The Breath of God

I
The Breath of God blew down hard from the north. Here in the Bizogot country near the Glacier, the wind off the great ice sheet blew hard all winter long. Hamnet Thyssen’s own breath smoked as if he  were puf.ng on a pipe. He wished he were, though Ulric Skakki liked tobacco better than he did. Unless Raumsdalian traders had brought a little up from the south, there was none for hundreds of miles.
Count Hamnet was a Raumsdalian himself. He was large and dark and dour, with a black beard that had a streak of white above a scar and some scatterings of gray  elsewhere— and that looked whiter now than it really was, what with all the rime and snow caught in it. He wore  Bizogot- style furs and leather, with the stout felt boots that  were the best foot-gear ever made for .ghting cold. In spite of hooded jacket and furred trousers, he felt the frigid weather like an icepick in his bones.
Ulric was up from the south, too, though Hamnet  wasn’t sure the foxy- faced adventurer had been born inside the borders of the Raumsdalian Empire. Whether he had or not, he spoke Raumsdalian perfectly these days. Pitching his voice to carry through the shrieking wind, he said, “Things could be worse.”
“How?” Hamnet asked. “We could have frozen to death already?”
“Oh, you don’t freeze to death up  here, not if you’re careful. You just wish you could,” Ulric said, which was true. “That’s not what I meant. A couple of thousand years ago, we could have enjoyed this lovely weather down near Nidaros.”
Sigvat II, the Raumsdalian Emperor, ruled from Nidaros these days. Two thousand years earlier, the great city was no more than a hunting camp on the edge of Hevring Lake. The meltwater .lling the lake came from the Glacier, which in those days lay just to the north. The glaciers had fallen back all this way in the years since. Nidaros was almost temper­ate these days; barley grew there most years, and wheat in the warmer ones. Hevring Lake was long gone. When the ice dam that corked it melted through, it poured out to the west in a great .ood that carved out the badlands still scarring that terrain.
Despite the warming weather in the  south—or rather, be­cause of it— Hamnet Thyssen bared his teeth in a mirthless grin. “Better that, some ways, than this.”
“What?” Ulric mocked without mercy. “I thought you always wanted to go beyond the Glacier.”
“Not always. I didn’t used to think there was anything be­yond the Glacier,” Hamnet answered. “And even after I found out there was, I didn’t want what lived beyond the Glacier coming here, curse it.”
“Life is full of surprises,” Ulric Skakki said, which would have been funny if only it  were funny.
For some time now, the Glacier had been melting back to­wards the northwest and northeast, leaving a corridor of open land— the  Gap— between the two great frozen sheets. Now at last the Gap had melted through, allowing travelers from the south to discover what lay on the far side of the Glacier.
Up until that .nally happened, Hamnet Thyssen had always thought the northern glaciers went on forever. So had most Raumsdalians— and most of the nomadic Bizogots who lived north of them. The Golden Shrine? As far as Count Hamnet was concerned, the Golden Shrine was only a myth.
He knew better now. Oh, not about the Golden Shrine, which might still be mythical for all he could prove. But he’d gone beyond the Glacier himself. He’d seen the striped cats called tigers, which preyed there in place of the lions and sabertooths he knew. He’d seen the great brown bears that scooped salmon from streams unfrozen in summer. He’d seen vast herds of deer with both stags and does bearing  blunt- tined antlers.
And he’d seen the folk who rode those deer as men on this side of the Glacier rode  horses. The Rulers, they called them­selves. They not only herded woolly mammoths, as the Bizo­gots had for centuries uncounted, but rode them to war, with lancers and men with long, long lances on the beasts’ shaggy backs.
The Rulers seemed convinced any folk not of their blood were animals, to be tamed like mammoths or hunted and killed like wolves and tigers. They were not warriors to be despised, and their sorcerers had strength neither Raums­dalian wizards nor Bizogot shamans could easily withstand.
Trasamund rode up to Hamnet and Ulric. He too looked north. “Anything?” he asked, doing his best not to sound wor­ried. He was a big, burly man, bigger than Hamnet Thyssen, with piercing blue eyes and a thick, curly  red- gold beard al­most like a pelt.
“Hard to tell with this snow, Your Ferocity, but I don’t think so.” Hamnet gave the jarl of the Three Tusk clan his proper title of respect, even if the Rulers, pouring down through the Gap, had shattered the clan and left him a jarl with only a remnant of a folk to rule. Trasamund’s pride remained grand as  ever— grander, maybe, to help compensate for all he’d lost.
