The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  Ulric did enjoy trotting out what he knew and showing it off. “Well, ask Grippo, then,” Hamnet said.

  “I can’t. I don’t know him. And Ulric Skakki does, curse it.”

  Grippo raised a skin of smetyn to Ulric in salute. “Warmer than the last time you were here, isn’t it?” the jarl of the Green Geese said.

  “Oh, just a little,” Ulric answered. “Couldn’t very well be colder, by God.”

  “When were you here before?” Trasamund inquired.

  “A couple of winters ago,” Ulric Skakki answered lightly. He glanced over towards Trasamund. “That was the winter I slipped up through the Gap.”

  Trasamund looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. He ended up doing some of each. “Why, you lying sack of horse turds!” he burst out. “You expect me to believe that? You would have had to go right on past the Three Tusk clan without ever letting us know you were around.”

  “Yes? And so? What’s so hard about that?” Ulric said. “You stuck by your tents and by your herds. No one had any idea I was there.”

  “You can’t make me believe that,” Trasamund said. “By God, I was the first one through the Gap, the first one to see what was on the other side of the Glacier. Why would I have come down to the Empire if I wasn’t?”

  “Because you’re not as smart as you think you are?” Ulric Skakki suggested. His voice stayed mild, but he had no give in him.

  Trasamund sent a glance of appeal to Hamnet Thyssen. “Tell him to ease off, Your Grace,” he said, as if Ulric weren’t standing there a few feet away. “Tell him I don’t want to thump him, but I will if he doesn’t quit spewing nonsense like this.”

  “Your Ferocity, I don’t think it is nonsense,” Count Hamnet answered. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I believe him. He told me about this when we were going up through the Gap last summer. He sounded like somebody who knew what he was talking about, too, and when we got beyond the Glacier some of the things he said turned out to be true.”

  He might have stabbed Trasamund in the back. “You want me to think a Raumsdalian is as good up here as any Bizogot?” the jarl said. “You want me to think a Raumsdalian is better up here than most Bizogots? I won’t do it!”

  “Do you know what you sound like?” Ulric said. “You sound like one of those tiresome Raumsdalians who go on and on about how Bizogots are too barbarous to do this, that, or the other thing. They’re stupid bores, if you ask me.” He didn’t say what Trasamund was if you asked him, but you didn’t need to be a scholar of logic to figure it out.

  Trasamund certainly had no trouble. “If any of your drivel is true, why didn’t you come out with it a long time ago?” he demanded.

  “Well, I did tell Count Hamnet here - and I told him to keep it quiet,” Ulric Skakki replied. “I didn’t tell you before because I thought you’d get tiresome yourself if you knew - and I was bloody well right, wasn’t I?”

  “I ought to thump you from here to Nidaros and back again,” Trasamund snarled.

  “You’re welcome to try,” Ulric said politely. Trasamund was much the bigger man. Ulric was quicker and, as Hamnet Thyssen had painfully discovered, knew more fighting tricks than anyone had any business knowing. If the Bizogot and the adventurer fought, Count Hamnet knew which way he’d bet.

  Trasamund was no coward - anything but. He’d hurled himself at the Rulers without the slightest worry about what might happen next. But something in Ulric’s matter-of-fact invitation seemed to give him pause. He grabbed a skin of smetyn and took a long pull. With the air of a man being more magnanimous than he might, he said, “I am going to let you live, and I’ll tell you why.”

  “I hang on your every word, Your Ferocity.” Ulric Skakki’s tone suggested that the jarl was welcome to hang himself.

  Ignoring it, Trasamund said, “I am going to let you live because the Rulers are the enemies we have to fight. Once they’re beaten, we can worry about each other again.”

  “Congratulations,” Ulric said. “You see? You can make sense if you put your mind to it. I wasn’t sure, but you can after all.”

  “Enough,” Hamnet Thyssen said quickly. Ulric was working on making Trasamund lose his temper. Volcanic as the Bizogot was, that wouldn’t be hard. It might be good for the sake of Ulric’s amusement. But it also might end in blood - and Trasamund was right when he said fighting the Rulers was more important.

