The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  Arnora set a hand on his shoulder and shook him. “What about us?” she said with drunken intensity. “Don’t you want to be intereshting - interesting - too?”

  “My reputation would never be the same if I said no,” the adventurer replied. “I aim to please, and God forbid I should fail in my aim.” He rose, too, more smoothly than Marcovefa had done, and went off into the deepening twilight with his scar-faced lady friend.

  That didn’t quite leave Hamnet and Liv all alone, but not many people were close by, and none of them paid any attention to the Raumsdalian noble and the Bizogot shaman. “Well?” Liv said, an odd note of challenge in her voice. “Shall we?”

  “I’m with Ulric,” Hamnet replied. “I aim to please, too.”

  They went into one of the tents and slid under a mammoth-hide blanket. Bizogots lived in one another’s pockets, especially during the long, hard northern winters, and needed less in the way of privacy than Raumsdalians did. They were better at looking the other way and pretending not to hear, too. By now, Hamnet had spent enough time among them to worry less about who might be watching and listening than he would have down in Nidaros.

  All the same, he wasn’t sure how well he would respond after everything he’d eaten and drunk. Making love with a full belly took more effort nowadays than it had when he was younger. And his quarrels with Liv didn’t help, either.

  But he succeeded. By the way she responded, he was better than good enough tonight. “You do still care,” she murmured as they lay in each other’s arms afterwards, their hearts slowing towards calm.

  “I’ve always cared,” he answered.

  “Too much, maybe.” Liv had said that before.

  Hamnet Thyssen frowned. “How can a man care too much about a woman?”

  “Easy enough,” Liv said. “If you care so much, if you worry so much, that you drive her away instead of pulling her towards you, isn’t that too much?”

  “Are you saying I do that?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” she replied, which was just polite enough to hold off a row. “But sometimes not, too.” She caressed him. “Not is better.”

  “Better for you, maybe,” he muttered.

  He was lucky: she didn’t hear him. She sprawled across him, warm and soft and, for the moment, happy. He found himself yawning. He didn’t usually fall asleep right after making love, but he didn’t usually eat and drink as much as he had beforehand, either. His eyes slid shut. He and Liv both started to snore about the same time.

  Liv woke Hamnet the next morning by poking him in the ribs. His automatic response was to grab for his sword. Then he discovered he wasn’t wearing it - or anything else. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “But it’s noisy out there, and it doesn’t sound like good noise. We’d better find out.”

  Hamnet listened and found himself nodding. No, the racket out there didn’t sound happy. If that wordless keening wasn’t a woman in mourning, then it was a woman desperately ill. The groaning man also sounded none too healthy.

  Despite the noise, some of the Bizogots in the tent stayed asleep. Others, like him and Liv, were waking up. Down in the Empire, Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to get out from under the blanket and dress with so little privacy. He especially wouldn’t have wanted Liv to put herself on display like that. Bizogot customs were different, though. He didn’t worry about it... much.

  The bright sunlight hurt his eyes and made his head ache. Yes, he’d poured down too much smetyn the night before. But he wasn’t nearly so bad off as Trasamund and Marcovefa. Their moans and groans had fooled Liv and him into thinking some real disaster had befallen the Snowshoe Hares.

  Trasamund found a skin of water and poured it over his head. He came out blowing and snorting like a grampus. Then he found a skin of smetyn. That he applied internally. “I’ll be better in a while,” he said. “The hair of the dire wolf that bit me.”

  Marcovefa said something that sounded pitiful. Hamnet Thyssen looked around for Ulric Skakki and didn’t see him. Maybe the adventurer figured out what the commotion was about. Or maybe he was just an uncommonly sound sleeper. Without Ulric around, Hamnet had to work out for himself what Marcovefa meant. He pointed to a skin of water and mimed pouring it over her. She looked at him through bloodshot eyes, then nodded.

  She spluttered and coughed, then gasped out something Hamnet only half followed. He thought it meant, This is supposed to make me feel better?

  “Here.” Trasamund thrust a skin of smetyn at her and showed her she was supposed to drink from it.

