The Breath of God (19 page)

 

 

 

 

“
D
O YOU KNOW
this speech?” Hamnet Thyssen asked in the Bizogot language. The strangers looked something like Bizogots, though they didn't come close to matching them for size. They were fair-skinned and pale-eyed, with hair and matted beards of yellow or red or light brown.

One of them said a few words in his own tongue. It sounded something like the Bizogot speech. Count Hamnet couldn't make anything of it, though. By their frowns, neither could Trasamund or Liv or any of the other mammoth-herders.

To his amazement, Ulric Skakki said something in what sounded like the same language, or one much like it. And if Hamnet was amazed, the barrel-chested men of the Glacier were astonished. They all pointed at Ulric and said something that had to mean,
How can you talk with us?

He replied, haltingly. Count Hamnet could
almost
follow him, but meaning somehow flitted away. Then Ulric spoke in the ordinary Bizogot language: “There's this little clan bumped up against the western mountains—the Crag Goats, they call themselves. They speak a dialect God couldn't follow. It's as old as those hills, and twice as dusty. That's what I'm using.”

“Even if God couldn't, you learned it,” Vulfolaic said.

A man of the Glacier shouted angrily and raised his bow in plain warning: the captives weren't supposed to talk in a tongue he couldn't readily follow. Then the man spoke to Ulric Skakki again.

Ulric answered yes. That much Hamnet Thyssen could make out, but no more. What he answered yes to, Hamnet had no idea. Ulric Skakki and the men of the Glacier went back and forth. He spoke slowly, feeling for words.
They answered at their usual speed. They seemed to have trouble grasping the idea of someone who spoke only a little of their language.

After pointing to his comrades, Ulric got some grudging nods from their captors. “All right,” he said in the usual Bizogot language, though slowly and with an antique turn of phrase. “They give me leave to speak somewhat to you. I think their ancestors came up here the same way we did, and then found they could not return.”

“How long ago?” Trasamund and Audun Gilli asked at the same time. They looked at each other in surprise; two men less likely to think alike were hard to imagine.

It did them no good. Ulric shrugged and spread his hands. “I have no idea,” he answered. “They don't know, either. Longer ago than any of them remember—that's all I can tell you.”

“What will they do with us?” Liv asked.
What will they do to us?
had to be what she meant. She was wise to phrase the question the way she did. No telling how much of the normal Bizogot tongue they might be able to grasp.

“Well, I don't
think
we're breakfast right now,” Ulric said. Hamnet Thyssen's stomach did a slow lurch. That had already crossed his mind.

“Should we give them the meat we have left?” Arnora asked.

“That's a good idea. You're as smart as you're beautiful,” Ulric told her, and she blushed like a girl. He went on, “They'll find it anyway. Better we give it to them than that they take it from us.”

He spoke again in the ancient dialect the men of the Glacier used. The Bizogots had lived north of the Raumsdalians for a couple of thousand years. When in that time did these people's forebears come up here? Were they fleeing some disaster, or were they just exploring? Hamnet Thyssen shrugged a tiny shrug. If they didn't know any more, he was unlikely ever to find out.

When they understood Ulric Skakki, they could hardly hide their excitement. The strangers had meat? The strangers would
give
them meat? One of them pointed to his ear, as if to say he couldn't believe what he was hearing. He answered Ulric quickly. Count Hamnet couldn't be sure what he said, but thought it likely to mean,
If you're really going to do this, you'd better do it.

The adventurer confirmed that, saying, “They want to see it. Time for us to cough up, I'm afraid. Go to the packs and get it out. Don't hold any back. And
don't
go for your weapons. We're all dead if you do.”

When the men of the Glacier saw the chunks of raw horseflesh and
musk-ox meat, they sighed in something close to ecstasy. Those gobbets were too big to come from any of the animals Hamnet had seen up here. One of the men of the Glacier used a stone blade to cut a mouthful of meat. He chewed and swallowed.

His face lit up in surprise. “Not man meat!” he exclaimed—Hamnet made that out very clearly.

