The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  They took no captives. The Rulers tried to flee when they saw things going so far against them, but had no luck - their riding deer couldn’t outrun horses. Three Bizogots died in the fight. Several more were hurt. Ulric Skakki looked at Count Hamnet. “You’re bleeding,” he remarked.

  “Am I?” Hamnet said in surprise. Then he looked down and saw the cut on the back of his hand. As soon as he noticed it, it started to hurt. “So are you.”

  “I know. I know.” Ulric had a scratch on his left ear. He shrugged. “My tunic is stained. So what? It’ll make me look fierce and warlike, won’t it?”

  He looked anything but. That didn’t mean he wasn’t, but he didn’t look as if he were. Like the northern beasts that changed color with the seasons, he concealed his talents as best he could.

  “Tell Marcovefa she did a good job spooking their deer,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “She did, didn’t she?” Ulric looked around for her, then called out in the strange, old-fashioned dialect she used.

  She replied at some length. “What does she say?” Hamnet asked.

  Ulric looked bemused. “She says we’ve been going on and on about how strong their magic is, but it wasn’t anything much.”

  “How does she know?” Hamnet said. “They had no wizard with them.”

  “Good point.” Ulric Skakki put the question into Marcovefa’s tongue. Knowing what he was going to say helped Count Hamnet follow some of it.

  Marcovefa answered volubly. When she spoke, Hamnet could find a word here and there, but not enough to piece together into meaning. “She says you can always tell,” Ulric Skakki reported. “She says you can taste it on the wind, smell it in their sweat.”

  The adventurer shrugged. “I don’t know whether to take that literally or not. Considering her eating habits up on top of the Glacier, I hope I’m not supposed to.”

  Marcovefa scowled at him. She had to understand what he meant. She could follow the regular Bizogot language, but not Raumsdalian, which he’d used - not usually, anyhow. But when she decided to, she understood whatever she wanted. Now she chose to be affronted, or at least to act affronted. It wasn’t the same thing. Were she really angry, she would have made Ulric as sorry as Grippo.

  Trasamund bowed in the saddle to Marcovefa. “For your aid I give thanks, wise woman,” he said. “Any blow against the Rulers is a good one.”

  “They are not so much,” Marcovefa said clearly in the Bizogot tongue. Then she added something Hamnet couldn’t follow.

  Neither could Trasamund. “What was that?” he asked.

  She repeated it. This time, Ulric translated: “They deserve drowning, like little beasts a mother cannot raise. They will get what they deserve.”

  “By God, may it be so,” the jarl boomed. He pointed to the corpses dotting the steppe. “If you’re hungry, you’re welcome to them.”

  Again, Marcovefa spouted gibberish. Again, Ulric translated: “She says she would not touch ill-omened flesh.”

  “That suits me. Let the crows have them, then,” Trasamund said. “We ride on.” And they did.

  They’d swung even farther west than Hamnet Thyssen thought. He expected they would have to travel along the northern edge of Sudertorp Lake, and looked forward to showing Marcovefa the wide expanse of water. (She’d lived her life above a much wider expanse of water, but that didn’t occur to him till later. The Glacier yielded meltwater, yes, but it didn’t really cross his mind when he thought of the lake. It was, or felt like, something altogether different.) But they were west of its westernmost tip, and had to find a way to cross the little Sudertorp River, which flowed out of it. He was stuck with talking about the lake instead of having it there in front of him.

  Through Ulric Skakki, Marcovefa asked, “Why does the water stay in the lake? Why doesn’t it all run out through the river?”

  Count Hamnet frowned at him. “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”

  “Well, yes, but so what?” Ulric said. “You were playing tour guide, and I wasn’t. You do the explaining.”

  “Fine.” Hamnet pointed east, back towards the outlet to the lake. “Tell her about all the dirt and rocks and ice that dam up the end and hold the water in the lakebed. Tell her they’re leftovers from the days when the Glacier came this far south.”

  Ulric did. Hamnet could follow bits and pieces of what he said to Marcovefa, and of what she said to him. That meant he was braced when Ulric translated another question from her: “What would happen if the dam gave way?”