“A couple of men from the Red Dire Wolves are right be­hind me,” Trasamund said. “You southerners can  ride for the tents now. I know you’re feeling the weather worse than a man born to it would.”
“It gets this cold down in the Empire,” Ulric Skakki said. “It just doesn’t stay this cold from fall through the start of spring.”
“Well, go in anyway. Warm yourselves. Get some food.
You need more when it does stay like this.” Trasamund was right about that; Count Hamnet had seen as much. He ate like a dire wolf to keep from freezing, and didn’t gain an ounce. The Bizogot paused, an anxious look .itting across his face. “You can .nd your way back to the tents by yourselves in this weather?”
It wasn’t an idle question. With snow and wind wiping out tracks almost as fast as they were made, with visibility short, someone who didn’t know how to make his way across the frozen steppe could wander till he froze to death.
All the same, both Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki smiled. They weren’t Bizogots, born to the northern plains, but they could manage. Smiling still, Ulric said, “Yes, Mother dear.”
Trasamund’s snort birthed a young fogbank. “Scoff all you please,” he said. “Any Bizogot clan will tell you about Raums­dalian traders who ended up stiff clean through because they thought they knew more about this country than they really did.”
“We’ll get there,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He wheeled his horse. The beast seemed glad to face away from the Breath of God. Hamnet and Ulric rode south, towards the encamp­ment housing the remnants of the Three Tusk clan and the Red Dire Wolves, who guested them and who, reluctantly, joined them in the war against the Rulers.
One stretch of snowy, windswept ground really did look a lot like another. Count Hamnet was starting to wonder whether he and Ulric had bragged too soon when the Bizogots’ mammoth- hide tents appeared in the distance. The mammoths’ thick skins and the long, shaggy dark brown hair on them of­fered a barrier formidable even to the .ercest gales.
All the same, entrances invariably faced south. They did down in the Empire, too. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki tethered their  horses behind a snow- block wall that shielded the animals from the worst of the wind. They’d bought the horses in Nidaros, but the animals  were of the small, shaggy Bizogot breed, better suited to the harsh northern weather than other  horses.
Hamnet ducked into the tent belonging to Totila, the jarl of the Red Dire Wolves. He needed a moment to get used to the gloom inside. A couple of bone lamps burning butter made from the milk of musk oxen and mammoths gave only a dim, .ickering light. A brazier that burned dried dung added a lit­tle heat, but not much.
The brazier and lamps did contribute to the pungency. Hamnet Thyssen knew his nose would soon get used to it, but it was .erce when he’d just come in from the fresh if frigid steppe. Chamber pots of leather and wickerwork had tight lids, and people emptied them often, but their reek hung in the air. So did that of unwashed bodies, Hamnet’s own among them. Bathing in winter in the Bizogot country was asking for anything from chest fever to frostbite.
“Anything, Raumsdalian?” Totila asked. The Red Dire Wolves’ jarl sounded worried, for which Count Hamnet could hardly blame him. Now his clan, along with what was left of Trasamund’s, stood on the front line against the Rulers. Any blow that fell would probably fall on him.
He relaxed— a  little— when Hamnet Thyssen shook his head and said, “No.” Hamnet let his hood drop down off his head and undid the top toggle on his fur jacket. It was warmer inside the tent, though more from the body heat of the people it sheltered than from the brazier’s feeble little .re.
“I sense nothing amiss— nothing close, anyhow.” Liv was the shaman from the Three Tusk clan. She was close to thirty, with golden hair (short and greasy and dirty, as the Bizogots’ hair commonly was), cheekbones as proud and sharp and an­gular as the Glacier, and eyes of the deepest blue Count Ham-net had ever seen.
He’d studied those eyes from very close range indeed. He and Liv  were lovers. She was the only woman he’d met since Gudrid left him who made him . . . oh, not forget his former wife, but remember she  wasn’t the only .sh in the sea. And if that wasn’t a miracle, Hamnet Thyssen had never met one.
Totila went right on worrying. “Would you?” he asked. “Or could their magic mask their moves so you  wouldn’t know till they got right on top of us?”
“It could,” Liv said seriously, at which the jarl gnawed on his lower lip. Hamnet understood how he felt. He himself had fretted over the way things went in his county down in the southeastern part of the Empire. And his domain never faced danger close to that which hovered above the Red Dire Wolves like a teratorn soaring through the air in search of a fresh corpse to gnaw.
