The Golden Shrine

by Harry Turtledove

  XIX

  SUDERTORP LAKE WAS thawing. Spring was in the air. So were countless thousands—millions, more likely—of waterfowl, all bound for the marshes around the lake to breed.

  In years gone by, the Leaping Lynxes would have settled in their stone huts to live off the fat of the land as long as it lasted. No more: the Rulers had smashed that Bizogot clan. And Marcovefa didn’t want to go back toward the eastern edge of the lake, where the Leaping Lynxes’ village stood.

  “Why not?” Hamnet asked her. So did Trasamund. So did Liv. So did Audun Gilli. So did Ulric Skakki. So did Runolf Skallagrim and everyone else who knew her.

  “It is not lucky,” she answered. When people tried to argue with her—and a lot of them did—she added, “Are you the shaman, or am I?”

  Liv and Audun had magical talents of their own. Neither claimed talents to match hers, though. Earl Eyvind tried to use logic against her. Logic he had in plenty, though no more sorcerous talents than one of the ducks that dabbled in the chilly lake.

  Marcovefa heard him out. She respected logic and knowledge. Having heard him out, she smiled and repeated, “It is not lucky.” After a moment, she continued, “You may go there, if you think you must. If you have no joy of it, do not blame me.”

  Eyvind Torfinn spluttered. “That makes no sense!” he complained.

  “Then go—you and your wife,” Marcovefa said. “See what happens to you.”

  “You sound as if you’d be glad to get rid of us,” Eyvind told her.

  “You said it, not me,” Marcovefa replied. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure how much Eyvind knew about Gudrid’s feuds with practically everyone else. More than the scholarly earl let on, odds were. He was sure Eyvind stopped arguing with Marcovefa. He was also sure neither Eyvind nor Gudrid left the band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians still in the field against the Rulers.

  And he was sure the Rulers were moving against that band, though cautiously. Scouts reported squadrons of the invaders, along with their riding deer and war mammoths, both to the north and to the south. For the time being, though, the Rulers didn’t try to close with their enemies. They seemed content to gather strength for the fight once it did begin.

  “They won’t fool around when they come after us this time, will they?” Trasamund said grimly.

  “Think of it as respect from the enemy,” Count Hamnet told him.

  “I’ve been thinking of it that way all along,” Ulric Skakki said. “Even so, I could do without the honor. If you can’t . . . well, in that case you’re foolish in ways I never gave you credit for.”

  “Which ways did you give him credit for?” Now Trasamund sounded intrigued.

  Ulric answered without the least hesitation: “Well, he’s foolish about women, of course. And he trusts people too bloody much. And there’s his confounded stubborn sense of duty.” He watched the jarl nod eagerly, then continued with a certain relish his voice hadn’t held before: “But for sheer blockheaded stupidity, give me a Bizogot every time.”

  Trasamund swore at him. Ulric’s grin was raw impudence. Hamnet Thyssen considered the adventurer’s charges. “You son of a whore,” he said. “I can’t even tell you you’re wrong.”

  “I am your servant, Your Grace,” Ulric Skakki replied. “Did I mention your deplorable habit of speaking the truth when a lie would serve you better? No, I don’t believe I did. Well, no matter. Emperor Sigvat would have more to say on that score.”

  Hamnet expressed a detailed opinion on what His Majesty could do about it. Sigvat II would have had to be improbably limber to accomplish even a quarter of it. Trasamund guffawed. Ulric grinned again. Hearing Hamnet’s suggestions, Runolf Skallagrim asked, “Who’s that you’re telling off?”

  “Nobody important,” Hamnet said. “Only the Emperor.”

  Runolf looked troubled. “You really shouldn’t joke like that, Thyssen. Haven’t you seen what happens when you do?”

  “Too right I have,” Hamnet said. “But who’s joking?”

  “He’s right, you know,” Ulric said. By Baron Runolf’s scowl, he knew nothing of the sort. Sighing, Ulric spelled it out for him: “If Sigvat were important, the Rulers would go after him as hard as they could, right? Are they doing that? Are they doing anything close to that? Not likely! What are they doing? They’re pulling their warriors and mammoths out of Raumsdalia so they can come after us. How important does that make Sigvat?”

