The Golden Shrine g-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Hamnet Thyssen wanted to bash him in the head with a rock and let in some sense. Unfortunately, he didn’t see any suitable bashers close by. “Stop that!” he said when Trasamund showed no sign of letting up. “We don’t have that many Bizogots here-not enough to beat a real army.”

  Instead of answering, Trasamund pulled the stopper from the skin, raised it to his mouth, and drank a long draught. “Ahh!” he said, smacking his lips, when he finally came up for air. “I needed that.”

  “Why won’t you worry about what’s going to happen, curse it?” Count Hamnet demanded.

  “I can’t make more Bizogots,” Trasamund said reasonably. “Well, I can, but no matter how willing the women are, the brats need twenty years before they’re worth anything in a brawl, and we don’t have that long.” Hamnet snorted. Ignoring him, the jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “So why are you nattering at me to fix something I can’t do anything about?”

  “They are going to hit us.” Hamnet clung to the rags of his temper by main force. “What will you do-what will we do-when that happens? Run away? Where will we go? How will we keep the Rulers off us once we get there?”

  “You have more frets than a mammoth has fleas,” Trasamund said, and took another swig from the smetyn skin. “Whatever comes will come, and God will see to it that it all turns out all right.”

  “The way he has so far?” Hamnet inquired, acid in his voice.

  “Go away. Bother me later.” Trasamund drank deep again. “I want to get drunk. I want to screw my brains out.”

  “What brains?” Hamnet asked, more sardonically still.

  “Go howl,” the Bizogot told him. “I’ll worry about your worries, but when I feel like worrying about them. Not now!”

  “When you were too late coming back to your clan from Raumsdalia, that was just one of those things that happen. It wasn’t your fault,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “But if you’re too late getting ready for trouble any fool can see coming, who’s left to blame but you?”

  He thought the only way to get Trasamund to listen to him was to be brutal. He turned out to be righter than he’d guessed. The jarl dropped the precious skin of smetyn and charged him, bellowing like a bull woolly mammoth. Hamnet was a big man, Trasamund bigger still. They grappled, cursing and punching. Count Hamnet managed not to get thrown under Trasamund, but pulled the Bizogot down beside him onto the ground. Hamnet did his best to knee Trasamund in the groin, but the jarl twisted and took the blow on the hip.

  “Well, this is sweet.”

  Ulric Skakki’s light, ironic tones didn’t prove enough to get Hamnet and Trasamund to stop pounding on each other. Then a bowstring thrummed. An arrow stood thrilling in the ground only a few inches from the fighters’ faces.

  “Enough!” Ulric’s voice got sharper. “If I shoot again, my aim may not be so good-or so bad, depending on how you look at things.” He reached over his shoulder for another shaft.

  Cautiously, Hamnet pushed Trasamund away from him. The Bizogot let him do it. Neither was sure Ulric wouldn’t shoot them to make them stop fighting. Such drastic measures were very much his style.

  Hamnet tasted blood. When he spat, he spat red, but no teeth seemed broken. He’d blacked one of Trasamund’s eyes. Dishonors between them seemed even. That dismayed him; he thought he should have thrashed the Bizogot.

  “And what were you gentlemen discussing when you decided words weren’t exciting enough to suit you?” Ulric kept an arrow nocked. His words were more piercing, though.

  “What to do next,” Trasamund answered, gingerly rubbing at the eye that had met Count Hamnet’s fist. Lucky it wasn’t my thumb, the Raumsdalian thought.

  “Our hero here doesn’t want to do anything much,” Hamnet said. “Just sit around and wait for the Rulers to jump on us.”

  “Probably better schemes than that.” Ulric Skakki could also sound judicious when he felt like it.

  “If I want to know what you think, Skakki, I’ll ask you,” Trasamund growled.

  “Well, I don’t think we want to wait that long,” the adventurer said. “We might have things to do in the meantime.”

  “You Raumsdalians can joke and eat fat goose and screw your women and take it easy,” Trasamund said. “You already know no true Bizogots will take you seriously. If I say something, though, you’d better believe they’ll hop to it.” He thumped his chest with his fist and struck a pose.

