Harry Turtledove - Breath of God

Liv pointed at the deer and murmured . . something. Suddenly, though the deer seemed to be running as hard as ever, it was hardly moving at all. The warrior of the Rulers beat it and cursed it, none of which did him any good. When the invaders had no shaman with them, they were vulnerable to Bizogot magic. Hamnet had seen that before.

The warrior leaped down from the ensorceled riding deer as the travelers drew near. He must have seen he had no hope for escape, for he charged them with drawn sword. Trasamund dismounted and met him blade-to-blade. “The Three Tusk clan!” the jarl cried.

He beat down his foe’s guard with a few fierce cuts. The killing stroke almost took off the enemy fighter’s head. The warrior of the Rulers staggered, blood gushing from a wound he couldn’t hope to stanch. After a few lurching steps, he crumpled, the sword slipping from his fingers.

“If only there were one neck for the lot of them!” Trasamund cleaned his blade in a snowdrift.

“Would make things simpler, wouldn’t it?” Ulric Skakki said. Hamnet Thyssen nodded.

The riding deer shifted nervously, half spooked by the shouting and by the stink of blood. But the beasts were more nearly tame than so many musk oxen would have been. The travelers had little trouble cutting several of them out of the herd and leading them downwind so the smells of their slaughtering wouldn’t frighten the others so much.

“Maybe we ought to use them for pack animals and slaughter the extra horses,” Audun Gilli said. “They fend for themselves better than horses do up here.”

“But we can ride the horses if we have to.” Trasamund was a staunch conservative. “We don’t know how to do that with them.”

“And they are beasts of the Rulers,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe, if they stay alive, Rulers can use magic to track them.”

Audun pursed his lips. “Yes, that could be,” he said. “I should have thought of it myself.”

And so they slaughtered the deer, wrapped the meat they wanted to take in the animals’ hides, and loaded it onto the pack horses. Then they pressed north, up towards Sudertorp Lake and what had been Leaping Lynx country. But the Leaping Lynxes, these days, were as shattered as Trasamund’s own clan.

“What can we do up here?” Hamnet said. “What hope have we got of putting a piece of this clan and a chunk of that one together and making an army that can stand up to the Rulers?”

“I don’t know,” Ulric answered. “But I do know Sigvat can’t put you in a dungeon up here, so that leaves us ahead of the game right there. Or do you think I’m wrong, Your Grace?” He used Hamnet’s title of respect with irony.

“I only wish I did,” Hamnet said. They rode on.

Marcovefa looked at the snow. She frowned in concentration, and maybe in a little pain, as she whistled a strange tune in a wailing, minor key. Then she muttered to herself. “That’s not right,” she said.

“Try it again,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. “Your magic’s bound to come back to you sooner or later, isn’t it?” He fought not to show his fear.

“Well, I hope so. I don’t want to be mindblind the rest of my days,” she answered. Mindblind wasn’t really a word in Raumsdalian, which didn’t keep Hamnet from understanding it – and from understanding that he wasn’t the only fearful one here.

Marcovefa eyed the drifted snow again. She nodded to herself, as if to say, I can do this. Then she whistled again. The tune was almost the same as it had been before – almost, but not quite. Hamnet couldn’t have defined the difference, but he knew it was there.

Suddenly, a vole popped out of the snow. It stared at Marcovefa with small, black, beady eyes. Then, as if recognizing her as one of its own kind, it scurried towards her. Her smile blazed brighter than the weak northern sun. She stopped whistling. The vole let out a high-pitched squeak of horror, almost turned a somersault spinning around, and scooted away.

She let it go. As she turned to Hamnet, her eyes shone with triumph. “There!” she said. “I did it! I called the vole to me!”

“Good,” he said. “Would you hunt that way up on top of the Glacier?”

“Sometimes I would, if I had to,” she replied. “But you see? I did a magic! Not a big magic yet, but a magic! My head is not ruined, not for good.”

“God be praised for that,” Hamnet said gravely. “Do you suppose you can call mammoths the same way when you get better?”

He was teasing her, but she took him seriously. “I don’t know. I never try anything like that up on the Glacier. No big animals up on the Glacier, not except for people.” She bared her teeth. Maybe she was teasing him back. Or maybe she was remembering the taste of man’s flesh. Then her grin faded. She touched the side of her head, still swollen and bruised. “I have myself back again. I have myself back again.” She made Hamnet hear the pause in the middle of the word.

“Good.” He could imagine what that meant to her. And he knew what it meant to the fight against the Rulers. Without Marcovefa, there was no fight against the Rulers . . . unless Sigvat could somehow mount one. From everything Hamnet had seen, that struck him as unlikely.

She whistled again. Another little furry head popped out of the snowbank. Another ensorceled vole started towards her. This time, she took it in her hands before relaxing the spell. Count Hamnet wondered if the vole would die of fright. It didn’t – it just twisted loose and ran away.

“Not an accident. Not a happenstance,” Marcovefa said happily. “I can really do this.”

“Good,” Hamnet said. “If any of the Rulers stick their heads out of the snow all of a sudden, we know just how to take care of them.”

Marcovefa laughed. Hamnet was joking, and then again he wasn’t. She’d worked magic, but she hadn’t worked strong magic. If this was the most she could do, how could she stand against the Rulers? And if she couldn’t stand against the Rulers, what was the point to anything?

“Suppose we meet the Rulers in the ordinary way,” Hamnet persisted. “What can you do then?”

“Whatever I have to do, I can do,” Marcovefa replied.

That was encouraging, or it would have been had Hamnet had more confidence in it. But he didn’t want to show Marcovefa he had no confidence; if he did show her that, wouldn’t it hurt her confidence? And confidence that she could beat the Rulers was one big advantage she enjoyed over both the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians. She’ll always thought she could, and she’d been right most of the time – till that slingstone made her wrong at just the wrong moment.

“Voles,” Hamnet Thyssen muttered.

“If I see any mammoths hiding in the snowdrift, I am able to call those, too,” Marcovefa said brightly.

“Oh, good,” Count Hamnet said. Marcovefa couldn’t always tell when he was being sarcastic. This time, she noticed, and thought it was funny. Hamnet went on, “Suppose they aren’t hiding there. Suppose they’re just.. . mammothing along. Could you call them then?”

“Mammothing? Is that a word?”

“It is now.”

“I don’t know if I could or not,” Marcovefa answered. “I tell you this, though – I want to find out.”

“So do I.” Hamnet said. If she could call mammoths the way she called voles … Well, what good would it do the Rulers to ride them, if they wouldn’t go where their riders wanted them to? Sometimes mammoth corpses got buried in floods or cave-ins and frozen underground for years or even centuries, then came to the surface again. Some of the people who found them that way thought they lived like moles and died when air touched them. How much of a difference was there between moles and voles?