The Golden Shrine

by Harry Turtledove

  “Maybe,” said Hamnet, in lieu of admitting that the adventurer had a point. He brought things back to the business at hand: “You popped out of those trees at just the right time, Runolf.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t seen the Rulers all tangled up with your people,” Runolf Skallagrim said. “You mess with war mammoths when you don’t have to, you’re sorry you did. Everybody in Raumsdalia’s found that out the hard way.”

  “Everybody up on the Bizogot steppe, too,” Count Hamnet agreed. Trasamund gave what had to be the most reluctant nod he’d ever seen from the jarl.

  “Looks like you were in the middle of a straight-up fight with the Rulers,” Runolf remarked. “They didn’t have a sorcerer along? You haven’t got one along yourself?” He shook his head. “That’s not right. I know it’s not. I saw what’s-her-name—Marcovefa—with you.”

  “Yes, she’s here,” Hamnet said. “She and the Rulers’ wizards seemed to battle one another to a standstill.”

  “Better than what any Raumsdalians have been able to do—that’s for sure,” Runolf said.

  “Yes, I know.” Hamnet left it there. Ulric Skakki and Trasamund probably understood why. If Runolf didn’t, Hamnet didn’t feel like spelling it out for him. Up till now, Marcovefa had thrashed almost all the sorcery the Rulers aimed her way. She’d had trouble with the disease they sent against the Bizogots, but she’d won straight-up contests of sorcery—till this one.

  Was she weaker than usual? Had the Rulers had an uncommonly strong wizard among the ones facing her? Hamnet Thyssen didn’t know, but he was sure he needed to find out. Marcovefa was the only edge he’d had on the enemy. If he didn’t have that edge, what was he supposed to do next? No—what could he possibly do next?

  MARCOVEFA TOASTED A chunk of riding-deer liver over a fire. She seemed more interesting in eating than in answering Hamnet’s questions. While she ate, she answered most of them with shrugs.

  Hamnet persisted. He always persisted, no matter how little good it did him, no matter how much it irritated people who had to deal with him. Marcovefa scowled at him. When she finished the liver, she said, “I don’t know what all it was. We won. Why worry about it?”

  “Would we have won if Runolf Skallagrim hadn’t been there to give us a hand?” Hamnet answered his own question: “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe we would have. I think we would have,” Marcovefa said. “One way or another, I always come up with something.”

  “Always?” Hamnet mimed a slingstone bouncing off the side of her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing like that this time,” she said. “A little better magic than usual, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

  Given half a chance, Hamnet always worried, too. “Are they finding better wizards than they did? Are they learning to block what you do better than they did? Will they be able to beat you one of these days?” One of these days soon, he meant, but he managed to swallow the last word.

  “They learn a little. Anyone who isn’t very, very stupid will learn a little,” Marcovefa answered. “But they will not beat me. You don’t need to worry about that.” She had her own brand of arrogance. Trasamund didn’t think anybody could beat him sword in hand. Any good warrior felt that way—if he didn’t, wouldn’t he run from any battlefield? Maybe wizards needed that same kind of certainty to do what they did.

  “All right.” By the way Hamnet said it, he made it plain it wasn’t.

  Marcovefa shook her head. “Do I have to screw you to get you to believe me? I do that if you need it.”

  “I want to believe you because you’re telling the truth, not because you’re screwing me. They aren’t the same thing,” Hamnet said stubbornly.

  “As long as you believe me, why doesn’t matter,” Marcovefa said.

  “Why matters. I’ve believed too many lies before, and I’ve believed them for too long,” Hamnet insisted.

  “Believe we don’t lose. It is true,” Marcovefa told him.

  “How can you know that?” Hamnet demanded.

  “How? Because I am what I am. Because I am who I am,” Marcovefa said.

  “How much can you foresee?” he asked her. “You couldn’t tell ahead of time that that slingstone was going to hit you. It could have killed you as easily as not. Then what would have happened to our fight?”

  “Then I wouldn’t be here prophesying to you now.” Marcovefa didn’t sound very interested in arguing might-have-beens. “But that doesn’t change anything else.”

