The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “It was different, sure enough.” Liv looked at him from under lowered eyebrows. “Why do you think I’m cheating on you with Audun?”

  Count Hamnet started to deny that he thought any such thing. He started to, yes, but found he couldn’t. It wasn’t so much that he minded lying as that he minded minded lying and getting found out. His voice dull with a mixture of anger and embarrassment, he answered, “I imagine because I saw it happen before with Gudrid.”

  “I’m not Gudrid, thank God. I hoped you might have noticed,” Liv said tartly. “And I’m not sleeping with Audun Gilli, either. If you keep trying to watch me all day and all night, though, I’m liable to start, just to give you something to watch.”

  He got out two syllables of a laugh before he realized she wasn’t joking. She thought spying was as big a betrayal as infidelity, and she would repay the one with the other. He hesitated. He knew the words he needed, but bringing them out came hard, hard. But he had no choice, not if he wanted to keep her. Hating himself, hating her a little, he mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?” Liv expected words to mean what they said. Bizogots weren’t much for polite hypocrisy, but she’d seen that Raumsdalians could be. She eyed him narrowly, trying to scent dissembling. She must not have, for at last she nodded. “Yes, I think you are. All right, then - let it go.”

  He nodded, too. It wasn’t done between them; he knew that. But it wouldn’t crash down on them like a great ice avalanche, either - not right now, anyway. He changed the subject: “Can we sleep safely?”

  “Sooner or later, we’ll have to,” Liv answered. “We may as well do it now. No quarrel between us and them for the time being.”

  “Except about what they eat.” Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t get the smell of roasting pork out of his nostrils or out of his mind.

  “We can’t do anything about that except not eat it ourselves.” Liv tossed a pebble up into the air. It fell with a small click. “Not eating it may make them leery of us, but I don’t think we can do anything about it.”

  “Nothing we’d want to do, anyhow,” Hamnet said.

  He curled up on the slope. Liv lay down beside him. He slid his arm around her and pulled her close to him. She moved willingly enough. It should have been comforting, reassuring. It seemed anything but, instead reminding him of how they’d quarreled and of what he feared. He couldn’t keep his arm around her all the time. What would she do when it wasn’t there?

  She’ll look around to see if you ‘re watching her, that’s what, he told himself. And you’d better not be, or she’ll make you sorry. But how could he not watch? Gudrid had taught him that unwatched women cheated whenever they felt like it, and you wouldn’t know they were cheating because you weren’t watching them. Then, when you couldn’t not know any more, you hurt all the worse because they’d been doing it for so long. You couldn’t win.

  He couldn’t even stay awake. He’d done too much and slept too little. His eyes slid shut in the middle of a worry. He never knew he’d slid under. If anyone tried to rouse him to stand sentry, it didn’t work. Except for breathing, he might have been dead.

  When he woke, he was confused, not realizing he’d been asleep. Wasn’t the sun over there a moment earlier? Or had he somehow shifted so that what he thought was east was really west? No and no, he finally decided. This was morning, and the sun truly did lie in the northeast. The men of the Glacier hadn’t tried to murder him while he slept, either.

  Liv still lay beside him, snoring softly. Sleep stole weariness and years from her face. Hamnet Thyssen could see the girl she had been, not the desperate shaman with the strange foreign lover she’d become.

  When Liv woke a little later, she smiled at Hamnet. But the expression soon faded as she remembered where they were and, no doubt, what they’d been talking about before exhaustion claimed them. They had a lot of repair work to do ... if they lived.

  IX

  We’ve got toget down from here,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If we don’t - and if we don’t do it soon - we’ll have a war on our hands.”

  “Yes? And so?” Trasamund sent a hooded but scornful glance towards the men of the Glacier. “It wouldn’t last long, and we’d cursed well win. We’d slaughter them, as a matter of fact, and we wouldn’t have much trouble doing it, either.”

