The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  Trasamund shouted a command much used in Bizogot warfare: “Chaaarge!” He lumbered towards the attackers. So did the rest of the Bizogot men. And so did Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki.

  Hamnet threw himself flat on the ice when an arrow hissed through the space where his head had been a couple of heartbeats earlier. As he scrambled to his feet again, he said, “If we can close with them, we’ll slaughter them. They don’t have shields or armor or swords.”

  No sooner had the words passed his lips than he suddenly felt as if he were running through porridge, not air. The band of barbarians that captured him and his comrades might not have had a shaman along. These newcomers did.

  A Bizogot howled and fell when an arrow pierced his leg. The attackers might pincushion all of them if something didn’t happen in a hurry.

  “Liv!” Count Hamnet bawled. “Audun! Do something!” Even in that moment of desperation, he wished he weren’t calling for the two of them together. But he couldn’t do anything about that now except hope they had a counterspell handy.

  They must have, for all at once he could move normally again. One of the attackers, a fellow with streaks of gray in his beard (and how many men of the Glacier lived long enough to go gray?), hung back a little from the rest. When the counterspell freed the Bizogots and Raumsdalians from the magic that had slowed them, he stamped his foot and swore. The gesture was so obvious, and so universal, it would have got a big laugh on the stage in Nidaros. Having stamped and sworn, he started incanting again.

  Hamnet Thyssen resolved to kill him before he could finish his new spell.

  Resolving to do it and doing it were two different things, as Hamnet knew too well. But he got one lucky break, for an arrow from a man of the Glacier on his side pierced an attacker’s hand before that attacker could finish pointing his arrow at Hamnet’s midsection. The wounded archer howled, broke the arrow, and pulled it from the wound, exactly as any other injured warrior might have done. Seeing Hamnet bearing down on him, he took a stone knife from a sheath on his belt and got ready to defend himself.

  A stone knife made a good enough weapon . . . against another stone knife. Against a good iron sword, it was hardly any weapon at all. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t let the man of the Glacier close with him and grapple. A slash sheared off two fingers when the fellow tried. He stood there astonished, staring at the spouting stumps, till Hamnet cut deep into his neck with another stroke.

  Then Count Hamnet ran on, towards the attackers’ shaman. The man’s eyes blazed at him, blue as the depths of the Glacier. They radiated power and hatred.

  With a shout, the shaman started to aim a spell at him. Before the man of the Glacier could finish it, Hamnet swung his sword. Nimble as a hare dodging a fox, the shaman ducked away. He shouted something Hamnet couldn’t understand. Whatever it was, though, he doubted it was an endearment.

  Hamnet Thyssen swung the sword again. Again, the grizzled man of the Glacier evaded the cut. Again, it disrupted his magic. And again, he cursed Count Hamnet - the Raumsdalian noble thought so, anyhow. One of the phrases the shaman used sounded something like the Bizogot words for go away.

  That Count Hamnet didn’t intend to do. This time, he thrust instead of slashing. The man of the Glacier didn’t know what to do about that. Hamnet felt the sword grate on a rib as it went home.

  Those blue, blue eyes opened enormously wide, in astonishment and dismay and pain. The shaman opened his mouth, too, to shriek, but more blood than noise came from it. Slowly, he crumpled to the Glacier. Hamnet’s wrist twisted as he pulled the blade free: a veteran’s trick to enlarge the wound and make sure it killed. He probably didn’t need it here, but drill-masters had beaten it into him when he was young, and he used it whenever he got the chance.

  With the enemy’s wizard dying at his feet, he looked around to see how the rest of the fight was going. At least half a dozen of the barbarians were down, their blood steaming on the ice. One Bizogot was dead; a stone knife had slashed his throat. The man wounded during the spell was swearing with that arrow through his leg. Several men of the Glacier were running off as fast as they could go.

  Ulric Skakki wiped blood from his sword on a dead man’s trousers. “Thrusting it into earth would clean it better,” Ulric said, “but earth’s a little hard to come by right here.”

  “Just a little,” Hamnet Thyssen allowed. “They’ve forgotten what to do about swords.”