  Runolf Skallagrim grunted. “Well, all right. If you’re going to put it that way . . . But you still shouldn’t say rude things about the Emperor.”

  “I’d say them to his face if he were here,” Count Hamnet told him. “He deserves a lot of the blame for what’s gone wrong. If he hadn’t decided the Rulers weren’t dangerous, the Empire would be better off. I don’t know if we could have beaten the Rulers, but we would have given them a better fight. I’d bet on that.”

  Since Runolf didn’t answer, Hamnet hoped he’d made his point. Up in the sky, an arrowhead of geese flew toward Sudertorp Lake, and another, and another. There were also ducks and swans and snipes and coots and every other sort of bird that lived on water or by it. They knew what season of the year it was, or would be soon. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t know how they knew, but they did.

  Trasamund eyed the waterbirds and shorebirds, too. “Mosquito season any day now,” he said dolefully. The bugs knew when to hatch. Hamnet didn’t know how they knew, either. He only wished they didn’t.

  WHEN SPRING CAME to the Bizogot steppe, it came in a rush. One day, the snow lay thick and drifted on the ground. The next, it was gone, and everything was green and growing, with flowers splashing the plains with color. It couldn’t really have happened so fast . . . could it? Looking back, Count Hamnet supposed that was impossible, but it didn’t seem so at the time.

  Sudertorp Lake had already thawed. The new year’s growth around the lakeshore sheltered the incoming birds. Ulric Skakki baited a hook with bits of offal and pulled several fat trout out of the lake. Fishing fascinated the Bizogots. Most streams up here held nothing to catch because they froze top to bottom during the winter. As it so often was, Sudertorp Lake was different.

  Ulric’s catch fascinated Hamnet for another reason. “How did you happen to have a fish hook?” he asked the adventurer.

  “I have all kinds of things,” Ulric replied with dignity. “Never can tell when one of them will come in handy.”

  “Where did you get the hook?” Hamnet persisted.

  “Down in Raumsdalia.” Ulric could be maddeningly opaque when he told the truth. As if to explain himself further, he went on, “The Bizogots don’t make ’em, you know. Even if they did, they’d carve ’em out of bone. They wouldn’t use bronze.”

  Hamnet gave up. All right, so Ulric found a way to take advantage of something where nobody else could. What was so surprising about that?

  The Rulers skirmished with the scouts the Bizogots and Raumsdalians set out. They didn’t seem eager to close with them, though. Hamnet wondered at that. Actually, he wondered less than he marveled. “They’re afraid of you,” he said to Marcovefa. “That’s the only thing holding them back.”

  “If they were smart, they would strike soon,” she answered. “But they are the Rulers. They are not smart—not as smart as they think they are. Not as strong as they think they are, either.”

  He looked at her. “How long did you lie there with your spirit disconnected from your body?”

  Marcovefa shrugged, as if to say that was of no account. “If I had stayed all together, we would not have come up here onto the steppe,” she said. “We need to be up here.”

  “Why?” Count Hamnet asked bluntly.

  She only shrugged again. “I do not know yet. When the time comes, I will know. I think I will, anyhow.”

  “What happens if you don’t?” Hamnet inquired.

  “Then maybe the song does not have the ending the singer first intended to give it,” Marcovefa said. “But I do not think it will turn out like that. When I need
to know something, I know it. Till then . . . Till then, I only think I need to know it.”

  She could be almost as maddening as Ulric. The one thing she lacked was his smiling insolence. But if she only thought she needed to know something now, Hamnet couldn’t be too angry at her for not actually knowing it. He didn’t suppose he could, anyhow.

  More and more Rulers came down from the direction of the Gap and up from Raumsdalia. As far as fighting strength went, they could have crushed their foes in a couple of hours, if not sooner. But more than fighting strength went into the balance. So did sorcerous strength. There, thanks to Marcovefa, the Rulers felt less confident.

  When Bizogots encamped, their mammoth-and musk-ox-hide tents scattered all over the landscape, each one pitched wherever its owner happened to want it. Raumsdalian army encampments weren’t much neater. No one in the Empire had seen much point to imposing order on something likely to get torn down the next day.

