Breath of God

frighten his horse. He guided the animal to one side and slashed at the enemy fighting man with his own blade.

Yammering something Hamnet couldn’t understand, the warrior turned the stroke. He cut at Hamnet, too. The Raumsdalian noble beat aside the curved blade. He was taller in the saddle than the man from beyond the Glacier, as his horse stood several hands higher than the deer. He chopped down and laid open the deer’s shoulder. The enemy warrior couldn’t give all his attention to his swordplay after that, and combat was too serious for anything less. Hamnet Thyssen hacked him out of the saddle.

Mounted on horses, the Bizogots also had the advantage of height on the deer-riding Rulers. Wherever horses confronted deer, the Bizogots surged forward. But the enemy’s mammoths were another story. They dominated their part of the field. The Bizogots could not stand against them.

“Hold fast! Hold fast!” Trasamund and Totila shouted, both separately and together. Hamnet admired the Bizogots for not giving way to panic. It was as if they were fighting a swarm of fortresses that moved as fast as any horse.

Hamnet looked around for Liv. He did that as often as he could. Getting into the battle meant he couldn’t stay as close to her as he would have liked. But when he saw her with her arms upraised and a furious look on her face as she cried out to the heavens, he spurred towards her as fast as he could.

“No!” she shouted. “By God, no!”

She looked as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, as if she were trying to bear up under more than anyone was supposed to carry. Hamnet Thyssen slashed the air with his sword, hoping to help as he had when her spirit flew north to see what the Rulers were doing. If that did any good, he couldn’t see it or sense it.

Where was Audun Gilli? Could he come to Liv’s aid? Count Hamnet heard his angry cry – he too sounded like a man in over his head. What were the Rulers’ wizards doing? Whatever it was, they were putting a lot of strength into it.

Hamnet looked around for Odovacar. If that wasn’t a measure of his desperation, he couldn’t imagine what would be. He didn’t see the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman. A moment later, he did hear a howl that sounded as desolate as the shouts that came from Liv’s throat and from Audun’s. No ordinary dire wolf would come so close to a battlefield till it could feed on corpses, so that had to be Odovacar.

And then, despite everything the Bizogot shamans and the Raumsdalian wizard could do, the sorcerous storm broke on the army Trasamund and Totila led. Hamnet Thyssen thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, making him see enemies where there were none, where there could be none.

But then a warrior of the Rulers almost killed him. Not all the foes he thought he saw came from his imagination alone. He watched Bizogots fall because they could not tell false foes from true. And he suspected, though he could not prove, that some of the false foes turned true because the Bizogots thought them true.

Liv cried out again. Her hands twisted in furious passes. For a moment, Hamnet s vision cleared – but only for a moment. And the effects of Liv’s spell didn’t reach very far. Bizogots more than a bowshot from her seemed as bedeviled as they ever had.

“No!” Trasamund’s deep roar reached across the battlefield. “These lying mammoth turds can’t get away with that!”

But the Rulers could. They did. And, with their enemies reeling in confusion, their wizards threw another spell at them. From what seemed every direction at once, icicles flew at the Bizogots like arrows. Shields turned some; thick leather clothes stopped others. But some struck home, wounding men and horses alike. The spell probably would have been more dangerous, more deadly, in the heart of winter than at the tag end of the season, but it was bad enough as things were.

“Stop them!” a Bizogot screamed at Liv, blood running down his face. “Don’t let them do that!”

“I’m trying!” she screamed back. None of the darting, plunging icicles had struck or even struck at her. She seemed able to protect herself. Hamnet had shattered one with his sword, but only one. She could ward him, too, to some degree. She lacked the strength to extend her reach to the whole Bizogot host.

So did Audun Gilli and Odovacar. If they could have, they would have – Hamnet Thyssen was sure of that. Coping with wizardry and war mammoths both all but unstoppable … How long could the Bizogot army hold together?

Ulric Skakki shot a fellow who was plainly a leading officer among the Rulers off his mammoth. The man had been yelling orders and pointing this way and that, directing his men as a band leader might direct his musicians. Hamnet Thyssen hoped his fall – and he did fall, bleeding, into the snow – would throw the enemy into disarray and buy the Bizogots time to regroup.

Losing their commander did discomfit the Rulers … for a minute or two. Then another of their officers, noting or learning that the commander was down, took over for him. He shouted orders. He pointed this way and that. And the enemy army pulled itself together and went back to the business of crushing its opponents.

“They’re good, God curse them,” Ulric Skakki said.

“They’re better than good. They’re smoother than we are, let alone the Bizogots,” Count Hamnet said. “We couldn’t lose a captain and shrug it off like that.” He didn’t even talk about what would happen if Trasamund or Totila were badly wounded here. He knew, and so did Ulric – the Bizogots would fall to pieces.

Even without losing their chieftains, they fell to pieces anyhow. It didn’t happen all at once, the way it might have if a jarl fell. No one could deny the Bizogots’ courage. But when courage without much direction ran up against courage with discipline, and against war mammoths and superior sorcery, it came up short.

At first by ones and twos, then in small groups, then in clusters, the Red Dire Wolves – those who could – broke free of the press and rode off to the southwest. They knew where their herds roamed. If they were to survive as a clan, they had to protect the beasts. Men from the Three Tusk clan rode with them. Fierce and desperate as Trasamund’s Bizogots were, they were made of flesh and blood; they had limits. The Rulers inflicted enough punishment on them to push them to those limits and beyond.

“Cowards!” Trasamund roared, watching his own clansmen retreat with the Red Dire Wolves. “Where are your ballocks?”

“Your Ferocity, what more can we do here but get killed to no purpose?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. “Can we beat the Rulers in this fight?”

Trasamund sent him a look full of hate. “Not you, too? Well, run away if you want to. I came here to fight, by God!” He’d done plenty of that; his great two-handed sword was smeared and splashed with blood all along the blade.

“Did you come here to throw yourself away?” That wasn’t Count Hamnet – it was Liv. “We’ve lost this battle. We’re beaten. If we try again, when we try again, it will have to be somewhere else. We still must have our revenge. But can’t you see we won’t win it here?”

Plainly, Trasamund didn’t want to heed her. Just as plainly, she was right. Totila called, “We’ve got to get away, save what we can!”

Seeing his fellow jarl flee the field seemed to bring Trasamund to his senses. “Away, then,” he said bitterly. “Away! Will we spend the rest of our lives running away from the accursed Rulers?”

It’s possible, Count Hamnet thought. If the invaders could bring in enough men and mammoths through the Gap, they would be very dangerous indeed. Hamnet had feared they would fight well. They turned out to fight even better than he’d expected.

How hard would they pursue? If they pressed the chase with everything they had in them, they might shatter the Red Dire Wolves forever. But they didn’t seem willing – or, more likely, able – to do that. They’d won, yes, but not easily. And so the Bizogots escaped them and broke off the fight. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how much difference it would make.

Not many thingsin the world were grimmer than the camp of an army that had just lost a battle. The wounded were sullen, feeling they suffered pointlessly. The men who’d got away safe were angry and embarrassed, having done their best to no purpose. And everyone was apprehensive, fearing the enemy would fall on them while their spirits were at a low ebb.

The warm weather around the camp made the snow melt, and the drips reminded Hamnet Thyssen of tears shed for the cause. That was more fanciful than he usually got, but he couldn’t help it.