The Golden Shrine

owned it—the tapman?—didn’t die of starvation.

“Yes, that’s a splitting headache, all right,” Ulric agreed. Then he stooped and lifted a couple of stoppered jars the man’s corpse had partly covered. “And the Rulers really are a pack of barbarians from the back of beyond. They don’t even know how to do a proper job of plundering.”

He scraped away at the pitch sealing one stopper with the tip of his dagger. Once he could wiggle the stopper, he worked it free with the dagger and his thumb and forefinger. “What have you got?” Audun Gilli sounded more than a little interested.

Ulric sniffed, then swigged. “Yes, that’s mead, all right. Pretty good mead, too.” He swigged again, as if to make certain. Audun also looked more than a little interested. He looked thirsty, as a matter of fact. Ulric passed him the jar.

He drank, then drank some more, then drank some more after that, and finally delivered his verdict: “You’re right. That is pretty good mead.” He took another swig, just to make sure . . . or just because he wanted to.

“Save some for the rest of us,” Ulric said, snatching the jar back.

“You might want to be able to walk when you’re done, too,” Hamnet said.

“Mm—I might.” By the way Audun Gilli said it, he wasn’t even close to sure he’d care about walking.

“Let me try some of that,” Trasamund said. Looking resigned, Ulric Skakki gave him the jar. The Bizogot raised it to his lips. His larynx worked. He made at least as big a dent in the mead as Audun had. When he finally lowered the jar, he nodded. “Not bad at all.”

“Do I get to try it, too?” Hamnet Thyssen asked pointedly.

“If there’s any left.” Trasamund shook the jar and listened to the slosh inside. “Still some, anyhow.” He held it out to Hamnet.

The Raumsdalian noble shook it, too, and hefted it. “Not bloody much. You’re a pig, Your Ferocity—and so are you, Gilli.” He drank. The mead was as advertised—and there wasn’t bloody much of it. He drained the jar.

“You’ve called me plenty worse than that,” Audun said.

Count Hamnet threw the jar down on the floor, not quite at the wizard’s feet. It smashed, even though the floor was only rammed earth. Audun Gilli sidestepped smartly to dodge one flying sherd. “You deserved what I called you, and more besides,” Hamnet said in the flat voice of formal hostility.

“We’ve been round this barn before—too often.” Ulric Skakki worked at the stopper on the other jar. “We don’t need to hear it all again.” He sniffed. “Besides, this one’s wine.” He thrust it at Count Hamnet. “Here—you go first.”

“Bribing me, are you?” Hamnet said. The adventurer gave back a bland smile and a nod. Instead of making something of it, Hamnet drank. Sweet and strong, the wine ran down his throat. He took his fair share or a little more, then lowered the jar. “Pretty good wine,” he reported, deadpan.

“You—! Give me that!” Trasamund started to snatch the jar out of his hands. So did Ulric. They glared at each other. They didn’t quite square off, but they left the feeling that they would if somebody didn’t do something in the next few heartbeats. Hamnet did something: he gave Audun Gilli the jar.

Trasamund and Ulric both glared at him. Audun looked astonished. Count Hamnet was astonished, at himself. This was the first time he’d done anything for Audun since the wizard took Liv away from him. He hadn’t meant to; all he’d meant to do was annoy Ulric and Trasamund. Well, he’d managed that.

Audun wasted no time before sampling the wine. As Trasamund’s had not long before, his larynx bobbed up and down. “Not bad at all,” he allowed after reluctantly lowering the jar.

Ulric grabbed faster than Trasamund. He drank, and made as if to go on drinking. Trasamund growled deep in his throat, like a lion warning a dire wolf it had better clear off from a carcass. Ulric was not a man to be intimidated like that, but he was a man who would share . . . when he felt like it.

He passed Trasamund the wine jar a bare instant before the jarl would have stolen it from him and perhaps started a real fight. “Ahh!” Trasamund said after his first gulp. “Those grapes died happy, by God!”

“They probably died when pretty girls squashed them with bare feet,” Ulric Skakki said. He raised a more or less leering eyebrow. “Worse ways to go, I daresay. Ugly girls squashing you with bare feet, for instance.”

Trasamund was drinking again, and almost choked. When he stopped spluttering, he said, “Is that really how they smash grapes? Women stepping on them? Or are you making it up to fool a Bizogot who doesn’t know anything about wine except that it tastes good?”

“By God, Your Ferocity, in the fall there are women with purple toes down in the south where the grapes grow,” Ulric said gravely, holding up his hand as if taking an oath. “They have big wooden vats full of grapes, and the women get in there and hike up their skirts and—”

“Trample out the vintage,” Audun Gilli finished for him. “Sometimes the men will do it, too, but it’s mostly women.”

He pointed at the wine jar Trasamund was holding and murmured a charm. The jar grew a face: a pretty, spoiled-looking face. In a squeaky voice, it said, “And you can just quit thinking about looking up my skirt, too, you—you man, you. There I am, working my feet as purple as your nose, and you’ve got your mind in a cesspit!” Animating such things was Audun’s favorite magical sport.

“My nose isn’t purple!” Trasamund might have been answering a woman, not an enchanted jug.

Ulric Skakki looked artfully astonished. “You mean that isn’t a plum stuck on to the front of your face?”

Like a lot of Bizogots, Trasamund had been down in Raumsdalia often enough to know what a plum was. His whole face turned red, if not purple. “One day you will talk too bloody much, Skakki. You’ll be sorry for it when you are—you’d best believe you will.”

“People keep telling me so,” the adventurer said. “It hasn’t happened yet, though. One day I’m going to get tired of waiting.”

