The Golden Shrine

“We can beat the Rulers. Why did we come back down into Raumsdalia if we didn’t think we could beat the Rulers?” Trasamund said angrily. “I am not going to run from them any more. I have done too much running, more than any self-regarding Bizogot should ever do.”

“Did you really plan on fighting all the war mammoths in the world at the same time?” Ulric exaggerated, but by less than Hamnet wished he did. Trasamund set his massive jaw and nodded. Ulric sighed. The Bizogot jarl wasn’t going to listen to anything or anybody right now. Ulric said, “If you insist on getting killed yourself, do you have to insist on killing all your friends, too?”

“I insist on nothing.” Trasamund pointed off toward the north. “There is plenty of open space. You can save your skin, if you love it so much. Go ahead and run. See if I care.”

The adventurer bowed in the saddle. “As always, Your Ferocity, I thank you for the encouragement.”

“You aren’t funny, either,” Trasamund added. “Always saying one thing when you mean the other—it gets old, Skakki. It gets old.”

“Literary criticism and generalship, both from the same man. Who could have imagined it?” Ulric was so ostentatiously calm, he made Hamnet Thyssen think Trasamund had struck a nerve. The adventurer went on, “I will run when you do, Your Ferocity. Have you ever known me to run when you didn’t?”

Trasamund wanted to say yes to that. When he opened his mouth, Hamnet could all but see the word on the tip of his tongue. But he didn’t let it out. Hamnet knew why he didn’t, too: he couldn’t. Since he was a truthful man, he answered, “Well, no,” as grudgingly as he could.

“There you are, then,” Ulric Skakki said. “Here you are, then. Here we all are, then. Here we all are, then, in the same place. Here we all are, then, in the same boat. If you have any good ideas about how we all get out of it together—except running away, I mean—I’d love to hear them.”

As Trasamund had before, he said, “If we can’t beat the war mammoths, we have to beat the Rulers.”

“Finding out how you propose to go about that would be nice,” Ulric observed. Hamnet thought so, too. Trasamund glared instead of answering. Regretfully, Hamnet decided the jarl had no answer. Or rather, he had the same old answer: fight like a demon, and hope you came out on top. Hamnet would have liked that one better if it hadn’t already proved wrong so often. By Ulric’s expression, he felt the same way. With Trasamund so notoriously hard of listening, though, why point it out?

Count Hamnet glanced toward Marcovefa again. “Where are their wizards?” he asked her. “If you can do something about them, maybe you can do something about the mammoths a little later.” Not much later, he hoped—the massive beasts were getting closer alarmingly fast.

Marcovefa looked angry and frustrated at the same time. “Don’t know where the vole pukes are,” she snarled. “They pretend to be nothing but ordinary warriors.” She said something that sounded incendiary in her own dialect. In irate Raumsdalian, she added, “Pretend too stinking well, too.”

What did that mean? Did the Rulers’ wizards know they were facing Marcovefa? Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t think of anything else it was likely to mean. The Rulers had little trouble against any other wizards they’d run into on this side of the Glacier. Marcovefa, though, they respected—and, very likely, feared.

Of course, they also seemed to respect, and perhaps even fear, Hamnet himself. And if that didn’t say they weren’t as smart as they thought they were, Hamnet didn’t know what it was likely to say.

Trasamund pointed toward the oncoming mammoths. “We should advance against them,” he said. “The worst thing you can do is meet the enemy’s charge standing still.”

Hamnet would have thought the worst thing you could do was not meet the charge. Retreat and flight didn’t seem to enter Trasamund’s mind at all. Count Hamnet wished they didn’t enter his. If you were going to fight and not run, Trasamund gave good advice. Hamnet booted his horse forward. All along the line, Raumsdalians and Bizogots were doing the same. Nobody seemed enthusiastic, but nobody hung back. Hamnet usually admired that kind of dogged courage. Today, he wondered if it wasn’t harebrained, not dogged.