  The idea was plenty to make him shudder. “The biggest flood anybody ever saw. You know about the badlands west of Nidaros, where Hevring Lake flooded and tore everything to pieces. Tell her about those, and tell her we’d have more just like them up here if Sudertorp Lake broke the dam.”

  Ulric did, with gestures. Marcovefa seemed suitably impressed, but Hamnet wondered how much she really understood. How much could she understand, when she’d had so little to do with running water before descending from the Glacier?

  “Where’s the closest ford?” he asked Ulric.

  The adventurer pointed west. “About an hour’s ride that way, I think. There’s a closer one we could use if the water were lower, but I don’t think we could get away with it now.” He knew the steppe like a Bizogot - knew it better than a lot of Bizogots, in fact, for he’d ranged it widely while they stayed on their clan’s grazing grounds most of the time.

  Dire wolves drank by the river. Their heads rose when they saw or heard or smelled the riders coming. They peered towards the approaching Bizogots and Raumsdalians, as if wondering whether to stand their ground and fight. One of them let out a querulous whine. That must have been the signal for all of them to leave. They trotted away, tails held high as if to say they weren’t really afraid.

  “Big foxes,” Marcovefa remarked. “Friendly foxes. They go in bunches, like the musk oxen.” Yes, she was learning the regular Bizogot tongue.

  “Packs. We call them packs,” Trasamund said. “And you wouldn’t think they were so friendly if you ran into them by yourself.”

  Count Hamnet wondered about that. If anyone could stay safe in the company of hungry dire wolves, the shaman from atop the Glacier seemed a likely candidate. But she hadn’t meant they were friendly to people; she was talking about how they behaved with one another.

  Rocks sticking up out of the water showed where the first possible ford lay. Seeing the white water churning around them, Hamnet shook his head. “I don’t think we want to try to get across there,” he said. “Looks like a good way to drown.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t be good with this much water in the river,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “You tell me all kinds of things,” Hamnet replied. “Some of them are true. Some . . .”

  “I’m so insulted.” Ulric laughed out loud.

  They reached the real ford a little later. The water there didn’t get up past the horses’ bellies. It was cold, but that was no great surprise. Marcovefa watched with eyes as wide as a child’s as the horse carried her across to the southern bank. Up above the Glacier, were any streams big enough to make such a thing possible, even if they’d had horses up there? Hamnet didn’t think so.

  “Is this still Leaping Lynx country?” he asked after splashing up onto the far bank.

  “I think so. Or maybe their lands end farther east,” Ulric Skakki answered. “Either way, they’ll be in trouble when the Rulers get this far south.”

  Hamnet Thyssen nodded. The Leaping Lynx clan were rarities: semi-sedentary Bizogots. In winter they roamed like any other mammoth-herders. But in the warm season they lived in stone houses near the eastern edge of Sudertorp Lake. The swarms of waterfowl that bred in the reeds and marshes there gave them so much food, they didn’t have to roam. They wouldn’t even be a moving target when the invaders swept down on them.

  “Hard to feel real sorry for the Leaping Lynxes,” Trasamund said. “They aren’t really proper Bizogots at all.”

  “
Set against the Rulers, everybody from this side of the Glacier is proper,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If we lose sight of that, we lose, and there’s the end of it.”

  The Bizogot jarl grunted. He didn’t want to lose his particularism - it suited him too well. Anything bigger than a clan had to feel artificial to him. “People across the steppe are saying, ‘Well, the Three Tusk clan can’t be proper Bizogots, because they lost a battle and lost their grazing lands,’ “ Ulric Skakki said. “Are they right?”

  “No, by God!” Trasamund shouted.

  But he couldn’t or wouldn’t see that that had anything to do with the way he looked at the Leaping Lynxes. Ulric sighed but didn’t seem surprised. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t surprised, either - saddened, yes, but not surprised. Trasamund always had trouble seeing that he’d made a mistake, or even that he could.

