The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “They wouldn’t do that!” Hamnet exclaimed - by which he meant he wouldn’t do that himself. But the Rulers? They might be a different story. So what if they had enemy soldiers behind them? If they were confident they could beat any force that came up against them, why would they worry? And wouldn’t they have more warriors moving down into Raumsdalia off the Bizogot plains?

  I’m full of cheerful notions today, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Nothing like losing a battle to bring such ideas bubbling to the surface like noxious gases from the asphalt pits of the far southwest.

  Wounded men’s moans did nothing to lift his spirits. He spotted Audun Gilli doing what he could to help some of the worst-hurt men with his magic. After a while, Audun looked up and nodded to him. The wizard looked weary, and who could blame him?

  A yawn that surprised Count Hamnet told him how weary he was himself. He also realized how hungry he was. He had a couple of hard rolls in a belt pouch - they were even harder now than they had been when they went in there. Men were carving steaks from dead horses and roasting them.

  If you were used to beef and mutton, horsemeat tasted like glue. If you’d eaten all kinds of strange things to keep your belly full, horsemeat wasn’t half bad. Count Hamnet took out his belt knife and haggled a chunk off the haunch of an animal dead on its side in bloody snow. The meat, burnt on the outside, raw in the middle, wasn’t good even of its kind. He ate it anyway.

  Then he got a chunk for Marcovefa. She didn’t show her usual wolfish appetite. That worried him. “Head hurts too much,” she said. He grimaced. He couldn’t do anything about that, however much he wished he could.

  They slept Bizogot-style, with furs over them and snow heaped up to the north to hold away the Breath of God. The wind didn’t blow too hard. It was as if even God had forgotten about Raumsdalia. And as for Hamnet Thyssen, he’d never spent a lonelier night in someone else’s arms.

  When morning came, he asked for volunteers to go north and spy out what the Rulers were doing. He wondered if he would get any. More than a little to his own surprise, he did. “We’re like fleas,” one of them said. “A lot of the time, we aren’t worth smacking.” He grinned. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen; to him, it had to seem more like an adventure, a game, than something where he could lose his life.

  With the bulk of the army - with the bulk of what was left of the army - Count Hamnet marched south and east towards Kjelvik. He rode close by Marcovefa, in case she needed help staying in the saddle. Up till this summer, she’d never ridden, or even imagined riding was possible. She didn’t look happy now - who with a nearly broken skull would have? But she rode.

  And Kjelvik didn’t seem particularly happy to see the returning soldiers, either. Fleeing men had got there before the army did, and had spread word of the disaster it suffered. “Why did you go out there to lose?” someone yelled at Hamnet Thyssen when he rode back into the town.

  Were his bow strung, he would have shot the obnoxious, leather-lunged pest. No one went out to lose a battle. Half the commanders who fought, though, ended up with what they didn’t want. Hamnet had wound up in that unhappy number, even if not on purpose.

  A stone in the house behind the hecklers head suddenly sported a mouth. In a vicious, whiny imitation of his voice, it squawked, “Why did you screw that broad next door?”

  “What? I never - ” But the local looked horrified. And the man standing next to him, who was both larger and better muscled, looked first suspicious and then furious.

  Hamnet Thyssen rode on before he learned how that drama turned out. He looked around for Audun Gilli. When he spotted the wizard, he nodded his thanks. He’d never thought he would do that, not after Audun took Liv from him, but he did. Life was full of surprises, not all of them as nasty as one would think.

  The garrison cooks came up with meals tastier than charred horseflesh. A bed in a room off the barracks made a better place to sleep with Marcovefa than snow-covered ground. A charcoal brazier gave the chamber at least a little warmth.

  “How are you?” he asked as the two of them sat down on the bed.

  “Hurts,” Marcovefa answered matter-of-factly.

  Not tonight - I have a headache. Hamnet wondered if he was losing his wits or just too tired to see straight. He’d seldom felt less lecherous. He might want to hang on to Marcovefa through the night for reassurance - and warmth, which was in short supply despite the brazier. Anything more could wait... for the next year or two, by the way his eyelids sagged.

