Deer and horses, then, made larger, easier targets than warriors. Wounded animals shrilled out cries of pain that reminded Hamnet Thyssen of women in torment. Listening, he wanted to stuff his fingers in his ears to block out the horrid sounds. But his hands had other things to do.
He methodically drew and shot, drew and shot. His bowstring didn’t break, as it had in the last fight against the Rulers. Liv had set a spell on it, and on many others, to ward against the enemy’s sorcerous mischief. Audun and Odovacar had also seen to the Bizogots’ bows. So far, their charms seemed to be working.
Bizogot horsemen were at least a match for the warriors of the Rulers on riding deer. But horsemen could not withstand the Rulers’ war mammoths. Fight as the Bizogots would, the mammoths drove a great wedge into the center of their line, threatening to split their force in two.
“If you can do anything at all about those God-cursed beasts, this would be a mighty good time!” Hamnet shouted to Liv.
“I’ll try,” she answered, and said something to Audun Gilli, who rode close by. The Raumsdalian wizard nodded. He began what Hamnet recognized as a protective spell, to keep Liv from having to guard herself while she made a different kind of magic.
Count Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to cast a spell while riding a bucketing horse and hoping no enemy arrow struck home. That was what Liv had to do, though, and she did it as if she had years of practice. Her voice never wavered, and her passes were, or at least seemed, quick and reliable. Hamnet admired her at least as much for her unflustered competence as for her courage.
And suddenly the ground in front of and under the Rulers’ war mammoths began to boil with .. . with what? With voles, Hamnet realized, and with lemmings, and with all the other mousy little creatures that lived on the northern steppe. Some of them started running up the mammoths’ legs. Others squeaked and died as great feet squashed them. Still others started up the mammoths’ trunks instead of their legs.
The mammoths liked that no better than Hamnet would have enjoyed a sending of cockroaches. They did odd, ridiculous-looking dance steps, trying to shake free of the voles and lemmings. If they also shook free of some of the warriors on their backs, they didn’t care at all. The Rulers might, but the mammoths didn’t.
And those mammoths particularly didn’t like the little animals on their trunks. They shook them again and again, sending lemmings flying. They didn’t pay any attention to the battle they were supposed to be fighting.
Where the war mammoths had forced their way into the center of the Bizogots’ line, now they suddenly halted, more worried about vermin than violence. The Bizogots whooped and cheered and fought back hard. Had the confusion in the enemy ranks lasted longer, and had they met with no confusion of their own . . .
Hamnet Thyssen often thought about that afterwards. Much too late to do anything about it then, of course.
In the battle, he shouted, “Ha! See how you like it!” He shot an enemy warrior who’d fallen from his mammoth, and then another one. They would have done the same to him. They’d tried to do the same to him. But he’d succeeded against them. And Liv and Audun and Odovacar had succeeded against their wizards.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he discovered it did not do to count the Rulers’ wizards out too soon. The air suddenly darkened around the Bizogots. Hamnet had thought he knew everything there was to know about bugs in the north when the steppe unfroze. He quickly found out how naive he’d been.
As Liv and her comrades called voles and lemmings to the Rulers’ mammoths, so the enemy wizards called insects to the Bizogots and their horses. Some always buzzed about; all you could do was slap and swear. But now the mosquitoes and gnats and flies descended in a cloud as thick and choking as if woven from the long hairs of the woolly mammoth. Horses bucked and thrashed in torment, lashing their tails against the overwhelming onslaught.
Fighting was next to impossible with so many bugs assailing every unclothed inch of skin. Even breathing wasn’t easy. Hamnet Thyssen coughed and choked. Something nasty that wiggled and tasted of blood crunched between his teeth. Gnats kept getting in his eyes. He rubbed frantically.
The bugs didn’t seem to bother the Rulers or their animals, or no worse than usual. Why am I not surprised? Hamnet thought bitterly. The enemy’s war mammoths were still distracted, but the warriors on riding deer seemed unaffected by either side’s sorcery.
Not far from Hamnet, Liv was slapping and scratching and spitting as desperately as he was. “Make it stop!” he shouted to her. “By God, you have to!”