  There wasn’t really time to worry about it or time to quarrel about it. Audun Gilli asked, “Are the Rulers over this river yet?” That was the burning question.

  “If they are, we may find out about it soon,” Hamnet said. “Sudertorp Lake will have pushed them either this way or off to the east. If it is to the east, God help the Leaping Lynxes.” And if it’s not, God help us, he thought.

  “This land is so rich,” Marcovefa said. “It can hold so many. Such a shame to need to fight over it.”

  Hamnet and Ulric looked at each other. She saw the land was richer than the mountaintop sticking up through the Glacier. But she didn’t see how very poor that was. Rich by comparison didn’t mean truly rich - not even close.

  Trasamund pointed. “There are mammoths,” he said.

  In the days before the Gap melted through, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would have welcomed that news. It would have meant more mammoth-herders were close by. Now it might mean mammoth-riders were near. The difference sounded small, but was even bigger than the one between Marcovefa’s homeland and the Bizogot steppe. It was the difference between safety and disaster.

  They approached the mammoths with as much caution as they could muster. If the great beasts belonged to the Rulers, what could Trasamund and those with him do but flee? And what kind of chance would they have if they did? Not good, Hamnet Thyssen thought. No, anything but good.

  But they breathed easier when the man who rode out to see who they were and what they were up to rode a horse, not a deer. The hair under his fur hat was Bizogot yellow, not the shiny black of the Rulers. Even his brand of bluster sounded familiar: “Who the demon are you, and what the demon do you think you’re doing here?”

  “You’re Marcomer, aren’t you?” Hamnet Thyssen shouted back, pleased he remembered the fellow’s name. “We met when I guested with the Leaping Lynxes last year.”

  “Thyssen?” Marcomer called, and Hamnet nodded. The Bizogot barely waited for that before he went on, “What in blazes is going on farther north? We’ve had more people coming down through our grazing grounds than anybody in his right mind would believe. . . And that’s Trasamund with you again, isn’t it?”

  “It’s me, all right.” Trasamund was never shy about speaking for himself. He and Count Hamnet took turns talking about the arrival of the Rulers. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan finished, “It’s even worse than we thought it would be when we came through going north last winter.”

  “We’ve heard some of this from others,” Marcomer said. “We didn’t know how much to believe. Men riding mammoths. . Mad sorceries . . But I’ve got to believe you when you tell me you went to the top of the Glacier. Nobody would be daft enough to make that up and expect the folk who heard him to listen.”

  Marcovefa stirred but held her tongue. She must have realized the Bizogot with the name that sounded like hers wasn’t trying to offend.

  “Will you let us pass on?” Ulric Skakki, as usual, went straight to the point.

  “You ought to go back to the stone houses and talk to the jarl,” Marcomer answered.

  “If we go back to the stone houses, we’re liable to run into folk we don’t want to meet,” Hamnet said. “I hope not, but we don’t care to take the chance.”

  “Folk you don’t want to meet? What are you talking about?” Marcomer might have heard what the travelers told him, but he hadn’t really listened.

  “I don’t know whether the Rulers have come this far south, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hamnet said. “I do know they haven’t come west of Sudertorp Lake, because we would have met them instead of you if they had. But if they have come this far and they’ve gone east of Sudertorp Lake, where are they likely to be?”

  “At the stone houses!” Marcomer went pale. Now he understood what Count Hamnet and Trasamund were talking about. “We’d better send someone over there to warn the jarl.” Without any kind of farewell, he rode back towards the mammoths, shouting at his fellow herders as he went.

  “Well, we livened up his morning, didn’t we?” Ulric Skakki sounded more proud of himself than anything else.

  Before long, Marcomer and another horseman trotted east. Hamnet Thyssen silently wished them luck. Maybe they could warn the rest of the Leaping Lynxes. He feared they were more likely to run headlong into disaster. But that was also part of life - an all too common part.

  “Let’s ride,” Trasamund said. “They won’t kill a mammoth calf for us - I’m sure of that. We need to go on till we find a herd of musk oxen.”