Some of the other men of the Glacier sampled the new food. They nodded agreement. Then they tried to get Ulric Skakki to tell them what beasts it came from.
Horse
and
musk ox
were only words to them. When he talked about what the live animals were like, when he stretched out his arms to show how big they were, the men plainly didn't believe him. They'd forgotten too much.

They ate the horsemeat and what was left of the musk ox in nothing flat. Hamnet Thyssen knew the Bizogots could eat more at a sitting than Raumsdalians. That was what happened when you didn't always eat regularly. But the men of the Glacier effortlessly outdid the Bizogots. Trasamund's eyes widened to watch them put away the meat.

When the men of the Glacier finished, they seemed amazed themselves at what they'd done. They patted their bellies and swaggered around. Count Hamnet got the idea they weren't used to feeling full.

They didn't let down their guard, though. Several of them kept the Bizogots and Raumsdalians covered with nocked arrows. Their bows were marvels of bone and sinew and lashings of leather and roots: they had no wood to give them proper bowstaves. That meant they also had no spears, which had to make hunting harder.

“If we get the chance, we can take them,” Hamnet murmured to Ulric without moving his lips.

“I think so, too.” Ulric had also mastered that small but useful skill. “But will they give it to us?”

Hamnet wished he could talk to Liv or Audun Gilli, but neither stood close enough to let him do it without drawing the notice of the men of the Glacier. If they could use magic to distract the barbarians, who could guess what might happen next?

The opportunity passed. The men of the Glacier used gestures to get their captives to hold their hands out for binding. Again, the cords were strange to Hamnet's eyes, but they did the job. He strained at them, trying not to show he was doing it. He had no luck breaking free.

A man of the Glacier plucked a dagger from a sheath on Ulric Skakki's
belt. He stared at the iron blade, holding it up close to his face. Then he tried the edge with his thumb. He tried his own stone knife a moment later. His shrug said he found them about equally sharp. Hamnet Thyssen waited to see what the shaggy men made of swords—especially of Trasamund's great two-handed blade. But they didn't disarm all their captives, though another man did rob Ulric of his bow and quiver. The men of the Glacier admired the bow and, even more, the few arrows he had left.

They still remembered something of herding. They got the Bizogots and Raumsdalians moving off the mountain refuge and back down to the Glacier. As soon as they could see it, they pointed to another peak that stuck up farther west. And off they went, surrounding their captives and urging them along. Having no choice, Hamnet went where he was bidden.

 

A
S LONG AS
the prisoners tried to keep up, the men of the Glacier didn't harry them. They also didn't seem to mind any more if the Bizogots and Raumsdalians spoke among themselves. Now that their hands were bound, they didn't seem so dangerous. That was Hamnet's guess, anyhow.

“Do they have any shamans with them?” he asked Liv as they trudged along.

“I don't feel any men of power,” she answered after a moment spent doing whatever a shaman did instead of listening. “Maybe there is one where we're going, though. I can't imagine living your whole life without magic.”

“No up here—that's for sure,” Hamnet said. “I thought you Bizogots led a hard life. Well, you do, but this is harder.”

Liv nodded. “These people are of our kindred,” she said. “Not close kin, not now, but they were Bizogots once. Their looks and their speech say the same thing.”

“So does Ulric Skakki,” Count Hamnet agreed.

Some snow buntings fluttered by, looking for plants growing in the pockets of dirt that clung to the top of the ice. The men of the Glacier sprang into action as if they'd practiced for years—and so, no doubt, they had. They carried nets made from sinews and twisted dried plants: the same kind of cords they used to bind their prisoners. Flinging them up, they caught several little birds, then quickly killed them.

They seemed pleased with themselves afterwards. The birds didn't offer much meat. Nothing up here offered much meat. Every little bit meant the men of the Glacier wouldn't starve for a while longer. Hamnet Thyssen
would have pitied them more if they hadn't shown they knew what man's flesh tasted like.

“Things could be worse,” Ulric Skakki said a bit later.

“Oh, of course they could,” Count Hamnet agreed sardonically. “They could have killed us all right away and started feasting on us back at the other mountain. Wouldn't that have been jolly?”

