The Breath of God (21 page)

“Ulric!” he called.

“What is it?” The adventurer looked up from his colloquy with the shaman.

“Ask if we can eat some hares or whatever else they have instead of . . . that.” Hamnet pointed to the meat cooking above the fires.

“Oh. Right.” Ulric Skakki went back to the language the men of the Glacier could follow. The shaman sounded surprised as she answered. Ulric said, “She wants to know why, when man's flesh is so much sweeter. She says there's nothing better than the flesh of foes you've killed yourself.”

“Wonderful,” Count Hamnet said tightly. “Well, tell her it's not our custom or whatever you have to say to get us out of it. God knows you aren't lying.”

“I'll do my best.” Again, Ulric returned to the other dialect. The shaman shrugged and tapped her forehead with a callused finger as she said something in reply. “She thinks foreigners are crazy,” Ulric translated unnecessarily.

“Well, we love her, too,” Hamnet said, which made Ulric bark laughter and earned the Raumsdalian noble a sharp glance from the shaman. Hamnet Thyssen looked back impassively, and the woman of the Glacier was the first to turn her eyes away.

Instead of hares, the men of the Glacier fed their guests pikas and voles. Hamnet guessed they were being given the glove, but he wasn't inclined to fuss about it. He would have eaten worms and earwigs instead of the meat that smelled so damnably tempting.

The men of the Glacier didn't worry about it. Hamnet could see why. Life here was impossibly hard. They probably didn't recognize the folk of other clans as human beings at all. But when he watched them cut flesh with their stone knives and greedily stuff it into their mouths, he almost lost his own appetite.

Almost, but not quite. He was so hungry, before long he
would
have eaten man's flesh and been glad to get it. That thought made him despise the locals less as he watched them feast.

“How much does their shaman know?” he asked Liv. If he could talk about anything else, it had to help.

“Hard to be sure, but more than I expected,” she answered. “They have so little up here—they
can't
use much for shamanry. But what will can do, will and bone and stone, Marcovefa does. I suppose that's true for the other one, too, the one you killed.”

“I've never seen anything like that tanglefoot spell before—I know that.” Hamnet shivered. “I hope I never do again, either.” He remembered the choice morsels he'd been offered from the dead shaman. With another shiver, he
wondered if one day before too long he'd regret not eating them when he had the chance.

“It was different, sure enough.” Liv looked at him from under lowered eyebrows. “Why do you think I'm cheating on you with Audun?”

Count Hamnet started to deny that he thought any such thing. He started to, yes, but found he couldn't. It wasn't so much that he minded lying as that he minded minded lying and getting found out. His voice dull with a mixture of anger and embarrassment, he answered, “I imagine because I saw it happen before with Gudrid.”

“I'm not Gudrid, thank God. I hoped you might have noticed,” Liv said tartly. “And I'm not sleeping with Audun Gilli, either. If you keep trying to watch me all day and all night, though, I'm liable to start, just to give you something to watch.”

He got out two syllables of a laugh before he realized she wasn't joking. She thought spying was as big a betrayal as infidelity, and she
would
repay the one with the other. He hesitated. He knew the words he needed, but bringing them out came hard, hard. But he had no choice, not if he wanted to keep her. Hating himself, hating her a little, he mumbled, “I'm sorry.”

“Are you?” Liv expected words to mean what they said. Bizogots weren't much for polite hypocrisy, but she'd seen that Raumsdalians could be. She eyed him narrowly, trying to scent dissembling. She must not have, for at last she nodded. “Yes, I think you are. All right, then—let it go.”

He nodded, too. It wasn't done between them; he knew that. But it wouldn't crash down on them like a great ice avalanche, either—not right now, anyway. He changed the subject: “Can we sleep safely?”

“Sooner or later, we'll have to,” Liv answered. “We may as well do it now. No quarrel between us and them for the time being.”

“Except about what they eat.” Hamnet Thyssen couldn't get the smell of roasting pork out of his nostrils or out of his mind.

“We can't do anything about that except not eat it ourselves.” Liv tossed a pebble up into the air. It fell with a small click. “Not eating it may make them leery of us, but I don't think we can do anything about it.”

