Harry Turtledove: Breath of God

There were things the scout hadn’t said. How many enemies waited ahead? Were they ready to fight? For that matter, Count Hamnet wondered whether his own army was ready to fight. They’d run from the Rulers often enough before. Only one way to find out…

“I see em!” Trasamund bellowed. So did Hamnet Thyssen: a line of men on riding deer, with the bigger lumps of mammoths anchoring the center of their line. They were ready, then.

“Try to stay out of slingstone range!” Hamnet shouted to Marcovefa.

She gave back what was anything but a military salute. Then she blew him a kiss. He wondered what it meant. He wondered if it meant anything. He’d find out – probably sooner than he wanted.

Sooner than he wanted, he found the Rulers had at least one wizard with them. Snow leapt up from the ground. It took the shapes of wolves and of the fierce great cats from beyond the Glacier – tigers, the Rulers called them. Count Hamnet thought they were illusion till one of the snow tigers tore the throat out of a scout’s horse and then killed the Bizogot, too.

If Marcovefa couldn’t do anything about that. . . Would the magic beasts break up the Bizogot charge by themselves, or would they terrify the Bizogots into turning around and fleeing? They weren’t far from scaring Count Hamnet into turning around.

But then they all burst into puffs of steam. Marcovefa laughed in delight. Hamnet thought that was joy at having her power back. He was delighted that she had it back, too.

“Give them something to remember you by!” he yelled.

Marcovefa laughed again. “Oh, they will remember me!” she said. Maybe it was her joy that made her do what she did next. All the Rulers’ riding beasts – deer and mammoths alike – seemed to go into heat at the same time, and into a more fiery heat than any they knew in their proper mating season.

A mammoth interested in rutting with another mammoth was a mammoth rather spectacularly not interested in carrying warriors of the Rulers into battle. The same held true for riding deer. Bucks butted at one another and locked antlers. Does pushed their way towards the males, ignoring the riders trying to push them towards the Bizogots.

Some of the enemy fighting men could still use their bows. Most seemed at least as distracted as their beasts. The Rulers had no hope fighting with swords and spears. Those required cooperation between warriors and mounts, but they had none.

Only a few slingers made life difficult for the Bizogots. The band Hamnet’s men had come across didn’t seem to be an army on campaign, as the one down in Raumsdalia had been. It was probably a clan’s worth of men – if the Rulers used clans. The Bizogots broke their line with ease. Why not, when their own animals had broken it?

Hamnet sent horsemen straight at the slingers. He couldn’t do that so neatly as he would have with Raumsdalian soldiers. The Bizogots didn’t obey for the sake of obeying, as trained troopers would. But when he pointed at the slingers and shouted, enough Bizogots took the hint to do what he wanted done. They charged.

One slingstone hit a horseman in the face and knocked him out of the saddle. But the slingers couldn’t fight cavalry at close quarters. A few who held their ground paid for it. The rest broke and ran, and the Bizogots rode them down, too.

Seeing them run told Hamnet Thyssen what a victory he’d gained. Far more even than Raumsdalians, the Rulers were disciplined warriors. Losing to men from the herds – their contemptuous term for anyone not of their folk – was the worst disgrace they knew. Fleeing from the herds … He wondered if they’d so much as imagined such an enormity.

He pointed Bizogots at the Rulers’ wizards, too. More snow beasts sprang against them – maybe those were this clan’s sorcerous specialty. If so, it did them no good. Marcovefa boiled these monsters out of existence, as she had the others.

Then Count Hamnet got to enjoy the spectacle of wizards running for their lives. Running helped them no more than it had the slingers. Not even a wizard of the Rulers could aim a spell as fast as an archer could aim an arrow. And shrieks of agony disrupted the harsh gutturals of the Rulers’ language.

The enemy commander kept on roaring commands from mammothback till his mammoth, consumed by erotical lust, plucked him off with its trunk and threw him down, hard, onto the frozen ground. Then he shrieked, too, a shriek that ended with horrible abruptness as a mammoth foot descended on his chest. Hamnet Thyssen was close enough to hear ribs snap and crackle and pop, close enough to watch blood splash out to stain the snow. He looked away. He also rode farther away, lest the mammoth decide he and his horse stood in its way, too.

After their leader died, a few of the Rulers tried to surrender. That went against everything the iron-souled invaders were supposed to hold dear. Count Hamnet had seen it happen before even so, in the invaders’ rare defeats. The urge to live could corrode even the sternest discipline.

But the Bizogots’ lust was up, too: theirs for blood hardly less than that of the Rulers’ beasts for coupling. Hamnet and Ulric Skakki both shouted that some of the enemy should be spared. Trasamund shouted the same thing, which surprised Hamnet – was the jarl finally discovering what a good idea staying practical could be?

Much good it did him if he was. His fellow Bizogots paid no more attention to him than they did to the foreigners among them. More blood dappled the white of the frozen steppe. And then it was over: there were no more Rulers left to kill.

Even Trasamund seemed pleased. “By God, this’ll give the musk-ox buggers something to think about,” he boomed, looking around the trampled field. The iron stink of blood filled the frosty air.

“Well, so it will,” Ulric Skakki said. “And the first thing they’ll think about is how to do in the bastards who did this to them.”

That struck Hamnet Thyssen as being altogether too likely. But battle fever thrummed in his veins, too, and he said, “Let them try! As long as we’ve got Marcovefa, they don’t stand a chance.”

Ulric mimed a slingstone glancing off someone’s head. Then he mimed a slingstone catching someone between the eyes. Hamnet glared at him, not because he was being foolish but because he wasn’t. It could happen. It almost had. But it hadn’t.

“We can hurt them now,” he said. “We can hurt them badly, maybe even stop them from getting down into the Empire.”

“Hurrah!” Trasamund said sourly. “What good does that do my land? What good does that do my folk?” His wave encompassed the whole of the Bizogot country.

“If no more warriors or wizards of the Rulers can get down into Raumsdalia, maybe the Empire will be able to deal with the ones who are there now,” Count Hamnet said. “That weakens the enemy everywhere, not just in the south. It’s all one big fight, you know.”

“Ha! Easy for you to say.” Trasamund wasn’t convinced.

“Last summer, the Bizogots didn’t think it was one big fight,” Ulric Skakki reminded him. “They tried to take on the Rulers clan by clan – and look what that got them.”

Trasamund glared at him – again, not because he was wrong but because he was right. “You are an impossible pest,” the jarl growled. Ulric bowed in the saddle, as if at a compliment. That made Trasamund no happier.

Hamnet Thyssen looked around one more time, now to make sure Liv was all right. She wasn’t his anymore, but… . But what? he asked himself, and found no good answer. He knew too well he would have done the same thing were Gudrid on the field, even though she might hope he died in battle.

There was Liv, binding up a wound on Audun Gilli s arm and chanting a healing charm over it. Catching Hamnet s eye, she nodded gravely to him. He made himself nod back. Unlike Gudrid, Liv plainly wished him no harm. That helped, but not enough.