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Ulric said with what was probably commendable restraint. “I was thinking we could have grown up here ourselves. The world's biggest frozen trap . . . God must have been in a nasty mood when he left these poor buggers stuck here.”

He wasn't wrong, not even a little bit. To try to stay alive on terrain that gave a man so little—it would have driven anyone to the edge of madness, or maybe beyond. Hamnet's shiver, for once, had nothing to do with the vast plain of ice across which he tramped.

Then one of his captors let out a startled grunt and pointed north. Hamnet Thyssen's head turned that way. He saw more human figures moving in the distance. And those distant people saw his comrades and captors, too. They loped towards them.

The men of the Glacier who'd captured the Bizogots and Raumsdalians looked to their weapons. “They're people, all right,” Ulric said. “Put a few of them together, and they make factions and go to war.”

Inspiration struck Hamnet. “Tell these bastards we'll fight on their side if they turn us loose,” he said urgently. “They didn't eat us right away, after all. And if we can get our hands free with something in them . . .”

Ulric gave him a foxy grin. “I'll try. No guarantees, but I'll try. If it doesn't work, how are we worse off?”

How could we be worse off?
went through Hamnet Thyssen's mind. But there were ways; he and Ulric had both come up with some. The adventurer spoke to the men of the Glacier. They weren't altogether naive—they could see that Ulric didn't have only their benefit in mind. But they could also see that the approaching band of barbarians outnumbered them. If they didn't do something, they were liable to end up on a spit or in a stewpot themselves.

They went back and forth with Ulric. At last, he spoke in the regular Bizogot tongue: “I've promised them we won't attack them right after this fight. That seems fair to me. But if we get our hands free, we'll be equals or more than equals. Is it a bargain? They'll understand
yes,
I think.”

“Yes!” everyone shouted.

The men of the Glacier cut their bonds then. The stone knives did the job about as fast as iron could have. Hamnet opened and closed his hands again and again, working circulation back into them. He hoped he wasn't frostbitten.

He drew his sword. His comrades were taking hold of their weapons, too. “You know you've been in a bad place when the chance of getting killed is better than what you had before,” Ulric Skakki remarked with what seemed to Count Hamnet excessive good cheer.

Trasamund drew his great two-handed blade and swung it in circles so it thrummed through the air. “Let them come!” he roared. “Let them come, by God, and I will make them go!” The men of the Glacier exclaimed and pointed. They'd never seen anything like the weapon—and maybe they'd never seen anything like the Bizogot jarl, either.

Shouting, the members of the other clan or tribe or whatever it was trotted forward. If the sight of strangers with strange weapons fazed them, they didn't let on. One of them drew his bow and let fly. His arrow fell short, splintering against the Glacier. Before long, though, the missiles would start to bite.

Trasamund shouted a command much used in Bizogot warfare:
“Chaaarge!”
He lumbered towards the attackers. So did the rest of the Bizogot men. And so did Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki.

Hamnet threw himself flat on the ice when an arrow hissed through the space where his head had been a couple of heartbeats earlier. As he scrambled to his feet again, he said, “If we can close with them, we'll slaughter them. They don't have shields or armor or swords.”

No sooner had the words passed his lips than he suddenly felt as if he were running through porridge, not air. The band of barbarians that captured him and his comrades might not have had a shaman along. These newcomers did.

A Bizogot howled and fell when an arrow pierced his leg. The attackers might pincushion all of them if something didn't happen in a hurry.

“Liv!” Count Hamnet bawled. “Audun! Do something!” Even in that moment of desperation, he wished he weren't calling for the two of them together. But he couldn't do anything about that now except hope they had a counterspell handy.

They must have, for all at once he could move normally again. One of the attackers, a fellow with streaks of gray in his beard (and how many men of the Glacier lived long enough to go gray?), hung back a little from the rest. When the counterspell freed the Bizogots and Raumsdalians from the
magic that had slowed them, he stamped his foot and swore. The gesture was so obvious, and so universal, it would have got a big laugh on the stage in Nidaros. Having stamped and sworn, he started incanting again.