Breath of God

IX

We’ve got toget down from here,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If we don’t – and if we don’t do it soon – we’ll have a war on our hands.”

“Yes? And so?” Trasamund sent a hooded but scornful glance towards the men of the Glacier. “It wouldn’t last long, and we’d cursed well win. We’d slaughter them, as a matter of fact, and we wouldn’t have much trouble doing it, either.”

“I know. That’s what I’m afraid of,” Count Hamnet answered. The Bizogot jarl sent him a quizzical look. He explained: “We slaughter the men. We take the women and sire our own children on them. We raise rabbits and voles on this crag, and we fight with the men of the Glacier who live on other crags. Then what? We turn into men of the Glacier ourselves, that’s what, and the children we sire will think everything we say about what it was like down in the Bizogot country is a pack of lies. Is that what you’ve got in mind?”

Trasamund bared his teeth in a horrible grimace. “Good God, no!”

“Well, I don’t, either,” Hamnet said. “And so we’d better take as much food as they’ll let us have and get out of here before the fighting starts.”

“Where can we get down, though, except where we climbed up?” Trasamund said. “If we try that, the Rulers are liable to be waiting for us.”

“I doubt it. We’re only an afterthought to them – if that, by now,” Hamnet said. “They’ve got bigger things to worry about farther south – not just the Bizogot clans down there, but the Empire. Odds are they’ve forgotten about us.”

“Maybe.” The Bizogot didn’t sound as if he believed it. He was so self-important, he couldn’t imagine that anyone else, even his enemies – perhaps especially his enemies – wouldn’t think him important, too.

“At least we’re here in the summer.” Hamnet felt like stretching in the sun like a cat. It was almost as warm as it would have been down on the Bizogot plains. And, up so high, the sun was harder on the skin than it would have been down there. A swarthy man, Hamnet had got darker. Many of the fairer Bizogots were sunburned, some of them badly.

With a grunt, Trasamund nodded. “Winter up here wouldn’t be much fun.” From a Bizogot, especially a Bizogot who’d lived his life hard by the edge of the Glacier, that was no small admission.

“No, not much.” Count Hamnet didn’t want Trasamund outdoing him at understatement. “Maybe, though, it will melt enough of the Glacier to touch off a new avalanche at the edge. And maybe we can use that to get down.”

“Even if it does, how would we know?” Trasamund replied. “And how long do you want to wait around and hope? You were the one who said we couldn’t wait long, and I think you’re right.”

“If a big chunk does let go, we might hear it even though we’re a long way from the edge of the Glacier,” Count Hamnet said. “Not a lot of other noise between there and here.” He growled, down deep in his chest. “As for the other. . . You’re right, I did say that, and it’s true, curse it. Not enough food up here to keep guests long.”

“What are you talking about?” Trasamund retorted. “Up here, guests are food.”

“Not for us. If we turn cannibal, there’s no point going down again. Next to that, the Rulers are welcome to do as they please.”

“Not to me they’re not, by God,” the Bizogot said. “I’d eat man’s flesh if it was that or starve. Not before, but then. It happens in hard winters once in awhile.”

“Mm, I can see how it might.” Hamnet tried to sound calm and judicious, not revolted. “But what do you think afterwards of the people who did it?”

“Depends. If they really had no other choice, then it’s just one of those things. If it’s not like that, or if the friends and kin of the ones who got eaten decide it’s not like that. . . Well, the cannibals don’t last long then.”

Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding. By the Bizogots’ rough standards, that seemed fair enough. Even down in the Empire, there were stories of men who ate neighbors and relatives when the Breath of God blew strong and the harvest failed. People laughed at those stories more often than not, which didn’t mean some of them weren’t true. Sometimes you laughed because screaming was the only other choice.

Ulric was translating for Audun Gilli and the shaman from the men of the Glacier, whose name was Marcovefa. The adventurer suddenly straightened and stiffened like a dog that had taken a scent. “Ha!” he said, turning, Thyssen!

