The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  They did have the courtesy to sit where Hamnet couldn’t see them without twisting to do it. That helped a little, but only a little. Every time he heard Liv’s voice, he felt vitriol dripping down his back.

  Ulric Skakki waved to the serving girl and pointed at Hamnet. “Bring this man another mug of beer.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Trasamund asked.

  “I’m not sure of anything,” Ulric answered, “but I think one more will numb him. Three or four more . . . Well, three or four more wouldn’t be a good idea right now.”

  The girl set the mug in front of Count Hamnet. He drained it. Ulric was a nice judge of such things, no doubt from experience. The beer built a wall - a low wall, but a wall - between him and what he was feeling. A few more, though, and he wouldn’t have cared what he did.

  Marcovefa was one of the last travelers to come down to the taproom. When she did, she noticed right away how people were sitting. The clans atop the Glacier must have had their quarrels and squabbles and scandals, too. People were people, no matter where and how they lived. They would fall in love with one another.

  They would fall out of love with one another, too.

  Marcovefa sat down by Hamnet. “I am sorry,” she said in the ordinary Bizogot tongue. “It happens.”

  He looked at her - through her, really. “Go away,” he said.

  She looked back. “No.”

  “Then keep quiet and leave me alone.”

  She said something to Ulric Skakki in her own dialect. Hamnet could follow just enough of it to know it wasn’t complimentary to him. He ignored it. He made a point of ignoring it. He made such a point of ignoring it, in fact, that Marcovefa thought it was funny. The only response he could find was to keep on ignoring her. She thought that was even funnier.

  When they rode out of Malmo, Count Hamnet got fresh salt rubbed in his wounds. After Gudrid finally left him, she went off to Nidaros, and he hardly saw her till she came with Eyvind Torfinn on the journey up beyond the Glacier. He brooded that she was gone - brooded and brooded and brooded - but at least he didn’t have to watch her with whatever lovers she’d had before latching on to the scholarly earl.

  But he couldn’t get away from Liv. There she was, not far away, talking animatedly with Audun Gilli, her face glowing the way it had not long before when she talked with him. Even when he rode too far away to make out what she was saying, he could hear the lilt in her voice. She talked to Audun the way a woman talked to a lover who pleased her. Hamnet knew the tone too well to mistake it. Now that she used it with someone else. .

  He ground his teeth till his jaw hurt. He wished a short-faced bear or a lion would spring out of the woods and devour Audun Gilli. Slowly, he thought, so l can savor his screams. Once the wizard was gone, he reasoned, Liv would come back to him. That she might have other choices didn’t occur to him, which showed his reasoning wasn’t all it might have been.

  They rode on through the Empire’s northern forests. The deeper they got, the more Marcovefa and the Bizogots who’d never before come down off the steppe marveled. That marveling wasn’t always of a happy sort; they seemed to feel the trees pressing in on them more than ever. To Hamnet, it was only a forest: not the same kind as grew by his castle farther south, but close enough. The jays here had dark heads and blue bellies, not blue heads and white bellies. But their screeches weren’t much different from those of any other jays.

  Sedranc, the next town farther south, was larger and more prosperous than Malmo. As Marcovefa had before, she ate barley bread and oatcakes. In Sedranc, though, she really seemed to notice what she was eating and how unlike anything she’d known atop the Glacier it was. “What is this?” she asked. “How do they make it?” She sounded almost as wary as a Raumsdalian at one of her folk’s cannibal feasts.

  Some of the Bizogots also seemed curious. No crops grew on their plains, either. They gathered berries and roots and leaves, but they knew nothing of grain. Explaining how Raumsdalian farmers raised their crops and harvested them, how the seeds were ground into flour and the flour baked, took quite awhile.

  “A lot of work.” Marcovefa delivered her verdict. “Too much work, maybe.”

  “Lots of food,” Count Hamnet said. “More than we could get from hunting and picking berries. That food lets us have towns.” Lets us be civilized, he thought. The two amounted to the same thing.

  “What good is a town?” asked the shaman from atop the Glacier. “Why have this place? Why not wander?”