Trasamund muttered into his beard. Whatever he said, he didn’t say it loud enough to get through the facial shrubbery. Trading insults with Ulric was a losing game; he gave worse than he got. As Count Hamnet had seen—and discovered, painfully, for himself—fighting Ulric was also a losing game. Which left . . . what? Loving him, maybe? Hamnet Thyssen scowled. That also struck him as an unappetizing choice.

HAMNET FOUND HIMSELF looking east as he rode across what had been Hevring Lake’s bottomland. He saw Per Anders doing the same thing. Catching Sigvat’s courier at it made him realize he was doing it, too. A little sheepishly, he said, “If the Rulers sacked Nidaros, not much point looking for the city smoke rising from it, is there?”

Per blinked. “No, I guess not,” he answered, also sounding sheepish. “Force of habit.”

“I know. I was doing the same thing,” Hamnet said. “And I’ll probably start doing it six or eight more times, till I get it through my thick head that that smoke cursed well won’t be there.”

He did, too. Late the next afternoon, they came close enough to Nidaros to get a good look at what the Rulers had done to the Raumsdalian capital. Hamnet could have done without it. It was almost as hard on him as seeing Gudrid’s naked corpse would have been. And Nidaros itself hadn’t betrayed him, even if important people inside the city had.

Nidaros’ gray granite walls could have held out every Bizogot ever born for a thousand years. So Raumsdalians said, anyhow, and Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t inclined to argue with the conventional wisdom there. Those stout walls had held out the Rulers . . . for a little while. Not for long enough.

The granite blocks didn’t seem to have been overthrown. No: what happened to them was worse. It looked as if they’d been melted back into the lava from which they’d formed. Stone had flowed and run like hot fat, if not quite like water. What had happened to the men up on those walls when the granite melted? Nothing good—Count Hamnet was sure of that.

“Do we want to go in there?” Trasamund wondered aloud.

“Depends,” Ulric answered. “If only a few people lived through the sack, if only a few people are back, then we can scrounge as much as we need. There’ll be plenty of food and the like. But if a lot of the vultures that walk on two legs are prowling around in there, we’re just wasting our time. Your choice, Your Ferocity.”

“Let’s go up, get a closer look,” the jarl said. “Then we can figure out whether going in is smart or not.”

“That’s sensible,” Ulric said. “But what the demon? Let’s do it anyway.” Trasamund sent him a curious look, but didn’t try to parse the adventurer’s comment. Hamnet did, and felt his head start to whirl. He gave it up as a bad job.

Somewhere not far from the western wall was the house Earl Eyvind and Gudrid had shared, the house that looked out on the Hevring bottomland. Did it still stand? Had the Rulers plundered it? If they hadn’t, was anything about the Golden Shrine still there, or had Eyvind Torfinn managed to pack up all his assembled knowledge when he fled?

Hamnet remarked on that to Ulric. “Should we go there?” he asked. “Or do you think it’s a waste of time?”

“Mm . . . You ask interesting questions, and I wish to God you didn’t.” Ulric plucked at his beard. “Maybe we ought to see, eh? It’s not too deep into the city. We can’t get into too much trouble heading over there—I hope.”

“Oh, we can always get to trouble.” Hamnet Thyssen spoke with mournful conviction. “But will we get into worse trouble going in or staying clear?”

“Interesting questions, like I said.” Ulric Skakki didn’t make it sound like a compliment. By the way he said it, Count Hamnet might have come down with a rare—and socially embarrassing—disease. After a moment’s thought, the adventurer looked pleased with himself. “Why don’t we ask the wizards? They can tell us what kind of fools we are.”

“I already know that. We’re big fools, or we wouldn’t be here,” Hamnet said. “I want to know what we can do about it.”

“Amounts to the same thing in the end,” Ulric answered cheerfully.

They did talk to the wizards. Marcovefa, Audun Gilli, and Liv put their heads together. Marcovefa looked up at the sun. Liv opened her arms wide and spread her fingers wide, as if to trap a lot of air so she could smell it. Audun Gilli plucked up a pinch of earth and tasted it.

After that, they put their heads together again. Hamnet got the notion they were deciding on their verdict. Was that good? Bad? Indifferent?

Audun spoke for all of them: “You can go in if you want. We don’t think it will make things any worse.”

“Will it make them any better?” Ulric Skakki inquired, a heartbeat before Count Hamnet could ask the same question.

Audun and Liv and Marcovefa seemed equally surprised. They put their heads together one more time. When they broke apart again, Liv gave the answer for them all: “We don’t know. That isn’t plain.”

“Well?” Hamnet asked Ulric. “What do you want to do?”

“Let’s go,” Ulric said. “I’m a ghoul at heart. I do want to see what Nidaros is like after a sack. Maybe it’ll give us something new to tell Sigvat.”

“The only thing I want to tell him is where to head in,” Hamnet said grimly.

“When the Rulers chased him out of Nidaros, he found out where he was heading in, by God,” Ulric replied. “I won’t say it didn’t serve him right.”

“He’ll say that,” Hamnet predicted. “Nothing’s ever his fault. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.”

Per Anders also wanted to go into Nidaros, to see what had become of it. They recruited a squad’s worth of Bizogots to go with them and help keep them safe from whatever happened to be loose in the city. If the Bizogots did some plundering while they were there, Hamnet was willing to look the other way. Ulric seemed more than willing. He looked ready to do some plundering of his own.

They made the final approach to the fallen capital on foot. “No surly gate guards to persuade that we’re worthy to go in,” Hamnet remarked.

“I wonder if those whoresons tried asking the Rulers their snooty questions,” Ulric said. “If they did, they deserved whatever happened to them.”

Listening to them, Per Anders looked pained. “You men are not proper Raumsdalian patriots,” he said stiffly.