The Golden Shrine

think we should be able to.”

“You have a trouble, a problem. You bring it to me. Now you don’t want me to fix it,” Marcovefa said. “Where is the sense in that?”

“Losing scouts is a problem,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Losing you is a catastrophe.” Then he had to explain what a catastrophe was: “Worse than a problem. Much worse.”

“But you won’t lose me,” Marcovefa said. “Don’t think so, anyway.”

“You don’t think so,” Hamnet echoed discontentedly. “Don’t you see? That isn’t good enough. Without you, we’re nothing.”

“You are more than you think you are,” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know how much you are. You have no idea.”

“Do you mean me, or do you mean all of us?” Hamnet’s wave encompassed the ragtag army he’d helped build.

“Yes,” Marcovefa answered, making herself as annoying as if she were Ulric Skakki.

Count Hamnet fumed, but only to himself. “Which?” he asked.

“I mean you, and I mean everyone,” Marcovefa said. “It is not a question with only one answer. If you were not stronger than you think, the Rulers would have won a long time ago. Don’t you see that?”

“Well . . . maybe.” Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. He’d got used to looking down on himself. Why not, when everyone else did. That was how his thoughts ran, anyway. Losing first Gudrid and then Liv did nothing to make him feel better about himself, either.

“No maybe,” Marcovefa said. “It is a truth. An important truth, too.”

“Maybe,” Hamnet said again—he didn’t want anyone making him happy against his will. “All I know is, whenever we went up against the Rulers in any kind important fight before we climbed to the top of the Glacier and found you, we lost. The only reason we climbed it was because it gave us one chance in a thousand to get away from the Rulers. If we stayed down on the Bizogot steppe, the mammoth-riders would have killed us all.”

Smiling, Marcovefa shook her head. “Not so simple.”

“No?” Sure enough, Count Hamnet didn’t want to believe anything. “Then what were we doing up there?”

“I think the Golden Shrine sent you.” Marcovefa sounded as matter-of-fact as if she’d said something like I think the Three Tusk clan sent you.

No matter how matter-of-fact she sounded, she made Hamnet Thyssen gape. “How do you know something like that? How can you? Did God tell you?” He didn’t believe God went around doing such things. He was sure God didn’t do them with him. He wished God did.

“God didn’t tell me anything. I don’t know this is true. But I think so. We all need the Golden Shrine now. Maybe never in all the time since it disappeared do we need it more,” Marcovefa said.

How long had the Golden Shrine been lost? Hamnet didn’t know if he’d ever heard a number of years. Eyvind Torfinn would know, if anyone did. What he didn’t know about the Golden Shrine, nobody knew. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t feel like asking him. Dealing with Earl Eyvind was too likely to mean dealing with Gudrid. As long as Hamnet didn’t have to do that, he didn’t want to.

But he couldn’t help wondering how many people down through the ages had been sure their time was the worst one possible. They would have been sure they had to have the Golden Shrine’s help, too. No matter how much they needed it, they wouldn’t have got it. Some would have gone down to ruin without it. Others, he supposed, would have got through on their own.

Clumsily, he tried to explain that to Marcovefa. It seemed very clear inside his own head—much less so when he put it into stumbling words. She heard him out, then said, “Things are worse now.” As before, she sounded very matter-of-fact, very sure.

“How can you know they are?” Hamnet demanded.

“I know what I know. And time is not all strung together in little pieces like beads on a string. Time is. All of it. At once,” Marcovefa said.

Hamnet muttered to himself. That sounded like nonsense to him . . . till he remembered how she’d led the little band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians to the edge of the Glacier, to the very spot where an avalanche would make the descent less steep, less difficult. But the avalanche hadn’t happened yet when they got there. She’d seen it through time, but she hadn’t quite seen it in time. Then the time came round, and they were able to climb down.

“Why don’t you know where the Golden Shrine is, then?” Hamnet asked.

The question didn’t interest Marcovefa. “It is where it is. It is where it needs to be. When it is appointed to show itself, show itself it will.”

Appointed to show itself. Count Hamnet wondered what that meant, and whether it meant anything. Marcovefa must have thought so. He didn’t ask her to explain—he didn’t think what she said would mean anything to him. He couldn’t see, couldn’t conceive of, all time as a single thing. He wondered if his inability was a curse . . . or a blessing.

XIV

THIS TIME, IT was the Breath of God. The wind howled down from the north, howled down off the Glacier. The ice might have retreated, but it was a long way from gone. The wind might have traveled a long way, too, but it was as cold as if it had blown but a few miles.

Hamnet Thyssen had cold-weather gear. So did every other Raumsdalian in his ragtag army. Down in the far south, beyond the Empire’s reach, Ulric Skakki insisted, there were countries the Breath of God never touched. Hamnet had traveled far enough south to find that likely, even if he couldn’t testify to it from personal experience. But men in these parts knew they had to stay warm through the winter or die.

