The Breath of God

by Harry Turtledove

  “Oh, good,” Ulric Skakki said. “That’s the way to guarantee you win your battles - make sure your soldiers know exactly what they need to do.”

  Ingolf scratched his head. “Is he joking, uh, Your Grace?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.

  “I wish he were,” Hamnet said, while Ulric snorted. Waving the adventurer to silence, Count Hamnet nodded to the trooper. “Go on.”

  “Well, I was trying to,” Ingolf Rokkvi said. “We rode north up the forest tracks, looking for the savages. We figured we’d give them a hiding, and they’d run like they usually do, and then we could go home.”

  Trasamund and Marcomer and several other Bizogots growled at that scornful assessment of their prowess. Count Hamnet waved them to silence, too. His glare was enough to keep them from reaching for their weapons. He told Ingolf Rokkvi, “Go on,” again.

  “I will, if you let me,” Ingolf said. “We were riding along, and all of a sudden the worst blizzard in the world blows up, right in the middle of the woods. You wouldn’t think something like that could happen, but it did.”

  Hamnet glanced at Liv and Audun Gilli and Marcovefa. They all nodded. Liv and Audun looked worried, which meant they wouldn’t have wanted to try a spell like that - Hamnet supposed that was what it meant, anyhow. Marcovefa looked amused, which could have meant.. . anything at all. “Then what happened?” Hamnet asked Ingolf Rokkvi.

  “Mammoths happened, that’s what!” Ingolf said. “By God, they did. Mammoths with soldiers on em. They were built like bricks, with big curly beards.”

  “The mammoths?” Ulric Skakki asked.

  “The soldiers,” Ingolf Rokkvi said reproachfully. “They speared us, they trampled us - you can’t make a horse stand against a mammoth, on account of he’s just not big enough - and they laughed while they did it.”

  “What happened then?” Count Hamnet asked.

  “What do you think happened?” Ingolf’s look told him he was short on brains. “We tried to get away from them. That’s what you do when you haven’t got a chance of winning, and we cursed well didn’t. There was more horrible weather in the woods, and short-faced bears and dire wolves jumping out at us like they had no business doing, and all the time it was like we heard those savages laughing at us, like they thought we were the biggest joke in the world.”

  “Would you fight them again?” Hamnet asked.

  Ingolf Rokkvi needed some time to think about that. “Maybe I would,” he said at last, “if I thought we had some kind of prayer of winning. A lot of the ones who weren’t on mammoths were on these funny deer, and they weren’t anything special. A regular horseman doesn’t hardly need to worry about ‘em. But the mammoths, and the magic . ..” He scowled. “That’s a pretty scary business.”

  “We can beat them. By God, we can,” Hamnet said. Ingolf Rokkvi’s scowl got deeper. He didn’t believe a word of it. After what he’d been through, Hamnet had a hard time blaming him. A little desperately, the Raumsdalian nobleman went on, “We have a wizard who can match anything they do.” He pointed to Marcovefa.

  Ingolf eyed her the way a man will eye a good-looking woman, not like a soldier eyeing someone who might help his cause. “Well, if you say so,” he said after a moment: he didn’t believe a word of it.

  His horse looked back at him and said, “Don’t be dumber than you can help. She really can. She’s not running from them the way you are, is she?”

  That wasn’t Marcovefa’s style of magic. Audun Gilli enjoyed putting words in the mouths of things that didn’t normally have mouths, or at least had no business talking. Audun looked innocent when Hamnet Thyssen glanced his way - ostentatiously innocent, as a matter of fact. Hamnet didn’t love him and never would, but for the time being decided he wasn’t sorry to have him along.

  Ingolf’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “How did you do that?” he demanded of Marcovefa.

  She really was innocent - of this, anyway. In her accented Raumsdalian, she said, “Is my fault if beast has more sense than you do?”

  The cavalry trooper gathered himself. Hamnet had feared he might go to pieces - he’d been through a lot lately. But he didn’t. “All right. I’ll try,” he said. “If I end up dead ... I reckon the lot of you will be there beside me. Have I got that right?”

  “Yes,” Hamnet said simply. “The next town ahead is Kjelvik, isn’t it? Does it have a decent garrison?”

