The Golden Shrine

by Harry Turtledove

  “He is,” Marcovefa agreed. She handed back the necklace. Grimoald made haste to put it on again. Marcovefa added, “What these short-faced bears can do to the Rulers, they will do.”

  “That’s good.” Grimoald clutched some of the claws. They clicked together, almost like worry beads. Hamnet Thyssen hoped the invaders would soon be the ones doing the worrying.

  If they were, it didn’t show right away. Skirmishing between the Rulers and the Raumsdalians and Bizogots went on every day. Sometimes Hamnet’s men had the advantage, sometimes they didn’t. A week after Marcovefa’s magic, they were farther north than they had been when she tried the spell. Overall, then, the Rulers had advanced more than they’d retreated.

  “Maybe I should go climb the Glacier again,” Ulric Skakki said. “We could use more fancy shamans.”

  “Well, so we could,” Hamnet said. “But we need you around here, too, you know.”

  “You say the sweetest things.” Ulric batted his eyelashes at Hamnet. “How do I know I can believe you, though? You probably say them to everybody.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Hamnet exploded. “I’m not trying to seduce you.”

  “A good thing. I’m as dull and normal as you are—I like women, too,” Ulric said.

  “I’m sure all the women are delighted to hear it,” Hamnet said.

  “Well, now that you mention it, so am I.” Ulric was undeniably—and annoyingly—smug.

  Hamnet might have gone on harassing him, but a white-faced Bizogot came into the encampment calling his name. “I’m here,” Hamnet said, standing up to let himself be seen. “What’s gone wrong now?” By the fellow’s tone, he was sure something had.

  All the fellow said was, “You’d better come with me.”

  Count Hamnet had to saddle his horse before he could. That did nothing to make him any more enthusiastic, especially when the horse didn’t want to exhale to let him tighten its girths. He kicked it in the ribs. That did the trick. Ulric was saddling his mount, too. “Can’t let ’em play games with you,” he said.

  “No.” Hamnet nodded. He asked the Bizogot, “Should Marcovefa see this, too, whatever it is?”

  The man didn’t need long to think about that. He nodded. “By God, she should.”

  “All right—go get her,” Hamnet told him. “She can ride double with me. That way, we won’t waste any more time.” Nodding again, the Bizogot hurried away.

  “What do you suppose it is?” Marcovefa asked as they started to ride. “He didn’t want to say anything much to me. Only that it was important.”

  “That’s more than he told me,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “I figured it out myself, though—I will say that.”

  They followed the Bizogot across snow-covered fields toward a stand of pines ahead. Hamnet wondered if they were riding into an ambush. He made sure his sword was loose in its scabbard. Maybe Marcovefa would scent that kind of danger ahead. He could hope so, which didn’t mean he was sure of it. He checked the sword again.

  Marcovefa gave no sign of sensing trouble. But that was not to say that she seemed happy. “Oh,” she said, the corners of her mouth turning down.

  “Do you know what this is about?” Hamnet asked.

  “I have a pretty good notion, anyhow,” she answered, and fell silent again. Hamnet muttered under his breath, which did him no good at all.

  They rode into the woods. The Bizogot seemed to be following the trail he’d made riding back to the camp. All of a sudden, he reined in. “There,” he said, and pointed between two pines.

  Something lay in the snow behind them, though branches obscured the view. Whatever it was, Hamnet’s horse didn’t like it. The beast sidestepped and snorted, nostrils flaring.

  “What is it?” Ulric asked—exactly the question in Hamnet’s mind.

  “See for yourselves,” the Bizogot answered, his face all screwed up. When Hamnet glanced back at Marcovefa, he saw she was wearing the same expression. Yes, sure enough, she had an idea of what was going on.

  He got down from his horse and tied the reins to a branch. Marcovefa slid down, too. Ulric Skakki also tethered his horse. “I always love a little excursion during the day,” the adventurer said brightly. “Don’t you?”

  “No.” Hamnet’s voice might have come from a talking boulder.

  He drew his sword before pushing past the pines in the way. So did Ulric. Marcovefa let them take the lead. Maybe that meant she thought she needed protection. More likely, it meant she thought they thought she needed protection. She was alarmingly good at taking care of herself.