“What good are your precious senses, then?” Totila snapped.
Liv didn’t rise to his anger and fear. “Maybe no good,” she answered, “but I don’t think so. Masking movement on that scale isn’t easy for us or for the Rulers. And we have sentries out.” She nodded towards Hamnet. “Even if my spells do fail, sharp eyes shouldn’t.”
“They’d better not,” the jarl said. He too nodded towards Hamnet, though his expression was gruff, not fond. “Feed yourself. We have meat, and you need to stoke your .re.”
“I know.” The Raumsdalian took off his mittens.
The meat came from a mammoth liver. Hamnet Thyssen impaled a chunk on a long bone skewer and started toasting it over the  dung- fueled brazier. Through most of the year, the Bizogots didn’t have to worry about salting meat or smoking it to keep it edible. They had the biggest ice chest in the world right outside their tents.
They also had peculiar  tastes—or so it seemed to a man from farther south. Listen to a Bizogot and he’d tell you meat cooked with wood lacked .avor. They were used to what dung .res did, and they liked it. Count Hamnet was getting used to it, too. He had to, or eat his meat raw, or starve. Whether he would ever like it was a different question.
Mammoth liver would have been  strong- .avored stuff no matter what it was cooked over. Hamnet stolidly ate. He had to get used to being as carnivorous as a sabertooth, too. No grain up here— no bread, no porridge. No potatoes or turnips or even onions. In summer, the Bizogots varied their diet with the small, sweet berries that quickly ripened and then were gone. Those in the southern part of the frozen steppe gathered honey from the few hardy bees that buzzed about when the weather warmed and .owers blossomed frantically.
They were fond of mushrooms. But for that, they ate meat,
and occasionally .sh.
“Nothing wrong to the north? You’re sure?” Liv said.
He shook his head. “There’s plenty wrong to the north, and we both know it. But I didn’t see any sign that the Rulers were about to swoop down on the Red Dire Wolves.”
“That’s what I meant,” Liv said. “But I don’t think they’ll wait much longer.”
Hamnet Thyssen liked the .avor of that even less than he liked the .avor of dung- cooked mammoth liver. “Is that your feeling?” he asked. “Or is it what your magic tells you?”
“Not mine. Audun Gilli’s,” the shaman answered. “His seems better at piercing the wards the Rulers use than mine does.” She didn’t sound jealous, merely  matter-of- fact.
“Where is Audun, anyway?” Hamnet asked. The Raums­dalian wizard usually stayed in the jarl’s tent, too. He’d never learned much of the Bizogot tongue, and needed another Raumsdalian or Liv or Trasamund to translate for him.
“He’s with Theudechild, in the tent where she stays,” Liv said.
“Oh.” Hamnet left it there. He wondered what the Bizogot woman saw in Audun Gilli, who was short and slight and un­prepossessing and could hardly talk to her. What ever it was, she doted on him. And Audun seemed to like her well enough. He’d lost his family some years earlier, and lived in a drunken stupor till Ulric Skakki plucked him from the gutter— literally—and made him dry out.
Getting drunk among the Bizogots took dedication. Except for beer and wine brought up from the south, their only tipple was  smetyn— fermented  musk- ox or mammoth milk. It was sour and not very strong. The  mammoth- herders poured it down, though.
Something else occurred to Hamnet. “He’s with Theudechild? The lamps are still lit.”
“So what?” Liv said. “People look the other way. They pre­tend not to hear. When you live in crowded tents most of the year, you have to do things like that. I’ve seen your houses with all their rooms.” She dropped in a couple of Raumsdalian words for things the Bizogots didn’t have and didn’t need to name. “You can get away from one another whenever you please. All we have are  blankets— and the sense not to look when it’s none of our business.”
Not many Raumsdalians had that kind of sense. Maybe they didn’t need it so much. On the other hand, maybe they would have got along better if they had more of it. Hamnet said, “Well, it’s good to see Audun happy, too.”
Was it good to see himself happy? He had to think about that. He wasn’t used to thinking of himself as happy. After what Gudrid did to  him— and after the way he spent years brooding and agonizing about what she did to  him— he was much more used to thinking of himself as miserable. But he wasn’t, not any more.
“So it is,” Liv said. Did she know how happy she made him? If she didn’t, it  wasn’t because he didn’t try to show her. And was that a twinkle in her eye, or only a .icker from one of those odorous lamps? What ever it was, she asked, “Are you Bizogot enough to think blankets and the sense not to look are enough?”