“I’m here,” Hamnet answered. “What do you need?”

“Come over here, why don’t you? That way, I won’t have to yell,” Ulric said. “Besides, you may understand pieces of this in the original, and it’s better if you try. I might make a mistake.”

Grunting, Hamnet got to his feet. Parts of him creaked and crunched as he moved. He had enough years to feel sleeping on hard ground after marching and fighting, enough years to make him feel half again as old as he really was. He creaked again when he squatted beside Ulric and Marcovefa and Audun. He had to make himself nod to the Raumsdalian wizard. Audun nodded back as if nothing was wrong.

“What’s the story?” Hamnet asked.

“She may know another way down,” Ulric answered.

That got Hamnet s interest, all right. “Tell me more,” he said.

Ulric spread his hands in frustration. “I can’t – or not much more, anyhow. The verbs are driving me crazy. Here. Wait. I’ll have her tell you what she told me. Maybe you’ll be able to make some sense out of it.”

“I couldn’t,” Audun Gilli said. But Audun had needed a year to get something more than a smattering of the ordinary Bizogot language. Whatever his talents as a wizard, he made anything but a cunning linguist.

“Well, I’ll try.” Hamnet knew he sounded dubious. He thought he recognized words here and there in the language the men of the Glacier used. A couple of times, he’d made out a sentence, as long as it was short and simple.

Ulric spoke to Marcovefa. Hamnet thought he said something like, Tell him what you just told me. He wouldn’t have bet anything he cared about losing, though.

Marcovefa answered. It was her birthspeech; she didn’t stumble or hesitate the way Ulric did. That made her harder for Hamnet Thyssen to follow, not easier. He frowned, listening intently.

When she finished, he said, “Didn’t she say she knows where a way down will be?”

“Ha! You heard it like that, too!” Ulric said. “Maybe the verbs are strange, but that sure sounds like a Bizogot future tense, doesn’t it?”

“It did to me,” Hamnet said. “Why don’t you ask her?”

“I’ve tried. It didn’t help.” Ulric sighed and tried again.

“Past? Now? Later? All the same.” That was what Hamnet thought Marcovefa said. He looked a question at Ulric.

The adventurer sighed. “I think she’s saying there’s no difference between one time and another. Crazy little bird, isn’t she?”

He spoke in Raumsdalian, which the shaman couldn’t possibly understand. Nothing in his face or his tone of voice gave him away. But Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff and slapped his arm the way a mother would slap a child who’d done something rude and silly. She might not have followed the words, but she knew – she knew – he hadn’t treated her with the respect she deserved.

“Maybe there’s more to it than you think,” Count Hamnet said slowly.

“Maybe.” Ulric didn’t sound as if he believed it, but now he didn’t sound as if he dared disbelieve it, either. That left him sounding . . . confused. He went on speaking Raumsdalian: “Maybe up here there’s so little going on that now and then can blend like salt and garlic in a stew. Nothing up here would surprise me very much anymore. I mean, what is time but a way to keep everything from happening at once?”

Hamnet Thyssen half – more than half – expected Marcovefa to slap him again for being flip. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she was crazy, at least by the standards that prevailed at the bottom of the Glacier. This was too strange and too harsh and too different a world to expect standards to stay the same. But instead of being insulted, the shaman nodded vigorously. She let out what was, to Hamnet, mostly a stream of gibberish.

By the bemused look on Ulric s face, he understood a good deal more of it, but was none too happy that he did. “What was that all about?” Hamnet asked when Marcovefa finally fell silent.

“She says I get it after all,” Ulric replied, shaking his head. “She says she thought I was as vacant as a vole – which is a demon of a phrase, even in her weird dialect – till I made my snide joke. But everything I said was true, she told me. She feels it in her heart.”

Marcovefa laid a hand over her left breast. She might not understand Raumsdalian in any ordinary sense of the world, but she could sense truth and falsehood … or she thought she could, anyhow. By what Hamnet was seeing here, he would have had a hard time telling her she was wrong.

