The Golden Shrine

by Harry Turtledove

  “I suppose it didn’t want to get crushed when the Glacier rolled down from the north, either,” Ulric said, which had already occurred to Hamnet.

  “It must not have. Had it wanted that, be sure that would have happened,” she said. Ulric started to answer, then seemed to think better of it. Count Hamnet didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t have known how to answer that, either.

  A goose flew up from its nest, wings thundering. Audun Gilli pointed at what looked like a paving stone half covered by lakeside plants. “Isn’t that the start of a road out to the Shrine?” he said.

  Hamnet was on the point of saying he thought that was ridiculous. Before he could, Marcovefa nodded briskly. “Yes, I do believe it is,” she replied. At that, Hamnet swung down from his horse and walked over to the nest the goose had abandoned. He picked up and hefted an egg. “What are you doing?” Marcovefa asked.

  “What with everything else that’s gone on, I wondered if we’d found the nest of the goose that lays the golden eggs,” he answered. “Doesn’t seem that way, though. Too bad.” Replacing the egg he’d taken, he mounted again.

  Marcovefa scratched her head. Maybe her folk didn’t tell that story. But she didn’t ask any questions. Audun was right. That road did lead out toward the Golden Shrine. And, next to the Shrine, even golden eggs weren’t important enough to worry about.

  HOW LONG HAD it been since men last visited the Golden Shrine? How long had it been since the Glacier rolled down from the north and . . . covered it? Hamnet Thyssen asked Earl Eyvind. The scholar only shook his head and spread his hands. “Thousands of years—that’s all I can say. If you ask me how many thousands, well, for this your guess is as good as mine.”

  “ ‘Thousands of years’ seems close enough,” Ulric Skakki said. Count Hamnet wasn’t inclined to argue with him.

  To look at it, though, the Golden Shrine might have vanished from human ken day before yesterday. Or, for that matter, it might never have vanished at all. The tiles that decorated the outer walls were decorated with what looked like an elaborate, sinuous script. But if it was writing, it wasn’t writing of a kind Hamnet had ever seen before.

  He glanced toward the widely traveled Ulric Skakki. When he caught the adventurer’s eyes, Ulric only shrugged. He couldn’t read those sparkling tiles, either. He and Hamnet both looked at Eyvind Torfinn. Eyvind wasn’t so widely traveled. But he was widely—and deeply—read. That might count for more.

  Then again, it might not. “If you are wondering, gentlemen, I must confess that I have never seen the like,” he said.

  “Oh.” Hamnet couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  Ulric was looking around. “Most of the lake bottom’s just mud and gravel, the way you’d expect,” he said. “But not this road, and not the ground right in front of the Golden Shrine.”

  “You’re right.” Hamnet wondered why he hadn’t noticed that himself. Maybe because the road leading toward the Golden Shrine seemed so ordinary. No mud or gravel fouled the flagstones. They weren’t even wet. They should have been, but they weren’t. Which meant they weren’t ordinary, either, even if they seemed to be.

  Neither was the grass growing in front of the Golden Shrine. It was grass, not some underwater weed. It grew there as if the Shrine had been standing in the sun for all these years. Hamnet knew better, but the illusion remained convincing.

  Trasamund chuckled nervously. “Next thing you know, that door will open and a priest or shaman or whatever you want to call him will come out and bid us good day.”

  “Don’t be more ridiculous than you can help,” Gudrid snapped.

  Eyvind Torfinn coughed. “My dear, in our present state of knowledge—or rather, of ignorance—calling anything ridiculous would be, well, ridiculous.

  Hamnet reached out and tapped Trasamund on the arm. “Once upon a time, you said we’d fight it out in front of the Golden Shrine’s door. If you still want to try it, Your Ferocity, I’m ready.”

  The jarl started to reach over his back for his great sword. Then he stopped and laughed and shook his head. “Let it go, Thyssen—let it go. With this in front of me, I can do without the sport. Unless you think your honor’s touched, of course. If you do, I’ll gladly oblige you.”

  “Right now, letting go is better,” Hamnet said, glad Trasamund didn’t want to hold him to their promise. He nodded to Marcovefa. “You must have expected all this.”

