The Golden Shrine

by Harry Turtledove

“We aim to please,” Ulric said loftily. “And you don’t need a cure. You just need better aim yourself sometimes.” That gave Hamnet something new to chew on.

  XI

  A RAUMSDALIAN SCOUT galloped back toward Hamnet Thyssen. “Mammoths!” he shouted. “Stacks of mammoths!”

  Hamnet tried to imagine mammoths piled one atop another. He felt himself failing, which was bound to be just as well. “How far are they?” he asked. “Do the Rulers know we’re here? Are they heading this way?”

  The scout pointed south over his shoulder. “Not very far,” he said as he reined in his blowing horse. “Not far enough, by God! When you get to the top of the next little swell of ground, you’ll see ’em yourself. They didn’t spot me—or I hope like anything they didn’t, anyhow—but they were coming toward us like they mean business. And I bet they do. How the demon do we stop ’em?”

  “Marcovefa!” Count Hamnet called. “Did you hear what he said?”

  “I heard,” she answered. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Narfi asked a good question. How the demon do we stop them?” Hamnet said. “Will the spell you used against the war mammoth in the last fight work again? Can you use it over and over, till all the Rulers’ mammoths fall down dead?”

  “If nothing wards them, it will work.” Marcovefa seldom lacked for confidence. “I can use it again and again. If they have stacks of mammoths, I cannot kill them all, though. I get too tired. It is like screwing—sometimes all you can do is all you can do.”

  “Heh,” Hamnet said uneasily. Only Marcovefa would have connected lovemaking and murderous magic. It never would have occurred to him, anyway. In his mind, the two amounted to the same thing, regardless of whether or not they really were. “Form line of battle!” he yelled. “The Rulers are heading this way with mammoths! Marcovefa will take care of them for us.” I hope, he added, but only to himself. “We’ll finish off the buggers on riding deer or horses or rabbits.”

  “Rabbits?” Ulric Skakki said, stringing his bow.

  “You never can tell,” Hamnet answered. He pointed south himself. “There are the ones on mammoths.”

  Those war mammoths might not have come in a stack, but they surely came in a swarm. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so many of them all in a line. Several Rulers sat atop each one: the man who guided it, a lancer with a long spear, and anywhere from one to three archers. They shouted when they spied the Raumsdalians and Bizogots ahead of them.

  “Any time you’re ready,” Count Hamnet told Marcovefa, in lieu of shrieking, For God’s sake do something about them!

  Her crooked grin said she had a good notion of what he wasn’t saying. He was embarrassed, but only a little. He couldn’t work up a whole lot of shame over fearing war mammoths. Who in their right mind didn’t?

  Marcovefa didn’t. Her grin got wider. “More mammoth meat than we can eat. Plenty for big birds, big foxes,” she promised. Hamnet couldn’t see dire wolves as big foxes, but she did. She pointed her right forefinger at the closest war mammoth and chanted the little tune in her own dialect. Hamnet Thyssen waited for the war mammoth to drop dead. He waited. And he waited. And he waited some more.

  And nothing happened.

  Marcovefa stared at her index finger with the indignant reproach a man might give his bow if the string snapped when he needed it most. She aimed again. She chanted again. Hamnet waited again.

  Nothing happened again—or, possibly, nothing still happened.

  “Um, I don’t mean to fuss or anything, but if she’s going to do something, she ought to do it pretty soon,” Ulric said.

  “It doesn’t look like the magic’s going to work today,” Hamnet told him.

  “Well, well. Isn’t that interesting?” Ulric replied. Between the two of them, they’d given themselves perhaps the most casual death sentence in the history of the world.

  “Do you know what’s wrong?” Count Hamnet asked as Marcovefa sent her forefinger another black look.

  “They are warded. They must be warded.” By the way she said it, she might have accused the Rulers of gambling with loaded dice. Still scowling at her finger, she went on, “I did not think the Rulers would figure out what I did so fast.”

  “Some of them must have got away after you killed that one mammoth,” Hamnet said, and she nodded bleakly. He asked, “If you can’t kill this lot, what can we do to them?”

  “Fight them. They are still flesh.” But Marcovefa couldn’t help adding, “They are a whole great glacier of flesh.”