Then she said something else, something that sounded very self-assured. Ulric’s jaw dropped. “What now?” Hamnet asked. “Do I really want to know?”

“Well, I’m damned if I want to be the only one who does,” Ulric answered. “She says she’s going with us, to the edge of the Glacier and over it.”

“But what about her clan?” Hamnet said. “Won’t they end up a feast for some of the others up here if she leaves them? How can she do it?”

The adventurer spoke to her. She pointed to a young man scraping flesh from the inside of a pika hide with a sharpened bit of flint. “That’s Dragolen,” Ulric said. “He’s well on his way to turning into a shaman himself. By what she can tell, nothing too horrendous happens – not will happen, but happens – to the clan till he finishes learning the things he needs to know.”

“Tell her we don’t eat man’s flesh down below,” Hamnet said. “Maybe that will make her want to stay here.”

But Marcovefa only shrugged at the news. Like a lot of shamans and wizards, she could be imperious when she chose. “I go,” she said, and even Hamnet couldn’t misunderstand her – however much he might have wanted to.

No matter whatMarcovefa thought of Dragolen as an up-and-coming shaman, Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether the clan chief – he didn’t have enough people under him to count as a jarl in the Raumsdalian’s mind – would be eager to let her leave. But he said not a word against her. He was probably so glad to get rid of the dangerous strangers that losing his shaman seemed small by comparison.

Hamnet asked both Liv and Audun Gilli if they foretold trouble by bringing Marcovefa along. Liv simply shook her head. On matters that didn’t touch their private lives, she and Hamnet still worked well together. On those that did … they didn’t.

“We’re already in so much trouble, what’s a little more?” Audun said. Having no good answer for that, Hamnet walked away shaking his head.

Ulric dickered with the clan chief over how many hares and pikas and voles the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would take with them when they left. When he didn’t like the deal the chief proposed, he sweetened it by offering to leave a couple of swords behind with the men of the Glacier. That made the chief cheer up.

“Swords won’t help them catch rabbits,” Audun said, a puzzled note in his voice.

Ulric eyed him with something approaching pity. “Rabbits aren’t the only meat they hunt, and swords will help them with the other.”

“The other…? Oh!” Light – a revolted light – shone in the wizards eyes.

Marcovefa led them off the mountainside and down onto the surface of the Glacier. Count Hamnet shook his head in wonder. He’d never dreamt he would need to descend to travel over the Glacier. He’d never dreamt of a lot of the things that happened to him till they did. A good many of them, he would have been happier to avoid. That was afterwards, though, and afterwards was always too late.

Here and there, puddles dotted the top of the Glacier. Marcovefa eyed them dubiously. She said something. When Hamnet looked a question at Ulric, the adventurer translated: “In her grandfather’s grandfathers days, this didn’t happen, she says.”

“Is she sure she’s not talking about her grandchildren’s days?” Hamnet asked. “She’s the one who can’t keep time straight.”

Before Ulric could render that into Marcovefa’s dialect, she sent Hamnet a severe look, as if he were a child acting snippy around grownups. That shouldn’t have been easy to bring off; he thought he was older than she was. But when she wanted to, she could assume as many years and as much dignity as she pleased. It was an unusual gift, and not a small one, either.

She led the Bizogots and Raumsdalians south and west with a fine display of confidence. Count Hamnet wondered what lay behind it. He wondered if anything did. Maybe she was willing to sacrifice herself to strand them on the Glacier and rid her clan of the threat they posed. But when that thought bubbled up from the dark places at the bottom of his mind, he shook his head. He could imagine it, but he couldn’t believe it. She acted like someone who knew what she was doing and where she was going.

Of course, a madwoman would act that way, too. Hamnet was much less certain Marcovefa and the real world touched each other very much.

