Harry Turtledove - Breath of God

With a shout of triumph, the jarl straddled the beast’s broad back. “I’m here!” he roared. “I really am up here! Look at me!” He let out a loud, wordless whoop almost as discordant as the mammoth’s trumpeting.

“By God, I don’t think I got that excited the first time I went into a woman,” Ulric said. “Of course, if you’d seen the woman I did it with the first time, you wouldn’t have got very excited, either.”

Hamnet Thyssen had a hard time not laughing. “What did she think of you?”

“She thought I’d paid her, and she was right.” Ulric raised his voice to a shout. “Now that you’re up there, Your Ferocity, how do you make the mammoth go?”

“You think I haven’t got an answer,” Trasamund yelled back. “Shows what you know.” He pulled a stick from his belt. “The Rulers use a goad to make the beasts obey, and I can do the same.” He thwacked the mammoth’s right side. “Get moving!”

“The Rulers probably start training their mammoths when they’re calves,” Hamnet said. “The animals know what the signals are supposed to mean. This mammoth’s never run into them before. What will it do?”

“You can see that, and I can see that, but do you really expect a Bizogot to see that?” Ulric Skakki answered. “Well, the beast’s hair is thick. Maybe it won’t think he’s hitting it hard enough to be really annoying. He’d better hope it doesn’t, because otherwise the last thing he’ll ever say is ‘Oops!’“

After Trasamund belabored the mammoth for a bit, it did start to walk. He whooped again – too soon. The mammoth was going where it wanted to go, not where he wanted it to go. And it was going there faster and faster, too, first at a trot, then at what had to be a bone-shaking gallop. Trasamund had no saddle and no reins. All he could do was hang on to handfuls of mammoth hair for dear life – and he did.

Ulric and Hamnet mounted their horses and rode after the mammoth. They made sure not to come too close. Spooking it might mean killing Trasamund. It might also mean getting killed themselves. Discretion seemed the better choice.

Even now, the woolly mammoth didn’t try to pull the obstreperous human off its back. It was a good-natured beast; the Red Dire Wolves had chosen well. And Trasamund, to Hamnet Thyssens surprise, had the sense not to be too obstreperous. After goading the mammoth into running, he let it go till it wore itself out, without trying to urge it on any more. When it finally stopped, breath smoking and great shaggy flanks heaving, Trasamund slid down and off over its tail, nimble as one of the monkeys that sometimes came up in trade from lands in the distant south.

Monkeys never lasted long in Nidaros; when the weather turned cold, chest fever carried them away. Hamnet hadn’t thought Trasamund would last long on the mammoths back, either. He was glad to find himself wrong. The Bizogot trotted away from his enormous mount before it could decide to turn on him for revenge.

“Bravely done – you idiot,” Ulric Skakki said.

“Call me whatever you please. I don’t care.” Trasamund’s grin was as wide and foolish and wondering as if he were just coming away from his first woman. “But you can’t call me an oathbreaker, by God. I swore I would do this, and I cursed well did. And I’ll do it again, too.”

“I have a question for you,” Count Hamnet said.

“What was it like?” Trasamund said. “I’ll tell you what it was like. It – ”

But Hamnet shook his head. “No, that wasn’t what I wanted to ask.”

Trasamund glowered at him; it was what the Bizogot jarl wanted to talk about. Pretending not to notice, Hamnet Thyssen went on, “You might have done better – smoother – if you’d asked one of our captives from the Rulers how they ride their mammoths. Why didn’t you? That’s what I want to know.”

Trasamund went from scowling to flabbergasted in the blink of an eye. “I never thought of it. I wanted to find out for myself.”

“Is that a Bizogot, or is that a Bizogot?” Ulric Skakki said, not loud enough for Trasamund to hear. Hamnet Thyssen nodded.

“Do you think the captives would give good advice or bad?” Trasamund asked. “They might want to see anyone from this side of the Glacier who gets on a mammoth die. If we have mammoth-riders, too, that gives us a better chance against their brethren.”

“If we were talking about Bizogots or Raumsdalians, I’d say you were right,” Hamnet answered. “But if the Rulers get captured, they’re disgraced. They’re cast out from their own folk. They can never go back – the sin, or whatever they think it is, clings to them.”

“That’s why a lot of them try to kill themselves,” Ulric added.

“It is,” Hamnet agreed. “But it’s also why I think you can rely on what they tell you. In their eyes, they aren’t of the Rulers anymore, because they know their own folk don’t want them back and won’t take them back. If they’re going to live any kind of life at all, they have to do it with us.”

“They’re queer birds, all right,” Trasamund said. “Well, maybe I will talk to them, then. If I like what they say, I’ll try it. And if I think they are lying to me, they’ll die, but not so fast as they’d want to.”

The cow mammoth lifted her trunk, bugled once more, and strode off with an air of affronted dignity. You got away with that, but if you think I’m happy about it you’d better think again – every line of her body told how she felt. She might have been a frumpy matron down in Nidaros offended because her soup was cold.

“I’m just glad the Rulers have held off from hitting us as long as they have,” Ulric Skakki said. “If they’d come after the Red Dire Wolves right after they hit the Three Tusk Bizogots, I don’t know how we could have stopped them.”

“My guess is, my brave clan hurt them badly even in defeat,” Trasamund said. “They haven’t pressed farther south because they can’t.”

“It could be.” Hamnet Thyssen doubted it was, but he was willing to let the Three Tusk jarl keep as much pride as he could. “But it could also be that they’re building strength up there, bringing men and mammoths and riding deer down through the Gap and getting ready for a big campaign.” If he were a chieftain of the Rulers, that was what he would have done.

“Makes sense to me,” Ulric said. “I wish we’d had more luck getting the Bizogots to fight as one army and not by clans. If they’re not careful, they’ll all go down separately, one clan at a time.”

“Getting Bizogots to do anything together with other Bizogots is like herding mosquitoes,” Trasamund said. “They fly where they want, they bite where they want, and if they feel like biting the herder, they do that, too.”

“And the swifts and the swallows swoop down and eat them as they please,” Hamnet said. Trasamund sent him a sour stare, but couldn’t very well claim he was wrong. “We need more spies up at the edge of the country the Rulers hold,” Hamnet went on. “I wish Odovacar’s wolves could tell us more, because it’s hard to get men up there without letting the Rulers know.”

“Maybe magic would serve where spies can’t,” Ulric said.

“It had better, by God,” Trasamund said. “Liv and Audun Gilli have been going on for a while now about how their toenails itch, and that means the Rulers have a hangover. Let’s see what they can do when they set their minds to it, and when old Odovacar tosses in whatever he can.”

“If the Rulers’ wizards catch them spying, it may do us more harm than good,” Hamnet Thyssen said. Did he fear what the Rulers’ wizards might do to Liv if they caught her working magic against them? He knew he did.