The Golden Shrine

by Harry Turtledove

  Marcovefa only laughed. “Now they try a spell to throw insects at us. They think we cannot beat the likes of that?” She laughed again.

  She might have thought it was funny, but alarm trickled through Hamnet. The Rulers had used that spell in a battle the year before, and the swarms of bugs they threw at the Bizogots and their animals drove them mad and paved the way for the invaders’ victory. Liv and Audun Gilli had had to abandon their own magic to weaken the enemy sorcery even a little. Would Marcovefa be able to do anything else while she fought it?

  Even if she couldn’t, Liv and Audun rode with the Bizogots today. If Marcovefa could keep the Rulers’ wizards busy, the two of them might work magic on the enemy. That Liv had once worked a different kind of magic on Hamnet . . . he shoved down in his mind. He didn’t have time to fret about Liv now, any more than he had time to fret about Gudrid.

  A gnat flew into his left eye. He rubbed his face and sent Marcovefa a reproachful look. Maybe it was a natural gnat, not one the Rulers had inspired. Maybe Marcovefa was just weakening the spell, not blocking it altogether. He supposed he could forgive her a gnat or two. But why did this one have to find his eye?

  Trasamund drew his blade and brandished it over his head. It was a two-handed sword, which meant he needed a well-trained horse to use it. He couldn’t hang on to the reins and swing it at the same time. While he used it, he had to guide his mount with knees alone.

  Arrows started flying. Hamnet shot again and again, emptying his quiver as fast as he could. The Rulers had used spells to break bowstrings, too. Not this time, or, if they were trying that magic, Marcovefa wasn’t letting it get anywhere.

  Here and there, invaders and riding deer crashed to the ground. Some lay still, others writhed and thrashed in pain. Bizogots also went down. Whatever Marcovefa was doing, she wasn’t interfering with the Rulers’ archery. Therein lay her greatest danger: one of those flying shafts might find her.

  No sooner had that thought crossed Hamnet’s mind than Marcovefa caught an arrow out of the air. She kissed the tip and threw it back at the Rulers—maybe at the man who’d shot it. Hamnet was able to watch, because it glowed as it flew . . . and it flew faster than any shaft ever launched from a horn-backed bow. It caught an enemy warrior square in the chest, and he didn’t move after he slid off over his riding deer’s tail.

  “How did you do that?” Hamnet shouted.

  She winked at him. “Magic,” she answered, as if he didn’t know.

  “Could you hit a war mammoth with an arrow like that?” he asked. In any fight between Rulers and Bizogots, the invaders had the edge because they could ride mammoths and fight from them.

  Marcovefa thought about it. “Maybe,” she said at last. “Those long-nosed marmots have a lot of protection, though.” Did she mean the thick leather armor the mammoths wore or the Rulers’ ward spells? Hamnet didn’t know.

  He didn’t have much time to wonder, either. The rival forces came to close quarters. Trasamund worked fearsome execution with that two-handed blade. Hamnet drew his own sword and traded cuts with an enemy warrior till their mounts carried them past each other.

  Trasamund guided his horse toward a mammoth. Hamnet wondered if battle fury had driven the Three Tusk jarl out of his wits, but there was method to his madness. He sprang down from the horse and hewed at the mammoth’s left hind leg. The huge beast let out a horrid bleat of pain and toppled, hamstrung.

  The warriors atop the mammoth shrieked as it crashed to the ground. One tried to leap clear, only to be crushed by that mountain of falling flesh. Another did jump free, but it did him no good. Trasamund cut him down before he could even get to his feet. Then the jarl remounted and rode toward another mammoth.

  “He can’t do that twice!” Ulric Skakki exclaimed.

  “I didn’t think he could do it once,” Count Hamnet answered.

  Now the Rulers knew what Trasamund had in mind. They shot at him again and again. An arrow in its throat, his horse sank like a ship that had hit a rock. But it had got him close to the woolly mammoth. Careless of his own safety, he dashed forward. His huge sword swung in an arc of mayhem and struck home. The mammoth bugled distress. Like the other great beast, it went down.

  And that was as much as the Rulers wanted. Their war mammoths had given them the edge in every fight with the Bizogots. Against a berserk madman who would maim them without caring whether he lived or died, they had no sure defense. They turned and fled north as fast as their riding deer and the mammoths still hale would carry them.

