. “What are you sitting there for?” She didn’t slur her words, but spoke with exaggerated precision. “Aren’t you going to screw me?”

  “Well . . .” That question had only one possible answer, unless he wanted an unholy row. “Yes.” Some time later, he asked, “Is that better?” He rubbed his left shoulder, then sneaked a look at the palm of his hand. She hadn’t bitten him quite hard enough to draw blood.

  She stretched like a lion after a kill. “What do you think?”

  “If it got any better than that, I don’t know if I’d live through it.” Hamnet was stretching things, but not by much. Never a dull moment with Marcovefa.

  Her smile said she liked the answer. She drank more smetyn. Then she said, “In a little while, we do it again.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. “I may need some magic to hold up my end of the bargain.”

  “I can do that,” Marcovefa said, and he’d seen that she could. She went on, “Or we could do other things besides just screwing.”

  “Whatever you please,” Hamnet Thyssen said. They weren’t prudes, up there on top of the Glacier. They didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, so they made the most of what they did have-lovemaking included.

  And he ended up doing more than he’d thought he could. There were advantages to having a shaman for a lover. There were also disadvantages. Liv had left him, but she hadn’t hated him. He hoped Marcovefa wouldn’t hate him, either, if she ever decided to leave. If she did hate him, he’d need to look for a place to hide-and he’d need to hope he could find a place like that with a shaman after him.

  “What do you suppose the Rulers think about us right now?” Ulric Skakki came up with interesting questions to make time go by while riding on patrol.

  “Nothing good, I hope,” Count Hamnet said.

  Ulric dropped the reins in his lap for a moment so he could sarcastically clap his hands. “Brilliant, Your Grace! Bloody fornicating brilliant! A lesser mind would be incapable of such analysis.”

  “Oh, bugger off,” Hamnet said, which made the adventurer laugh out loud.

  But Ulric didn’t give up: “If you were the Rulers, how would you try to get rid of us?”

  “Annoy us to death?” Hamnet suggested, and Ulric laughed again. But the question got Hamnet thinking. Slowly, he said, “Magic didn’t work-came close, but it didn’t work. Little raids haven’t worked, either. What’s left? Using an anvil to swat a fly-coming down on us with everything they’ve got. Or do you have some different kind of scheme in mind?”

  “No, not me.” Ulric shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I hoped you did.”

  “Afraid not,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “Pity.” Ulric didn’t let the chatter stop him from looking around every few heartbeats. “What do we do if they decide to land on us with both feet like that?”

  “Probably can’t fight if they come at us with everybody and his favorite mammoth,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki nodded, which disappointed him; he’d wanted the adventurer to tell him he was wrong. Sighing, Hamnet went on, “If we can’t hold them off, we’d better run.”

  “Seems logical,” Ulric agreed. “Next question is, where? Sort of all over the landscape, or some place in particular?”

  Count Hamnet smiled in spite of himself. “Chances are, going somewhere in particular would be smart.”

  “Oh, good! I knew you were a clever fellow.” Ulric made as if to clap his hands again. Hamnet made as if to punch him; sarcasm could wear thin. As if ignorant of that, the adventurer went on, “Now let’s see how clever you really are. If you have to run somewhere, where do you want to run?”

  That required some thought. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t like the first answer he came up with, so he tried to see if he could find a better one. To his dismay, he couldn’t. Reluctantly, he gave the first one: “The Empire. Better my own people should jail me than the Rulers should kill me . . . I suppose.”

  “Yes, I suppose so, too,” Ulric Skakki said. “And no, I don’t like it any better than you do. But what choice have we got? The Bizogots are shattered, all up and down the plain, and as far across it to east and west as we can reach. The Empire isn’t doing all that well, but it isn’t shattered, either.”

  “Well, it wasn’t when that last messenger made it up here, anyhow,” Hamnet said.

  “You’re right. It wasn’t then.” Ulric nodded. “He said Nidaros hadn’t fallen. If it has by now, Sigvat II’s bound to be dead, and-”

  “And that’s bound to help what’s left of Raumsdalia,” Count Hamnet broke in.

