The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  Another slingstone buzzed past Hamnet. He pointed towards the dismounted men behind the enemy line. “Can you do anything about them?” he asked. “They’re hurting us.”

  “I can try.” Audun’s quick spell was only a small one. It did no more than whip up snow into the slingers’ faces. But that put them off - for a while, anyhow. He sent Hamnet a real smile this time - maybe the first one he’d given him since taking Liv away. “It’s nothing big, and it works mostly because the strong wizards are all busy doing other things.”

  “It does what it needs to do, and no one’s complaining - except those God-cursed slingers,” Hamnet said. “If you stay up at the front of the battle line, try not to get yourself killed right away, all right?”

  “I’ll do my best,” Audun answered. “Are you sure you mean it?”

  “Right away, I told you,” Count Hamnet said. “Liv wouldn’t come back to me even if you did, so you may as well live - for now. We need you - for now.”

  “Would you want her back, since you’ve got Marcovefa?” the wizard asked.

  That question probably deserved more serious consideration than it would get on the battlefield. “I don’t know if I want her back so much,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “I want not to have lost her in the first place, if you know what I mean. D’you see the difference?”

  “I may. Yes, I think so,” Audun Gilli replied. “I wasn’t trying to steal her from you, you know. If she didn’t want to go, she wouldn’t have looked at me - not that way, anyhow.”

  Count Hamnet believed him. But what was meant to be reassuring proved more dismaying than otherwise. Gudrid had been ready to go, and she went. Liv had been ready to go, and she went, too. Why can’t I keep a woman? What will make Marcovefa decide it’s time for her to leave?

  Those questions wouldn’t get answered on a battlefield, either. The lull that had given him a minute or two to talk with the wizard ended. More warriors of the Rulers swarmed towards him on their riding deer. The mounts weren’t everything they might have been, but the men on them were as fierce as short-faced bears. Hamnet had to fight for his life again, slashing with his sword, keeping his shield between his vitals and the enemy’s weapons, and once smashing it into the face of a soldier he couldn’t stop any other way. He picked up a cut over his eye that stung like vitriol and half blinded him as it bled. His sole consolation was that it could have been worse - it could have split his skull, and it almost had.

  A slingstone thudded off his shield. He felt it all the way up his arm to his shoulder. Audun was fighting hard, too - fighting too hard to keep on harassing the slingers. Count Hamnet swore under his breath. Not keeping that spell on would get Raumsdalians hurt, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. Audun Gilli was, he grudgingly supposed, allowed to keep himself alive if he could.

  With a little luck, Raumsdalian horsemen would ride down the slingers before long anyhow. They were bending the Rulers on riding deer back and back on their flanks. If they could surround the enemy altogether, this whole army might get wiped out. Not even Sigvat II could complain about that. . Hamnet supposed.

  He couldn’t worry about the Emperor, either. A warrior on a mammoth came much too close to skewering him with a long lance. He couldn’t do anything about that but duck, hack at the spearshaft, and sidestep his horse to get out of the way. He shook his head, angry at himself. If you didn’t pay attention to what was going on around you, you almost deserved to get speared.

  Was Marcovefa paying as much attention as she should? This was her first big battle. Did she know enough to stay alive on the field? Where had she disappeared to, anyway? Count Hamnet stared across the field in growing alarm.

  Spotting her, he sighed in relief. That was all right. But then, quite suddenly, it wasn’t any more. He chanced to be looking her way when a sling-stone caught her in the side of the head. It was a glancing blow. If it hadn’t been, it would have smashed in her skull like a hammer smashing a rotten melon. Yet even a glancing blow proved quite bad enough. She swayed in the saddle and started to crumple to the ground.

  “No!” Hamnet howled, a cry of despair both for himself and for the fight.

  A Raumsdalian trooper held Marcovefa upright. If she did fall off her horse, she’d soon get trampled by friends and foes impartially. Hamnet spurred towards her, hacking past any enemy warriors who tried to stand against him. He saw them less as foemen than as obstacles like boulders and tree trunks.

  “Hullo, Your Grace,” the trooper said when Hamnet rode up. He was one of the men who’d run from the Rulers once and been forced back into the army at Kjelvik. “She got one right in the pot, I’m afraid.”