“There they are!” Marcovefa exclaimed, but by then arrows were already starting to fly. Whatever Marcovefa did to the Rulers’ wizards, she would have to do on her own.

Or so Hamnet thought, till he saw a host of Raumsdalian lancers burst from an orchard off to the east. They took the Rulers in the flank, spearing men on riding deer and rushing toward the enemy’s war mammoths. He wondered how she could conjure up so many men and make them seem so convincing.

Then he recognized the fellow leading the Raumsdalians: Baron Runolf Skallagrim, an old acquaintance of his, and a recent comrade-in-arms. Marcovefa knew Runolf, too. But could she have remembered him well enough to put him at the head of an imaginary army? Why would she do that when adding one more imaginary warrior was bound to be easier?

“They’re real!” Hamnet exclaimed. “They’ve got to be real!”

Ulric Skakki looked quite humanly surprised. “You mean your lady’s not just spitting phantasms at the Rulers?”

“Phantasms, my left one,” Hamnet answered. “Look! Tell me that’s not Runolf Skallagrim in charge of them and I’ll say they’re phantasms.”

“Well, bugger me blind,” Ulric said gravely after looking.

Baron Runolf had commanded the garrison at Kjelvik, another northern town. He’d fought the Rulers with Hamnet and Marcovefa the winter before—and fled with them when a slingstone knocked Marcovefa out of the fight and let the Rulers’ terrifying wizardry prevail. And he’d let Hamnet and his friends leave Kjelvik for the Bizogot country when Sigvat wanted to haul Hamnet down to Nidaros and make him pay the price for failure.

Count Hamnet hadn’t seen Runolf since coming back to Raumsdalia. He’d assumed that either the Rulers or Sigvat had done for his old friend. He’d never been gladder to find himself wrong.

The Rulers hadn’t expected to get attacked from the flank as well as the front. Hamnet Thyssen had seen what surprise could do to Raumsdalians and Bizogots. The Rulers might be vicious invaders from beyond the Glacier, but they were also human beings. When everything went the way they expected it to, they were as near invincible as made no difference. When taken by surprise, they proved no less immune to panic than anybody else.

Runolf’s men slammed through the Rulers on riding deer. They would have slammed through a like number of Bizogots, too. The blonds who roamed the steppe below the Glacier didn’t have lancers armored head to foot in plate and chain, or the big heavy horses they would have needed to carry those armored lancers. Some of Runolf’s troopers even rode armored horses.

That didn’t mean they could face mammoths on equal terms. But a charging lancer was something warriors on mammothback couldn’t ignore. A couple of Raumsdalians drove sharp steel into the bellies and legs of the Rulers’ immense mounts. Mammoths liked getting speared no better than any other animals—or any people—would have. They screamed and bled and were lost to the fight.

Most of the time, the Rulers’ wizards would have done something horrible to Runolf Skallagrim’s knights before they got close enough to threaten the riding deer, let alone the mammoths. Not here. Not today. Whatever sorcerers the Rulers had with them had frustrated Marcovefa by not showing themselves. She frustrated them by blocking not only the spells they aimed at her force but also the ones they tried to use against Runolf’s men.

All that left the fight pretty much the way it would have been if there were no such things as wizards and shamans. And, if anything, it left the Rulers even more discomfited than they would have been if merely—if that was merely—struck in the flank by surprise.

Trasamund bellowed in delight when one war mammoth after another turned around and lumbered off to the south. “Run, cowards! Run!” he roared after the retreating Rulers. “Can’t stand it when real men come up against you, can you? Yes, run, you scuts!”

One of the main reasons the Rulers were running was a woman, not a man. Hamnet Thyssen almost pointed that out to Trasamund. Almost, but not quite—he didn’t feel like quarreling with the jarl. And he had worries of his own. Retreating southward, the Rulers only moved farther into the Raumsdalian Empire. He wanted to drive them out of it, not entrench them in it more deeply.