Why are you following her, then? he asked himself. But the answer to that was all too plain: even if she was leading them to disaster, what did they have to lose? Staying up here was only disaster of a different kind. The miserable cannibal life the men of the Glacier led showed that all too clearly.

He skirted another puddle atop the Glacier. “What do you suppose would happen if it all melted?” he asked.

“Never happen,” Trasamund said. “Not while we still live.”

Those two things weren’t the same, though the jarl didn’t seem to understand it. Even if he and Hamnet Thyssen lived to grow long white beards – which seemed most unlikely at the moment – they would die in an eyeblink of time as far as the world went. Not so far long ago, as far as the world went, the Glacier had pushed down to not far north of Nidaros. The country around the present capital was much like the Bizogot steppe in those days. If the Glacier disappeared, this northern land might turn out not to be so useless, too.

But Trasamund wouldn’t be here to see it. To him, nothing else mattered. Well, that made a certain amount of sense, or maybe more than a certain amount. But Hamnet tried to take a longer view.

Marcovefa said something. Ulric answered. She said something else. Ulric translated:” ‘The day is coming,’ she says, or maybe, ‘The day is here.’“

“Not here yet, by God,” Hamnet said. “Or what are we walking on?”

Again, Ulric turned that into words Marcovefa could understand. She gave back one word. “Illusion,” Ulric said.

“Well, as long as it fools my feet, I’m not going to worry about it,” Hamnet said.

The Bizogots caught a few voles in patches of greenery. Marcovefa had a bird net and a chant that seemed to lure birds into it. But there weren’t many to lure. They steadily went through the meat they’d got from the shaman’s clan. Count Hamnet began to wonder if they would have enough to get back to the crag at need. Before long, he stopped wondering: they wouldn’t. Marcovefa led them towards the edge of the Glacier – the rim of the world, she called it – with perfect and sublime certitude.

When they got there, they could look down at a sea of curdled white clouds that hid the Bizogot country from the eye. Count Hamnet and Ulric stared at each other, both appalled, but neither, somehow, enormously surprised. Liv glanced over towards Marcovefa as if wondering what her fellow shaman would do now. Audun Gilli, by contrast, only shrugged, as if to say,Well, this is interesting, isn’t it?

But Trasamund exploded like a tightly shut pot forgotten atop a fire. He didn’t just curse Marcovefa – he screamed at her. He pulled his two-handed sword from the sheath he wore on his back and brandished it, bellowing, “We ought to carve steaks off you, you worthless, mangy trull!”

Marcovefa answered more calmly than Hamnet Thyssen thought he could have managed under such circumstances. She said something that set Ulric giggling helplessly. “What was that?” Hamnet asked.

“Something like, ‘Why didn’t your mother spank you when you were little?’ “ the adventurer answered.

Trasamund didn’t ask for a translation. He kept on raving. When Count Hamnet thought he really might swing that sword, his feet went out from under him and he sat down, hard, on the Glacier. He was lucky the sword didn’t skewer or slice him. Marcovefa looked the slightest bit smug – enough to convince Hamnet that the Bizogot’s pratfall was no accident.

Even Trasamund seemed convinced after trying four times to stand and failing again and again. “Give over!” he told Marcovefa, holding up a hand in token of surrender. “I’ll put the blade away. By God, I will!”

The shaman didn’t speak the ordinary Bizogot tongue. What Trasamund said couldn’t have meant much to her. But she seemed to grasp the essentials behind or under language. She knew what the jarl meant even if she didn’t know what he said. With a nod whose somber dignity the Raumsdalian Emperor might have envied, she signaled that he was free from her spell. When he tried to get to his feet once more, he succeeded.

He shuddered. “She knows somewhat of shamanry, all right,” he said to Hamnet Thyssen. “But why the demon didn’t she know the Glacier here is just like the Glacier everywhere else except at that one big avalanche?”

“If I could tell you, I’d be on my way towards making a pretty fair shaman myself,” Count Hamnet answered.