  “I saw it,” Hamnet Thyssen answered grimly. He shook Marcovefa. Her limbs were as limp as a fresh corpse’s. His thumb found her wrist. Her pulse still throbbed, and strongly. She lived, anyhow. He had a skin with beer in it on his belt. Holding it to her lips, he wished it were wine.

  She choked, but then swallowed. Her eyelids fluttered. But she wasn’t awake, not in any real sense of the word. Count Hamnet had no idea how badly she was hurt: he was neither healer nor wizard.

  He hoped the Rulers didn’t know how badly she was hurt. When she got knocked cold, what happened to the sorcery that held their spells at bay? Wouldn’t it dissolve like mist on a hot day? How long would they need to realize that?

  He got the answer faster than he wanted to. It wasn’t quite a shout of triumph echoing across the battlefield, but it might as well have been. As soon as the enemy wizards found they could at last work unhindered here ... they did. And the battle, which had inclined towards the Raumsdalians, swung the Rulers’ way as well.

  The trooper grabbed Count Hamnet’s left arm, the one that wasn’t steadying Marcovefa. He pointed into the cloudy sky. “By God!” he shouted. “Did you see that? Did you see it?”

  Maybe because Hamnet was holding Marcovefa, maybe because he was too stubborn to yield easily to anyone’s magic, he hadn’t seen anything. “What?” he asked, his heart sinking.

  “A teratorn!” the trooper cried. “Its claws almost tore my eyes out.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Hamnet said. “There are never any teratorns on a battlefield till the fighting’s over.”

  For a couple of heartbeats, the trooper looked doubtful. He knew that, too, once someone reminded him of it. But then he ducked and quivered. “Another one!” he yelled.

  And Hamnet Thyssen saw it, too, and felt the wind of its passage, and smelled the stench of corruption clinging to its feathers. Was it there? Was it real? If he thought it was, if his senses told him it was, how could he doubt it? Who could guess what the wizards of the Rulers could do with no one there to thwart them?

  Cries of dismay came from all over the field. Whatever the enemy’s wizards were doing here, they were doing everywhere. Fear seemed to rise up from the ground like a poisonous fog and choke the flame of Raumsdalian hopes, which had burned so bright a moment before.

  Desperately, Count Hamnet looked around for Audun Gilli and Liv and the wizards Endil Gris had brought north with him. They probably wouldn’t be able to beat the Rulers’ wizards - nobody but Marcovefa had done that. But they might slow down the enemy’s sorcery and give the Raumsdalians a chance to do with weapons what they couldn’t now with magic.

  There was Audun, incanting as if his life depended on it - which was, no doubt, all too true. A puff of snow leaped up from nowhere and hit him in the face - almost the same trick he’d used against the Rulers’ slingers. It wasn’t deadly. But it made Audun cough and splutter and clap his mittened hands to his face to get snow out of his eyes. While he was busy with that, he couldn’t chant or make passes. When he started again ... he got another sorcerous snowball right between the eyes.

  Where was Liv? Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t see her, or the Raumsdalian wizards. He was sure they were doing all they could - Liv herself had her share and more of stern Bizogot courage. Whatever she and the Raumsdalians were doing wasn’t enough. Even Hamnet fe
lt despair and darkness rising inside him like mold crawling up a dank board.

  Hoping against hope - the only kind of hope he had left - he shook Marcovefa. If only she would come back to herself, everything might yet be saved.

  She moaned and muttered something, but didn’t wake. For all he knew, her skull was broken. She might stay like this for days, or months, or years. Or she might die in the next few minutes.

  “No, God,” Hamnet whispered, as if God were in the habit of paying any attention to what he wanted.

  He leaned over and kissed Marcovefa. The familiar feel of his lips . .. didn’t do much. She murmured again. What could have been the ghost of a smile flitted across her face for a moment. Then it was gone as if it had never been. Hamnet Thyssen swore softly. He might have known his kisses held no magic.

  “What’s wrong, Thyssen?” Runolf Skallagrim cried.

  “Our wizard’s down, curse it,” Hamnet answered.