“Nothing we'd want to do, anyhow,” Hamnet said.

He curled up on the slope. Liv lay down beside him. He slid his arm around her and pulled her close to him. She moved willingly enough. It should have been comforting, reassuring. It seemed anything but, instead reminding him of how they'd quarreled and of what he feared. He couldn't keep his arm around her all the time. What would she do when it wasn't there?

She'll look around to see if you're watching her, that's what
, he told himself.
And you'd better not be, or she'll make you sorry
. But how could he not watch? Gudrid had taught him that unwatched women cheated whenever they felt like it, and you wouldn't know they were cheating because you weren't watching them. Then, when you couldn't not know any more, you hurt all the worse because they'd been doing it for so long. You couldn't win.

He couldn't even stay awake. He'd done too much and slept too little. His eyes slid shut in the middle of a worry. He never knew he'd slid under. If anyone tried to rouse him to stand sentry, it didn't work. Except for breathing, he might have been dead.

When he woke, he was confused, not realizing he'd been asleep. Wasn't the sun over
there
a moment earlier? Or had he somehow shifted so that what he thought was east was really west? No and no, he finally decided. This was morning, and the sun truly did lie in the northeast. The men of the Glacier hadn't tried to murder him while he slept, either.

Liv still lay beside him, snoring softly. Sleep stole weariness and years from her face. Hamnet Thyssen could see the girl she had been, not the desperate shaman with the strange foreign lover she'd become.

When Liv woke a little later, she smiled at Hamnet. But the expression soon faded as she remembered where they were and, no doubt, what they'd been talking about before exhaustion claimed them. They had a lot of repair work to do . . . if they lived.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“
W
E
'
VE GOT TO
get down from here,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If we don't—and if we don't do it soon—we'll have a war on our hands.”

“Yes? And so?” Trasamund sent a hooded but scornful glance towards the men of the Glacier. “It wouldn't last long, and we'd cursed well win. We'd slaughter them, as a matter of fact, and we wouldn't have much trouble doing it, either.”

“I know. That's what I'm afraid of,” Count Hamnet answered. The Bizogot jarl sent him a quizzical look. He explained: “We slaughter the men. We take the women and sire our own children on them. We raise rabbits and voles on this crag, and we fight with the men of the Glacier who live on other crags. Then what? We turn into men of the Glacier ourselves, that's what, and the children we sire will think everything we say about what it was like down in the Bizogot country is a pack of lies. Is that what you've got in mind?”

Trasamund bared his teeth in a horrible grimace. “Good God, no!”

“Well, I don't, either,” Hamnet said. “And so we'd better take as much food as they'll let us have and get out of here before the fighting starts.”

“Where can we get down, though, except where we climbed up?” Trasamund said. “If we try that, the Rulers are liable to be waiting for us.”

“I doubt it. We're only an afterthought to them—if that, by now,” Hamnet said. “They've got bigger things to worry about farther south—not just the Bizogot clans down there, but the Empire. Odds are they've forgotten about us.”

“Maybe.” The Bizogot didn't sound as if he believed it. He was so
self-important, he couldn't imagine that anyone else, even his enemies—perhaps especially his enemies—wouldn't think him important, too.

“At least we're here in the summer.” Hamnet felt like stretching in the sun like a cat. It was almost as warm as it would have been down on the Bizogot plains. And, up so high, the sun was harder on the skin than it would have been down there. A swarthy man, Hamnet had got darker. Many of the fairer Bizogots were sunburned, some of them badly.

With a grunt, Trasamund nodded. “Winter up here wouldn't be much fun.” From a Bizogot, especially a Bizogot who'd lived his life hard by the edge of the Glacier, that was no small admission.

“No, not much.” Count Hamnet didn't want Trasamund outdoing him at understatement. “Maybe, though, it will melt enough of the Glacier to touch off a new avalanche at the edge. And maybe we can use that to get down.”

“Even if it does, how would we know?” Trasamund replied. “And how long do you want to wait around and hope? You were the one who said we couldn't wait long, and I think you're right.”

