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 puffing 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 footgear ever made for fighting 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 filling 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 flood 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 finally 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 flitting across his face. “You can find 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 fiercest 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, flickering 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 fierce when he’d just come in from the fresh if frigid steppe. Chamber pots of leather and wicker-work 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 fire.

“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 Hamnet 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 fish 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 fire.”

“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 flavor. They were used to what dung fires 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-flavored 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 flowers blossomed frantically. They were fond of mushrooms. But for that, they ate meat, and occasionally fish.

“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 flavor of that even less than he liked the flavor 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. Whatever 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 flicker from one of those odorous lamps? Whatever 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 Hamnet 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 finally 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 fires 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. He imagined them trying to come down to the Bizogot country, stepping off the edge of the Glacier as if off the edge of the world. Descending might be even harder than reaching the top of the Glacier. Down near the bottom, you had at least some margin for error. Up above, the tiniest mischance would kill you, sure as sure.

He suddenly realized Audun Gilli had said something to him. “I’m sorry. What was that?” he said. “You caught me woolgathering.”

Above the woven wool that muffled his mouth and nose, the wizard’s eyes were amused. “I must have. You seemed as far away as if someone had dropped you on top of the Glacier.”

That made Hamnet shiver again. Wizards . .. knew things. Sometimes they didn’t know how they knew or even that they knew, but know they did. “Well, ask me again,” Hamnet said. “I’m here now.”

“How lucky for you.” Audun still seemed to think it was funny. “I said, what do we do when the Rulers strike the Red Dire Wolves?”

“The best we can. What else is there?” Hamnet answered bleakly. “How good is the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman? How much help can he give you and Liv?”

“Old Odovacar?” Audun Gilli rolled his eyes. “Liv’s got more brains in her little finger than he does in his head. He turned them all into beard.”

Audun wasn’t far wrong about the shaman’s beard; it reached almost to his crotch. Even so, Count Hamnet said, “Are you sure? You can talk with Liv now – she’s learned Raumsdalian.” And why haven’t you learned more of the Bizogots’ tongue? But that was an argument for another day. Hamnet went on, “Odovacar might be clever enough with spells in his own language.”

“Yes, he might be, but he isn’t,” Audun said. “I’ve talked with him through Liv. He has one spell down solid – he can take the shape of a dire wolf. But even when he’s in man’s form, he hasn’t got any more sense than a dire wolf. I’m surprised nobody’s caught him sitting on his haunches licking his ballocks.”

That started a laugh out of Hamnet. Even so, he said, “Odovacar must be able to do more than that. Shamans can’t be shamans on so little. Whoever he learned from surely taught him other things, too.”

“Oh, I suppose he can find lost needles and read the weather and do some other little tricks that won’t help us against the Rulers at all,” Audun said. “But the one thing the shaman of the Red Dire Wolves has to do is commune with dire wolves, and by God Odovacar can do that. And since he can, they forgive him for all the things he cursed well can’t do, starting with learning anything he didn’t get from his teacher a thousand years ago.”

“Don’t exaggerate.” Mock severity filled Hamnet Thyssen’s voice. “Odovacar can’t be a day over eight hundred.”

“Ha!” The Raumsdalian wizard laughed for politeness’ sake alone, because he plainly didn’t find it funny. “However old he is, he’s outlived his usefulness. If you don’t believe me, talk to your lady love. She’s as fed up with him as I am.”

Talk to your lady love, Audun Gilli had lost his wife, too, in circumstances more harrowing than Hamnet s. But he didn’t seem jealous that the other Raumsdalian had won Liv’s love. Hamnet was glad he wasn’t. Audun might have made a rival, since he and Liv had sorcery in common.If I thought she cheated on me the way Gudrid used to, I’d worry about Audun now. Hamnet shook his head. If you let thoughts like that grow, they would poison whatever good you’d found in your life.

When he pulled his mind away from that notion, it lit on a different one. “Odovacar communes with real dire wolves, you say?”

“Well, he doesn’t smoke a pipe with them or anything like that, but he goes out wandering when he wears wolf shape,” Audun Gilli answered. “He must meet real dire wolves when he does, and they haven’t eaten his scrawny old carcass yet.”

“That’s what I’m driving at,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you suppose he could go out as a dire wolf and rally the real ones against the Rulers?”

Audun started to shake his head, but then caught himself. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might be worth a try. The Rulers wouldn’t like packs harrying their riding deer, would they? Harrying them, too, come to that, if Odovacar can bring it off. And if he goes out in a wolfskin and doesn’t come back, the Red Dire Wolves might be better off.”

“Are you sure you ‘re not wearing Ulric Skakki’s skin?” Hamnet asked; the adventurer was more likely to come out with something that cynically frank.

Audun pulled off a mitten and lifted his cuff. “Nothing up my sleeve but me,” he said, and thought for a little while. “You know, Your Grace, that could work. The Rulers wouldn’t like dire wolves worrying at their animals – or at them.”

“Who would?” Count Hamnet said. “The other nice thing about this is, they may have a harder time returning the favor.”

“Why?” Audun Gilli frowned. Then his face cleared. “Oh, I see what you mean. No dire wolves on the far side of the Glacier, just those smaller, skinnier beasts.”

