The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  Hamnet Thyssen, Ulric Skakki, and Audun Gilli all smiled, then tried to pretend they hadn’t. So did Trasamund and Liv, who’d come south before. They knew about trees. For the rest of the Bizogots, as for Marcomer and Marcovefa, these scraggly samples just below the line where the ground froze were far and away the biggest living things they’d ever seen.

  As Hamnet peered first east and then west, Ulric sent him a quizzical stare. “What are you looking for?” the adventurer demanded.

  “A border station,” Count Hamnet answered.

  Ulric arched an eyebrow. “Why? Those snoops are nothing but nuisances. And, if you remember the way we left, they’re liable to have orders to arrest us on sight.”

  “Let them try,” Hamnet said. “We’ve got thirty warriors and three wizards with us. If that isn’t enough to make border guards leave us alone, we’re in real trouble. And when we find a station, we’ll find a road leading south from it.”

  “Mm, there is that,” Ulric admitted. He looked along the edge of the forest, too. “It would be easy in the wintertime.”

  “So it would,” Hamnet Thyssen said. During the winter, the border guards kept big fires blazing to stay warm. A column of smoke pointed the way to each post. At this season of the year, though, the men didn’t need to worry about freezing. Hamnet shrugged. “I don’t see one, but our wizards can tell us which way to go to find one close by. They’d better be able to, anyhow.”

  Audun Gilli had a bit of lodestone on a string that he used for finding directions. The spell wasn’t so accurate up in the far north as it was in the Empire, but the wizard thought it would work here. Count Hamnet judged him likely to be right, but they didn’t need enormous precision now. Knowing whether to ride east or west would do.

  “West,” Audun said after chanting and making passes and watching the way the lodestone swung.

  They went west. Marcovefa tried to question Audun about his charm. Ulric Skakki translated with a martyred expression on his face. Hamnet understood that; for a non-wizard, nothing was more boring than trying to render sorcery’s technical terms from one tongue to another. He’d done it himself before Audun learned the Bizogot tongue. Now he wasn’t sorry to see Audun talking with Marcovefa and not with Liv.

  Jealous? Me? he thought, and then, Well, yes.

  They reached the border post in a couple of hours; the stations were scattered thinly across the frontier between civilization and barbarism. This one looked like all the others Hamnet Thyssen had seen: a wooden hut held by a handful of Raumsdalian soldiers who didn’t have the clout to get posted anywhere else. The Raumsdalians seemed horrified to see such a large party approaching them.

  “What you do?” one of them shouted, using the Bizogot language badly but understandably. “No war here!”

  “No, no war here yet,” Hamnet answered in Raumsdalian. “But how long will it be? Have you heard of the coming of the Rulers?”

  “What we hear and what we see are two different things,” the soldier answered. “When we see these Rulers or whoever they are, maybe we’ll worry about them. If they deserve it, I guess we will. Meantime, though, who the demon are you?”

  “I am Count Hamnet Thyssen.” Hamnet waited to see what would happen next.

  One of the border guards started violently. “He’s that one!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s right. I’m that one. What are you going to do about it?” Hamnet asked with a certain somber pride.

  Before answering, the guards put their heads together. Then one of them said, “What’ll you do after we let you into the Empire?”

  “Try to persuade people there really is a danger to the north. You’ll see for yourself soon enough. So will everybody, and it won’t be much longer.”

  The border guards put their heads together again. When they drew apart, they all wore almost identical unpleasant smiles. “Pass on,” one of them said. “You’ll do worse to yourselves than anything we can do to you.”

  “Thank you so much.” Count Hamnet wasn’t about to show that he thought they were much too likely to be right. He translated the permission to advance for the Bizogots who spoke no Raumsdalian. Ulric rendered it into Marcovefa’s dialect. She said something in return: something he didn’t translate. “What’s the closest town down this road?” Hamnet asked the guards.

  “Malmo,” answered the man who’d spoken before. “It’s about half a day’s ride from here.” He sighed wistfully. “I sure wish it were closer.” Hamnet believed that. A stretch at a border station could seem too much like one in jail.