  Count Hamnet would have called them a mountain of flesh, but it amounted to the same thing either way. Trouble. Deadly trouble.

  “Why aren’t the miserable things dying?” Trasamund demanded.

  That was a good question. If the mammoths didn’t start dying, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would. “Technical difficulties,” Count Hamnet answered, that being easier than admitting Marcovefa wasn’t up to murdering mammoths at the moment.

  Trasamund might have been a barbarian from the frozen steppe, but he wasn’t a stupid barbarian. He understood what Hamnet meant when Hamnet didn’t say it. “She can’t do ’em in, eh?”

  “Not right now. Doesn’t seem that way, anyhow,” Hamnet replied.

  “So what do we do about them, then?” the jarl inquired.

  “Fight them. What else can we do?” Another answer did suggest itself to Hamnet Thyssen. But if he screamed Run away!—even more to the point, if he matched action to word—he wouldn’t win Trasamund’s respect. In fact, he’d throw away as much of it as he already had.

  “Fight them. Right,” the Bizogot said tightly. His folk had tried that against the Rulers time after time, up on their home terrain. They’d lost time after time, too. Trasamund’s Three Tusk clan was a shattered wreck, although he’d been coming back from the Empire when the invaders swept down through the Gap and beat its warriors.

  “Oh, come on.” Ulric Skakki sounded absurdly cheerful. “It’ll be as simple as a Bizogot in a dice game.”

  “You’ll answer for that, Skakki,” Trasamund said. “As soon as we’ve walloped these scuts, you’ll answer to me.”

  “Looking forward to it.” Ulric still sounded happier than he might have.

  Count Hamnet turned to Marcovefa. “All right—you can’t work the spell you would have wanted to. Can you do anything else to keep the mammoths from trampling all of us?” Again, he didn’t say, By God, you’d better be able to! He didn’t say it, no, but he thought it very loudly.

  He must have thought it loudly enough for Marcovefa to pick it up. Or maybe his face gave him away. She smiled and said, “Everything will be all right.” But even she didn’t sound sure of that, for she went on, “They have better warding than usual for them—beasts and men.”

  “Wonderful,” Hamnet said. Better-warded mammoths than usual, and more mammoths than usual, too. Put them together and you had—what? A disaster was the first thing that occurred to him.

  One of the Raumsdalians who’d joined his band must have come to the same conclusion. With a wail of despair, the man wheeled his horse and fled long before the Rulers drew close enough to harm him. “Somebody ought to slaughter the worthless coward,” Trasamund growled.

  “He’s not worth wasting an arrow on,” Ulric replied.

  Trasamund looked disgusted. “You only say that because he’s one of your folk.”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a Bizogot galloped away just as fast as the Raumsdalian had a moment earlier. “He’s not worth wasting an arrow on, either,” Ulric Skakki observed.

  “I thank God he is no man of my clan. Bad enough he is any kind of Bizogot.” Trasamund still looked—and sounded—revolted.

  Hamnet Thyssen wondered why. If Marcovefa couldn’t stop the Rulers’ mammoths, what would keep the invaders from rolling over this makeshift army and then going on with their war against Sigvat and whatever was left of the Raumsdalian Empire here in the south? Nothing Hamnet could see.

>   Ulric had to be thinking along the same lines, for he said, “Maybe we should all run away. Our chances here don’t look so good, do they?”

  “We can beat the Rulers. Why did we come back down into Raumsdalia if we didn’t think we could beat the Rulers?” Trasamund said angrily. “I am not going to run from them any more. I have done too much running, more than any self-regarding Bizogot should ever do.”

  “Did you really plan on fighting all the war mammoths in the world at the same time?” Ulric exaggerated, but by less than Hamnet wished he did. Trasamund set his massive jaw and nodded. Ulric sighed. The Bizogot jarl wasn’t going to listen to anything or anybody right now. Ulric said, “If you insist on getting killed yourself, do you have to insist on killing all your friends, too?”

  “I insist on nothing.” Trasamund pointed off toward the north. “There is plenty of open space. You can save your skin, if you love it so much. Go ahead and run. See if I care.”

  The adventurer bowed in the saddle. “As always, Your Ferocity, I thank you for the encouragement.”

  “You aren’t funny, either,” Trasamund added. “Always saying one thing when you mean the other—it gets old, Skakki. It gets old.”