  She wasn’t being sardonic, or Hamnet didn’t think so. “To let us have beds. To let us have bathtubs. To let us build houses the Breath of God has trouble blowing away,” he replied.

  “To let us buy and sell and trade,” Ulric Skakki added.

  “Money.” Marcovefa used the Raumsdalian word as if it were a curse.

  “Money.” It sounded different in Ulric’s mouth.

  “To stay safe behind the wall,” Audun Gilli said. He was right, too. Ham-net Thyssen glared at him anyway.

  “Wall is not so much, either,” Marcovefa said.

  “What would you do different? How would you do better?” If Hamnet argued with her - if he argued with anyone but Audun - he wouldn’t have to dwell on his own misery.

  For the first time, a question seemed to give her pause. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “Something not like this, though.”

  “These are just country towns, and back-country towns at that,” Ulric Skakki said in the ordinary Bizogot tongue. Then he had to go back and forth with Marcovefa, no doubt explaining what a back-country town was and why it wasn’t so much of a much. When he dropped back into speech Hamnet could understand, he added, “Plenty of places farther south much finer than this.”

  “It’s true,” Liv said. “When I first came down to Raumsdalia, I thought each place was the finest one I’d ever seen. Then the next one down the road would be grander still.”

  Hamnet remembered that, remembered it with heartbreaking clarity. She’d shared her amazement and delight with him only the autumn before. Now, if she still had them, she’d share them with Audun Gilli. Hearing her voice stabbed Hamnet in the memory, and what wounds hurt worse than that?

  He’d felt the same way about Gudrid last year. She’d gone out of her way to bait him, too, which Liv didn’t seem to be doing - a small mercy, but a mercy even so. And yet, when a short-faced bear burst out of the forest, killed Gudrid’s horse, and menaced her, he’d ridden to her rescue without a thought in his head except driving the bear away or killing it. Even at the time, he’d wondered why. Did he hope she’d be grateful? If he did, she disappointed him yet again.

  What would he do if a short-faced bear came after Liv now? He was lucky - if it was luck - he didn’t have to find out.

  The forest’s northern edge was clear-cut: there was a line past which trees simply could not grow. Its southern border was more ambiguous. Men could farm on south-facing slopes even in the midst of the trees. In good years, in warm years, in years when the Breath of God didn’t blow too hard, they’d bring in a crop. Chances were they could bring in enough to last out one bad year. Two long, hard winters in a row, though, and they would start to starve.

  More farmers seemed to be trying to carve out steadings up here than had been true before Count Hamnet’s beard started going gray. More seemed to be making a go of it, too. In his grandfather’s day, the forest’s lower edge lay miles to the south.

  Go back enough generations and it hadn’t been forest here at all, but frozen steppe. Go back further than that, and the Glacier had ground forward and back, and who could say what it ground into oblivion? Only a few legends and - maybe - the Golden Shrine survived from those days.

  If I found the Golden Shrine, could I make Liv love me again? Hamnet wondered. God, could I make Gudrid love me again? Could I make myself not care if I couldn’t make either one of them love me again? Without love, poppy juice for the soul seemed plenty good.

  He looked around, a
s if he would find the Golden Shrine in the middle of this frontier district. That would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. He hadn’t found the Golden Shrine even beyond the Glacier. What chance of stumbling over it in these mundane surroundings did he have? None, and he knew it.

  What chance do I have? he wondered bitterly. The question was hard enough to answer all by itself.

  He looked back over his shoulder, back past the forest, back towards the Bizogot steppe. He wondered why he cared so much about beating the Rulers. What did he care if they smashed the Bizogots and hurled Raumsdaliadown in ruins?

  Part of the answer to that seemed plain enough. If the Rulers smashed the Empire, he was all too likely to get caught and killed in the collapse. Even if he didn’t, he would have to bend the knee to the invaders from beyond the Glacier. Every fiber in his being rebelled against that. Better to fight them for...

  For what? For the love of a woman? Gudrid lay in Eyvind Torfinn’s arms - and in any other arms she happened to fancy. And now Liv had thrown Ham-net over, too - and for whom? For a wizard lost in the real world. Why care whether he lived or died himself, let alone the Bizogots or the Raumsdalian Empire?