Liv shook her head. “I am a fair shaman, or I like to think I am,” she said. “I have no idea why we’re here.” Then she turned to Audun Gilli and asked, “Do you?” Hamnet wished she hadn’t, even if he understood why she had.

Audun started to shake his head, too, but hesitated. “Nooo,” he said slowly, “not unless . . .” He did shake his head then, firmly and decisively. His voice firmed as he repeated, “No,” and continued, “The whole idea is too ridiculous.”

“And what about this mess isn’t?” Ulric asked. “Come on – out with it.”

But Audun wouldn’t talk. All he said was, “If we know, we’ll know without any doubt. And if we don’t, we’ll be too busy starving to worry about it.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Ulric said. Not even his sly mockery could pry any more words out of the Raumsdalian wizard. Marcovefa looked on with what Hamnet would have called innocent amusement if he hadn’t already figured out that she was much less innocent than she seemed, and in a way that had nothing to do with her taste for cannibal feasts.

Arnora came over and linked her arm with Ulric s. “We may as well camp here,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere – that’s for sure.”

Marcovefa asked a question. Hamnet Thyssen would have bet it was, What did she say? The shaman didn’t understand everything that went on around her. Words spoken without strong emotion behind them remained opaque. Ulric translated for her. She said something else. Ulric asked her a different question. She repeated herself – Hamnet could hear that – more emphatically.

“What now?” he asked Ulric.

“She says we all die before our time if we camp here,” the adventurer replied.

Arnora tossed her shining head. “What does she know?”

“More than you do, sweetheart, when it comes to things up here,” Ulric said. Arnora pulled her arm free and glared at him.

“I think maybe the woman from the men of the Glacier is right. Maybe.” Audun Gilli always spoke the Bizogots’ language slowly and clumsily. Now something new was in his voice. Only the way he looked at Marcovefa helped Hamnet Thyssen give it a name. Awe. Without a doubt, it was awe.

“Where do we camp if we don’t camp here?” Trasamund asked, eyeing the westering sun. “Wherever it is, we’d better take care of it before too long. I know twilight lingers, but not forever.”

Marcovefa led them away from the edge of the Glacier, back in the direction of the mountain refuge from which they’d come. She still had an imperious certainty that made anyone else doubt her at his peril.

“Why didn’t she just tell us to stop where she wanted us to stop?” Arnora grumbled. “Instead, she almost led us off the tallest cliff there is.”

“I don’t think she knew the cliff was still there,” Ulric answered.

“You don’t think she knew?” the Bizogot woman said shrilly. “And you followed her anyway?”

Ulric only shrugged. “Have you got a better idea?”

Arnora opened her mouth. Then she closed it again. Up here atop the Glacier, there were few good ideas to have. The best one, to Hamnet Thyssen’s way of thinking, was not to get stuck here in the first place. But when the only other choice was staying where you were and getting slaughtered, trying to reach the top of the Glacier suddenly looked a lot better. It had to Hamnet not long before, and it must have to the ancestors of the men of the Glacier sometime in the dim and vanished past.

Marcovefa stopped without warning in the middle of an icefield which looked no different from the rest of the Glacier that stretched as far as the eye could see. She spoke. As usual, Ulric translated: “This will do, she says.”

“Do what?” Hamnet asked.

She looked at him even before Ulric turned the dour question into words she could understand. He thought she would be angry at him for presuming to talk back, but amusement glinted in her eyes. She said a few words. Ulric asked her something. She nodded. “Do to keep the Glacier under our feet,” he reported. “That’s what she says.”

“Well, where else would it be?” Trasamund rumbled. “Up our – ?” He didn’t finish that, but went far enough to leave no doubt of his meaning.

Hamnet Thyssen waited for Marcovefa to get angry at him. Instead, the shaman started to laugh. When she spoke, so did Ulric. “She says you’re welcome to put it there if that makes you happy.” She added something else: “She’d like to watch if you try.”