Mammoths also moved faster than horses. If the Rulers on mammoth-back intended to get away, he couldn’t do anything about it. Marcovefa might have, but the enemy’s wizards still left her as thwarted as she left them. That added up to a victory of sorts for the Rulers, though not one they were likely to appreciate.

Hamnet rode toward Runolf Skallagrim. “Well met, by God!” he called.

“That you, Thyssen?” Baron Runolf answered his own question: “I’ll be damned if it isn’t. I figured the bastards on the mammoths would have done for you by now, or else the Emperor.”

“That’s funny,” Hamnet said, though he wasn’t laughing. “Bugger me blind if it isn’t. I figured either Sigvat or the Rulers would’ve done for you by now, too.”

Runolf laughed. He was older and grayer than Hamnet, and less inclined to brood about things. (As far as Hamnet knew, Runolf had never had a woman betray him, which might or might not have meant something.) “Nah, not me,” he said now. “The Rulers have become close a time or three, but I managed to talk Sigvat out of it.”

“Did you?” Hamnet said, deeply impressed. “More luck than I ever had. How the demon did you pull that off?”

“I told his courier I’d rise against him if he tried to arrest me,” Runolf answered stolidly. “Sigvat must’ve believed me, because he hasn’t given me any guff since.”

“Good for you,” Ulric Skakki said. “Good for you!” He turned to Hamnet. “You see? You’re too loyal for your own good. Sigvat got away with doing all kinds of things to you that he never would have dared to try if he’d been a little bit more afraid of what you’d do to him.”

“Maybe,” said Hamnet, in lieu of admitting that the adventurer had a point. He brought things back to the business at hand: “You popped out of those trees at just the right time, Runolf.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t seen the Rulers all tangled up with your people,” Runolf Skallagrim said. “You mess with war mammoths when you don’t have to, you’re sorry you did. Everybody in Raumsdalia’s found that out the hard way.”

“Everybody up on the Bizogot steppe, too,” Count Hamnet agreed. Trasamund gave what had to be the most reluctant nod he’d ever seen from the jarl.

“Looks like you were in the middle of a straight-up fight with the Rulers,” Runolf remarked. “They didn’t have a sorcerer along? You haven’t got one along yourself?” He shook his head. “That’s not right. I know it’s not. I saw what’s-her-name—Marcovefa—with you.”

“Yes, she’s here,” Hamnet said. “She and the Rulers’ wizards seemed to battle one another to a standstill.”

“Better than what any Raumsdalians have been able to do—that’s for sure,” Runolf said.

“Yes, I know.” Hamnet left it there. Ulric Skakki and Trasamund probably understood why. If Runolf didn’t, Hamnet didn’t feel like spelling it out for him. Up till now, Marcovefa had thrashed almost all the sorcery the Rulers aimed her way. She’d had trouble with the disease they sent against the Bizogots, but she’d won straight-up contests of sorcery—till this one.

Was she weaker than usual? Had the Rulers had an uncommonly strong wizard among the ones facing her? Hamnet Thyssen didn’t know, but he was sure he needed to find out. Marcovefa was the only edge he’d had on the enemy. If he didn’t have that edge, what was he supposed to do next? No—what could he possibly do next?

MARCOVEFA TOASTED A chunk of riding-deer liver over a fire. She seemed more interesting in eating than in answering Hamnet’s questions. While she ate, she answered most of them with shrugs.

Hamnet persisted. He always persisted, no matter how little good it did him, no matter how much it irritated people who had to deal with him. Marcovefa scowled at him. When she finished the liver, she said, “I don’t know what all it was. We won. Why worry about it?”

“Would we have won if Runolf Skallagrim hadn’t been there to give us a hand?” Hamnet answered his own question: “I don’t think so.”

“Maybe we would have. I think we would have,” Marcovefa said. “One way or another, I always come up with something.”

“Always?” Hamnet mimed a slingstone bouncing off the side of her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Nothing like that this time,” she said. “A little better magic than usual, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”