The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes, the lot of us, by God,” Hamnet answered. “You’re not the best hostel in town if you can’t make us fit.”

  “Well, we’ll try,” the tout said. “Come with me, and I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

  Merchants had to stop their wagons and pack trains as the travelers turned off the main thoroughfare and onto a little side street. The traders sent some hard looks their way, but no one seemed inclined to quarrel with a small army of mounted and armed Bizogots - and the handful of Raumsdalians with the northern barbarians looked like dangerous customers, too.

  The hostel turned out to be better than Hamnet Thyssen had expected, but it was still a long way from the best. No southern wines graced the taproom, only beer and ale and mead. The rooms were cleaner than most, but small and plain, not as opulent as chambers in the palace, the way they would have been at a first-class establishment. And the proprietor proved willing to haggle, which he wouldn’t have in a fancy place. In one of those, you went somewhere else if you couldn’t afford what the landlord asked.

  Hamnet made sure he didn’t get a room next to Ulric and Arnora. The Bizogots between whom he tried to sleep didn’t rut their way through the night. Instead, the big blond man on one side invited in friends, and they all started to sing. The racket was appalling, but Count Hamnet wasn’t appalled. It wasn’t the kind of noise he had to pay attention to, the way lovemaking would have been. Even though drunken discords woke him a couple of times, they didn’t infuriate him or leave him quivering with unslaked lust. He had no trouble dropping off again.

  After breakfast the next morning, he nodded to Kormak Bersi. “Well, you’ve captured me, or near enough,” he said. “Take me to the palace. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” the imperial agent asked.

  “No, but then neither does Sigvat, and it doesn’t stop him. It doesn’t even slow him down,” Hamnet answered. “We’ll see what he says when he finds out I’ve come back in spite of everything.”

  “Yes, we will, won’t we?” On that encouraging note, Kormak rose from the table. Hamnet Thyssen followed him.

  They walked to the palace. Count Hamnet would have ridden, but Kormak Bersi didn’t seem to think it was a good idea. Hamnet thought about arguing, but let it go. Approaching anyway at all was arrogant enough. Sigvat II was bound to see it like that, anyhow.

  A Raumsdalian in Bizogot furs and leather walking through the streets of the capital got his share of curious looks and more. Hamnet Thyssen stolidly ignored them. He hadn’t trimmed his hair and beard, either.

  When he and Kormak came to the palace, the gate guards gaped at him, too. Kormak displayed his emblem for them. That got him respect, at least. “Who’s the wild man with you, sir?” a guard asked.

  “I am Count Hamnet Thyssen,” Hamnet growled, sounding like the proudest of nobles. “And who the demon are you?”

  The guard’s jaw dropped. His eyes all but bugged out of his head. “By God, you are him,” he choked out. “What are you doing here?”

  Kormak Bersi had asked him the same question in different words. Couldn’t anybody in Nidaros see out past the city walls? It didn’t look that way. “Reporting to His Majesty,” Hamnet answered. “I know more about what’s going on in the Bizogot country than anybody he’s talked to lately. I hope he’ll listen to me, for the Empire’s sake.”

  “But he’s angry at you. Didn’t you know that?” the guard said.

  Count Hamnet shrugged. “I’ll take the chance. I have to. If I can come back for the Empire’s sake, he can listen to me.”

  “Go report that Count Hamnet has returned to the palace,” Kormak Bersi said.

  The guard didn’t do it himself. Instead, he told off a couple of his men and sent them hotfooting it down the corridor. Hamnet Thyssen knew what that meant: this fellow didn’t want to be associated with bad news. Had Hamnet been in good odor here, the squad leader would have done the job himself.

  A couple of disbelieving courtiers came back with the guards. They stared at Count Hamnet as if at some fierce animal unaccountably running loose instead of being caged in a zoological garden. “Good day, gentlemen,” he said, as if to show them he could be civilized after all.

  They flinched from the sound of his voice. “What the demon did you come back here for, Thyssen?” one of them said. “Don’t you know the Emperor would just as soon kill you as look at you?”