  “I know. That’s what I’m afraid of,” Count Hamnet answered. The Bizogot jarl sent him a quizzical look. He explained: “We slaughter the men. We take the women and sire our own children on them. We raise rabbits and voles on this crag, and we fight with the men of the Glacier who live on other crags. Then what? We turn into men of the Glacier ourselves, that’s what, and the children we sire will think everything we say about what it was like down in the Bizogot country is a pack of lies. Is that what you’ve got in mind?”

  Trasamund bared his teeth in a horrible grimace. “Good God, no!”

  “Well, I don’t, either,” Hamnet said. “And so we’d better take as much food as they’ll let us have and get out of here before the fighting starts.”

  “Where can we get down, though, except where we climbed up?” Trasamund said. “If we try that, the Rulers are liable to be waiting for us.”

  “I doubt it. We’re only an afterthought to them - if that, by now,” Hamnet said. “They’ve got bigger things to worry about farther south - not just the Bizogot clans down there, but the Empire. Odds are they’ve forgotten about us.”

  “Maybe.” The Bizogot didn’t sound as if he believed it. He was so self-important, he couldn’t imagine that anyone else, even his enemies - perhaps especially his enemies - wouldn’t think him important, too.

  “At least we’re here in the summer.” Hamnet felt like stretching in the sun like a cat. It was almost as warm as it would have been down on the Bizogot plains. And, up so high, the sun was harder on the skin than it would have been down there. A swarthy man, Hamnet had got darker. Many of the fairer Bizogots were sunburned, some of them badly.

  With a grunt, Trasamund nodded. “Winter up here wouldn’t be much fun.” From a Bizogot, especially a Bizogot who’d lived his life hard by the edge of the Glacier, that was no small admission.

  “No, not much.” Count Hamnet didn’t want Trasamund outdoing him at understatement. “Maybe, though, it will melt enough of the Glacier to touch off a new avalanche at the edge. And maybe we can use that to get down.”

  “Even if it does, how would we know?” Trasamund replied. “And how long do you want to wait around and hope? You were the one who said we couldn’t wait long, and I think you’re right.”

  “If a big chunk does let go, we might hear it even though we’re a long way from the edge of the Glacier,” Count Hamnet said. “Not a lot of other noise between there and here.” He growled, down deep in his chest. “As for the other. . . You’re right, I did say that, and it’s true, curse it. Not enough food up here to keep guests long.”

  “What are you talking about?” Trasamund retorted. “Up here, guests are food.”

  “Not for us. If we turn cannibal, there’s no point going down again. Next to that, the Rulers are welcome to do as they please.”

  “Not to me they’re not, by God,” the Bizogot said. “I’d eat man’s flesh if it was that or starve. Not before, but then. It happens in hard winters once in awhile.”

  “Mm, I can see how it might.” Hamnet tried to sound calm and judicious, not revolted. “But what do you think afterwards of the people who did it?”

  “Depends. If they really had no other choice, then it’s just one of those things. If it’s not like that, or if the friends and kin of the ones who got eaten decide it’s not like that. . . Well, the cannibals don’t last long then.”

  Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding. By the Bizogots’ rough standards, that seemed fair enough. Even down in the Empire, there were stories of men who ate neighbors and relatives when the Breath of God blew strong and the harvest failed. People laughed at those stories more often than not, which didn’t mean some of them
weren’t true. Sometimes you laughed because screaming was the only other choice.

  Ulric was translating for Audun Gilli and the shaman from the men of the Glacier, whose name was Marcovefa. The adventurer suddenly straightened and stiffened like a dog that had taken a scent. “Ha!” he said, turning, Thyssen!

  “I’m here,” Hamnet answered. “What do you need?”

  “Come over here, why don’t you? That way, I won’t have to yell,” Ulric said. “Besides, you may understand pieces of this in the original, and it’s better if you try. I might make a mistake.”

  Grunting, Hamnet got to his feet. Parts of him creaked and crunched as he moved. He had enough years to feel sleeping on hard ground after marching and fighting, enough years to make him feel half again as old as he really was. He creaked again when he squatted beside Ulric and Marcovefa and Audun. He had to make himself nod to the Raumsdalian wizard. Audun nodded back as if nothing was wrong.

  “What’s the story?” Hamnet asked.

  “She may know another way down,” Ulric answered.

