Harry Turtledove - Breath of God

By the glint in Ulric Skakki’s eye, he knew the same thing. “A goldpiece is no good if it sits in your belt pouch. You’ve got to spend it,” he said. “A soldier is no good if he sits in a tavern pinching the barmaids. He’s got to go out into the field and fight. A wizard’s not worth much if he can’t work magic.”

“That’s all true, every word of it,” Trasamund said. “Let’s see what our shamans can do.”

Count Hamnet wanted to hate both of them. They aimed to send his beloved into danger. But he found he couldn’t, for he knew they were right. And he knew Liv would say the same thing when anyone got around to putting the question to her. And so he nodded heavily, and hated himself instead.

Audun Gilli looked worried, which would have alarmed Hamnet Thyssen more if Audun didn’t look worried so much of the time. Liv looked serious, which again was nothing out of the ordinary. Odovacar looked like a man who wanted a skin of smetyn. But, as far as Hamnet could tell, the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman was sober.

Deciding what the three of them wanted to do hadn’t been easy. Audun Gilli still knew much less of the Bizogot language than Hamnet wished he did. Liv’s temper frayed with translating for him and for Odovacar. And the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman’s deafness meant she had to shout the same thing over and over, which did nothing to make her any happier.

After a lot of shouting – not all of it having to do with Odovacar’s bad ears, by any means – the three sorcerers decided to send a spirit animal to what had been the Three Tusk Bizogots’ lands to see what the Rulers were doing there. Liv’s spirit would make the spearhead of the magic; Audun Gilli and Odovacar would lend her strength and help ward her against anything the invaders tried.

“What can go wrong?” Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv the night before they tried the spell.

She shrugged. “All kinds of things. Shamanry is not a certain business, especially when the enemy’s shamans fight against what you do.”

That much the Raumsdalian noble knew for himself. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked.

“Maybe they can kill me,” Liv answered. “Maybe they can kill my spirit and leave my body alive without it. Which is worse, do you think?” She sounded as if it were an interesting abstract question, one with nothing to do with the rest of her life – however long that turned out to be.

“Should you go on with this, then?” Yes, Hamnet feared for her.

“Warriors go into battle knowing they may not see the sun rise again,” Liv said. “You have done this yourself. You know it is so. We need to find out what the Rulers are doing. I’m best suited to look out over the lands that were my clan’s – that are my clan’s, by God – and see what the Rulers are doing there. It will be all right, Hamnet. Or if it isn’t, it will be the way it is.”

It will be the way it is. The hard life the Bizogots led made them into fatalists. Most of the time, Hamnet Thyssen admired that. Now it terrified him. “I don’t want to lose you!” he exclaimed.

“I don’t want to lose you, either,” Liv said. “You asked for the worst, and I told you. I do not think it will come to that. We are working on our home ground, with spells we know. I may not learn everything I want to, but I should be able to get away again afterward. Does that make you feel better?” She sounded like a mother comforting a little boy who’d had a nightmare.

The way they chose to comfort each other a little later had nothing to do with little boys, though there was some small chance it might have made Liv the mother of one. Afterward, if the old jokes were true, Count Hamnet should have rolled over and gone to sleep. He didn’t. He lay awake a long time, staring up at the darkness inside the mammoth-hide tent. Liv was the one who slipped quickly into slumber. He supposed that was all to the good; she would need to be fresh when morning came.

At last, he did sleep. He wished he hadn’t – his dreams were confused and troubled. He hoped that didn’t mean anything. He was no wizard, no foreteller. All the same, he wished they were better.

Liv broke her fast on meat and marrow. Through the winter, the Bizogots ate little else. She showed a good appetite. Hamnet Thyssen had to force his food down. “It will be all right,” she said again.

“Of course it will,” he answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying.

The weather should have cheered him. It was bright and sunny, and not far below freezing – after what they’d been through, it felt like spring. The equinox couldn’t be far away; the sun spent more time above the horizon every day. But even after winter formally died, the Breath of God would go on blowing for another month, maybe even six weeks. Only then would the snow melt, the land turn to puddles, mosquitoes and midges start breeding in mad and maddening profusion, and the landscape go from white to flower-splashed green.

Breathing didn’t feel as if Hamnet were inhaling knives. Getting out of the stuffy, smelly tent was a relief to the nose, too. If any air was fresher and cleaner than that which came down off the Glacier, the Raumsdalian couldn’t imagine what it might be.

He looked north. There stood the Glacier, tall as any other formidable mountains. He wished the Gap had never melted through. Then the Rulers would still be walled off from the Bizogot country – and from the Raumsdalian Empire to the south.

But if the Gap hadn’t melted through, Trasamund wouldn’t have come south to Nidaros looking for help exploring the land beyond the Glacier. Hamnet wouldn’t have come north with him, which meant he wouldn’t have met Liv.

He started to ask her if she thought the opening of the Gap was worth it to her, if their meeting made everything else worthwhile. He started to, yes, but he wasn’t fool enough to finish the question. Of course she would say no, and she would have good reason to. Because the Gap had melted through, the Rulers had crushed her clan. Her kinsfolk and friends, the folk she’d known all her life, were dead or exiled or living under the heel of the invaders.

No, she wouldn’t think that was worth it. She might have found love among her fellow Bizogots. Even if she hadn’t, they would still roam their grazing grounds as free men and women. Nothing right now meant more to Hamnet Thyssen than she did. As a Raumsdalian, he naturally thought nothing should mean more to her than he did. But Raumsdalians were, and could afford to be, more individualistic than Bizogots. To Liv, the clan mattered far more than the Empire did to Hamnet – and he was, by the standards of his folk, a duty-filled man.

Here came Audun Gilli, a somber look on his thin, scraggly-bearded face. And here came Odovacar, in his tufted and fringed shaman’s costume. He carried a drum – a frame made of mammoth bone, with a musk-ox-hide drumhead. Tufts of dire-wolf fur and sparkling crystals attached with red-dyed yarn dangled from it.

“Are we ready?” he asked.

“If we aren’t, what are we doing here?” Liv replied. Audun Gilli had picked up enough of the Bizogot tongue to understand the simple question, if not her reply. He nodded to Odovacar.

“Good. Good. Then let us begin.” The Red Dire Wolves’ shaman tapped the drum – once, twice, three times. The tone was deeper and richer than Hamnet Thyssen had expected. The rhythm, to his surprise, didn’t put him in mind of a dire wolf’s howl. It was shorter and sharper; it might have been bird tracks in the snow.

Odovacar started to dance. However old and stooped he was, he moved with surprising grace and ease. Liv began dancing, too. Her steps perfectly fit the beat of the drum. Count Hamnet was almost taken aback that she left ordinary footprints in the snow, not marks with three toes forward and one behind. Her arms flapped as if she were a bird.