  “Not too bad,” Ingolf answered. “I don’t know whether they’ll want to fight or bug out, though.”

  “We’ll see,” Hamnet Thyssen said. They all rode north.

  They came across more soldiers fleeing the Rulers before they got into Kjelvik. Some of them they persuaded to turn around and resume the fight. Others, seeing a body of armed men coming their way from out of the south, rode around them no matter how far out of their way that took them. Hamnet didn’t try to round up those soldiers; they were too far gone to be of much use.

  Kjelvik sat on a low hill. There were no tall hills or steep slopes in the northern part of the Empire. The Glacier had lain here too recently, and had ground such things down under its immense weight. As Count Hamnet neared the top of the hill, he could look ahead and see the dark smudge of the north woods out on the horizon. He was getting close. So were the Rulers.

  He got a less than overwhelming reception from the gate guards. “Who the blazes are you, and why are you coming the wrong way?” a sergeant asked.

  Instead of answering with words, Count Hamnet displayed Sigvat’s commission, all adorned with seals and gorgeous with ornate calligraphy. “What’s it say, Sergeant?” one of the guards asked. “I can’t read for beans.”

  “What? You think I can?” the underofficer said. “I went to work when I was a brat, same as most people. I didn’t have the time to waste on my letters.”

  “This is an order from His Majesty, the Emperor,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “It gives me command in the north against the new invasion of the barbarians.”

  “Right. And rain makes apple-sauce,” the sergeant jeered. “Nobody in his right mind’d want to go fight these savages. They ride mammoths, I hear. Ride ‘em - would you believe it?” Ingolf Rokkvi shuddered - he believed it, all right.

  And so did Count Hamnet, who had also seen it with his own eyes. He growled, “Go get an officer - someone who actually can read. He’ll tell you whether I’m lying or not, by God.”

  Grudgingly, the sergeant sent off one of his guards. In due course, the man returned with a young officer. “I am Osvif Grisi,” he said. “What do you want, stranger? What do you need?”

  “I want to drive the barbarians out of the Empire. I need Kjelvik’s garrison to help me do it,” Hamnet answered. Osvif gaped. Hamnet displayed his commission again.

  “Is he a fraud, sir?” the sergeant asked. “If he is, we’ll give him what-for like he wouldn’t believe.”

  Osvif Grisi stared at the impressive parchment. He reached Sigvat’s peremptory commands, his lips moving. Count Hamnet didn’t think the less of him for that; he read the same way himself, as did most people who could read at all. The more Osvif read, the wider his mouth fell open. By the time he finished, his thinly bearded chin was hanging on his chest.

  “Well?” Hamnet said.

  The youngster’s jaw shut with an audible click. He stiffened to a parade-ground attention. “Give me whatever orders you think right, Your, uh, Grace,” he said. “I am at your service in all ways, as is Kjelvik.”

  “He’s real?” Now the sergeant’s jaw dropped.

  “He’s real, all right,” Osvif said grimly. “If he told me to hang you from a pole off the battlements, you’d be hanging there now.” The sergeant gaped. Osvif Grisi turned back to Hamnet. “What do you want from Kjelvik, sir?”

  “Every soldier you can put on a horse,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “We’re going to have to scrape together some kind of army to fight the Rulers, you know.”

  “I suppose so, yes.” The young officer licked his lips. “I think you’d bette
r talk to the town’s commandant.”

  “Yes, I think so, too,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “I’ve been trying to do that, and people keep getting in my way.” He eyed the sergeant, who did his best to hide in plain sight. Maybe he imagined himself kicking his life away up on the battlements. Hamnet wouldn’t have ordered him hanged, but he didn’t have to know that. The noble nodded to Osvif. “Take me to him.”

  Kjelvik’s garrison wasn’t big enough to hold the walls for long against a determined foe. The keep wasn’t strong enough to keep out an invader once he’d broken into the city. So Hamnet s professional eye told him, anyhow. The guards outside the keep’s portcullis stared at the Bizogots behind him.

  “I thought some different barbarians were loose in the north,” one of them said to his friend.