  As they were in so many ways, the Rulers were different. Hamnet Thyssen had seen that the moment he first set eyes on one of their camps out beyond the Gap. They pitched tents in rows and in squares. No matter where they were, each of their camps always looked like all the others.

  And when a troop encamped in different places night after night, each man’s tent always sat in the same place in the grid. Their warriors always knew where to find a friend or a superior or a shaman. Their beasts were always tethered in the same positions.

  That had its advantages, especially in emergencies. It was one more reason they beat the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians far more often than they lost to them.

  Count Hamnet watched from the natural dam of rocks and dirt and underground ice that contained Sudertorp Lake as more and more of those dark squares filled the low-lying lands to the west. War mammoths and riding deer went back and forth among the encampments. Count Hamnet supposed men on foot did, too, but most of them were too far away for him to see.

  He turned to Ulric Skakki. “I didn’t know they had so many men,” he remarked, and quickly went on, “If you say, ‘Life is full of surprises,’ I’ll bash you over the head with a boulder.”

  “In that case, I’d have to be bolder than I am to say it.” The adventurer’s eyes twinkled. “As a matter of fact, they’ve got more men than I figured, too.”

  “What are we going to do about it?” Hamnet asked heavily.

  “Good question,” Ulric said. “What are we going to do about it?” If he couldn’t be difficult one way, he would be another.

  “I was hoping you might have an answer,” Hamnet said.

  “You should always hope. That way, when things don’t work out, you’ll be properly disappointed.” As usual, Ulric was most outrageous when he sounded most reasonable.

  “Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Rulers will decide they’ve got enough mammoths and men and magicians to smash us flat,” Hamnet said. “Then they’ll set out to do it. How do you propose to stop them?”

  “I expect I’ll fight,” Ulric answered. “If fighting looks hopeless, I expect I’ll run. Not many more choices, are there?”

  “Well, there’s always dying,” Hamnet said.

  “I’ll do that. So will you. But you can bugger me with a pine cone if I’ll do it by choice,” Ulric said.

  Marcovefa walked over to them. Eating greasy goose and duck agreed with her. She wasn’t hollow-eyed any more, and her cheekbones no longer showed as sharp promontories under tight-wrapped skin. “What are you two going on about?” she asked.

  “Dying.” Only Ulric could make the word sound so cheery.

  Marcovefa looked back at Sudertorp Lake, at the marsh plants springing up all around it, and at the waterfowl whose wingbeats sometimes made speech difficult because of their astounding abundance. She turned and looked at the Rulers’ encampments to the west. Then she looked down at the mossy boulder she was standing on, and at the ice that still survived in the shadowed crevice between it and the dirt around it.

  And then she started to laugh. Whatever was going on in her mind, it was so funny that she had trouble stopping. Laughing still, she kissed Ulric. Before Hamnet’s jealousy could flare, she kissed him, too. As he held her, her shoulders shook with mirth.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Dying,” she said. “Oh, there will be a great dying, all right.” That might have been the best joke in the world. She laughed so much, she got the hiccups. Hiccuping and giggling and shaking her head, she ambled back toward the forlorn encampment the Bizogots and Raumsdalians had set up just south of the earthen dam.

  “I knew I was a funny fellow,” Ulric Skakki remarked, “but I didn’t think I was that funny.”

  “Neither did I,” Hamnet assured him. “Now we need to find out one more thing.” Ulric made a questioning noise. Hamnet explained: “Whether you really are.”

  WHEN THE RULERS finally decided they were ready to move forward against the ragtag band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians still opposing them, they took their time forming a battle line. Maybe they wanted their foes to see everything they had and to despair. If so, they knew how to get what they wanted.

  Hamnet Thyssen had never seen—had never dreamt of—so many war mammoths drawn up side by side. He’d never imagined so many riding deer all in the same place. More than a few Rulers were on horse back, too; the invaders had quickly learned to make the most of what this new land offered them.

  They couldn’t keep that large a force fed for long. Soon, the mammoths and deer and horses would strip every growing thing from the ground around their encampments. Even sooner, Hamnet thought, the enemy warriors would eat everything bigger than a mosquito.

