The Golden Shrine

Ulric Skakki stared at him in artfully simulated disbelief. “A Bizogot jarl admits the times are changing? What is this sorry old world coming to?”

“I don’t know. By the past couple of years, nothing good,” Trasamund said. “But I’m not dead yet, and some more of those maggoty musk-ox turds are. That, I like. And I know the world is changing. Was I not the first man through the Gap?” He struck a pose, there on horse back.

Ulric didn’t tell him no. But the adventurer had gone through the Gap the winter before him. None of the Three Tusk Bizogots knew Ulric had crossed their grazing grounds, and he didn’t want it known.

Trasamund pointed to the wizards’ blackened corpses. “A good thing these burning bastards didn’t start grass fires. That could have been a nuisance.”

“I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re not wrong,” Count Hamnet said.

“Grass fires can be very bad,” Trasamund said. “Not now, but later in the year—at the end of summer and the start of fall, before the first snows. We don’t get much summer rain here, and things dry out. When fires start, they can spread and spread. They can ruin grazing grounds. When that happens, wars follow. You have to have somewhere to take your herds. Or, if the fires catch the animals, you have to grab someone else’s. When it’s that or die, you do what needs doing.”

“I suppose so,” Hamnet said. He’d fought in plenty of wars with less behind them than life and death.

Trasamund pointed to the stone huts. “Let’s make sure we haven’t got any more vermin skulking in there.” A Raumsdalian would have spoken of serpents or scorpions. The frozen steppe lacked a few unpleasant things, anyhow. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “We can live off the fat—by God, the goose grease—of the land . . . for a while, anyhow. Then things get hard again. They always do, curse them.”

No more Rulers remained. Hamnet Thyssen did wonder why so many wizards had come together. When he wondered out loud once more, Ulric said, “To plot mischief against us. Why else?”

“I can’t think of any other reason, either,” Hamnet replied. “I wish I could.”

“Maybe your lady friends and Audun will figure out what they were up to from the stuff they left behind,” Ulric said.

Hamnet gave him a stony look. “Liv is not my lady friend these days. You may perhaps have noticed.”

“Perhaps.” Nothing bothered Ulric Skakki—or if it did, he didn’t let it show, which served about as well. Still in that blithe vein, he went on, “You don’t have to hate a lover after she leaves you, you know. You can, yes, but it’s not a requirement. Liv’s a lady—no doubt about that—and she makes a good friend whether you’re sleeping with her or not.”

“Do I tell you how to run your life?” Hamnet growled.

“As a matter of fact—yes.”

That caught Hamnet with his mouth open. He closed it before a bug flew in—at this season of the year, a real worry on the Bizogot steppe, not just a way for mothers to scold their children. He feared Ulric was telling the truth. He did like to run other people’s lives, not just his own. Feebly, he said, “Well, I’ll try not to do it any more.”

“No, no. Try to do it less,” Ulric said, which only made his confusion worse.

COMPARED TO PROPER houses, Raumsdalian houses, the huts the Leaping Lynxes had run up were sorry. Their roofs were thatch over a framework of bones held together with sinew. No one had tended to them since the Rulers ran the Bizogots away from Sudertorp Lake. That left the huts draftier than they might have been. During springtime, though, it wasn’t such a great hardship.

Hamnet and Marcovefa took one of the huts for their own. He threw out the bones and other trash that had accumulated in there. Marcovefa gave him a quizzical look. “Why bother?” she said. “It doesn’t stink or anything.”

“You don’t care much about house keeping, do you?” he said.

“I don’t care any about house keeping,” Marcovefa answered. “Why bother? I save caring for things that matter.”

He supposed that made sense. Lots of people he knew had made sense lately: Marcovefa, Ulric Skakki, even Trasamund. To quote Ulric, what was this old world coming to?

But . . . to stay friends with a woman who’d left you? To stay friends with a woman who’d left you for a weed of a man like Audun Gilli? Hamnet could believe Ulric was friends with a swarm of women in the Empire and on the frozen steppe and likely elsewhere as well. Ulric didn’t take anything or anybody seriously. If he ran into a woman he’d slept with once upon a time —well, so what? He wouldn’t fret about it.

When Hamnet met a woman, though, he always thought she was the woman. And he hated admitting even to himself that he might have made a mistake. If things didn’t work out, then, of course he blamed the woman for the failure. How could you stay friends with someone you blamed?

He glanced over at Marcovefa. If things went wrong between them, would he wind up shunning her, too? He suspected he would. He seemed to work that way, whether Ulric Skakki approved or not.

She was looking at him, too. She beckoned. “Now that we have this clean floor thanks to you, we ought to use it. I said I would thank you for that arrow before. Now I will.” She shrugged out of her jacket.

It was still light outside. Bizogots cared much less about privacy than Raumsdalians. Living the way they did, that was no surprise. It also held true for their cousins from atop the Glacier. Hamnet preferred privacy, but he’d spent enough time among the Bizogots to do without it at need.

Had she thanked him any more thoroughly, he thought he would have fallen over dead. He couldn’t imagine a more enjoyable way to go. After his heart stopped thudding quite so hard, he said, “I should save you more often.”

“Why not?” Marcovefa agreed lazily.

She seemed in no hurry to put her clothes back on. When Hamnet was younger, he would have tried for a second round in a little while. Now that he was the age he was, he knew he would have to wait longer. Most of the time, he took that for granted. Sprawling naked beside an inviting woman who was also a powerful shaman, he realized he might not have to.