  “Me, too. Shows what we know,” the other guard said. Then he noticed Osvif with Hamnet’s party. “What’s going on, sir?”

  “This noble” - Osvif pointed to Hamnet - ”is in charge of all defenses in the north, by His Majesty’s command.” That made all the guards spring to attention. Osvif went on, “I am taking him to Baron Runolf.”

  “Is that Runolf Skallagrim?” Hamnet asked. He hoped so - if the local commander was a man he knew, things would go smoother.

  And Osvif nodded. “That’s right. You’ve met him?”

  “Awhile ago, but yes,” Hamnet replied.

  Runolf Skallagrim was about his own age, a little heavier, a little softer - a little happier-looking, if you wanted to get right down to it. “By God,” he said when Osvif led Count Hamnet into his chamber. “Look what the hound dragged in!” As he rose to clasp Hamnet s hand, he went on, “What the demon are you doing here? Last I heard, you’d got jugged.”

  “That’s old news now.” Hamnet Thyssen displayed his commission.

  Runolf looked it over. In due course, he nodded. “Well, that’s better than sitting in a dungeon, I must say.”

  “Is it?” Hamnet asked bleakly. “In the dungeon, I don’t have to worry about a mammoth stepping on my head.”

  “There is that,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “So what do you want from me?”

  “As many men as you’ve got, as many fugitives from the armies that have already lost to the Rulers as you can round up, and enough food for them to take north.”

  “You don’t ask for much, do you?” Runolf said.

  “If you’ve got three times that many men in your pocket, I’ll gladly take em,” Hamnet said. “Oh - any wizards in town? We need them, too.”

  “A supply train’ll be hard enough to come by.”

  That was much too likely to be true. Kjelvik wasn’t a town from which anyone in the Empire had expected an army to sortie. If Raumsdalia needed to move against invaders from a town this far south, they’d penetrated farther and done worse than anybody would have guessed possible. Well, so they had. “Do what you can, Runolf, please,” Count Hamnet said. “I’ve met these Rulers before. They come from beyond the Glacier, and they’re more trouble than you can imagine.”

  “Beyond the Glacier?” The garrison commander looked and sounded intrigued. “So those stories about a way melting through don’t just come from merchants off the Bizogot steppe getting drunk and telling tales in taverns, eh?”

  “No, they’re true, all right. I’ve been up there. It’s a different world. We haven’t had anything to do with it since the Glacier walled it off, God only knows how many thousand years ago. But we do now.”

  Runolf Skallagrim grunted. “I will do what I can, Thyssen. And I think the first thing I’ll do is set my men to rounding up the soldiers who’ve come south out of the woods. My bet is, we’ll need a show of force before a lot of those buggers’ll want to remember why the Emperor pays them.”

  “My bet is, you’re right,” Count Hamnet said. “Fair enough. Do that first. After they comb them out of the fields and the taprooms and the whorehouses, we’ll see what we’ve got. Don’t waste time on it, though. The way it looks to me is, we’ve wasted all the time we can afford, or maybe a little more than that.”

  The soldiers lined up in front of Hamnet Thyssen and Baron Runolf were a sorry-looking lot. Some of them were obviously hung over. Some were still drunk. Several were wounded, though none seemed seriously hurt - a man with a bad wound wouldn’t have been able to come so far so fast. They all glared at him. They knew he wanted them to fight the Rulers again, and they were anything but keen on the idea.

  Most of them still had swords. If he hadn’t had the Bizogots and some of Runolf’s archers backing him, he wouldn’t have been surprised if they tried to mob him and mutiny. His guess was that bad odds were the only thing holding them back.

  “So you’ve met the mammoth-riders,” he said.

  “What do you know about it, you blue-blooded son of a whore?” one of the soldiers said. “Somebody told you they could do that, did he? Do you know what it means, though? Not bloody likely, not if you’re coming up from Nidaros.”

  “I fought them half a dozen times, up on the Bizogot plains,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He waved back towards Trasamund and the other big blonds. “So did they.”

  The soldier blinked and shut up. Another one found a bitter question: “Why the demon didn’t you whip them? Then they wouldn’t have set on us.”