  “Literary criticism and generalship, both from the same man. Who could have imagined it?” Ulric was so ostentatiously calm, he made Hamnet Thyssen think Trasamund had struck a nerve. The adventurer went on, “I will run when you do, Your Ferocity. Have you ever known me to run when you didn’t?”

  Trasamund wanted to say yes to that. When he opened his mouth, Hamnet could all but see the word on the tip of his tongue. But he didn’t let it out. Hamnet knew why he didn’t, too: he couldn’t. Since he was a truthful man, he answered, “Well, no,” as grudgingly as he could.

  “There you are, then,” Ulric Skakki said. “Here you are, then. Here we all are, then. Here we all are, then, in the same place. Here we all are, then, in the same boat. If you have any good ideas about how we all get out of it together—except running away, I mean—I’d love to hear them.”

  As Trasamund had before, he said, “If we can’t beat the war mammoths, we have to beat the Rulers.”

  “Finding out how you propose to go about that would be nice,” Ulric observed. Hamnet thought so, too. Trasamund glared instead of answering. Regretfully, Hamnet decided the jarl had no answer. Or rather, he had the same old answer: fight like a demon, and hope you came out on top. Hamnet would have liked that one better if it hadn’t already proved wrong so often. By Ulric’s expression, he felt the same way. With Trasamund so notoriously hard of listening, though, why point it out?

  Count Hamnet glanced toward Marcovefa again. “Where are their wizards?” he asked her. “If you can do something about them, maybe you can do something about the mammoths a little later.” Not much later, he hoped—the massive beasts were getting closer alarmingly fast.

  Marcovefa looked angry and frustrated at the same time. “Don’t know where the vole pukes are,” she snarled. “They pretend to be nothing but ordinary warriors.” She said something that sounded incendiary in her own dialect. In irate Raumsdalian, she added, “Pretend too stinking well, too.”

  What did that mean? Did the Rulers’ wizards know they were facing Marcovefa? Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean. The Rulers had little trouble against any other wizards they’d run into on this side of the Glacier. Marcovefa, though, they respected—and, very likely, feared.

  Of course, they also seemed to respect, and perhaps even fear, Hamnet himself. And if that didn’t say they weren’t as smart as they thought they were, Hamnet didn’t know what it was likely to say.

  Trasamund pointed toward the oncoming mammoths. “We should advance against them,” he said. “The worst thing you can do is meet the enemy’s charge standing still.”

  Hamnet would have thought the worst thing you could do was not meet the charge. Retreat and flight didn’t seem to enter Trasamund’s mind at all. Count Hamnet wished they didn’t enter his. If you were going to fight and not run, Trasamund gave good advice. Hamnet booted his horse forward. All along the line, Raumsdalians and Bizogots were doing the same. Nobody seemed enthusiastic, but nobody hung back. Hamnet usually admired that kind of dogged courage. Today, he wondered if it wasn’t harebrained, not dogged.

  “There they are!” Marcovefa exclaimed, but by then arrows were already starting to fly. Whatever Marcovefa did to the Rulers’ wizards, she would have to do on her own.

  Or so Hamnet thought, till he saw a host of Raumsdalian lancers burst from an orchard off to the east. They took the Rulers in the flank, spearing men on riding deer and rushing toward the enemy’s war mammoths. He wondered how she could conjure up so many men and make them seem so convincing.

  Then he recognized the fellow leading the Raumsdalians: Baron Runolf Skallagrim, an old acquaintance of his, and a recent comrade-in-arms. Marcovefa knew Runolf, too. But could she have remembered him well enough to put him at the head of an imaginary army? Why would she do that when adding one more imaginary warrior was bound to be easier?

  “They’re real!” Hamnet exclaimed. “They’ve got to be real!”

  Ulric Skakki looked quite humanly surprised. “You mean your lady’s not just spitting phantasms at the Rulers?”

  “Phantasms, my left one,” Hamnet answered. “Look! Tell me that’s not Runolf Skallagrim in charge of them and I’ll say they’re phantasms.”

  “Well, bugger me blind,” Ulric said gravely after looking.