  Hamnet Thyssen didn’t strike him, but he came close. “Then why the demon don’t you say something to them?” he snapped. “If you let things drift, the Rulers will call the tune instead.”

  “Must be what he has in mind,” Ulric said helpfully. “After we’re dead, the lions and teratorns can make the plans.”

  “Bah!” Trasamund stuck his nose in the air and lumbered off.

  After spitting again-still red-Hamnet sighed and said, “He reminds me of a bull musk ox in mating season. All he wants to do is bang heads.”

  “And screw,” Ulric said. “Don’t forget screwing.”

  There had been times when Hamnet wished he could. But that wasn’t what worried him now. “What are we going to do about it?”

  “Nothing much we can do that won’t make things worse,” Ulric replied. “If dear Trasamund comes down with a sudden case of loss of life, who takes over for him? Won’t be us. He’s right about that-the Bizogots won’t follow us. And the rest of the men are worse muttonheads-musk-ox heads, if you’d rather-than he is.”

  “We’re stuck with him, I’m afraid,” Count Hamnet said mournfully. “And I’m afraid because we’re stuck with him, too.”

  A raven fluttered down out of the sky and landed on Marcovefa’s left shoulder. She reached out and scratched its head as if it were a cat. It brought its formidable beak alarmingly close to her eye before it croaked something in her ear. She croaked back. They might have been conversing. For all Hamnet Thyssen knew, they were.

  Several Bizogots stared at the spectacle of woman communing with bird. Hamnet didn’t, but only because he’d seen it before up on the Glacier and during the harrowing descent to the Bizogot steppe. At last, one of the mammoth-herders worked up the nerve to ask, “Is that your fetish animal, wise woman?”

  “Not the way you mean it.” Marcovefa caressed the raven some more. It croaked again, with obvious pleasure. She went on, “But it still tells me things.”

  “Like what?” Hamnet asked.

  “Where the carrion is. I don’t have to watch teratorns. And where the carrion is, most of the time the Rulers are, too.”

  “Ah.” The Raumsdalian noble nodded. “That is worth knowing, yes. But why hasn’t one come to you for a while?”

  She shrugged. “Ravens do what they want, not what you want. If they were only a little worse, they would make fair people.”

  A little worse how? Hamnet wondered. Then he wondered if he wanted to know. He ended up not asking. What he did ask was, “Where is the carrion these days? Where are the Rulers?”

  Marcovefa croaked at the raven. The big black bird with the shaggy feathers answered. It swung its head to look northwest. Then it swung it again to look almost due south, toward the Raumsdalian Empire. “You see,” Marcovefa said.

  “Well, so I do,” Hamnet agreed. “But have the Rulers come out of the woods, then? Have the left the Empire?” If they had, he thought they were stupid. They would have a much easier time feeding themselves inside the Empire than up here. He wondered if they realized the territory they roamed on the far side of the Glacier was more like the Bizogot steppe than the Empire.

  Marcovefa and the raven croaked back and forth some more. But all Hamnet got from her was another shrug. “The bird doesn’t know,” she reported. “Why should it care about people who aren’t dead?”

  “They’ll make us dead if they get the chance,” the Raumsdalian noble said. “But I don’t suppose the raven cares about us while we’re alive, either. Well, maybe about you-a little, anyhow.”

  “A little,” Marcovefa agreed.
“It thinks I’m interesting because we understand each other some. If we didn’t, it would only want to peck out my eyeballs after I’m gone.”

  “You say the most cheerful things,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. The Bizogots were more fatalistic than most Raumsdalians. And Marcovefa was more fatalistic than most Bizogots. Part of that might have been her own character. Part was surely growing to womanhood atop the Glacier. Just as the Bizogots had a harsher life than denizens of the Empire, so Marcovefa’s clan lived in a way that would horrify-had horrified-any Bizogots who saw it.

  “Do I tell lies?” Marcovefa asked.

  “Not here,” Hamnet said. She grinned, unoffended. He went on, “Do you know any way to make ravens interested in live people? If we had flying eyes, that would help us a lot.” He told her about the Rulers’ wizard who’d turned himself into an owl to spy on the Bizogots and Raumsdalians.

  “A raven is a smart bird, but only a bird,” Marcovefa said. “Why should it care?”

