The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “It must have met people before, then,” Count Hamnet said, and the bitterness in his voice made everyone who heard him either stare or else look away from him in embarrassment.

  What kind of embarrassment? he wondered. That I made a fool of myself? Or that I told a truth that hurts but that they can’t deny? He shrugged. What difference did it make? Anyone who still took a sunny view of human nature after what the Rulers visited upon the Rock Ptarmigans was too big a fool to deserve to wander the Bizogot plains alone, anyhow.

  Marcovefa pointed out towards the lion and spoke. “She says we’re lucky to live in a land that has such beasts,” Ulric said. “She says they give us something to measure ourselves against.”

  “Measuring myself against a lion is easy,” Audun Gilli said. “I am less than a lion, and I hope I have sense enough to know it.”

  When Ulric Skakki translated, Marcovefa shook her head. “Could the lion have called you away from other men and made you come to it?” she asked through the adventurer.

  “I hope not, by God!” Audun blurted, which struck Count Hamnet as the truth wrapped in a joke. The wizard went on, “I wouldn’t have called it here, either. Maybe I could have - maybe - but I wouldn’t.”

  “Why not?” Marcovefa asked.

  “For fear something would go wrong with my magic, that’s why,” Audun said.

  “Never fear,” the shaman from atop the Glacier said seriously. “Never. When you fear, it makes your magic small.”

  “Well, yours isn’t. We’ve noticed that,” Audun Gilli said.

  “You see?” Even with Ulric Skakki translating for her, Marcovefa sounded sure of herself.

  “I think she is of our blood,” Trasamund said. “Bizogots know better than to fear.”

  “Not fearing isn’t always good, either,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out. “Sometimes you can run straight into something you would have stayed away from if only you’d had the sense to fear it.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Trasamund said.

  What about your clan? Hamnet thought. If they’d kept proper watch at the Gap, they might have kept the Rulers from getting through for a long time. But they hadn’t known enough to fear the mammoth-riders. They’d found out soon enough: too soon, in fact.

  He knew Trasamund would quarrel with him if he pointed that out. Life was too short. They bickered often enough as things were, sometimes over things that might actually get fixed. They were stuck with the past, though, however little either one of them liked it.

  Instead of chaffing the jarl, Hamnet asked, “What will we do if we run into the enemy on our road south?”

  “What will we do when we run into the enemy? That’s what you mean.” Ulric Skakki was rarely shy about throwing oil on the fire.

  But Count Hamnet shook his head. “I said if. I meant if. We’re trying to stay out of the paths the Rulers are likely to take.”

  “The answer is the same any which way,” Trasamund said. “If we find them - if they find us - we fight them.” He reached back over his shoulder to touch the hilt of his great two-handed sword. “They can die. We can kill them. We have killed a good many of them - not enough, but a good many.” He scowled. “Unless we kill them all, it is not enough. I don’t know how to do that. I wish I did.”

  “We can kill them, yes. But they can kill us, too, and they’re rather better at that than we are at the other.” Ulric enjoyed irritating Trasamund, where Hamnet Thyssen didn’t. “Wouldn’t we do better staying away from them than fighting where we can’t win?”

  “If you are afraid -” Trasamund began: a Bizogot’s automatic retort. But then he shook his big head. “I know you too well. You are not afraid. You are only annoying me, like any other gnat. Well, I don’t feel like letting you bite today. If we run into the Rulers, do whatever you please. You will anyhow.”

  Hamnet looked down at the ground so Ulric wouldn’t see him smile. When he had his features under control, he raised his head once more. Ulric Skakki was using the edge of a blade of grass to rout out something stuck between his teeth. If Trasamund’s thrust bothered him, he didn’t show it. But, to those who knew him, his very nonchalance said he knew he’d lost the exchange.

  “How does it feel to be a gnat?” Hamnet asked.

  “Natural enough,” Ulric replied easily. Hamnet started to nod. Then he grimaced and found something else to do. If Ulric had lost the exchange to the Bizogot jarl, he’d just lost it to Ulric, and the adventurer needed only two words to make him do it.