Trasamund turned red. “Never mind,” he muttered. “I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on.” Hamnet didn’t believe he would – or could. That he said he would was surprising enough.

They set stones on the Glacier and dried dung on the stones so they could make fires and cook their meat. Marcovefa carried cuts that did not come from a hare or vole. Now that Hamnet had got used to the smell of that flesh roasting, he decided it didn’t quite smell like pork after all. It smelled better than pork, as if it were perfectly right for the nose, for the mouth, for the belly. He supposed it was – in a way. In every other way, though . .. He’d done a lot of things for which people could blacken his name. Better to walk off the edge of the Glacier than to earn the name of cannibal.

It didn’t bother Marcovefa. Man’s flesh was only food to her. Count Hamnet couldn’t match her detachment, and didn’t want to try.

Twilight lingered long even after the sun went down. Trasamund posted sentries. “Never can tell who saw the fires,” he said. He looked to Marcovefa to see if she had anything to say about that. She didn’t. She was getting ready to sleep. Lying on the Glacier was like lying on frozen rock. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t care. When you were tired enough, frozen rock felt like a mattress stuffed with eiderdown.

Morning twilight was already turning the eastern sky gray when a Bizogot shook him awake for sentry duty. “Anything look funny?” he asked around a yawn.

“Everything up here looks funny,” answered the Bizogot, whose name was Magnulf. “Nothing looks any worse than it did before, though.”

“All right.” Hamnet climbed to his feet. His back and shoulder and one knee creaked. Maybe frozen rock wasn’t so wonderful to sleep on after all. The Bizogot pointed northeast to show Hamnet where he should go. Knee still aching, he trudged in that direction.

After taking his place out there, he looked back towards the camp. In happier times, in easier times, Liv would often come out to keep him company while he stood watch. Not now. She lay there sleeping. She might have done that anyway. Hamnet Thyssen knew as much. But he chose to resent it this morning.

In due course, fire struck the edge of the world in the northeast: the sun climbing over the horizon. For the moment, Hamnet could look at it without hurting his eyes. That wouldn’t last long; the higher it climbed, the hotter it would seem. And the day would be warm, too. How long could the Glacier last if weather like this came every year?

It’ll last longer than I do, by God, Hamnet Thyssen thought, and he turned away from the sun. His shadow stretched out before him across the glacier-top, many times taller than he was. It would shrink as the day advanced and then advance as the day shrank, and finally darkness would swallow it. As the shadow goes, so the man.

Come morning, his shadow would be reborn. Himself? He had much less hope about that.

Looking away from the sun meant looking in the direction from which he’d come. People there were starting to stir. Someone waved in his direction: Ulric. Even at a couple of bowshots’ distance, the adventurer’s sinuous grace made him stand out. Ulric gestured to him to come back in. With the sun in the sky, anyone could see trouble coming.

Ha! Count Hamnet thought. If people could see trouble coming as easily as that, we’d all have less of it.

Small plumes of smoke rose from dried dung on flat stones. The air above the fires shimmered with heat. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians cooked small animals. Marcovefa roasted the abominable meat she liked better.

“Now what?” Hamnet asked, carefully licking all the grease from his fingers.

Ulric’s head swiveled as he surveyed the Glacier all around. “As far as I can tell, the plan is for us to sit here till we starve.” He didn’t sound like a man who was joking, but he did sound absurdly cheerful at the prospect.

“No.” That wasn’t Hamnet Thyssen; it was Audun Gilli. The wizard shook his head. “Oh, no.”

“You know something.” Count Hamnet sounded accusing, even to himself. “What is it?”

“Something is about what I know,” Audun agreed. “Something is going to happen, and happen soon. What?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.”

“Will it happen before we starve?” Hamnet asked. “That would be nice, because Ulric’s right – we’re going to.”

“By God, we won’t starve to death up here,” the wizard said. “I don’t know what will happen to us, but not that.”