“I’m not a Bizogot at all, and I never will be.” Count Ham-net paused, but not for long. “I don’t suppose that means I can’t act like one, though. I am here, after all....” Not much later, he did his very best to pretend he and Liv had all the privacy in the world. By the small sounds she made even when trying to keep discreetly silent, his best seemed good enough.
Musk oxen  were made for the frozen plains the Bizogots roamed. Their shaggy outer coats and the thick, soft hair that grew closer to the hide warded them against the worst the Breath of God could do. They knew how to scrape snow away with their hooves to uncover plants frozen under the snow. When danger threatened, they formed protective circles, with the formidably horned bulls and larger cows on the outside and the smaller females and calves within. Dire wolves and lions took stragglers now and again, but they had to be des­perately hungry to attack one of those circular formations.
The Bizogots hadn’t fully domesticated the musk oxen they herded, but the beasts  were used to having men around. The herders helped protect them from predators . . . and preyed on the musk oxen themselves.
Despite the threat from the Rulers, the Red Dire Wolf Bi­zogots had to follow the herds. If they lost them, they would starve. And the survivors from the Three Tusk clan and the Raumsdalians up from the south took their turn tending the musk oxen, too. The Three Tusk Bizogots knew just what to do; all across the northern steppe, the Bizogots tended their animals in much the same way. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki did their best, and seemed to pick up what they needed to know fast enough to suit the Red Dire Wolves. Audun Gilli also did his best. Not even the Bizogots said anything  else. How good that best was...
“Careful, Audun!” Count Hamnet pitched his voice to carry through the howling wind. “If you get too close, you’ll spook them.”
“If I stay this far away, though, I have trouble seeing the front part of the herd,” the wizard answered.
Patiently, Hamnet said, “Other riders are up there. We’re not doing this by ourselves, you know. We worry about the beasts close to us, they worry about the ones close to them, and when we put everything together the job gets done.”
“I suppose so.” Audun Gilli sounded distinctly dubious. “Better one person should be able to take care of everything.”
That was a wizard’s way of looking at the world. Wizards had as much trouble cooperating as cats did, and used weapons sharper and deadlier than fangs and talons. Working together meant sharing power and secrets, and power and secrets didn’t like to be shared. Audun and Liv had teamed up a couple of times against sorcery from the Rulers, but it  wasn’t easy or nat­ural for them.
“One person would need to use magic to take care of a whole herd of musk oxen,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you want to try?”
Audun thought about that. It didn’t take a  whole lot of thought. “Well, no,” he admitted, shaking his head.
“Good,” Hamnet said. “If you’d told me yes, I would have thought you  were as arrogant as one of the Rulers.”
“I hope not!” Audun exclaimed. “The worst thing about them is, they have the strength to back up their arrogance. That makes them think they have some natural right to it, the way they think they have the right to lord it over all the folk they can reach.”
“No,” Count Hamnet said. “The worst thing about the Rulers is, they can reach folk on this side of the Glacier because of the Gap.”
“I think we said the same thing,” Audun Gilli replied.
“Well, maybe we did.” Hamnet looked north, towards the Gap that had .nally melted through the great Glacier and to­wards the two enormous ice sheets that remained, one to the northwest, the other to the northeast. He  couldn’t have seen the opening in the Gap anyway; it lay much too far north. Swirling clouds and blowing snow kept him from getting even a glimpse of the southern edge of the Glacier now. When the weather was clear, those frozen cliffs bestrode the steppe like the edge of any other mountains, but steeper and more abrupt.
He’d had an odd thought not long before. There  were moun­tains in the west. They ran north and north, till the Glacier swallowed them. Did any of their peaks stick out above the surface of the ice? Did life persist on those islands in the ice­bound sea? Were there even, could there be, men up there? No one had ever seen .res burning on the Glacier, but no one had ever gone up there to look at close range, either.
This time, his shiver had nothing to do with the frigid weather. Trasamund had told him once that Bizogots had tried to scale the Glacier to see if they could reach the top. It had to be at least a  mile— maybe two or  three—almost straight up. The mammoth- herders hadn’t managed it. They were proba­bly lucky they hadn’t killed themselves. One mistake on that unforgiving climb would likely be your last. You might have too long to regret it as you fell, though.
Hamnet Thyssen imagined men roaming from one un­frozen mountain refuge to another.

 

Excerpted from The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove.
Copyright © 2008 by Harry Turtledove.