  She recoiled in horror, water dripping from her hair and her chin and the end of her nose. The way she held out her hands as she spoke told Hamnet what she had to mean - that she didn’t want to get near smetyn ever again.

  “Curse it, Thyssen, tell her it’ll make her feel better, not worse,” Trasamund said.

  “I’ll try,” Count Hamnet told him. And he did, with the regular Bizogot speech and the few words of Marcovefa’s dialect he thought he knew and a lot of gestures. She didn’t want to believe him, for which he could hardly blame her. If it had poisoned her once, why wouldn’t it poison her again?

  He tried to show her that a little would help but a lot would make things worse. At last, warily, she drank. It wouldn’t be a miracle cure; Hamnet knew that from somber experience. But chances were it would do her some good.

  Euric looked more sympathetic than Count Hamnet had thought he would. He even kissed Marcovefa on the cheek. She must have pleased him when they went back into his tent together. What would she be like under a blanket? That was probably not the kind of question Liv wanted him asking himself.

  Even if Marcovefa had pleased the jarl of the Snowshoe Hares, Euric did his best to wiggle out of the bargain he’d made with her the day before. He didn’t refuse to turn over a dozen horses. He did do his best to give the refugees the dozen worst the clan owned. A couple of them were visibly on their last legs. None of the ones he wanted to turn over looked capable of anything more than a lazy canter.

  A few swigs of smetyn had made Marcovefa more nearly reconciled to staying alive. Ulric took her aside and murmured in her ear. When she pointed at Euric, he blanched. She spoke. Ulric translated: “She says not to be niggardly. If you can’t give with both hands, at least give with one.”

  “But - ” Euric began. Then he swallowed whatever else he might have been about to say. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble figuring out why. After what he and Marcovefa had done the night before, she was able to work the most intimate kind of magic against him. He didn’t know she would, but he didn’t know she wouldn’t, either. Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to take that chance himself.

  Then he glanced over to Liv - glanced more nervously than he wished he would have. Whatever Marcovefa could do to Euric, Liv could do to him . . . if she decided she wanted to. When you fell in love with, or even made love with, a shaman, you took chances you didn’t with an ordinary woman.

  Euric did give with one hand. He still passed on some of his clan’s horrible screws, but he also gave away some horses that didn’t look as if a strong breeze would blow them over. He sighed and moaned and mourned about every one of them, so much so that Hamnet wondered if he was laying it on too thick. But Hamnet knew more than a little about horses himself, and the replacements weren’t bad animals. Euric was just unhappy he had to give them up.

  With half the Bizogots and Raumsdalians mounted but the rest still on foot, the band of refugees moved no faster than it had before. If the clan south of the Snowshoe Hares had enough horses to let everybody here ride, things would pick up. In the meantime, the nags didn’t slow the travelers down.

  Liv and Arnora and Marcovefa rode most of the time. The men took turns on the other horses. Hamnet didn’t mind walking. He’d got used to it. He did begrudge their sorry pace, though. “Who knows what the Rulers are doing farther east?” he said.

  “Come on - you know and I know and the rest of us know,”
Ulric Skakki said. “They’re chewing up every Bizogot clan that gets in their way.”

  Hamnet Thyssen winced, not because he didn’t find that likely but because he did. He wished Ulric hadn’t been so blunt. “You don’t think we’ll be able to pull the Bizogots together to fight them, do you?” he said.

  “Well, it gets harder when they’re going south faster than we are,” Ulric replied - another painful truth.

  “We may have to ride south and warn the Empire,” Hamnet said. “When we get the horses to do it, I mean - and if it’s not too late by then.”

  “Yes. If.” Ulric was nothing if not discouraging. But then, with the way things were, there was too much to be discouraged about.

  They got no help from the Rock Ptarmigans. Well before they found the clan’s encampment, Hamnet Thyssen began to fear that might be so. His first moment of worry came when the travelers approached a herd of mammoths.

  The beasts awed Marcovefa. “The Rulers ride these, you say?” she asked, and Hamnet had no trouble following her.

  “That’s right,” Ulric Skakki answered.

  “Well, I can see why,” Marcovefa said. Then she added something Hamnet couldn’t follow. Ulric translated: “She wants to know if there are any beasts bigger than these.”

