Harry Turtledove - The Golden Shrine

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” the wizard exclaimed. “We went to the ends of the earth-by God, we went past the ends of the earth-and we never saw a trace or heard a rumor. The Rulers don’t seem to know anything about it.”

“Maybe that means it’s on this side of the Glacier after all.” Count Hamnet shrugged. “Or maybe it means the Shrine was never anything but a pipe dream. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either-if I had to guess, I’d say nobody ever will.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say you were right,” Audun replied. “We’ll find out-or, more likely, we won’t.”

Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I imagine men a thousand years from now will still go chasing the Golden Shrine. By then, this will all be forest, and only fragments will be left of the Glacier.” He glanced over to Audun Gilli. “There. I’m talking to you, by God. Are you happier?”

“Yes, Your Grace. Are you?”

“Mm-maybe. Yes, I suppose I am.” Hamnet gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. “If you like, you can tell Liv I’m sorry.”

“You can do that yourself, too,” Audun said.

“I’d rather you did. I might . . . say some other things besides, and chances are that wouldn’t help. Besides, something like that, it won’t matter if it comes from me or from you. Not now it won’t.”

“No, not now,” Audun said. “Earlier . . . Well, no wizard’s ever found a spell to let you fix now what you made a hash of back then. Probably just as well. Things would get knotted up worse than a musk-ox-wool cape knitted by somebody who never learned to knit.”

“Can’t quarrel with you there. And people would make mistakes ‘fixing’ mistakes. . . . What a mess!” Hamnet said.

“Life is complicated enough. Too complicated, sometimes,” Audun Gilli said.

“Can’t quarrel with you there, either.” Count Hamnet turned away. He supposed he could deal with the Raumsdalian wizard. He even thought he might be able to talk to Liv again one of these days, though he didn’t want to do it any time soon. Showing enthusiasm for either prospect was more than he had in him.

“You know what you look like?” Ulric Skakki asked as he and Hamnet rode across the steppe with a band of Bizogots out searching for the Rulers.

“No. What?” Hamnet asked, as he was surely meant to do.

“You look like somebody who wants to kill something.”

“Oh.” Count Hamnet looked around. His eye carefully didn’t light on Audun Gilli, who was along to help if the Rulers they ran into had a wizard along. “Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?” Ulric didn’t look Audun’s way, either. Maybe he was too polite-anything was possible-or maybe he really didn’t know what was making Hamnet’s stomach hurt. Either way, he went on, “If you go out there looking to slaughter the first thing you see, sometimes you don’t worry about staying alive while you’re bashing and smashing.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Hamnet said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Right.” Ulric plainly didn’t believe him. Since Hamnet knew he was lying, he didn’t try to insist.

One of the Bizogots pointed east. “Look at the teratorns circling over there. Lots of them-something big is dead,” he said. “Maybe we should find out what.”

No one said no. If something big was dead, or if more smaller somethings were, very likely it or they had got killed. And if things had got killed, there was a good chance the Rulers had killed them.

Hamnet Thyssen steered his horse with knees and reins. He did watch Audun Gilli as they all rode toward the carrion birds. The wizard seemed rather birdlike himself, the way he flapped his arms every time the horse strode. Audun would never make a picture rider; any equestrian trainer down at Nidaros would have screamed his head off at such bad form. But nobody on the frozen steppe cared about style. Audun got the job done, and that was all that mattered.

They took longer to get to the teratorns’ feast than Count Hamnet had thought they would. Teratorns were so big-big enough to dwarf even condors, let along lesser vultures-that they tricked the eye into thinking they flew closer than they really did.

When they did see why the teratorns were spiraling down out of the sky, they discovered it had nothing-nothing obvious, at least-to do with the Rulers. A mammoth had fallen over and died. Teratorns and smaller scavengers stalked around that mountain of meat. Even on the ground, the teratorns stood out, and not only for their size: their bare-skinned heads were wattled and hideously gaudy.

They let out loud, indignant croaks now, because they couldn’t get at the food they craved. Lions and dire wolves were stuffing themselves with mammoth meat. Whenever a teratorn tried to rush up and steal some, the beasts that could also kill snarled threats. The great birds retreated.

Every so often, one of them would leap into the air. Foxes prowled around the dead mammoth, too. They also wanted their share of the scraps-or a vulture would do, if they couldn’t get anything else.

“Well, this was a waste of time,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

“How right you are,” Ulric agreed readily. “We could have written epic poetry or gone to a fine eatery or played a couple of games of draughts while we rode across the steppe if it weren’t for those miserable teratorns.”

Hamnet’s ears heated. “You know what I mean. We didn’t accomplish anything coming here.”

“Right again!” Ulric Skakki sounded more enthusiastic than ever, always a bad sign. “If not for this dead mammoth, we could’ve chased the Rulers back beyond the Gap by now.”

“You’re making yourself annoying on purpose,” Hamnet said.

“That’s better than doing it by accident, wouldn’t you say?” the adventurer returned. “At least I know what I’m up to.”

Audun Gilli pointed north across the frozen steppe. “Someone else is heading this way. Maybe we weren’t the only ones to wonder what was dead here and how it got that way.”

“This way, that way, any way at all,” Ulric Skakki said. “When somebody writes the history of this war nobody will ever write, he can call this fight the Battle of the Dead Mammoth.”

“Somebody writes the history nobody will . . .” Count Hamnet gave it up as a bad job. He looked to his weapons instead. With them, he had a better notion of what he was doing.

“Have they got a wizard with them?” Trasamund asked Audun, reaching over his shoulder to draw his two-handed sword.

That, Hamnet realized, was an important question-maybe the important question. If the Rulers had no wizard along, then Audun Gilli gave the Bizogots the edge. But if the Rulers did . . . If they did, Audun was liable to be in over his head. Marcovefa might scoff at the sorcery the men from beyond the Gap used, but it was stronger than Bizogot shamans or Raumsdalian wizards could match.

Count Hamnet imagined himself riding back to the Leaping Lynxes’ huts and telling Liv Audun had died valiantly fighting the Rulers. He wouldn’t sound as if he was gloating. He’d give Audun all the credit he deserved, and more besides. And Liv would dissolve in tears, and he would hold her and try to console her. . . .

He laughed sourly, realizing what an idiot he was. For one thing, Liv would be furious if Audun died while he survived. For another, if the Rulers slew Audun they were much too likely to slay him, too.

“Well, we found them,” Ulric Skakki said, methodically examining his arrows. “Not quite the way we expect to, but we found them. And now we get to see how sorry we end up that we did.”

“I thank you.” Hamnet bowed in the saddle. “Whenever I think things are bad, you always remind me they’re really worse.”