Published in November 2009 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and
reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in
any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

I
The Breath of God blew down hard from the north. Here in the Bizogot country near the Glacier, the wind off the great ice sheet blew hard all winter long. Hamnet Thyssen’s own breath smoked as if he  were puf.ng on a pipe. He wished he were, though Ulric Skakki liked tobacco better than he did. Unless Raumsdalian traders had brought a little up from the south, there was none for hundreds of miles.
Count Hamnet was a Raumsdalian himself. He was large and dark and dour, with a black beard that had a streak of white above a scar and some scatterings of gray  elsewhere— and that looked whiter now than it really was, what with all the rime and snow caught in it. He wore  Bizogot- style furs and leather, with the stout felt boots that  were the best foot-gear ever made for .ghting cold. In spite of hooded jacket and furred trousers, he felt the frigid weather like an icepick in his bones.
Ulric was up from the south, too, though Hamnet  wasn’t sure the foxy- faced adventurer had been born inside the borders of the Raumsdalian Empire. Whether he had or not, he spoke Raumsdalian perfectly these days. Pitching his voice to carry through the shrieking wind, he said, “Things could be worse.”
“How?” Hamnet asked. “We could have frozen to death already?”
“Oh, you don’t freeze to death up  here, not if you’re careful. You just wish you could,” Ulric said, which was true. “That’s not what I meant. A couple of thousand years ago, we could have enjoyed this lovely weather down near Nidaros.”
Sigvat II, the Raumsdalian Emperor, ruled from Nidaros these days. Two thousand years earlier, the great city was no more than a hunting camp on the edge of Hevring Lake. The meltwater .lling the lake came from the Glacier, which in those days lay just to the north. The glaciers had fallen back all this way in the years since. Nidaros was almost temper­ate these days; barley grew there most years, and wheat in the warmer ones. Hevring Lake was long gone. When the ice dam that corked it melted through, it poured out to the west in a great .ood that carved out the badlands still scarring that terrain.
Despite the warming weather in the  south—or rather, be­cause of it— Hamnet Thyssen bared his teeth in a mirthless grin. “Better that, some ways, than this.”
“What?” Ulric mocked without mercy. “I thought you always wanted to go beyond the Glacier.”
“Not always. I didn’t used to think there was anything be­yond the Glacier,” Hamnet answered. “And even after I found out there was, I didn’t want what lived beyond the Glacier coming here, curse it.”
“Life is full of surprises,” Ulric Skakki said, which would have been funny if only it  were funny.
For some time now, the Glacier had been melting back to­wards the northwest and northeast, leaving a corridor of open land— the  Gap— between the two great frozen sheets. Now at last the Gap had melted through, allowing travelers from the south to discover what lay on the far side of the Glacier.
Up until that .nally happened, Hamnet Thyssen had always thought the northern glaciers went on forever. So had most Raumsdalians— and most of the nomadic Bizogots who lived north of them. The Golden Shrine? As far as Count Hamnet was concerned, the Golden Shrine was only a myth.
He knew better now. Oh, not about the Golden Shrine, which might still be mythical for all he could prove. But he’d gone beyond the Glacier himself. He’d seen the striped cats called tigers, which preyed there in place of the lions and sabertooths he knew. He’d seen the great brown bears that scooped salmon from streams unfrozen in summer. He’d seen vast herds of deer with both stags and does bearing  blunt- tined antlers.
And he’d seen the folk who rode those deer as men on this side of the Glacier rode  horses. The Rulers, they called them­selves. They not only herded woolly mammoths, as the Bizo­gots had for centuries uncounted, but rode them to war, with lancers and men with long, long lances on the beasts’ shaggy backs.
The Rulers seemed convinced any folk not of their blood were animals, to be tamed like mammoths or hunted and killed like wolves and tigers. They were not warriors to be despised, and their sorcerers had strength neither Raums­dalian wizards nor Bizogot shamans could easily withstand.
Trasamund rode up to Hamnet and Ulric. He too looked north. “Anything?” he asked, doing his best not to sound wor­ried. He was a big, burly man, bigger than Hamnet Thyssen, with piercing blue eyes and a thick, curly  red- gold beard al­most like a pelt.
“Hard to tell with this snow, Your Ferocity, but I don’t think so.” Hamnet gave the jarl of the Three Tusk clan his proper title of respect, even if the Rulers, pouring down through the Gap, had shattered the clan and left him a jarl with only a remnant of a folk to rule. Trasamund’s pride remained grand as  ever— grander, maybe, to help compensate for all he’d lost.