  He wasn’t sorry to take sentry duty when the sun finally went down. A few stars came out, but only a few. Twilight lingered long in the north, and the moon filled the southern sky with pale light. Everything was grayish, colors muted and distances confused. Even motion seemed indistinct. It was like watching half in dreamland.

  Sounds, though, were somehow magnified. A dire wolf that howled far off to the south might almost have been sniffing at Hamnet’s boots. An owl’s hoot made his hand drop to his swordhilt. The Rulers’ wizards flew through the night - and sometimes through the day - as owls. He needed another hoot or two to realize how distant this bird was. Real or sorcerous, it would not come across the travelers’ encampment.

  And a footfall that sounded as if it came from right behind him was much farther away than that. For a moment, there in the uncertain light, he wasn’t sure who was coming out to him. But Liv was impossible not to recognize. The way she moved spoke to him in his blood, at a level below words.

  “Is it all right?” she asked as she came up.

  “It seems to be,” Hamnet answered. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”

  She shrugged. “With the sun in the sky so long, I don’t seem to need as much.” Hamnet found himself nodding. He’d noticed the same thing. When he had to, he could go longer without sleep here than he could have down in the Empire. The long, deep winter darkness in the north made him want to curl up and hibernate like a bear, though.

  “I heard an owl not long ago,” he said.

  “Yes, I heard it, too,” Liv said. “I think it was only an owl. I hope it was only an owl.” She looked around. The twilight was deepening, but almost imperceptibly. “This stretch of days makes up for the rest of the year. It tries to, anyway.”

  “Half light and half dark anywhere you go,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Only the way they’re blended is different.”

  “Yes.” Liv stared up at the moon. It washed the shadows and lines from her face; she might have been a marble bust, not a woman of flesh and blood. Seeing her lips move as she spoke again, seeing that her lips could move, seemed startling. “I suppose people are the same way. Only the - what did you call it? - the blend is different.”

  “It could be,” Hamnet said. “I don’t know that it is, but it could be. Even the wickedest man won’t tell you he’s wicked. He won’t think he is. Whatever he was doing, he was doing for the best of reasons - or he thinks he was, anyway.”

  “Even the Rulers are heroes in their own eyes.” Liv s mouth twisted. “But not in mine. Oh, no - not in mine.”

  Her clan was shattered. She hadn’t been there when the Rulers struck, hadn’t pitted her wizardry against theirs. That the Rulers would have rolled over the Three Tusk clan anyhow seemed as certain to Hamnet Thyssen as tomorrow’s sunrise. Telling Liv as much was pointless. He knew, because he’d tried.

  What could he have done to keep Gudrid from betraying him all those years ago? Nothing, very likely; faithlessness was in her blood. That didn’t keep him from lacerating himself even now, or from wishing things might have been different.

  It also didn’t keep him from lacerating himself about Liv whether he needed to or not: indeed, it drove him to do just that. But it blinded him to why he did it, too, and blinded him to his being blind. That, of course, he could not see.

  “What are we going to do?” Liv cried. Hamnet thought she meant the two of them, but she went on, “What are the poor sorrowful Bizogots going to do?”

  “Fight the enemy,�
� Hamnet answered. “What else can you do?”

  “But every time we try, we lose!”

  He shook his head. “You’ve beaten them - we’ve beaten them - in raids.”

  She brushed that aside, as being of no account: “We can nip them when we catch them without a shaman. But when they have one, we lose.”

  “The Empire’s wizards aren’t to be despised,” Hamnet said.

  “Don’t you think the Rulers will smash them?” she returned. “Their magic is of much the same kind as ours. Maybe they know a bit more, or maybe they can do a bit more, but it is of the same kind. And how much good has that kind of magic done against the Rulers?”

  “Not enough,” Count Hamnet admitted.

  “Hardly anything!” Liv cried in a passion of fury most unlike her. “Whatever we try, even against their mammoths, they do something better - or rather, something worse - to us. Do you really think the Empire’s wizards can stop them, or even slow them down very much?”

  “If they can’t,” Hamnet said slowly, “then this whole land is in even more trouble than we thought it was.”

  “It is!” Liv said. “It is!”