  Sometimes things looked better after you woke up in the morning. This wasn’t one of those times for Count Hamnet. The brazier had run out of fuel during the night, which left the room as cold as the inside of a snowball, almost as cold as the inside of Sigvat s heart. Hamnet still remembered defeat much too well. And when he looked over at Marcovefa lying there beside him, the bruise on the side of her head was much too plain.

  He lay quiet, letting her sleep as long as she would. Her eyes opened about half an hour later. She smiled at him and said, “I need to piss.”

  “So do I,” he answered. “I didn’t want to bother you. How do you feel?”

  “Not so bad,” Marcovefa said, but she winced when she sat up and then stood. “Not so good, either.” She used the pot first. As usual, she was much less self-conscious about such things than Raumsdalians, or even ordinary Bizogots. On that mountain up above the Glacier, privacy wasn’t even a word. “What do we do now?” she asked as Hamnet got up and eased him-self.

  Lick our wounds, was the first thought that came to mind. “Try to find out what the Rulers are doing,” he said out loud: it had the virtue of sounding better, anyhow. “See if we have to stand siege here.”

  “Can we?” Marcovefa asked - a much too pointed question.

  “For a while, anyhow,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Till we’re relieved, or till their magic knocks down the wall, or till your magic comes back. If yours comes back soon, we can last a lot longer.”

  She frowned in concentration, then shook her head, then winced again, regretting that. With a sigh that puffed fog from her mouth even indoors, she said, “Not there yet. Like my head all clogged up inside.”

  “You’re lucky you really don’t have a rock in there,” Hamnet said.

  “This is luck?” Marcovefa started to shake her head once more, but thought better of it. “With luck, the stone misses. With luck, we win the fight.”

  Hamnet had had those thoughts when someone told him something bad was really lucky. All it boiled down to was, Well, things could be worse. He supposed they could. That didn’t make them wonderful the way they were.

  “Let’s go get something to eat,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, but the thought of breakfast didn’t cheer her up, either. “Food makes me . .” She couldn’t find the word, but mimed puking.

  “Nauseated,” Hamnet supplied.

  “Nauseated. Yes. I thank you,” she said. “But I try to eat. I am a fire inside. I need dung to burn.”

  A plains Bizogot would have said the same thing. It still sounded odd in Hamnet s ears. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

  As in most towns where armies have suddenly arrived, breakfast was uninspiring. Oat-and-rye porridge with not enough butter or salt and a mug of sour beer didn’t satisfy Hamnet’s tongue. His stomach, though, quieted down. There was enough for the moment, anyhow.

  Marcovefa ate without complaint, even though the food was strange to her. “You have so much,” she said. “You get food, and you don’t have to hunt for it even in wintertime. Do you know how lucky you are?”

  Plains Bizogots said the same thing. They had enough themselves to appreciate how much more the Raumsdalians enjoyed, and to want it for themselves. Marcovefa’s tone was different. Her folk had so little up there atop the Glacier, she might have come to the Empire from the dark side of the moon. She was beyond jealousy. Everything she saw surprised her.

  She didn’t always admire it: “Because you
don’t hunt so much, I see some of you sit around and get fat. You had better watch out. Such people are good only for roasting. Your foes will feast on you if you are not careful.”

  Count Hamnet’s stomach did a slow lurch. He’d managed to make himself forget his prized shaman, his prized lover, had eaten enemy clansmen. No doubt those foes had also devoured men from her clan. Did that mean what she’d done was any better? Maybe a little, Hamnet thought.

  And then she said, “If I ever catch the scut who hit me with that stone, I’ll eat his liver without salt.” A Raumsdalian would have meant it for a joke. An ordinary Bizogot would have, too, though a Raumsdalian who heard her might have wondered. Marcovefa was dead serious. And if she did find that slinger, he would be dead, too, dead and butchered.

  Toward noon, a scout rode in. “They’re out of the woods,” he reported. “We skirmished a little, and then fell back.”

  “Are they heading for Kjelvik?” Count Hamnet demanded tensely. Could he stand siege here? If he couldn’t, he would have to retreat now. If he did, Sigvat II would have one more reason not to love him.

  But the scout shook his head. “No, uh, Your Grace. They’re going southeast across country. You ask me, sir, they’re heading straight for Nidaros.”

