The Golden Shrine

of his hand from one stubborn warrior. The man lay sprawled in death on the grass—much good his courage did him.

The last thing the villagers had expected was to be delivered from their tormentors. They cheered and capered at the same time as they mourned. Some of the women seemed eager to give their rescuers what the Rulers would have taken by force. Nine months from now, some of the babies would probably have the fair hair and light eyes that marked the Bizogots . . . and their byblows.

“Now this is a welcome,” Trasamund said as he disappeared with a buxom brunette. “I’ll give her something to remember me by.”

Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow. “And we’ll hope she doesn’t give him something to remember her by.” He mimed scratching furiously at an intimate place.

“You take a chance whenever you lie down with a woman.” Count Hamnet paused, considering. “And I suppose she takes a chances whenever she lies down with you.”

“Of course she does.” Ulric mimed a bulging belly this time.

“Well, yes, that, too, but it isn’t what I meant.” Hamnet hesitated again, wondering exactly what he did mean. Slowly, he went on, “You can wound a lover in ways you can’t wound somebody who isn’t. You take a chance that you’ll get hurt, or that you’ll hurt the other person.”

“Life is full of chances. So you bet—and sometimes you lose,” Ulric said. “If you don’t bet at all, no one notices when you die, because you were hardly alive to begin with.”

Hamnet Thyssen grunted. He’d gone years not betting—not betting his heart, anyway. He’d risked his life again and again. With a hole in the center of it, the chance of losing it hardly seemed to matter. At last, he fell in love again . . . and then he fell on his face again.

“Women are strange creatures. You can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them, either,” he said. “Do you suppose they say the same thing about us?”

“Why are you asking me?” Ulric Skakki returned. “People have called me a lot of different things, but I don’t think anybody ever said I had to squat to piss.”

“Thank you,” Hamnet said. The adventurer raised a questioning eyebrow. Hamnet explained: “If I ever needed a cure for romantic thoughts, you just gave it to me.”

“We aim to please,” Ulric said loftily. “And you don’t need a cure. You just need better aim yourself sometimes.” That gave Hamnet something new to chew on.

XI

A RAUMSDALIAN SCOUT galloped back toward Hamnet Thyssen. “Mammoths!” he shouted. “Stacks of mammoths!”

Hamnet tried to imagine mammoths piled one atop another. He felt himself failing, which was bound to be just as well. “How far are they?” he asked. “Do the Rulers know we’re here? Are they heading this way?”

The scout pointed south over his shoulder. “Not very far,” he said as he reined in his blowing horse. “Not far enough, by God! When you get to the top of the next little swell of ground, you’ll see ’em yourself. They didn’t spot me—or I hope like anything they didn’t, anyhow—but they were coming toward us like they mean business. And I bet they do. How the demon do we stop ’em?”

“Marcovefa!” Count Hamnet called. “Did you hear what he said?”

“I heard,” she answered. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Narfi asked a good question. How the demon do we stop them?” Hamnet said. “Will the spell you used against the war mammoth in the last fight work again? Can you use it over and over, till all the Rulers’ mammoths fall down dead?”

“If nothing wards them, it will work.” Marcovefa seldom lacked for confidence. “I can use it again and again. If they have stacks of mammoths, I cannot kill them all, though. I get too tired. It is like screwing—sometimes all you can do is all you can do.”

“Heh,” Hamnet said uneasily. Only Marcovefa would have connected lovemaking and murderous magic. It never would have occurred to him, anyway. In his mind, the two amounted to the same thing, regardless of whether or not they really were. “Form line of battle!” he yelled. “The Rulers are heading this way with mammoths! Marcovefa will take care of them for us.” I hope, he added, but only to himself. “We’ll finish off the buggers on riding deer or horses or rabbits.”

“Rabbits?” Ulric Skakki said, stringing his bow.

“You never can tell,” Hamnet answered. He pointed south himself. “There are the ones on mammoths.”

Those war mammoths might not have come in a stack, but they surely came in a swarm. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he’d ever seen so many of them all in a line. Several Rulers sat atop each one: the man who guided it, a lancer with a long spear, and anywhere from one to three archers. They shouted when they spied the Raumsdalians and Bizogots ahead of them.

“Any time you’re ready,” Count Hamnet told Marcovefa, in lieu of shrieking, For God’s sake do something about them!

Her crooked grin said she had a good notion of what he wasn’t saying. He was embarrassed, but only a little. He couldn’t work up a whole lot of shame over fearing war mammoths. Who in their right mind didn’t?