“A couple of men from the Red Dire Wolves are right be­hind me,” Trasamund said. “You southerners can  ride for the tents now. I know you’re feeling the weather worse than a man born to it would.”
“It gets this cold down in the Empire,” Ulric Skakki said. “It just doesn’t stay this cold from fall through the start of spring.”
“Well, go in anyway. Warm yourselves. Get some food.
You need more when it does stay like this.” Trasamund was right about that; Count Hamnet had seen as much. He ate like a dire wolf to keep from freezing, and didn’t gain an ounce. The Bizogot paused, an anxious look .itting across his face. “You can .nd your way back to the tents by yourselves in this weather?”
It wasn’t an idle question. With snow and wind wiping out tracks almost as fast as they were made, with visibility short, someone who didn’t know how to make his way across the frozen steppe could wander till he froze to death.
All the same, both Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki smiled. They weren’t Bizogots, born to the northern plains, but they could manage. Smiling still, Ulric said, “Yes, Mother dear.”
Trasamund’s snort birthed a young fogbank. “Scoff all you please,” he said. “Any Bizogot clan will tell you about Raums­dalian traders who ended up stiff clean through because they thought they knew more about this country than they really did.”
“We’ll get there,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He wheeled his horse. The beast seemed glad to face away from the Breath of God. Hamnet and Ulric rode south, towards the encamp­ment housing the remnants of the Three Tusk clan and the Red Dire Wolves, who guested them and who, reluctantly, joined them in the war against the Rulers.
One stretch of snowy, windswept ground really did look a lot like another. Count Hamnet was starting to wonder whether he and Ulric had bragged too soon when the Bizogots’ mammoth- hide tents appeared in the distance. The mammoths’ thick skins and the long, shaggy dark brown hair on them of­fered a barrier formidable even to the .ercest gales.
All the same, entrances invariably faced south. They did down in the Empire, too. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki tethered their  horses behind a snow- block wall that shielded the animals from the worst of the wind. They’d bought the horses in Nidaros, but the animals  were of the small, shaggy Bizogot breed, better suited to the harsh northern weather than other  horses.
Hamnet ducked into the tent belonging to Totila, the jarl of the Red Dire Wolves. He needed a moment to get used to the gloom inside. A couple of bone lamps burning butter made from the milk of musk oxen and mammoths gave only a dim, .ickering light. A brazier that burned dried dung added a lit­tle heat, but not much.
The brazier and lamps did contribute to the pungency. Hamnet Thyssen knew his nose would soon get used to it, but it was .erce when he’d just come in from the fresh if frigid steppe. Chamber pots of leather and wickerwork had tight lids, and people emptied them often, but their reek hung in the air. So did that of unwashed bodies, Hamnet’s own among them. Bathing in winter in the Bizogot country was asking for anything from chest fever to frostbite.
“Anything, Raumsdalian?” Totila asked. The Red Dire Wolves’ jarl sounded worried, for which Count Hamnet could hardly blame him. Now his clan, along with what was left of Trasamund’s, stood on the front line against the Rulers. Any blow that fell would probably fall on him.
He relaxed— a  little— when Hamnet Thyssen shook his head and said, “No.” Hamnet let his hood drop down off his head and undid the top toggle on his fur jacket. It was warmer inside the tent, though more from the body heat of the people it sheltered than from the brazier’s feeble little .re.
“I sense nothing amiss— nothing close, anyhow.” Liv was the shaman from the Three Tusk clan. She was close to thirty, with golden hair (short and greasy and dirty, as the Bizogots’ hair commonly was), cheekbones as proud and sharp and an­gular as the Glacier, and eyes of the deepest blue Count Ham-net had ever seen.
He’d studied those eyes from very close range indeed. He and Liv  were lovers. She was the only woman he’d met since Gudrid left him who made him . . . oh, not forget his former wife, but remember she  wasn’t the only .sh in the sea. And if that wasn’t a miracle, Hamnet Thyssen had never met one.
Totila went right on worrying. “Would you?” he asked. “Or could their magic mask their moves so you  wouldn’t know till they got right on top of us?”
“It could,” Liv said seriously, at which the jarl gnawed on his lower lip. Hamnet understood how he felt. He himself had fretted over the way things went in his county down in the southeastern part of the Empire. And his domain never faced danger close to that which hovered above the Red Dire Wolves like a teratorn soaring through the air in search of a fresh corpse to gnaw.