  “Not me,” she said. “I always thought beating the Rulers would have to happen up here on the Bizogot plain. I didn’t understand why that was so till just before the end. And the Golden Shrine . . . Who could expect the Golden Shrine? You hope. You imagine. You never expect.”

  A goose alighted in a puddle on what had been the bottom of Sudertorp Lake. The bird seemed bewildered at the changes that had turned its world all topsy-turvy. Hamnet Thyssen understood how it felt.

  The road ran straight to the Golden Shrine. Had it really lain there under the waters of the lake? Had it really lain under the Glacier even longer? Like the Shrine, the road showed no signs of any such mishap. Had they been somewhere else—perhaps not even on or in or of this world at all—and suddenly appeared here when the Rulers were swept away?

  However tempting that was, Count Hamnet couldn’t believe it. Both the roadway and the Golden Shrine gave the impression of belonging where they were. He couldn’t have said why or how they did, but it was so.

  He slid off his horse and walked toward the doorway. A polished brass knocker was fixed to the door just below eye level. Why isn’t it green with patina? he wondered. When the Golden Shrine wasn’t dripping—when it wasn’t ground to dust—he had no idea why that detail puzzled him, but it did.

  Gudrid laughed harshly when he reached for the knocker instead of the latch. “Do you truly think someone will open it?” she jeered.

  “I don’t know what to think right now,” Hamnet answered. “And if you think you do know, you’re wrong.”

  The knocker swung smoothly in his hand. He rapped with it once, twice, three times. The clear, sharp sound echoed out over what had been Sudertorp Lake. The goose in the puddle took off. Hamnet paused, then knocked three more times.

  “Oh, well. So much for that,” Ulric Skakki said. “Now try the latch.”

  Hamnet was reaching for it when the door into the Golden Shrine swung open on silent hinges. Magic, he thought, or maybe the power of God. Is there any difference?

  A woman in a golden robe looked out at him and his companions. “Good day,” she said. That was what he heard, anyhow, although it didn’t match the motion of her lips.

  Trasamund laughed raucously. “Ha!” he told Gudrid. “D’you see? Do you?” She pointed her nose to the sky, pretending not to hear.

  “Welcome,” the woman went on. “We haven’t had visitors in . . . oh, quite a long time.” She wasn’t very large. Her hair was light brown, her eyes somewhere between green and hazel. By that and by her cast of features, she might have been either Raumsdalian or Bizogot—or both, or neither.

  “She speaks my dialect,” Marcovefa said, and then, “Oh. It must be a translation spell. If the Rulers sometimes use them, why should we be surprised the folk of the Golden Shrine do, too?”

  “It is a translation spell,” the woman in the golden robe agreed.

  In a way, Marcovefa’s words made good sense to Hamnet. In another . . . “How are there folk of the Golden Shrine?” he asked. “This place has, mm, been through a lot, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes—and no. That is the only answer I can give.” Smiling, the woman stood aside. “Come in. You will see for yourselves.”

  There was only one problem with that: no one wanted to stay behind and hold the horses. After some argument, Hamnet said, “We’ll just tether them, then. I don’t think anyone will steal them, not on the grounds of the Golden Shrine.” He glanced toward the priestess in some embarrassment.

  Her smile didn’t falter. All she said was, “I think you are right. They are also unlikely to stray.” O
ne by one, the Raumsdalians and Bizogots dismounted. They queued up behind Count Hamnet. The horses hardly needed tethering. They seemed content to crop the grass growing outside the wall.

  “You’ll be the first one in,” Ulric told Hamnet. “Someday, somebody’ll write your name in a history book.”

  “Now tell me something that matters,” Hamnet said. Ulric chuckled. Hamnet walked through the door and into the Golden Shrine.

  It was warm in there, not warm as if summer were here, but warm as if the Glacier had never rolled south, warm as if the Breath of God never blew. Some of the plants that grew in the courtyard lived far, far to the south, in lands where the Breath of God didn’t reach. Others Hamnet Thyssen had never seen before, on this side of the Glacier or the other.