“If we do, we’ll have to let go of the spell that calls the little animals to their mammoths,” she answered.
He might have guessed that. “I think you’d better do it anyhow,” he said. “They’re hurting us worse than we’re hurting them.” Saying that tasted bad .. . but not so bad as the insects that filled his mouth and furred his teeth.
Liv said something that should have made every insect in the world burst into flames. It should have, but it didn’t. She shouted to Odovacar, who didn’t hear her, then to Audun Gilli, who did. Audun nodded - indistinctly, through the curtain of bugs.
A Bizogot right in front of Hamnet caught an arrow in the throat, gurgling when he tried to scream and drowning in his own blood. That could have been me, the Raumsdalian thought, and shuddered, and got another gnat, or another three, in his eye. He ducked to rub at himself, and an arrow hissed past just above his head. If he were sitting straight on his horse, it would have caught him in the forehead. Sometimes whether you lived or died was nothing but luck.
He could tell when Liv and Audun and possibly Odovacar began to fight the mad swarm of insects the Rulers’ wizards had summoned. The bugs went from impossible to intolerable all the way down to extremely annoying. He could spit bugs out of his mouth faster than they flew in. He wasn’t swallowing or inhaling so many. He could even see, sometimes for a minute or two at a time.
And what he could see was that everything had its price. As soon as the Bizogot shamans and Audun Gilli abandoned their spell to fight the one the Rulers were using, the lemmings and voles they’d called to the battlefield did what anyone would expect little animals to do in the presence of big ones - they ran away. And the war mammoths, no longer bedeviled, surged forward once more.
“We can beat them!” Trasamund shouted again and again. He went on shouting it after he pulled an arrow out of his left hand. He went on shouting it after the Bizogots, having fought as hard as anybody could fight, had to retreat anyhow. He went on shouting it as retreat turned to rout. He went on shouting it - roaring it out at the top of his lungs - long after he must have stopped believing it.
Ulric Skakki was bleeding from a gashed ear - the kind of wound that splattered gore all over the place without meaning much. “How come we’re going the wrong way if we can beat them?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.
“Oh, shut up,” Count Hamnet explained.
Ulric nodded gravely, as if the explanation meant something. “Makes as much sense as anything I could have come up with myself,” he said.
Hamnet pointed south - actually, a little west of south. “Are those riding deer?” he asked.
“Well, they aren’t glyptodonts - that’s for sure,” Ulric said.
“They’re cutting us off from the other half of the army. They ‘re cutting us off from the Red Dire Wolves’ herds, too,” Hamnet said.
“They’re good at war. They’re better than the Bizogots, because they come into fights with a plan,” Ulric said. “They’re going to be a lot of trouble.”
“They’re already a lot of trouble,” Count Hamnet said. “And they’re herding us the way you’d herd musk oxen - or even sheep.”
“Baaa,” Ulric said - or was it Bah?. Hamnet couldn’t tell. The adventurer went on, “What do you think we can do about it?”
“Right now? Not a cursed thing,” Hamnet answered.
“Well, that’s what I think we can do about it, too,” Ulric Skakki
said. “Nice to see we agree about something, isn’t it? And it’s nice to see the Rulers can run a pursuit when they feel like it, eh?”
“Fornicating wonderful,” Hamnet said. Ulric laughed, for all the world as if that were funny ... for all the world as if anything were funny.
“Where’s Totila?” Ulric Skakki asked after looking around.
Count Hamnet also looked for the Red Dire Wolves’ jarl. “Don’t see him.”
“He must be with the other bunch - if he’s still anywhere,” Ulric said. Glumly, Hamnet nodded. He didn’t see Odovacar any more, either. Was the shaman still alive? Hamnet wondered if he would ever know.
Then he had more urgent things to worry about. A warrior of the Rulers, shouting something unintelligible, slashed at him with a sword. He parried and gave back an overhand cut. The enemy fighting man turned it with a little round leather buckler he wore on his left arm. His riding deer tried to prod Hamnet’s horse with its antlers. The Raumsdalian cut again. He wounded the deer’s snout. The animal let out a startled snort and started to buck, just the way a horse would have. The man on it had everything he could do to stay in the saddle. Hamnet Thyssen got a good slash home against the side of his neck. Blood spurted. The warrior let out a gobbling wail and crumpled.
