The Golden Shrine g-3

by Harry Turtledove

  “No one should be blamed for hoping,” Liv said softly. “Not ever.”

  “Yes, you can say that, can’t you?” Hamnet’s voice was bleak enough to make her flinch. But his desperation drove him to speak directly to her again: “Please see what you can do to help her, Liv.”

  “Me? But I told you-”

  “You knew about this Levigild.” Hamnet Thyssen was proud of himself for coming up with the legendary Bizogot’s name.

  “Well, yes, but . . .” Liv struggled to put what she was thinking into words. “Hamnet, I told you-I know nothing of mistletoe except the legend! I would never have recognized it. Audun did that, remember.”

  “Yes, I know.” The look Count Hamnet sent Audun Gilli failed to annihilate him, though not from lack of effort. It did make him turn red, which seemed a less than adequate substitute. Hamnet went on, “But since he doesn’t want to try, I was hoping you might. We can’t beat the Rulers without Marcovefa, you know.”

  “It isn’t that Gilli doesn’t want to try,” the cup said, puffing out ceramic cheeks it never should have owned. “It’s just that he doesn’t think he can do her any good.”

  “Crackpots everywhere,” Hamnet said sadly. Liv flinched again, perhaps for a different reason this time. Even the cup winced. Count Hamnet continued, “I would ask this if Marcovefa were not my lover. I would ask this if she were a man. We need her. The fight needs her.”

  “I know. I understand. I believe you.” Liv looked and sounded dreadfully unhappy. “But I don’t know what I can do here. I don’t know if I can do anything. And failing might be worse than not trying at all.”

  “How?” Hamnet demanded. “Is that even possible?”

  “Worse is always possible.” That wasn’t Liv-it was Audun. “Better may not be, but worse always is. Nothing is so mucked up that you can’t muck it up worse. If I’ve learned one thing in life, by God, that’s it.”

  Hamnet thought it over. Reluctantly, he decided Audun had a point. All the same, he said, “If you leave her like this, she’s liable to die. What happens to us if she does?” What happens to me if she does? But that was a different question-in most ways, he supposed, a lesser question.

  “We will do what we can for her, Hamnet, and for you.” Liv responded to what Hamnet had said, and to what he hadn’t. Audun Gilli couldn’t have looked less delighted if she’d told him he needed a tooth pulled and they were all out of poppy juice. But he didn’t walk away or say no, and Count Hamnet gave him grudging respect on account of that.

  “What can you do?” Hamnet asked.

  “Our best,” Audun answered. “How good it’ll be . . .” He shrugged. “We just have to find out, that’s all.”

  “So we do.” Coming from Liv’s mouth, it didn’t sound like such a pronouncement of doom. She studied the inert Marcovefa as she might have studied a track on bad ground. Then she asked Audun, “What do you think? The charm with the moonstone, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps,” Audun said in tones of deep skepticism. In an aside to Hamnet Thyssen, he went on, “If we set a moonstone under her tongue with the proper spell, it is supposed to kindle her mind and make her wits sharp.”

  “That sounds like exactly what she needs!” Hamnet exclaimed. More slowly, reacting to the wizard’s tone, he added, “Why aren’t you happier about it?”

  “Because most of the time it doesn’t do what the grimoires claim it does,” Audun Gilli answered. “Take any book of recipes-you’ll find a few that don’t turn out a dish you’d want to eat. It’s the same way with sorcery. I shouldn’t wonder if it’s the same way with everything. And the moonstone spell is like that: it sounds better than it eats, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ve made it work,” Liv said. “Not all the time, but sometimes, anyhow.”

  “Then you cast it this time. If you have faith in it, it’s more likely to do what you want it to,” Audun said.

  “I’ll try it, yes.” Liv hesitated before adding, “If that’s all right with you, Hamnet.”

  “Of course. Why do you even ask?” Hamnet said.

  “She can’t speak for herself now. If anyone has the right to speak for her, it’s you,” Liv said. “So if you don’t trust me to work the magic . . .”

  “Ah. I see.” He nodded. “As far as I know, you don’t have anything against Marcovefa. That’s the only thing that would make me say no. Go ahead.”

