The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THEY GOT NO help from the Rock Ptarmigans. Well before they found the clan’s encampment, Hamnet Thyssen began to fear that might be so. His first moment of worry came when the travelers approached a herd of mammoths.

The beasts awed Marcovefa. “The Rulers ride these, you say?” she asked, and Hamnet had no trouble following her.

“That’s right,” Ulric Skakki answered.

“Well, I can see why,” Marcovefa said. Then she added something Hamnet couldn’t follow. Ulric translated: “She wants to know if there are any beasts bigger than these.”

“Some of the forest mastodons get a little bigger, I think, but not much,” Hamnet said. Ulric nodded. As he relayed that, Count Hamnet went on, “But whales are supposed to be a lot bigger than any mammoths or mastodons, aren’t they?”

Getting the idea of whales across to Marcovefa wasn’t easy. Getting the idea of the sea across to her was even harder. She understood what streams and ponds were. But a pond full of salt water, bigger than the Glacier and deeper than a mountain was tall, strained her credulity.

Again, she spoke too fast for Count Hamnet to keep up with her. “She says we’re joking with her. She says that just because the mammoths and the musk oxen turned out to be true, now we think she’ll believe anything,” Ulric reported.

Hamnet Thyssen raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “By God, it’s the truth,” he said. Marcovefa didn’t care much for God, either, and remained unconvinced.

“Nobody’s riding out to see who the demon we are,” Trasamund said. “That’s not how things ought to work.”

He was right. Bizogots were as territorial as bad-tempered dogs. They should have spotted the strangers and come forth to challenge them, maybe to try to order them off the clan’s land. Her voice troubled, Liv said, “I don’t think there are any men with those mammoths.”

As Count Hamnet drew closer to the herd, he decided Liv was right. And that was out of the ordinary, out of the ordinary in a bad way. Hamnet had trouble imagining any innocuous reason why the Bizogots would let a herd of mammoths wander on its own. Those animals meant food and wool and hides to the clan. Knowing where they were at a given moment was no light matter.

Audun Gilli nodded. “No dogs, either.”

“More likely to see dogs around musk oxen than around mammoths,” Trasamund said. “Musk oxen pay attention to them, because dogs remind them of dire wolves. But dire wolves don’t trouble mammoths, except maybe to nip in and kill a calf once in a while, so mammoths don’t care so much about them. Still . . .”

“It’s not a good sign,” Ulric Skakki said, and the jarl of the Three Tusk clan nodded.

The mammoths didn’t seem to care much about strangers on horseback, either. The Rulers really tamed their mammoths. The Bizogots followed them, sometimes guided them, and used them, but the mammoths here below the Glacier remained their own masters in a way dogs and horses and even musk oxen didn’t.

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