  “We didn’t because we couldn’t.” As usual, Hamnet used the truth, however unpalatable it was.

  “How come you think you’ll do any better this time, then, curse you?” the second soldier demanded.

  “Because this time we have a wizard who can beat anything the Rulers throw at her.” Count Hamnet waved to Marcovefa. She took a step forward and nodded to the soldiers as if they were first-rate fighting men, not the flotsam and jetsam of a campaign gone wrong.

  “Another Bizogot twat - huzzah,” the second soldier said, slathering on his scorn with a trowel.

  Maybe he thought Marcovefa didn’t speak his language. Maybe he just didn’t care. If he didn’t, he made a bad mistake. As Gudrid could have told him, angering a wizard you couldn’t kill on the instant was commonly a mistake.

  It was here. Marcovefa murmured to herself. The soldier developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to disrobe. Once he was naked in front of his staring comrades, he acted like a jackass - literally. He brayed, got down on all fours, and started pulling scraps of dead grass up from between cobbles with his teeth. He also relieved himself like an animal, calmly and without shame.

  Marcovefa murmured again. The soldier came back to himself - and cried out in horror as he realized what he’d done. Marcovefa suffered him to dress and return to the ranks with no further afflictions.

  “Any other donkeys here?” Hamnet Thyssen inquired.

  Nobody said anything. The unhappy survivors of one encounter with the Rulers looked apprehensively from him to Marcovefa and back again. Something like a sigh rippled through their ragged ranks.

  Count Hamnet understood the sigh all too well. His nod was precisely calibrated between scorn and sympathy. “That’s right,” he said. “You can turn around and have another go at the barbarians - this time with a real chance of winning - or you can face us now. Which one looks like a better bet?”

  Even after Marcovefa’s magic, the question didn’t seem to have the quick and obvious answer he’d hoped for. He knew what that meant: the Rulers had beaten the Raumsdalian army even worse than he’d feared. They’d made the men afraid of them, sure another beating lay around the corner.

  But they also looked at the soldier who’d done such a humiliating impression of an ass. If that could happen to him, what was liable to happen to them if they tried to tell Hamnet no?

  “We’ll go, I guess,” said a man with the look of a sergeant. “If the savages kill us, at least it’s over with in a hurry.” Most of the men assembled with him nodded; he’d summed up what they were thinking.

  “We fought them again and again on the Bizogot steppe,” Hamnet said again. “We lost more than we won - I won’t tell you anything differ
ent, because I can’t. But you can beat them. By God, you can! And we’ll do it.”

  He didn’t expect them to break into frantic cheers. A good thing, too, because they didn’t - that kind of thing happened only in bad romances. A few of them looked thoughtful, which was about as much as he’d hoped for.

  He turned to Runolf Skallagrim. “What do you think?”

  “They’ll march. They’ll fight.. . some,” the commander of Kjelvik replied. “If they win the first time out, they’ll fight harder after that. If they lose the first time, they’ll run away so fast, their shadows won’t keep up with em.”

  “Heh.” Hamnet hadn’t remembered that Runolf had such a gift for pungent truth. Then he added the most he could: “We’re better off with ‘em than without em.”

  “You hope,” Runolf said.

  “That’s right.” Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I hope.”

  He’d come into Kjelvik with a troop of Bizogots. He rode out of it with an army of Raumsdalians. It wasn’t exactly the army he would have wanted, not when it was made up of garrison troops and men who’d already run away from the Rulers once. But it was an army, and it could fight. It could. Whether it would . ..

  “We’re going in the right direction,” he told Ulric Skakki. “We’re moving towards the enemy.”

  “So we are,” the adventurer said. “If only we had to move father before we bumped into those bastards.”

  Runolf Skallagrim said, “What I don’t understand is, why didn’t the Emperor do something about these Rulers sooner?” He seemed glad to be out of Kjelvik. He kept reaching for his sword and pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, as if ready to go into battle then and there. If all the soldiers who followed were as eager as the baron, the Rulers really might have something to worry about.

  “You’d have to ask His Majesty about that,” Hamnet replied. “I really couldn’t tell you.” He didn’t want to shout that Sigvat was a purblind idiot, even if that explanation made more sense than any other.