  Of course, the Rulers didn’t have to hold their army together long. As soon as they’d disposed of their foes, they could disperse across the broad Bizogot steppe.

  Trasamund shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. “I wonder how many of them I can kill before they finally drag me down,” he said.

  “I wonder if we’d have a better chance fighting somewhere else.” Hamnet didn’t want to talk about running, not with Trasamund. Unlike Ulric, the jarl would take it the wrong way. Seeing what the Rulers were about to hurl at them made him cast about for ways to do it, though.

  “Some of us can get away. Maybe most of us can.” Ulric himself came closer to directness. But he added, “I don’t know how much of a fight we’ll ever put up afterwards if we do ride out.”

  “How much of a fight can we put up here and now?” Runolf Skallagrim asked: a painfully cogent question.

  “We need to stay here,” Marcovefa said. “This is where we make our stand.”

  Fear and doubt filled everyone else. She seemed serene. “What do you know that we don’t?” Hamnet asked her.

  “Why, what I know, of course.” She sounded surprised he needed to ask.

  “And that is?” he persisted.

  “It certainly is,” Marcovefa agreed. For a moment, he was furious. Then, slowly, he realized it was one of those things she might know but had no words for. He’d seen that before, with her and with other shamans and wizards. Sometimes it all came together at the proper moment.

  Sometimes, of course, it didn’t. If it didn’t this time, he couldn’t imagine their getting another chance.

  Several men on riding deer moved out in front of the Rulers’ war mammoths. “Their wizards,” Marcovefa said. “They think that, if they can kill me first, everything else is easy.”

  “Are they right?” Hamnet blurted.

  “Yes. This time, yes.” She nodded with as little fuss as if he’d asked her whether the sun was shining.

  “Can they do it?” Trasamund found a more urgent question still.

  “I don’t know,” Marcovefa answered, still calmly. With what seemed like irrelevance to Count Hamnet, she added, “The Glacier is melting.” Then she said, “If they do not kill me, I will kill them.” Hamnet liked the sound of that much better.

  But the Rulers were going to have their try firs
t. Marcovefa gestured to the men around her, as if to say they would be none too safe if they stayed close to her. Neither Hamnet nor any of the others moved more than a pace or two.

  The enemy wizards put their heads together. They might have been talking about some game. And so they were, but to the victors here went life. The wizards separated again. One of them pointed not at Marcovefa but at the sky above her head.

  Lightning crashed down, though the day was bright and sunny and clear. But it didn’t strike Marcovefa. Instead, it smote the earthen dam a couple of bowshots north of where she stood. Steam rose from the riven ground. Another bolt of lightning struck. Again, Marcovefa deflected it. More steam spurted from the dam enclosing Sudertorp Lake.

  And Marcovefa laughed—not a mirth-filled laugh, but one that made Hamnet’s hackles rise. God might have laughed that way, thinking of a particularly nasty joke. Marcovefa pointed down toward the Rulers’ wizards. “Fools!” she shouted in her own dialect. “You dig your own graves, fools!”

  They couldn’t have heard her—they were too far away. Even if they had heard her, they wouldn’t have understood her. Hamnet Thyssen barely did. Ulric Skakki saw the same thing. “What is she going to do?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Hamnet whispered back. “I’m not sure she knows herself. But whatever it is, I wouldn’t want it aimed at me.”

  The Rulers’ wizards must have felt the same way. The one who’d pointed at the sky extended his hand again, not above Marcovefa this time but straight toward her. Fire spurted from his outstretched finger, fire that Hamnet somehow realized was powered by all the enemy magicians together.

  That spear of flame took only a couple of heartbeats to fly from the Ruler to Marcovefa. She gestured with her right hand. Instead of cremating her, the fire also smashed against the earthen dam. The sound of that impact was like red-hot iron dropped into a bucket of water, but magnified a hundredfold.

  When the fiery gout also went wide, the Rulers’ wizards seemed to slump on their riding deer. They’d tried two strong weapons and failed with both. Now, their manner said, it was Marcovefa’s turn.