Breath of God

was. But when she wanted to, she could assume as many years and as much dignity as she pleased. It was an unusual gift, and not a small one, either.

She led the Bizogots and Raumsdalians south and west with a fine display of confidence. Count Hamnet wondered what lay behind it. He wondered if anything did. Maybe she was willing to sacrifice herself to strand them on the Glacier and rid her clan of the threat they posed. But when that thought bubbled up from the dark places at the bottom of his mind, he shook his head. He could imagine it, but he couldn’t believe it. She acted like someone who knew what she was doing and where she was going.

Of course, a madwoman would act that way, too. Hamnet was much less certain Marcovefa and the real world touched each other very much.

Why are you following her, then? he asked himself. But the answer to that was all too plain: even if she was leading them to disaster, what did they have to lose? Staying up here was only disaster of a different kind. The miserable cannibal life the men of the Glacier led showed that all too clearly.

He skirted another puddle atop the Glacier. “What do you suppose would happen if it all melted?” he asked.

“Never happen,” Trasamund said. “Not while we still live.”

Those two things weren’t the same, though the jarl didn’t seem to understand it. Even if he and Hamnet Thyssen lived to grow long white beards – which seemed most unlikely at the moment – they would die in an eyeblink of time as far as the world went. Not so far long ago, as far as the world went, the Glacier had pushed down to not far north of Nidaros. The country around the present capital was much like the Bizogot steppe in those days. If the Glacier disappeared, this northern land might turn out not to be so useless, too.

But Trasamund wouldn’t be here to see it. To him, nothing else mattered. Well, that made a certain amount of sense, or maybe more than a certain amount. But Hamnet tried to take a longer view.

Marcovefa said something. Ulric answered. She said something else. Ulric translated:” ‘The day is coming,’ she says, or maybe, ‘The day is here.’“

“Not here yet, by God,” Hamnet said. “Or what are we walking on?”

Again, Ulric turned that into words Marcovefa could understand. She gave back one word. “Illusion,” Ulric said.

“Well, as long as it fools my feet, I’m not going to worry about it,” Hamnet said.

The Bizogots caught a few voles in patches of greenery. Marcovefa had a bird net and a chant that seemed to lure birds into it. But there weren’t many to lure. They steadily went through the meat they’d got from the shaman’s clan. Count Hamnet began to wonder if they would have enough to get back to the crag at need. Before long, he stopped wondering: they wouldn’t. Marcovefa led them towards the edge of the Glacier – the rim of the world, she called it – with perfect and sublime certitude.

When they got there, they could look down at a sea of curdled white clouds that hid the Bizogot country from the eye. Count Hamnet and Ulric stared at each other, both appalled, but neither, somehow, enormously surprised. Liv glanced over towards Marcovefa as if wondering what her fellow shaman would do now. Audun Gilli, by contrast, only shrugged, as if to say, Well, this is interesting, isn’t it?

But Trasamund exploded like a tightly shut pot forgotten atop a fire. He didn’t just curse Marcovefa – he screamed at her. He pulled his two-handed sword from the sheath he wore on his back and brandished it, bellowing, “We ought to carve steaks off you, you worthless, mangy trull!”

Marcovefa answered more calmly than Hamnet Thyssen thought he could have managed under such circumstances. She said something that set Ulric giggling helplessly. “What was that?” Hamnet asked.

“Something like, ‘Why didn’t your mother spank you when you were little?’ “ the adventurer answered.

Trasamund didn’t ask for a translation. He kept on raving. When Count Hamnet thought he really might swing that sword, his feet went out from under him and he sat down, hard, on the Glacier. He was lucky the sword didn’t skewer or slice him. Marcovefa looked the slightest bit smug – enough to convince Hamnet that the Bizogot’s pratfall was no accident.

Even Trasamund seemed convinced after trying four times to stand and failing again and again. “Give over!” he told Marcovefa, holding up a hand in token of surrender. “I’ll put the blade away. By God, I will!”

The shaman didn’t speak the ordinary Bizogot tongue. What Trasamund said couldn’t have meant much to her. But she seemed to grasp the essentials behind or under language. She knew what the jarl meant even if she didn’t know what he said. With a nod whose somber dignity the Raumsdalian Emperor might have envied, she signaled that he was free from her spell. When he tried to get to his feet once more, he succeeded.

He shuddered. “She knows somewhat of shamanry, all right,” he said to Hamnet Thyssen. “But why the demon didn’t she know the Glacier here is just like the Glacier everywhere else except at that one big avalanche?”

“If I could tell you, I’d be on my way towards making a pretty fair shaman myself,” Count Hamnet answered.

Liv shook her head. “I am a fair shaman, or I like to think I am,” she said. “I have no idea why we’re here.” Then she turned to Audun Gilli and asked, “Do you?” Hamnet wished she hadn’t, even if he understood why she had.

Audun started to shake his head, too, but hesitated. “Nooo,” he said slowly, “not unless . . .” He did shake his head then, firmly and decisively. His voice firmed as he repeated, “No,” and continued, “The whole idea is too ridiculous.”

“And what about this mess isn’t?” Ulric asked. “Come on – out with it.”

But Audun wouldn’t talk. All he said was, “If we know, we’ll know without any doubt. And if we don’t, we’ll be too busy starving to worry about it.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Ulric said. Not even his sly mockery could pry any more words out of the Raumsdalian wizard. Marcovefa looked on with what Hamnet would have called innocent amusement if he hadn’t already figured out that she was much less innocent than she seemed, and in a way that had nothing to do with her taste for cannibal feasts.

Arnora came over and linked her arm with Ulric s. “We may as well camp here,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere – that’s for sure.”

Marcovefa asked a question. Hamnet Thyssen would have bet it was, What did she say? The shaman didn’t understand everything that went on around her. Words spoken without strong emotion behind them remained opaque. Ulric translated for her. She said something else. Ulric asked her a different question. She repeated herself – Hamnet could hear that – more emphatically.

“What now?” he asked Ulric.

“She says we all die before our time if we camp here,” the adventurer replied.

Arnora tossed her shining head. “What does she know?”

“More than you do, sweetheart, when it comes to things up here,” Ulric said. Arnora pulled her arm free and glared at him.

“I think maybe the woman from the men of the Glacier is right. Maybe.” Audun Gilli always spoke the Bizogots’ language slowly and clumsily. Now something new was in his voice. Only the way he looked at Marcovefa helped Hamnet Thyssen give it a name. Awe. Without a doubt, it was awe.

“Where do we camp if we don’t camp here?” Trasamund asked, eyeing the westering sun. “Wherever it is, we’d better take care of it before too long. I know twilight lingers, but not forever.”

Marcovefa led them away from the edge of the Glacier, back in the direction of the mountain refuge from which they’d come. She still had an imperious certainty that made anyone else doubt her at his peril.

“Why didn’t she just tell us to stop where she wanted us to stop?” Arnora grumbled. “Instead, she almost led us off the tallest cliff there is.”

“I don’t think she knew the cliff was still there,” Ulric answered.

“You don’t think she knew?” the Bizogot woman said shrilly. “And you followed her anyway?”

Ulric only shrugged. “Have you got a better idea?”

Arnora opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Up here atop the Glacier, there were few good ideas to have. The best one, to Hamnet Thyssen’s way of thinking, was not to get stuck here in the first place. But when the only other choice was staying where you were and getting slaughtered, trying to reach the top of the Glacier suddenly looked a lot better. It had to Hamnet not long before, and it must have to the ancestors of the men of the Glacier sometime in the dim and vanished past.