  “You’re no fun,” the adventurer said petulantly.

  “Yes, I know. That seems to be how things work for me,” Count Hamnet said. “But Trasamund’s trying hard to do the right thing. He deserves credit for it. He doesn’t deserve you pushing him into a brawl he’s doing his best to walk away from.”

  Ulric Skakki pushed out his lower lip. “You’re really very ugly when you’re right, too - just in case you didn’t know.”

  “Thank you,” Hamnet said. If Ulric was trying to bait fern now, he wouldn’t have any luck. By his sour stare, Ulric was trying to do exactly that.

  “You are a band of brothers,” Grippo observed. Before Count Hamnet could figure out a polite way to call the jarl of the Green Geese an idiot, Grippo continued, “My brothers and I, we would fight like dire wolves in mating season. You seem the same way - you know one another too well, and you’ve been too close together too long.”

  Instead of calling Grippo a fool, Hamnet Thyssen bowed. “You have good sense, Your Ferocity.”

  “Maybe. And even if I do, how much will it help me if these invaders decide to serve us the way they served the Rock Ptarmigans?”

  That was a good question. In a way, it was too good a question, because Hamnet had no answer for it. “We’re all doing what we can,” he said, which was true but liable to be less than helpful.

  “Will it be enough?” Grippo inquired - another pointed query. “And if it isn’t, then what?”

  “I don’t know, Your Ferocity,” Count Hamnet answered. “But if the Rulers win, I don’t expect to be alive to see it.”

  “If the Rulers win, not many of us will be,” Grippo said, “not unless we bend the knee to them, anyhow.”

  “And maybe not even then,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Anyone who is not of their folk is part of the herd, as far as they’re concerned. Why would they treat a herd of people any better than a herd of mammoths?”

  The Bizogot grunted. He lived in a mammoth-hide tent. He slept under a mammoth-hide blanket. He ate mammoth meat, used mammoth fat and butter in his lamps, wore mammoth-leather clothes, and used mammoth ivory for everything from ornaments to arrow points. The mammoths had no say in any of that. Under the Rulers, neither would he.

  “By God, any Bizogot who bends the knee to the Rulers deserves whatever happens to him,” Trasamund declared. “Any Bizogot who bends the knee to anyone deserves whatever happens to him. Are we not the free folk? Is it not better to die on our feet than to live on our knees?”

  “People say so,” Grippo answered. “The ones who do say so are all alive, though. I haven’t heard what the dead ones say.”

  There was a piece of cynicism worthy of any diplomat from Nidaros, worthy even of Sigvat II himself. Hamnet Thyssen bowed his head in admiration of a sort. Euric had shown him that the Bizogots could aspire to civilized deceit. Listening to Grippo, he found that they’d truly mastered the art.

  “We ought to bring him with us,” Ulric Skakki murmured in Raumsdalian. “He’d swindle the Emperor right out of his shoes.”

  “For which I thank you, though you do me too much honor,” Grippo said in the same language, his accent elegant and educated.

  First Euric, then Grippo - again ... Count Hamnet had rarely seen Ulric nonplused, but he did now. “You never let on that you could speak Raumsdalian!” the adventurer yelped.

  “Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?” replied the jarl of the Green Geese.

  “If you deal with the Rulers, you’ll get your share,” Hamnet Thyssen told him. “You may not like them once you have them, though.”

  “You’v
e made yourself very plain,” Grippo said. “I will do ... what I do. Whatever it is, I won’t harm you by it. I could, you know. If I seized you, if I gave you to the Rulers, I’d win favor from them. Will you tell me I’m wrong?”

  “You wouldn’t enjoy it long.” That was as much as Count Hamnet could say. If he tried to tell Grippo the Rulers wouldn’t reward him for turning over such persistent nuisances, the jarl would know he was lying.

  “So I judge,” Grippo replied calmly.

  Marcovefa said something - a long, angry burst in her own language. How much of the talk had she understood? She was learning the usual Bizogot tongue, and she had that gift for understanding whether she knew the words or not. She glanced expectantly towards Ulric Skakki. Well - go on, her attitude said.