  “Well, he can do that,” Hamnet said. “The Empire won’t be better off if he does, but he can.”

  “You don’t care whether you live or die, do you?” the courtier croaked.

  After examining what lay inside himself, Count Hamnet shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”

  That made the courtiers back away in a hurry. He didn’t suppose he could blame them. Self-preservation did matter to most people, and especially to people who had anything to do with princes and potentates. It would have mattered to him, too, if Liv weren’t giving herself to a no-account wizard.

  But she was. Next to that, anything Sigvat or his torturers could do hardly seemed worth getting excited about.

  Another courtier came out, this one with a fat gold chain around his neck to show what an important fellow he was. “So you want to see the Emperor, do you?” he said in a voice that sounded barely alive.

  “That’s right,” Hamnet answered. “Can you take me to him?”

  “I can. I doubt I would be doing you a favor, but I can.”

  “Let me worry about that,” Count Hamnet said.

  “I intend to. And you have more to worry about than you can imagine,” the courtier replied. “But, if you must, come with me.”

  Hamnet Thyssen did. The palace seemed badly overdecorated; he was too used to serais and to Bizogot tents. It also seemed too warm. How much wood did Sigvat and his servitors go through every day? Is that why I came back? To preserve such waste? Hamnet wondered.

  The courtier with the gold chain led him to the throne room. There he and Kormak Bersi had to stand and wait for a while. Sigvat II was busy talking to an elderly merchant whose fur robe celebrated his wealth. At last, the fellow bowed and tottered away. The courtier stepped forward. In ringing tones, he announced Count Hamnet.

  “Your Majesty.” Hamnet went to one knee before the Emperor. Beside him, Kormak, who was not a noble, dropped to both knees.

  “So. You came back to mock me, did you?” Sigvat’s voice was too thin and light to give him a proper growl. He was at least ten years younger than Hamnet Thyssen, and perhaps had more than his share of a young man’s worry about whether his elders respected him as much as he thought they ought to.

  “No, Your Majesty.” Count Hamnet shook his head. “I came back to warn you. The Rulers turn out to be even more dangerous than I thought they were last year.”

  “So you say,” Sigvat jeered. “I say one set of barbarians up beyond the woods is the same as another. And I say you disobeyed me when you went north last fall. You weren’t supposed to do that. How do you propose to defend yourself, eh?”

  “By telling you it was necessary,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “I understood the frozen plains better than you did, since I’ve been there and you haven’t.”

  “Your Majesty, what’s happening on the plains now shows that Count Hamnet has a point,” Kormak Bersi said. “He -”

  “He is a traitor,” the Emperor broke in. “If you back him - and I see you do - then you’re another.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Guards! Take this wretch - take both these wretches - to the dungeons!”

  XVI

  Hamnet Thyssen had always known the imperial palace had dungeons. He hadn’t expected to make their personal acquaintance. Wasn’t a big part of real life the difference between what you expected and what you got?

  Fighting a dozen guards would have been suicidally stupid. Hamnet took a certain dour satisfaction in noting how astonished Kormak Bersi seemed when the guards laid hold of him. His only crime had been to
tell the truth as he saw it. To Sigvat, that was perfidious enough all by itself.

  The guards hustled Count Hamnet and Kormak out of the throne room. The last thing the Raumsdalian noble saw there was the courtier’s smirking face. “What’s going on here?” someone asked as the guards frog-marched the new prisoners through the corridors down which Hamnet had come on his own not long before.

  “They made the Emperor angry,” one of the guards answered. He didn’t seem to think he needed to say anything more. By all appearances, he was right.

  How many times had Hamnet walked past a stairway without wondering where it went? Now he found out with this one, and wished he hadn’t. Dungeons were supposed to be dark and gloomy, weren’t they? This one, built below ground level, lived up to - or down to - that specification. Mold clung to the massive stones of the wall. Only a few torches gave fitful light. The air was cold and damp, and smelled of sour smoke and stale straw.

