The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “Coming up, sir,” Eyvind Torfinn’s servant said as he filled a cup. If Earl Eyvind was making his bountiful cellars available to his guests, Hamnet, like Ulric, aimed to take advantage of them. And wine was stronger than beer and ale and smetyn; even a determined drinker needed to pour down less to make the world go away.

  Of course, the determined drinker would still regret it the next morning or whenever he finally sobered up. Right now, the morning seemed a million years and a million miles away from Hamnet Thyssen. The wine in his cup might not have been a great vintage, but it was sweet and it was strong. Hamnet wondered what the southern wine growers got that they thought worth as much as their marvelous elixir. A poet could do something with that conceit, he thought. No poet himself, he made do with savoring the smooth, blood-red richness as it slid down his throat.

  “So what are you going to have to do for Sigvat to keep from decorating his dungeons again?” Ulric Skakki asked, sidling up to him.

  “Nothing much,” Hamnet asked. Unlike the tapman’s a moment before, Ulric’s elevated eyebrow was redolent of skepticism. “Nothing much, by God,” Count Hamnet said again. “Just drive off the Rulers, that’s all. They’re inside the Empire, in case you haven’t heard, and they’ve beaten the stuffing out of an imperial army and a bunch of imperial wizards. Believe it or not, that even got His Majesty’s attention.”

  “And they said it couldn’t be done!” Ulric said in mock - Hamnet supposed it was mock - astonishment. “He won’t do anything to you if you don’t manage it, either, I’m sure. Maybe cut off your fingers and toes one at a time and then start in on anything else that still happens to stick out. Like I say, nothing much. D’you suppose your balls’d count as one cut or two?”

  “I hadn’t worried about it - up till now.” Hamnet spoke the last three words in as shrill a falsetto as he could muster.

  He caught Ulric Skakki by surprise. The adventurer’s laugh was high-pitched, too - almost a giggle. “You’re not supposed to do things like that,” Ulric said severely.

  The others who understood Raumsdalian were laughing, too. Marcovefa chose that moment to walk into the dining hall. “What is the joke?” she asked. “Why do I always come in right after the joke?”

  Some of that was in her own tongue, some in the regular Bizogot language. “Hamnet made it,” Ulric said, and pointed to the newly released nobleman.

  “Say it again,” Marcovefa told him.

  He did, in the Bizogot tongue this time. It sounded stronger in that language than it did in Raumsdalian. Hamnet wondered why that should be so, but had no doubt it was. Marcovefa laughed and laughed. Pointing to her, he said, “When I do go against the Rulers, I’ll need you beside me.”

  She batted her eyes at him, for all the world like a coquette of the kind he couldn’t stand. “Why, darling, I didn’t know you cared,” she murmured in surprisingly good, if still accented, Raumsdalian.

  People in the dining hall laughed much harder at that than they had at Count Hamnet’s joke. Ulric Skakki dropped his cup. Quick as a cat, he caught it before it smashed, but wine spilled on the floor. A servant scurried away and came back with a rag. Hamnet groped for an answer, even after the fellow was down on his knees wiping up the wine. Just then, he would sooner have embraced a rattlesnake than a woman, but he could see how Marcovefa might not appreciate that kind of reply.

  “I want you for your magic, not for your -” he began, and then broke off again. His mouth seemed determined to land him in trouble whether he wanted to end up there or not.

  “Twat?” Marcovefa suggested, in the regular Bizogot language - maybe she hadn’t learned how to say that in Raumsdalian yet.

  “Well, yes,” Hamnet muttered, which brought on fresh gales of merriment from the Bizogots - Liv very much included - and Ulric Skakki. Where was Audun Gilli? Count Hamnet didn’t see him, which spared him complete humiliation ... but only by the tiniest of margins.

  Or so he thought, anyhow, but then Marcovefa leaned up and forward and brushed her lips across his as if they were old lovers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise not to give you anything you don’t want.”

  “Ah, but will you give him everything he does want?” Trasamund bellowed. He thought his own sally was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, funnier than whatever had gone before. Hamnet Thyssen had rather a different opinion.