  Another question easier to ask than answer.

  Big, sharp-nosed, rough-coated dogs that looked to be at least half dire wolf ran snarling at the travelers from a farm cabin near the woods. Almost without thinking, Hamnet strung his bow and let fly. The arrow caught a wolf-dog in the flank. Its snarls turned to yelps of pain. It ran off faster than it had come forward. The other beasts, hearing their friend wounded, seemed to think twice.

  “What did you go and do that for?” The farmer shook his fist at Count Hamnet. “He’s a good dog!”

  “Good dogs don’t act like they want to tear my throat out,” Hamnet answered. He nocked another shaft. If he had to shoot again, it might not be at a dog.

  But the farmer, no matter what he thought, had better sense than to pick a fight with a band of thirty or so Bizogots and Raumsdalians. He went back to weeding. Each stroke of the hoe against some poor, defenseless plant said what he would have done to Hamnet Thyssen if only he were a hero.

  Hamnet glanced up at the sky. It was blue - a watery blue, but blue. A few puffy clouds sailed across from west to east. No sign of dark clouds, threatening clouds, riding the Breath of God down from the north. But if the wind changed, when the wind changed ... It could happen any day, any time. Hamnet Thyssen knew that well. The farmer had to know it, too. To Hamnet, it was a fact of life. To the farmer, it was a matter of life and death.

  Which brought Hamnet back to the question he’d asked himself before. Why did he want to hold on to the one and hold off the other? He looked over at Liv, who was chatting happily with Audun Gilli. Yes, why indeed?

  Once they came out of the forest and down into country where crops would grow most years, Marcovefa started marveling all over again at the richness of the landscape. Boats with sails astonished and delighted her, as the mere idea of them had delighted Liv a year before. Hamnet Thyssen wished he hadn’t had the earlier memory; it meant he took no pleasure from the shaman’s discovery.

  “What happens in winter?” Marcovefa asked.

  “About what you’d think. The rivers and lakes freeze. They haul the boats out of the water.” Hamnet illustrated with gestures. Marcovefa followed well enough.

  They were well to the west of Nidaros, and had to work their way southeast. Hamnet didn’t think local officials in this part of the Empire were warned against them. He didn’t see any couriers hotfooting it off to the capital to say he’d presumed to come back.

  When he remarked on that to Ulric Skakki, the adventurer shrugged and said, “Well, no. But if these people have any idea what they’re doing, you wouldn’t see it. They’d make sure of that.”

  “If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn’t be here,” Count Ham-net said. “They’d be in the capital or somewhere else that mattered.”

  “Most of the time, you’d be right.” Now Ulric was the one looking north. “If the Rulers come down - no, when the Rulers come down - it won’t be like an ordinary Bizogot raid, though. The Bizogots likely wouldn’t get this far anyway. I don’t know if the Rulers can, either. I don’t know ... but they might.”

  “Yes. They might.” Hamnet Thyssen’s scowl covered the invaders and the Empire impartially. “I don’t even know if I care.”

  “You need to spend some silver,” Ulric Skakki said seriously.

  The quick change of subject confused Hamnet. “What are you talking about?”

  “You need to spend some silver,” Ulric repeated. “Go to a whorehouse or pick a pretty serving girl who’s easy - God knows there are enough of them. Once you lay her or she sucks your prong or whatever you happen to want, you won’t hate the whole cursed world.”

  Hamnet shook his head. “It wouldn’t mean anything.”

  “A pretty girl’s got you in her mouth, it doesn’t have to mean anything,” Ulric said. “It feels good. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Nothing wrong with it while it’s going on,” Count Hamnet said gloomily. “But afterwards you know she only wanted money, and she’d spit in your eye if you didn’t pay her. If she doesn’t care about you to begin with, why bother?”

  “Because it feels good?” Ulric suggested with exaggerated patience.

  “Not reason enough,” Hamnet said. Ulric threw his hands in the air.

  They came to the town of Burtrask just as the sun was setting. Burtrask had outgrown its wall; suburbs flourished outside the gray stone works. The gate guards hardly bothered to question the newcomers. Burtrask was used to prosperity, and seemed to have not a care in the world.