“You so relieve our minds,” Ulric said.

“You notice Marcovefa isn’t coming over here and slapping him silly – well, sillier,” Hamnet said, which won him a wounded look from Audun Gilli. That worried him not at all. He went on, “Must mean she thinks he knows what he’s talking about.”

“Happy day,” Ulric said. “Which of them is crazier, do you suppose?”

“Both of them,” Count Hamnet answered. That confused the wizard, but Ulric nodded in perfect understanding. Marcovefa eyed Hamnet as if wondering whether to say anything. When she didn’t, he was more relieved than he hoped he showed.

“What are we going to do today?” Trasamund demanded. “Sit around here freezing our arses off?”

“If you do much sitting around here, you will freeze your arse off,” Count Hamnet said. “On the other hand, where do you propose to go?”

“Back to the edge of the Glacier?” But Trasamund didn’t sound sure of himself – almost a first for the big, rambunctious Bizogot.

“Why?” Ulric asked. “What can you do there besides jump off? How long do you suppose you’d have to regret that before you went splut!”

He picked a particularly expressive noise to describe how Trasamund would sound when he hit. The jarl glared and muttered into his beard. Then he walked away shaking his head.

“Sometimes the worst thing you can do to somebody is tell him the truth,” Count Hamnet remarked.

“No doubt,” Ulric said. “And do you have any idea how many people get old and gray without ever once figuring that out?”

“Too many, or I miss my guess,” Hamnet said.

Marcovefa seemed happy enough sitting around doing nothing. Once, halfway through the day, a raven flew up and landed on her shoulder. It sat there as if it belonged, preening and making soft croaking noises and peering around with disconcertingly clever beady black eyes. Marcovefa took its presence for granted. She scratched its head. Instead of pecking her with its formidable bill, it bent forward like a cat so her hand could better find its itches.

“A familiar?” Ulric wondered out loud.

“Not exactly, or I don’t think so,” Audun Gilli said. “Seems more like a friend.”

The longer Count Hamnet watched, the more he thought Audun was right. Marcovefa croaked, too, as if she and the raven shared a language where she didn’t share one with the Bizogots and Raumsdalians all around her. The big black bird seemed to understand what she was saying, and she also seemed to follow it. Hamnet told himself nothing the shaman could do surprised him much anymore. He’d already told himself the same thing several times, and been wrong every one of them.

After a while, the raven flew off towards the edge of the Glacier. Ulric’s eyes followed it. “Good bit of meat on a bird that size,” he remarked. “Those cursed things have got fat off us on every battlefield since the beginning of time. We could start paying them back.”

Even as he spoke, his gaze slid to Marcovefa. He might have known she would understand the essence of what he was saying. She came over to him and pulled his ear, exactly as if he were a naughty boy. Then she gave him a piece of her mind in her own language.

“She eats man’s flesh, but she draws the line at raven.” Audun Gilli shook his head.

“Maybe she does. She’s sure making Ulric eat crow, though,” Count Hamnet said, deadpan.

Audun started to nod. Then he caught himself and drew back from Count Hamnet as if the Raumsdalian noble had some rare, dangerous, and highly contagious disease. Chances were he did, too. At any rate, people often treated foolishness that way.

An hour or so later, the raven came back. No one tried to catch it or kill it. It perched on Marcovefa’s shoulder again and croaked in her ear. One of the croaks sounded like soon to Hamnet Thyssen. He scratched his ear, wondering if he’d heard that or only imagined it. He knew ravens could be trained to speak, but he had trouble believing this one had been. He had even more trouble believing it had been trained to speak a language he understood.

Was he becoming like Marcovefa, then, and gaining the ability to grasp meaning even without knowing a language? He had an enormous amount of trouble believing that.

The shaman scratched the base of the raven’s beak with a forefinger. That beak might have been able to bite the finger off. Instead, the raven nuzzled her like a lovesick pup. Getting it to do something like that – getting it to want to do something like that – probably wasn’t magic in any ordinary sense of the word, but Hamnet had a hard time deciding what else to call it.