  Plainly, she didn’t think Hamnet would have an answer for her. But he did: “If we can find the Rulers, we can fight them. If we fight them, the ravens will get plenty of fresh food.” Maybe including us, he thought. He’d run that risk whenever he went into battle. Sometimes, though, it seemed bigger than others.

  Marcovefa grinned again, this time in delight. She blew him a kiss. “Yes, that may work . . . if the bird can see so far ahead. Have to find out.” She started croaking at the raven. It made strange, throaty noises back at her. She croaked again and again.

  The raven tilted its head to one side. If it wasn’t thinking things over, Count Hamnet had never seen anything, man or beast, that was. What went on behind those bright jet eyes? How much could a bird anticipate? Hamnet was no bird, so he didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, ravens were more clever than most other flying feathered creatures. But could this one understand the promise of more meat down the line if it did something rather than something else?

  It said something to Marcovefa. Ravens could learn to speak human words, but this one wasn’t doing that. It had its own way of getting ideas across, one only vaguely connected to human language. Had Marcovefa needed magic to learn it, or had study sufficed?

  He couldn’t ask her now; whatever she was using, she needed to concentrate hard to get meaning from the sounds the raven was making. When it finally finished, she said, “It will try. Maybe it will forget. Maybe the other ravens won’t understand what it needs. But it will try.”

  “As much as we can expect, I suppose.” Hamnet expected nothing from the raven. That way, he couldn’t possibly be disappointed. Anything he did hear from the bird or its fellows would come as a pleasant surprise.

  He looked at life the same way. The view had advantages and disadvantages, as everything did. When things went wrong, he had little trouble accepting it-most of the time-because he’d looked for nothing better. (Where he did look for something better, as with Gudrid and Liv, disillusionment proved doubly bitter.) When things went well, he tried not to show the surprise too much.

  “This is right on the edge of what a raven can do,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe over the edge. The bird here is smart, even for a raven. I don’t know if all of them can do what it can.”

  She croaked some more at the big black bird. Count Hamnet knew nothing of the language of ravens, and knew he never would. If he had to guess from tone, though, he would have said she was telling this one how bright it was. It preened-literally. Did that mean it understood the praise and accepted it? You would have to be a raven-or Marcovefa-to know.

  The bird sprang into the air. Wind whistled out between its wing feathers as it flapped. It wasn’t an arrow with a beak, the way a falcon was. But it could outsoar and outmaneuver a falcon. Ravens harried hawks for the sport of it, then tumbled out of the way in the air to keep the birds of prey from turning on them.

  Ravens harried hawks, jays harried ravens, mockingbirds harried jays, kingbirds harried mockingbirds, hummingbirds harried kingbirds . . . and dragonflies probably harried hummingbirds. Hamnet Thyssen looked for a lesson there, but couldn’t find one he liked. Everything large and fearsome had something small and feisty that annoyed it. No, not much of a lesson.

  Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true, on land as well as in the air. Right now, the Bizogots seemed small and feisty, the Rulers large and fearsome. That was how things looked if you were a Bizogot or a Raumsdalian up here beyond the tree line, anyhow. The Rulers probably had a different view of it.

  The only view of the Rulers Hamnet wanted was one of their backs as they rode off beyond the Gap once more. He wondered if he would ever get a view like that. He feared he wouldn’t, even if the Bizogots and the Empire somehow beat the invaders. The Rulers would be part of the political landscape from now on. The Gap would be open from now on, too. More Rulers-or even other invaders-could sweep down out of the north. The world had got bigger and more complicated.

  When he said as much to Marcovefa, she gave him a wry smile. “This happened to me when I came down off the Glacier,” she said. “Everything new, everything strange, everything-” She threw her arms wide to show how much her world had expanded.

  “You’ve done well,” Hamnet told her.

  She shrugged. “People are still people. That’s the biggest thing. The world is strange. The animals are strange. But people? No.”

  “People are always strange,” Count Hamnet said. Especially women, he added, but only to himself.

  Marcovefa smiled again and nodded. “But they’re strange the same way here as they are in my clan up on the nunatak.”

  “On the what?” Hamnet said.