  As they rode past the border station, Marcovefa murmured to herself. Her hands twisted in quick passes. The guards got down on all fours and started cropping grass. When a noise from the travelers startled them, they bunched together in a ring, heads facing out. They weren’t musk oxen, but they didn’t seem to know they weren’t.

  “How long will the spell last?” Count Hamnet asked.

  “A day. Maybe two.” Marcovefa seemed pleased with herself.

  Hamnet looked over his shoulder. The border guards were grazing again. He hadn’t cared for their arrogance. Maybe they wouldn’t act quite so high and mighty when they regained full humanity. Or maybe they wouldn’t notice any difference. Either way, they weren’t his worry.

  “On to Malmo,” he said, and Marcovefa nodded.

  The shaman from atop the Glacier wasn’t so happy by the time she reached the forest town. Several Bizogots from the frozen steppe were also in a bad way. “These trees!” one of them said with a shudder. “They’re pressing in on me!”

  “Where is the sky?” another one added. “Where is the . . . the space?” He threw his arms wide, as if to push back the branches that hung out over the road - which was hardly more than a track - and the dark trees from which they grew.

  Out on the plains to the north, Count Hamnet often felt he was too small and the landscape much too large. Here where things closed in, Bizogots had the opposite trouble. He’d seen that before when traveling towards Nidaros with Trasamund and Liv. Liv didn’t seem too happy now, but she’d been through this then and knew what to expect now. The mammoth-herders who hadn’t, got an unpleasant surprise. So did Marcovefa, who’d also lived her life in a land of wide horizons.

  She sighed in relief when they rode out into the clearing that surrounded Malmo. “The sun!” she said. “Not shadows in my face all the time.” Then she dropped into her own tongue.

  “What’s she saying?” Hamnet asked Ulric Skakki. “Something about wood, but I can’t make out what.”

  “She’s excited about all the ways you can use it,” Ulric said. “The palisade, the houses . . She called them wooden tents.”

  That was amusing and clever at the same time. “Wait till she sees the fires at the serai,” Hamnet said. Malmo wasn’t a very big town, but it was bound to have a place where travelers could stay. . wasn’t it?

  As things turned out, it was. The serai was nothing special, even by the standards of provincial towns. But it had a bathhouse and cooked food and rooms with beds. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t inclined to be fussy. After so long among the Bizogots - to say nothing of the sojourn on top of the Glacier - even the rough edges of civilization seemed wonderful.

  Marcovefa marveled at everything. She’d never known real buildings before. Bathing in hot water with soap must have seemed indescribably luxurious to her. She didn’t want to come out and let some of the other travelers wash.

  At supper, she ate roast pork. When she first tried it, she looked surprised. “Is this - ?” she started.

  Count Hamnet knew what she was driving at. “No, by God, it isn’t,” he told her. “When it cooks, it smells like that, but it’s not.”

  “It tastes like that, too,” she said. “Maybe not just like that, but close.” She added something else in her own dialect.

  Ulric translated: “She didn’t think we ate each other, but she would have believed you if you told her that was what it was.”

  “We don’t. I
t isn’t.” Hamnet Thyssen drained a mug of ale, glad to be spared at least one sin. After smetyn, ale seemed very good to him. He didn’t ask for wine. The tapman might have had some, but this far north it was bound to be painfully expensive. Ale would do.

  Through Ulric, Marcovefa asked, “If I drink a lot of this, will my head want to fall off tomorrow morning?”

  “Yes.” Hamnet and Ulric and Trasamund and Audun Gilli all said the same thing at the same time.

  Then she asked, “How much is a lot?”

  That was harder to answer. Hamnet said, “It’s different from one person to the next. It depends on how big you are and how much you usually drink and on who knows what.”

  “Have to find out, then.” Marcovefa finished her mug and waved to the tapman for another. She was starting to figure out how things worked here. But when Ulric gave the fellow a coin for the fresh mug, she got puzzled all over again. To her, copper and silver and gold made good ornaments, but that was all. Trying to explain why money was money wasn’t easy. “What good is it?” she asked, over and over.