  Count Hamnet muttered to himself. “By God, why wouldn’t it? How are we supposed to win without you?”

  “I don’t know anything about supposed to,” she said. “I know is. I know is not. Those matter. Supposed to? Who cares?”

  He kept trying to get answers out of her—yes, he was stubborn. She kept on not giving them. She’d said everything she intended to say, or maybe everything she knew how to say. If he didn’t like it, too bad. He didn’t like it, and he thought it was too bad.

  RUNOLF SKALLAGRIM HAD about as many Raumsdalians with him as Hamnet did. Hamnet offered to yield command to him. Runolf shook his head. “Keep it and welcome, your Grace,” he said. “The Bizogots’ll listen to you better than they would to me, and our own folk will listen just as well.”

  “Or just as badly,” Hamnet said.

  “Or just as badly,” Runolf agreed without even blinking. “What have you got in mind doing next?”

  “Fighting the Rulers. Keeping ourselves fed. Staying alive, if we can. What else is there?” Hamnet Thyssen answered.

  “Not bloody much, not right now,” the other Raumsdalian noble said. “We’re on our own. We don’t have to worry about orders from anybody else, anybody higher. Feels kind of funny, doesn’t it?”

  “Feels pretty good, if you want to know what I think,” Hamnet said. “When we got orders from the Emperor, how much good did they ever do? Sigvat could always take a bad situation and make it worse.”

  “Well . . .” Baron Runolf sounded uncomfortable. Like Hamnet, he was a man of deep loyalty. He hadn’t had his nose rubbed so deeply in the cost of giving his loyalty to someone who didn’t deserve it.

  That thought set Hamnet laughing. Runolf Skallagrim gave him a quizzical look. He didn’t explain. Runolf wouldn’t have thought it was funny. But who could have imagined that Gudrid might be training for Sigvat? They were unfaithful and cruel in different ways, but so what? The infidelity and the cruelty were all that really counted.

  Climbing up onto his horse and riding south let him stop brooding about that, at least for a little while. The trouble with following the Rulers was that they were as bad as locusts when it came to sweeping up everything in their path. Hamnet almost hoped another battle would come soon. Then his forces could feast on the riding animals that fell in the fighting.

  Not much to feast on here. The crops were still growing in the fields. Too many of them were growing untended: the Rulers had either killed or run off the peasants who would have tended them. They weren’t ripe yet. More than a few fields had broad swaths trampled through them where the Rulers had ridden. How much about crops did the invaders understand? Anything at all? Why should they, when nothing like that would grow on the lands they were used to roaming? The Bizogots didn’t—Hamnet had seen as much.

  The fields and grass would keep the horses fed till fall, anyhow. That was something. But people? The Rulers might not care about crops, but they’d made close to a clean sweep of livestock. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys? Gone. Bones at abandoned campsites told where many of them went.

  Maybe some of the farmers had taken some of their animals with them when they ran away from the Rulers. Hamnet Thyssen hoped so, both for their sake and because it would bother the invaders. No matter what had happened to the beasts, though, they weren’t here now to feed his fighters.

  Bizogots went on eating meat that was higher than Hamnet cared to stomach. “I’ve done it,” Ulri
c Skakki said. “It’s nasty, but it’s better than starving.”

  “Unless it poisons you,” Hamnet replied. “It’s getting to where it smells pretty poisonous.”

  “I’m still here,” Ulric said. “Don’t know what that means. Maybe I can eat like a goat, or a teratorn.”

  “We’re all starting to stink like goats,” Hamnet said. “God knows I wouldn’t want to stink like a teratorn.”

  “Well . . . no. Neither would I,” Ulric admitted. Like smaller vultures, teratorns stuck their bare, wattled heads deep into the corpses of long-defunct beasts—and people. Sometimes you could smell them on the wing.

  “It shouldn’t come down to anything like that,” Hamnet said.

  “You’re right. It shouldn’t.” Ulric nodded sagely. “So why do you sound like a man who’s whistling to keep the ghosts away?”

  “Is that how I sound?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “I don’t even believe whistling keeps the ghosts away. I’ve never run into a ghost on the loose on its own. Have you? The only ones I know about are the ones the wizards magic up.”

