The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “God be praised for that,” Hamnet said gravely. “Do you suppose you can call mammoths the same way when you get better?”

  He was teasing her, but she took him seriously. “I don’t know. I never try anything like that up on the Glacier. No big animals up on the Glacier, not except for people.” She bared her teeth. Maybe she was teasing him back. Or maybe she was remembering the taste of man’s flesh. Then her grin faded. She touched the side of her head, still swollen and bruised. “I have myself back again. I have myself back again.” She made Hamnet hear the pause in the middle of the word.

  “Good.” He could imagine what that meant to her. And he knew what it meant to the fight against the Rulers. Without Marcovefa, there was no fight against the Rulers . . . unless Sigvat could somehow mount one. From everything Hamnet had seen, that struck him as unlikely.

  She whistled again. Another little furry head popped out of the snowbank. Another ensorceled vole started towards her. This time, she took it in her hands before relaxing the spell. Count Hamnet wondered if the vole would die of fright. It didn’t - it just twisted loose and ran away.

  “Not an accident. Not a happenstance,” Marcovefa said happily. “I can really do this.”

  “Good,” Hamnet said. “If any of the Rulers stick their heads out of the snow all of a sudden, we know just how to take care of them.”

  Marcovefa laughed. Hamnet was joking, and then again he wasn’t. She’d worked magic, but she hadn’t worked strong magic. If this was the most she could do, how could she stand against the Rulers? And if she couldn’t stand against the Rulers, what was the point to anything?

  “Suppose we meet the Rulers in the ordinary way,” Hamnet persisted. “What can you do then?”

  “Whatever I have to do, I can do,” Marcovefa replied.

  That was encouraging, or it would have been had Hamnet had more confidence in it. But he didn’t want to show Marcovefa he had no confidence; if he did show her that, wouldn’t it hurt her confidence? And confidence that she could beat the Rulers was one big advantage she enjoyed over both the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians. She’ll always thought she could, and she’d been right most of the time - till that slingstone made her wrong at just the wrong moment.

  “Voles,” Hamnet Thyssen muttered.

  “If I see any mammoths hiding in the snowdrift, I am able to call those, too,” Marcovefa said brightly.

  “Oh, good,” Count Hamnet said. Marcovefa couldn’t always tell when he was being sarcastic. This time, she noticed, and thought it was funny. Hamnet went on, “Suppose they aren’t hiding there. Suppose they’re just.. . mammothing along. Could you call them then?”

  “Mammothing? Is that a word?”

  “It is now.”

  “I don’t know if I could or not,” Marcovefa answered. “I tell you this, though - I want to find out.”

  “So do I.” Hamnet said. If she could call mammoths the way she called voles ... Well, what good would it do the Rulers to ride them, if they wouldn’t go where their riders wanted them to? Sometimes mammoth corpses got buried in floods or cave-ins and frozen underground for years or even centuries, then came to the surface again. Some of the people who found them that way thought they lived like moles and died when air touched them. How much of a difference was there between moles and voles?

  If you were a vole or a mole, a lot. Otherwise?

  “I have my magic back,” Marcovefa said. “Nothing else matters.” Count Hamnet was inclined to agree with her.

  Coming up to the steppe before, Hamnet had passed smoothly from one Bizogot clan’s territory to the next. As often as not, riders near the edge of one clan’s lands - or the fierce dogs they had with them - would let him know when he’d come within the bounds of a new jarl’s domain.

  Now the Rulers had shattered the arrangements that prevailed for so long. In a broad swath down the center of the frozen plain, the invaders had beaten and broken up the clans that had roamed there for so long. The Rulers had commandeered as many of the herds as they could lay hold of, but others still wandered with no one to protect them from lions and short-faced bears and dire wolves . . and from hungry Bizogots as much on their own as the musk oxen and mammoths and horses were.

  Chaos and banditry, of course, spread far beyond the clans the Rulers had actually broken. Refugees and fugitives went where they would, went where they could, and turned their swords and bows against the Bizogots already holding those grounds and herds. Some of the clans the Rulers hadn’t touched got smashed to pieces by their own folk . . and then they spread disorder farther yet.

