The Golden Shrine g-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “Pick your route,” Hamnet said. “I won’t quarrel with you, whatever it is. I want to get away from here-that’s all.”

  “I know what you mean,” Ulric said. “I can fell the goose’s footsteps on my grave, too.”

  As a matter of fact, that wasn’t what Hamnet Thyssen meant. He kept rubbing the palm of his hand against his trouser leg as he followed Ulric through the maze of alleys that zigzagged between the main streets. Ulric never seemed to have any doubts about where he was going. Hamnet did, more than once, but Ulric proved right in the end.

  No one troubled them while they made their getaway. “Maybe God watches over us,” Per Anders said in glad surprise as they trotted out through the open gates.

  “Maybe,” Hamnet and Ulric said together. Neither man sounded as if he believed it.

  “Well?” Trasamund asked when they got back to the Bizogots’ encampment.

  “Wasted trip, I’m afraid,” Ulric said. Count Hamnet nodded.

  Marcovefa looked sharply at Hamnet. “You had something,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “A trinket of Gudrid’s,” he said. “Nothing important.”

  “You think not?”

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked irritably. “Go back and get it for you?”

  For a moment, he thought she would say yes. He thought, in fact, she would insist on coming with him. But then she hesitated, and finally shook her head. “No, no point,” she said at last. “The bone comes from the beast, but the bone is not the beast.”

  “What does that mean?” Hamnet asked. She didn’t answer.

  X

  The Rulers rode along as if they hadn’t a care in the world. There were two or three dozen of them-most on the deer that must have come down from beyond the Glacier, a few riding horses. They didn’t disdain what they found the Bizogots and Raumsdalians using. A war mammoth led the troop.

  “Let’s go get ’em,” Trasamund said. Nobody told him no. His force far outnumbered the invaders. By the way the Rulers paraded along south of Nidaros, they expected no enemies in this part of the Empire.

  As in so much of life, what they expected and what they got were two different things. Their heads twisted toward the oncoming foes in what couldn’t be anything but horror. Despite that, none of them made as if to flee. Maybe they knew it would do them no good, since riding deer couldn’t outrun horses. Or maybe running never crossed their minds. As Hamnet Thyssen had seen more often than he cared to remember, the Rulers were formidable.

  They formed a battle line: riding deer on the wings, horses near the center, and the war mammoth anchoring the whole thing. And then one man on a deer rode out in front of the line. The fringes and animal tails and sparkling crystals adorning his costume declared what he was: a shaman.

  “Well, well,” Ulric Skakki said. “No wonder they think they can take us.”

  “No wonder at all,” Hamnet said. “But this bastard never ran into Marcovefa.”

  He glanced over to her. She probably didn’t notice him: her eyes were on the enemy sorcerer. A lion doubtless eyed a fat sheep the same way. This fellow in his fancy clothes didn’t know he was a fat sheep, but he was about to find out.

  With a harsh shout-or maybe it just seemed so to Hamnet’s ears, since he knew little of their language-the Rulers rode forward. Their shaman still held the lead. They started to shoot when they were still well out of range. Or so Hamnet would have thought, but their arrows landed among the Bizogots and Raumsdalians. A Raumsdalian soldier who’d joined Trasamund’s band clutched at his throat and slid from the saddle.

  When Trasamund’s men answered the enemy archery, their shafts did fall short. The Rulers’ wizard held up his hand as if defying not only arrows but the whole world.

  Then a red-shouldered hawk perched on that outstretched hand. Its talons closed on-and in-the wizard’s flesh. Somehow, his screech of pain resounded over the battlefield. He beat at the hawk with his free hand. Its hooked beak nipped his fingers. It pecked at his face.

  Marcovefa laughed. With the shaman distracted, archery went back to normal. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians were well within range of the Rulers now. Men and beasts on both sides began to fall. The mammoth trumpeted in anger and distress when an arrow pierced its sensitive trunk. The Rulers on the great beast’s back managed to keep it under control, though. It was well trained-and they were experienced.