  “Can we strike at their flank, then?” Hamnet aimed the question more at himself than at the rider who’d just come in. Regretfully, he rejected the idea. His men had no spirit for another fight yet. And, without Marcovefa’s sorcerous aid, they might as well have gone into battle without shields against an army of archers.

  “What do we do if we don’t hit them, Your Grace?” the scout asked.

  The question was more pointed than Hamnet Thyssen wished it were. Wait for the axe to drop was the first answer that sprang to mind. He didn’t come out and say that; he feared the scout would believe him. Worse, he feared he would believe himself. “I’ll talk with the others,” was what he did say, and that satisfied the scout, who didn’t see - or didn’t want to see - how little it told him.

  When Count Hamnet gathered Ulric Skakki, Trasamund, and Runolf Skallagrim, none of them seemed eager to assail the advancing enemy. If Trasamund in particular held back, that told Hamnet the thing couldn’t be done. And the Bizogot jarl did. “No point hitting em unless we hit ‘em hard, and we can’t right now, curse it,” he said unhappily.

  “Looks that way to me, too, I’m afraid,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “And to me,” Runolf agreed. “If we’re going to get squashed if we poke our noses outside the walls . . well, then we don’t, that’s all.”

  Had Hamnet Thyssen had any great hopes of victory, he would have argued against the others. Since he didn’t, he accepted their argument. Sometimes the best thing you could do was nothing.

  He did send another courier down to Nidaros, warning that the Rulers were loose in the Empire below the northern woods and that he lacked the force to do anything about it. “Maybe a miracle will happen,” he told Ulric. “Maybe the Emperor will send me more soldiers.”

  “Don’t wait up expecting them, or you’ll get mighty sleepy,” the adventurer replied. “He’ll probably yell for your head instead, for not doing enough with what he was generous enough to give you before.”

  “Yes, that thought crossed my mind, too,” Count Hamnet said. “What am I supposed to do then?”

  “Well, if you want to go to the chopper or back to the dungeon, you just do what dear, sweet, lovable Sigvat tells you to do,” Ulric said. “If you don’t, you do something else. If you don’t feel like getting chopped, I’ll go with you, for whatever you think that’s worth. If you do, you’re on your own.”

  Hamnet Thyssen set a hand on his shoulder, a gesture of affection and appreciation he rarely used. “Thanks. I’m not going to let Sigvat wreck me or the Empire, not if I can help it.”

  “You’ve got a chance to keep him from wrecking you,” Ulric Skakki said. “If he doesn’t wreck you, he’ll have a harder time wrecking Raumsdalia, anyway. But you’ve got to worry about yourself first. You can do something about yourself. Right this minute, you can’t do much about the whole bloody Empire.”

  The Empire was going to get bloodier. Count Hamnet couldn’t do much about that, either, not till Marcovefa’s wits unscrambled - if they ever did. Congratulations, he told himself. You just found something brand new to worry about.

  He sighed. “Up till now, I’ve always put the Empire first. I still do, I guess, but . .”

  “Yes. But,” Ulric said. “One thing you still need to figure out is, there’s a difference between the Empire and the Emperor. Raumsdalia can go on without Sigvat II, even if Sigvat’s too cursed dumb to see that for himself.”

  Since Hamnet Thyssen hadn’t seen if for himself, he maintained what he hoped was a discreet silence. Even if not just Sigvat but his dynasty perished, the Raumsdalian Empire could go on. Sometimes a truth was too obvious to be easy to see. Sometimes, in the woods, a mastodon was next to invisible. But then it would lift its trunk and trumpet, and everyone for a long way in all directions would know where it stood.

  At least I know where I stand, Hamnet thought. That would have to do for now. “Who do you think hates me more right this minute?” he asked Ulric. “The Rulers or His Majesty?”

  “Well, it depends,” Ulric said judiciously.

  “On what?”

  “On whether your messenger has got to Nidaros yet.”

  “Oh.” Count Hamnet weighed that. Then he nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “You’re not afraid enough to suit Sigvat,” Ulric said. “That’s one of the reasons he doesn’t like you.” There was an understatement of almost cosmic proportions. Even the adventurer seemed relieved to change the subject: “How’s your lady love?”