  The way she asked it made Hamnet Thyssen wonder himself. “We make lots of different kinds of things - you’ve seen that,” Ulric said after several false starts. He got a cautious nod from Marcovefa. Thus encouraged, he went on, “We find it easier to give coins for things than to trade things all the time. It makes dealing simpler.”

  “How did you decide to do that?” she asked.

  Now he shrugged. “I don’t know. I do know we’ve been doing it for a long time. Everybody down here does it. That makes it work.”

  “You have strange customs,” Marcovefa said seriously. A Raumsdalian talking about the ways of the folk who lived up on the Glacier would have used the exact same tone of voice.

  Up on the Glacier, it was impossible to be rich. There wasn’t enough for anyone to get a surplus. Having enough wasn’t easy. Trading with one another and with the Empire, Bizogots could get rich - Trasamund had been, before his clan fell on hard times - but it wasn’t easy. For that matter, it wasn’t easy in the Empire, but it was easier, because there were more goods to move around - and because there was money to make the moving easier.

  Was that good or bad? Hamnet had never wondered before. It was what Raumsdalia and every other civilized land had, and what the Bizogots and other barbarians aspired to. If the clans atop the Glacier had lost it, that was only because they’d lost so many other things as well.

  “Everyone has strange customs - to people who don’t have the same ones,” he said, and waited to see if the shaman would need Ulric to translate for her. Her nod said she followed on her own.

  Audun Gilli emptied his mug of ale, yawned, and went upstairs. Several Bizogots had already drunk themselves sleepy. Ulric Skakki grinned. “They haven’t got the head for real drinking,” he said.

  “Seems that way,” Hamnet agreed, glad he was drinking ale instead of smetyn.

  “Who says?” Trasamund demanded, and shouted for a fresh mug. Ulric also waved for a refill. So did Hamnet.

  “Drink yourselves foolish if you please, but I’m going upstairs.” Liv set down her mug and did just that.

  After Hamnet Thyssen had more ale in front of him, he found he didn’t feel like getting getting blind drunk just to make a point. He knew what he could hold, and so did Ulric and Trasamund, the people he would have been most interested in impressing. He drained the mug in a hurry - no point in letting it go to waste, after all - then pushed back his stool and stood up. “I’m going upstairs, too,” he said.

  His friends jeered at him. He’d known they would, so he had no trouble ignoring them. The room spun a little as he walked to the stairs. Yes, he’d already had plenty.

  He climbed the steps with exaggerated care and quiet. At the top of the stairs, he stopped dead. There stood Liv and Audun Gilli, kissing in the hallway.

  XIV

  Sometimes when you were wounded, you didn’t feel the pain for the first few heartbeats. Sometimes it pierced you right away. When Hamnet Thyssen heard a noise like a dire wolf’s growl, he needed that handful of heartbeats to realize it came from his own throat.

  The other two also needed a moment to hear it through their more enjoyable distraction. It reached Audun before Liv. He sprang away from her with a gasp of horror. “I can explain,” he gabbled. “You have to understand -”

  “Understand what?” Hamnet said, still growling. “Understand how many pieces I’m going to cut you into?” His hand already lay on the hilt of his sword, though he didn’t remember telling it to go there.

  “Don’t be foolish, Hamnet,” Liv said. “It’s over. You know it is. It’s been over for a while now. You know that, too.”

  He did know it, even if he hadn’t wanted to look at it. That made things worse, not better. “It can’t be!” he said. He’d lost Gudrid. How could he stand losing another woman? “I loved you! You loved me!” He wished that hadn’t come out in the past tense. Maybe his mouth was wiser than his brain.

  Liv nodded. “I did, for a while. But when you started herding me the way dogs herd musk oxen, when you started wondering whether I was faithful every time I breathed . . . You caused what you wanted to cure. Killing Audun won’t get me back, even if you can. It’s too late for that.”

  “I ought to kill you, too,” he ground out. He should have done that with Gudrid. Then she wouldn’t have been able to torment him all these years after they broke apart. Would Liv do the same? Would she revel in it the way Gudrid had?

