Breath of God

himself nothing the shaman could do surprised him much anymore. He’d already told himself the same thing several times, and been wrong every one of them.

After a while, the raven flew off towards the edge of the Glacier. Ulric’s eyes followed it. “Good bit of meat on a bird that size,” he remarked. “Those cursed things have got fat off us on every battlefield since the beginning of time. We could start paying them back.”

Even as he spoke, his gaze slid to Marcovefa. He might have known she would understand the essence of what he was saying. She came over to him and pulled his ear, exactly as if he were a naughty boy. Then she gave him a piece of her mind in her own language.

“She eats man’s flesh, but she draws the line at raven.” Audun Gilli shook his head.

“Maybe she does. She’s sure making Ulric eat crow, though,” Count Hamnet said, deadpan.

Audun started to nod. Then he caught himself and drew back from Count Hamnet as if the Raumsdalian noble had some rare, dangerous, and highly contagious disease. Chances were he did, too. At any rate, people often treated foolishness that way.

An hour or so later, the raven came back. No one tried to catch it or kill it. It perched on Marcovefa’s shoulder again and croaked in her ear. One of the croaks sounded like soon to Hamnet Thyssen. He scratched his ear, wondering if he’d heard that or only imagined it. He knew ravens could be trained to speak, but he had trouble believing this one had been. He had even more trouble believing it had been trained to speak a language he understood.

Was he becoming like Marcovefa, then, and gaining the ability to grasp meaning even without knowing a language? He had an enormous amount of trouble believing that.

The shaman scratched the base of the raven’s beak with a forefinger. That beak might have been able to bite the finger off. Instead, the raven nuzzled her like a lovesick pup. Getting it to do something like that – getting it to want to do something like that – probably wasn’t magic in any ordinary sense of the word, but Hamnet had a hard time deciding what else to call it.

A warm breeze ruffled his beard and the raven’s feathers. For the moment, maybe even for the season, the Breath of God, the cold, ravening wind from the Glacier, had failed. It would blow again when the year turned; Hamnet was sure of that. But for now, even here, the wind came up from the south.

Liv and Audun Gilli both stiffened at the same time, like two hunting dogs taking a scent. Liv stared at Marcovefa. Audun exclaimed, “She really did!”

Hamnet Thyssen felt the Glacier shudder under his feet. Earthquake, he thought. He was safer here than he would have been in Nidaros. In bad earthquakes, people died when heavy things fell on them. The only thing that could fall on him here was the sky.

Along with the shaking came a deep bass rumble from the south, a rumble and a crashing and a roar. When Hamnet looked that way, he didn’t see anything. Maybe his wits were slow, because he didn’t grasp what the noise might mean.

Clever as usual, Ulric did. His trouble was different: he tried hard not to believe it. “She couldn’t have known an avalanche was coming, . . could she?” he said, his own doubt showing in the last two words.

Although the raven fluttered its wings when the shaking and rumbling started, it stayed on Marcovefa’s shoulder. The shaman stroked the bird, calming it. Did she look pleased with herself? If she didn’t, Hamnet lacked the words to describe the way she did look.

At last, the commotion subsided. Marcovefa said something in her language. Everyone else looked towards Ulric for a translation. Reluctantly, he gave one: “She says we can go down now.”

“She knew. She knew.” Audun Gilli made it sound more like an accusation than praise. “Even back on the mountainside, she saw the avalanche coming.”

“He’s right,” Liv said, not something Hamnet wanted to hear from her but not something he could disagree with, either. “She must have known.”

“She’s a shaman, not a sham, sure enough,” Ulric said. “The only thing she didn’t know was just when it would happen – and I don’t think she cared.”

Marcovefa said something else. Even Hamnet thought he understood it: when didn’t matter. Maybe she was right, maybe she was wrong. Either way, she sounded very sure. She didn’t wait to give Ulric a chance to translate. She just started walking south. Every line of her body made it plain that she didn’t care whether the Bizogots and Raumsdalians went with her. No matter what they did, she would try to descend from the Glacier.

They did follow, of course. Something occurred to Count Hamnet as they tramped along over the Glacier. He caught up with Ulric, who was walking not far from Marcovefa, and said, “Ask her if she knows of the Golden Shrine.”

“Well, I will, but what are the odds?” Ulric said.

Before he could ask the question in Marcovefa’s dialect, she stopped dead and stared at Hamnet Thyssen. A flood of words burst from her. Ulric held up his hands, as if to dam the flow. He didn’t have much luck. A moment later, he started to laugh. “What is it?” Hamnet asked.

“You impressed her – that’s what,” Ulric replied. “Up till now, she thought we were a bunch of godless savages. But if we know about the Golden Shrine, we can’t be so bad after all.”

“She understood me before you translated,” Hamnet said slowly, and the adventurer nodded. Hamnet went on, “What does she know, then?”

Again, Marcovefa started talking without waiting to hear the question in her tongue. She pointed north, then south. Ulric said, “She knows it’s somewhere not under the Glacier. It’s a salve for the good and a snare for the wicked, she says. You get from it what you bring to it. It makes you even more what you are already. I’m not sure what that means. I’m not sure she’s sure what she means, come to that.”

Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff. “I think she is,” Count Hamnet said. “Eyvind Torfinn talked about the place the same way, and he knows more about it than anybody.” Anybody except maybe a cannibal savage, he thought. How strange was that? Stranger than anything else here atop the Glacier? Hamnet doubted it.

The avalanche they’d heard proved even bigger than the one they’d climbed to get here. Marcovefa and her raven both looked smug. The way down lay open – if the travelers could take it.

X

Hamnet Thyssen hadthought climbing up tumbled and shattered blocks of ice was bad. And it was. How many times had he almost killed himself in the desperate scramble to escape the Rulers? Probably more than he realized, which said everything that needed saying all by itself. But descending made going up child’s play by comparison.

If you slipped while you were climbing, someone below you had a chance to catch you and save you. If you slipped on the way down, you went down yourself, maybe all the way down, and you had a good chance of starting another avalanche when you did it.

“By God, I wish we had more rope,” Trasamund said before they’d gone even a bowshot. “If we could tie all of ourselves together, a slip wouldn’t be so bad.”

“It might be worse,” Count Hamnet said. “If one of us slipped, he might carry everybody he was roped to down with him.”

The jarl grunted. He looked as if he wanted to tell Hamnet he was wrong. He didn’t, though, because too plainly the Raumsdalian was right. Disaster waited under their feet at every step they took. They might have done better staying up on the Glacier. . except that they would soon have begun to starve.

“That other avalanche had a chance to settle down before we tackled it.” As usual, Ulric sounded most cheerful when the going was worst. “This one’s still shifting and sorting itself out.”

“You noticed that, too, did you?” Hamnet pointed down the steep slope.

Crashes and thuds farther down told of more shifting below. “This one’s a long way from finished – but it can finish us any time it wants to.”

“Don’t give it ideas. It’s bound to have enough of its own,” Ulric said.

“I wish I could call you a liar,” Hamnet said. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians had separated into little groups of three and four and five, each group staying as far from the others as it could. If one set of climbers did touch off another avalanche, with luck it wouldn’t sweep them all to their doom. With luck.