  Liv rummaged in one of the pouches she wore on her belt, and then in another one. At last, she nodded. “Here we are.” She held a small moonstone in the palm of her hand. The stone’s soft luster reminded Count Hamnet of the mother-of-pearl ornaments that sometimes came up into the Empire from the lands by the shore of the Southern Sea.

  “You’re going to put that under her tongue?” he asked. When Liv nodded, he went on, “What do you do if she swallows it?”

  “I’ve never seen that happen.” Liv gave the moonstone a thoughtful look. “It’s small and smooth. It should pass.” Hamnet eyed the stone, too. After a moment, he found himself nodding again.

  When he didn’t ask any more questions, Liv slid the stone into Marcovefa’s mouth. Marcovefa smiled but didn’t open her eyes. Liv started to chant. She used an old-fashioned dialect of the Bizogots’ language, but not so old-fashioned that Hamnet couldn’t follow most of it. She called on the moonstone to banish the baneful mistletoe.

  Liv’s hands twisted in quick, assured passes. Hamnet watched Audun Gilli watching them. Every once in a while, the Raumsdalian wizard would nod or smile in appreciation of what they were doing. One skilled stonecarver might have watched another work with mallet and chisel the same way.

  “Oh, very nice!” Audun murmured at one point in the proceedings. Hamnet didn’t see anything that struck him as special, but he knew he would have also missed most of the fine points of what a stonecarver was doing.

  When a stonecarver finished his work, he had some carved stone he could point to. Then anyone could judge whether he’d done well or not so well. When Liv finished, she’d have . . . what? With any luck at all, she’d have Marcovefa fully restored to herself. Count Hamnet hoped for nothing less.

  Liv’s voice rose. “So may it be!” she said, and pointed a callused, short-nailed index finger at Marcovefa’s face-or perhaps at the moonstone still in Marcovefa’s mouth. Despite the winter chill, sweat soaked her hair and ran down her face. She pointed, she waited expectantly, and. . . .

  Nothing happened. Marcovefa lay there. Her chest rose and fell. Her color stayed good. But her eyes didn’t open. She didn’t revive.

  “Oh, a pestilence,” Audun Gilli said softly.

  Liv looked much more distressed than Marcovefa did. She was also panting from the effort she’d put forth. “It didn’t work,” she said, as if that were the worst thing she could think of. Right this minute, it probably was.

  “It doesn’t seem to have,” Hamnet said. “Would trying it again do any good? Would your trying it do any good, Gilli?” Using the Raumsdalian wizard’s family name instead of his individual name was less than friendly, but it was as much as Hamnet could do.

  Audun Gilli didn’t take offense now, as he hadn’t before. “I’ll try if you want,” he said. “I don’t know how much good it will do, but I’ll try.”

  And he did, from the beginning. He even took the moonstone out of Marcovefa’s mouth and put it back in before starting his spell. That made her smile again, but didn’t revive her. His spell was different from Liv’s; he used Raumsdalian in place of the Bizogots’ language. Where Liv had almost ordered Marcovefa to return to herself, Audun cajoled her.

  None of the differences mattered even a copper’s worth. As she had before, Marcovefa still lay there. She wasn’t dead. But she wasn’t among those present, either.

  “What are we going to do?” Hamnet Thyssen heard the despair in his own voice.

  “We fought the Rulers before we ever met Marcovefa,” Liv said. “We can go on fighting without her.”

  Neither Hamnet nor Audun
Gilli said anything to that. They could go on fighting, yes. They had to, in fact. And they had fought before. The only trouble was, they hadn’t fought with anything resembling success. Could they now? Hamnet had to hope so, but he couldn’t see how.

  “Thank you for trying,” he said, half-bowing first to Audun and then to Liv.

  “We need her,” Liv said simply.

  “Maybe Earl Eyvind will have some notion of what to try next,” Audun said. “He’s not a wizard, but he knows a lot.”

  “So he does,” Hamnet said morosely. Audun might have suggested that he ask Gudrid. That would have been less appealing. Offhand, Hamnet couldn’t think of anything else that would have been.

  Eyvind Torfinn and Gudrid were eating together when Count Hamnet found them. Back in Nidaros, neither of them would have dreamt of sucking the marrow out of a sheep’s leg bone while sprawled out near a fire. But Hamnet had seen on the journey through the Gap that they could rough it when they had to.