  “Then we’re ruined!” Runolf was no coward, not without magic curdling his marrow. But he wheeled his horse and rode off to the south as fast as it would go.

  All at once, the Rulers’ riding deer seemed bigger and fiercer than Raumsdalian war horses. Rationally, Hamnet knew that couldn’t be so, but terror drowned common sense. It’s only magic! his mind yammered. It was magic, but it wasn’t only. The mammoths seemed twenty, thirty, fifty feet high, and broad in proportion.

  The Raumsdalian army melted away like the snow when spring finally came to the Bizogot steppe. It was flee or die, flee or be overwhelmed by what didn’t seem to be phantasms at all. And once flight started, it took on a momentum of its own. Hamnet Thyssen was one of the last to leave the field. He brought Marcovefa away in his arms. Even he - or maybe especially he - knew a disaster when he saw one.

  XXI

  Hammnet Thyssen and what was left of his army made it out of the woods again. The one and only piece of good news he took from the lost battle was that the Rulers didn’t press their pursuit. Maybe that showed how close they’d come to losing. If it did .. . well, so what? They hadn’t lost.

  And when would the Empire get out of the woods? Not soon, Count Hamnet feared. He’d had his chance to stop the barbarians, had it and failed with it. Now Raumsdalia lay open to invasion once more. He wouldn’t get this army to fight again, not the way it had.

  He looked around to see who’d lived through the battle. He didn’t see Endil Gris, or Kormak Bersi, either. Where was Marcomer, the Leaping Lynx Bizogot?

  Liv was here. She had a bandage on her forehead. A sword slash, someone had told Hamnet. Even though she wasn’t his anymore, he didn’t like to think of that stern beauty marred. Maybe Audun Gilli knew a spell to hide scars or defeat them altogether. Hamnet could hope so, anyhow.

  Trasamund was telling anyone who would listen about the slaughter he’d wreaked on the Rulers. All the slaughter in the world, though, wouldn’t give him back his clan. He had to know that. Maybe the tale kept him from brooding about it... so much.

  Silent as a snowflake, Ulric Skakki appeared behind Hamnet. The adventurer had a cut on his right arm, and one on his right cheek. He spoke out of the left side of his mouth: “She’s awake.”

  “By God!” Count Hamnet said. “That’s the first thing that’s gone right in awhile. How is she?”

  “She asked the same thing about you,” Ulric answered. “She wanted to come see you, but she’s still too wobbly on her pins.”

  “I’ll go to her.” Hamnet hurried away.

  Marcovefa sat on a wounded horse that had foundered and died. They’d laid her on the animal when they stopped here, to keep her out of the snow and in the hope that what was left of its warmth would help her. Maybe it had. Hamnet wasn’t sure about anything anymore - except that he was glad to see her with reason in her eyes.

  “How are you?” He and she asked the same question at the same time. They both smiled. If his smile was as shaky as hers ... he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

  “My head hurts.” Marcovefa touched her temple very lightly, then jerked her hand away.

  “I believe it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “A slingstone got you. I told you to move farther back from the fighting.”

  To his amazement, her smile got wider. “So you people say, ‘I told you so,’ too? Not just us on top of the Glacier?”

  “We say it,” Hamnet answered. “Sometimes we have reason to say it.”

  “Well, yes.” She waved that aside as casually as if they’d been married for years. “What happened after I got hurt?”

  “They threw magic at us. They threw fear at us. We lost,” Hamnet said. “Why do you think we’re down here? Without you ... we lost. Without you ...” He wondered how to go on. “Without you, it wouldn’t have mattered so much if we won.”

  “I like you, too, but fight is more important now,” Marcovefa said. Count Hamnet bit his lip, but he couldn’t even tell her she was wrong. She looked around. “Can we fight more?”

  “No,” Hamnet said bluntly. “Even with your magic, I don’t think we could make the men stand and fight again soon. The stone knocked you out. You didn’t feel the fear the Rulers threw at us.”

  “I felt it. I held it off,” she said. What that would have been like hadn’t occurred to Hamnet Thyssen. Maybe he was lucky. Marcovefa shook her head very, very carefully. “Don’t think I can do it again now. Head hurts too much. All scrambled up in there.”