  Ulric showed his teeth in what looked like a grin but wasn’t. “How right you are! It’s no wonder His Majesty has brown eyes, is it?”

  “Eh?” Hamnet was a beat slow getting the joke. Then he did. “Oh. No, no wonder at all, by God. Whatever they find to take his place-even if it’s the old drunk who sweeps out the stables-is bound to be better.”

  “You don’t like Sigvat, do you?”

  “He stuck his head up his arse when we found the Rulers. He stuck me in a dungeon when I kept reminding him about that. And he stuck us with Gudrid when we went up through the Gap. Why the demon should I like him?”

  “Interesting which one you put last,” Ulric murmured.

  “Oh, shut up. So I’m not over Gudrid yet. So chances are I never will be. So what are you going to do about it?” Hamnet said.

  “Mm, when you put it that way, probably nothing,” the adventurer replied. “All right-back to the Empire . . . if we can get there. Good-sized army of Rulers already down there, remember. If they move up against us-”

  “Why would they do that?” Hamnet said. “It’d be like a sabertooth walking away from a buffalo carcass to chaster after a yappy little fox.”

  “A sabertooth wouldn’t be that stupid,” Ulric admitted. “I’m not so sure about people. And we haven’t just yapped at the Rulers. We’ve nipped them a few times-and nobody else on this side of Glacier seems able to do even that much. They have their reasons from coming after us. Besides, they’re afraid of you, remember.”

  Hamnet Thyssen laughed bitterly. “If they are, they’re every bit as stupid as you make them out to be. Too much to hope for, though, I fear.”

  “They’re smarter than you are, because they’ve got some notion of what’s dangerous to them,” Ulric said.

  “Oh, I know what’s dangerous to me, all right,” Hamnet said. “I ought to, after all the mistakes I’ve made with them.”

  “You may be dangerous to women. That doesn’t mean they’re dangerous to you,” Ulric told him.

  “If they’re not, God save me from running into anything that is,” Count Hamnet said.

  “You take things too seriously,” the adventurer said.

  “I’ve had things happen to me that need to be taken seriously,” Hamnet retorted. “Not everybody slides through life with a greased hide the way you do.”

  “Just goes to show you don’t know me as well as you think.” Ulric shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, not really. We decided what we needed to decide. Only thing left now is convincing Trasamund.”

  That sent Hamnet laughing again. “You don’t ask for much!”

  “Oh, he’ll come around. He’ll yell and fuss and bellow till he works all the indigestion out of his system, and then he’ll be fine. He doesn’t sit around brooding like some people I could name.” Ulric sent Hamnet a pointed glance.

  When Hamnet suggested a few things Ulric could do if he didn’t like it, the adventurer only laughed. That made Hamnet offer more suggestions. Ulric laughed harder. Hamnet knew Ulric was trying to get his goat. The adventurer was good at getting what he wanted, too. Instead of swearing any more, Hamnet subsided into quiet fury.


  That wasn’t what Ulric Skakki wanted. “Come on, Thyssen-swear some more,” he said. “You need to get it out of your system, too, and I don’t care if you call me names. You wouldn’t be the first one, God knows.”

  “If you don’t care, what’s the point?” Hamnet said.

  Ulric started to laugh some more, but broke off. “All right. Fine. I give up. Do what you want to do, no matter how idiotic it looks. Never mind that the Rulers worry about you. They’re nothing but a pack of fools. We’re all a pack of fools. Everybody in the whole stupid world’s a fool-except you.”

  That set Hamnet swearing again. Ulric Skakki bowed in the saddle, which only irked Hamnet more. “If the Rulers are so stinking afraid of me, why? What have I done?” he demanded. “They’ve trounced the Bizogots while I was up here. They’ve trounced the Empire while I was down there. I’m useless, is what I am.”

  “Are they better wizards than the ones we’ve got, or are they worse?” Ulric asked. “I mean Raumsdalian wizards and Bizogot shamans-leave Marcovefa out of it.”