A warm breeze ruffled his beard and the raven’s feathers. For the moment, maybe even for the season, the Breath of God, the cold, ravening wind from the Glacier, had failed. It would blow again when the year turned; Hamnet was sure of that. But for now, even here, the wind came up from the south.

Liv and Audun Gilli both stiffened at the same time, like two hunting dogs taking a scent. Liv stared at Marcovefa. Audun exclaimed, “She really did!”

Hamnet Thyssen felt the Glacier shudder under his feet. Earthquake, he thought. He was safer here than he would have been in Nidaros. In bad earthquakes, people died when heavy things fell on them. The only thing that could fall on him here was the sky.

Along with the shaking came a deep bass rumble from the south, a rumble and a crashing and a roar. When Hamnet looked that way, he didn’t see anything. Maybe his wits were slow, because he didn’t grasp what the noise might mean.

Clever as usual, Ulric did. His trouble was different: he tried hard not to believe it. “She couldn’t have known an avalanche was coming, . . could she?” he said, his own doubt showing in the last two words.

Although the raven fluttered its wings when the shaking and rumbling started, it stayed on Marcovefa’s shoulder. The shaman stroked the bird, calming it. Did she look pleased with herself? If she didn’t, Hamnet lacked the words to describe the way she did look.

At last, the commotion subsided. Marcovefa said something in her language. Everyone else looked towards Ulric for a translation. Reluctantly, he gave one: “She says we can go down now.”

“She knew. She knew.” Audun Gilli made it sound more like an accusation than praise. “Even back on the mountainside, she saw the avalanche coming.”

“He’s right,” Liv said, not something Hamnet wanted to hear from her but not something he could disagree with, either. “She must have known.”

“She’s a shaman, not a sham, sure enough,” Ulric said. “The only thing she didn’t know was just when it would happen – and I don’t think she cared.”

Marcovefa said something else. Even Hamnet thought he understood it: when didn’t matter. Maybe she was right, maybe she was wrong. Either way, she sounded very sure. She didn’t wait to give Ulric a chance to translate. She just started walking south. Every line of her body made it plain that she didn’t care whether the Bizogots and Raumsdalians went with her. No matter what they did, she would try to descend from the Glacier.

They did follow, of course. Something occurred to Count Hamnet as they tramped along over the Glacier. He caught up with Ulric, who was walking not far from Marcovefa, and said, “Ask her if she knows of the Golden Shrine.”

“Well, I will, but what are the odds?” Ulric said.

Before he could ask the question in Marcovefa’s dialect, she stopped dead and stared at Hamnet Thyssen. A flood of words burst from her. Ulric held up his hands, as if to dam the flow. He didn’t have much luck. A moment later, he started to laugh. “What is it?” Hamnet asked.

“You impressed her – that’s what,” Ulric replied. “Up till now, she thought we were a bunch of godless savages. But if we know about the Golden Shrine, we can’t be so bad after all.”

“She understood me before you translated,” Hamnet said slowly, and the adventurer nodded. Hamnet went on, “What does she know, then?”

Again, Marcovefa started talking without waiting to hear the question in her tongue. She pointed north, then south. Ulric said, “She knows it’s somewhere not under the Glacier. It’s a salve for the good and a snare for the wicked, she says. You get from it what you bring to it. It makes you even more what you are already. I’m not sure what that means. I’m not sure she’s sure what she means, come to that.”

Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff. “I think she is,” Count Hamnet said. “Eyvind Torfinn talked about the place the same way, and he knows more about it than anybody.” Anybody except maybe a cannibal savage, he thought. How strange was that? Stranger than anything else here atop the Glacier? Hamnet doubted it.

The avalanche they’d heard proved even bigger than the one they’d climbed to get here. Marcovefa and her raven both looked smug. The way down lay open – if the travelers could take it.