  “In you go,” the guards told Kormak Bersi. One of them opened a massive wooden door with a small iron grate at eye level. Kormak’s captors shoved him in, closed the door (the hinges didn’t squeal - they were rustproof bronze), and made sure it stayed closed with a heavy wooden bar.

  “Now it’s your turn,” a guard said to Hamnet. He went into a cell some distance from Kormak’s. He supposed the guards didn’t want him plotting with the agent. That was a compliment of sorts, but only of sorts. No matter how much plotting he and Kormak did, he couldn’t see how it would help them get away.

  His cell had stone walls, a stone floor and ceiling, a musty pallet and wool blanket that were bound to be verminous, and a stinking slop bucket. Maybe a wizard could have put that together and used it to escape, but Hamnet knew he couldn’t. The only light came through the grate.

  After a bit, the door to the cell opened again. Three guards pointed bows at Hamnet while a fourth set a jug and a loaf on the floor and then hastily withdrew. When Count Hamnet sniffed the jug, he sighed. It held water. If he drank from it, it would probably give him a flux of the bowels. Of course, if he didn’t... The loaf wasn’t very big, and seemed almost as full of husks and chaff as his mattress. He ate about a quarter of it, and found it tasted as bad as it looked. Saving the rest for later - he had no idea how often they would feed him, but feared the worst - was no hardship. Eating more when he got hungry probably would be. Again, though, not eating was bound to be worse.

  He paced off the cell. Six strides from the door to the back wall. Seven from one side to the other. With nothing else to do, he walked back and forth and around and around for a bit. That soon palled, as he’d known it would. He sat down on the miserable pallet. The blanket that went with it would be warm enough now. When the Breath of God started to blow? How many prisoners died of chest fever every winter?

  As his eyes got used to the near-darkness all around, he saw more sharply than he had when the guards first shoved him in here. That might have been useful if there were anything much to see in the cell. Or so he thought at first.

  After a while, he got up and went back to the far wall. No, his eyes hadn’t tricked him. Prisoners who’d been here before had used - well, who could say what? - to scratch their names and other things onto the stones there. Some proclaimed their innocence. Some named the women they’d loved. One had carefully shown a woman loving him. The man wasn’t a bad artist, and he must have had plenty of time to complete his work. Hamnet wondered how many other luckless souls in this cell had wandered over to the obscene drawing to remind themselves of what they were missing.

  His mouth tightened. If he thought of Gudrid or Liv, he wouldn’t necessarily think of them doing that with him. He might be more likely to see them in his mind’s eye loving someone else.

  And some of the prisoners cursed the people who’d caused them to end up here. Emperors’ names figured prominently there. Some of them went back hundreds of years. Viglund had been a great conqueror in the days when the Raumsdalian Empire was much younger than it was now. Someone he’d conquered hadn’t appreciated it.

  Much good it did the poor bastard, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Much good anything does anybody.

  With nothing better to do, he went back to the pallet and sat down again. He started reciting poetry, and wished he knew more of it. A bard might be able to entertain himself for a long time.

  Or he might not. A guard’s head blocked the grate, killing almost all the light in the cell. “Shut up in there!” the man snarled. “No noise allowed!”

  Hamnet Thyssen laughed in his face. “What will you do to me if I make noise? Throw me in the dungeon?”

  When the guard laughed, too, it was not a pleasant sound - anything but. “You want to find out, smart boy? Keep mouthing off and you will, by God! There’s never been a bad place that couldn’t get worse.”

  He spoke with great assurance. After a couple of heartbeats, Count Hamnet decided he was bound to be right. The guards could do whatever they wanted to a prisoner who annoyed them. “I was only trying to make time pass by,” Hamnet said.

  “It’ll pass whether you do anything or not,” the guard said. “So shut up. That’s the rules.” He stomped off.

  A kidney stone would pass, too. . eventually. And it would hurt all the time while it was passing. As for the rules, well, the people who enforced them always liked them better than those at whose expense they got enforced.