  In the midst of such madness and uncertainty, a knot of hard-bitten travelers who weren’t afraid to fight had no trouble gathering a following. Men who wanted to hit back at the invaders but saw no way to do it on their own were glad to join people who did have a plan.

  “How does it feel, being most of the way towards a king?” Ulric Skakki asked Hamnet after they’d collected a pretty fair beginning to an army.

  Hamnet rolled his eyes. “How does it feel, being out of your head?”

  “I enjoy it most of the time,” Ulric said easily. “Now answer my question.”

  “I’m not a king. I’m not a jarl, either. I’m barely even a general,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If Trasamund wanted that slot, he could take it. I wouldn’t say a word. This is his country, not mine.”

  “That’s why he’s standing back and letting you have it,” Ulric said. Before Hamnet could tell him he was crazy again, Ulric went on, “Up here, he’s just another Bizogot - and just another Bizogot who’s lost to the Rulers. But you, you’re -”

  “Just another Raumsdalian who’s lost to the Rulers,” Hamnet broke in.

  Ulric Skakki shook his head. “You’re a foreigner. You’re interesting. You’re exotic. You carry hope.”

  “And other diseases,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “Ow!” Ulric wasn’t easy to wound with words, but he flinched then. Gathering himself, he said, “Well, the Rulers would agree with you.”

  “Bugger the Rulers. Bugger em with a pine cone,” Count Hamnet said.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” the adventurer reminded him.

  “I know,” Hamnet said. “We’re going to have to hit them. If we don’t, the Bizogots will decide we’re good for nothing. They’ll ride off and leave us, and then -”

  “We will be good for nothing,” Ulric Skakki finished for him. “Well, the world has been telling me I’m good for nothing for a long time. Maybe it’s been right all along. You never can tell.”

  Hamnet Thyssen glowered at him. “We haven’t got much of an army here. If we strike at the Rulers and lose. ..” He shook his head. “If that happens, we’re ruined.”

  “We wouldn’t be way the demon up here if plenty of people didn’t already think we were ruined,” Ulric said. “So far, we’ve hurt the Rulers here on the steppe. We’ve killed their men and slaughtered their animals. And have they hurt us? Have they even touched us? They haven’t, and you know it.”

  Reluctantly, Hamnet nodded. He did know it, but knowing it brought no reassurance. “Pinpricks,” he said. “We’ve given them pinpricks, and they haven’t bothered noticing. But they will if we hit them hard.”

  Ulric Skakki set his mittened hands on Hamnet s shoulders. “You can stay invisible, or you can make a proper enemy. The way it looks to me, those are your only choices. And you can’t do both at once. So which would you rather?”

  “What do you think?” Hamnet asked.

  “Well, I hoped I knew,” Ulric Skakki answered.

  “You do,” Hamnet said grimly. Ulric nodded and stopped bothering him, one of the more sensible things the adventurer ever did.

  For all their bold talk, Hamnet and Ulric didn’t lead their growing band across the frozen top of Sudertorp Lake, the way they’d gone north the year before. They’d almost died the year before, too, when magic from the Rulers cracked the ice and nearly spilled them into the freezing water.

  Ma
ybe Marcovefa could have shielded them from a repeat of that fright. She seemed sure her sorcery was close to full strength. All the same, Count Hamnet didn’t want to test her before he had to. And, despite the confidence she showed, she didn’t seem eager to test herself, either. Ready, yes, but not eager.

  “When the time comes, I will do what wants doing,” she said. “Till then ... Well, each day I am stronger. Each day my head is clearer.”

  “That’s what I want to hear,” Hamnet said.

  “I do not say it because you want to hear it. I say it because it is true,” Marcovefa told him.

  “All right. Good.” He didn’t want to quarrel with her. He looked across the rolling, snow-covered landscape. With no trees, the Bizogot steppe grew boring in winter. “I wonder if the Golden Shrine is anywhere near here. If it is, you’d probably heal right away if you went inside.”

  “We knew of the Golden Shrine up on top of the Glacier, too,” Marcovefa said. “We thought it was up there - somewhere up there. Sometimes we went looking for it, but no one ever found it.”