  That got Hamnet s interest, all right. “Tell me more,” he said.

  Ulric spread his hands in frustration. “I can’t - or not much more, anyhow. The verbs are driving me crazy. Here. Wait. I’ll have her tell you what she told me. Maybe you’ll be able to make some sense out of it.”

  “I couldn’t,” Audun Gilli said. But Audun had needed a year to get something more than a smattering of the ordinary Bizogot language. Whatever his talents as a wizard, he made anything but a cunning linguist.

  “Well, I’ll try.” Hamnet knew he sounded dubious. He thought he recognized words here and there in the language the men of the Glacier used. A couple of times, he’d made out a sentence, as long as it was short and simple.

  Ulric spoke to Marcovefa. Hamnet thought he said something like, Tell him what you just told me. He wouldn’t have bet anything he cared about losing, though.

  Marcovefa answered. It was her birthspeech; she didn’t stumble or hesitate the way Ulric did. That made her harder for Hamnet Thyssen to follow, not easier. He frowned, listening intently.

  When she finished, he said, “Didn’t she say she knows where a way down will be?”

  “Ha! You heard it like that, too!” Ulric said. “Maybe the verbs are strange, but that sure sounds like a Bizogot future tense, doesn’t it?”

  “It did to me,” Hamnet said. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “I’ve tried. It didn’t help.” Ulric sighed and tried again.

  “Past? Now? Later? All the same.” That was what Hamnet thought Marcovefa said. He looked a question at Ulric.

  The adventurer sighed. “I think she’s saying there’s no difference between one time and another. Crazy little bird, isn’t she?”

  He spoke in Raumsdalian, which the shaman couldn’t possibly understand. Nothing in his face or his tone of voice gave him away. But Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff and slapped his arm the way a mother would slap a child who’d done something rude and silly. She might not have followed the words, but she knew - she knew - he hadn’t treated her with the respect she deserved.

  “Maybe there’s more to it than you think,” Count Hamnet said slowly.

  “Maybe.” Ulric didn’t sound as if he believed it, but now he didn’t sound as if he dared disbelieve it, either. That left him sounding . . . confused. He went on speaking Raumsdalian: “Maybe up here there’s so little going on that now and then can blend like salt and garlic in a stew. Nothing up here would surprise me very much anymore. I mean, what is time but a way to keep everything from happening at once?”

  Hamnet Thyssen half - more than half - expected Marcovefa to slap him again for being flip. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she was crazy, at least by the standards that prevailed at the bottom of the Glacier. This was too strange and too harsh and too different a world to expect standards to stay the same. But instead of being insulted, the shaman nodded vigorously. She let out what was, to Hamnet, mostly a stream of gibberish.

  By the bemused look on Ulric s face, he understood a good deal more of it, but was none too happy that he did. “What was that all about?” Hamnet asked when Marcovefa finally fell silent.

  “She says I get it after all,” Ulric replied, shaking his head. “She says she thought I was as vacant as a vole - which is a demon of a phrase, even in her weird dialect - till I made my snide joke. But everything I said was true, she told me. She feels it in her heart.”

  Marcovefa laid a hand over her left breast. She might not understand Raumsdalian in any ordinary sense of the world, but she could sense truth and falsehood ... or she thought she could, anyhow. By what Hamnet was seeing here, he would have had a hard time telling her she was wrong.

  Then she said something else, something that sounded very self-assured. Ulric’s jaw dropped. “What now?” Hamnet asked. “Do I really want to know?”

  “Well, I’m damned if I want to be the only one who does,” Ulric answered. “She says she’s going with us, to the edge of the Glacier and over it.”

  “But what about her clan?” Hamnet said. “Won’t they end up a feast for some of the others up here if she leaves them? How can she do it?”

  The adventurer spoke to her. She pointed to a young man scraping flesh from the inside of a pika hide with a sharpened bit of flint. “That’s Dragolen,” Ulric said. “He’s well on his way to turning into a shaman himself. By what she can tell, nothing too horrendous happens - not will happen, but happens - to the clan till he finishes learning the things he needs to know.”