“That’s what I meant,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Maybe the dire wolves would be friendly to a wizard in the hide of one of those other wolves. But maybe they’d have him for supper instead. That’s how I’d bet.”

“Well, we’ll see what Odovacar thinks.” Audun frowned again. “For that matter, we’ll see if Odovacar thinks.”

Like every other Bizogot shaman Count Hamnet had seen, Odovacar wore a ceremonial costume full of fringes and tufts. His were all made from the hides and furs of dire wolves. Some were dyed red with berry juice, others left their natural brown and gray and cream. Even old and bent and thin, he was a big man; he must have been enormous, and enormously strong, when in his prime.

Getting anything across to him wasn’t easy, for he’d grown almost deaf as he aged. He used a hearing trumpet made from a musk-ox horn, but it didn’t help much. Audun Gilli, with his problems with the Bizogot language, didn’t try to talk to the shaman – he left that to Hamnet and to Liv.

She bawled into the hearing trumpet while Hamnet Thyssen shouted into Odovacar’s other ear. The racket they made surely disturbed some of the other Red Dire Wolf Bizogots, but it bothered Odovacar very little because he heard very little of it.

“A wolf? Yes, of course I can shape myself into a wolf,” he said. Many old men’s teeth were worn down almost flat against their gums. Not his – they were still long and sharp and white, suggesting his ties to the Red Dire Wolves’ fetish animal.

Getting him to understand what to do after he went into dire wolf’s shape took the best – or maybe the worst – part of an afternoon. It wasn’t that Odovacar was stupid. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t think it was, anyhow. But he heard so little that getting anything across to him was an ordeal.

With Audun Gilli or another Raumsdalian wizard, Count Hamnet could have written down what he wanted. Nothing was wrong with Odovacar’s eyes, but writing didn’t help him, for the Bizogots had no written language. Hamnet and Liv had to keep shouting over and over again till, one word at a time, one thought at a time, they tunneled through the wall deafness built between Odovacar and the folk around him.

“Ah,” he said at last, his own voice too loud because he wanted to have some chance of hearing himself. “You want me to lead the dire wolves against the invaders from the north.”

“Yes.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped it was yes. Or did Odovacar think he and Liv meant they wanted him to take command of the Red Dire Wolves’ human warriors? By then, nothing would have surprised Hamnet overmuch.

But Odovacar had it right. “I can do it,” he said in that loud, cracked, quavering old man’s voice. He began to sway back and forth, chanting a song that sounded as if it was in the Bizogot language but that Hamnet couldn’t follow. Liv’s nod said she could.

He slowly rose and started to dance, there inside his tent. At first, the dance seemed little more than swaying back and forth while on his feet, more or less in rhythm to the song he chanted. But it got more vigorous as the song went on. The chant grew more vigorous, too. Hamnet still couldn’t understand it, but growls and snarls began replacing some of the sounds that seemed like Bizogot words. The tune, though, stayed the same.

Odovacar’s fringes shook. His long white beard whipped back and forth. In the lamplight, his eyes blazed yellow.

Yellow? Hamnet Thyssen rubbed at his own eyes. Like almost all Bizogots, Odovacar had ice-blue eyes. But was this still Odovacar the man? Hamnet shook his head. No, not wholly, not any more.

Liv was nodding in understanding and, Hamnet thought, in admiration as she watched the change sweep over the other shaman. She was used to seeing such things. She’d probably shifted shape herself, though Count Hamnet didn’t think she’d done it since he’d known her. She might take it for granted, but it raised the Raumsdalians hackles.

Odovacar dropped down onto all fours. His wolfskin jacket and trousers and his own beard all seemed to turn into pelt. His teeth, already long and white, grew whiter and much longer while his tongue lolled from his mouth. His nose lengthened into a snout. His ears grew pointed and stood away from his head. He wore a wolf’s tail attached to the seat of his trousers. As the spell took hold, it was still a wolf’s tail – it was his tail, attached to him as any beast s tail was attached to it. As if to prove as much, it lashed back and forth.

“Can you hear me?” Hamnet Thyssen asked in a small voice. Odovacar the dire wolf was doubtless still old, but seemed much less decrepit than Odovacar the man. And he swung his fierce head towards Hamnet and nodded somewhat as a dog might nod, but also somewhat as a man might. Shapeshifters kept some of their human intelligence in beast form. How much? Hamnet wasn’t sure even they could answer that question once they returned to human shape.

“You know what you are to do?” Liv sounded far more respectful of the shaman as a dire wolf than she had of him as a man.

Odovacar nodded again. A sound that wasn’t a word but was agreement burst from his throat. Hamnet Thyssen had heard an owl that was also a wizard use human speech, but that was under the influence of the magic Liv used to capture it, not through the spell the wizard used to transform himself.

“Good,” Liv said. “Go, then, and God go with you.”

One more nod from Odovacar, who bounded out through the south-facing tent flap. He made another sound once he was out in the open air, a canine cry of joy pure and unalloyed. To a dire wolf’s senses, the inside of the tent had to be cramped and smelly. Unlike people, wolves weren’t made to be confined in such places. Hamnet Thyssen stuck his head out into the cold. Odovacar trotted purposefully off to the west, wagging his tail as he went. Yes, he was glad to get away.