  If he showed Trasamund he was angry, he lost. He saw that much. “I want to beat the Rulers,” he said. “I want to drive them out of Raumsdalia. I want to drive them off the Bizogot plains.”

  “You do all that, and so many women will want to say thank-you with their legs open, you’ll need a club to keep them off,” Ulric said.

  “Maybe not,” Trasamund said before Hamnet could answer. “Maybe the sour look on his face will do it.” He guffawed.

  “You’re your own best audience,” Hamnet told him.

  “Drive off Rulers? Not so hard,” Marcovefa said. “Everyone makes big fuss about Rulers. Feh! This to Rulers.” She snapped her fingers.

  “The reason everyone makes a fuss about them is that they keep beating everyone,” Ulric said. “It’s a reprehensible habit, I know, and one from which they should be discouraged by any means necessary.”

  “What is reprehensible?” Marcovefa asked.

  “Why, deserving of reprehension, of course,” Ulric answered blandly.

  “And what does reprehension mean?” Was her patience wearing thin? Hamnet Thyssen knew his would have been.

  But Ulric went right on playing. “Reprehension is that which is reprehensible.”

  Maybe Marcovefa would have turned him into a newt. More likely, since there were no newts atop the Glacier, she would have chosen something like a pika instead. Before she could do anything she might - or might not - regret later, Hamnet said, “What Ulric is doing now is reprehensible. It deserves reprehension.”

  “Ah. I understand. Thank you,” Marcovefa said.

  Ulric Skakki sent Hamnet a jaundiced stare. “You’re no fun.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hamnet said. “But then, I’ve just come out of His Majesty’s dungeons. The sport down there isn’t everything it might be.”

  “Well, that’s true enough,” the adventurer agreed. “I didn’t enjoy the stretch I put in under the throne room, either.”

  “You never told me you got jugged.” Count Hamnet didn’t know whether to believe him, either. Ulric had done a lot of things, but he hadn’t done everything ... had he?

  “I never told you it snowed in the wintertime up in the Bizogot country, either. I never saw the need.” He spoke with exaggerated patience. And then he went on to talk about what things were like in the dungeons. He’d been there; he left Hamnet Thyssen in no possible doubt about that. He knew more about what went on in the bowels of the imperial palace than Hamnet did himself. He knew guards by name and by habit. He knew those cells as if he’d lived in them for years. Maybe he had.

  “How did you get out?” Count Hamnet asked when he finished.

  “Same way you did,” Ulric answered. “His Majesty found something where he thought I might be useful. As a matter of fact, it was that bit of business we did together six or eight years ago.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were just out of the dungeon!” Hamnet exclaimed.

  “You didn’t ask me,” Ulric said. “I’d washed most of the stink off, same as you did. I thought you’d get all sniffy if you knew I was coming up for air for the first time in ... well, in a while, anyway. I’d say I was right, too.”

  Was he? Looking into himself, Hamnet thought he might well have been. “I’m sorry,” the Raumsdalian noble mumbled.

  “What? For being what you are? That’s foolish,” Ulric said. “Besides, you’re ... a little better now. And you’ve done a stretch yourself, which doesn’t hurt.”

  Count Hamnet bowed. “Thank you so much.”

  Ulric Skakki also bowed, with a sinuous elegance Hamnet couldn’t hope to match. “My privilege,
Your Grace.”

  Before Hamnet could take the next step in the politer-than-thou dance, a servant came in and said, “His Splendor requests that I announce a meal is being served. If you will be so kind as to accompany me. ..”

  All things considered, Hamnet Thyssen would rather have gone on sparring with Ulric. It wasn’t that Eyvind Torfinn didn’t set an elegant, even an extravagant, table. No, the problem was who would be sitting at it.

  And, sure enough, Gudrid waited there when he walked in.

  Ignoring her would have been rude, especially since he was a guest in her present husband’s home. Glancing over towards Earl Eyvind, Hamnet thought the older noble awaited this meeting with more than a little apprehension of his own. If there’s a fight, I won’t start it, Hamnet decided. That being so, he bowed to Eyvind Torfinn and to Gudrid and took his seat without speaking to either of them.