  Hamnet Thyssen would have called for a pursuit had the Rulers tried to keep going south. If they were heading away from their army down in the Empire, he was content to let them go. They’d hurt the Bizogots, too. This little band couldn’t stand too much hard use, or it would fall to pieces.

  For now, the Bizogots made the most of victory. They dismounted and methodically finished off any wounded Rulers they found. No one went near the thrashing, crippled war mammoths. “I hate to waste all that meat,” a Bizogot said. “It could feed us for quite a while. But . . .”

  “If we come back tomorrow, we can fight the lions and the bears and the dire wolves and the foxes and the teratorns for the scraps,” Ulric Skakki said. He was bound to be right. The beasts wouldn’t leave so much flesh lying around for long. But right now those mammoths could still kill.

  “We can butcher the deer that went down. They won’t give us any trouble,” Hamnet said.

  “And the horses,” Liv added.

  “And the horses,” Hamnet agreed without enthusiasm. He wasn’t fond of horse meat, and nothing would ever make him like it. But nothing went to waste on the Bizogot steppe. With meat to be had, the nomads would take it.

  Marcovefa looked at the Rulers’ swarthy, curly-bearded corpses. “They would be tasty,” she said. “Plenty of flesh on them—they didn’t go hungry.”

  Well, almost nothing goes to waste on the Bizogot steppe, Hamnet thought. Marcovefa’s clan, up atop the Glacier, thought nothing of eating dead enemies. Life there was even harsher than it was here.

  He shook his head. “People down here don’t do that.” Or if they did do it, they never talked about it. Who could say what went on in poor clans in harsh winters? Even the folk who might have talked wouldn’t; the strongest taboo possible lay on admitting one had tasted man’s flesh.

  “Seems a shame to let them lie there for your birds and big foxes.” Marcovefa used the name she’d made up for dire wolves.

  They’d gone round that pingo before. Instead of doing it again, Hamnet asked: “How strong was the magic the Rulers threw at you?”

  “Nothing special,” she answered. “If my folk could ever come down from the top of the Glacier, they would show the Rulers and everyone else what real rulers are.”

  She was probably right. It might happen one day, as the ice continued to melt and avalanches offered easier paths down. Hamnet Thyssen refused to worry about it. His great-great-grandchildren could do that, if he ever had descendants of his own. Marcovefa had just been talking about dining on his main worry.

  She wouldn’t get away from it, either. “You know,” she said, “with the enemy inside you, you can work real magic against him. You know him in a way you never would without eating him.”

  “No,” Hamnet said again. “Not unless you think you can beat the Rulers all by yourself. No one down here wants anything to do with a cannibal. It may be all right for you, but we have strong bans against eating people.”

  The alarming thing was, Marcovefa thought about it. Only after that consideration did she reluctantly shake her head. “Maybe not by myself,” she said. “Too much might go wrong. But it is a foolish ban.”

  “All customs look foolish to people who don’t follow them.” That wasn’t Hamnet—it was Ulric. “But if you laugh at them, that’s one of the easiest ways I know to make everybody hate you.”

  “When we were up on the Glacier, we stayed polite to your clan,” Hamnet added. “We gave them the m
eat we carried with us—”

  “So they wouldn’t eat you instead,” Marcovefa broke in.

  “Well, yes,” Hamnet said. “But we didn’t try to stop them from butchering their enemies after a fight we helped them win. And we didn’t say anything when they ate men’s flesh. We just didn’t eat any ourselves.”

  “Our customs are right,” Marcovefa maintained.

  “For you,” Ulric said. “Not for everybody. Same with ours.”

  If he hadn’t added the last three words, the shaman from atop the Glacier would have got angry at him. Hamnet Thyssen could see the warning signs on her face. He wouldn’t have wanted to anger any wizard, let alone one as powerful as Marcovefa. But Ulric managed to disarm her. She gave him a grudging nod. “Maybe,” she said.

  The butchery went on. Even if the Bizogots left the hamstrung mammoths alone, they had plenty of meat. Once they saw that, they stopped caring so much about leaving some behind.