“Can you do anything magical to get him back into shape again in a hurry?” he asked.

She looked at him sidelong. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know. You’re the wizard,” he said.

“How about this?” She leaned over and did something. It should have raised the dead. Raising the middle-aged proved a bigger challenge. She muttered to herself, then murmured to herself, then began a chant in her own dialect. The tune she chose almost made Hamnet start to laugh. Down to the southwest of the Raumsdalian Empire, the Manche barbarians had wizards who could charm snakes with music. Marcovefa had never seen a snake—well, she’d never seen a two-eyed snake, anyhow—but her tune was a lot like theirs.

And it worked. Like a charmed snake, he rose to the occasion. She nodded to herself. “There it is,” she said. “Now what do you want to do with it?”

He did laugh then, so much that he lost what she’d given him. She didn’t seem too annoyed about repeating the spell. Hamnet found something to do with it after all. Marcovefa seemed contented afterwards, too.

“Again?” she asked then.

Count Hamnet remembered that. He remembered thinking about the answer. He didn’t remember giving it, which was fair enough, because he fell asleep before he could. When he woke up, he found Marcovefa had pulled a blanket cut from a mammoth hide over the two of them. He was still bare under the hide. A moment later, he discovered she was, too.

It was still light outside. No: it was light again. The brief northern night had come and gone, and the sun was shining from a different direction now. Marcovefa stirred only a couple of minutes after Hamnet did. “Happy now?” she asked him. Her voice said she was smugly certain of the answer.

And he nodded. “With you? Yes, I should hope so.” But he went on, “I’d be happier if we could drive the Rulers back beyond the Gap.”

Marcovefa grunted. She got out from under the blanket and, in a marked manner, got into her clothes. She paused only once, to say, “No wonder you lose women.”

“No wonder at all,” Hamnet agreed mournfully, wondering if he’d lost her, too. All he did was answer the question she asked him. He didn’t even forget to say something nice about her. But then he went on to the rest of what was in his mind. Too late—as usual—he realized that was his mistake. When would he ever learn? No. Would he ever learn, late or otherwise?

“You are what you are, that’s all.” Marcovefa seemed to be reminding herself. She shrugged. “Well, who isn’t?”

Since she seemed willing to leave it there, Hamnet Thyssen didn’t push it, either. As he also dressed, he decided not pushing it was a good idea, and progress of a sort. That also would have been too late to do him any good had he decided the other way.

The Bizogots had a fire of dried dung going. They were roasting meat above it. Hamnet’s stomach rumbled. There were appetites, and then there were appetites. Filling your belly wasn’t so much as making love, but you wouldn’t go on making love very long, even with sorcerous assistance, if you were empty.

Hamnet got a musk-ox rib. Instead of gnawing on it, he gave it to Marcovefa. Then he grabbed another one for himself. Maybe she would recognize the peace offering, maybe not.

She certainly ate with good appetite. Bizogots always did, and their close kin from atop the Glacier even more so. And the only way she could have got more off the bone was with a rough tongue like a lion’s. Her tongue wasn’t the least bit rough. Hamnet knew that as well as a man could.

She took another rib, and denuded that one, too. “You people are so lucky to have such big meat-beasts,” she said. “Do you know how lucky you are? Voles, pikas, hares . . . That’s all we knew. Well, that and the beasts that go on two legs.”

“I was up there. I saw how you lived,” Hamnet said. “You did what you could with what you had. People everywhere do the same.” He thought of the Manches again, and of how they scraped a living from their desert. That wasn’t the same as what the Bizogots did, but it wasn’t necessarily easier, either.

“There is so much more to have down here,” Marcovefa said. “The animals . . . The trees . . . The—what do you call them down in the Empire? The crops! That’s it. Plants that aren’t berries, but you can eat them anyhow. And the big berry things that grow on trees—”

“Fruit,” Hamnet said. Apples and pears and plums surprised the Bizogots, too. They had nothing like them.

Marcovefa wasn’t done. “And the head-spinning stuff, the smetyn and the beer and the wine . . . Once in a while, we find mushrooms to send shamans into the spirit world. You go whenever you want. You are so lucky! I am so jealous!”

Count Hamnet wouldn’t have called getting drunk going into the spirit world. When he did it, he mostly did it to forget whatever was troubling his spirit. But it was new and wonderful to the shaman from atop the Glacier. Everything was new and wonderful to Marcovefa. She was like a child in a fairyland. If it sometimes looked like a nightmare to Hamnet, maybe he was the jaded one.

And maybe he’d seen enough of the world down here on the ground to have a better notion of what was what than she did. He suspected that was so, but didn’t make the claim out loud. He didn’t feel like arguing. Besides, he might have been wrong. He rather hoped he was.

Ulric Skakki also snagged a second rib. He took a bite, then nodded to Hamnet. “Cozy little place we’ve got, isn’t it?”

“Till the Rulers find out we’re here,” Hamnet replied. “How long do you think that will take?”

“Depends on whether any of them got away yesterday,” the adventurer said. “I don’t think so, but I’m not sure. Or maybe one of the wizards got word out magically, and they already know. Won’t be long any which way. When the wizards don’t show up wherever they’re supposed to, the Rulers will come see why not.”