  Hamnet stopped in his tracks. Behind him, Ulric made an involuntary noise full of disgust. A short-faced bear’s head lay in the snow, its blood staining the white with red. No footprints led away from it. Neither did a trail of blood drops. It might have been dropped there by magic. As soon as that thought crossed Hamnet’s mind, he realized the bear’s head probably had been.

  “This is the Rulers’ answer to your magic?” he asked Marcovefa.

  She nodded. “Nothing else.”

  “Does it break your spells?” Ulric asked. “Or does it just say they know the spell is there and they defy you?”

  She reached out with a mittened hand, as if feeling the air in front of her. When that didn’t tell her what she wanted to know, she stepped past Hamnet and Ulric, stooped beside the bear’s head, and laid her hand just above one ear. She recoiled, her mouth twisting. “The spell is broken,” she said.

  “Can you restore it?” Count Hamnet asked, and then, on second thought, “Is there any point to restoring it?”

  “I think not,” Marcovefa answered. “I could do it, but they would only break it again. They would have an easier time breaking it again, because they’ve already done it once and they know how.”

  The Bizogot who’d found the bear’s head came up behind them. “Now you know,” he said.

  “Now we know,” Hamnet agreed. “You could have told us back at the camp. It would have saved a lot of time.”

  “No.” The Bizogot spat in the snow. “Some things you need to see for yourself. When Grimoald hears of this, the war against the Rulers will be to the death for him. They have desecrated his clan animal.”

  Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding. The Bizogots took such things as the deadliest of insults. Ulric Skakki sometimes enjoyed being difficult for the sake of being difficult. He said, “But Grimoald wears the bear-claw necklace. Why should he care if someone else goes hunting?”

  “It is not the same thing.” The Bizogot seemed shocked that Ulric couldn’t see as much. “Grimoald hunted with reverence. He killed with reverence. Not like . . . this.” He pointed to the bear’s head, which did indeed seem a sad, dejected object.

  “It may have mattered to Grimoald.” Yes, Ulric was determined to be difficult today. “How much did it matter to the beasts? They ended up dead either way.”

  “It matters.” That wasn’t the scandalized Bizogot but Marcovefa. “To the bear’s spirit, it matters very much whether it was killed by a warrior with respect and awe or by an enemy in hate.”

  “And you know this because . . . ?” Ulric said.

  He was bound to be teasing, but Marcovefa answered anyhow: “Because I do. Because I can feel it. Ask any shaman. They will all tell you the same.”

  “People tell me lots of different things,” Ulric said. “Figuring out what’s true is half the fun.”

  “This is true,” Marcovefa declared. “Do you say I am lying?”

  Hamnet Thyssen would not have cared to say any such thing to her. Evidently, Ulric didn’t, either, which struck Hamnet as uncommonly sensible of the adventurer. “Well, no,” Ulric allowed, “but I do say you could be wrong.”

  “I could be,” Marcovefa said, with the air of someone making a great and undeserved concession. “I could be, yes, but I am not. As I tell you, ask Liv. Ask Audun Gilli. If they tell you I am wrong, they know less of magic than I think they do.”

  “Never mind all this fan
cy talk,” said the Bizogot who’d found the short-faced bear’s head. “What do we do now?”

  “The first thing I must do is tell the bear I am sorry for the indignity it suffered,” Marcovefa answered in the Bizogot language commonly used on the steppe north of the Empire. Then she switched to her own dialect. Hamnet could follow only a word here and there. He got just enough to gather that she was doing what she’d said she would. Maybe—evidently—the apology made her feel better. Whether it did the same thing for the bear he was less sure.

  Ulric Skakki’s upraised eyebrow probably said he harbored some of the same doubts. If he did, though, he didn’t come right out and say so. Challenging Marcovefa once was not for the faint of heart. Challenging her more than once? Very bold or very, very foolish.

  At last, she seemed satisfied with what she’d done. She picked up what had to be a symbolic handful of snow and dropped it on the head. Then she returned to the usual Bizogot language to say, “We can go now. It is appeased.” After a moment, she looked south, toward the Rulers’ camps. “It is appeased,” she repeated. “It is, but I am not.”