So Hamnet donned furs with resignation. Most of the other Raumsdalians felt the same way. The Bizogots, by contrast, gloried in the cold weather. “Snow!” Trasamund exclaimed. “About time! Everything up in the Three Tusk country would be covered in white by now.”

“God’s dandruff,” Ulric said. He could take as much cold as anyone—slipping through the Gap to the lands beyond the Glacier in the middle of winter proved that. But he didn’t enjoy it the way the Bizogots did.

“Why, you blasphemous vole!” Trasamund blurted. A Raumsdalian would have called Ulric a toad or a snake, but creatures like that couldn’t survive up on the frozen steppe. The jarl did the best he could with what he knew.

“Your servant, Your Ferocity.” Ulric gave back a mocking bow.

Trasamund had put on mittens, which made it hard for him to wag a finger under the adventurer’s nose. Again, he did his best. “You should not speak so,” he said severely. “If you do, maybe God will not choose to show us where the Golden Shrine lies. Don’t you think we should be pure of mind, pure of heart, pure of speech, to deserve to learn where the Shrine is?”

To Count Hamnet’s amazement, Ulric shook his head. Hamnet hadn’t thought of Trasamund’s argument, and it seemed to him to carry weight. But Ulric said, “If God is waiting for people who are pure of mind and heart and speech, the Golden Shrine will stay hidden to the end of time. A good thing, too, because people who are that pure are hardly people at all.”

“You turn everything upside down and inside out!” Trasamund complained.

Ulric gave him another bow. “Your servant,” he repeated.

Trasamund swung at him. Hamnet could have told the Bizogot that was a mistake, even if he had been baited. But Hamnet never got the chance. Ulric Skakki turned Trasamund upside down and almost inside out: he grabbed the jarl’s arm, then dipped, wheeled, and threw. Trasamund’s startled shout cut off abruptly when he hit the ground. Not enough snow had stuck yet to soften his landing.

Count Hamnet helped him up. “How the demon did he do that?” Trasamund mumbled, shaking his head to try to clear it.

“He’s done the same thing to me,” Hamnet said, reasoning that misery loved company. And it was true. “He knows some wrestling tricks I’ve never seen before.”

“I know a trick, too,” Trasamund growled. “How about Bizogot stand-down?” He’d won that brutal game against the Rulers, as Hamnet had told Tahpenes while she was a prisoner.

“No, thanks,” Ulric said. “If you want me to admit your head is harder than mine, I’ll do it. You don’t have to prove it on me.”

“You—” But Trasamund couldn’t call him a coward, not after all they’d been through together. Since the word stuck in his throat, the jarl tried a different tack: “Will you show me that flip?”

“One of these days, maybe. Not right now,” Ulric answered. “Don’t you think we ought to ride?”

Most of the Bizogots and Raumsdalians were already mounted. Quite a few of them had watched Trasamund’s sudden, unexpected overthrow. No one had seen Hamnet fly through the air, though the thud he made on landing brought palace servants running to see what had collapsed. Neither of them had got badly hurt, but Trasamund’s dignity and pride took a worse beating.

The Bizogot did some more muttering. “Another time, then,” he said aloud. “In the meanwhile, I will take out on the Rulers what I think about you.”

“It’s all right by me,” Ulric said cheerfully. “If I were the Rulers’ chief, I’d start running right now.” Trasamund muttered yet again.

“Don’t push him too hard,” Hamnet said.

“Why not? What other fun do I have these days?” Ulric eyed him with a mild and speculative air. “Or should I start in on you instead?”

“If you want to,” Hamnet answered stolidly. “I can take it better.”

“But that means you don’t give so much sport.”

“Take what you can get,” Count Hamnet advised. “We need Trasamund—without him, the Bizogots fall apart like a snowball slamming into a rock. Nobody cares whether I’m happy or not. Nobody even cares whether I’m here.”

“Well, I would have said the same thing,” Ulric told him—if Hamnet left himself open for a thrust, the adventurer would deliver. So Hamnet thought, anyhow, till Ulric went on, “But Marcovefa thinks you’re wrong, remember? I’ll argue with you any day. I think twice before I decide she’s made a mistake.”

Hamnet Thyssen did remember what Marcovefa had said about him. Remembering it didn’t mean he believed it. It made him profoundly uneasy—he didn’t want to carry so much weight in the scales of the world. What he mostly wanted was to go back to his castle down in the far southeast and be left alone. He knew he was no more likely to get that than any of his other wishes.

“Marcovefa doesn’t know everything there is to know,” he said after a pause he hoped wasn’t too obvious—if it was, it would make a liar out of him all by itself.