  He stood waiting to be noticed. Gudrid ostentatiously ignored him. He didn’t mind. If anything, he preferred having nothing to do with her to having anything to do with her. Earl Eyvind took longer to see Hamnet was there than he might have, though.

  At last, he did. “What can I do for you, Your Grace?” he asked.

  “Well, Your Splendor, it’s like this. . . .” Hamnet Thyssen told him what had happened to Marcovefa, and about the moonstone spell Liv had tried.

  “I . . . see,” Eyvind said slowly. “How very unfortunate.”

  “Hamnet never did have much luck with women, but this is ridiculous.” Gudrid sounded amused.

  “Your Splendor, will you please tell this . . . person I came for your advice, not for hers?” Hamnet said.

  “Oh, you can talk straight to me, Hamnet, dear,” Gudrid said. “It’s not my fault you don’t know what to do with them if you find them.”

  Again, Count Hamnet spoke to Earl Eyvind: “Will you please tell her I will kill her if she opens her mouth again about Marcovefa? Will you tell her I am not joking? Will you remind her we’ll have a demon of a time fighting the Rulers without Marcovefa? And will you also remind her how much she enjoyed their company the last time she ran into them?”

  What Earl Eyvind did say to Gudrid was, “I think you would do well not to provoke Count Hamnet, my sweet. I think you would do very well indeed, as a matter of fact.”

  Gudrid’s eyes flashed. She didn’t take kindly to anyone who tried to tell her what to do. But, for a wonder, she kept her mouth shut. Or maybe it wasn’t a wonder. Maybe it was the murder writ large across Hamnet Thyssen’s face.

  Whatever it was, her silence kept him from grabbing his sword and keeping his promise. Instead, he asked Earl Eyvind, “What do you know about magics made with moonstones?”

  “I assume Liv told you the legend of Levigild the hero?” Eyvind said. Gudrid’s eyes glinted again, but she stayed quiet. One of her gifts was gauging just how far she could goad Hamnet without endangering herself. She’d pushed right to the edge-almost over it-this time, because she hadn’t realized how upset he was, not only for himself but for their cause.

  “She did.” Count Hamnet nodded. “She used his name in her spell, I think, but it didn’t do any good.”

  “All right,” Eyvind Torfinn said. Hamnet didn’t think it was. Before he could say so, Earl Eyvind went on, “Other legends also accrue to the mistletoe, you know.”

  “That was the kind of thing I was hoping you could tell me about,” Hamnet said. Gudrid yawned enormously. Hamnet kept pretending she wasn’t there, which was the best thing that could have happened to her.

  “I will tell you what I know.” Eyvind paused to gather his thoughts. Hamnet pictured him riffling through an enormous codex inside his head. That probably wasn’t how it worked, but the end results were about the same. Eyvind said, “You will of course have met the custom of kissing under the mistletoe on the night of the winter solstice.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Gudrid murmured.

  Hamnet went right on ignoring her. As long as she insulted him alone and not Marcovefa, he could, with effort, hold his temper. He nodded to Earl Eyvind. “Yes, of course, Your Splendor.”

  “Excellent!” By the way Eyvind beamed, Hamnet might have been a promising pupil.

  “I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything here, though,” Hamnet said.

  “Well, neither do I,” Eyvind admitted. “It was the first thing that came to mind, that’s all.”It was on the top page of the codex between his ears, Hamnet thought. Eyvind continued, “The powdered leaves, if drunk, are sovereign against the falling sickness.”

  “But the arrow gave her something like the falling sickness,” Hamnet protested.

  “I am telling you what I know of mistletoe and its uses,” Earl Eyvind said stiffly. “If it does not correspond to the woman’s symptoms, I am not responsible for the discrepancy.”

  Hamnet wanted to hit him. Even if he did, though, he realized Eyvind wouldn’t understand. To the scholarly noble, this was a scholarly problem, no more and no less. Eyvind Torfinn didn’t seem to grasp that, without Marcovefa to oppose them, the Rulers could do pretty much as they pleased against this ragtag force of Bizogots and Raumsdalians.

  “Do you know of any charms for waking people out of a long sleep?” Count Hamnet asked.

  Eyvind shook his head. “I am afraid I do not. Lacking any sorcerous capabilities myself, I never extended my investigations in that direction.”