  And their shaman proved not the worst of wizards, either. Even though he was bleeding, he managed to make the red-shouldered hawk fly off. A moment later, lightning crashed down out of a clear blue sky not far from Marcovefa’s horse. The beast snorted and reared at the thunderclap. Hamnet hoped she could stay on-she was anything but an experienced rider. She managed-awkwardly, but no equestrian judges stood around doling out style points.

  As the horse came down on all fours, Marcovefa laughed again. Count Hamnet wondered why. Then he realized that lightning bolt was intended to blast her black and smoking, and that she’d successfully turned the stroke. Sorcerous judges would have given her as many points as the rules allowed.

  The Rulers’ shaman realized the same thing at about the same time as Hamnet. He threw up his blood-splashed hands in what had to be despair. He’d done everything he knew how to do-and it didn’t work. What could he do now but wait for Marcovefa’s revenge?

  Hamnet nocked an arrow, drew the bowstring back to his ear, and let fly. The string lashed the leather brace on the inside of his wrist. The shaft caught the shaman in the chest, right between two glittering chunks of crystal. The man threw up his hands once more. He slumped down against the riding deer’s neck.

  “I would have given him worse than that,” Marcovefa called.

  “He’s dying. What’s worse than that?” Hamnet asked. Marcovefa’s feral smile suggested that she knew several answers. Count Hamnet was just as glad he didn’t know any of them.

  He didn’t have time to worry about them, either. Without the shaman to protect the Rulers’ ordinary fighting men, they didn’t last long. Few of them even tried to surrender: they sold their lives as dearly as they could. Hamnet had seen the invaders behave that way more often than not. Say what you would about the Rulers, they didn’t lack for courage.

  The warriors on mammothback charged again and again, but the Bizogots and Raumsdalians simply rode out of their way and kept shooting arrows at them from the sides and rear. After a while, the last enemy soldier slumped down on the mammoth’s back, either dead or too badly hurt to go on fighting. The mammoth itself must have been almost mad from pain; it had nearly as many arrows sticking out of its hide as a porcupine had quills.

  “I feel sorry for the poor thing,” Ulric Skakki said as the mammoth lumbered off toward the south. “Not its fault the people who trained it are a pack of dire wolves who walk on two legs.”

  “Maybe not,” Hamnet said, “but if my neighbor has a dog that tries to bite me, I’m going to kill it before it can.”

  “We ought to kill that mammoth-put it out of its misery,” Ulric said.

  “Go ahead,” Count Hamnet told him. The adventurer gave back a reproachful look.

  “You want it dead?” Marcovefa said. Before either Ulric or Hamnet could answer, she pointed at the mammoth and chanted something in her peculiar dialect. The huge beast walked along for another couple of strides. Then it fell over. Its sides heaved only once or twice before they stilled. It was, without a doubt, dead.

  “Good God!” Hamnet said. “How did you do that?”

  “I put-how do you say it?-a clog in its heart,” Marcovefa answered. “Nothing can live with that. Not vole, not fox, not man, not mammoth. It is a very easy spell to make. Can be countered, but easy to make.”

  Hamnet Thyssen looked at her. “You can kill anyone you want, whenever you want?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, no. Spell takes some time-you saw that. And I have to see the man-or the animal-to use it. And it can be countered. Even one of your puny amulets will stop it most of the t
ime. I didn’t know if the Rulers warded their mammoths that way. They didn’t ward this mammoth. Shall we butcher it? Plenty of meat.”

  Some of the Bizogots were already riding over to do just that. Hamnet wasn’t wild about mammoth meat. It was tough and gamy. But it was meat, and it was there. He had a little sausage and some hard bread in his belt pouch. A bellyful of meat-even tough, gamy meat-didn’t sound bad at all.

  And it didn’t turn out bad at all. He ate and ate. “You can stuff yourself like a Bizogot, by God,” Trasamund said admiringly.

  “I’ve got used to going without,” Hamnet answered. “When there’s plenty, I make the most of it.”

  “Here.” A Bizogot used a hatchet to split a bone that had been lying in the fire. “Want some marrow?”