  “Hmm.” The adventurer frowned in thought. “No, come to think of it, I haven’t, either. All that whistling must work better than we think.”

  Count Hamnet snorted. “Nice to know I’ll be laughing while we starve to death.”

  “Glad to be of service, your Grace. If you laugh hard enough, you’ll wear yourself out and starve faster. You should thank me again, for my act of mercy.”

  “I should do all kinds of things you’ll never see from me,” Hamnet replied. “You can chalk that up as one more.”

  “All right. I will.” Ulric could be most dangerous when he seemed most accommodating. “But will you answer one more little question for me?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try,” Hamnet said cautiously—he recognized, and flinched from, that mild tone. “What is it?”

  “Are the Rulers really getting the hang of Marcovefa’s magic, and of how to use their own against her? Against us, I should say?”

  “You’d do better asking her,” Count Hamnet said, which wasn’t an answer and wasn’t intended as one.

  “I will if I have to,” Ulric Skakki said. “Don’t much want to, though. Questions like that can hurt a wizard’s confidence, and sometimes thinking they can do something is what lets them do it for real. And if anybody but Marcovefa is likely to know, you’re it.” He aimed a forefinger at Hamnet’s broad chest as if it were the point of an arrow.

  “If.” Hamnet felt like a target, all right. He muttered under his breath. At last, he said, “I think they may be gaining. There are lots of them and only one of her, after all. The other thing is, she hasn’t been quite the same since that slingstone got her. Close, now, but not the same. What do you think?”

  “Mm, you may be right,” Ulric said. “So where does that leave us? What are the odds she’ll get the missing bits back? If she does, when will she do it?”

  “That’s more than one question,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out.

  “So it is. Give me an inch, and I’ll take whatever I can get.” Ulric filled a pipe. He had no trouble scrounging tobacco down here in the Empire—the Rulers didn’t think it was worth stealing. He lit the pipe with a twig he stuck in the fire. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke.

  “I believe you,” Hamnet said. “A lot of girls have likely believed you, too—and then regretted it the next day.”

  “Oh, no. They never regret it the next day,” Ulric said smugly. But he stopped asking questions about Marcovefa, questions Hamnet couldn’t answer, questions he didn’t want to think about.

  Once the questions got into his mind, though, they didn’t want to go away. Marcovefa was the best weapon the Bizogots and Raumsdalians had against the Rulers. If she wasn’t weapon enough, what were they supposed to do? Give up? Hamnet ground his teeth till one of the back ones hurt. He was damned if he’d do that.

  Or maybe he was damned if he wouldn’t.

  Runolf Skallagrim came up to him. “What’s chewing on you, Hamnet?” he asked. “You look like a dire wolf carried off your cub. We won that fight a few days ago, remember? Let your face know it, all right?”

  Runolf was an earnest, decent fellow. He came out and spoke his mind. Most of the time, that made Count Hamnet like him better. Not today. “How many more will we have to win?” Hamnet wondered.

  “As many as it takes. My knights can wallop the stuffing out of those savages.” Runolf didn’t lack for confidence, either.

  “Sure they can—as long as Marcovefa’s able to hold off the Rulers’ magic.” Hamnet wished he hadn’t had to say that. It only made him worry more.

  “She will. Just tell her not to stop any more stones with her head, hey?” Baron Runolf thought that was funny.

  Hamnet didn’t rise up and clout him, which proved he liked him. But he didn’t laugh, either, and that sent Runolf away in a huff.

  XII

  ONE DAY, THE wind started blowing cool, down from the north. The Bizogots smiled. Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “Not the Breath of God, not yet,” he said, “but it’s a reminder there is such a thing.”

  “Just what we need,” Per Anders said. The courier didn’t seem to have gone up to the Bizogot country till he came after Hamnet and his comrades. “Maybe it will stop blowing every winter once the Glacier finally melts.”

  “That would be something,” Baron Runolf said. “Mild all winter long? By God, I’d love it!”

  “You think so?” Ulric said. “You go far enough south, you’ll find places where it’s mild all winter long.”

  “I’d like that, too,” Trasamund put in.