  “A good thing, too, or they would have been tougher,” Ulric said. “They put up a better fight than I thought they could. When you scragged their shaman, that took a lot of heart out of them.”

  “Did it?” Hamnet had been too busy to notice.

  “Oh, yes. They must have thought he was the finest thing since raw meat.” Ulric Skakki eyed the shaman’s corpse. “Now he is raw meat. I wonder if our charming friends will turn him into the main course. And I wonder if they’ll expect us to share.”

  “You come up with the most delightful ideas,” Hamnet said. Ulric made as if to bow. As Hamnet s stomach twisted, he went on, “Maybe I could turn cannibal to keep from starving. Maybe. Just to feed myself? No. I hope not, anyway.”

  “Up here, the difference between needing to feed yourself and starving isn’t likely to be very big,” Ulric said.

  Hamnet Thyssen grunted. Before he could say anything, a man of the Glacier came up to him and pounded him on the back. The fellow poured out a torrent of gibberish. “What’s he saying?” Hamnet asked Ulric Skakki.

  “That you’re a demon of a warrior,” the adventurer answered. “That he didn’t think anybody could kill old Leudigisel, but you made it look easy. Uh, that you’re entitled to his heart and liver and ballocks if you want them.”

  Reflecting that his stomach had twisted too soon, Count Hamnet said, “Tell him I don’t want to offend him, but that’s not our custom. Tell him I wouldn’t pollute myself by eating any part of old what’s-his-name.”

  “I’m not sure I can say that, but I’ll try.” Ulric Skakki did. He must have made his point, for the man of the Glacier said something and pointed to Hamnet. “He likes what you said,” Ulric translated. “He says it shows a manly attitude.” The man of the Glacier spoke again. “He asks if you mind if his clan feeds on their dead foes’ flesh.”

  “They can do whatever they want,” Hamnet replied. “We didn’t come up here to reform them. We didn’t even know they were here when we did come up.” He switched to Raumsdalian so the man of the Glacier couldn’t possibly understand: “And I’d rather have them butcher the shaman than us, by God.”

  “Yes, that crossed my mind, too,” Ulric Skakki said. He spoke haltingly in the tongue the men of the Glacier used, the tongue related to an obscure Bizogot dialect.

  The man with whom he was talking shouted to his comrades. They started butchering their fallen enemies. Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t watch for long. He’d butchered many animals and slain many men, but he’d never seen people deliberately cut up human corpses for meat.

  No man of the Glacier ate any raw man’s flesh. Through Ulric, Count Hamnet asked why not. The man who answered him explained that there was a curse on the practice. “I bet they come down sick when they eat their neighbors raw,” Ulric guessed shrewdly. “You have to cook pork gray to keep that from happening, and it’s bound to be worse with your own kind. Lots of curses have common sense behind them if you know where to look.”

  That wouldn’t have occurred to Count Hamnet. Ulric Skakki had a knack for eyeing the world sideways and seeing things other people missed. Hamnet said, “I hope there are enough rabbits and mice and berries and whatnot on the next mountain to keep us going for a while. Otherwise . ..”

  “Otherwise we have to keep quiet forever if we do somehow make it down from here,” Ulric finished for him. “Yes. If we don’t, no one will want to do anything with us but kill us on sight.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, all right.” Hamnet wished it weren’t. He didn’t want to become a cannibal, to put himself beyond
the pale of decency for the rest of his life. But he didn’t want to starve to death, either.

  Ulric spoke to a man of the Glacier who was helping to cut up a corpse. Hamnet caught something that sounded like the Bizogot word for friends. The barrel-chested barbarian nodded. He said something that had Leudigisel’s name in it. Hamnet guess the man meant that anyone who’d killed Leudigisel was a friend of his.

  When Ulric asked another question, the man of the Glacier shrugged and spread his gory hands. He paused and wiped his fingers clean - well, cleaner. Then the man of the Glacier said something more.

  “What’s going on?” Hamnet asked.

  “I asked him if he knew how we could get down from the Glacier, get back to the rest of the world,” Ulric replied. “He said he didn’t. He asked me why anyone would want to when things were so much better here.”