  “They’re better, and you know it as well as I do,” Hamnet Thyssen snapped. “Why talk about what’s obvious?”

  Ulric bowed again. “Why? Because it’s so obvious, you don’t want to look at it. If they’ve got better wizards than we do-and they’ve got ’em, all right-then they can see things we can’t. And one of the things they see is that Count Hamnet Thyssen means trouble to them.”

  “Only goes to show they’re not smart all the time,” Hamnet said stubbornly.

  “You don’t want to believe me. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you it got cold up here in the wintertime,” Ulric Skakki said. “Fine. Don’t believe me. But ask your lady love. If she says it, you’d better believe it.”

  “She’s not my lady love,” Hamnet muttered. That was part of his problem, too. He slept with Marcovefa. He kept company with her. He liked her-when she didn’t scare the piss out of him. Love her the way he’d loved Gudrid and Liv? No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t come close. She was too strange . . . and she didn’t seem to want him to love her, either.

  He didn’t try explaining that to Ulric. He would have had trouble explaining it to himself. But it was there, and it ate at him at the same time as the troubles against the invaders did.

  By the way Ulric eyed him, he didn’t need to explain it. The adventurer was alarmingly good at understanding how people worked. To Hamnet, that came close to being magic-dark magic. “Lady love or not, ask her anyway. She’ll give you a straight answer. Maybe she’ll even figure out why the Rulers get all weak in the knees when they think about you.”

  “Oh, go howl!” Hamnet said. But the seed, once planted, wouldn’t go away.

  Marcovefa looked at him. For all Count Hamnet could tell, she looked into him, looked through him. “Why do the Rulers fear you?” she said. “Why do you care so much about why? Isn’t it enough to know that they do?”

  “No, curse it,” Hamnet said. “As far as I can see, it’s nothing but stupidity. They have no reason to do it. Trasamund is more dangerous to them than I’ll ever be. The Bizogots listen to him. Nobody listens to me here. Nobody listens to me down in the Empire, either. God knows that’s true.”

  “You worry too much about things,” Marcovefa said.

  Hamnet Thyssen laughed harshly. “Now tell me something I didn’t know. But I think the Rulers worry too much about me.”

  “If you want me to”-by the way Marcovefa said it, she meant, If you’re daft enough to want me to-“I can try a divination to see why. I don’t know what it will show. I don’t know if it will show anything.”

  “Try,” Hamnet said. “If it doesn’t do anything else, maybe it’ll make Ulric Skakki shut up. That’d be worth a lot to me all by itself.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “All right,” she said. “We see.” She smiled to herself as she picked up a small earthenware bowl. She admired pottery. So did the Bizogots, who got it in trade from the Empire. Their nomadic way of life didn’t let them build the kilns they would have needed to make their own bowls and pots and jugs. “I will be back,” she told him. “I need water for this divination. I will look into the water in the bowl and see what it shows.”

  “All right. We have scryers who work like that,” Hamnet said.

  She nodded. “I am not surprised. Anyone who does magic would think of this. Easier to keep water in a bowl than to weave a basket that holds it.”

  “Yes.” Count Hamnet nodded, too. The Bizogots also had that art. Raumsdalians didn’t. No need for it in a land where potters worked in every village.

  Marcovefa ducked out of their hut. It wasn’t far from the edge of Sudertorp Lake; she soon returned, carrying the bowl carefully so she wouldn’t spill the lakewater. “Come outside,” she told Hamnet. “The sun will help show what there is to see.”

  “If you say so.” Hamnet expected the perpetually curious-perpetually nosy-Bizogots to crowd around and watch her work magic. But they didn’t. Maybe keeping them away was another magic. Hamnet couldn’t think of anything else likely to do it.

  The shaman from atop the Glacier began to chant in her own dialect. Hamnet Thyssen had learned bits and pieces of it, but not enough to follow her song. Follow or not, he knew about what she had to be saying. She was asking for calm water, in which she could see what would happen in days to come.

