Harry Turtledove - The Golden Shrine

She looked unhappy-no, unhappier. “I thought I could spy on you without drawing notice. It seems I was wrong.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Ulric Skakki’s tone of voice suggested she was an idiot for thinking any such thing.

“It’s all of a piece,” Hamnet said, more to Ulric than to their captive. “The Rulers think they can do whatever they want, get away with whatever they want. Sooner or later, they’ll find out they’re wrong.”They’d better, or they’ll end up winning this fight after all.

“They all think like that, don’t they?” Ulric had a knack for embellishing other people’s thoughts. “Maybe they should have called themselves the Herd, not the Rulers. They all act the same, like so many, uh, riding deer.”

“How dare you speak of us like that? How dare you?” Tahpenes snarled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Doesn’t stop you from talking about us,” Hamnet said. “Why should it stop us from talking about you?”

The answer blazed in her black eyes. Hamnet Thyssen read it there. The Rulers had the right to do as they pleased, because they were the Rulers. Lesser folk existed only on sufferance. When those “lesser” folk had captured you, though, bragging about how wonderful and mighty you were could prove inexpedient. For a medium-sized wonder, Tahpenes was smart enough to see that.

Hamnet pointed ahead. “There are the houses the Leaping Lynx Bizogots built. Yes, those are the houses where your precious wizards met. They died right in front of them.”

Were he speaking Raumsdalian, he would have called the stone structures huts. He always thought of them that way when he used his own language. Here, though, he wanted to make them seem impressive to Tahpenes. She was a nomad herself; any permanent buildings were bound to be large and imposing in her eyes.

“Here comes Trasamund.” Ulric pointed to the burly jarl.

Tahpenes knew the name. “We beat his clan when we first came here,” she said.

“So you did,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Why don’t you tell him all about it? Don’t you think he’d want to know just how you embarrassed the Bizogots he led?”

Tahpenes didn’t answer. She didn’t boast to Trasamund, either. Pretty plainly, she was clever enough to see the obvious. Just as plainly, that put her several lengths ahead of most of the Rulers.

Marcovefa had trouble with the idea of prisoners. “This woman doesn’t know very much,” she complained to Hamnet Thyssen. “We’ve got most of what she does know. Keeping her alive is nothing but a waste of food.”

“We can spare it,” Hamnet said. “Are you hungry?”

“Hungry? No, by God!” Marcovefa laughed. “So much food right now-all these waterfowl-I’m getting fat. No one up on top of the Glacier gets fat. No one, not unless you have something wrong with you and you die soon.”

Only the rich got fat down in the Empire. That was one way you could tell they were rich: they always had plenty to eat. Hardly any Bizogots grew fat. In the springtime, the Leaping Lynxes had been the exception. So many ducks and geese and swans and other birds bred at Sudertorp Lake, what the Bizogots took barely dented the abundance.

Now Trasamund’s band was reaping the same benefits. Hamnet could smell duck grease on his own mustache. He said, “You aren’t fat. You’re just right.” He hoped Marcovefa believed him, because he meant it.

“How do I know that?” she asked.

“Well, if I haven’t shown you, I must be older and feebler than I thought I was,” he said. He knew exactly what he could do. For a man his age, it wasn’t bad at all. Of course, he did get magical help every now and then, too.

“You are only a man. Men will say anything so they can do that.” Marcovefa dismissed half the human race with a wave of the hand.

Instead of arguing with her, Hamnet changed the subject: “Have you learned anything worthwhile from Tahpenes?”

“Maybe a little,” Marcovefa said grudgingly. “Not much, but a little.”

“Like what?” Hamnet asked.

“I have learned I would not want to be a woman among the Rulers,” Marcovefa answered. “They are for screwing, for birthing warriors, for doing what men tell them to do. And that is all, poor fools.”

To Hamnet Thyssen, that sounded a lot like women’s life among the Bizogots-or, for that matter, down in the Empire. Women took their revenge with adultery and other betrayal. He knew more about that than he’d ever wanted to find out. If he said something along those lines, he would only make Marcovefa angry. So he asked, “How are things different up on the Glacier?”

“My folk don’t think a woman with a working brain is poison,” Marcovefa answered. “They like clever women, in fact. If women are shamans, then more men can hunt and fight. It is so here, too, I have seen.”

Slowly, Hamnet nodded. That was true enough. Liv filled the bill. His mouth tightened, as it often did when he thought of her. He knew he’d tried too hard to hold on. Knowing didn’t tell him how to stop doing things like that. He wished it would have.

He couldn’t even blame Liv too much, the way he did with Gudrid. Liv hadn’t sneaked around behind his back. She’d warned him what she was going to do, and then she’d done it. And if Audun Gilli made her unhappy-or, more likely, when Audun Gilli made her unhappy-she’d leave him the same way.

As for Gudrid . . . No, he didn’t want to think about her at all. And so he asked Marcovefa, “It’s different with the Rulers?”

“I should say it is!” Indignation snapped in her eyes. “To them, a woman is nothing but a twat with legs. That is how you say it, yes?”

“If that’s what you want to say, that’s how you say it, all right,” Count Hamnet agreed gravely.

“As long as a woman has the brains to lie down and open up”-Marcovefa demonstrated lewdly-“that is all the Rulers want.”

That was all quite a few men from this side of the Glacier wanted in a woman, too. “No woman shamans among them, though?” Hamnet said.

“None,” Marcovefa answered. “This Tahpenes chit, she didn’t think it was possible. Even when Liv worked magic in front of her stupid pointed nose, she still didn’t think it was possible. Some people are so stupid, you wonder how they stay alive. Some people are so stupid, you wonder why they stay alive.”

Count Hamnet wanted whatever weapons he could find against the Rulers. “Do you think we could stir up trouble between their men and women?” he asked. “Once the women find out we let women do more things here, will they squabble with their menfolk? Will that turn into anything we can use?”

Marcovefa kissed him. “You have a sneaky, wicked way of looking at the world-do you know that?”

“It all depends,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki thought he was a natural-born innocent. Hamnet feared the adventurer was right. Otherwise, how could he have stayed blind to so many things for so long? But even an innocent by imperial standards might look like a sophisticate to someone who’d come down from the Glacier not long before. “Do you think that might work?”

“It might-no way to know till we try,” Marcovefa said. “But how do we even begin?”

“Not hard.” Sure enough, Hamnet did feel like a sly sophisticate. He cherished the feeling, knowing it might not come again any time soon. “Let Tahpenes see how things are here. Maybe even play things up while she’s watching. Then let her get away. She takes trouble for the Rulers with her, stuck inside her own head.”

“Let her get away?” Marcovefa’s eyes widened. “I would never think of that, not in ten thousand years. When you have a captive, you keep a captive. Maybe you fatten up a little, if you can spare the food, but you keep.”