  “I won’t say no.” Hamnet scooped some out with a chunk of meat so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. The marrow tasted stronger than any that came from cows or sheep or pigs or horses. But it was good. He suspected even teratorn marrow would be good, though he hoped he never got desperate enough to find out.

  “Let me have a bit of that.” Ulric Skakki didn’t worry about whether the marrow was hot. He reached in, grabbed what he wanted, and stuffed it into his mouth. Maybe his fingers and palm were even more callused than Hamnet’s. Maybe he was just hungrier.

  Marcovefa sighed and patted her stomach. “Up on the Glacier, we don’t have feasts like this. Unless-” She broke off with a sly smile. “Seems a shame to waste the warriors, but when you have game this big, I suppose I can see why you don’t bother with them.”

  “You . . . eat people?” Per Anders didn’t know what things were like up on top of the Glacier.

  “Not really people-never anybody from my clan, and those are the only true people,” the shaman answered. She smacked her lips. “But two-legged meat, once you cook it well, is the best there is. Better than mammoth, better than mutton, better than duck, better than anything.”

  Per glanced toward Count Hamnet. Was he slightly green, or was it only Hamnet’s imagination? “You can tell her to stop teasing me now,” he said. “No matter how she goes on, I won’t believe her.”

  “You’d better,” Hamnet answered. “She means it.”

  “Don’t you start!” Per Anders was determined not to believe.

  “By God, Anders, I’m not joking,” Hamnet said. Ulric and Trasamund nodded to show Hamnet meant it. Hamnet went on, “They don’t waste anything up there, anything at all. They can’t afford to. And that includes waste the meat that comes off an enemy’s carcass.”

  Per Anders looked from one of them to the next. He must have decided they weren’t joking, because he got up shaking his head and walked away from them. Hamnet Thyssen let out a sour chuckle. “See how we win friends wherever we go?” he said.

  “He is a foolish man,” Marcovefa said.

  “No, he’s just a man who’s never been up on top of the Glacier,” Hamnet said.

  “A lucky man, in other words,” Ulric Skakki put in.

  Marcovefa sent him a dirty look. “I never knew we were poor. I never knew we were missing so many things. You do not miss what you never had.” She licked her lips. “But I do miss man’s flesh. I had that up there, but it would turn your stomachs if I ate it here.”

  “You’re right-it would,” the adventurer agreed. “I’ve eaten a lot of nasty things in my time. You can’t believe some of the things you’ll try if you get hungry enough. I never did turn cannibal, though. I haven’t got a lot to be proud of, but that’s something, by God.”

  “Pooh!” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Man’s flesh isn’t nasty. Man’s flesh is good. Like I say, the best meat there is.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to my body-but only after I’m done using it,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “You’ve already got my body, but not for stewing, I hope,” Count Hamnet added. Marcovefa thought that was funny. After a moment, so did Hamnet. Winning a skirmish made everything look better.

  They pushed South, picking up more Raumsdalians who wanted to fight the Rulers. Some of the men from armies the invaders had shattered had gone home. Others had turned bandit. Still others seemed willing to try again as long as they had someone to lead them against the enemy.

  “Our own officers ran away,” one man angrily told Hamnet. “What the demon good are they if they won’t stand and fight?”

  “They didn’t all run away,” a new recruit said. “But most of the ones who did fight got killed.” He paused, then admitted, “Watching them get killed set some of the others running.”

  Count Hamnet made a grinding noise deep in his chest. “I sometimes wonder whether Raumsdalia deserves to live.”

  “Who do you suppose appointed the officers?” Ulric answered his own question: “Sigvat did, that’s who. And what did Sigvat do when the Rulers got to Nidaros? He ran away, that’s what. It’s no wonder the officers take after their master.”

  The new recruits stared at him. “If one of our captains heard you say something like that, he’d horse whip you,” said the soldier who’d complained that the officers had run.

  “He might think so,” Ulric said lightly.

  “Oh, he’d do it, all right. He’d . . .” The soldier seemed to take his first good look at the adventurer. He paused, then changed course: “Well, maybe not. He was mighty fond of his own skin.”