  WHEN MARCOVEFA SAID she wasn’t appeased, she meant it. Marcovefa commonly meant what she said. Her cold fury puzzled Hamnet. “The bears killed Rulers. They must have,” he said the next day. “Why not expect the Rulers to kill bears?”

  She looked at him—looked through him, rather. “I do expect them to kill bears. Killing is part of war. Killing like that . . .” She shook her head. “No.”

  “What can you do about it? Anything?”

  “They will pay. Oh, they will pay.” Marcovefa was still looking through him. He wondered whether her eyes saw any of the real world. Then he wondered how real the world was, and whether what she saw wasn’t truer, closer to the absolute heart of things, than the campfire and the snow and the smell of horses on the breeze. He didn’t know; he was trapped forever in mundane reality and the orderly succession of time. Marcovefa had proved she wasn’t. She went on, “Their doom hangs over them like a crag of ice.”

  “May it be so,” Hamnet said. “How do we make it fall on them?”

  “What?” Abruptly, Marcovefa seemed back in the here-and-now. Hamnet realized she had no idea what she’d just said. It shook him less than it might have; he’d seen the same thing from her before, and from others who trafficked in magic as well. He told her what she’d told him. She looked at him in surprise. “I said that?”

  “I’m not making this up, you know,” he answered.

  “No. You are not.” Marcovefa sounded more sure than an ordinary person had any business being. Well, whatever else she was, an ordinary person she wasn’t. “If I said it, and I do not know that I said it, it is likely to be so.”

  From anyone else, something like that would have been lunacy. Coming from Marcovefa, it made an odd kind of sense. Or Hamnet thought it did, anyhow, which might have proved nothing except that his own grasp on sanity was starting to slip. “How do we make their doom fall on them?” he asked again.

  “I cannot tell you that. I wish I could,” she said. “It will come when the Golden Shrine is found again.”

  “It will?” Hamnet wondered if she would have any idea she’d come out with that.

  She did. “Yes. It will. The doom of the Rulers and finding the Golden Shrine are bound together.”

  “How?” Hamnet asked eagerly.

  Marcovefa spread her hands. They were callused and scarred: the hands of a person who’d worked hard all her life to survive. Up atop the Glacier, not even shamans had an easy time of it. “I do not know,” she replied. “When it happens, you will see.” Her smile pulled up only half her mouth. “And so will I. And it will surprise both of us.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” Hamnet said.

  “Fight the Rulers. What else can we do? If they win, if they evade their doom, prophecy melts like snow on a south-facing slope in summer.”

  Hamnet Thyssen scratched his head. “Then how is it prophecy?”

  “If we fight them hard, they won’t win. I hope they won’t, anyhow,” Marcovefa said.

  “But you aren’t sure?” Hamnet persisted.

  “I am sure of what I know. But one of the things I know is that I don’t know everything there is to know,” Marcovefa replied.

  He scratched his head again. “Does anybody know anything?” he asked.

  “Of course. Just not enough.” By the way Marcovefa said that, she meant it to be reassuring. To Hamnet, it was anything but. He didn’t push it any further, though. If he did, he feared he would end up feeling like a dog chasing its own tail.

  Compared to trying to understand what prophecy meant, riding out on patrol was a relief. He knew what he was doing there: looking for enemy warriors. He knew what he would do if he found them, too: either fight or run away, depending on how many of them there were.

  He didn’t mind having Marcovefa along, either, since on patrol they weren’t trying to understand the whichness of what. If he came across one of the Rulers’ shamans, chances were Marcovefa could beat the man.

  That thought, unfortunately, brought Hamnet back to the whichness of what. Not long before, he would have taken it for granted the Marcovefa could beat the Rulers’ wizards. He still thought she could, but he wasn’t sure any more. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  Neither could the way his force of Bizogots and Raumsdalians kept falling back toward the north. If this went on, they’d retreat past Nidaros before long. When would they end up back in the great northern forests again? When would they end up on the Bizogot plains beyond the forests?

  “It would not be so bad,” Marcovefa said when he asked her about it.