“If a big chunk does let go, we might hear it even though we're a long way from the edge of the Glacier,” Count Hamnet said. “Not a lot of other noise between there and here.” He growled, down deep in his chest. “As for the other . . . You're right, I did say that, and it's true, curse it. Not enough food up here to keep guests long.”

“What are you talking about?” Trasamund retorted. “Up here, guests
are
food.”

“Not for us. If we turn cannibal, there's no point going down again. Next to that, the Rulers are welcome to do as they please.”

“Not to me they're not, by God,” the Bizogot said. “I'd eat man's flesh if it was that or starve. Not before, but then. It happens in hard winters once in a while.”

“Mm, I can see how it might.” Hamnet tried to sound calm and judicious, not revolted. “But what do you think afterwards of the people who did it?”

“Depends. If they really had no other choice, then it's just one of those things. If it's not like that, or if the friends and kin of the ones who got eaten decide it's not like that . . . Well, the cannibals don't last long then.”

Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding. By the Bizogots' rough standards, that seemed fair enough. Even down in the Empire, there were stories of men who ate neighbors and relatives when the Breath of God blew
strong and the harvest failed. People laughed at those stories more often than not, which didn't mean some of them weren't true. Sometimes you laughed because screaming was the only other choice.

Ulric was translating for Audun Gilli and the shaman from the men of the Glacier, whose name was Marcovefa. The adventurer suddenly straightened and stiffened like a dog that had taken a scent. “Ha!” he said, turning. “Thyssen!”

“I'm here,” Hamnet answered. “What do you need?”

“Come over here, why don't you? That way, I won't have to yell,” Ulric said. “Besides, you may understand pieces of this in the original, and it's better if you try. I might make a mistake.”

Grunting, Hamnet got to his feet. Parts of him creaked and crunched as he moved. He had enough years to feel sleeping on hard ground after marching and fighting, enough years to make him feel half again as old as he really was. He creaked again when he squatted beside Ulric and Marcovefa and Audun. He had to make himself nod to the Raumsdalian wizard. Audun nodded back as if nothing was wrong.

“What's the story?” Hamnet asked.

“She may know another way down,” Ulric answered.

That got Hamnet's interest, all right. “Tell me more,” he said.

Ulric spread his hands in frustration. “I can't—or not much more, anyhow. The verbs are driving me crazy. Here. Wait. I'll have her tell you what she told me. Maybe you'll be able to make some sense out of it.”

“I couldn't,” Audun Gilli said. But Audun had needed a year to get something more than a smattering of the ordinary Bizogot language. Whatever his talents as a wizard, he made anything but a cunning linguist.

“Well, I'll try.” Hamnet knew he sounded dubious. He thought he recognized words here and there in the language the men of the Glacier used. A couple of times, he'd made out a sentence, as long as it was short and simple.

Ulric spoke to Marcovefa. Hamnet thought he said something like,
Tell him what you just told me
. He wouldn't have bet anything he cared about losing, though.

Marcovefa answered. It was her birthspeech; she didn't stumble or hesitate the way Ulric did. That made her harder for Hamnet Thyssen to follow, not easier. He frowned, listening intently.

When she finished, he said, “Didn't she say she knows where a way down will be?”

“Ha! You heard it like that, too!” Ulric said. “Maybe the verbs are strange, but that sure sounds like a Bizogot future tense, doesn't it?”

“It did to me,” Hamnet said. “Why don't you ask her?”

“I've tried. It didn't help.” Ulric sighed and tried again.

“Past? Now? Later? All the same.” That was what Hamnet thought Marcovefa said. He looked a question at Ulric.

The adventurer sighed. “I think she's saying there's no difference between one time and another. Crazy little bird, isn't she?”

He spoke in Raumsdalian, which the shaman couldn't possibly understand. Nothing in his face or his tone of voice gave him away. But Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff and slapped his arm the way a mother would slap a child who'd done something rude and silly. She might not have followed the words, but she knew—she
knew
—he hadn't treated her with the respect she deserved.