A tiny victory - too tiny to mean anything in the bigger fight. The Rulers went right on driving this band of Bizogots north and west, away from the larger group farther south. Every so often, an arrow would bite, and a man or a horse would go down.
Spring days had stretched in a hurry. That let the Rulers push the pursuit longer and harder than they could have at a different season or, say, down in the Empire. After what seemed a very long time, night finally fell.
“We must be backup in the lands of the Three Tusk clan,” Liv said when the Bizogots - and Hamnet, and Ulric, and Audun Gilli - finally stopped to rest. She sounded ready to fall over from exhaustion, or possibly from despair.
“What are they going to do - chase us till they smash us against the Glacier?” Maybe Ulric meant it for a sour joke. But it sounded much too likely to Hamnet Thyssen.
Vl
The sun cameup too early. Count Hamnet munched smoked mammoth meat. He scooped up water with his hands from one of the countless ponds, and hoped it wouldn’t give him a flux of the bowels.
And then one of the rearguard shouted that the Rulers were coming. Swearing wearily, Hamnet climbed up onto his horse. The animal’s sigh sounded all too human, all too martyred. It was weary, too. Hamnet didn’t care. If he didn’t ride, the Rulers would kill him. If he did, he might get away to fight again later on.
“What did we do to deserve this?” Trasamund groaned as they headed north and west again. “Why does God hate us?”
“It hasn’t got anything to do with God,” Ulric Skakki said. “The weather’s warmer, so the Gap melted through. That’s all there is to it.”
“All, eh?” Trasamund said. “And who made the weather warmer? Was it you? I don’t think so. Did God have a little something to do with it? Well, maybe.”
Ulric grunted. The jarl’s sarcasm pierced like an arrow. And the weather was warmer, without a doubt. This would have been a warm day down in Nidaros, let alone here on the frozen steppe. Count Hamnet wondered whether the steppe would stay frozen if weather like this persisted. What kind of country would this be if it ever thawed out all the way?
Up ahead, growing taller every hour, loomed the Glacier. Imagining it gone from the world seemed lunatic. Only a few years earlier, though, imagining it split in two would have seemed just as mad. Whether God had anything to do with it or not, the Glacier was in retreat.
“Does this land belong to the Three Tusk clan?” Hamnet asked. “Or have we come so far west, we’re in the country of - what’s the next clan over?”
“They are the White Foxes,” Trasamund answered. “They are a pack of thieves and robbers, not to be trusted even for a minute.”
To Raumsdalians, all Bizogots were thieves. The harsh land in which they lived made them eager to grab whatever they could, and not worry about silly foreign notions like ownership. If Trasamund thought the White Foxes were thieves even by Bizogot standards, that made them larcenous indeed . .. unless it just said the Three Tusk clan looked down its collective nose at its neighbors.
Ulric Skakki must have had that same thought, for he asked, “And what do the White Foxes say about the Three Tusk clan?”
“Who cares?” Trasamund missed the sly mockery in Ulric’s voice. “With a pack of ne’er-do-wells like that, what difference does it make?”
“You still didn’t say whose land this is,” Hamnet pointed out.
“These are not Three Tusk grazing grounds. That much I know,” Trasamund said. “Maybe they belong to the Red Dire Wolves, maybe to the White Foxes. But I have roamed every foot of our land, and this is none of it. Can you not see how much poorer it is than the lands we use?”
Hamnet Thyssen could see nothing of the sort. He doubted Trasamund could, either. The Three Tusk jarl reflexively boasted about the glories of his clan and its grazing grounds - or rather, the grazing grounds the clan had once held, the grazing grounds now under the Rulers’ sway.
His horse thudded and squelched its way to the northwest. It was tired and blowing. He didn’t know what he’d do if it foundered. He shook his head. That wasn’t so. He knew all too well: he would die.