  “When your ancestors first went up atop the Glacier, they already knew about the Golden Shrine,” Hamnet answered. “Most folk say it’s the oldest thing in the world. Some say it was there before the Glacier first came down from the north. Eyvind Torfinn believes that, I think.”

  “He is a strange man. He has no magic in him, but he is wise. I did not think that could be, but it is.” Marcovefa paused. “He is wise, except for the woman he chose. She is pretty, but....”

  “You know she was mine once,” Hamnet said.

  “I know she was wed to you once, yes. But she was never yours. Gudrid is only Gudrid’s.”

  “Well, yes,” Hamnet agreed. “But I didn’t know that then, and I paid for the lesson.” Gudrid was even prettier in those days, too, which made the price dearer - or at least seem dearer to a man who was younger himself.

  “The Golden Shrine . . .” Marcovefa seemed willing not to talk about Gudrid, which suited Count Hamnet fine. “We say you find it if you don’t expect it. If you look for it, it is never there.” Her grin was impish. “We must have looked for it. It was never there for us.”

  “We say the same kinds of things about it,” Hamnet agreed. “I didn’t believe it was there at all till I learned of the lands beyond the Glacier. Now I think maybe there is such a thing. But it is where it wants to be, not where we want it to be. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “More than you know, maybe,” Marcovefa said.

  Before Hamnet could ask her what she meant, a scout came galloping back. “We found them!” he shouted. “We found the stinking mammoth turds! Now let’s go kill every cursed one of them!”

  The Bizogots who formed the bulk - formed almost all - of Hamnet’s army roared like the predators they were. Everyone thundered forward. Hamnet didn’t much want a battle just then. He had one anyhow. Now he had to try to lead it. If he didn’t, one thing seemed plain: the army wouldn’t be his anymore.

  There were things the scout hadn’t said. How many enemies waited ahead? Were they ready to fight? For that matter, Count Hamnet wondered whether his own army was ready to fight. They’d run from the Rulers often enough before. Only one way to find out...

  “I see em!” Trasamund bellowed. So did Hamnet Thyssen: a line of men on riding deer, with the bigger lumps of mammoths anchoring the center of their line. They were ready, then.

  “Try to stay out of slingstone range!” Hamnet shouted to Marcovefa.

  She gave back what was anything but a military salute. Then she blew him a kiss. He wondered what it meant. He wondered if it meant anything. He’d find out - probably sooner than he wanted.

  Sooner than he wanted, he found the Rulers had at least one wizard with them. Snow leapt up from the ground. It took the shapes of wolves and of the fierce great cats from beyond the Glacier - tigers, the Rulers called them. Count Hamnet thought they were illusion till one of the snow tigers tore the throat out of a scout’s horse and then killed the Bizogot, too.

  If Marcovefa couldn’t do anything about that. . . Would the magic beasts break up the Bizogot charge by themselves, or would they terrify the Bizogots into turning around and fleeing? They weren’t far from scaring Count Hamnet into turning around.

  But then they all burst into puffs of steam. Marcovefa laughed in delight. Hamnet thought that was joy at having her power back. He was delighted that she had it back, too.

  “Give them something to remember you by!” he yelled.

  Marcovefa laughed again. “Oh, they will remember me!” she said. Maybe it was her joy that made her do what she did next. All the Rulers’ riding beasts - deer and mammoths alike - seemed to go into heat at the same time, and into a more fiery heat than any they knew in their proper mating season.

  A mammoth interested in rutting with another mammoth was a mammoth rather spectacularly not interested in carrying warriors of the Rulers into battle. The same held true for riding deer. Bucks butted at one another and locked antlers. Does pushed their way towards the males, ignoring the riders trying to push them towards the Bizogots.

  Some of the enemy fighting men could still use their bows. Most seemed at least as distracted as their beasts. The Rulers had no hope fighting with swords and spears. Those required cooperation between warriors and mounts, but they had none.

  Only a few slingers made life difficult for the Bizogots. The band Hamnet’s men had come across didn’t seem to be an army on campaign, as the one down in Raumsdalia had been. It was probably a clan’s worth of men - if the Rulers used clans. The Bizogots broke their line with ease. Why not, when their own animals had broken it?

