Breath of God

He had no good answer for that. “Can you do anything about their mammoths?” he asked.

She smiled at him the way a mother might smile at a fussy child. “We can do things,” she replied. “I don’t know whether they’ll work the way we hope, but we can do them.”

He had to be content, or not so content, with that. He worried as he rode forward with the Bizogots. If Liv and Audun and Odovacar couldn’t stop or slow down the mammoths, this battle was lost before it began. They had to see that, didn’t they?

Liv did. Audun probably did. Odovacar? Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure how much Odovacar saw, or how much it mattered.

Closer now. The mammoths loomed up ahead like perambulating mountains. The riding deer out to the flanks weren’t nearly so formidable. Where were the Rulers’ wizards? What new deviltry were they planning?

The Bizogots shouted Totila’s name, and Trasamund’s. They shouted for vengeance. They roared out their hatred of the Rulers. They shook their fists. They yelled curses that probably wouldn’t bite. And the Rulers yelled back. Hamnet Thyssen still knew next to nothing of their harsh, guttural speech. All the same, he doubted that the invaders were praising the Bizogots or passing the time of day.

Arrows started to fly. “Do you see?” Ulric Skakki said. “They’ve put more armor on their mammoths.”

Hamnet hadn’t noticed, but Ulric was right. The thick leather sheets did cover more of the enormous beasts. “I don’t care how much they put on,” Hamnet said. “Leather won’t turn a square hit.” As if to try to prove the point, he nocked an arrow and let fly.

Ulric Skakki also began shooting. “I don’t think they can armor their deer, or not very much,” he said. “Those have all they can do to carry men. They don’t have any weight left over for armor, too.”

Down in the Empire, heavy cavalry horses would carry a trooper, his coat of mail, and iron armor of their own. Charges of such knights were irresistible . . . except, perhaps, by mammoths. But the Bizogots had neither such big horses nor such armor. Their warriors wore cuirasses of leather boiled in oil – when they wore armor at all. Their horses had no more protection than the Rulers’ riding deer.

Deer and horses, then, made larger, easier targets than warriors. Wounded animals shrilled out cries of pain that reminded Hamnet Thyssen of women in torment. Listening, he wanted to stuff his fingers in his ears to block out the horrid sounds. But his hands had other things to do.

He methodically drew and shot, drew and shot. His bowstring didn’t break, as it had in the last fight against the Rulers. Liv had set a spell on it, and on many others, to ward against the enemy’s sorcerous mischief. Audun and Odovacar had also seen to the Bizogots’ bows. So far, their charms seemed to be working.

Bizogot horsemen were at least a match for the warriors of the Rulers on riding deer. But horsemen could not withstand the Rulers’ war mammoths. Fight as the Bizogots would, the mammoths drove a great wedge into the center of their line, threatening to split their force in two.

“If you can do anything at all about those God-cursed beasts, this would be a mighty good time!” Hamnet shouted to Liv.

“I’ll try,” she answered, and said something to Audun Gilli, who rode close by. The Raumsdalian wizard nodded. He began what Hamnet recognized as a protective spell, to keep Liv from having to guard herself while she made a different kind of magic.

Count Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to cast a spell while riding a bucketing horse and hoping no enemy arrow struck home. That was what Liv had to do, though, and she did it as if she had years of practice. Her voice never wavered, and her passes were, or at least seemed, quick and reliable. Hamnet admired her at least as much for her unflustered competence as for her courage.

And suddenly the ground in front of and under the Rulers’ war mammoths began to boil with .. . with what? With voles, Hamnet realized, and with lemmings, and with all the other mousy little creatures that lived on the northern steppe. Some of them started running up the mammoths’ legs. Others squeaked and died as great feet squashed them. Still others started up the mammoths’ trunks instead of their legs.

The mammoths liked that no better than Hamnet would have enjoyed a sending of cockroaches. They did odd, ridiculous-looking dance steps, trying to shake free of the voles and lemmings. If they also shook free of some of the warriors on their backs, they didn’t care at all. The Rulers might, but the mammoths didn’t.