  “A sensible fellow,” Ulric said. “Of course, if we were all that fond of our own skins, nobody would ever hurt anybody else for fear of what would happen to him. But it doesn’t work that way, worse luck.”

  “We’ve both got the scars to prove it,” Hamnet said, and Ulric nodded. Hamnet went on, “Better to dish them out than to wait while they heal up, though.” Ulric Skakki nodded again. So did the Raumsdalian soldiers rejoining the fight.

  And so did Trasamund. “Always better to give than to receive,” he said, and reached over his shoulder to touch the hilt of his two-handed sword.

  “I have a question,” Hamnet said. Everybody looked at him. He asked it: “How long before the Rulers figure out they’ve got trouble behind them as well as in front of them? What do they do once they realize it?”

  “That’s two questions,” Ulric pointed out.

  “If you’ve got two answers, I’ll listen to them,” Count Hamnet said.

  Ulric made as if to turn out his pockets and go through his belt pouches. Hamnet Thyssen waited. He knew the adventurer was trying to annoy him, and would win a point if he succeeded. When Hamnet just stood there, Ulric said, “My guess is, it won’t be long. And when they do realize it, they’ll turn on us. It’s not like they’ve got any reason to be afraid of Sigvat.”

  “Too right it isn’t,” Hamnet said. “And that’s about what I was thinking, too. We’ve better be ready for the worst they can do to us.”

  “Why are you telling me? You need to talk to your lady love,” Ulric said. “Without her, the best we can hope for is to hightail it off to some place where the Rulers won’t come for a while.”

  “Not so bad as that.” But Trasamund didn’t sound as if he believed it himself.

  “We usually say things won’t be so bad when we bump up against the Rulers,” Ulric said. “And they usually aren’t. They’re usually worse.”

  Trasamund had brightened till he finished. Then the jarl glowered at him. “Curse it, why can’t you leave that part out?”

  “Because I’m trying to tell the truth?” Ulric suggested. “I know Bizogots don’t always understand the word-”

  “What do you mean?” Trasamund said indignantly.

  “Oh, you know it’s true as well as I do.” Ulric sounded impatient, to say nothing of tired. “What gets you people through the winters up there except lies swapped back and forth? Don’t tell me any different, either. I know better. Anyone who’s passed a winter up on the plains knows better.”

  “Those are just for the sport of it. Nobody believes them. Nobody expects to believe them,” Trasamund said. �
�When we need to tell the truth, we can do it as well as anybody else. I’ve heard plenty of Raumsdalian liars, too.” He fixed Ulric with a significant stare.

  “Who, me?” the adventurer said. “If you can prove anything I’ve ever said is a lie, go ahead and do it.”

  “How am I supposed to? You talk about places nobody else has ever been to. You’re the only one who knows if there’s any truth in you at all.”

  “Hamnet’s been to some of those places,” Ulric said. “He knows whether I’m telling the truth or not.”

  Thus prodded, Hamnet said, “I’ve told you before, Trasamund: Ulric hasn’t lied about any places where I’ve been, anyhow. I would have let you-and him-know about it if he had.”

  “Huh.” Trasamund didn’t want to believe him, either. “But he talks about places you’ve never seen, too, Thyssen. As far as anybody knows, he’s making all that up as he goes along.”

  “I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why,” Count Hamnet said. Trasamund could have looked no more dubious had he practiced in front of a mirror. Ignoring his expression, Hamnet went on, “Here’s why. When we went up onto the Glacier, Ulric could talk with the people we met there. How? Because he’d run into Bizogots who spoke a dialect like theirs way over by the western mountains.”

  “He didn’t talk about that before we went up onto the Glacier,” Trasamund protested.

  “No, but he’d done it. He’s done some things you haven’t done, Your Ferocity, and seen some things you haven’t seen, and you might as well get used to it,” Hamnet said.

  “Oh, don’t tell him that,” Ulric said. “Now I’ll be able to lie as much as I please, and he’ll have to swallow all of it. Where’s the challenge in that? Where’s the sport? Making somebody believe a really juicy lie shouldn’t be easy. You should have to work at it.”

  Count Hamnet exhaled through his nose. “You’re not helping, you know.”