  She bent low over the bowl, still chanting. The water inside lay utterly still. To Hamnet, it was only water. To Marcovefa, it would show what lay ahead more clearly than a mirror of polished silver down in Nidaros showed a fair lady’s reflection.

  Then, without warning, the bowl broke. Marcovefa exclaimed in surprise. The water spilled out and carved a couple of tiny gullies in the dirt in front of the hut.

  “I didn’t know it was cracked,” Hamnet said.

  “It wasn’t,” Marcovefa answered.

  “But it must have been. It wouldn’t have done that if it weren’t,” Hamnet insisted.

  She shook her head. “No. That was part of the scrying. Look.” She picked up the pieces of the bowl, then dug something out of the dirt with her fingernail. She held it under Hamnet’s nose.

  His eyes crossed as he tried to focus. “A little scrap of crystal. So what?”

  “It’s more than that,” she said.

  “Well, what is it, then?”

  “Something to do with the divination.”

  “How could it be? It wasn’t even in the water.”

  “It was under the water. That’s what matters.”

  “You aren’t making any sense,” Hamnet said impatiently.

  Marcovefa looked annoyed-not at him, but at herself. “I can’t make sense about this-not as much as I want to, anyhow. The scrying broke apart when the bowl did.”

  “You mean you don’t know what’s ahead?” Hamnet felt like kicking something. “We just wasted the time and the bowl?”

  “No.” She shook her head again. “I learned . . . something, anyhow. You will face the Rulers here, in the land of the Bizogots.”

  “Not down in Raumsdalia?” Hamnet said in some surprise.

  “Maybe there, too. But when it matters most, it will be here.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “Then . . . the bowl breaks.” Marcovefa gave him a crooked grin he would have thought he’d be more likely to see on Ulric Skakki’s face. “You don’t always find out everything you want to know.”

  “Of course not,” Hamnet said. “That would make things too easy.”

  Marcovefa nodded, even if he’d meant it for a sour joke. “Yes. It would. But if I do not know what happens after the bowl breaks, neither do the Rulers. I saw that much, anyhow.”

  “Can you get another bowl and try again?” Count Hamnet asked.

  “I am not brave enough,” the shaman answered. “When the bowl broke and the water spilled, that told me I was not supposed to know any more. But the Rulers know what they are about. Whatever happens here, it happens on account of
you.”

  “I’m going to go out and punch Ulric in the chops,” Hamnet said.

  “Why?”

  “For being right.”

  “Ah.” Marcovefa nodded once more. “Yes, that makes sense. Not many worse things a man can do.”

  Now he thought she was joking-but if she was, she hid it very well. “I still can’t believe it,” Hamnet said. “I’m nobody in particular. Why does this have to land on me?”

  “Why not you? It has to land on someone. Or else it lands on no one, and the Rulers win without a real fight,” Marcovefa said. “But you aren’t ‘nobody in particular.’ Who has been beyond the Glacier? Who has been to the top of the Glacier, too?”

  “Ulric. Trasamund.” Hamnet Thyssen hesitated, then produced two more names: “Audun Gilli. Liv. So why me?”

  “One in five is not ‘nobody in particular,’ ” Marcovefa said. “Who has loved a woman from your folk, from the Bizogots, and from my folk? Only you.”

  “Is that why?” Hamnet was more appalled than anything else. He started to blurt, Much good it’s done me, but swallowed the words. He didn’t want to anger Marcovefa.

  Swallowing words around a shaman didn’t always help. By Marcovefa’s expression, she knew what he was about to say even if he didn’t say it. “I do not know if that is why or not,” she said. “Maybe. Maybe not. But there is more to you than you want to see.”

  “More to land me in trouble,” he said.

  “That, too,” she agreed, which didn’t make him any happier. “Maybe also more to get you out, though.”

  He laughed. “When was the last time I wasn’t in trouble?” He knew the answer to that, whether Marcovefa did or not: “The day before Sigvat’s courier got to my castle to tell me I had to come to Nidaros, that’s when. One thing after the other.”

  “Am I one thing-or the other?” she asked sharply.