The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  Hamnet Thyssen looked around one more time, now to make sure Liv was all right. She wasn’t his anymore, but... . But what? he asked himself, and found no good answer. He knew too well he would have done the same thing were Gudrid on the field, even though she might hope he died in battle.

  There was Liv, binding up a wound on Audun Gilli s arm and chanting a healing charm over it. Catching Hamnet s eye, she nodded gravely to him. He made himself nod back. Unlike Gudrid, Liv plainly wished him no harm. That helped, but not enough.

  He forced himself back to matters he could do something about. “We’ll plunder them,” he called, not that the Bizogots weren’t already tending to that. “We’ll plunder them, and we’ll slaughter their riding deer -”

  “And I, by God, will ride off on one of their mammoths!” Trasamund shouted.

  And, to Hamnet s amazement, he did. After Marcovefa let her spell lapse, the mammoths and deer soon calmed down. A woolly mammoth let the Bizogot jarl clamber aboard and guide it along. Trasamund whooped with joy and pride. He was a boy with a new toy - a toy that could kill him if he got the least bit careless, but he didn’t worry about that, not then.

  Count Hamnet didn’t worry about it, either. For once, he didn’t worry about anything, and wondered why not. His gaze slid towards Marcovefa. She grinned back at him, then eyed an enemy corpse and reached for a knife, as if to butcher it. She was only half joking, if that much. Hamnet didn’t care. Savage or not, cannibal or not, she gave him hope. And when you had hope, what else did you need?