  He pointed to one of them. “Have those grown here since before the ice began to swell?” he asked.

  “You might say so,” the priestess answered. “Or you might not.”

  “Why do you talk in riddles?” Marcovefa demanded. “This is the Golden Shrine. This is the place where there should be answers, not more questions.”

  “The answers are here,” the priestess assured her. “Whether you can understand them all . . . That, I fear, is one more question.” She smiled to show she wasn’t mocking Marcovefa.

  More priestesses and priests came out to greet the awestruck newcomers. Like the first one, they might have been Raumsdalians or Bizogots . . . or they might not have. The one thing Hamnet was sure of was that they weren’t close kin to the Rulers.

  As Hamnet had, Eyvind Torfinn pointed to some unfamiliar flowers. “Where do these come from?” he asked.

  “Why, they grow here,” the priestess said.

  “I see that, yes.” Earl Eyvind nodded. “But where did they come from before they grew here?”

  “They grew out in the world before the Glacier came down,” the priestess replied. Her eyes twinkled as she waved to include her colleagues. “So did we. Things outside the Shrine have changed more than they have here.”

  “How much more?” Eyvind asked. “Have you yourself been here since before the Glacier advanced?”

  Put that way, the question sounded innocuous. What if he’d asked, Are you thousands and thousands of years old? That would have meant the same thing, but it wouldn’t have sounded the same. Oh, no—not even close.

  “You had to call us forth,” the priestess said. “If you hadn’t, we would have gone on in near-nothingness till someone else did. A day? A month? A year? A century? Where we were, none of them mattered very much. We noticed—about the way you would notice an itch. After we scratched, it was gone. And once it was gone, it was forgotten.”

  “Could the Rulers have, uh, called you forth?” Hamnet Thyssen used her term for it, having no better one of his own.

  The priestess frowned. “I do not like to say anything is impossible—the fullness of time often makes a mockery of the word. But I will say, knowing what I know of the Rulers, that the idea strikes me as most unlikely.”

  “What do you know of the Rulers?” Trasamund asked. “If you’re so mighty, why didn’t you do something about them?”

  “Those are two separate questions,” a priest remarked, coming up beside the priestess who’d done all the talking till now. He had a handsome face and a light, pleasant voice. He didn’t seem dangerous. Hamnet wondered how much that proved. Very little, unless he missed his guess. The man went on, “Which would you rather we answer?”

  “Either,” Trasamund said. “Both.”

  “No.” Ulric Skakki shook his head. “Tell us why you didn’t do something about the Rulers.”

  “How do you know we didn’t?” the priest said, smiling. “They were stronger than you in almost every way. Yet you prevailed. How?”

  “Because I found a spell that poured Sudertorp Lake out onto them,” Marcovefa answered proudly.

  The priest didn’t lose his smile. “And how do you think that spell came to you?” he asked. “What did you know of lakes, living up atop the Glacier all your life?”

  How did he know that? Marcovefa hadn’t said anything about it, not in his hearing. Did he recognize her dialect? That was the only thing that occurred to Hamnet, but it also struck him as unlikely. The Golden Shrine had lain under Sudertorp Lake all the time Marcovefa’s folk lived up there . . . hadn’t it?

  Or maybe these priests and priestesses were simply wizards who put not only the rulers but also Marcovefa to shame. Marcovefa might have thought the same thing. “If you can give me that spell without my knowing it, why don’t you rule the world instead of staying under a lake?” she asked.

  “Because we have enough sense not to want to rule it,” the priest answered. The priestess beside him nodded.

  Hamnet Thyssen hoped the man in the golden robe spoke the truth. If the fellow didn’t . . . Well, what can you do about it? Hamnet asked himself. He didn’t see anything. What could a butterfly do about a mammoth? Try not to be there when its feet came down, that was all.

  Ulric Skakki still held a small, tight smile on his face—the smile, perhaps, of a man fighting hard not to be impressed, or not to show how impressed he was. “Now you’re in trouble,” he told the priest. “Now you don’t have ice or water covering you up any more. Now all the cursed fools in the world will make tracks for this place, expecting you to show them how to be wise.” His grin grew even tighter and more self-mocking as he added, “We’re here, after all.”