  And he did: “She says you have her curse, Grippo, if you go against what is best for your folk for the sake of what you think best for you.” Marcovefa nodded, as if satisfied with the feel of the translation.

  “How much should this worry me?” By the way Grippo asked the question, he thought the answer was not much.

  Marcovefa muttered to herself. Grippo started to say something else, something that probably would have been sardonic or cruel or crude. What came out instead was a deep, gabbling honk - the honk a goose the size of a man might have made. Grippo looked astonished. Then he started pecking for seeds on the ground. His face wasn’t built for that the way a goose’s was, but he didn’t seem to care. And then he started preening. Unlike a goose, a man had no business being able to stick his head into his armpit. Grippo’s neck seemed to stretch to accommodate. He honked some more, now seeming seriously alarmed.

  “Tell her she’s made her point,” Hamnet Thyssen whispered to Ulric. “Too much is too much, same as it would have been with Euric. She should let him be a man again.” Ulric nodded and spoke in Marcovefa’s language.

  Grippo raised his head. He went on honking for a few heartbeats, but then found ordinary words: “What the demon did you do to me?”

  Ulric translated his question and then her reply: “She says she showed you what a silly goose you would be if you kissed the Rulers’ backside.”

  “By God! I guess she did!” the jarl of the Green Geese said. “It was the oddest thing. Some of the seeds I found there were really good. Now I know they had to be disgusting, but I sure liked them when I pecked them up. And I knew what my honks meant, even if you didn’t.”

  “Shamans sometimes take beast shape themselves, you know,” Liv said.

  “Oh, yes.” Grippo nodded. “I’ve seen that. But I never thought I’d do it. I’m a man, and that’s flat. But now I’m a man with a different look at things.”

  “I hope it’s a look that says dealing with the Rulers wouldn’t be such a good idea,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

  “Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” Grippo nodded again and shivered at the same time. “Next time, if there were a next time, your shaman might turn me into a bird louse instead of a bird.”

  Marcovefa gave him a grin full of teeth. No one had said anything about her eating habits atop the Glacier. That grin suggested them despite the silence. Grippo flinched from it, and from the idea that she’d followed him without knowing his language.

  When the travelers rode south the next morning, the Green Geese gave them more horses and everything they asked for in the way of supplies. Count Hamnet had the feeling Grippo would have done anything at all to get them away from his clan. Unlike Euric, he didn’t invite Marcovefa to sleep with him. Hamnet thought he would sooner have slept with a serpent - and Grippo had never seen a serpent in his life.

  “She does make an impression on people, doesn’t she?” Hamnet said as the tents of the Green Geese shrank behind them.

  “Who? Our cannibal princess? Oh, just a little,” Ulric Skakki replied. “Yes, just a little. And if he gave her half a chance, she would make an impression on him.” He mimed biting down hard. Hamnet Thyssen winced. That wasn’t what he’d meant, which didn’t mean it wasn’t so.

  The sun seemed to stay in the sky forever. It was high summer on the northern plains. For a few weeks, you could forget all about the Glacier unless the Breath of God decided to blow down from the north even at that time of year. If it did, all kinds of strange things could happen, from snowstorms that blighted a growing season to twisters that picked up anything from a mammoth to a whole Bizogot encampment and flung it across the landscape.

  But now the Breath of God might have been a million miles away. It got as hot as it ever did down in Nidaros - maybe hotter. The hunting was good ... and Grippo sent one of his men with the travelers down to the edge of his grazing lands. The man from the Green Geese ordered musk-ox herders to kill a beast for the Bizogots and Raumsdalians passing through.

  “What? Are you sure?” one of the herders said. “Grippo never tells us to do things like that.”

  “He did this time.” The other Bizogot sent Marcovefa a sidelong glance. He didn’t explain his jarl’s embarrassment, not in public, but he sounded very sure of himself. The herder stopped grumbling.

  Audun Gilli shaved bits from the musk ox’s horns after it fell. “Why are you doing that?” Liv asked him.

  “I don’t know, not exactly.” The wizard sounded a little sheepish. “But here we are, and here I am, and here’s the musk ox, and the horns are strong, and they may be good for some kind of magic one of these days.”

