Harry Turtledove - Breath of God

“It’s out!” Ulric said. Not much flesh clung to the barbs on the point; the drawing spoon really had shielded the wound from most of the damage it would have taken otherwise.

“Thank you,” the wounded Bizogot said. “Easier to bear now that that cursed thing isn’t sticking into me anymore.”

“That’s what she said,” Ulric answered, which made the wounded man laugh.

“Let me see that spoon,” Totila said. “Could we make it from bone or horn?”

“I don’t see why not. Here, keep this one if you want to.” Ulric cleaned it in snow and slush before handing it to the Bizogot. Totila studied it and nodded thoughtfully.

Count Hamnet, meanwhile, bandaged the wounded man’s leg. Down in the Empire, bandages would have been made of linen. Here, the Bizogots used musk-ox wool and dried moss to close wounds and soak up blood. If anything, those worked better than their Raumsdalian equivalents.

“I thank you,” the wounded man said. “Do you think it will heal clean?”

“That’s in God’s hands, not mine,” Hamnet answered. “But I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.”

“Those strangers really do fight from mammothback,” the Bizogot said in wondering tones. “Who would have believed it?”

“We’ve been telling you about it all winter,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out with more than a touch of asperity.

“And so?” The wounded nomad seemed glad to have something to talk about besides the darkening bandage on his leg. “I can tell you about a sky-blue mammoth with pink horns that honks like a goose, but will you expect to see one if I do?”

“It depends,” Count Hamnet said judiciously. “If I know you’re a reliable man, I might. Why would we lie to you? By God, why would what’s left of the Three Tusk clan lie to you? They fought the Rulers. They saw them using war mammoths.”

To his surprise, the man from the Red Dire Wolves had an answer for him: “We all thought you were making them out to be worse than they really are so we’d join you and do what you wanted. We thought it was nothing but a trick to scare us, to make us fall in line behind you. We’re Bizogots. We’re free men. We didn’t aim to do that.”

“And so you had to get crushed before you decided we might know what we were talking about after all?” That sounded like something a Bizogot would do. Hamnet Thyssen counted himself to be lucky in a country where the closest walls – those of the stone houses the Leaping Lynx clan’s summer homes by Sudertorp Lake – were many miles away. Otherwise, he would have been sorely tempted to pound his head against one.

The wounded man nodded. “Sure. Except we didn’t expect to get crushed. We thought we’d do the crushing.”

After rubbing snow on his hands to get the blood off them, Hamnet Thyssen walked away. He put on his mittens to warm himself up again. Ulric Skakki came after him. “This is what we came north for?” Ulric said.

“This is what we came north for,” Hamnet answered stolidly. “The Bizogots are fools, but at least they’re fighting fools. Down in Nidaros, Sigvat II is a blind fool. If you ask me, that’s worse.”

“Well, maybe,” Ulric Skakki said. “But where are we going to find some people who aren’t fools? That’s what we really need.”

“We really need to beat the Rulers. Fighting fools can do that – may be able to do that, anyhow,” Hamnet said. “Blind fools won’t.”

They were both using Raumsdalian again; it let them speak their minds without worrying that the Bizogots would overhear and get angry. Ulric Skakki rolled his eyes. “All the Bizogots in the world couldn’t stop the army that beat us today. God knows the Bizogots are brave. But God knows they’re stupid, too. And the more I see of the Rulers, the more I see that they aren’t. They’re cruel bastards, but they aren’t dumb bastards.”

“And that sorcery .. .” Count Hamnet let the words hang in the air.

“That was pretty bad,” Ulric agreed. “Some of those flying icicles almost skewered me. And some of them did skewer Bizogots – or else distracted them so the Rulers had an easy time killing them.”

“Do you suppose our best wizards could have stopped the spell?” Ham-net asked.

“I don’t know,” the adventurer said. “One day before too long, chances are we’ll find out.”

“God help the Empire if its wizards don’t have better luck than the Bizogot shamans up here,” Hamnet said.

“God help the Empire. That’ll do,” Ulric Skakki said. “Somebody’d better, and it’s not as if Sigvat’s up to the job.”

“God should help the Bizogots, too – and if he doesn’t, we should lend a hand,” Count Hamnet said. “Do you know whether Totila and Trasamund aim to send messengers to the other clans and tell them what’s happened to the Red Dire Wolves?”

“I know they haven’t done it yet. I know I haven’t heard them talk about doing it,” Ulric answered. “Whether the thought has trickled through their beady little minds .. . that I can’t tell you.”

“Beady little minds,” Hamnet echoed sourly. The phrase fit much too well. “All right, then. We’d better make sure they do think of it. And we’d better make sure they don’t just think of it, too. We’d better make sure they do it.”

“You don’t have much faith in them, do you?” Ulric said.

Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”

Spring. Down inthe Empire, it was a time of renewal, return, rebirth. In the Bizogot country it was all of that and more, jammed into a few frantic weeks. When the snow up on the northern plains melted, everything turned to mud and marshes and ponds. Getting from here to there became a challenge. Getting from here to there in a hurry became a joke.

Bare mud and shallow water didn’t last long. (There was no deep water on the frozen steppe, which stayed frozen a few feet down regardless of the season.) Plants came to mad life, coating the ground with green and bursting into bloom. And in the marshes and puddles, the eggs mosquitoes and flies and midges had laid the year before thawed out and hatched and gave birth to a new generation of buzzing biters.

Hamnet Thyssen squelched and slapped and swore. The air was thick not only with bugs but also with the birds that battened on them. The birds grew fat and nested and laid eggs so their succeeding generation could feast off bugs yet unborn. But far too many bugs remained uneaten.

“Can’t you do anything about it?” Hamnet asked Liv, not for the first time.

“Bear grease on your face and hands helps some,” she answered. She was bitten, too. So were all the Bizogots. So were their dogs and musk oxen and mammoths, all of which shed their winter coats just in time to give the mosquitoes tempting targets.

“You should have a magic to keep the bugs away,” he said.

She looked at him. “You Raumsdalians like to think you’re stronger than the world around you. Up here, shamans know better. God lets us live on the plains … as long as we don’t push our luck too hard. How could one shaman hold off all the bugs that spawn every spring?”

Put that way, it was a different kind of question. Count Hamnet said, “Can’t you hold off some of the bugs?”

That only made Liv smile. “What if we did? Don’t you think the rest would be plenty to drive men and beasts wild?”

“Umm . . . Probably.” Hamnet Thyssen managed a smile of his own, a crooked one. “You’re telling me to give up and leave this alone, aren’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes – except for the bear grease,” Liv said. “That helps – as much as anything, anyhow.” With a sigh, Hamnet smeared some on. Maybe it helped a little. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t.