The Golden Shrine

“Not here,” Hamnet said. She grinned, unoffended. He went on, “Do you know any way to make ravens interested in live people? If we had flying eyes, that would help us a lot.” He told her about the Rulers’ wizard who’d turned himself into an owl to spy on the Bizogots and Raumsdalians.

“A raven is a smart bird, but only a bird,” Marcovefa said. “Why should it care?”

Plainly, she didn’t think Hamnet would have an answer for her. But he did: “If we can find the Rulers, we can fight them. If we fight them, the ravens will get plenty of fresh food.” Maybe including us, he thought. He’d run that risk whenever he went into battle. Sometimes, though, it seemed bigger than others.

Marcovefa grinned again, this time in delight. She blew him a kiss. “Yes, that may work . . . if the bird can see so far ahead. Have to find out.” She started croaking at the raven. It made strange, throaty noises back at her. She croaked again and again.

The raven tilted its head to one side. If it wasn’t thinking things over, Count Hamnet had never seen anything, man or beast, that was. What went on behind those bright jet eyes? How much could a bird anticipate? Hamnet was no bird, so he didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, ravens were more clever than most other flying feathered creatures. But could this one understand the promise of more meat down the line if it did something rather than something else?

It said something to Marcovefa. Ravens could learn to speak human words, but this one wasn’t doing that. It had its own way of getting ideas across, one only vaguely connected to human language. Had Marcovefa needed magic to learn it, or had study sufficed?

He couldn’t ask her now; whatever she was using, she needed to concentrate hard to get meaning from the sounds the raven was making. When it finally finished, she said, “It will try. Maybe it will forget. Maybe the other ravens won’t understand what it needs. But it will try.”

“As much as we can expect, I suppose.” Hamnet expected nothing from the raven. That way, he couldn’t possibly be disappointed. Anything he did hear from the bird or its fellows would come as a pleasant surprise.

He looked at life the same way. The view had advantages and disadvantages, as everything did. When things went wrong, he had little trouble accepting it—most of the time— because he’d looked for nothing better. (Where he did look for something better, as with Gudrid and Liv, disillusionment proved doubly bitter.) When things went well, he tried not to show the surprise too much.

“This is right on the edge of what a raven can do,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe over the edge. The bird here is smart, even for a raven. I don’t know if all of them can do what it can.”

She croaked some more at the big black bird. Count Hamnet knew nothing of the language of ravens, and knew he never would. If he had to guess from tone, though, he would have said she was telling this one how bright it was. It preened—literally. Did that mean it understood the praise and accepted it? You would have to be a raven—or Marcovefa—to know.

The bird sprang into the air. Wind whistled out between its wing feathers as it flapped. It wasn’t an arrow with a beak, the way a falcon was. But it could outsoar and outmaneuver a falcon. Ravens harried hawks for the sport of it, then tumbled out of the way in the air to keep the birds of prey from turning on them.

Ravens harried hawks, jays harried ravens, mockingbirds harried jays, kingbirds harried mockingbirds, hummingbirds harried kingbirds . . . and dragonflies probably harried hummingbirds. Hamnet Thyssen looked for a lesson there, but couldn’t find one he liked. Everything large and fearsome had something small and feisty that annoyed it. No, not much of a lesson.

Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true, on land as well as in the air. Right now, the Bizogots seemed small and feisty, the Rulers large and fearsome. That was how things looked if you were a Bizogot or a Raumsdalian up here beyond the tree line, anyhow. The Rulers probably had a different view of it.

The only view of the Rulers Hamnet wanted was one of their backs as they rode off beyond the Gap once more. He wondered if he would ever get a view like that. He feared he wouldn’t, even if the Bizogots and the Empire somehow beat the invaders. The Rulers would be part of the political landscape from now on. The Gap would be open from now on, too. More Rulers—or even other invaders—could sweep down out of the north. The world had got bigger and more complicated.

When he said as much to Marcovefa, she gave him a wry smile. “This happened to me when I came down off the Glacier,” she said. “Everything new, everything strange, everything—” She threw her arms wide to show how much her world had expanded.

“You’ve done well,” Hamnet told her.

She shrugged. “People are still people. That’s the biggest thing. The world is strange. The animals are strange. But people? No.”

“People are always strange,” Count Hamnet said. Especially women, he added, but only to himself.

Marcovefa smiled again and nodded. “But they’re strange the same way here as they are in my clan up on the nunatak.”

“On the what?” Hamnet said.

“Nunatak,” Marcovefa repeated. “That’s our word for a mountaintop that sticks out above the Glacier.”

“Oh.” Hamnet Thyssen had probably heard the term while he was atop the Glacier himself, and while he was on that mountaintop—that nunatak. If he had, though, it had gone clean out of his mind. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t been at his best up there. None of the Bizogots or Raumsdalians had. He thought for a moment longer. “It doesn’t sound like a Bizogot word at all.”

“Maybe it isn’t. Our songs say other folk were up there when our forefathers came,” Marcovefa answered.

“What happened to them?” Hamnet asked.

“We ate them,” she answered calmly.

He didn’t splutter and make disgusted noises, because she so obviously wanted him to do just that. All he said was, “Seems as though you ate some of their words, too.”

“It could be.” Marcovefa’s expression was comically disappointed. Yes, she’d aimed to get more of a rise out of him.

One corner of his own mouth quirked upward. People didn’t get everything they wanted—not even a powerful shaman like Marcovefa. Nobody got everything. Maybe that meant the Rulers wouldn’t.

Or maybe it meant the Bizogots and the Empire wouldn’t. Who from each side got how much . . . would tell the tale till the Glacier melted, and maybe even after that.