  “The only other choice is rolling on our bellies, the way the jarl of the Green Geese was thinking of doing,” Hamnet said. “I can’t do that. Can you?”

  “No. I can’t do anything at all, and I hate it,” Liv said. “One of the best things about being a shaman is that you’re able to change things, able to make them better. Against the Rulers, I can’t, and it drives me wild. We’re running away from them, and that seems to be the most we can do.”

  He put an arm around her. She clung for a moment, then broke away. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip. He couldn’t even manage to comfort her.

  “Why did you come to me?” he asked, his voice wooden.

  “Because -” She broke off. “Oh, never mind.”

  “Because why?” he asked. He could come up with answers on his own. The likeliest one was, Because Audun Gilli’s asleep. Even imagining that one did wonders for the way he felt about himself.

  Liv didn’t say that, though. “Because if I kept quiet any longer, I thought my head would explode,” she told him. “There. Is that enough? Or do you want to stick any more thorns in me?”

  Somehow, she’d twisted things so he was in the wrong. “I never wanted to do that,” he said.

  “No, eh? Or did you just want to stick something else in me instead?”

  “You know I do,” he answered, as steadily as he could. “I thought it went both ways. Maybe I was wrong.”

  “No, but... Do you have any idea how impossible you are?”

  “I do my best,” he said with a certain somber pride.

  In spite of everything, that made her laugh. This time, she put her arms around him. He squeezed her, which made him do exactly what she’d said. For a moment, she squeezed him back. Then she twisted away again.

  “Not now,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Why not?” With the blood pounding in his veins, he couldn’t see any reason.

  “Because that’s something you should do when you’re happy,” Liv answered. “I’m not happy now, not when I miss the clan so much.”

  “I walked away from the Empire,” Hamnet Thyssen said. I walked away, and I want to make love with you anyhow.

  “Yes, but you walked away from somewhere you didn’t fit any more,” Liv said. “I belonged in the Three Tusk clan. I’ll never find any other place where I belong half so well.”

  She was right about him. He’d stayed on the fringes of imperial life as much as he could for years before deciding to give it up and come north. She’d had a place where she belonged till the Rulers robbed her of it. He’d thought he fit with Gudrid. After he found out how wrong he was there, he’d been on his own, an uncomfortably independent island in an ocean full of people sure of their places and comfortable in them.

  “Let it go, then,” he said gloomily - not that he wanted to let it, or her, go, but that he had not the energy to quarrel over it. He wondered what he would have had the energy to quarrel about just then. A sudden irruption of the Rulers, perhaps. Getting excited about anything smaller seemed more trouble than it was worth.

  Maybe Liv caught some of that in his voice. “I don’t mean never,” she said. “I only mean not right now.”

  “I know.” Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t make himself get very excited even about being turned down. And if that wasn’t a sign of something badly wrong deep inside his spirit, then it wasn’t, that was all.

  “Well,” Liv said. The word seemed to hang in the air. Hamnet knew he ought to say something, anything, but nothing came to him. He couldn’t even care about not caring. Liv sighed. “I’ll go back to the rest of them, then, and leave you here to stand your watch.” She walked away, looking back over her shoulder once. Was she hoping he would call out to her? He nearly did, but again kept silence.

  After what seemed a very long time - but, by the slow wheeling of the moon and stars, was no longer than it should have been - a Bizogot came out to relieve him. “Anything funny going on?” the man asked. “Anything strange?”

  “No,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “It’s been pretty quiet.”

  He walked back to the encampment, lay down, and got a little sleep before the early-rising sun stuck slivers of light under his eyelids and forced them apart. Someone had built up the fire. Hamnet carved off a gobbet of musk-ox meat and began toasting his breakfast. “You look cheerful,” Ulric Skakki said.

  “I doubt it,” Hamnet answered.

  Mechanical as if moved by clockwork, he climbed aboard his horse and rode off with the rest of the travelers. If he nodded in the saddle, he wasn’t the only one. And then Trasamund pointed south and let out a bellow of mingled fear and fury.