  “Not elegant, maybe, but it’s a victory,” Ulric said.

  “We need victories. We don’t see them often enough,” Hamnet replied. “Now we’ve given the Rulers a poke, and we’ll see what they do next.”

  “You have a knack for making everything sound so delightful. You always did.” Ulric Skakki batted his eyes. Count Hamnet picked up a pebble and threw it at him. Ulric’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, but he was laughing. So was Hamnet Thyssen. You could do that after you won a battle.

  Somewhere to the north, the Rulers wouldn’t think anything was funny right now.

  DAYS STRETCHED AS spring advanced. Nights shrank. The air was murmurous with birds and with bugs. Down at Sudertorp Lake, the reed-choked waters by the shore would be full of nesting ducks and geese and swans.

  For years, the Leaping Lynx Bizogots had lived well off the waterfowl: so well that they built stone houses to live in during the spring and summer, though they had to follow the herds the rest of the year. But the Rulers had shattered the Leaping Lynxes the year before.

  “Who’s holding Sudertorp Lake now?” Hamnet asked Trasamund. “Anyone? Have the Rulers garrisoned it?”

  “I don’t think so,” the jarl answered. “By the time they got down there, most of the birds would have flown. They’re strangers here. They might not even know how rich it gets come spring.”

  “Then we ought to go there,” Hamnet said. “If they are taking the waterfowl, we should drive them off if we can. If they aren’t, we ought to take the birds ourselves. The hunting is easy—the Leaping Lynxes show that. We could spend less time tending the herds and more time rousing the Bizogots against the Rulers.”

  Trasamund plucked at his beard. “It could be. I hate to walk in on a clan’s territory when I’m not at war with it, but—”

  “You know the Leaping Lynxes are shattered,” Count Hamnet said. “We’ve got some of them with us. Put it to them, if you want. Ask if they’d rather see the Rulers eating their waterfowl, or if the birds should go to their own kind.”

  The Bizogot chieftain rumbled laughter. “You’re sneakier than you look, Thyssen. If I ask them like that, by God, I know what they’ll say.”

  “That’s the idea,” Hamnet said. “If you ask the question the right way, you’ll get the answer you want.”

  “Unless I don’t,” Trasamund said. “With Bizogots, you never can tell. We are a free people, we are.” He sounded proud of his folk’s freedom.

  Hamnet Thyssen nodded somberly. “Yes. That’s so. And I can’t think of anything that’s done you more harm in your fight against the Rulers. If you made war as a unit instead of by clans that didn’t want to stand with other clans, wouldn’t you have had more luck?”

  He strode off, leaving Trasamund staring after him. As he walked, he wondered, too late, if he’d just sunk his own scheme. If the Three Tusk jarl got angry at him, wouldn’t he be less likely to want to follow a suggestion no matter how sensible it was? Why didn’t that occur to me sooner? he wondered unhappily.

  But he knew the answer. If something came to him, he was likely to say it. He’d helped ruin things with Liv by blurting out questions he should have swallowed. That might have gone wrong anyway, but he’d sure given it a push.

  He must have still been scowling when he came up to Ulric Skakki, because the adventurer said, “What’s gnawing at you now? You look like somebody just told you you’d have rocks for supper.”

  “No, the rocks are in my head. I’ve been stupid.” Hamnet explained how he’d botched things with Trasamund.

  Ulric raised a quizzical eyebrow. “At least you know you messed up. Most people never figure that out.”

  “But how do I keep from making the same mistakes over and over?” Hamnet asked.

  Ulric looked at him. “If I knew the answer to that, don’t you think I’d do it myself? If you find out, let me know.”

  Count Hamnet must not have offended Trasamund too badly. The jarl shouted the rest of the Bizogots into moving toward Sudertorp Lake. On they went, driving their herds before them. They crashed into what had been the grazing grounds of several tribes, but no one complained.

  “Can you imagine the wars we would have started if we tried this journey before the Rulers came?” Trasamund asked, and he let out a gusty sigh.

  “You don’t need to sound so disappointed,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “Scoff all you please,” the jarl said. “The glory of the Bizogot folk is shattered forever.”

  “Not if we can beat the Rulers,” Hamnet said. “Then you can get back a lot of what you lost. . . . Well, some it it, anyhow.”