  “Let me finish, if you please,” Ulric said. “Places where it’s mild all winter, you don’t want to be there in the summertime. Either you broil or you boil, depending on whether it’s dry or sticky. If the winter’s warmer, so is the summer—that’s the rule.”

  “Well, if that’s the Rule, it must be fit for the Rulers, right?” Runolf Skallagrim said. “What should we do with ’em? Broil ’em or boil ’em?”

  “Either one. Both,” Hamnet said. “Talking about it’s easy, though. Doing it takes more work.”

  Runolf chuckled. “Ah, well. If you’re going to complain about every little thing . . .” Ulric thought that was funny. Hamnet, again, didn’t. This time, he made himself smile. He could occasionally get away with hypocrisy because no one suspected he would stoop to such a thing.

  The Raumsdalians and Bizogots mounted and spread out and rode south, looking for the Rulers—and for food. Coming across a flock of sheep the invaders had somehow missed made everyone happy. Oh, Trasamund said, “When I have a choice, I like musk-ox meat better,” but his heart wasn’t in the grumbling.

  “Been a couple of thousand years since musk oxen ranged this far south,” Hamnet said. “In those days, the Glacier covered everything down to just north of Nidaros. No Gap then—not the smallest thought of one. Nothing but ice.”

  “Good times, by God,” the jarl said. “Things on the far side of the Gap stayed where they belonged. They didn’t come down and bother honest men.” To put Hamnet in his place, he added, “Or Raumsdalians.”

  “Ha! Bizogots are the ones who steal,” Hamnet retorted. “Even a guest-friend can’t go into an encampment and come away with everything he brought.”

  “You don’t miss it. You Raumsdalians all have too many things anyhow,” Trasamund said.

  “You sound like Marcovefa—only she says the same thing about ordinary Bizogots, too,” Count Hamnet replied.

  Trasamund grunted. “Her folk don’t have enough. That is nothing but the truth, by God—not enough. I saw that with my own eyes. And you Raumsdalians have too much. Everybody knows it’s so. We Bizogots, we are just right.” He thumped his chest with his right fist.

  “Why was I sure you would say something like that?” Hamnet asked dryly.

  “Because down deep, you do have some notion of the truth,” Trasamund sai
d. Runolf Skallagrim couldn’t make Hamnet laugh, but the Bizogot did. That was the silliest thing Hamnet had heard in weeks.

  Trasamund got angry because he started laughing. The jarl took himself seriously—he always did. But before he could heat up his argument or start a fight, a horn warned that somebody off to the left had spotted the enemy. When Trasamund reached over his shoulder to grab for his sword, Hamnet knew the Bizogot didn’t intend to use it on him.

  Hamnet Thyssen made sure his sword was loose in the scabbard, too. He saw no Rulers, not yet, so it wasn’t time to string his bow. He looked around for Marcovefa. Without her, neither sword nor bow was likely to matter much.

  She waved to him. If her confidence was damaged, it didn’t show. That was all to the good. She called out, but he couldn’t catch what she said. He cupped a hand behind his ear.

  Marcovefa rode closer. “We’ll fix them. You see if we don’t,” she said.

  “Sounds good to me,” Hamnet said.

  “The weather is better. I hope it will help my magic.” Marcovefa seemed to think better meant colder. Having lived almost all her life atop the Glacier, she probably did.

  When Hamnet did spot the Rulers, they were herding along a swarm of Raumsdalian prisoners. Unlike Marcovefa’s folk, they didn’t eat people not of their blood—or Hamnet didn’t think they did. Whether they slaughtered them for the fun of it, unfortunately, might be a different question.

  Still . . . “They’re nothing but guards—not real warriors,” Hamnet called. “We can beat them!”

  The Raumsdalians and Bizogots cheered. Hamnet hoped he wasn’t lying too much. If the Rulers had a wizard along, things might get more complicated. The same was true if they attacked their captives.

  Even if they didn’t, he wondered what his followers would do with that flock of Raumsdalians. How would they feed them? How would they house them? People couldn’t stay out in the open forever, not with the Breath of God beginning to stir. Even this far south of Nidaros, winter would be hard. He didn’t want to become a herdsman of people himself.