Breath of God

“I’m with Ulric,” Hamnet replied. “I aim to please, too.”

They went into one of the tents and slid under a mammoth-hide blanket. Bizogots lived in one another’s pockets, especially during the long, hard northern winters, and needed less in the way of privacy than Raumsdalians did. They were better at looking the other way and pretending not to hear, too. By now, Hamnet had spent enough time among them to worry less about who might be watching and listening than he would have down in Nidaros.

All the same, he wasn’t sure how well he would respond after everything he’d eaten and drunk. Making love with a full belly took more effort nowadays than it had when he was younger. And his quarrels with Liv didn’t help, either.

But he succeeded. By the way she responded, he was better than good enough tonight. “You do still care,” she murmured as they lay in each other’s arms afterwards, their hearts slowing towards calm.

“I’ve always cared,” he answered.

“Too much, maybe.” Liv had said that before.

Hamnet Thyssen frowned. “How can a man care too much about a woman?”

“Easy enough,” Liv said. “If you care so much, if you worry so much, that you drive her away instead of pulling her towards you, isn’t that too much?”

“Are you saying I do that?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she replied, which was just polite enough to hold off a row. “But sometimes not, too.” She caressed him. “Not is better.”

“Better for you, maybe,” he muttered.

He was lucky: she didn’t hear him. She sprawled across him, warm and soft and, for the moment, happy. He found himself yawning. He didn’t usually fall asleep right after making love, but he didn’t usually eat and drink as much as he had beforehand, either. His eyes slid shut. He and Liv both started to snore about the same time.

Liv woke Hamnet the next morning by poking him in the ribs. His automatic response was to grab for his sword. Then he discovered he wasn’t wearing it – or anything else. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “But it’s noisy out there, and it doesn’t sound like good noise. We’d better find out.”

Hamnet listened and found himself nodding. No, the racket out there didn’t sound happy. If that wordless keening wasn’t a woman in mourning, then it was a woman desperately ill. The groaning man also sounded none too healthy.

Despite the noise, some of the Bizogots in the tent stayed asleep. Others, like him and Liv, were waking up. Down in the Empire, Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to get out from under the blanket and dress with so little privacy. He especially wouldn’t have wanted Liv to put herself on display like that. Bizogot customs were different, though. He didn’t worry about it… much.

The bright sunlight hurt his eyes and made his head ache. Yes, he’d poured down too much smetyn the night before. But he wasn’t nearly so bad off as Trasamund and Marcovefa. Their moans and groans had fooled Liv and him into thinking some real disaster had befallen the Snowshoe Hares.

Trasamund found a skin of water and poured it over his head. He came out blowing and snorting like a grampus. Then he found a skin of smetyn. That he applied internally. “I’ll be better in a while,” he said. “The hair of the dire wolf that bit me.”

Marcovefa said something that sounded pitiful. Hamnet Thyssen looked around for Ulric Skakki and didn’t see him. Maybe the adventurer figured out what the commotion was about. Or maybe he was just an uncommonly sound sleeper. Without Ulric around, Hamnet had to work out for himself what Marcovefa meant. He pointed to a skin of water and mimed pouring it over her. She looked at him through bloodshot eyes, then nodded.

She spluttered and coughed, then gasped out something Hamnet only half followed. He thought it meant, This is supposed to make me feel better?

“Here.” Trasamund thrust a skin of smetyn at her and showed her she was supposed to drink from it.

She recoiled in horror, water dripping from her hair and her chin and the end of her nose. The way she held out her hands as she spoke told Hamnet what she had to mean – that she didn’t want to get near smetyn ever again.

“Curse it, Thyssen, tell her it’ll make her feel better, not worse,” Trasamund said.

“I’ll try,” Count Hamnet told him. And he did, with the regular Bizogot speech and the few words of Marcovefa’s dialect he thought he knew and a lot of gestures. She didn’t want to believe him, for which he could hardly blame her. If it had poisoned her once, why wouldn’t it poison her again?

He tried to show her that a little would help but a lot would make things worse. At last, warily, she drank. It wouldn’t be a miracle cure; Hamnet knew that from somber experience. But chances were it would do her some good.

Euric looked more sympathetic than Count Hamnet had thought he would. He even kissed Marcovefa on the cheek. She must have pleased him when they went back into his tent together. What would she be like under a blanket? That was probably not the kind of question Liv wanted him asking himself.

Even if Marcovefa had pleased the jarl of the Snowshoe Hares, Euric did his best to wiggle out of the bargain he’d made with her the day before. He didn’t refuse to turn over a dozen horses. He did do his best to give the refugees the dozen worst the clan owned. A couple of them were visibly on their last legs. None of the ones he wanted to turn over looked capable of anything more than a lazy canter.

A few swigs of smetyn had made Marcovefa more nearly reconciled to staying alive. Ulric took her aside and murmured in her ear. When she pointed at Euric, he blanched. She spoke. Ulric translated: “She says not to be niggardly. If you can’t give with both hands, at least give with one.”

“But – ” Euric began. Then he swallowed whatever else he might have been about to say. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble figuring out why. After what he and Marcovefa had done the night before, she was able to work the most intimate kind of magic against him. He didn’t know she would, but he didn’t know she wouldn’t, either. Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to take that chance himself.

Then he glanced over to Liv – glanced more nervously than he wished he would have. Whatever Marcovefa could do to Euric, Liv could do to him . . . if she decided she wanted to. When you fell in love with, or even made love with, a shaman, you took chances you didn’t with an ordinary woman.

Euric did give with one hand. He still passed on some of his clan’s horrible screws, but he also gave away some horses that didn’t look as if a strong breeze would blow them over. He sighed and moaned and mourned about every one of them, so much so that Hamnet wondered if he was laying it on too thick. But Hamnet knew more than a little about horses himself, and the replacements weren’t bad animals. Euric was just unhappy he had to give them up.

With half the Bizogots and Raumsdalians mounted but the rest still on foot, the band of refugees moved no faster than it had before. If the clan south of the Snowshoe Hares had enough horses to let everybody here ride, things would pick up. In the meantime, the nags didn’t slow the travelers down.

Liv and Arnora and Marcovefa rode most of the time. The men took turns on the other horses. Hamnet didn’t mind walking. He’d got used to it. He did begrudge their sorry pace, though. “Who knows what the Rulers are doing farther east?” he said.

“Come on – you know and I know and the rest of us know,” Ulric Skakki said. “They’re chewing up every Bizogot clan that gets in their way.”

Hamnet Thyssen winced, not because he didn’t find that likely but because he did. He wished Ulric hadn’t been so blunt. “You don’t think we’ll be able to pull the Bizogots together to fight them, do you?” he said.

“Well, it gets harder when they’re going south faster than we are,” Ulric replied – another painful truth.

“We may have to ride south and warn the Empire,” Hamnet said. “When we get the horses to do it, I mean – and if it’s not too late by then.”

“Yes. If.” Ulric was nothing if not discouraging. But then, with the way things were, there was too much to be discouraged about.

They got no help from the Rock Ptarmigans. Well before they found the clan’s encampment, Hamnet Thyssen began to fear that might be so. His first moment of worry came when the travelers approached a herd of mammoths.

The beasts awed Marcovefa. “The Rulers ride these, you say?” she asked, and Hamnet had no trouble