  Touts just inside the gate bawled out the virtues of competing serais. Others bawled out the vices of competing bawdy houses. Count Hamnet felt Ulric’s ironic eye on him. He didn’t give the adventurer the satisfaction of looking back. Ulric’s chuckle said he knew exactly what Hamnet wasn’t doing, and why. Hamnet went right on ignoring him.

  The seraikeeper they chose seemed surprised to have so many people descend on him at once, but he didn’t let it faze him. “We’ll have to set out pallets in the taproom for some of you, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’ll keep the fire going all night - no need to worry about that. I don’t believe in freezing my guests. Neither do the girls down the street.” The brothel stood a few doors away. That was also true of the other serais in Burtrask. They knew what travelers wanted. Most travelers, anyhow.

  Thunk! Thunk! A hatchet came down on the necks of chickens and ducks out back. No doubt supper would be fresh. A couple of servants rolled barrels of beer into the taproom. Everybody in the Empire’s northern provinces knew how Bizogots could drink.

  Food and drink did make Count Hamnet feel better, but not enough. He bedded down on the taproom floor himself. Ulric Skakki and Arnora stayed together, and Trasamund had found a friendly serving girl without needing any suggestion from Ulric.

  Strangers coming in for breakfast woke Hamnet not long after sunup. The seraikeeper, with work to do, didn’t bother keeping quiet. He rattled pots and pans and thumped mugs down on the counter. Anyone who didn’t like it, his attitude declared, was a lazy slugabed who should have paid for a room far from the racket. That his serai didn’t have rooms enough for all his guests bothered him not a bit.

  As Hamnet sat up and yawned, one of the men who’d come in for breakfast walked over to him: a nondescript fellow, not too tall or too short, not too fat or too thin, not too young or too old, with features altogether un-memorable except for gray eyes of uncommon alertness. “You are Count Hamnet Thyssen,” he said. It was not a question.

  Count Hamnet got to his feet. Here we go, he thought as he belted on his sword, which had lain beside him. “That’s right,” he said aloud. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, sir.” That sounded politer than Who the demon are you? even if it meant the same thing.

  “I’m Kormak Bersi,” the man replied - a name as ordinary as
his looks. “I have the honor to serve His Majesty.”

  That was a polite phrase, too. It meant I’m an agent, though it sounded nicer. “Well, what Raumsdalian doesn’t?” Hamnet said. He pointed to the oatcakes and mug of beer Kormak was carrying. “Do you mind if I get myself some breakfast, too? Then we can talk, if talk is what you’ve got in mind.”

  “By all means, Your Grace, feed yourself,” Kormak said. “And talk is the only thing I have in mind, believe me. I’m a peaceable man.”

  “That’s nice,” Hamnet said. “But whenever somebody says, ‘Believe me,’ I usually take it as a sign I shouldn’t. I hope that doesn’t offend you . . too much.”

  Kormak Bersi’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Not. . too much, Your Grace.” He had a blade on his hip, and looked to be in good shape. Count Hamnet thought he could take him if he had to, but didn’t want it to come to blood. He stepped over a couple of Bizogots who kept snoring away despite the noise and got a breakfast like the one the Emperor’s man had bought. Kormak sat down at a small table. “Will this do?”

  “As well as anywhere.” Hamnet perched on a stool across from him. “Well? What’s on your mind?” He tore off a chunk of oatcake, put it in his mouth, and deliberately began to chew.

  Kormak also ate and drank a little before answering. Then, steepling his fingers in front of him, he said, “A bit of a surprise, discovering you back in Raumsdalia.”

  “Life is full of surprises,” Hamnet said stolidly. He had to fight a scowl as he raised his mug to his lips. The surprises he’d got lately weren’t pleasant ones.

  “What do you suppose Sigvat II will think of your return?” Kormak Bersi asked, as if it mattered no more than the price of a jug of wine.

  “I hope he’ll think I wouldn’t come back unless it was important,” Hamnet replied. “You know about the Rulers?”

  “I’m familiar with what you said last year,” Kormak answered, which was no surprise at all. “And some, ah, wild rumors have also come down from the Bizogot country more recently.”