  “Oh.” Hamnet Thyssen put no stress on the word. He didn’t think it needed any. By Ulric Skakki s crooked smile, neither did he.

  Did vultures and teratorns come up here to the top of the Glacier? Hamnet couldn’t remember seeing any overhead. If he had, he would have thought they were waiting for him to keel over. Marching and fighting in this thin air left him crushingly weary.

  “We went to war for this clan,” he told Ulric. “They owe us help getting down, if they have any to give.”

  The adventurer translated his words for the man of the Glacier. The barbarian shrugged. He spoke. “He says to wait for another avalanche,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “No, thanks,” Count Hamnet answered. Scavenger birds might or might not come up here. But small-eared foxes, no doubt drawn by the scent of blood, already stood waiting just out of bowshot to clean up the remains the men of the Glacier didn’t want.

  Pointing to them, Ulric Skakki said, “They show these people have been up here for a long time, poor devils.”

  “How do you mean?” Hamnet asked.

  “They know how far a bow shoots, and they know not to come that close.”

  “That makes them smarter than a lot of warriors I’ve run into.” Hamnet pointed to the puddles of blood now freezing on the ice.

  “Heh,” Ulric said. “That’s one of those jokes that would be funny if only it were funny - know what I mean?”

  “Who said I was joking?” Hamnet Thyssen answered.

  The mountaintop refugeto which the men of the Glacier led the Raumsdalians and Bizogots was larger and more hospitable than the one they’d found on their own. It had a broad, low south-facing slope that caught as much sun as there was to catch. Flowers and berries and other greens grew as thickly as they could at that height and in that weather.

  Stone pens housed hares and pikas and voles. The men of the Glacier did everything they could to make themselves at home here. And everything they could do still left their little world terrifyingly bleak to anyone who came to it anew.

  Count Hamnet saw his first women and children of the Glacier there. The only difference between them and their menfolk he could find was that they grew no beards, so their faces were only filthy, not shaggy. They hid behind rocks when they saw oddly dressed strangers accompanying their kinsmen, but came out with glad cries when the men of the Glacier told of the battle they’d fought and showed off the meat they’d brought back.

  They used dried dung for their fires, as the Bizogots did down on what Hamnet had thought of as the frozen plain till he came to the top of the Glacier. Some of the dung was rabbit pellets. The rest... Well, the men of the Glacier couldn’t even afford to waste waste.

  “We can’t stay here long,” Trasamund said in a low voice.

  “I wouldn’t want to, God knows,” Hamnet answered. “But why do you say we can’t?”

  “Because we’ll eat them empty if we do,” the jarl said. “I’ll bet some of them starve every winter the way things are. Pretty soon they’ll see they can’t keep us, if they haven’t seen it by now. And then they’ll kill us and cook us, or try.”

  As soon as Hamnet heard that, he knew it had to be true. “We’d best keep sentries up while the rest of us sleep, then,” he said.

  “Already thought of it,” Trasamund replied.

  “Good,” Hamnet said. “We don’t want to be pushy about it. If we are, we’re liable to give them ideas they don’t need. But we don’t want to let them talk us out of it, either.”

  “That’s about how I see things, too,” the Bizogot said. “We can whip them if we have to, I think.”

  “Maybe,” Hamnet said. “But even if we do, so what? Do you want to be lord of this mountain?” He didn’t come out and ask, Are you utterly mad? - but he didn’t miss by much, either.

  The idea appalled Trasamund. “I want to come down off the Glacier. I want to fight the Rulers. I want to beat them, by God. I’m jarl of the Three Tusk clan, and that’s what I aim to grow old being.”

  No matter how he aimed, Hamnet Thyssen feared he was unlikely to hit his target. His clan was shattered beyond repair. So was the Bizogots’ whole way of life on much of the frozen steppe, if not on all of it. Hamnet could hardly blame the jarl if that hadn’t sunk in yet. Sooner or later, though, it would have to.