TALL, DARK, ANVIL-TOPPED clouds floated ponderously across the sky. The air was hot and muggy, still and sullen. Wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, Ulric Skakki said, “Whew! This is the kind of weather you’d expect a thousand miles south of here.”

“Yes, and you’d complain about it down there, too.” Hamnet Thyssen had taken off his tunic. His hands and face were tanned dark, but his arms and torso were pale as a Bizogot’s, though the mat of hair on his chest was dark, not golden. Right now, his skin was slick with sweat.

Ulric gave the clouds a dirty look. “If we’re going to have a thunderstorm, I wish we’d have it. It would wash the air clean of this garbage.” He shed his tunic, too.

“That would be good,” Hamnet agreed.

But the thunderheads rolled by, one after another. Count Hamnet did hear thunder once, far off in the distance. No rain fell anywhere nearby. The air remained close and stuffy.

Marcovefa walked by with her tunic off. Hamnet’s jaw dropped. Ulric’s eyes widened. Unless they were bathing, Bizogot women didn’t go bare- breasted in public (neither did Raumsdalians). “What are you doing?” Hamnet managed after a couple of false starts.

“Trying to stay cool, same as you.” Marcovefa mimed a panting fox. “I never knew weather like this up on the Glacier. I feel like I am wading in hot soup.”

“Don’t sunburn your, uh, self,” Ulric said, gallantly not looking at what he was really talking about.

“I be careful,” Marcovefa said, and walked on. Anyone who wanted to tell her to cover up would need to be a braver man than either Raumsdalian.

After she was gone, Hamnet and Ulric eyed each other. They both shrugged at the same time. “Look on the bright side,” Ulric said. “Maybe she’ll start a new trend.”

“Right,” Hamnet said tightly. He wondered what he would have done had Gudrid or Liv acted so scandalously. Odds were he would have pitched a fit, and maybe had a stroke. He wondered why he wasn’t pitching a fit now. Partly because Marcovefa was a law unto herself, no doubt. And, perhaps, partly because he’d already pitched enough—or too many—fits about women.

Have I learned something? he wondered. Or am I just too bloody tired to get upset about things right now?

Ulric Skakki looked around: not in Marcovefa’s direction. The adventurer’s nostrils flared, as if he were a dire wolf seeking a scent. “The air is nasty,” he said.

“Hot and muggy enough and then some, that’s for sure,” Count Hamnet agreed.

But Ulric shook his head. “Not what I meant. It’s bad that way, too. But I don’t like the way it feels. Do you have any notion of what I’m talking about?”

“No.” Hamnet was nothing if not direct.

“Didn’t think so.” Ulric gave him a bow that should have been mocking but somehow wasn’t. “It feels like something horrible is going to happen to us any minute.”

Hamnet Thyssen raised an eyebrow. “Foretelling? I didn’t know you’d gone into the wizard business. Have you talked with Audun Gilli or Liv about this?” He didn’t think he wanted Ulric talking with Marcovefa, not while she was running around without her tunic.

The adventurer’s chuckle said he knew what was going through Hamnet’s mind. But his mirth quickly faded. “I will talk with them, by God. I don’t know if they’ll tell me I’m daft. If they don’t, I don’t know whether they can do anything about it. Better to find out, though.” Lithe as a tumbler, he got to his feet.

With a grunt and a creak, Count Hamnet rose, too, and followed him. Hamnet also tried to feel the air. To him, it felt like . . . air. Hot, sticky air, but air and nothing else but. He thought Ulric was letting his imagination run wild. That wasn’t like the adventurer, but neither was his turning wizard.

Audun Gilli sat in the shade of the hut he shared with Liv. He hadn’t shed his tunic, but looked suddenly thoughtful as Ulric and Hamnet came up to him. Maybe he would before long.

“What’s up?” Audun asked. The look he gave Hamnet was slightly apprehensive. He might have cleared the air, but he knew Hamnet would never love him.

But Ulric did the talking, finishing, “Have I just got the fidgets on account of this beastly weather, or am I feeling something real?”

“Well, I haven’t sensed anything like that,” Audun Gilli answered. Count Hamnet started to give Ulric an I-told-you-so look, but the wizard went on, “Which doesn’t have to prove anything. Have you talked to Marcovefa yet? I’d bet she’s more sensitive than I am.”

“I thought I’d wait till she puts on more clothes,” Ulric said blandly. “She might not be distracted, but I would be.”

“She’s not wearing any less than the two of you,” Audun pointed out—he’d seen her, too, then. He’d seen quite a bit of her, in fact.

“That’s what she told us,” Ulric Skakki said. “It looks better on her, though. And I know better than to argue with a shaman, I do.” His saucy grin dared Hamnet to make something of that. Hamnet ignored him. With a small sigh, Ulric went on, “If you say I ought to talk to her, I guess I’ll go do it.” This time, he wasn’t grinning when he spoke to Hamnet: “You’re welcome to tag along again, Your Grace. I’m not going to talk about anything I don’t want you to hear.”

Not while I’m there, you’re not, Hamnet thought. All he said was, “I want to get to the bottom of this, too.”

The Leaping Lynxes’ village wasn’t very big. Finding Marcovefa didn’t take long. She raised an eyebrow when Ulric and Hamnet came up to her. “Are you two going to try to tell me what to do again?” she asked, an ominous note in her voice.

Hamnet shook his head. “No. This is something else.” He gestured to Ulric Skakki.

Ulric told the story one more time. He looked Marcovefa in the eye while he was doing it. If his gaze slipped farther south, it wasn’t in any obvious way. “So,” he said, “have I got