The Golden Shrine

“Scoffer!” Trasamund said.

Ulric graciously inclined his head. “At your service, Your Ferocity.” Hamnet Thyssen wondered if Trasamund would explode. But he didn’t, not after a winning fight. He threw back his head and laughed instead.

VI

AFTER THE BIZOGOTS returned in triumph to the Leaping Lynxes’ village, Hamnet Thyssen took Trasamund aside and said, “This can’t go on much longer.”

“What? Why not, by God?” The jarl had a skin of smetyn clenched in his big fist instead of a sword hilt, but he hadn’t started drinking yet. “We’ll drive the stinking buggers mad.”

“That’s why,” Hamnet answered. “They won’t let us get away with it much longer. Either they’ll bring more men down from beyond the Gap—”

“If they’ve got ’em—” Trasamund broke in.

“If they have them,” Count Hamnet agreed. No one on this side of the Glacier knew how many Rulers there were or how wide a territory they ruled. Too cursed many and too wide were the only sure answers. But Hamnet went on, “If they don’t, they’ll bring their army up from the Empire to deal with us—or a good piece of it, anyhow. And don’t you think a good piece of that army could do the job?”

Trasamund scowled. “Not if Marcovefa’s magic puts the flyblown fornicators to rout, the way it’s supposed to.”

“There’s only one of her,” Hamnet reminded him. “I hope she can deal with their wizards. I don’t know if she can deal with all of them, but I hope so. If you think she can deal with the wizards and the warriors, you may be asking too much.”

“Then we deal with them.” Trasamund thumped his own chest. “We! The Bizogots! The hero-folk!” He broke into rolling verse.

Hamnet Thyssen wanted to bash him in the head with a rock and let in some sense. Unfortunately, he didn’t see any suitable bashers close by. “Stop that!” he said when Trasamund showed no sign of letting up. “We don’t have that many Bizogots here—not enough to beat a real army.”

Instead of answering, Trasamund pulled the stopper from the skin, raised it to his mouth, and drank a long draught. “Ahh!” he said, smacking his lips, when he finally came up for air. “I needed that.”

“Why won’t you worry about what’s going to happen, curse it?” Count Hamnet demanded.

“I can’t make more Bizogots,” Trasamund said reasonably. “Well, I can, but no matter how willing the women are, the brats need twenty years before they’re worth anything in a brawl, and we don’t have that long.” Hamnet snorted. Ignoring him, the jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “So why are you nattering at me to fix something I can’t do anything about?”

“They are going to hit us.” Hamnet clung to the rags of his temper by main force. “What will you do—what will we do—when that happens? Run away? Where will we go? How will we keep the Rulers off us once we get there?”

“You have more frets than a mammoth has fleas,” Trasamund said, and took another swig from the smetyn skin. “Whatever comes will come, and God will see to it that it all turns out all right.”

“The way he has so far?” Hamnet inquired, acid in his voice.

“Go away. Bother me later.” Trasamund drank deep again. “I want to get drunk. I want to screw my brains out.”

“What brains?” Hamnet asked, more sardonically still.

“Go howl,” the Bizogot told him. “I’ll worry about your worries, but when I feel like worrying about them. Not now!”

“When you were too late coming back to your clan from Raumsdalia, that was just one of those things that happen. It wasn’t your fault,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “But if you’re too late getting ready for trouble any fool can see coming, who’s left to blame but you?”

He thought the only way to get Trasamund to listen to him was to be brutal. He turned out to be righter than he’d guessed. The jarl dropped the precious skin of smetyn and charged him, bellowing like a bull woolly mammoth. Hamnet was a big man, Trasamund bigger still. They grappled, cursing and punching. Count Hamnet managed not to get thrown under Trasamund, but pulled the Bizogot down beside him onto the ground. Hamnet did his best to knee Trasamund in the groin, but the jarl twisted and took the blow on the hip.

“Well, this is sweet.”

Ulric Skakki’s light, ironic tones didn’t prove enough to get Hamnet and Trasamund to stop pounding on each other. Then a bowstring thrummed. An arrow stood thrilling in the ground only a few inches from the fighters’ faces.

“Enough!” Ulric’s voice got sharper. “If I shoot again, my aim may not be so good—or so bad, depending on how you look at things.” He reached over his shoulder for another shaft.

Cautiously, Hamnet pushed Trasamund away from him. The Bizogot let him do it. Neither was sure Ulric wouldn’t shoot them to make them stop fighting. Such drastic measures were very much his style.

Hamnet tasted blood. When he spat, he spat red, but no teeth seemed broken. He’d blacked one of Trasamund’s eyes. Dishonors between them seemed even. That dismayed him; he thought he should have thrashed the Bizogot.