And those mammoths particularly didn’t like the little animals on their trunks. They shook them again and again, sending lemmings flying. They didn’t pay any attention to the battle they were supposed to be fighting.

Where the war mammoths had forced their way into the center of the Bizogots’ line, now they suddenly halted, more worried about vermin than violence. The Bizogots whooped and cheered and fought back hard. Had the confusion in the enemy ranks lasted longer, and had they met with no confusion of their own . . .

Hamnet Thyssen often thought about that afterwards. Much too late to do anything about it then, of course.

In the battle, he shouted, “Ha! See how you like it!” He shot an enemy warrior who’d fallen from his mammoth, and then another one. They would have done the same to him. They’d tried to do the same to him. But he’d succeeded against them. And Liv and Audun and Odovacar had succeeded against their wizards.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he discovered it did not do to count the Rulers’ wizards out too soon. The air suddenly darkened around the Bizogots. Hamnet had thought he knew everything there was to know about bugs in the north when the steppe unfroze. He quickly found out how naive he’d been.

As Liv and her comrades called voles and lemmings to the Rulers’ mammoths, so the enemy wizards called insects to the Bizogots and their horses. Some always buzzed about; all you could do was slap and swear. But now the mosquitoes and gnats and flies descended in a cloud as thick and choking as if woven from the long hairs of the woolly mammoth. Horses bucked and thrashed in torment, lashing their tails against the overwhelming onslaught.

Fighting was next to impossible with so many bugs assailing every unclothed inch of skin. Even breathing wasn’t easy. Hamnet Thyssen coughed and choked. Something nasty that wiggled and tasted of blood crunched between his teeth. Gnats kept getting in his eyes. He rubbed frantically.

The bugs didn’t seem to bother the Rulers or their animals, or no worse than usual. Why am I not surprised? Hamnet thought bitterly. The enemy’s war mammoths were still distracted, but the warriors on riding deer seemed unaffected by either side’s sorcery.

Not far from Hamnet, Liv was slapping and scratching and spitting as desperately as he was. “Make it stop!” he shouted to her. “By God, you have to!”

“If we do, we’ll have to let go of the spell that calls the little animals to their mammoths,” she answered.

He might have guessed that. “I think you’d better do it anyhow,” he said. “They’re hurting us worse than we’re hurting them.” Saying that tasted bad .. . but not so bad as the insects that filled his mouth and furred his teeth.

Liv said something that should have made every insect in the world burst into flames. It should have, but it didn’t. She shouted to Odovacar, who didn’t hear her, then to Audun Gilli, who did. Audun nodded – indistinctly, through the curtain of bugs.

A Bizogot right in front of Hamnet caught an arrow in the throat, gurgling when he tried to scream and drowning in his own blood. That could have been me, the Raumsdalian thought, and shuddered, and got another gnat, or another three, in his eye. He ducked to rub at himself, and an arrow hissed past just above his head. If he were sitting straight on his horse, it would have caught him in the forehead. Sometimes whether you lived or died was nothing but luck.

He could tell when Liv and Audun and possibly Odovacar began to fight the mad swarm of insects the Rulers’ wizards had summoned. The bugs went from impossible to intolerable all the way down to extremely annoying. He could spit bugs out of his mouth faster than they flew in. He wasn’t swallowing or inhaling so many. He could even see, sometimes for a minute or two at a time.

And what he could see was that everything had its price. As soon as the Bizogot shamans and Audun Gilli abandoned their spell to fight the one the Rulers were using, the lemmings and voles they’d called to the battlefield did what anyone would expect little animals to do in the presence of big ones – they ran away. And the war mammoths, no longer bedeviled, surged forward once more.

“We can beat them!” Trasamund shouted again and again. He went on shouting it after he pulled an arrow out of his left hand. He went on shouting it after the Bizogots, having fought as hard as anybody could fight, had to