  “Listening to Hamnet might put anyone into a long sleep, but I don’t suppose that’s magic,” Gudrid said.

  “No, probably not,” Hamnet agreed. Gudrid looked unhappy. He’d told her before that he didn’t much care if she insulted him. She evidently hadn’t believed him. Too bad-he’d told the truth. She told so many lies herself, she had to expect them all the time from other people.

  “Can Marcovefa eat? Can she drink? Can we sustain her until such time as we find a means to defeat this sorcery?” Earl Eyvind asked. They were all good questions-perhaps Eyvind had a better connection with reality than Hamnet had thought.

  He spread his hands. “I don’t know the answers to any of those. We just have to see, that’s all. If we can take care of her, you’re right-that buys us time. If we can’t . . .” The face he made told what he thought of that prospect.

  “Yes, who’d give you a tumble then?” Gudrid said.

  She was lucky. Hamnet Thyssen walked away from her, not toward her. He went over to one of the cooks’ kettles and dipped out a bowl of barley mush. The mush had bits and shreds of mutton in it. A baby could have got it down with no trouble. With any luck at all, an ensorcelled invalid would be able to do the same. If she couldn’t, the game was up. It was about that simple.

  He dipped a horn spoon into the mush and blew on it, the way he would have before feeding a baby. Then, worriedly, he slid the spoon between Marcovefa’s flaccid lips.

  She smiled. She ate. She swallowed. But her eyes didn’t open and she showed no sign of being aware of herself. Hamnet looked at the good and ignored as much of the bad as he could. He gave her another spoonful, then another, then another. Before long, the bowl was empty. He wiped off her chin. She was no neater than a baby would have been. He didn’t care. She wouldn’t starve to death.

  It soon became plain she had no more control over her bodily functions than a baby did. Grimly, Hamnet took care of that, too. Had Gudrid come by to mock him then . . . But she didn’t. This time, her notion of how far she could push him proved good.

  Liv did come by. “I will help you keep her clean, if you let me,” she said. “And sooner or later-you will know when better than I do-her time of the month will come. Chances are you would sooner have me deal with it.”

  “Chances are you’re right,” Hamnet said, scrubbing his hands with snow. “I thank you for the kindness.”

  “She would do the same for me.” Liv looked at him. “So would you, I think, even now.”

  “I ho
pe so.” Hamnet hesitated. Then he said, “Too bad it didn’t work out.”

  “Yes, I think so, too.” Liv gave back a nod and a smile and a shrug. “But it didn’t, and we can’t very well pretend it did.”

  That felt colder than the snow against his skin-and yet, in another way, it didn’t. “I can’t imagine talking with Gudrid this way,” Hamnet said. “That didn’t work out, either.”

  “Well, the difference is, you and I don’t hate each other, or I hope we don’t,” Liv said. “You and Gudrid . . .” She shook her head and didn’t go on.

  Hamnet Thyssen started to deny it. No matter what Gudrid felt about him, what he felt about her couldn’t be hate . . . could it? What else would you call it, then? he asked himself, and found no answer. “Thank you-I think,” he said slowly. “You just showed me something about myself I didn’t know before.”

  “I’m not sure I did you a favor,” Liv said.

  “I’m not, either. That’s why I said, ‘I think,’ ” Hamnet answered. “What are we going to do now?”

  “Try to keep her fed and watered and clean,” Liv said. “Try to find a magic that will lift the mistletoe spell-either that or hope it wears off on its own. A lot of spells do, you know.”

  “Not quite what I meant,” he told her. “Pretty soon, the Rulers will realize we can’t beat back their magic any more. They’ll see we aren’t aiming strong spells at them. Then they’ll jump on us with both feet.”

  The shaman from the Three Tusk clan bit her lip. “You shame Audun and me.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Hamnet said quickly. “By God, Liv, I didn’t.”

  “You might as well have meant it if you didn’t.” Her voice was bleak. “It’s not as if you weren’t telling the truth. Marcovefa could beat the Rulers. Audun and I . . . can’t. We’ve seen that.”

  “It’s not your fault-not your fault in particular,” Count Hamnet said. “Nobody on this side of the Glacier can beat the Rulers. We’ve seen that, too. So has Sigvat II, and I hope he likes it.” He didn’t need anyone else to tell him that he hated the Raumsdalian Emperor.