  “You can try,” she said. “But what good would it do? It won’t bring me back to you. Nothing can do that now. What we had was good while it lasted. Why not remember it that way?”

  Hamnet started to say that killing her and Audun would make him feel better. But he wasn’t even sure that was true. It might make him feel better for a little while, but he knew he would be sorry afterwards if he did it. He couldn’t tell them he hoped they would be happy together; he didn’t. He didn’t see much point in telling them he hoped they would be unhappy together - they could figure that out for themselves.

  And so he pushed past them without a word. Audun Gilli shrank from him. Liv didn’t. She had as much courage as any Bizogot. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but she didn’t do that, either. After their first spell of intoxication with each other, neither of them had been able to find enough to say to each other. That was part of the trouble, though Hamnet didn’t realize it.

  When he walked into the mean little room he’d thought he would share with Liv, he found she’d already taken her meager belongings out. He said something that should have made the roof cave in and the walls collapse. Everything stayed up, though, and the bed didn’t collapse when he threw himself down on it, even if the frame did groan.

  After losing Gudrid, he’d wept for days - weeks, in fact. He wept now, too, but even he knew the tears were more drunken self-pity than anything else. Gudrid had had a hold on him that Liv couldn’t match. Knowing he would probably be all right before too long made him all the more mournful.

  One good thing: Audun Gilli’s chamber lay halfway down the hall. If he’d had to listen to the mattress in the next room creaking rhythmically, he really might have drawn his sword and done his best to slaughter the wizard and the shaman.

  Instead, he fell asleep with his boots still on, sprawled out across the bed. After that, he didn’t hear a thing.

  When he came downstairs the next morning, some of the Bizogots were already eating breakfast. So was Ulric Skakki. He sat next to Trasamund. Both of them cautiously spooned up porridge of rye and oats and sipped from mugs of beer. By their sallow skins and red-tracked eyes, they hoped the beer would soothe aching heads. By the way the corners of their mouths turned down, it hadn’t done the job yet.

  Trasamund stared at Count Hamnet. “By God, man, what ails you?” the jarl burst out. “You went to bed long before we did, but you look worse than either one of us.”

  Ulric, by contrast, had a way of cutting t
o the chase. He did it now with two words: “He knows.”

  Hamnet scowled at him. How long had they known? How long had everybody known? How long had people been laughing at him behind his back? Hadn’t he had enough of that with Gudrid? Evidently not.

  “What’ll it be, friend?” The tapman sounded cheerful. Why not? He hadn’t just lost his woman.

  “Beer,” Hamnet said. “Porridge.” Even if part of him wished he were dead, his belly craved ballast.

  “Sorry, Thyssen,” Ulric said when Hamnet sat down across from him. “It happens, that’s all. It’ll probably happen with me and Arnora before long.”

  “Yes, but - ” Hamnet began, and then stopped.

  “But what?” Ulric asked, his voice deceptively mild.

  “But you and Arnora aren’t in love.”

  “No. We just screw each other silly, which isn’t bad, either. But you and Liv aren’t in love any more, either, if you ever were,” Ulric said.

  “I still love her!” Hamnet cried.

  “Which has nothing to do with what I said.” Ulric was most dangerous when he was most accurate. “You may love Liv, but it’s pretty plain she doesn’t love you right now. And if she doesn’t, you two aren’t in love, no matter how much you may wish you were. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

  Count Hamnet wanted to. He knew too well he couldn’t. “No,” he mumbled. A serving girl who might have been the tapman’s daughter brought him his breakfast.

  “Dig in,” Ulric said cheerfully. “You may as well.”

  And Hamnet did. The porridge had onions and bits of smoked sausage in it. No matter how the rest of him felt, his belly was happy. Arnora came down a few minutes later. Instead of sitting by Ulric, she made a point of plopping herself down at a far table and scowling at him. He grinned back, which only seemed to annoy her more.

  Then Liv and Audun Gilli came down together. They were holding hands. Liv looked pleased with herself. The wizard looked happy and frightened at the same time. Hamnet’s glower said he wished they would both catch fire. Liv shook her head and Audun flinched, but they stayed unscorched.