Harry Turtledove - The Golden Shrine

Spring on the Bizogot steppe came late, and grudgingly. The Breath of God blew down from the Glacier and over the frozen plain long after southern breezes began melting snow and bringing green back to the Raumsdalian Empire. At last, though, as the sun stayed longer in the sky day by day, the weather north of the tree line began to change, too.

Even down in the Empire, Count Hamnet Thyssen reckoned spring a minor miracle. Up on the Bizogot steppe, the miracle seemed not so minor; spring was harder won here. All the same, Hamnet had a bigger miracle to celebrate on this bright, mild, blue-skied, sunny day. He and his friends had lived through the winter.

“And I tell you,” he remarked to Ulric Skakki, “I wouldn’t have given a counterfeit copper for our chances when we set out last fall.”

“Why not, Your Grace?” With his auburn hair and foxy features, Ulric could don the mask of innocence more readily than Count Hamnet, who was large and dark and somewhere between stolid and dour. “Just because it was a toss-up whether our side wanted us dead more than the enemy did?”

“That will do for a start,” Hamnet answered, which made Ulric laugh as merrily as if he were joking.

“What do you say?” Marcovefa asked. The shaman from the cannibal tribe that lived atop the Glacier looked like a Bizogot: she was large and blond and robust. The language her folk used sprang from the Bizogot speech, but from a strange, distant dialect. And her people had been isolated for centuries from the clans who roamed the steppe. She was learning their speech as she was learning Raumsdalian-learning them both as foreign tongues.

Hamnet Thyssen explained in slow, simple words, partly in Raumsdalian and partly in the Bizogot language. He wished the Empire were doing more to fight the Rulers, the mammoth-riding invaders who’d swarmed through the Gap after the Glacier melted in two. The stocky, swarthy, curly-bearded invaders made ferocious fighting men and even more fearsome wizards.

Everyone thought so except Marcovefa. Her own powers equaled or exceeded those of the Rulers’ sorcerers. Hamnet often wondered why that should be so. His best guess was that the scattered folk who dwelt up on the Glacier did without so many material things. They had no crops. They knew nothing of wood. They knew no animals larger than foxes. They couldn’t work metal-even stone was sometimes hard for them to come by.

No wonder, then, that their magical skills were strong. They had to have something going for them up there in the perpetual cold and the perpetually thin air. Thus wizardry flourished alongside desperate poverty. So it seemed to him, anyhow. Marcovefa didn’t think of herself or the folk among whom she’d grown up as poor. But then, she’d had no standard of comparison till she came down to the Bizogot steppe with Hamnet and his comrades the summer before.

She laughed at his worries now. “It will be as it is, that’s all,” she said. “All we can do is try to make it turn out the way we want it to.”

“Well, yes,” Hamnet said. “I don’t think of that as all .”

Marcovefa laughed again, louder this time. “But it is. Soon enough, nothing will matter any more, because we will be dead.”

She made Ulric Skakki laugh, too, on a different note. “Later, I hope-not sooner,” he said. “I don’t plan on dying for quite a while yet.”

“No, eh?” Hamnet said. “Why did you come up to the steppe again, in that case?”

“Maybe I’m a fool,” Ulric said. He was a great many things: scout, raider, thief, assassin. Hamnet Thyssen had never made the mistake of reckoning him a fool. Other mistakes, certainly. That one? No-he wasn’t such a big fool, or that particular kind of fool, himself. Then Ulric aimed a wry smile at him. “Or maybe you have such pretty eyes, I couldn’t resist.”

Count Hamnet snorted. He took his pleasure-and, too often, his pain-from women. So did Ulric Skakki. Hamnet had never thought pretending otherwise was funny. Ulric did.

“What are you going on about?” Trasamund rumbled. He was the very image of a Bizogot jarl, a clan chief. He was a big man, bigger than Hamnet. He had a hero’s muscles, a hero’s appetite for strong drink and willing women, a hero’s courage. Strong sun and chill winds had carved harsh lines that gave dignity to his bluffly handsome features.

He was, these days, a jarl almost without a clan. The Three Tusk Bizogots lived close by the Glacier. Trasamund was one of the first men through it, one of the first to begin exploring lands cut off by ice for thousands of years.

And the Rulers had fallen on his clan first when they swarmed into the lands on this side of the Glacier. Trasamund had been down in the Empire then. The only thing he could have done had he been among his clansmen was die with them. He knew that, but blamed himself anyhow.

“I was just telling Count Hamnet how beautiful he was, and he was getting all embarrassed about it,” Ulric said archly.

“If I didn’t know the two of you . . .” Trasamund let his voice trail away. Hamnet knew what he wasn’t saying. The Bizogots scorned men who lay with other men, which was putting it mildly. Trasamund didn’t know what to make of men who lay with women but affected not to. No Bizogot seemed to have thought of that particular vice before. Hamnet sent Ulric a not particularly warm glance. He didn’t want Trasamund thinking of him like that.

Grinning, Ulric blew him a kiss. So much for the not very warm glance. “If you were half as funny as you think you are, you’d be twice as funny as you really are,” Hamnet said.

“And I’d still be funnier than you,” Ulric said. Hamnet shook his head like a man bedev iled by bees. He was unlikely to need to worry about bees this far north. Soon enough, though, midges and flies and mosquitoes would spring to life in every pond and rill and puddle left by melting snow and ice. Everything on the Bizogot steppe burst with life in the springtime-including the pests. Ulric Skakki seemed to be trying his best to get himself included in their number.

More Bizogots rode up from the southwest to take over the watch. Hamnet Thyssen was glad enough to head back to camp. He made a point of talking with Marcovefa and Trasamund, and of ignoring Ulric. The adventurer noticed. He laughed at Hamnet, who ignored him harder than ever. Ulric Skakki kept right on laughing. Hamnet kept right on fuming.

“If you let him bother you, he wins, you know,” Marcovefa said.

“I suppose,” Hamnet answered. “But if I don’t let him bother me, that says I shouldn’t have been bothered to begin with, and he wins anyhow. So what am I supposed to do?”

“You could kill him.” Marcovefa wasn’t joking. The Bizogots brawled at any excuse or none. Her own clan, like the others scattered over the top of the Glacier, had grown more ruthless than the folk from whom they were descended. They’d had to; life up there gave them even less margin for error than the ordinary Bizogots had. To Marcovefa, the frozen steppe was a land of riches and abundance. If that didn’t say how desperately impoverished her folk were, nothing could.

All the same, Hamnet shook his head. “We need him. And-” He broke off, one word too late.

“And what?” Marcovefa asked. Of course she noticed. She wasn’t just a shaman. She was an uncommonly observant woman.

Hamnet’s cheeks heated. When he answered, he spoke in a low voice, because he didn’t want Ulric to hear. But, however reluctantly, he spoke the truth: “And he’d be more likely to kill me, curse it.” He was a formidable warrior. He was sure he could beat Trasamund, even if the Bizogot was bigger and stronger than he was-Trasamund had more courage than he knew what to do with, but less technique than he needed. Ulric Skakki was no braver than he had to be, but he coupled a wildcat’s speed and grace with more skill in fighting with weapons or without them than anyone else Hamnet had ever known.