“And what were you gentlemen discussing when you decided words weren’t exciting enough to suit you?” Ulric kept an arrow nocked. His words were more piercing, though.

“What to do next,” Trasamund answered, gingerly rubbing at the eye that had met Count Hamnet’s fist. Lucky it wasn’t my thumb, the Raumsdalian thought.

“Our hero here doesn’t want to do anything much,” Hamnet said. “Just sit around and wait for the Rulers to jump on us.”

“Probably better schemes than that.” Ulric Skakki could also sound judicious when he felt like it.

“If I want to know what you think, Skakki, I’ll ask you,” Trasamund growled.

“Well, I don’t think we want to wait that long,” the adventurer said. “We might have things to do in the meantime.”

“You Raumsdalians can joke and eat fat goose and screw your women and take it easy,” Trasamund said. “You already know no true Bizogots will take you seriously. If I say something, though, you’d better believe they’ll hop to it.” He thumped his chest with his fist and struck a pose.

Hamnet Thyssen didn’t strike him, but he came close. “Then why the demon don’t you say something to them?” he snapped. “If you let things drift, the Rulers will call the tune instead.”

“Must be what he has in mind,” Ulric said helpfully. “After we’re dead, the lions and teratorns can make the plans.”

“Bah!” Trasamund stuck his nose in the air and lumbered off.

After spitting again—still red—Hamnet sighed and said, “He reminds me of a bull musk ox in mating season. All he wants to do is bang heads.”

“And screw,” Ulric said. “Don’t forget screwing.”

There had been times when Hamnet wished he could. But that wasn’t what worried him now. “What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing much we can do that won’t make things worse,” Ulric replied. “If dear Trasamund comes down with a sudden case of loss of life, who takes over for him? Won’t be us. He’s right about that—the Bizogots won’t follow us. And the rest of the men are worse muttonheads—musk-ox heads, if you’d rather—than he is.”

“We’re stuck with him, I’m afraid,” Count Hamnet said mournfully. “And I’m afraid because we’re stuck with him, too.”

A RAVEN FLUTTERED down out of the sky and landed on Marcovefa’s left shoulder. She reached out and scratched its head as if it were a cat. It brought its formidable beak alarmingly close to her eye before it croaked something in her ear. She croaked back. They might have been conversing. For all Hamnet Thyssen knew, they were.

Several Bizogots stared at the spectacle of woman communing with bird. Hamnet didn’t, but only because he’d seen it before up on the Glacier and during the harrowing descent to the Bizogot steppe. At last, one of the mammoth-herders worked up the nerve to ask, “Is that your fetish animal, wise woman?”

“Not the way you mean it.” Marcovefa caressed the raven some more. It croaked again, with obvious pleasure. She went on, “But it still tells me things.”

“Like what?” Hamnet asked.

“Where the carrion is. I don’t have to watch teratorns. And where the carrion is, most of the time the Rulers are, too.”

“Ah.” The Raumsdalian noble nodded. “That is worth knowing, yes. But why hasn’t one come to you for a while?”

She shrugged. “Ravens do what they want, not what you want. If they were only a little worse, they would make fair people.”

A little worse how? Hamnet wondered. Then he wondered if he wanted to know. He ended up not asking. What he did ask was, “Where is the carrion these days? Where are the Rulers?”

Marcovefa croaked at the raven. The big black bird with the shaggy feathers answered. It swung its head to look northwest. Then it swung it again to look almost due south, toward the Raumsdalian Empire. “You see,” Marcovefa said.

“Well, so I do,” Hamnet agreed. “But have the Rulers come out of the woods, then? Have the left the Empire?” If they had, he thought they were stupid. They would have a much easier time feeding themselves inside the Empire than up here. He wondered if they realized the territory they roamed on the far side of the Glacier was more like the Bizogot steppe than the Empire.

Marcovefa and the raven croaked back and forth some more. But all Hamnet got from her was another shrug. “The bird doesn’t know,” she reported. “Why should it care about people who aren’t dead?”

“They’ll make us dead if they get the chance,” the Raumsdalian noble said. “But I don’t suppose the raven cares about us while we’re alive, either. Well, maybe about you—a little, anyhow.”

“A little,” Marcovefa agreed. “It thinks I’m interesting because we understand each other some. If we didn’t, it would only want to peck out my eyeballs after I’m gone.”

“You say the most cheerful things,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. The Bizogots were more fatalistic than most Raumsdalians. And Marcovefa was more fatalistic than most Bizogots. Part of that might have been her own character. Part was surely growing to womanhood atop the Glacier. Just as the Bizogots had a harsher life than denizens of the Empire, so Marcovefa’s clan lived in a way that would horrify—had horrified—any Bizogots who saw it.

“Do I tell lies?” Marcovefa asked.