  “They will be disappointed,” the priest said.

  “Fools often are,” the priestess agreed. “But not all of you here are fools. If you were, you would not have done what you did.”

  Not all of us? Hamnet wondered. He also wondered—and knew he would wonder for the rest of his life—how much they’d really done themselves. He couldn’t know for certain, and he couldn’t blindly accept whatever answers he got here. He knew he was a fool, but he hoped he wasn’t that kind of fool.

  “Here is one thing more for you to think about,” the priest said. “No one takes away from the Golden Shrine even a barleycorn more than he brought to it.”

  “I knew a verse to that effect,” Eyvind Torfinn exclaimed proudly.

  Ulric bowed to the man in the golden robe. One of his eyebrows quirked as he straightened. “You can say that. I may even believe you when you do. But do you think it will do you any good? Do you think fools will pay any attention? If they did, by God, they wouldn’t be fools.”

  “Well, we will worry about that when the time comes.” The priest’s voice stayed mild. “It has not come yet.”

  Eyvind Torfinn had gone over to another priest and was doing his best to talk the man’s ears off. Hamnet had never seen him so excited. Well, here he had his heart’s desire. With some men, that was one particular woman. With others, it was gold and jewels piled high. All Earl Eyvind had wanted was to find the Golden Shrine. He’d never dreamt he would, but now he had.

  Gudrid could also see that women weren’t the first thing on Eyvind’s mind. More particularly, she could see she wasn’t the first thing on his mind, or on anyone else’s. Hamnet could tell she didn’t fancy that. If she wasn’t the center of attention, she had trouble believing she was real.

  Liv and Audun Gilli were talking with a priestess. The woman in the gold robe nodded and gestured. Liv looked entranced, Audun astonished. Maybe they wouldn’t take a barleycorn away with them, but Count Hamnet would have bet they were gaining something.

  Hamnet laughed, not altogether pleasantly. To the priest and priestess before him, he said, “Good thing you’re up here on the Bizogot steppe and not in Raumsdalia. Emperor Sigvat would try to tax you or make you tell him whatever you know or try to close you down.”

  To his surprise, they looked amused. “Some things never change,” the priestess said. “I don’t suppose we expected this to be different from the way it was in the old days.”

  “In the old days . . .” Hamnet echoed. What did that mean to these people? “Are those the days before th
e Glacier moved south this last time?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What were things like then? Do you know what things were like before the Glacier came forward time before last?” Hamnet wasn’t Eyvind Torfinn, but if you weren’t curious about ancient days in a place like this, you probably had no pulse.

  “There were empires and kingdoms and wandering tribes. People were people,” the priestess said. “And when the Glacier moved, a lot of them died.”

  “So we’re the descendants of the ones who lived,” Hamnet said.

  “You would be unlikely to derive from anyone else.” The priestess’ smile didn’t keep Hamnet from blushing.

  “Do you remember those days yourself? Were you here for them?” he persisted. “How did this place survive when the Glacier came down on top of it?”

  “I was here for some of those days: the worst time, when people saw they couldn’t stop the Glacier and despaired,” she answered. “But, as I said, I have not been here for all the days since, not in the usual sense of the word. Those days went around me, not through me—that is the best way I can put it.”

  “But the Glacier didn’t go around the Golden Shrine. The Glacier went over it. Then Sudertorp Lake covered it,” Hamnet said.

  “That is so,” the priestess agreed.

  “Then how—?” He’d already asked once. Would asking twice do any good?

  Marcovefa touched his arm. “Let it go,” she said. “I know more shamanry than your folk do. These folk know more than that much more than I do. They will not be able to explain it. Could you explain taming a horse to a baby making messes in its drawers?”

  “I am not a baby,” Hamnet Thyssen said stubbornly.

  “Your friend may have said that. I did not,” the priestess assured him. “I—” She broke off. Suddenly, she didn’t look mild or amused. Her eyes flashed. That wasn’t aimed at Hamnet. He would no more have wanted it to be than he would have wanted a longbow aimed at his bare chest from five paces. “Where is the woman who came in with you?” the priestess demanded.