Breath of God

far too much for someone sleeping in it by himself. He tossed and turned all night.

Ulric and Arnora had the room next door. The walls weren’t thick enough to mute their screaming row – or the way they made up afterwards. Hamnet Thyssen plopped his pillow over his head. It didn’t block out the sounds of lovemaking, which did nothing to help him drop off.

He came downstairs the next morning pouchy-eyed and grumpy. Beer and bacon made a good breakfast, but couldn’t get him moving very fast. That Liv and Audun Gilli came down right after him only made things worse. They sat at a table halfway across the taproom – they weren’t trying to torment him, as Gudrid would have – but his eyes kept sliding towards them.

Audun faced him. The wizard was smiling and happy and voluble. Hamnet knew the feeling; he’d enjoyed it himself not long before. He could see only the back of Liv’s head. The way she held it made him sure she was happy, too. Maybe he was imagining things, but he didn’t think so.

Ulric Skakki walked in and sat across from Hamnet. That kept him from seeing Liv unless he peered around the adventurer, which was probably part of what Ulric had in mind. It didn’t help much, though. He didn’t need to see Liv with his body’s eyes to see her inside his mind.

To try to blot out that bright, shining image, he glowered at Ulric and said, “You’re bloody noisy – you know that?”

“Not all my fault,” Ulric said. “Arnora gets her share of the blame. More than her share, to tell you the truth – she enjoys quarreling over nothing, and I don’t.”

“Cursed walls are thin,” Count Hamnet said, sipping from his mug. “By now, I know just about everything she enjoys – and you, too.”

“I told you you needed to get laid,” Ulric said with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “All that stuff is turning sour inside of you. It can’t be healthy. You’ll end up like one of those bull mastodons in” – he snapped his fingers, looking for a word -”what the demon do they call it?”

“Musth,” Hamnet answered.

“That’s it!” Ulric agreed. A serving girl came over to the table. He ordered breakfast, then turned back to Hamnet Thyssen. “They’d be a lot happier if they found a friendly female, and so, by God, would you.”

“There’s no such thing as a friendly female,” Hamnet said stonily. “Not if you’re looking for something that lasts.”

“Not always true. A lot of the time, maybe, but not always,” Ulric Skakki said. “Besides, if all you’re trying to do is steer clear of musth, you don’t care whether it lasts or not. You musth believe me, my deer fellow.” He lisped with malice aforethought.

Count Hamnet grimaced at the pun and at the sentiment. “It wouldn’t mean anything,” he insisted.

“It would mean you could sleep at night. Is that so bad?”

“It would take more than that,” Hamnet said.

“That would be a good start.” Ulric looked back towards the stairs to make sure Arnora wasn’t coming. He lowered his voice: “If you want to take my not quite beloved off my hands, I won’t say a word. I’ll be glad I don’t have to worry about her, to tell you the truth. And since you say you know what she enjoys. .”

“No, thanks.” Hamnet s ears heated. “I know what I’d enjoy, too, and she isn’t it.”

“Too bad.” The adventurer eyed him, one corner of his mouth canted up in rueful amusement. “I always remembered you were a hard case, but I didn’t think you’d be quite so hard as this.”

“Well, I am,” Hamnet said, not without a certain somber pride.

“All right. Fine.” Ulric made flapping motions with his arms, as if he were trying to get a duck to go where he wanted it to. “Some people are stupid enough to enjoy being miserable. I didn’t think you were one of those, but if you are, you are.”

The girl brought him breakfast then. He settled in and began to eat. He ignored Hamnet Thyssen altogether, or seemed to. Hamnet grumbled to himself; he didn’t think he enjoyed being miserable. He hated it. He would much rather not have been miserable – but who’d given him a choice? Not Gudrid. Not Liv, either. That was how it looked to him, anyway.

Kormak Bersi came down just then. He sat down next to Ulric and nodded across the table to Count Hamnet. “You look cheerful this morning,” he remarked.

“Oh, drop dead,” Hamnet snarled.

Some men would have drawn sword on him. Kormak only turned to Ulric and said, “He sounds as happy as he looks, too.”

“Somewhere down inside, I think he is,” Ulric answered. “Only he hasn’t told his face about it yet.”

“You should go up on stage and tell jokes,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “You could set a bowl at the edge, and everybody who laughed would throw money into it. You’d get rich in nothing flat. Then you wouldn’t need to go adventuring.”

“Matter of fact, I’ve done that,” Ulric said. “If you think this is a hard way to make a living, you ought to try it. And mostly they don’t throw money. What they do throw. .” He held his nose.

Hamnet had helped jeer bad comics and jugglers off the stage. He’d never thought about what they were feeling when the audience booed them and flung old vegetables or rotten eggs. They were doing the best they could, even if it wasn’t good enough. All at once, he understood that much too well.

When the travelers came to the western gate, they had to wait behind carts filled with produce and donkeys carrying baskets of fruit. The old lake bottom was Nidaros’ larder these days. A peasant woman with a young porker under each arm sassed the gate guards. By the way they gave back her cheek, they’d been harassing one another a couple of times a week for years.

A mounted party made up mostly of fierce-looking Bizogots was something else again. Aside from likely being dangerous in their own right, the travelers broke routine. That was plenty to make the gate guards suspicious all by itself.

“Give me your names,” ordered the fat, sloppy-looking sergeant in charge of the guards. One by one, the newcomers did. When Hamnet Thyssen announced himself, the sergeant jerked as if a wasp had stung him. “You can’t be here! I’m supposed to arrest you if you show your face around here!”

“Good luck,” Hamnet said. Not only did his companions outnumber the guards about four to one, each of them was probably worth at least two of these soft timeservers in a fight.

“He’s in my custody. No arrest needed,” Kormak Bersi said.

The sergeant sent him a fishy stare. “And who the demon are you!”

Kormak Bersi told him who, and what, he was. The agent displayed a bronze badge that proved he wasn’t lying. “Any more questions?” he asked, his voice ominously mild.

“No, sir.” The sergeant seemed to shrink into himself, and to shrink away from Kormak. He waved. The travelers rode into Nidaros.

Even Trasamund and Liv, who had been to the imperial capital before, stared in wonder. For the other Bizogots, Nidaros raised more than wonder – it raised slack-jawed astonishment. And for Marcovefa . . . What went beyond astonishment. Hamnet Thyssen had no word for it, but he knew it when he saw it.

“So many people,” she whispered. She used her own dialect, but he managed to understand it.

Nidaros’ streets ran from southeast to northwest, from northeast to southwest. A few ran from east to west. None went from north to south. If they had, they would have given the Breath of God a running start. Houses stood close together, so as not to let too much of the wind squeeze between them. They all had high-pitched roofs that would shed snow. All but the poorest had two walls on their north-facing side, the space between filled with air that helped blunt the cold. Doorways, without exception, faced south.

People from all over the Raumsdalian Empire, and from beyond, crowded the streets. Some of them looked to be tourists, gawking at the tall buildings and at the shoals of mankind of which they made up a part. Others hawked everything from mammoth ivory to fine swords to sabertooth fangs to tobacco from the far south.

Ulric Skakki bought some tobacco first chance he got. He charged his pipe, lit it with a twig he ignited at a sausage-seller’s brazier, and puffed out happy clouds of smoke. Marcovefa said, “I have seen you do that before. What good is it?”

“I like it,” Ulric answered. “I don’t need any more reason than that.”

She wrinkled her nose. “It stinks.”

“I don’t think so,” Ulric said. “But even if it does, so what, by God? Plenty of other stinks in a city the size of this