Breath of God

retreat anyhow. He went on shouting it as retreat turned to rout. He went on shouting it – roaring it out at the top of his lungs – long after he must have stopped believing it.

Ulric Skakki was bleeding from a gashed ear – the kind of wound that splattered gore all over the place without meaning much. “How come we’re going the wrong way if we can beat them?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.

“Oh, shut up,” Count Hamnet explained.

Ulric nodded gravely, as if the explanation meant something. “Makes as much sense as anything I could have come up with myself,” he said.

Hamnet pointed south – actually, a little west of south. “Are those riding deer?” he asked.

“Well, they aren’t glyptodonts – that’s for sure,” Ulric said.

“They’re cutting us off from the other half of the army. They ‘re cutting us off from the Red Dire Wolves’ herds, too,” Hamnet said.

“They’re good at war. They’re better than the Bizogots, because they come into fights with a plan,” Ulric said. “They’re going to be a lot of trouble.”

“They’re already a lot of trouble,” Count Hamnet said. “And they’re herding us the way you’d herd musk oxen – or even sheep.”

“Baaa,” Ulric said – or was it Bah?. Hamnet couldn’t tell. The adventurer went on, “What do you think we can do about it?”

“Right now? Not a cursed thing,” Hamnet answered.

“Well, that’s what I think we can do about it, too,” Ulric Skakki said. “Nice to see we agree about something, isn’t it? And it’s nice to see the Rulers can run a pursuit when they feel like it, eh?”

“Fornicating wonderful,” Hamnet said. Ulric laughed, for all the world as if that were funny … for all the world as if anything were funny.

“Where’s Totila?” Ulric Skakki asked after looking around.

Count Hamnet also looked for the Red Dire Wolves’ jarl. “Don’t see him.”

“He must be with the other bunch – if he’s still anywhere,” Ulric said. Glumly, Hamnet nodded. He didn’t see Odovacar any more, either. Was the shaman still alive? Hamnet wondered if he would ever know.

Then he had more urgent things to worry about. A warrior of the Rulers, shouting something unintelligible, slashed at him with a sword. He parried and gave back an overhand cut. The enemy fighting man turned it with a little round leather buckler he wore on his left arm. His riding deer tried to prod Hamnet’s horse with its antlers. The Raumsdalian cut again. He wounded the deer’s snout. The animal let out a startled snort and started to buck, just the way a horse would have. The man on it had everything he could do to stay in the saddle. Hamnet Thyssen got a good slash home against the side of his neck. Blood spurted. The warrior let out a gobbling wail and crumpled.

A tiny victory – too tiny to mean anything in the bigger fight. The Rulers went right on driving this band of Bizogots north and west, away from the larger group farther south. Every so often, an arrow would bite, and a man or a horse would go down.

Spring days had stretched in a hurry. That let the Rulers push the pursuit longer and harder than they could have at a different season or, say, down in the Empire. After what seemed a very long time, night finally fell.

“We must be backup in the lands of the Three Tusk clan,” Liv said when the Bizogots – and Hamnet, and Ulric, and Audun Gilli – finally stopped to rest. She sounded ready to fall over from exhaustion, or possibly from despair.

“What are they going to do – chase us till they smash us against the Glacier?” Maybe Ulric meant it for a sour joke. But it sounded much too likely to Hamnet Thyssen.

Vl

The sun cameup too early. Count Hamnet munched smoked mammoth meat. He scooped up water with his hands from one of the countless ponds, and hoped it wouldn’t give him a flux of the bowels.

And then one of the rearguard shouted that the Rulers were coming. Swearing wearily, Hamnet climbed up onto his horse. The animal’s sigh sounded all too human, all too martyred. It was weary, too. Hamnet didn’t care. If he didn’t ride, the Rulers would kill him. If he did, he might get away to fight again later on.

“What did we do to deserve this?” Trasamund groaned as they headed north and west again. “Why does God hate us?”

“It hasn’t got anything to do with God,” Ulric Skakki said. “The weather’s warmer, so the Gap melted through. That’s all there is to it.”

“All, eh?” Trasamund said. “And who made the weather warmer? Was it you? I don’t think so. Did God have a little something to do with it? Well, maybe.”

Ulric grunted. The jarl’s sarcasm pierced like an arrow. And the weather was warmer, without a doubt. This would have been a warm day down in Nidaros, let alone here on the frozen steppe. Count Hamnet wondered whether the steppe would stay frozen if weather like this persisted. What kind of country would this be if it ever thawed out all the way?

Up ahead, growing taller every hour, loomed the Glacier. Imagining it gone from the world seemed lunatic. Only a few years earlier, though, imagining it split in two would have seemed just as mad. Whether God had anything to do with it or not, the Glacier was in retreat.

“Does this land belong to the Three Tusk clan?” Hamnet asked. “Or have we come so far west, we’re in the country of – what’s the next clan over?”

“They are the White Foxes,” Trasamund answered. “They are a pack of thieves and robbers, not to be trusted even for a minute.”

To Raumsdalians, all Bizogots were thieves. The harsh land in which they lived made them eager to grab whatever they could, and not worry about silly foreign notions like ownership. If Trasamund thought the White Foxes were thieves even by Bizogot standards, that made them larcenous indeed . .. unless it just said the Three Tusk clan looked down its collective nose at its neighbors.

Ulric Skakki must have had that same thought, for he asked, “And what do the White Foxes say about the Three Tusk clan?”

“Who cares?” Trasamund missed the sly mockery in Ulric’s voice. “With a pack of ne’er-do-wells like that, what difference does it make?”

“You still didn’t say whose land this is,” Hamnet pointed out.

“These are not Three Tusk grazing grounds. That much I know,” Trasamund said. “Maybe they belong to the Red Dire Wolves, maybe to the White Foxes. But I have roamed every foot of our land, and this is none of it. Can you not see how much poorer it is than the lands we use?”

Hamnet Thyssen could see nothing of the sort. He doubted Trasamund could, either. The Three Tusk jarl reflexively boasted about the glories of his clan and its grazing grounds – or rather, the grazing grounds the clan had once held, the grazing grounds now under the Rulers’ sway.

His horse thudded and squelched its way to the northwest. It was tired and blowing. He didn’t know what he’d do if it foundered. He shook his head. That wasn’t so. He knew all too well: he would die.

He was worn himself, worn and nodding. But he jerked upright when a deep rumble, as of distant thunder, came from the direction in which he was riding. He thought at first it was thunder, but thunder from a clear blue sky with the warm sun shining down would have meant God was taking a more direct interest in worldly affairs than he seemed to be in the habit of doing.

“What the – ?” he asked Liv.

“I think it was an avalanche,” she answered. She looked even wearier than he felt, which he would have thought impossible if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes. But she hadn’t merely fought in yesterdays battle; she’d worked magic all through it, which would drain anyone. After a yawn, she continued, “Sometimes chunks of the Glacier will crash down when the weather is like this. It will melt near the top and sometimes set everything farther down in motion.”

“Lucky it didn’t do that at the Gap,” Hamnet exclaimed.

“Farther north there – it’s usually cooler.” Liv pointed ahead. “Look at all the dust rising from the plain. It was an avalanche, and a big one, too.”

Sure enough, a cloud of dust like the ones that sometimes rolled across the plains of the Empire was climbing