  “Tell her we don’t eat man’s flesh down below,” Hamnet said. “Maybe that will make her want to stay here.”

  But Marcovefa only shrugged at the news. Like a lot of shamans and wizards, she could be imperious when she chose. “I go,” she said, and even Hamnet couldn’t misunderstand her - however much he might have wanted to.

  No matter whatMarcovefa thought of Dragolen as an up-and-coming shaman, Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether the clan chief - he didn’t have enough people under him to count as a jarl in the Raumsdalian’s mind - would be eager to let her leave. But he said not a word against her. He was probably so glad to get rid of the dangerous strangers that losing his shaman seemed small by comparison.

  Hamnet asked both Liv and Audun Gilli if they foretold trouble by bringing Marcovefa along. Liv simply shook her head. On matters that didn’t touch their private lives, she and Hamnet still worked well together. On those that did ... they didn’t.

  “We’re already in so much trouble, what’s a little more?” Audun said. Having no good answer for that, Hamnet walked away shaking his head.

  Ulric dickered with the clan chief over how many hares and pikas and voles the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would take with them when they left. When he didn’t like the deal the chief proposed, he sweetened it by offering to leave a couple of swords behind with the men of the Glacier. That made the chief cheer up.

  “Swords won’t help them catch rabbits,” Audun said, a puzzled note in his voice.

  Ulric eyed him with something approaching pity. “Rabbits aren’t the only meat they hunt, and swords will help them with the other.”

  “The other...? Oh!” Light - a revolted light - shone in the wizards eyes.

  Marcovefa led them off the mountainside and down onto the surface of the Glacier. Count Hamnet shook his head in wonder. He’d never dreamt he would need to descend to travel over the Glacier. He’d never dreamt of a lot of the things that happened to him till they did. A good many of them, he would have been happier to avoid. That was afterwards, though, and afterwards was always too late.

  Here and there, puddles dotted the top of the Glacier. Marcovefa eyed them dubiously. She said something. When Hamnet looked a question at Ulric, the adventurer translated: “In her grandfather’s grandfathers days, this didn’t happen, she says.”

  “Is she sure she’s not talking about her grandchildren’s days?” Hamnet asked. “She’s the one who can�
�t keep time straight.”

  Before Ulric could render that into Marcovefa’s dialect, she sent Hamnet a severe look, as if he were a child acting snippy around grownups. That shouldn’t have been easy to bring off; he thought he was older than she was. But when she wanted to, she could assume as many years and as much dignity as she pleased. It was an unusual gift, and not a small one, either.

  She led the Bizogots and Raumsdalians south and west with a fine display of confidence. Count Hamnet wondered what lay behind it. He wondered if anything did. Maybe she was willing to sacrifice herself to strand them on the Glacier and rid her clan of the threat they posed. But when that thought bubbled up from the dark places at the bottom of his mind, he shook his head. He could imagine it, but he couldn’t believe it. She acted like someone who knew what she was doing and where she was going.

  Of course, a madwoman would act that way, too. Hamnet was much less certain Marcovefa and the real world touched each other very much.

  Why are you following her, then? he asked himself. But the answer to that was all too plain: even if she was leading them to disaster, what did they have to lose? Staying up here was only disaster of a different kind. The miserable cannibal life the men of the Glacier led showed that all too clearly.

  He skirted another puddle atop the Glacier. “What do you suppose would happen if it all melted?” he asked.

  “Never happen,” Trasamund said. “Not while we still live.”

  Those two things weren’t the same, though the jarl didn’t seem to understand it. Even if he and Hamnet Thyssen lived to grow long white beards - which seemed most unlikely at the moment - they would die in an eyeblink of time as far as the world went. Not so far long ago, as far as the world went, the Glacier had pushed down to not far north of Nidaros. The country around the present capital was much like the Bizogot steppe in those days. If the Glacier disappeared, this northern land might turn out not to be so useless, too.

  But Trasamund wouldn’t be here to see it. To him, nothing else mattered. Well, that made a certain amount of sense, or maybe more than a certain amount. But Hamnet tried to take a longer view.