Harry Turtledove

The Golden Shrine

I

SPRING ON THE Bizogot steppe came late, and grudgingly. The Breath of God blew down from the Glacier and over the frozen plain long after southern breezes began melting snow and bringing green back to the Raumsdalian Empire. At last, though, as the sun stayed longer in the sky day by day, the weather north of the tree line began to change, too.

Even down in the Empire, Count Hamnet Thyssen reckoned spring a minor miracle. Up on the Bizogot steppe, the miracle seemed not so minor; spring was harder won here. All the same, Hamnet had a bigger miracle to celebrate on this bright, mild, blue-skied, sunny day. He and his friends had lived through the winter.

“And I tell you,” he remarked to Ulric Skakki, “I wouldn’t have given a counterfeit copper for our chances when we set out last fall.”

“Why not, Your Grace?” With his auburn hair and foxy features, Ulric could don the mask of innocence more readily than Count Hamnet, who was large and dark and somewhere between stolid and dour. “Just because it was a toss-up whether our side wanted us dead more than the enemy did?”

“That will do for a start,” Hamnet answered, which made Ulric laugh as merrily as if he were joking.

“What do you say?” Marcovefa asked. The shaman from the cannibal tribe that lived atop the Glacier looked like a Bizogot: she was large and blond and robust. The language her folk used sprang from the Bizogot speech, but from a strange, distant dialect. And her people had been isolated for centuries from the clans who roamed the steppe. She was learning their speech as she was learning Raumsdalian—learning them both as foreign tongues.