Harry Turtledove - Breath of God

They slept Bizogot-style, with furs over them and snow heaped up to the north to hold away the Breath of God. The wind didn’t blow too hard. It was as if even God had forgotten about Raumsdalia. And as for Hamnet Thyssen, he’d never spent a lonelier night in someone else’s arms.

When morning came, he asked for volunteers to go north and spy out what the Rulers were doing. He wondered if he would get any. More than a little to his own surprise, he did. “We’re like fleas,” one of them said. “A lot of the time, we aren’t worth smacking.” He grinned. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen; to him, it had to seem more like an adventure, a game, than something where he could lose his life.

With the bulk of the army – with the bulk of what was left of the army – Count Hamnet marched south and east towards Kjelvik. He rode close by Marcovefa, in case she needed help staying in the saddle. Up till this summer, she’d never ridden, or even imagined riding was possible. She didn’t look happy now – who with a nearly broken skull would have? But she rode.

And Kjelvik didn’t seem particularly happy to see the returning soldiers, either. Fleeing men had got there before the army did, and had spread word of the disaster it suffered. “Why did you go out there to lose?” someone yelled at Hamnet Thyssen when he rode back into the town.

Were his bow strung, he would have shot the obnoxious, leather-lunged pest. No one went out to lose a battle. Half the commanders who fought, though, ended up with what they didn’t want. Hamnet had wound up in that unhappy number, even if not on purpose.

A stone in the house behind the hecklers head suddenly sported a mouth. In a vicious, whiny imitation of his voice, it squawked, “Why did you screw that broad next door?”

“What? I never – ” But the local looked horrified. And the man standing next to him, who was both larger and better muscled, looked first suspicious and then furious.

Hamnet Thyssen rode on before he learned how that drama turned out. He looked around for Audun Gilli. When he spotted the wizard, he nodded his thanks. He’d never thought he would do that, not after Audun took Liv from him, but he did. Life was full of surprises, not all of them as nasty as one would think.

The garrison cooks came up with meals tastier than charred horseflesh. A bed in a room off the barracks made a better place to sleep with Marcovefa than snow-covered ground. A charcoal brazier gave the chamber at least a little warmth.

“How are you?” he asked as the two of them sat down on the bed.

“Hurts,” Marcovefa answered matter-of-factly.

Not tonight – I have a headache . Hamnet wondered if he was losing his wits or just too tired to see straight. He’d seldom felt less lecherous. He might want to hang on to Marcovefa through the night for reassurance – and warmth, which was in short supply despite the brazier. Anything more could wait… for the next year or two, by the way his eyelids sagged.

Sometimes things looked better after you woke up in the morning. This wasn’t one of those times for Count Hamnet. The brazier had run out of fuel during the night, which left the room as cold as the inside of a snowball, almost as cold as the inside of Sigvat s heart. Hamnet still remembered defeat much too well. And when he looked over at Marcovefa lying there beside him, the bruise on the side of her head was much too plain.

He lay quiet, letting her sleep as long as she would. Her eyes opened about half an hour later. She smiled at him and said, “I need to piss.”

“So do I,” he answered. “I didn’t want to bother you. How do you feel?”

“Not so bad,” Marcovefa said, but she winced when she sat up and then stood. “Not so good, either.” She used the pot first. As usual, she was much less self-conscious about such things than Raumsdalians, or even ordinary Bizogots. On that mountain up above the Glacier, privacy wasn’t even a word. “What do we do now?” she asked as Hamnet got up and eased him-self.

Lick our wounds, was the first thought that came to mind. “Try to find out what the Rulers are doing,” he said out loud: it had the virtue of sounding better, anyhow. “See if we have to stand siege here.”

“Can we?” Marcovefa asked – a much too pointed question.

“For a while, anyhow,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Till we’re relieved, or till their magic knocks down the wall, or till your magic comes back. If yours comes back soon, we can last a lot longer.”

She frowned in concentration, then shook her head, then winced again, regretting that. With a sigh that puffed fog from her mouth even indoors, she said, “Not there yet. Like my head all clogged up inside.”

“You’re lucky you really don’t have a rock in there,” Hamnet said.

“This is luck?” Marcovefa started to shake her head once more, but thought better of it. “With luck, the stone misses. With luck, we win the fight.”

Hamnet had had those thoughts when someone told him something bad was really lucky. All it boiled down to was, Well, things could be worse. He supposed they could. That didn’t make them wonderful the way they were.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, but the thought of breakfast didn’t cheer her up, either. “Food makes me . .” She couldn’t find the word, but mimed puking.

“Nauseated,” Hamnet supplied.

“Nauseated. Yes. I thank you,” she said. “But I try to eat. I am a fire inside. I need dung to burn.”

A plains Bizogot would have said the same thing. It still sounded odd in Hamnet s ears. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”

As in most towns where armies have suddenly arrived, breakfast was uninspiring. Oat-and-rye porridge with not enough butter or salt and a mug of sour beer didn’t satisfy Hamnet’s tongue. His stomach, though, quieted down. There was enough for the moment, anyhow.

Marcovefa ate without complaint, even though the food was strange to her. “You have so much,” she said. “You get food, and you don’t have to hunt for it even in wintertime. Do you know how lucky you are?”

Plains Bizogots said the same thing. They had enough themselves to appreciate how much more the Raumsdalians enjoyed, and to want it for themselves. Marcovefa’s tone was different. Her folk had so little up there atop the Glacier, she might have come to the Empire from the dark side of the moon. She was beyond jealousy. Everything she saw surprised her.

She didn’t always admire it: “Because you don’t hunt so much, I see some of you sit around and get fat. You had better watch out. Such people are good only for roasting. Your foes will feast on you if you are not careful.”

Count Hamnet’s stomach did a slow lurch. He’d managed to make himself forget his prized shaman, his prized lover, had eaten enemy clansmen. No doubt those foes had also devoured men from her clan. Did that mean what she’d done was any better? Maybe a little, Hamnet thought.

And then she said, “If I ever catch the scut who hit me with that stone, I’ll eat his liver without salt.” A Raumsdalian would have meant it for a joke. An ordinary Bizogot would have, too, though a Raumsdalian who heard her might have wondered. Marcovefa was dead serious. And if she did find that slinger, he would be dead, too, dead and butchered.

Toward noon, a scout rode in. “They’re out of the woods,” he reported. “We skirmished a little, and then fell back.”

“Are they heading for Kjelvik?” Count Hamnet demanded tensely. Could he stand siege here? If he couldn’t, he would have to retreat now. If he did, Sigvat II would have one more reason not to love him.

But the scout shook his head. “No, uh, Your Grace. They’re going southeast across country. You ask me, sir, they’re heading straight for Nidaros.”