  He looked around to see what Liv was doing. He seemed to be doing that more and more lately, and wished he weren’t. She and Audun Gilli were both trying to talk to a scrawny woman of the Glacier with long, stringy blond hair. The woman’s fur tunic and trousers were decorated with fringes and bits of sparkling crystal tied on with rawhide or cord. He nodded to himself. If she wasn’t this clan’s shaman, he would have been very much surprised.

  “Can you translate?” Audun Gilli called to Ulric Skakki. “You’re the only one of us who knows their language.”

  “It’s a little like what I speak, but only a little,” Liv added. “When I guess, I guess wrong half the time. And you don’t want to guess wrong when you’re talking about shamanry. A mistake can kill you.”

  “A shame you don’t want to put any pressure on me,” Ulric said with one of his lopsided smiles. “I’ll try, but I don’t know how much I can help. I didn’t have a lot to do with the Crag Goats’ shaman.”

  He squatted down beside the stringy-haired woman and spoke to her in her language. Listening, Count Hamnet felt he ought to be able to understand it, but couldn’t except for a word here and there. It was at least as far from the regular Bizogot tongue as the old-fashioned Raumsdalian priests used in their liturgies was from the everyday speech of Nidaros.

  A moment later, he forgot about the fine points of dialect, for the smell of roasting pork brought spit flooding into his mouth. He’d marched and fought on very little food, and that savory smell reminded him of it.

  But it wasn’t pork. He realized that a moment too late, a moment after the smell dug down deep and made his belly growl. Nausea and hunger warred within him. He’d wanted man’s flesh. He hadn’t quite known what it was, but he’d wanted it. Part of him still did, and that was worst of all.

  Trasamund went from smile to scowl in a way that suggested the cooking cannibal feast had smelled good to him, too. The men of the Glacier watched their enemies’ flesh sizzle with eager anticipation. They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong by eating it. Had the men of the other clan won the fight, these barbarians would have been bur.chered. And So would I, Count Hamnet thought.

  “Ulric!” he called.

  “What is it?” The adventurer looked up from his colloquy with the shaman.

  “Ask if we can eat some hares or whatever else they have instead of. .. that.” Hamnet pointed to the meat cooking above the fires.

  “Oh. Right.” Ulric Skakki went back to the language the men of the Glacier could follow. The shaman sounded surprised as she answered. Ulric said, “She wants to know why, when man’s flesh is so much sweeter. She says there’s nothing better than the flesh of foes you’ve killed yourself.”

  “Wonderful,” Count Hamnet said tightly. “Well, tell her it’s not our custom or whatever you have to say to get us out of it. God know
s you aren’t lying.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Again, Ulric returned to the other dialect. The shaman shrugged and tapped her forehead with a callused finger as she said something in reply. “She thinks foreigners are crazy,” Ulric translated unnecessarily.

  “Well, we love her, too,” Hamnet said, which made Ulric bark laughter and earned the Raumsdalian noble a sharp glance from the shaman. Hamnet Thyssen looked back impassively, and the woman of the Glacier was the first to turn her eyes away.

  Instead of hares, the men of the Glacier fed their guests pikas and voles. Hamnet guessed they were being given the glove, but he wasn’t inclined to fuss about it. He would have eaten worms and earwigs instead of the meat that smelled so damnably tempting.

  The men of the Glacier didn’t worry about it. Hamnet could see why. Life here was impossibly hard. They probably didn’t recognize the folk of other clans as human beings at all. But when he watched them cut flesh with their stone knives and greedily stuff it into their mouths, he almost lost his own appetite.

  Almost, but not quite. He was so hungry, before long he would have eaten man’s flesh and been glad to get it. That thought made him despise the locals less as he watched them feast.

  “How much does their shaman know?” he asked Liv. If he could talk about anything else, it had to help.

  “Hard to be sure, but more than I expected,” she answered. “They have so little up here - they can’t use much for shamanry. But what will can do, will and bone and stone, Marcovefa does. I suppose that’s true for the other one, too, the one you killed.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that tanglefoot spell before - I know that.” Hamnet shivered. “I hope I never do again, either.” He remembered the choice morsels he’d been offered from the dead shaman. With another shiver, he wondered if one day before too long he’d regret not eating them when he had the chance.