“What good are your precious senses, then?” Totila snapped.
Liv didn’t rise to his anger and fear. “Maybe no good,” she answered, “but I don’t think so. Masking movement on that scale isn’t easy for us or for the Rulers. And we have sentries out.” She nodded towards Hamnet. “Even if my spells do fail, sharp eyes shouldn’t.”
“They’d better not,” the jarl said. He too nodded towards Hamnet, though his expression was gruff, not fond. “Feed yourself. We have meat, and you need to stoke your .re.”
“I know.” The Raumsdalian took off his mittens.
The meat came from a mammoth liver. Hamnet Thyssen impaled a chunk on a long bone skewer and started toasting it over the  dung- fueled brazier. Through most of the year, the Bizogots didn’t have to worry about salting meat or smoking it to keep it edible. They had the biggest ice chest in the world right outside their tents.
They also had peculiar  tastes—or so it seemed to a man from farther south. Listen to a Bizogot and he’d tell you meat cooked with wood lacked .avor. They were used to what dung .res did, and they liked it. Count Hamnet was getting used to it, too. He had to, or eat his meat raw, or starve. Whether he would ever like it was a different question.
Mammoth liver would have been  strong- .avored stuff no matter what it was cooked over. Hamnet stolidly ate. He had to get used to being as carnivorous as a sabertooth, too. No grain up here— no bread, no porridge. No potatoes or turnips or even onions. In summer, the Bizogots varied their diet with the small, sweet berries that quickly ripened and then were gone. Those in the southern part of the frozen steppe gathered honey from the few hardy bees that buzzed about when the weather warmed and .owers blossomed frantically.
They were fond of mushrooms. But for that, they ate meat,
and occasionally .sh.
“Nothing wrong to the north? You’re sure?” Liv said.
He shook his head. “There’s plenty wrong to the north, and we both know it. But I didn’t see any sign that the Rulers were about to swoop down on the Red Dire Wolves.”
“That’s what I meant,” Liv said. “But I don’t think they’ll wait much longer.”
Hamnet Thyssen liked the .avor of that even less than he liked the .avor of dung- cooked mammoth liver. “Is that your feeling?” he asked. “Or is it what your magic tells you?”
“Not mine. Audun Gilli’s,” the shaman answered. “His seems better at piercing the wards the Rulers use than mine does.” She didn’t sound jealous, merely  matter-of- fact.
“Where is Audun, anyway?” Hamnet asked. The Raums­dalian wizard usually stayed in the jarl’s tent, too. He’d never learned much of the Bizogot tongue, and needed another Raumsdalian or Liv or Trasamund to translate for him.
“He’s with Theudechild, in the tent where she stays,” Liv said.
“Oh.” Hamnet left it there. He wondered what the Bizogot woman saw in Audun Gilli, who was short and slight and un­prepossessing and could hardly talk to her. What ever it was, she doted on him. And Audun seemed to like her well enough. He’d lost his family some years earlier, and lived in a drunken stupor till Ulric Skakki plucked him from the gutter— literally—and made him dry out.
Getting drunk among the Bizogots took dedication. Except for beer and wine brought up from the south, their only tipple was  smetyn— fermented  musk- ox or mammoth milk. It was sour and not very strong. The  mammoth- herders poured it down, though.
Something else occurred to Hamnet. “He’s with Theudechild? The lamps are still lit.”
“So what?” Liv said. “People look the other way. They pre­tend not to hear. When you live in crowded tents most of the year, you have to do things like that. I’ve seen your houses with all their rooms.” She dropped in a couple of Raumsdalian words for things the Bizogots didn’t have and didn’t need to name. “You can get away from one another whenever you please. All we have are  blankets— and the sense not to look when it’s none of our business.”
Not many Raumsdalians had that kind of sense. Maybe they didn’t need it so much. On the other hand, maybe they would have got along better if they had more of it. Hamnet said, “Well, it’s good to see Audun happy, too.”
Was it good to see himself happy? He had to think about that. He wasn’t used to thinking of himself as happy. After what Gudrid did to  him— and after the way he spent years brooding and agonizing about what she did to  him— he was much more used to thinking of himself as miserable. But he wasn’t, not any more.
“So it is,” Liv said. Did she know how happy she made him? If she didn’t, it  wasn’t because he didn’t try to show her. And was that a twinkle in her eye, or only a .icker from one of those odorous lamps? What ever it was, she asked, “Are you Bizogot enough to think blankets and the sense not to look are enough?”