  Swearing to himself, Hamnet - quietly - lay back on the miserable, lumpy pallet. When he and Kormak Bersi didn’t come back to the hostel, Trasamund and Ulric Skakki would realize something had gone wrong. No doubt they would have a good idea what, too. But what could they do about it? When the Emperor was angry, could they do anything at all?

  They would probably come straight to the palace to try to find out what was going on. And what would happen then? Count Hamnet’s best guess was that they would end up here in the dungeons themselves in short order.

  If Audun Gilli and Liv came along. . . Hamnet Thyssen ground his teeth. He didn’t suppose they would end up here, or Marcovefa, either. But the Emperor was bound to have some place where he could put wizards who caused him trouble - a place warded by other, stronger wizards, no doubt.

  Did the Raumsdalian Empire have any wizards stronger than Marcovefa? Count Hamnet wasn’t so sure about that. She was liable to give Sigvat’s arrogant sorcerers a surprise of the sort they hadn’t had in many years, if ever. But was she stronger than all of them put together? Hamnet had trouble believing she was.

  While he wondered about such things, time seemed to move at its normal rate. When his river of thought ran dry, though, it was as if everything stopped. He might have been in the cell for centuries, with another eternity or two to look forward to. He wasn’t too hungry. He didn’t need to ease himself. In the unending dim, damp twilight in there, those were his only clues that he hadn’t already spent a very long time indeed down below all the parts of the palace he’d ever visited before.

  If I do stay here long enough, my nails will grow out into claws and my beard will reach down to my waist. He might measure months and years that way. Days and weeks? The gauge wasn’t fine enough. Sunrise? Sunset? He was even more cut off from them than he would have been in winter up beyond the Glacier. The sun might stay below the horizon for weeks up there, but you knew it would come back sooner or later. Down here, he had no guarantee of ever seeing another sunrise again.

  He must have slept, for he jerked in surprise when the cell door opened and a guard threw in another miserable loaf. He still had some left from the last one. They weren’t trying to starve him, anyway. Was that any favor to him? Again, he wasn’t so sure.

  He listened for Ulric Skakki’s sly tones and Trasamund’s bellow outside the door. It wasn’t that he wanted them mewed up in here with him. But he did expect them to come after him. When they didn’t, he wondered what had happened to them - what had gone wrong with them, in other words.

  He’d been there for seventeen loaves - another way to count the time - when
a guard looked in through the grate and said, “C’mere, Thyssen. You’ve got a visitor.”

  “A visitor?” Hamnet’s voice sounded rusty even to himself. He hadn’t used it much lately. He also sounded astonished - and he was. He had trouble imagining any of the travelers talking their way down here without ending up prisoners themselves.

  “That’s right,” the guard said. “You want to talk or not?”

  “I’m coming.” Count Hamnet hurried to the door. Somebody thought enough of him to come down here. That had to be good news, didn’t it? He eagerly peered out.

  Gudrid looked back through the grate at him.

  She wore attar of roses, the same scent she’d brought with her when she traveled beyond the Glacier the year before. The flowery sweetness seemed even more incongruous against the stenches in the dungeon than it had up on the frozen steppe.

  “Hello, Hamnet,” his former wife said. Her red-painted mouth stretched into a broad, happy smile. “So good to see you where you belong at last.”

  “I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he answered. “Whatever it is, by God, I’m paying for it now.”

  “I thought the very same thing when we were together,” Gudrid said.

  He’d thought she loved him. He’d always known he loved her. Part of him still did, and always would. That only made her betrayal more bitter. He tried to show she couldn’t wound him - a lying, and a losing, battle. “Are you enjoying yourself? Stare all you please,” he said.

  “I should throw peanuts, the way I would at monkeys in cages,” she said, smiling wider yet. “What would you do for a peanut, Hamnet?”

  He told her where she could put a peanut. He told her where she could put a year’s worth of peanuts, and how well they would fit there, and why. She only laughed. Why not? She was on the outside looking in. He was on the inside looking out. It made all the difference in the world.

  “Did Eyvind Torfinn tell you I was here?” he asked.