  Riders ahead . . . Riders not on horses but on deer . . The Rulers! Apathy fell from Count Hamnet like a discarded cloak. He strung his bow and made sure his sword was loose in its sheath. If they wanted to go on, they would have to fight. Yes, he was ready for that.

  Xlll

  Fighting held a welcome simplicity. No time to brood. No time to think. Only to do, and to do fast. Your body knew far ahead of your mind. Hamnet’s mind had spun in too many circles. Better to snuff it out and let his body show what it knew.

  He would rather have done that lying with Liv. Since he couldn’t pleasure her, killing someone else would do almost as well.

  The Rulers, though, took a deal of killing. Even if their deer didn’t measure up to horses, their bows made them formidable enemies. And they had no fear. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians might outnumber them, but they rode to the attack without the slightest hesitation.

  By the way they came on, they thought the men who followed Trasamund would scatter like chaff before them. They were used to victory, and expected nothing else. Hamnet Thyssen nocked an arrow. No matter what they expected, he vowed that they would get a beating instead.

  They started shooting before he would have. With those powerful compound bows, they could afford to. But their deer were a little slower than horses, so they couldn’t stay out of range of the Raumsdalians and Bizogots they faced. They didn’t seem interested in staying out of range, anyhow.

  An arrow hissed past Hamnet’s head. At such a range, that was fearsomely good shooting, or perhaps fearsomely lucky. Had the arrow hit him, which wouldn’t have mattered.

  He let fly himself. The enemy he aimed at didn’t fall. Shooting from a bucketing horse at a foeman on a galloping deer wasn’t easy. He swore anyhow, and reached over his shoulder to pull another arrow from the quiver. He drew the bow, aimed, and released all in one smooth motion, guiding the horse with his knees while he did. The bowstring thrummed against his wrist.

  A moment later, the riding deer that carried the man he’d shot at crashed to the ground. That wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind, but it would do.

  Out in front of him, Trasamund bellowed, “A hit! A hit for the Three Tusk clan!”
The jarl let out an alarming - and alarmingly authentic - mammoth squeal. He shook his fist at the Rulers and bawled obscenities their way. He hadn’t seen who shot the deer, and wasn’t likely to give a Raumsdalian credit in place of one of his own. To be fair, many more Bizogots followed him, so the odds were on his side even if he happened to be wrong.

  One of his Bizogots tumbled from the saddle with an arrow through the chest. The remnant of the Three Tusk clan had just got smaller. Hamnet shot a couple of more arrows at the Rulers. He didn’t see any of them or their mounts go down after either one of those shots, but all he could do was keep trying.

  Then he set his bow aside and drew his sword. It was going to come down to handstrokes, the way fights always did. That gave him and his companions the edge, for their mounts were bigger than the ones the Rulers used. They could strike down at their foes from horseback. And the enemy didn’t seem to have a wizard along. If they had, odds were the Raumsdalians and Bizogots would already have come to grief.

  That thought had hardly crossed Count Hamnet’s mind before the Rulers’ riding deer seemed to go mad. They started leaping and bounding like oversized rabbits, and refused to answer their riders’ commands. The Rulers’ shouts mingled fury and dismay.

  Hamnet glanced over towards Liv. She looked as surprised as he was. He looked at Audun Gilli. The Raumsdalian wizard was having trouble staying on his own horse - not the kind of trouble the Rulers were having, but the kind of trouble any bad rider might have in battle. Whoever was driving the Rulers’ mounts crazy, it wasn’t either of them.

  Which left. . As soon as Hamnet Thyssen saw Marcovefa, he knew he’d wasted his time with his first two glances. The shaman from atop the Glacier was almost hugging herself with glee. Hamnet had no idea how she’d done it, but he had no doubt that she’d done it.

  He also had no doubt that his side needed to take advantage of it. “Come on!” he yelled. “Let’s hit them while they’re having trouble!”

  The Bizogots from the Three Tusk clan and the others who’d joined them needed little encouragement. Slaying their foes while the warriors of the Rulers were fighting to control their riding deer wasn’t sporting, but it was very effective. The enemy would have done the same to them - had done the same whenever their sorcerers let them. Revenge was sweet.