  Hamnet sent horsemen straight at the slingers. He couldn’t do that so neatly as he would have with Raumsdalian soldiers. The Bizogots didn’t obey for the sake of obeying, as trained troopers would. But when he pointed at the slingers and shouted, enough Bizogots took the hint to do what he wanted done. They charged.

  One slingstone hit a horseman in the face and knocked him out of the saddle. But the slingers couldn’t fight cavalry at close quarters. A few who held their ground paid for it. The rest broke and ran, and the Bizogots rode them down, too.

  Seeing them run told Hamnet Thyssen what a victory he’d gained. Far more even than Raumsdalians, the Rulers were disciplined warriors. Losing to men from the herds - their contemptuous term for anyone not of their folk - was the worst disgrace they knew. Fleeing from the herds ... He wondered if they’d so much as imagined such an enormity.

  He pointed Bizogots at the Rulers’ wizards, too. More snow beasts sprang against them - maybe those were this clan’s sorcerous specialty. If so, it did them no good. Marcovefa boiled these monsters out of existence, as she had the others.

  Then Count Hamnet got to enjoy the spectacle of wizards running for their lives. Running helped them no more than it had the slingers. Not even a wizard of the Rulers could aim a spell as fast as an archer could aim an arrow. And shrieks of agony disrupted the harsh gutturals of the Rulers’ language.

  The enemy commander kept on roaring commands from mammothback till his mammoth, consumed by erotical lust, plucked him off with its trunk and threw him down, hard, onto the frozen ground. Then he shrieked, too, a shriek that ended with horrible abruptness as a mammoth foot descended on his chest. Hamnet Thyssen was close enough to hear ribs snap and crackle and pop, close enough to watch blood splash out to stain the snow. He looked away. He also rode farther away, lest the mammoth decide he and his horse stood in its way, too.

  After their leader died, a few of the Rulers tried to surrender. That went against everything the iron-souled invaders were supposed to hold dear. Count Hamnet had seen it happen before even so, in the invaders’ rare defeats. The urge to live could corrode even the sternest discipline.

  But the Bizogots’ lust was up, too: theirs for blood hardly less than that of the Rulers’ beasts for coupling. Hamnet and Ulric Skakki both shouted that some of the enemy should be spared. Trasamun
d shouted the same thing, which surprised Hamnet - was the jarl finally discovering what a good idea staying practical could be?

  Much good it did him if he was. His fellow Bizogots paid no more attention to him than they did to the foreigners among them. More blood dappled the white of the frozen steppe. And then it was over: there were no more Rulers left to kill.

  Even Trasamund seemed pleased. “By God, this’ll give the musk-ox buggers something to think about,” he boomed, looking around the trampled field. The iron stink of blood filled the frosty air.

  “Well, so it will,” Ulric Skakki said. “And the first thing they’ll think about is how to do in the bastards who did this to them.”

  That struck Hamnet Thyssen as being altogether too likely. But battle fever thrummed in his veins, too, and he said, “Let them try! As long as we’ve got Marcovefa, they don’t stand a chance.”

  Ulric mimed a slingstone glancing off someone’s head. Then he mimed a slingstone catching someone between the eyes. Hamnet glared at him, not because he was being foolish but because he wasn’t. It could happen. It almost had. But it hadn’t.

  “We can hurt them now,” he said. “We can hurt them badly, maybe even stop them from getting down into the Empire.”

  “Hurrah!” Trasamund said sourly. “What good does that do my land? What good does that do my folk?” His wave encompassed the whole of the Bizogot country.

  “If no more warriors or wizards of the Rulers can get down into Raumsdalia, maybe the Empire will be able to deal with the ones who are there now,” Count Hamnet said. “That weakens the enemy everywhere, not just in the south. It’s all one big fight, you know.”

  “Ha! Easy for you to say.” Trasamund wasn’t convinced.

  “Last summer, the Bizogots didn’t think it was one big fight,” Ulric Skakki reminded him. “They tried to take on the Rulers clan by clan - and look what that got them.”

  Trasamund glared at him - again, not because he was wrong but because he was right. “You are an impossible pest,” the jarl growled. Ulric bowed in the saddle, as if at a compliment. That made Trasamund no happier.