“I’m not a Bizogot at all, and I never will be.” Count Ham-net paused, but not for long. “I don’t suppose that means I can’t act like one, though. I am here, after all....” Not much later, he did his very best to pretend he and Liv had all the privacy in the world. By the small sounds she made even when trying to keep discreetly silent, his best seemed good enough.
Musk oxen  were made for the frozen plains the Bizogots roamed. Their shaggy outer coats and the thick, soft hair that grew closer to the hide warded them against the worst the Breath of God could do. They knew how to scrape snow away with their hooves to uncover plants frozen under the snow. When danger threatened, they formed protective circles, with the formidably horned bulls and larger cows on the outside and the smaller females and calves within. Dire wolves and lions took stragglers now and again, but they had to be des­perately hungry to attack one of those circular formations.
The Bizogots hadn’t fully domesticated the musk oxen they herded, but the beasts  were used to having men around. The herders helped protect them from predators . . . and preyed on the musk oxen themselves.
Despite the threat from the Rulers, the Red Dire Wolf Bi­zogots had to follow the herds. If they lost them, they would starve. And the survivors from the Three Tusk clan and the Raumsdalians up from the south took their turn tending the musk oxen, too. The Three Tusk Bizogots knew just what to do; all across the northern steppe, the Bizogots tended their animals in much the same way. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki did their best, and seemed to pick up what they needed to know fast enough to suit the Red Dire Wolves. Audun Gilli also did his best. Not even the Bizogots said anything  else. How good that best was...
“Careful, Audun!” Count Hamnet pitched his voice to carry through the howling wind. “If you get too close, you’ll spook them.”
“If I stay this far away, though, I have trouble seeing the front part of the herd,” the wizard answered.
Patiently, Hamnet said, “Other riders are up there. We’re not doing this by ourselves, you know. We worry about the beasts close to us, they worry about the ones close to them, and when we put everything together the job gets done.”
“I suppose so.” Audun Gilli sounded distinctly dubious. “Better one person should be able to take care of everything.”
That was a wizard’s way of looking at the world. Wizards had as much trouble cooperating as cats did, and used weapons sharper and deadlier than fangs and talons. Working together meant sharing power and secrets, and power and secrets didn’t like to be shared. Audun and Liv had teamed up a couple of times against sorcery from the Rulers, but it  wasn’t easy or nat­ural for them.
“One person would need to use magic to take care of a whole herd of musk oxen,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you want to try?”
Audun thought about that. It didn’t take a  whole lot of thought. “Well, no,” he admitted, shaking his head.
“Good,” Hamnet said. “If you’d told me yes, I would have thought you  were as arrogant as one of the Rulers.”
“I hope not!” Audun exclaimed. “The worst thing about them is, they have the strength to back up their arrogance. That makes them think they have some natural right to it, the way they think they have the right to lord it over all the folk they can reach.”
“No,” Count Hamnet said. “The worst thing about the Rulers is, they can reach folk on this side of the Glacier because of the Gap.”
“I think we said the same thing,” Audun Gilli replied.
“Well, maybe we did.” Hamnet looked north, towards the Gap that had .nally melted through the great Glacier and to­wards the two enormous ice sheets that remained, one to the northwest, the other to the northeast. He  couldn’t have seen the opening in the Gap anyway; it lay much too far north. Swirling clouds and blowing snow kept him from getting even a glimpse of the southern edge of the Glacier now. When the weather was clear, those frozen cliffs bestrode the steppe like the edge of any other mountains, but steeper and more abrupt.
He’d had an odd thought not long before. There  were moun­tains in the west. They ran north and north, till the Glacier swallowed them. Did any of their peaks stick out above the surface of the ice? Did life persist on those islands in the ice­bound sea? Were there even, could there be, men up there? No one had ever seen .res burning on the Glacier, but no one had ever gone up there to look at close range, either.
This time, his shiver had nothing to do with the frigid weather. Trasamund had told him once that Bizogots had tried to scale the Glacier to see if they could reach the top. It had to be at least a  mile— maybe two or  three—almost straight up. The mammoth- herders hadn’t managed it. They were proba­bly lucky they hadn’t killed themselves. One mistake on that unforgiving climb would likely be your last. You might have too long to regret it as you fell, though.
Hamnet Thyssen imagined men roaming from one un­frozen mountain refuge to another.

 

Excerpted from The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove.
Copyright © 2008 by Harry Turtledove.
Published in November 2009 by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and
reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in
any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.