  “I believe it. You almost got scrambled for good,” Hamnet said. “This much over” - he held his hands maybe three digits apart - ”and the stone doesn’t hit you sideways.”

  “I know.” Marcovefa looked unhappy. “I fight the magic to a standstill, and a stupid rock does for me. Not seem fair.” Count Hamnet wouldn’t have argued. Where was God while all this was going on? Probably on holiday at the Golden Shrine - there was no sign of him here. Marcovefa went on, “What do we do now, then?”

  “Well, I suppose I have to send messengers back to Nidaros and let Sigvat know we lost.” Hamnet sighed. “I’m really looking forward to that.”

  “You did everything you could. We all did everything we could,” Marcovefa said. “We lost. It happens. Happens up on top of the Glacier, too.”

  “When the Emperor sends someone he doesn’t like out to do a job, that fellow better do it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If he doesn’t, the Emperor will blame him. Otherwise, Sigvat would have to blame himself, and the next time he does that will be the first.”

  “As long as I don’t get my head knocked, we win,” Marcovefa said.

  “But you did,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “And we didn’t.”

  “Don’t do it,” Ulric Skakki said when Count Hamnet chose a messenger to deliver the bad news.

  “I have to,” Hamnet said stolidly.

  “No, don’t,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “We’ll go back to Kjelvik. If we hold there, everything will look a lot better.”

  “How many of the towns in the woods held?” Hamnet said. “What does the Rulers’ magic do to walls?”

  “What will Sigvat do to you when he finds out you lost?” Ulric Skakki returned, which echoed Hamnet’s thoughts uncomfortably well.

  “Won’t the wizard from the north hold those buggers off?” Runolf asked.

  “Not for a while. She can’t do anything much in the way of magic now,” Hamnet answered. “She came too close to getting her head broken like a dropped egg.”

  “How long do we have to wait?” Runolf sounded suddenly apprehensive.

  “No way to tell,” Ulric Skakki said before Count Hamnet could reply. “You get hit in the head, you could be all right in a day or two, or you could go on having headaches and such for weeks.”

  “You sound like someone who knows what he’s talking about,” Hamnet remarked.

  “And don’t I wish I didn’t!” Ulric said. “I’ve got clobbered more times than I wish I had - I’ll say that. Probably why I’m the way I am today.”

  Hamnet, by contrast, had got hit in the heart t
oo often. He reflected that he probably would again. Did you ever get used to such wounds? Could you? Liv hadn’t hurt him so badly as Gudrid, but that wasn’t because he’d got hardened in the intervening years. Far from it. The only difference was, Gudrid took a malicious glee in tormenting him, while Liv seemed sorry she’d decided she had to go.

  Being sorry didn’t stop her, of course. When did it ever?

  Trasamund methodically cleaned blood from his sword and honed it against a whetstone to sharpen the edge and get the nicks out. He nodded to Hamnet. “We’ll have another go at them,” he said. “We almost licked em this time, by God.”

  “Yes.” Hamnet let it go at that. He didn’t want to lower the spirits of anyone who stayed ready to carry on. But he couldn’t help thinking that a horse which almost escaped a sabertooth got eaten just the same.

  And, no matter what Ulric said, Count Hamnet sent the courier off to Nidaros. Sigvat II needed to know what had happened up in the woods. For better or for worse - for better and for worse - the fate of the Empire rested in his hands. And after that. .

  Hamnet hunted up Runolf Skallagrim. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll go down to Kjelvik, the way you said.”

  “About the best thing we can do,” agreed the commandant of that town. “At least we’ll have somewhere to fight from. The wall’s in tolerable shape - you’ve seen it, for God’s sake. And we’ve still got a lot of food in the granaries . . and we’ll be bringing back some more in the supply wagons.”

  “That was my next question,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  How good were the Rulers at siege warfare? They were nomads like the Bizogots. He couldn’t imagine them settling down around Kjelvik and building catapults and siege towers, the way a Raumsdalian army would. But, after a little thought, he could imagine them knocking down the walls with sorcery. How soon would Marcovefa be able to stop them if they tried?

  Runolf had a different thought: “What if they just go on by us, go deeper into the Empire?”