Breath of God

rest of the year. It tries to, anyway.”

“Half light and half dark anywhere you go,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Only the way they’re blended is different.”

“Yes.” Liv stared up at the moon. It washed the shadows and lines from her face; she might have been a marble bust, not a woman of flesh and blood. Seeing her lips move as she spoke again, seeing that her lips could move, seemed startling. “I suppose people are the same way. Only the – what did you call it? – the blend is different.”

“It could be,” Hamnet said. “I don’t know that it is, but it could be. Even the wickedest man won’t tell you he’s wicked. He won’t think he is. Whatever he was doing, he was doing for the best of reasons – or he thinks he was, anyway.”

“Even the Rulers are heroes in their own eyes.” Liv s mouth twisted. “But not in mine. Oh, no – not in mine.”

Her clan was shattered. She hadn’t been there when the Rulers struck, hadn’t pitted her wizardry against theirs. That the Rulers would have rolled over the Three Tusk clan anyhow seemed as certain to Hamnet Thyssen as tomorrow’s sunrise. Telling Liv as much was pointless. He knew, because he’d tried.

What could he have done to keep Gudrid from betraying him all those years ago? Nothing, very likely; faithlessness was in her blood. That didn’t keep him from lacerating himself even now, or from wishing things might have been different.

It also didn’t keep him from lacerating himself about Liv whether he needed to or not: indeed, it drove him to do just that. But it blinded him to why he did it, too, and blinded him to his being blind. That, of course, he could not see.

“What are we going to do?” Liv cried. Hamnet thought she meant the two of them, but she went on, “What are the poor sorrowful Bizogots going to do?”

“Fight the enemy,” Hamnet answered. “What else can you do?”

“But every time we try, we lose!”

He shook his head. “You’ve beaten them – we’ve beaten them – in raids.”

She brushed that aside, as being of no account: “We can nip them when we catch them without a shaman. But when they have one, we lose.”

“The Empire’s wizards aren’t to be despised,” Hamnet said.

“Don’t you think the Rulers will smash them?” she returned. “Their magic is of much the same kind as ours. Maybe they know a bit more, or maybe they can do a bit more, but it is of the same kind. And how much good has that kind of magic done against the Rulers?”

“Not enough,” Count Hamnet admitted.

“Hardly anything!” Liv cried in a passion of fury most unlike her. “Whatever we try, even against their mammoths, they do something better – or rather, something worse – to us. Do you really think the Empire’s wizards can stop them, or even slow them down very much?”

“If they can’t,” Hamnet said slowly, “then this whole land is in even more trouble than we thought it was.”

“It is!” Liv said. “It is!”

“The only other choice is rolling on our bellies, the way the jarl of the Green Geese was thinking of doing,” Hamnet said. “I can’t do that. Can you?”

“No. I can’t do anything at all, and I hate it,” Liv said. “One of the best things about being a shaman is that you’re able to change things, able to make them better. Against the Rulers, I can’t, and it drives me wild. We’re running away from them, and that seems to be the most we can do.”

He put an arm around her. She clung for a moment, then broke away. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip. He couldn’t even manage to comfort her.

“Why did you come to me?” he asked, his voice wooden.

“Because -” She broke off. “Oh, never mind.”

“Because why?” he asked. He could come up with answers on his own. The likeliest one was, Because Audun Gilli’s asleep. Even imagining that one did wonders for the way he felt about himself.

Liv didn’t say that, though. “Because if I kept quiet any longer, I thought my head would explode,” she told him. “There. Is that enough? Or do you want to stick any more thorns in me?”

Somehow, she’d twisted things so he was in the wrong. “I never wanted to do that,” he said.

“No, eh? Or did you just want to stick something else in me instead?”

“You know I do,” he answered, as steadily as he could. “I thought it went both ways. Maybe I was wrong.”

“No, but… Do you have any idea how impossible you are?”

“I do my best,” he said with a certain somber pride.

In spite of everything, that made her laugh. This time, she put her arms around him. He squeezed her, which made him do exactly what she’d said. For a moment, she squeezed him back. Then she twisted away again.

“Not now,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right.”

“Why not?” With the blood pounding in his veins, he couldn’t see any reason.

“Because that’s something you should do when you’re happy,” Liv answered. “I’m not happy now, not when I miss the clan so much.”

“I walked away from the Empire,” Hamnet Thyssen said. I walked away, and I want to make love with you anyhow.

“Yes, but you walked away from somewhere you didn’t fit any more,” Liv said. “I belonged in the Three Tusk clan. I’ll never find any other place where I belong half so well.”

She was right about him. He’d stayed on the fringes of imperial life as much as he could for years before deciding to give it up and come north. She’d had a place where she belonged till the Rulers robbed her of it. He’d thought he fit with Gudrid. After he found out how wrong he was there, he’d been on his own, an uncomfortably independent island in an ocean full of people sure of their places and comfortable in them.

“Let it go, then,” he said gloomily – not that he wanted to let it, or her, go, but that he had not the energy to quarrel over it. He wondered what he would have had the energy to quarrel about just then. A sudden irruption of the Rulers, perhaps. Getting excited about anything smaller seemed more trouble than it was worth.

Maybe Liv caught some of that in his voice. “I don’t mean never,” she said. “I only mean not right now.”

“I know.” Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t make himself get very excited even about being turned down. And if that wasn’t a sign of something badly wrong deep inside his spirit, then it wasn’t, that was all.

“Well,” Liv said. The word seemed to hang in the air. Hamnet knew he ought to say something, anything, but nothing came to him. He couldn’t even care about not caring. Liv sighed. “I’ll go back to the rest of them, then, and leave you here to stand your watch.” She walked away, looking back over her shoulder once. Was she hoping he would call out to her? He nearly did, but again kept silence.

After what seemed a very long time – but, by the slow wheeling of the moon and stars, was no longer than it should have been – a Bizogot came out to relieve him. “Anything funny going on?” the man asked. “Anything strange?”

“No,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “It’s been pretty quiet.”

He walked back to the encampment, lay down, and got a little sleep before the early-rising sun stuck slivers of light under his eyelids and forced them apart. Someone had built up the fire. Hamnet carved off a gobbet of musk-ox meat and began toasting his breakfast. “You look cheerful,” Ulric Skakki said.

“I doubt it,” Hamnet answered.

Mechanical as if moved by clockwork, he climbed aboard his horse and rode off with the rest of the travelers. If he nodded in the saddle, he wasn’t the only one. And then Trasamund pointed south and let out a bellow of mingled fear and fury.

Riders ahead . . . Riders not on horses but on deer . . The Rulers! Apathy fell from Count Hamnet like a discarded cloak. He strung his bow and made sure his sword was loose in its sheath. If they wanted to go on, they would have to fight. Yes, he was ready for that.

Xlll

Fighting held a welcome simplicity. No time to brood. No time to think. Only to do, and to do fast. Your body