  That sounded like a stretch to Hamnet Thyssen, but Liv only nodded. “I do the same sort of thing sometimes,” she said. “My tent used to be full of this and that and the other thing - back when the clan was strong, I mean. And maybe I would have used some of what I gathered and maybe I wouldn’t, but I had it just in case.”

  “When I had a house down in Nidaros, it was the same way,” Audun said.

  Wonderful, Count Hamnet thought. They’ve found something else they have in common - they’re both packrats. Liv kept telling him he was worrying over nothing. Every time he looked, though, the nothing seemed bigger.

  “What about you?” Liv asked Marcovefa. “Do you save things even when you don’t know if you can use them?”

  “Yes,” Marcovefa answered in the regular Bizogot tongue. She was learning what she needed to know - or maybe her capacity for understanding helped whether she knew the words or not.

  “You’re going to be out of a job when she can speak for herself all the time,” Count Hamnet remarked to Ulric Skakki.

  “Well, it won’t break my heart,” Ulric answered. “Arnora already says I spend too bloody much time talking with her and talking for her.” He rolled his eyes. “Women won’t leave you alone when they think you might be fooling around.”

  “Right.” Hamnet showed less enthusiastic agreement than he might have. Would Liv have said something like, Men won’t leave you alone when they think you’re fooling around! Would she have pointed at him when she said it? Would she have had reason for pointing at him that way?

  Then Marcovefa pointed off into the middle distance and said something in her own dialect. What are those? - that was what it had to mean.

  Those were lions: a couple of males, three or four females, and several cubs. Maybe the smell of blood from the butchered musk ox drew them. They were wise in the ways of men, though, for they stayed well out of bowshot. Whatever was left of the carcass, they would take after the Bizogots moved on.

  Awry, self-mocking smile on his face, Ulric explained about lions. Marcovefa seemed intrigued - maybe even impressed. She said something more. Ulric translated: “She asks if we’ll spare one if she calls it close enough to get a good look at it.”

  “Can her shamanry make sure it spares us?” Trasamund asked.

  Instead of answering in words, Marcovefa walked over and patted him on the cheek, as if she were reassuring a nervous little boy. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan muttered something that probably wasn’t a compliment. Marcovefa ignored him. She began a crooning chant, one that made Liv prick up her ears. “We use that tune for summoning spell
s,” she said.

  “The men of the Glacier spring from Bizogots,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Should you be surprised they still share some things with you?”

  “When you put it that way, I guess not. I -” Liv broke off. The larger male lion trotted towards Marcovefa.

  Hamnet Thyssen started to string his bow, then cut off the move before it was well begun. An arrow seemed more likely to enrage the big cat than to kill it outright. And Marcovefa had a way of knowing what she was doing. Of course, if she turned out not to this time, it would be the wrong moment for a mistake. . .

  Down in the Empire, lions had manes not much more than stubble. This one boasted a full, luxuriant growth. Its coat was thinning with summer, but still far heavier than any the beasts in the south grew. It needed all the help it could get against the ferocious winter weather in these parts.

  When the lion drew near to the shaman from atop the Glacier, it flopped down on the ground and rolled with its paws in the air, for all the world like a pampered house cat. But these paws could rip the guts out of a man - or, for that matter, a horse. Marcovefa scratched the lion under its chin. A deep, rasping purr rewarded her. The beast yawned, exposing fangs that wouldn’t match a sabertooth’s but that were more than savage enough for all ordinary use. She rubbed its belly, and the purr got louder.

  “By God, I wouldn’t want to do that,” Ulric Skakki muttered.

  “I’d want to,” Trasamund said, “but I wouldn’t dare.” From the fierce Bizogot, that was no small admission.

  When Marcovefa had seen as much of the lion as she cared to, she chanted a new song. The great murderous beast stopped acting like a happy kitten. It got to its feet and trotted away from her. Only when it got back to the rest of the pride did the spell suddenly seem to wear off. The lion began washing and washing, going over its hide with its large, rough tongue.

  “Cleaning the stink of us off it,” Ulric said, amusement in his voice. “It doesn’t think we’re fit to associate with.”