Harry Turtledove - Breath of God

“Well, he doesn’t smoke a pipe with them or anything like that, but he goes out wandering when he wears wolf shape,” Audun Gilli answered. “He must meet real dire wolves when he does, and they haven’t eaten his scrawny old carcass yet.”

“That’s what I’m driving at,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you suppose he could go out as a dire wolf and rally the real ones against the Rulers?”

Audun started to shake his head, but then caught himself. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might be worth a try. The Rulers wouldn’t like packs harrying their riding deer, would they? Harrying them, too, come to that, if Odovacar can bring it off. And if he goes out in a wolfskin and doesn’t come back, the Red Dire Wolves might be better off.”

“Are you sure you ‘re not wearing Ulric Skakki’s skin?” Hamnet asked; the adventurer was more likely to come out with something that cynically frank.

Audun pulled off a mitten and lifted his cuff. “Nothing up my sleeve but me,” he said, and thought for a little while. “You know, Your Grace, that could work. The Rulers wouldn’t like dire wolves worrying at their animals – or at them.”

“Who would?” Count Hamnet said. “The other nice thing about this is, they may have a harder time returning the favor.”

“Why?” Audun Gilli frowned. Then his face cleared. “Oh, I see what you mean. No dire wolves on the far side of the Glacier, just those smaller, skinnier beasts.”

“That’s what I meant,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Maybe the dire wolves would be friendly to a wizard in the hide of one of those other wolves. But maybe they’d have him for supper instead. That’s how I’d bet.”

“Well, we’ll see what Odovacar thinks.” Audun frowned again. “For that matter, we’ll see if Odovacar thinks.”

Like every other Bizogot shaman Count Hamnet had seen, Odovacar wore a ceremonial costume full of fringes and tufts. His were all made from the hides and furs of dire wolves. Some were dyed red with berry juice, others left their natural brown and gray and cream. Even old and bent and thin, he was a big man; he must have been enormous, and enormously strong, when in his prime.

Getting anything across to him wasn’t easy, for he’d grown almost deaf as he aged. He used a hearing trumpet made from a musk-ox horn, but it didn’t help much. Audun Gilli, with his problems with the Bizogot language, didn’t try to talk to the shaman – he left that to Hamnet and to Liv.

She bawled into the hearing trumpet while Hamnet Thyssen shouted into Odovacar’s other ear. The racket they made surely disturbed some of the other Red Dire Wolf Bizogots, but it bothered Odovacar very little because he heard very little of it.

“A wolf? Yes, of course I can shape myself into a wolf,” he said. Many old men’s teeth were worn down almost flat against their gums. Not his – they were still long and sharp and white, suggesting his ties to the Red Dire Wolves’ fetish animal.

Getting him to understand what to do after he went into dire wolf’s shape took the best – or maybe the worst – part of an afternoon. It wasn’t that Odovacar was stupid. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t think it was, anyhow. But he heard so little that getting anything across to him was an ordeal.

With Audun Gilli or another Raumsdalian wizard, Count Hamnet could have written down what he wanted. Nothing was wrong with Odovacar’s eyes, but writing didn’t help him, for the Bizogots had no written language. Hamnet and Liv had to keep shouting over and over again till, one word at a time, one thought at a time, they tunneled through the wall deafness built between Odovacar and the folk around him.

“Ah,” he said at last, his own voice too loud because he wanted to have some chance of hearing himself. “You want me to lead the dire wolves against the invaders from the north.”

“Yes.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped it was yes. Or did Odovacar think he and Liv meant they wanted him to take command of the Red Dire Wolves’ human warriors? By then, nothing would have surprised Hamnet overmuch.

But Odovacar had it right. “I can do it,” he said in that loud, cracked, quavering old man’s voice. He began to sway back and forth, chanting a song that sounded as if it was in the Bizogot language but that Hamnet couldn’t follow. Liv’s nod said she could.

He slowly rose and started to dance, there inside his tent. At first, the dance seemed little more than swaying back and forth while on his feet, more or less in rhythm to the song he chanted. But it got more vigorous as the song went on. The chant grew more vigorous, too. Hamnet still couldn’t understand it, but growls and snarls began replacing some of the sounds that seemed like Bizogot words. The tune, though, stayed the same.

Odovacar’s fringes shook. His long white beard whipped back and forth. In the lamplight, his eyes blazed yellow.

Yellow? Hamnet Thyssen rubbed at his own eyes. Like almost all Bizogots, Odovacar had ice-blue eyes. But was this still Odovacar the man? Hamnet shook his head. No, not wholly, not any more.

Liv was nodding in understanding and, Hamnet thought, in admiration as she watched the change sweep over the other shaman. She was used to seeing such things. She’d probably shifted shape herself, though Count Hamnet didn’t think she’d done it since he’d known her. She might take it for granted, but it raised the Raumsdalians hackles.

Odovacar dropped down onto all fours. His wolfskin jacket and trousers and his own beard all seemed to turn into pelt. His teeth, already long and white, grew whiter and much longer while his tongue lolled from his mouth. His nose lengthened into a snout. His ears grew pointed and stood away from his head. He wore a wolf’s tail attached to the seat of his trousers. As the spell took hold, it was still a wolf’s tail – it was his tail, attached to him as any beast s tail was attached to it. As if to prove as much, it lashed back and forth.

“Can you hear me?” Hamnet Thyssen asked in a small voice. Odovacar the dire wolf was doubtless still old, but seemed much less decrepit than Odovacar the man. And he swung his fierce head towards Hamnet and nodded somewhat as a dog might nod, but also somewhat as a man might. Shapeshifters kept some of their human intelligence in beast form. How much? Hamnet wasn’t sure even they could answer that question once they returned to human shape.

“You know what you are to do?” Liv sounded far more respectful of the shaman as a dire wolf than she had of him as a man.

Odovacar nodded again. A sound that wasn’t a word but was agreement burst from his throat. Hamnet Thyssen had heard an owl that was also a wizard use human speech, but that was under the influence of the magic Liv used to capture it, not through the spell the wizard used to transform himself.

“Good,” Liv said. “Go, then, and God go with you.”

One more nod from Odovacar, who bounded out through the south-facing tent flap. He made another sound once he was out in the open air, a canine cry of joy pure and unalloyed. To a dire wolf’s senses, the inside of the tent had to be cramped and smelly. Unlike people, wolves weren’t made to be confined in such places. Hamnet Thyssen stuck his head out into the cold. Odovacar trotted purposefully off to the west, wagging his tail as he went. Yes, he was glad to get away.

“He seems happier as a dire wolf,” Hamnet said.

“I suppose he is,” Liv answered. “But he will die sooner if he keeps that hide and not the one he was born with. He knows that. Even as a wolf, he knows it. He will do what needs doing – what he can recall of it in beast shape. And we will see how much good it does us.”

“Quite a bit, I hope.” Hamnet Thyssen stuck his head out into the cold again. Like Odovacar, he was sometimes glad to get free of the Bizogot tents himself. Living through the long northern winters in the enforced close company of the mammoth-herders wasn’t easy for a man of his basically solitary temperament. If he weren’t in love with Liv, he wondered if he could have done it.