  Trasamund sat down to his left, Marcovefa to his right. Liv was some little distance down the table, between Ulric Skakki and a Leaping Lynx Bizogot Count Hamnet barely knew. Gudrid never failed to notice things like that. And of course she already knew Liv and Audun Gilli were sleeping together. Her mouth stretched into what looked like a smile of genuine pleasure.

  “How does it feel to have lost another woman?” she asked.

  “These things happen,” Hamnet said stolidly.

  “Oh, indeed.” Gudrid’s smile widened. “Anything can happen to anybody - once. If something happens to someone again and again, though, chances are it’s his own fault.”

  You can’t please a woman. She didn’t shout it, not in so many words. She let the guests of her husband’s generosity figure it out for themselves instead. And what she said might well have held a cruel barb of truth. But it was a barb that could also have stung her. Count Hamnet could have made some pointed gibes about her sport of infidelity ... if he’d wanted to insult the man who’d got him out of Sigvat’s dungeon. Since he didn’t, he just shrugged.

  Gudrid drew in another anticipatory breath. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how long he could go on giving mild answers if she kept baiting him. Not long enough, he feared. But Eyvind Torfinn beat Gudrid to the punch. “That will be enough of that, my dear,” he said in tones that brooked no argument.

  Gudrid blinked. She wasn’t used to hearing such tones from her husband - or anyone else. “But he -” she began.

  “That will be enough of that,” Eyvind Torfinn repeated. “We are none of us perfect. Reminding one another how we fall short does nobody any good. And the Empire needs Count Hamnet, whether he is perfect or not. You may think what you please, of course, but I will thank you to stay courteous in what you say.”

  Servitors began bringing in the meal. Trays of mutton and spicy pork and goose filled the table. An edge sharper and more dangerous than the one on any carving knife filled Gudrid’s voice: “And if I don’t?”

  If she intimidated Eyvind Torfinn, he didn’t show it. Waving to one of the servants, he said, “My wife won’t be dining with us after all, I’m afraid. Be so kind as to escort her to her bedchamber.”

  “Yes, Your Splendor,” the servant said.

  “But I don’t want to go to my bedchamber,” Gudrid said, which would surely do for an understatement till a bigger one came along.

  “Will you mind your manners, then?” Earl Eyvind asked with surprising firmness.

  “I will do and say whatever I need to do and say,” Gudrid answered, as if no other reply were possible. Plainly, she thought none was.

  “Rorik . ..” Eyvind said. The servant touched Gudrid on the shoulder.

  She screamed at him, and at her husband. Hamnet Thyssen looked down at the tabletop. He’d seen Gudrid’s temper kindle before. He’d been on the receiving end of it more often than he cared to remember. In a way, he still was. This fracas was about him, even if he didn’t happen to be at the center of it.

  Ulric Skakki yawned. “A little politeness would fix everything. Too bloody much to ask for, I suppose.”

  Gudrid didn’t intend to be polite. She grabbed a knife. Rorik knocked it away from her before she had the chance to try to stab him. That made Gudrid screech like a dire wolf with an arrow in its rump. For his part, Count Hamnet didn’t blame the servant one bit. His former wife didn’t take kindly to being thwarted by anybody.

  “You may stay... if you’ll stay civil,” Eyvind Torfinn told her. “Will you?”

  Her eyes blazed. She wasn’t about to forgive her husband any time soon, either. But she nodded and spat out three words: “Oh, all right.”

  Earl Eyvind beamed, which struck Hamnet as misplaced optimism. He kept his mouth shut, though. “Thank you, my dear,” Gudrid’s current husband said.

  She answered with something low-voiced, something Count Hamnet couldn’t quite make out. If Eyvind Torfinn did hear what it was, he affected not to. A certain amount of forbearance was an asset in any husband - or wife. The earl seemed to grasp that. Gudrid didn’t, and probably never would. As for Hamnet himself.. . He felt he’d used all his forbearance and more besides, trying to stay married to Gudrid. Her opinion of that might have differed.

  Gluttony seemed safe here. Gluttony, after the musty water and the small loaves of bad bread in Sigvat’s dungeon, seemed all but obligatory. Hamnet might not have been able to match the Bizogots in his relentless pursuit of a full belly, but he did his level best.