  “Some, maybe. But so many clans have broken up. So many fine grazing grounds are up for grabs now. The steppe will never be the same.” Trasamund sighed again. “Nothing can ever be the same. When the world crashes down, you don’t lift it up onto your shoulders again.”

  Hamnet winced. His own world had crashed down twice, first when Gudrid left him for whomever she pleased, then when Liv chose Audun Gilli instead of him. His body was seamed with scars from swordstrokes and arrows that had got home. Scars seamed his soul, too. None of the wounds his body bore disabled him. He wasn’t so sure about the ones inside.

  Dire wolves began tracking the musk oxen with the Bizogots. The big wolves knew enough to stay out of bowshot. That meant they weren’t desperately hungry; if they had been, they would have gone for the kill and worried about everything else later. Sometimes there wasn’t much difference between a wolf and a man.

  The dire wolves’ scent was enough to spook the musk oxen. They formed a defensive circle on the plain, the bulls and big cows facing out and protecting the smaller females and calves with their horns. As long as they stayed in the circle, the Bizogots who herded them couldn’t go anywhere, either. That meant the whole band of Bizogots either had to halt or to split and leave the herdsmen behind with the balky beasts.

  Trasamund solved that with direct action, the way a Bizogot jarl might be expected to solve a problem. At his bawled commands, some of the Bizogots attacked the dire wolves. Hungrier wolves might have gone after the horsemen who galloped down on them. This pack turned and ran. Only a couple of them got shot, and one of those didn’t seem badly wounded. It certainly ran off at a good clip.

  The other dire wolf made more more than a few paces before it went down. Blood ran from its mouth. The arrow had pierced a lung, and maybe its heart as well. It writhed and twisted and quickly died.

  “Are they going to leave the carcass there?” Marcovefa sounded shocked.

  “They’ll skin it, I suppose,” Hamnet answered. Sure enough, a Bizogot bent down to do just that.

  “What about the meat?”

  “We have enough,” he said. “The only time we eat dire wolf is when we’re very hungry and can’t get anything better. And some of the Bizogots here are from the Red Dire Wolf clan. They may not eat of their own fetish animal.”

  “That, at least, I understand,” said the shaman from atop the Glacier. “The other . . .” She shook her head. “Y
ou have so much down here. You can afford to waste things. We ate little foxes when we could catch them. You can just leave these big foxes out to rot. So strange.”

  “If you had herds of mammoths and musk oxen, or herds of riding deer like the Rulers, would you still eat fox meat?” Count Hamnet asked.

  “I don’t know. I hope so,” Marcovefa answered.

  With the wolves driven off, the Bizogots shouted and waved and got the musk oxen moving again. It took longer than Trasamund wished it would have. “Miserable, stubborn creatures,” the jarl grumbled.

  “And they’re different from Bizogots because . . . ?” Ulric Skakki asked politely. Trasamund rewarded him with a glare.

  “Their heads are harder,” Count Hamnet suggested.

  “Are you sure?” Ulric didn’t sound as if he believed it.

  “Funny men. Funny as a funeral,” Trasamund said. “Keep joking, funny men, and maybe it will be your funeral.”

  “If the Rulers haven’t killed me yet, I’m not going to lose any sleep about you.” Ulric blew him a kiss.

  Trasamund set a hand on the hilt of his sword. “Maybe you should.”

  “Maybe I should do lots of things I’m not very likely to do,” Ulric replied with a yawn.

  “Maybe one of them is know when to keep your mouth shut,” Hamnet suggested.

  The adventurer looked comically astonished. “There are such times?” Count Hamnet gave up.

  They rode on. Every so often, a small band of Bizogots would join them. Hardly ever did one man come in alone, as might have happened in the Empire. Up here, winters were so hard and long that one man was unlikely to survive them on his own, as he might have in Raumsdalia. The Bizogots had to cooperate to live.

  But the land was too niggardly to support anything more than clans. The only way Hamnet Thyssen saw for the mammoth-herders to go from folk to nation was by conquering richer country farther south—by invading the Raumsdalian Empire, in other words. In days gone by, he’d brooded about such things. Now he needed to brood about a folk that had invaded the Empire, not about one that might.