  “Some of the forest mastodons get a little bigger, I think, but not much,” Hamnet said. Ulric nodded. As he relayed that, Count Hamnet went on, “But whales are supposed to be a lot bigger than any mammoths or mastodons, aren’t they?”

  Getting the idea of whales across to Marcovefa wasn’t easy. Getting the idea of the sea across to her was even harder. She understood what streams and ponds were. But a pond full of salt water, bigger than the Glacier and deeper than a mountain was tall, strained her credulity.

  Again, she spoke too fast for Count Hamnet to keep up with her. “She says we’re joking with her. She says that just because the mammoths and the musk oxen turned out to be true, now we think she’ll believe anything,” Ulric reported.

  Hamnet Thyssen raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “By God, it’s the truth,” he said. Marcovefa didn’t care much for God, either, and remained unconvinced.

  “Nobody’s riding out to see who the demon we are,” Trasamund said. “That’s not how things ought to work.”

  He was right. Bizogots were as territorial as bad-tempered dogs. They should have spotted the strangers and come forth to challenge them, maybe to try to order them off the clan’s land. Her voice troubled, Liv said, “I don’t think there are any men with those mammoths.”

  As Count Hamnet drew closer to the herd, he decided Liv was right. And that was out of the ordinary, out of the ordinary in a bad way. Hamnet had trouble imagining any innocuous reason why the Bizogots would let a herd of mammoths wander on its own. Those animals meant food and wool and hides to the clan. Knowing where they were at a given moment was no light matter.

  Audun Gilli nodded. “No dogs, either.”

  “More likely to see dogs around musk oxen than around mammoths,” Trasamund said. “Musk oxen pay attention to them, because dogs remind them of dire wolves. But dire wolves don’t trouble mammoths, except maybe to nip in and kill a calf once in a while, so mammoths don’t care so much about them. Still. . .”

  “It’s not a good sign,” Ulric Skakki said, and the jarl of the Three Tusk clan nodded.

  The mammoths didn’t seem to care much about strangers on horseback, either. The Rulers really tamed their mammoths. The Bizogots followed them, sometimes guided them, and used them, but the mammoths here below the Glacier remained their own masters in a way dogs and horses and even musk oxen didn’t.

  When Trasamund’s Bizogots and the Raumsdalians with them came upon a herd of musk oxen with no riders or dogs nearby, Hamnet Thyssen began to worry in earnest. The Rock Ptarmigans would have had to have someone along to keep an eye on animals even more vital than mammoths . . . wouldn’t they?

  A cow musk ox was trailing the herd. Trasamund and some of the Bizogots from his clan cut the beast away from its fellows and killed it. After the feast Count Hamnet had had with the Snowshoe Hares, he’d been groaningly certain he would never want to eat again. A couple of days of travel showed him how foolish that was. He stuffed himself full of tough, stringy, half-charred musk-ox meat, and he was glad to get it.

  When morning came, Ulric Skakki pointed to the southwest. Count Hamnet didn’t need long to spot the carrion birds sliding down from the sky. “There are a lot of them,” he said. “More than there would be for a dead musk ox.”

  “More than there would be for a dead mammoth, too,” Ulric said. “What do you want to bet? - that’s where the Rock Ptarmigans had their camp.”

  “Keep that bet or find a fool,” Hamnet answered. “I won’t touch it.”

  “If we weren’t fools, what would we be doing up here?” Ulric asked: much too good a question.

  The Bizogots and Raumsdalians rode and walked towards the spot where the birds were landing. More and more birds kept coming: crows and ravens, vultures and teratorns, even owls and hawks hungry for meat that hadn’t got too high. Before the travelers saw corpses, they saw mammoth-hide tents in the distance and nodded to one another. Yes, this was where the Rock Ptarmigans had lived.

  And this was where the Rock Ptarmigans had died. Owls and hawks notwithstanding, the stench of death filled the air. Corpses of Bizogots and their dogs sprawled in unlovely death among the tents. The scavengers rose in skrawking, screeching clouds as the travelers neared. Teratorns, some of them with wingspans more than twice the height of a man, had to run along the ground before they could get airborne.

