Harry Turtledove - The Golden Shrine

Ulric raised a quizzical eyebrow. “At least you know you messed up. Most people never figure that out.”

“But how do I keep from making the same mistakes over and over?” Hamnet asked.

Ulric looked at him. “If I knew the answer to that, don’t you think I’d do it myself? If you find out, let me know.”

Count Hamnet must not have offended Trasamund too badly. The jarl shouted the rest of the Bizogots into moving toward Sudertorp Lake. On they went, driving their herds before them. They crashed into what had been the grazing grounds of several tribes, but no one complained.

“Can you imagine the wars we would have started if we tried this journey before the Rulers came?” Trasamund asked, and he let out a gusty sigh.

“You don’t need to sound so disappointed,” Ulric Skakki said.

“Scoff all you please,” the jarl said. “The glory of the Bizogot folk is shattered forever.”

“Not if we can beat the Rulers,” Hamnet said. “Then you can get back a lot of what you lost. . . . Well, some it it, anyhow.”

“Some, maybe. But so many clans have broken up. So many fine grazing grounds are up for grabs now. The steppe will never be the same.” Trasamund sighed again. “Nothing can ever be the same. When the world crashes down, you don’t lift it up onto your shoulders again.”

Hamnet winced. His own world had crashed down twice, first when Gudrid left him for whomever she pleased, then when Liv chose Audun Gilli instead of him. His body was seamed with scars from swordstrokes and arrows that had got home. Scars seamed his soul, too. None of the wounds his body bore disabled him. He wasn’t so sure about the ones inside.

Dire wolves began tracking the musk oxen with the Bizogots. The big wolves knew enough to stay out of bowshot. That meant they weren’t desperately hungry; if they had been, they would have gone for the kill and worried about everything else later. Sometimes there wasn’t much difference between a wolf and a man.

The dire wolves’ scent was enough to spook the musk oxen. They formed a defensive circle on the plain, the bulls and big cows facing out and protecting the smaller females and calves with their horns. As long as they stayed in the circle, the Bizogots who herded them couldn’t go anywhere, either. That meant the whole band of Bizogots either had to halt or to split and leave the herdsmen behind with the balky beasts.

Trasamund solved that with direct action, the way a Bizogot jarl might be expected to solve a problem. At his bawled commands, some of the Bizogots attacked the dire wolves. Hungrier wolves might have gone after the horsemen who galloped down on them. This pack turned and ran. Only a couple of them got shot, and one of those didn’t seem badly wounded. It certainly ran off at a good clip.

The other dire wolf made more more than a few paces before it went down. Blood ran from its mouth. The arrow had pierced a lung, and maybe its heart as well. It writhed and twisted and quickly died.

“Are they going to leave the carcass there?” Marcovefa sounded shocked.

“They’ll skin it, I suppose,” Hamnet answered. Sure enough, a Bizogot bent down to do just that.

“What about the meat?”

“We have enough,” he said. “The only time we eat dire wolf is when we’re very hungry and can’t get anything better. And some of the Bizogots here are from the Red Dire Wolf clan. They may not eat of their own fetish animal.”

“That, at least, I understand,” said the shaman from atop the Glacier. “The other . . .” She shook her head. “You have so much down here. You can afford to waste things. We ate little foxes when we could catch them. You can just leave these big foxes out to rot. So strange.”

“If you had herds of mammoths and musk oxen, or herds of riding deer like the Rulers, would you still eat fox meat?” Count Hamnet asked.

“I don’t know. I hope so,” Marcovefa answered.

With the wolves driven off, the Bizogots shouted and waved and got the musk oxen moving again. It took longer than Trasamund wished it would have. “Miserable, stubborn creatures,” the jarl grumbled.

“And they’re different from Bizogots because . . . ?” Ulric Skakki asked politely. Trasamund rewarded him with a glare.

“Their heads are harder,” Count Hamnet suggested.

“Are you sure?” Ulric didn’t sound as if he believed it.

“Funny men. Funny as a funeral,” Trasamund said. “Keep joking, funny men, and maybe it will be your funeral.”

“If the Rulers haven’t killed me yet, I’m not going to lose any sleep about you.” Ulric blew him a kiss.

Trasamund set a hand on the hilt of his sword. “Maybe you should.”

“Maybe I should do lots of things I’m not very likely to do,” Ulric replied with a yawn.

“Maybe one of them is know when to keep your mouth shut,” Hamnet suggested.

The adventurer looked comically astonished. “There are such times?” Count Hamnet gave up.

They rode on. Every so often, a small band of Bizogots would join them. Hardly ever did one man come in alone, as might have happened in the Empire. Up here, winters were so hard and long that one man was unlikely to survive them on his own, as he might have in Raumsdalia. The Bizogots had to cooperate to live.

But the land was too niggardly to support anything more than clans. The only way Hamnet Thyssen saw for the mammoth-herders to go from folk to nation was by conquering richer country farther south-by invading the Raumsdalian Empire, in other words. In days gone by, he’d brooded about such things. Now he needed to brood about a folk that had invaded the Empire, not about one that might.

When the Bizogots came to Sudertorp Lake, they came to its western edge, where a natural dam of rock and permanently frozen earth contained the waters that had flowed into its basin as the Glacier retreated across the Bizogot steppe. “All this water!” Marcovefa exclaimed. “Not frozen water!”

“Not now, no,” Hamnet agreed. “It freezes every winter, though.” Winter before last, he’d ridden across the ice covering Sudertorp Lake. He’d almost died, too, when the Rulers’ magic split the ice and nearly spilled his comrades and him into the freezing waters below.

“And this is supposed to be a great thing?” Marcovefa laughed at him. “Where I come from, the Glacier never thaws.”

“Really. I didn’t notice when I was there.” Count Hamnet didn’t do light sarcasm as well as Ulric Skakki, but he did manage to squeeze a chuckle from the shaman from atop the Glacier.

Swifts and swallows skimmed low above the water, snatching insects out of the air. Ducks and geese and swans and coots and grebes and loons nested amidst the reeds and rushes. Tall herons stabbed fish out of the water with swordlike beaks.

Hamnet wondered what the fish ate during the winter. One another, probably. He imagined Sudertorp Lake holding one very large, very ferocious fish at the start of each new spring. Obviously, the picture was impossible. That didn’t stop it from forming.

A lion drinking at the edge of the lake looked up when it heard or smelled or saw the Bizogots bearing down on it. Its snarl showed formidable fangs-not fangs to match those of the sabertooths farther south, but formidable all the same. When the snarl didn’t intimidate the Bizogots, the lion trotted away, dark-tufted tail tip held proud and high.

On the other side of the Glacier, big hunting cats had stripes instead of a mane. The Rulers called them tigers. Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether any of them had come down through the Gap. Just our luck if they have, he thought. But the Rulers were worse predators than tigers or lions or dire wolves or bears.

“I’m surprised we don’t see more ea gles up here, getting fat off all the waterbirds,” Ulric Skakki remarked.