  Eyvind Torfinn reminded him of one of the reasons he was feasting so extravagantly, asking, “How soon do you expect to depart for the north?”

  “As soon as I can,” Hamnet answered. “As soon as His Majesty gives me orders I can show people, orders that let them know I really do hold command there.”

  Though Eyvind nodded, the cynical Ulric Skakki asked, “Will he give you orders like that in writing?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t much care, either,” Count Hamnet said. “If he does give me what I need, I’ll go off and do my best with it. And if he doesn’t, I’ll go down to my castle instead - and wait for the Rulers to come to me.”

  “What does he say?” Marcovefa asked. Both Ulric Skakki and Eyvind Torfinn started to translate Hamnet’s words into her dialect. Each waved for the other to go on. After a moment, Ulric did. Marcovefa listened, frowning, then said, “Does he really think they can do that?”

  She spoke mostly in the usual Bizogot tongue. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble following that. “You may think the Rulers are easy meat,” he told her, “but, if you do, you’re the only one who does.”

  “Too many things down below the Glacier.” Marcovefa said that in her own dialect, but Hamnet had heard it often enough to have no trouble understanding it. Believing it was another story.

  Hamnet Thyssen ate for a while. Eyvind Torfinn’s chefs, as always, set a high standard. And, because Hamnet was just out of the dungeon, good food seemed even better to him. After a while, though, he looked across the table and spoke to Gudrid: “May I ask a favor of you?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise not, he judged, altogether feigned. “What is it?”

  “Don’t ask His Majesty not to give me the orders I need,” he said.

  This time, the way she batted her eyelashes was much too familiar. “Why would I do that?” she cooed, as if she didn’t know.

  “To stop me. To make me go back to my castle. To make me fail,” Hamnet said bluntly. “We both know that would make you happy. By all the signs, though, I’m more likely to fail if I do go up against the Rulers than if I don’t. But if by some chance I don’t fail, that will be good for the Empire. What happens to me doesn’t matter much, not on that scale of things. What happens to Raumsdalia does.”

  Eyvind Torfinn nodded. So did Trasamund. So, rather grudgingly, did Ulric Skakki, who worried about himself ahead of most things. So did Liv, without the least hesitation. And so did Audun Gilli, although Count Hamnet made a point of not looking at him.

  Gudrid? Gudrid stared at Hamnet as if he’d started speaking in Marcovefa’s dialect. “Why on earth should I care wha
t happens to Raumsdalia?” she demanded. “I care about what happens to me ... and I care about what happens to you.” The way she bared her small white teeth said she didn’t want anything good happening to him.

  Eyvind Torfinn took a sip of wine before speaking. The white-bearded scholar didn’t usually have any idea how to control Gudrid. As if anyone does, Hamnet thought. He feared whatever Eyvind said would only make things worse. Appealing to Gudrid’s patriotism was like appealing to a dire wolf’s sense of poetry. You could if you wanted to, but it wasn’t likely to do you any good.

  But all Earl Eyvind said was, “If you wish disaster upon your former husband, my sweet, the surest thing to do is let him go north and find it. That the Rulers have crossed the Bizogot plain in one campaigning season, that they have invaded the Empire, clearly shows anyone who stands against them is unlikely to stand for long.”

  His words held more truth than Hamnet Thyssen might have wished. Hamnet wanted to beat the Rulers, not to throw himself away as so many Bizogots - and, now, a Raumsdalian army - had done before him. Whether he could do what he wanted was a different question.

  With Eyvind Torfinn’s help, Gudrid saw that, too. She sent Count Hamnet one of her poisonously sweet smiles. “All right,” she said, and then, “All right,” again, her soft red lips and moist tongue giving the words a lewd caress as they escaped. “Sometimes the worst you can do to someone is to give him what he thinks he wants and then stand back and watch him ruin himself with it. If you want to play the hero going after the Rulers, be my guest. I won’t tell Sigvat to stop you. I’ll just laugh when you come back after you’ve made a fool of yourself. So will everyone else.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hamnet said. “I’ll have to do my best not to make a fool of myself, then, won’t I?”

  Gudrid’s laugh was loud and rich. “But darling, we all know your best is nowhere near good enough, don’t we?”