  “Nunatak,” Marcovefa repeated. “That’s our word for a mountaintop that sticks out above the Glacier.”

  “Oh.” Hamnet Thyssen had probably heard the term while he was atop the Glacier himself, and while he was on that mountaintop-that nunatak. If he had, though, it had gone clean out of his mind. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t been at his best up there. None of the Bizogots or Raumsdalians had. He thought for a moment longer. “It doesn’t sound like a Bizogot word at all.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. Our songs say other folk were up there when our forefathers came,” Marcovefa answered.

  “What happened to them?” Hamnet asked.

  “We ate them,” she answered calmly.

  He didn’t splutter and make disgusted noises, because she so obviously wanted him to do just that. All he said was, “Seems as though you ate some of their words, too.”

  “It could be.” Marcovefa’s expression was comically disappointed. Yes, she’d aimed to get more of a rise out of him.

  One corner of his own mouth quirked upward. People didn’t get everything they wanted-not even a powerful shaman like Marcovefa. Nobody got everything. Maybe that meant the Rulers wouldn’t.

  Or maybe it meant the Bizogots and the Empire wouldn’t. Who from each side got how much . . . would tell the tale till the Glacier melted, and maybe even after that.

  Tall, dark, anvil-topped clouds floated ponderously across the sky. The air was hot and muggy, still and sullen. Wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, Ulric Skakki said, “Whew! This is the kind of weather you’d expect a thousand miles south of here.”

  “Yes, and you’d complain about it down there, too.” Hamnet Thyssen had taken off his tunic. His hands and face were tanned dark, but his arms and torso were pale as a Bizogot’s, though the mat of hair on his chest was dark, not golden. Right now, his skin was slick with sweat.

  Ulric gave the clouds a dirty look. “If we’re going to have a thunderstorm, I wish we’d have it. It would wash the air clean of this garbage.” He shed his tunic, too.

  “That would be good,” Hamnet agreed.

  But the thunderheads rolled by, one after another. Count Hamnet did hear thunder once, far off in the distance. No rain fell anywhere nearby. The air remained close and stuffy.

  Marcovefa walked by with her tunic off. Hamnet’s jaw dropped. Ulric’s e
yes widened. Unless they were bathing, Bizogot women didn’t go bare-breasted in public (neither did Raumsdalians). “What are you doing?” Hamnet managed after a couple of false starts.

  “Trying to stay cool, same as you.” Marcovefa mimed a panting fox. “I never knew weather like this up on the Glacier. I feel like I am wading in hot soup.”

  “Don’t sunburn your, uh, self,” Ulric said, gallantly not looking at what he was really talking about.

  “I be careful,” Marcovefa said, and walked on. Anyone who wanted to tell her to cover up would need to be a braver man than either Raumsdalian.

  After she was gone, Hamnet and Ulric eyed each other. They both shrugged at the same time. “Look on the bright side,” Ulric said. “Maybe she’ll start a new trend.”

  “Right,” Hamnet said tightly. He wondered what he would have done had Gudrid or Liv acted so scandalously. Odds were he would have pitched a fit, and maybe had a stroke. He wondered why he wasn’t pitching a fit now. Partly because Marcovefa was a law unto herself, no doubt. And, perhaps, partly because he’d already pitched enough-or too many-fits about women.

  Have I learned something? he wondered.Or am I just too bloody tired to get upset about things right now?

  Ulric Skakki looked around: not in Marcovefa’s direction. The adventurer’s nostrils flared, as if he were a dire wolf seeking a scent. “The air is nasty,” he said.

  “Hot and muggy enough and then some, that’s for sure,” Count Hamnet agreed.

  But Ulric shook his head. “Not what I meant. It’s bad that way, too. But I don’t like the way it feels. Do you have any notion of what I’m talking about?”

  “No.” Hamnet was nothing if not direct.

  “Didn’t think so.” Ulric gave him a bow that should have been mocking but somehow wasn’t. “It feels like something horrible is going to happen to us any minute.”

  Hamnet Thyssen raised an eyebrow. “Foretelling? I didn’t know you’d gone into the wizard business. Have you talked with Audun Gilli or Liv about this?” He didn’t think he wanted Ulric talking with Marcovefa, not while she was running around without her tunic.