  “Not to you, maybe,” Hamnet answered. “But this is better.”

  “No,” she said. “Things are as they are meant to be. This is as it is meant to be. I do not worry about it, no matter what happens.”

  “You don’t?” Hamnet said. “Well, I do, by God. Suppose something happens to you. What would we do then? We can’t beat the Rulers without you. We’ve already proved that, curse it.”

  “You proved you did not beat them, yes,” Marcovefa said. “You did not prove you could not beat them.”

  Hamnet saw the difference. No matter what he saw, to him it was too subtle to matter. If the Bizogots and Raumsdalians hadn’t beaten the Rulers without the shaman from atop the Glacier, what were the chances they could suddenly start doing it now? Woefully slim, he thought.

  He caught motion from the corner of his eye. It wasn’t the kind of motion he was used to, the kind a man on a horse made. Riding deer had a gait with more up-and-down to it. The Rulers probably thought horses were the ones that moved oddly. That was their worry, not his.

  One of the Raumsdalian troopers in the patrol also spotted the enemy riders. “There’s some of the bastards!” he said, and strung his bow in one quick, practiced motion. “Let’s drive ’em off!” He swung his horse toward the south.

  “Sounds good to me,” Count Hamnet said, also stringing his bow. “Have they got a wizard with them?” he asked Marcovefa.

  “Yes, I think so.” She didn’t sound worried about it. But then, when did she?

  The Rulers didn’t need long to realize their foes had seen them. They could have pulled back into the trees, but they didn’t, even though their patrol was smaller than the one Hamnet led. They didn’t charge forward, either. They held their ground so they could shoot from mounts that weren’t moving.

  With their recurved bows, they made formidable archers. Their arrows fell among the Bizogots and Raumsdalians before Hamnet’s men could hit them. Marcovefa swore in her dialect. A shaft had grazed her hand a moment before hitting the leather of her saddle. It didn’t pierce the saddle and wound her horse. Good luck went through Hamnet’s mind.

  Then Marcovefa slumped over, unconscious or dead. “Poison!” Hamnet gasped—it was the first thing he thought of. He grabbed her and steadied her so she wouldn’t fall down and get trampled. Her eyes had rolled
up in her head; he saw nothing but white when he peeled back an eyelid.

  Nothing to do but flee when their main shield was taken away. The Rulers pursued for a little while. Their harsh jeers said they had a good notion of what they’d done. But, again, horses outdistanced riding deer. Hamnet Thyssen wondered if it mattered.

  XVI

  MARCOVEFA LAY IN front of Hamnet, splayed over the saddle like a stag killed in the hunt, by the time the patrol got back to camp. She wasn’t dead; her heart beat and her breathing stayed steady. But, try as Hamnet would, he couldn’t rouse her.

  He led her horse. The arrow that had grazed her still stuck up from the animal’s saddle. Something was strange about the point. It seemed to be made not of iron or bronze or chipped stone or carved bone but of leaves of some sort. Leaves, of course, had no business hurting anyone unless they were poisonous. Even then, Hamnet had never heard of a venom that could strike so swiftly from such a small wound.

  He’d never heard of any such thing, no. But the Rulers had.

  When people in the camp saw Marcovefa all limp and pale, it as was if they’d had their hearts plucked from their chests. Some of them hung back—they didn’t seem to want to know any more. Others rushed forward.

  “Is she slain?” Trasamund demanded—as usual, he came straight to the point.

  Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “No. It’s sorcery. Where’s Liv? Where’s Audun?”

  They rushed through the crowd. “What happened to her?” Audun Gilli asked.

  “That did.” Count Hamnet pointed to the arrow. “It only scratched her, but she’s been like this ever since it did.”

  “Get her down,” Liv said. Hamnet obeyed. Liv and Audun steadied Marcovefa so he could dismount without dropping her. Then he carried her to the tent the two of them shared and laid her down on a fur robe there.

  Audun uncinched the saddle from Marcovefa’s horse instead of pulling the arrow out of it. He lugged the saddle after Hamnet. Was that excessive caution or common sense? Hamnet would have liked to blame the wizard for it, but found he couldn’t.