  “Do you see any wounds on those bodies?” Trasamund asked heavily.

  “After the birds, would we?” Hamnet Thyssen returned.

  “Some,” Trasamund said. “Yes, some, by God. Do you see any arrows? Do you see any broken spearshafts? Do you see any signs of battle?”

  Looking around, Hamnet didn’t. Cold chills walked up his back. “What killed them, then?” he asked.

  Before Trasamund could answer, Marcovefa and Liv began to keen at the same time. They looked at each other in surprise, but both kept on. Audun Gilli didn’t keen. He was on horseback, and leaned over and noisily lost the meat he’d eaten for breakfast. Spitting and coughing, he gasped out one word: “Magic.”

  “Strong magic. Foul magic,” Liv added. Marcovefa said something in her own language. Ulric Skakki didn’t translate it, but Count Hamnet had no trouble guessing what it meant.

  “If the Rulers can do this . . .” Trasamund didn’t go on.

  Ulric did: “If they can do this, the Empire is in even more trouble than we thought it was. We need to get down there as fast as we can.”

  “Bugger the Empire! What about the rest of the Bizogots?” Trasamund roared.

  “What about them?” Ulric looked him in the eye. “Odds are we write them off, because they’re already lost anyhow.”

  Trasamund gaped. He must not have looked for the adventurer to be so frank. Count Hamnet could have told him that was a mistake. If anyone didn’t like such forthrightness, Ulric Skakki lost no sleep about it.

  “If the Empire can beat the Rulers, we’ll redeem the Bizogots,” Hamnet said. “If the Empire loses, we’re all ruined together.”

  Audun Gilli pointed past the encampment that death had struck. “Aren’t those the Rock Ptarmigans’ horses?” he said.

  The death that had struck men and dogs spared the horses, as it had spared mammoths and musk oxen. Count Hamnet supposed the Rulers expected to use the herd animals for themselves. They wouldn’t have got to use the horses unless they showed up soon, though, not when the beasts were tied in a line. If dire wolves didn’t find them, they would soon perish for want of water and food.

  “I didn’t want to get mounts for the rest of us like this,” Trasamund muttered as he cut the animals loose one after another.

  “Better us than . . . them.” Hamnet Thyssen looked east. “I wonder if they’re on
the way now.”

  “We can’t fight them.” Trasamund sounded as if he wanted Hamnet to tell him he was wrong.

  But the Raumsdalian nodded. “I know we can’t. The best thing we can do is disappear before they get here. Chances are they’ll just think we’re a band of brigands who happened on the camp before they did.”

  “Well, what else are we?” Ulric Skakki sounded proud, not ashamed.

  Trasamund didn’t gape this time - he glared. However much he must have wanted to, though, he did no more than glare. Count Hamnet took that to mean he feared Ulric was right. Hamnet cut another horse free and watched it start to graze. He feared Ulric was, too.

  XII

  Hamnet grew hardened to the saddle. With the horses from the Rock Ptarmigans’ camp, the travelers could switch mounts as beasts tired, which let them travel till they got too weary to go on themselves. The long days and twilight-filled nights of the Bizogot steppe in summer also kept them going longer than they would have at any other season of the year.

  Riding straight south, or rather a little east of south, would have taken them to Nidaros by the shortest route. Hamnet would have liked to go that way. But trying it was also more likely to make them bump into the Rulers. And so they went south and west, away from the newcomers who had irrupted into the land of the Bizogots.

  Trasamund and his clansmates didn’t know much about the clans who dwelt on that part of the plain. Ulric Skakki, by contrast, had been there before, and was on good terms with several of the jarls they met.

  “This is embarrassing,” Trasamund whispered to Hamnet Thyssen after the jarl of the Green Geese greeted Ulric like a long-lost brother. “What business does a Raumsdalian have knowing Bizogots better than a Bizogot does?”

  “Why ask me?” Hamnet said. “Why not ask Ulric, or even Grippo here?” Grippo was jarl of the Green Geese. Hamnet went on, “Ulric would tell you. You know that.”

  “And he’d gloat while he was doing it,” Trasamund said. “He gloats even when he doesn’t know he’s gloating.”