He was worn himself, worn and nodding. But he jerked upright when a deep rumble, as of distant thunder, came from the direction in which he was riding. He thought at first it was thunder, but thunder from a clear blue sky with the warm sun shining down would have meant God was taking a more direct interest in worldly affairs than he seemed to be in the habit of doing.
“What the - ?” he asked Liv.
“I think it was an avalanche,” she answered. She looked even wearier than he felt, which he would have thought impossible if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes. But she hadn’t merely fought in yesterdays battle; she’d worked magic all through it, which would drain anyone. After a yawn, she continued, “Sometimes chunks of the Glacier will crash down when the weather is like this. It will melt near the top and sometimes set everything farther down in motion.”
“Lucky it didn’t do that at the Gap,” Hamnet exclaimed.
“Farther north there - it’s usually cooler.” Liv pointed ahead. “Look at all the dust rising from the plain. It was an avalanche, and a big one, too.”
Sure enough, a cloud of dust like the ones that sometimes rolled across the plains of the Empire was climbing into the sky, obscuring what lay behind it. Hamnet looked back over his shoulder. Riding deer and a few war mammoths still pursued, though the Rulers didn’t seem to want to close.
And then, as if to grind the fugitives between two stones, Bizogots rode at them from straight ahead. They were men from the White Fox clan, which answered the question of whose grazing grounds these were. “What are you doing here, you saucy robbers?” one of them shouted angrily. “Get off our land, or we’ll fill you full of holes!”
“Why don’t you ride on by us?” Trasamund yelled back. “Then you can tell the Rulers the same thing. Do you think they’ll listen to you?”
“What are you talking about?” the White Fox Bizogot said. Then he recognized Trasamund. “By God! You’re the Three Tusk clan’s jarl!”
“And much good that’s done me,” Trasamund answered bleakly. “I’ve lost my clan. The Rulers have taken our grazing lands, and the Red Dire Wolves’, too. They’ll come after you next. They’re on the way.” He pointed back over his shoulder.
The White Foxes reined in. They put their heads together. The warrior who’d been shouting was plainly a man of some importance in their clan. Hamnet Thyssen watched him bringing the rest of the White Fox Bizogots around to whatever it was that he thought.
He rode out ahead of them. “Pass on!” he said. “If you come to our herds, you may kill enough to feed yourselves, but no more. If anyone challenges you, te
ll him I, Sunniulf, have given you leave.” He struck a pose, there on horseback, so they might see what a powerful fellow he was. Still holding himself straight and proud, he added, “As for the Rulers, we’ll deal with them.”
He waved the rest of the White Foxes forward. They trotted past the men fleeing the latest battle lost. “Shall we go with them and do what we can to help?” Count Hamnet asked.
“I wouldn’t help that arrogant son of a rotten mammoth chitterling up on his feet if all the Glacier fell on him,” Trasamund growled. “Did the White Foxes do anything to help us? Let them find out for themselves and see how they like it. The ones who live may have more sense after that.”
Hamnet didn’t like it, but he wasn’t in charge. Trasamund was if anyone was. After the disaster of the day before, Hamnet wasn’t sure anybody could give orders with confidence these Bizogots would follow them. But then, Bizogots generally obeyed orders only when they felt like it.
“We ride!” Trasamund shouted. They rode.
Ulric Skakki looked back a couple of times. “Trying to watch the White Foxes get what they probably will?” Hamnet asked.
“Well, yes.” Ulric sounded faintly embarrassed. “People always stare when a really nasty accident happens. You can’t help yourself.”
“Oh, spare me. You aren’t even trying,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Well, what if I’m not?” Ulric retorted. “I didn’t like that Sunniulf item any better than Trasamund did. What about you?”
“He could have done worse. He could have pitched into us instead of the Rulers.”
“As far as his clan is concerned, pitching into the Rulers will be worse. We likely won’t be able to take his name in vain much longer - he’ll be too dead to come back and defend his honor, such as it is.”
Count Hamnet wished he could tell the adventurer he was wrong. But he thought Ulric was right. “Sunniulf’s doing us a favor, though,” he said. “He’s keeping the pursuit off our backs.”
The Breath of God Page 10