Harry Turtledove - The Golden Shrine

Gunnlaug Kvaran nodded grimly. “Things couldn’t be much worse. Those cursed Rulers are demons in human shape. They-” Instead of snickering, Ulric Skakki burst into loud, raucous laughter. Gunnlaug sent him a reproachful look. “You scorn our troubles? You must be Skakki.”

“I not only must be, I am,” Ulric answered. “And I don’t scorn your troubles. I scorn God-cursed Sigvat, and I scorn Count Hamnet and me, too. We tried to tell you what kind of trouble was heading your way, and the thanks he got was . . . an inside view of the dungeons under the imperial palace. Hamnet loves Raumsdalia in spite of everything, but Hamnet owns a castle and he’s a sentimental fool besides. Me, I was just glad to get away.”

A sentimental fool? Hamnet Thyssen had thought of himself as a lot of different things, but that was a new one. Gunnlaug said, “Well, you were right, if it makes you feel any better.”

“Not much,” Ulric said. Hamnet nodded-he felt the same way. Ulric went on, “If Sigvat told us the same thing-”

“It still wouldn’t make much difference, not any more,” Count Hamnet broke in. Ulric looked surprised, but now he nodded.

“Then what are you people doing up here?” Gunnlaug Kvaran asked.

“Fighting the Rulers, by God!” Trasamund boomed. “What else is there that’s even half as much worth doing?”

“I don’t understand,” Gunnlaug said.

“You’re Sigvat’s man, all right,” Ulric said. “He doesn’t understand, either.”

“We’re fighting them because we want to,” Count Hamnet added, “not because the Raumsdalian Emperor wants us to.”

Ulric shook his head. “No. That’s not strong enough. We’re fighting them even though Sigvat wants us to.”

“True,” Hamnet said, which made Gunnlaug Kvaran looked unhappier yet. Count Hamnet hadn’t thought he could.

Trasamund didn’t loathe Sigvat quite so much as Hamnet and Ulric did-but then, the Bizogot jarl hadn’t passed any time in the Emperor’s dungeons. Rough sympathy in his voice, he said, “Well, you managed to get here, Kvaran, where none of the other poor sorry southern bastards did. So tell us what’s going on down there.”

“Nothing good,” Gunnlaug answered. “We still hold Nidaros, or we did when I set out, anyway. But the Rulers are plundering just about everything north of there. Their soldiers fight as if they don’t fear death-”

“They mostly don’t,” Hamnet said. “They fear losing more. Death happens. Losing is a disgrace.”

“If you say so,” Sigvat’s messenger said bleakly. “I wasn’t finished, though. They have wizards the likes of which we’ve never seen the likes of.”

Ulric snickered again. Hamnet Thyssen forgave Gunnlaug his fractured syntax. “We tried to tell you,” he said once more.

“Well, you were right. There. I said it again. Does it make you happy? His Majesty does say the same thing. Does that make you happy?”

“Kicking Sigvat in his iron arse might make me happy-or not so unhappy, anyway,” Count Hamnet replied.

“You’d only give him a concussion of the brain.” Ulric Skakki sounded bright and pleasant, eager to be useful.

“Will you help us? Can you help us? I’m supposed to take your answer back to Nidaros,” Gunnlaug said.

“So you get to run the gauntlet twice? God help you,” Hamnet said. “And I might have known Sigvat would want us to help him. He doesn’t care a fart’s worth what happens up here.”

“It’s not Raumsdalia,” Ulric said. “Why should he?”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” said the messenger from the Empire. “Can you help us? Will you? What word do I take back to His Majesty?”

“He has the whole Empire,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “We have one wizard from Raumsdalia, a few shamans, and some Bizogots.” One of the shamans was Marcovefa, but he didn’t mention that. He went on, “What are we supposed to be able to do that Sigvat can’t? Why are we supposed to be able to do it?”

“You are supposed to be able to beat the Rulers, Your Grace,” Gunnlaug told him. “I don’t know why, and His Majesty doesn’t know why, either. But for whatever reason, you worry them. They want you. They want you enough to put a fat price on your head, alive or not.”

Count Hamnet had heard that before. He’d heard it often enough by now that he had to believe it-which was not to say it made any sense to him. “Even the Rulers can be stupid sometimes,” he growled.

“And so can Sigvat, God knows,” Ulric Skakki added. “We have our worries, and he has his. Some of them are the same-some, yes, but not all.”

“You want to beat the Rulers, too, don’t you?” Gunnlaug Kvaran sounded anxious. And well he might, for he continued, “You wouldn’t . . . go in with them . . . would you?”

Trasamund answered that before either Hamnet or Ulric could: “No! We aim to boot them off the Bizogot plain! We aim to beat them back beyond the Gap! We aim to kill them all, if we can! You can tell your precious Sigvat that. You can tell him he cursed well should have listened to Count Hamnet here, too. In fact, you’d better tell him that-you hear me, Kvaran?”

“I hear you, Your Ferocity,” Gunnlaug said, without promising he would take the jarl’s words back to the Raumsdalian Emperor. Hamnet wondered how much it would matter. Even if Sigvat still held Nidaros, could his messenger get through the Rulers again? What were the odds? Bad, Hamnet was sure.

“Sigvat has heard me, too, by God,” Trasamund said. “If not for me, Count Hamnet and Ulric never would have fared north. They never would have gone beyond the Gap. They never would have seen the marvels on the far side.”

“We never would have bumped into the Rulers, either,” Ulric said. “We have a lot to blame you for, Trasamund.”

Trasamund bared his teeth in what might have been a friendly smile or might have been something else altogether. Gunnlaug Kvaran wore the expression of an outsider at a family squabble. Hamnet suspected Ulric Skakki was shading the truth. Even had Sigvat sent other Raumsdalians beyond the Gap, the Rulers would still have broken in. In that case, the noble and the adventurer would have been fighting them down in the Empire instead of up here. Would that have been better, worse, or just different? No way to know.

Gunnlaug Kvaran bowed to him and to Trasamund. “I go to take your reply to His Majesty,” he said.

“Not right this minute, you bloody idiot!” Ulric burst out. “Stay a while. Rest. Eat some more. Let your horse rest, too. You still have to make it back across the plains before you even try sneaking through to Nidaros.”

That was such obvious good sense, not even Gunnlaug argued against it very hard. Plainly a duteous man, the messenger had to see that duty also involved keeping himself and his horse fit. A couple of Bizogots carrying fat geese back from the marshes at the edge of Sudertorp Lake didn’t hurt in changing his mind, either.

He was gnawing on a roasted duck leg when he saw Tahpenes and recognized her for what she was. He almost dropped the leg in his lap. “What’s she doing here?” he demanded.

“The laundry, a little cooking . . . she sweeps the floors of our huts, too,” Ulric answered. “If you want your horse curried, I daresay she could attend to that.”

Gunnlaug scowled. “You are not a serious man, Skakki. His Majesty warned me about you, and I see he was right.”

“Thank you,” Ulric replied, which left the messenger without much of a reply. The adventurer often had that effect on people, as Count Hamnet had found to his own discomfiture.

Tahpenes also eyed Gunnlaug with a certain amount of surprise. What was going through her mind? How much did she care that one set of her folk’s enemies had managed to link up with the other? Did she wonder if the Raumsdalian newcomer was an avenue to escape?