“He seems happier as a dire wolf,” Hamnet said.

“I suppose he is,” Liv answered. “But he will die sooner if he keeps that hide and not the one he was born with. He knows that. Even as a wolf, he knows it. He will do what needs doing – what he can recall of it in beast shape. And we will see how much good it does us.”

“Quite a bit, I hope.” Hamnet Thyssen stuck his head out into the cold again. Like Odovacar, he was sometimes glad to get free of the Bizogot tents himself. Living through the long northern winters in the enforced close company of the mammoth-herders wasn’t easy for a man of his basically solitary temperament. If he weren’t in love with Liv, he wondered if he could have done it.

“Don’t get frostbite,” she told him – in this climate, an even more serious warning than it would have been down in the Empire.

“I won’t.” He wanted to twist around so he could look north towards the Gap, north towards the grazing grounds of the Three Tusk clan, the grazing grounds the Rulers had stolen. In his mind’s eye, he saw swarms of dire wolves raiding those grounds, feasting on the Rulers’ riding deer, dragging down musk oxen that couldn’t keep up with the herds, maybe even killing mammoth calves if they wandered away from their mothers. And he saw something else, even if it wasn’t so clear as he wished it were.

When he ducked back into the big black tent again, some of what he imagined he’d seen must have shown on his face, for Liv said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “But we’ve thought a lot about how we can hit back at the Rulers. What have they been thinking about all this time? I don’t know that, either, and I wish I did. Whatever it is, I don’t think we’re going to like it.”

The sun had turned in the sky. Days were still short, shorter than they ever got in Nidaros, but they were getting longer. Each day, the sun rose a little farther north and east of due south, swinging away from the tiny arc it made in the southern sky around the solstice. Each day, it set a little farther north and west of due south. And each day became more of a day, not just a brief splash of light punctuating the long hours of darkness.

Hamnet Thyssen would have hoped the longer daylight hours meant warmer weather. In that, he was disappointed but not much surprised. Down in the Empire, the worst blizzards usually came after the turning of the year, but before longer days finally led to the spring thaw. Those blizzards started here, when the Breath of God howled down off the Glacier. Spring would take longer to get here, and would have a looser grip when it finally did.

Odovacar returned to the Red Dire Wolves’ tents. Hamnet Thyssen saw him ambling in, still in dire-wolf shape. He was heavier than he had been when he set out, but he walked with a limp. A long, half-healed gash scored his left hind leg.

For a moment, the shaman didn’t seem to know Count Hamnet. Lips lifted away from those formidable fangs. A growl sounded deep in the Odovacar-wolf’s throat. The Bizogots told of shamans who turned beast so fully, they couldn’t come back to man’s shape again.

But Odovacar hadn’t gone that far. With a human-sounding sigh, he went into the tent that had been his. A moment later, Totila joined him. Word must have spread like lightning, for Liv and Audun Gilli ducked in together inside of another couple of minutes.

By then, Odovacar the dire wolf was already swaying back and forth in a beast’s version of the dance the shaman had used to change shape. The growls and barks and whines that came from the animal had something of the same rhythm as the song Odovacar had used when he was a man.

And he became a man again. His muzzle shortened. His beard grew out on his cheeks and chin – he had a chin again. His ears shrank; the light of reason came back to his eyes. The hair on his back and flanks was a pelt no more, but fringed and tufted wolfskin jacket and trousers. His dire wolf’s tail now plainly had been taken from a wolf, and was a part of him no more.

He let out a long, weary sigh – more regret than relief, if Hamnet Thyssen was any judge. “Well, I’m back,” he said, his voice as rusty as a sword blade left out in the rain. “I’m back,” he repeated, as if he needed to convince himself. After so long in beast shape, chances were he did.

“Have you harried the foe?” Totila asked. “Can you do it again at need?”

“We have . . . done what we could,” Odovacar answered slowly. Speech still seemed to come hard for him. “It is less than I hoped, better than nothing.” He shrugged stooped shoulders – yes, he was old. “Such is life. And the Rulers . . . The Rulers are very strong, and very fierce, and they are gathering. They are mustering. The time is coming, and coming soon.” His eyes – blue again, not wolf-amber – found first Liv and then Count Hamnet. “Well, you were right, the two of you. I wish you were wrong, but you were right. They are a danger. They are a deadly danger.”

“What did you do … when you were a dire wolf?” Hamnet asked in a low voice.

Odovacar heard him without trouble; maybe some of the dire wolf’s sharper senses stayed with him for a little while. “Hunted. Killed. Mated. Slept. Ran. Those are the things a dire wolf does,” he said. “Harried the Rulers’ herds. Fled when they hit back at us. I told you – they are strong and fierce. I smelled – watched, too, but scent matters more – too many wolf-brothers die. I was still man enough inside the dire wolf’s head to sorrow, not just to fear. And I watched the foe gather, and I smelled their muster, and I came back. And it might be better had I stayed a wolf.” A tear ran down his cheek.