Marcovefa didn’t. Her grin got wider. “More mammoth meat than we can eat. Plenty for big birds, big foxes,” she promised. Hamnet couldn’t see dire wolves as big foxes, but she did. She pointed her right forefinger at the closest war mammoth and chanted the little tune in her own dialect. Hamnet Thyssen waited for the war mammoth to drop dead. He waited. And he waited. And he waited some more.

And nothing happened.

Marcovefa stared at her index finger with the indignant reproach a man might give his bow if the string snapped when he needed it most. She aimed again. She chanted again. Hamnet waited again.

Nothing happened again—or, possibly, nothing still happened.

“Um, I don’t mean to fuss or anything, but if she’s going to do something, she ought to do it pretty soon,” Ulric said.

“It doesn’t look like the magic’s going to work today,” Hamnet told him.

“Well, well. Isn’t that interesting?” Ulric replied. Between the two of them, they’d given themselves perhaps the most casual death sentence in the history of the world.

“Do you know what’s wrong?” Count Hamnet asked as Marcovefa sent her forefinger another black look.

“They are warded. They must be warded.” By the way she said it, she might have accused the Rulers of gambling with loaded dice. Still scowling at her finger, she went on, “I did not think the Rulers would figure out what I did so fast.”

“Some of them must have got away after you killed that one mammoth,” Hamnet said, and she nodded bleakly. He asked, “If you can’t kill this lot, what can we do to them?”

“Fight them. They are still flesh.” But Marcovefa couldn’t help adding, “They are a whole great glacier of flesh.”

Count Hamnet would have called them a mountain of flesh, but it amounted to the same thing either way. Trouble. Deadly trouble.

“Why aren’t the miserable things dying?” Trasamund demanded.

That was a good question. If the mammoths didn’t start dying, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would. “Technical difficulties,” Count Hamnet answered, that being easier than admitting Marcovefa wasn’t up to murdering mammoths at the moment.

Trasamund might have been a barbarian from the frozen steppe, but he wasn’t a stupid barbarian. He understood what Hamnet meant when Hamnet didn’t say it. “She can’t do ’em in, eh?”

“Not right now. Doesn’t seem that way, anyhow,” Hamnet replied.

“So what do we do about them, then?” the jarl inquired.

“Fight them. What else can we do?” Another answer did suggest itself to Hamnet Thyssen. But if he screamed Run away!—even more to the point, if he matched action to word—he wouldn’t win Trasamund’s respect. In fact, he’d throw away as much of it as he already had.

“Fight them. Right,” the Bizogot said tightly. His folk had tried that against the Rulers time after time, up on their home terrain. They’d lost time after time, too. Trasamund’s Three Tusk clan was a shattered wreck, although he’d been coming back from the Empire when the invaders swept down through the Gap and beat its warriors.

“Oh, come on.” Ulric Skakki sounded absurdly cheerful. “It’ll be as simple as a Bizogot in a dice game.”

“You’ll answer for that, Skakki,” Trasamund said. “As soon as we’ve walloped these scuts, you’ll answer to me.”

“Looking forward to it.” Ulric still sounded happier than he might have.

Count Hamnet turned to Marcovefa. “All right—you can’t work the spell you would have wanted to. Can you do anything else to keep the mammoths from trampling all of us?” Again, he didn’t say, By God, you’d better be able to! He didn’t say it, no, but he thought it very loudly.

He must have thought it loudly enough for Marcovefa to pick it up. Or maybe his face gave him away. She smiled and said, “Everything will be all right.” But even she didn’t sound sure of that, for she went on, “They have better warding than usual for them—beasts and men.”

“Wonderful,” Hamnet said. Better-warded mammoths than usual, and more mammoths than usual, too. Put them together and you had—what? A disaster was the first thing that occurred to him.

One of the Raumsdalians who’d joined his band must have come to the same conclusion. With a wail of despair, the man wheeled his horse and fled long before the Rulers drew close enough to harm him. “Somebody ought to slaughter the worthless coward,” Trasamund growled.

“He’s not worth wasting an arrow on,” Ulric replied.

Trasamund looked disgusted. “You only say that because he’s one of your folk.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a Bizogot galloped away just as fast as the Raumsdalian had a moment earlier. “He’s not worth wasting an arrow on, either,” Ulric Skakki observed.

“I thank God he is no man of my clan. Bad enough he is any kind of Bizogot.” Trasamund still looked—and sounded—revolted.

Hamnet Thyssen wondered why. If Marcovefa couldn’t stop the Rulers’ mammoths, what would keep the invaders from rolling over this makeshift army and then going on with their war against Sigvat and whatever was left of the Raumsdalian Empire here in the south? Nothing Hamnet could see.

Ulric had to be thinking along the same lines, for he said, “Maybe we should all run away. Our chances here don’t look so good, do they?”