  Baron Runolf had commanded the garrison at Kjelvik, another northern town. He’d fought the Rulers with Hamnet and Marcovefa the winter before—and fled with them when a slingstone knocked Marcovefa out of the fight and let the Rulers’ terrifying wizardry prevail. And he’d let Hamnet and his friends leave Kjelvik for the Bizogot country when Sigvat wanted to haul Hamnet down to Nidaros and make him pay the price for failure.

  Count Hamnet hadn’t seen Runolf since coming back to Raumsdalia. He’d assumed that either the Rulers or Sigvat had done for his old friend. He’d never been gladder to find himself wrong.

  The Rulers hadn’t expected to get attacked from the flank as well as the front. Hamnet Thyssen had seen what surprise could do to Raumsdalians and Bizogots. The Rulers might be vicious invaders from beyond the Glacier, but they were also human beings. When everything went the way they expected it to, they were as near invincible as made no difference. When taken by surprise, they proved no less immune to panic than anybody else.

  Runolf’s men slammed through the Rulers on riding deer. They would have slammed through a like number of Bizogots, too. The blonds who roamed the steppe below the Glacier didn’t have lancers armored head to foot in plate and chain, or the big heavy horses they would have needed to carry those armored lancers. Some of Runolf’s troopers even rode armored horses.

  That didn’t mean they could face mammoths on equal terms. But a charging lancer was something warriors on mammothback couldn’t ignore. A couple of Raumsdalians drove sharp steel into the bellies and legs of the Rulers’ immense mounts. Mammoths liked getting speared no better than any other animals—or any people—would have. They screamed and bled and were lost to the fight.

  Most of the time, the Rulers’ wizards would have done something horrible to Runolf Skallagrim’s knights before they got close enough to threaten the riding deer, let alone the mammoths. Not here. Not today. Whatever sorcerers the Rulers had with them had frustrated Marcovefa by not showing themselves. She frustrated them by blocking not only the spells they aimed at her force but also the ones they tried to use against Runolf’s men.

  All that left the fight pretty much the way it would have been if there were no such things as wizards and shamans. And, if anything, it left the Rulers even more discomfited than they would have been if merely—if that was merely—struck in the flank by surprise.

  Trasamund bellowed in delight when one war mammoth after another turned around and lumbered off to the south. “Run, cowards!
Run!” he roared after the retreating Rulers. “Can’t stand it when real men come up against you, can you? Yes, run, you scuts!”

  One of the main reasons the Rulers were running was a woman, not a man. Hamnet Thyssen almost pointed that out to Trasamund. Almost, but not quite—he didn’t feel like quarreling with the jarl. And he had worries of his own. Retreating southward, the Rulers only moved farther into the Raumsdalian Empire. He wanted to drive them out of it, not entrench them in it more deeply.

  Mammoths also moved faster than horses. If the Rulers on mammoth-back intended to get away, he couldn’t do anything about it. Marcovefa might have, but the enemy’s wizards still left her as thwarted as she left them. That added up to a victory of sorts for the Rulers, though not one they were likely to appreciate.

  Hamnet rode toward Runolf Skallagrim. “Well met, by God!” he called.

  “That you, Thyssen?” Baron Runolf answered his own question: “I’ll be damned if it isn’t. I figured the bastards on the mammoths would have done for you by now, or else the Emperor.”

  “That’s funny,” Hamnet said, though he wasn’t laughing. “Bugger me blind if it isn’t. I figured either Sigvat or the Rulers would’ve done for you by now, too.”

  Runolf laughed. He was older and grayer than Hamnet, and less inclined to brood about things. (As far as Hamnet knew, Runolf had never had a woman betray him, which might or might not have meant something.) “Nah, not me,” he said now. “The Rulers have become close a time or three, but I managed to talk Sigvat out of it.”

  “Did you?” Hamnet said, deeply impressed. “More luck than I ever had. How the demon did you pull that off?”

  “I told his courier I’d rise against him if he tried to arrest me,” Runolf answered stolidly. “Sigvat must’ve believed me, because he hasn’t given me any guff since.”

  “Good for you,” Ulric Skakki said. “Good for you!” He turned to Hamnet. “You see? You’re too loyal for your own good. Sigvat got away with doing all kinds of things to you that he never would have dared to try if he’d been a little bit more afraid of what you’d do to him.”