  “Before too very long, we’ll be able to see the tree line,” Hamnet said. “We’re more than halfway across the Bizogot steppe. When we started, I never would have believed we could get this far.”

  “Something to that.” One corner of Ulric Skakki’s mouth quirked up. “I wonder what the Rulers will think of trees. I wonder what their mammoths will think of them.”

  That hadn’t occurred to Count Hamnet. No denying Ulric had something, though, or at least might have something. The land beyond the Glacier was also far beyond the tree line. The unfamiliar terrain might slow down the invaders. Or, on the other hand, it might not. Brilliant, Hamnet thought sardonically. You covered all the choices, and you didn’t settle a cursed thing.

  After that, riding on came as something of a relief.

  The worst, or something close to it, had befallen the Leaping Lynxes. Two days after the meeting by the mammoth herd, Marcomer and several other Bizogots from the lakeside caught up with the travelers from the north from behind. Along with his companions, Hamnet Thyssen had feared they might be warriors of the Rulers.

  “I never got to the stone houses. These - Rulers - attacked before I could,” Marcomer said. “They struck the clan, and they scattered us. Riccimir is dead. He had his quirks, but he was a good jarl.”

  “He was,” Hamnet agreed. The Leaping Lynxes had the richest hunting grounds in the Bizogot country. Riccimir defended them well against other clans, some bigger and stronger than his, that wanted to take them for themselves.

  “Some of our houses fell down,” said one of the Bizogots - a woman - with Marcomer. “The mammoth-riders made a magic, and the houses fell down. The jarl died in the wreck of his, when a rock smashed his head. Then the strangers swept down on us. We tried to fight, but how could we? God only knows what happened to the ones who couldn’t get away.”

  “They’re part of the Rulers’ herd now,” Hamnet Thyssen said. That did nothing to cheer the Leaping Lynxes. He hadn’t thought it would.

  “What can we do?” Marcomer asked. “I want to go back and kill as many of those demons as I can before they get me.”

  That might have done well enough if he were likely to kill any of the Rulers at all before they killed him. As things were, Hamnet answered, “You have a better chance for revenge if you come with us. We think the Empire can fight back against the invaders.” Well, we hope the Empire can, anyhow. That’s not the same thing, even if I don’t want Marcomer thinking about the difference.

  Marcovefa said something incomprehensible. Hamnet looked a question towards Ulric Skakki. The adventurer didn’t sound happy as he translated: “She doesn�
�t understand why we’re getting so upset about the Rulers. She says they’re nothing much.”

  She’d said that before. She’d proved it, too . . . against a raiding party that had no wizard of its own along. “When she beats their shamans, she may talk anyway she pleases,” Trasamund said. “Till then, seeing as we’ve been running from the Rulers ever since we came down from the Glacier - before that, too! - I wish she’d keep her mouth shut.”

  Count Hamnet waited for Marcovefa to resent that, and to show it by making Trasamund do something embarrassing or absurd. But she didn’t - she just smiled and blew him a kiss. The jarl muttered under his breath. He also seemed willing to leave it there, though.

  Audun Gilli tried to look on the bright side: “We’re a stronger party now. If we have to fight the Rulers, we stand a better chance.”

  “Something you really need to learn is the difference between better and good,” Ulric Skakki said. Audun Gilli looked wounded. Hamnet Thyssen would have sympathized with him more if he hadn’t been thinking the same thing. Ulric put it better than he would have and spoke first - that was all.

  When they came down to the tree line the year before, they’d been racing winter - and winter moved south faster than they did. This time, summer was sliding towards fall, but hadn’t got there yet. Although days were getting shorter, nights hadn’t yet outdistanced them. The firs and spruces remained dark, no snow stippling their needles.

  “I’ve heard about trees,” Marcomer said. “I never thought they’d be so big, though.” Up on the Bizogot plain, which began where the forest could no longer grow, wood was an imported luxury, scarce and expensive.

  “I thought they would be bushes,” Marcovefa said. “I thought they would be bushes taller than me. But they aren’t really like that, are they? And he is right. I never thought they would be this big.”