  “About how you’d expect after almost getting her head smashed,” Hamnet replied. He hesitated, then asked, “How’s Liv doing?”

  “She’ll heal. She’ll have a scar. It’s a shame - she’s a nice-looking woman. And no, in case you’re trying to find some reason to come after me with a hatchet, I never slept with her. She is anyway.” Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow. “You don’t need to ask me, you know. You could talk with her yourself. She’s not like Gudrid - she doesn’t aim to carve chunks off you every time she opens her mouth.”

  “I understand that,” Hamnet said, as steadily as he could. “I still haven’t decided whether it makes things better or worse.” Even the glib Ulric Skakki had no quick and clever retort for that.

  Count Hamnet was doing up his trousers as he came out of the garderobe when one of Runolf Skallagrim’s junior officers spotted him. “Oh, there you are, Your Grace!” the very young subaltern exclaimed.

  “Here I am, all right,” Hamnet agreed. “And why does it make any difference that I happen to be here?”

  “Because the baron needs to see you right away, sir,” the junior officer said. “He’s got six or eight men out looking for you.”

  “Does he?” Hamnet said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. That could only mean something had gone wrong. Two possibilities leaped to mind; he wondered which was the more appalling. “Well, I suppose I’d better go see him, then.”

  “Follow me, Your Grace.” The youngster hurried off so fast, Hamnet Thyssen had very little choice but to follow him. He stopped in front of Runolf’s door as abruptly as he’d sped away. When Hamnet came up a few heartbeats later, the fellow said, “Go on in, sir. I know he’s expecting you.”

  “I’m so glad to hear it,” Hamnet said. What a liar I’m turning into in my old age. He wasn’t that old, but some days felt as if they added years. He worked the latch and went inside.

  As he’d feared, a man with the look of an imperial courier waited with Runolf Skallagrim. “Morning, Thyssen,” Runolf said, trying to pretend he knew Hamnet not at all well.

  “It certainly is,” Hamnet said, more or less at random. He inclined his head to the man who looked like a courier. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “No, I do
n’t think so, either. I’m Gunnlaug Jofrid,” the man said. “I have orders to take you back to Nidaros.”

  Hamnet looked at him. “No.”

  “What?” By the way Gunnlaug gaped, Hamnet might have used a word in the language of the Rulers.

  “It’s a technical term,” Hamnet explained, not unkindly. “It means, well, no.”

  “You can’t say that!” Gunnlaug burst out. “His Majesty commands it!”

  “Listen carefully. Watch the way my lips move. . . No.”

  “But you can’t disobey the Emperor,” Gunnlaug Jofrid said, as if it were a law of nature.

  “Oh, I can’t, eh? I’m afraid we’ll just have to see about that,” Hamnet said.

  “What will you do? Where will you go? Every man’s hand will be raised against you, all over the Empire.”

  “Then I’ll leave,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “I’ve done it before. His Majesty won’t be sorry to see me do it again.”

  Gunnlaug looked doubtful, to say the least. “That’s not what my orders say. And how do I know you’ll really do it, anyhow? How do I know you won’t turn around and go somewhere and raise a rebellion? That would be worth my neck.”

  He wasn’t wrong. He was, in fact, bound to be right. “Well, you can come with me,” Hamnet suggested. “Then you’ll be able to say you saw me ride up onto the Bizogot plain with your own eyes.”

  “You’d rather go up there than down to Nidaros?” Gunnlaug seemed to have trouble believing his ears.

  “If I go down to Nidaros, Sigvat will either throw me back in the dungeon or kill me,” Count Hamnet said. “If I go up into the Bizogot country, maybe the Rulers will kill me. But maybe they won’t, too. And at least I’ll be able to fight back. Any which way, I’m better off. Is that plain enough, or shall I get a stick of charcoal and some parchment and draw you a picture?”

  “You’re making fun of me!” Gunnlaug Jofrid’s voice went shrill.

  Hamnet looked at Runolf Skallagrim. “Nothing gets by him, does it?” Gunnlaug spluttered indignantly. Ignoring him, Count Hamnet went on, “Sorry this is awkward for you.”