Free The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove Page B

won’t make it any better.”
    â€œHold him tight,” Ulric warned Hamnet and Totila. “He won’t like this, but I’ve got to do it. Here we go.”
    The wounded Bizogot bit down hard to keep from screaming. He spat red into the slushy snow, so he was chewing on his lips or tongue. His bunched fists pounded the snow again and again. Hamnet had taken battle wounds. He knew what the younger man was going through. The less he thought about that, the better.
    â€œIt’s out!” Ulric said. Not much flesh clung to the barbs on the point; the drawing spoon really had shielded the wound from most of the damage it would have taken otherwise.
    â€œThank you,” the wounded Bizogot said. “Easier to bear now that that cursed thing isn’t sticking into me any more.”
    â€œThat’s what
she
said,” Ulric answered, which made the wounded man laugh.
    â€œLet me see that spoon,” Totila said. “Could we make it from bone or horn?”
    â€œI don’t see why not. Here, keep this one if you want to.” Ulric cleaned it in snow and slush before handing it to the Bizogot. Totila studied it and nodded thoughtfully.
    Count Hamnet, meanwhile, bandaged the wounded man’s leg. Down in the Empire, bandages would have been made of linen. Here, the Bizogots used musk-ox wool and dried moss to close wounds and soak up blood. If anything, those worked better than their Raumsdalian equivalents.
    â€œI thank you,” the wounded man said. “Do you think it will heal clean?”
    â€œThat’s in God’s hands, not mine,” Hamnet answered. “But I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.”
    â€œThose strangers really do fight from mammothback,” the Bizogot said in wondering tones. “Who would have believed it?”
    â€œWe’ve been telling you about it all winter,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out with more than a touch of asperity.
    â€œAnd so?” The wounded nomad seemed glad to have something to talk about besides the darkening bandage on his leg. “I can tell you about a sky-blue mammoth with pink horns that honks like a goose, but will you expect to see one if I do?”
    â€œIt depends,” Count Hamnet said judiciously. “If I know you’re a reliable man, I might. Why would we lie to you? By God, why would what’s left of the Three Tusk clan lie to you? They fought the Rulers. They saw them using war mammoths.”
    To his surprise, the man from the Red Dire Wolves had an answer for him: “We all thought you were making them out to be worse than they really are so we’d join you and do what you wanted. We thought it was nothing but a trick to scare us, to make us fall in line behind you. We’re Bizogots. We’re free men. We didn’t aim to do that.”
    â€œAnd so you had to get crushed before you decided we might know what we were talking about after all?” That sounded like something a Bizogot would do. Hamnet Thyssen counted himself to be lucky in a country where the closest walls—those of the stone houses the Leaping Lynx clan’s summer homes by Sudertorp Lake—were many miles away. Otherwise, he would have been sorely tempted to pound his head against one.
    The wounded man nodded. “Sure. Except we didn’t expect to get crushed. We thought we’d do the crushing.”
    After rubbing snow on his hands to get the blood off them, Hamnet Thyssen walked away. He put on his mittens to warm himself up again. Ulric Skakki came after him. “This is what we came north for?” Ulric said.
    â€œThis is what we came north for,” Hamnet answered stolidly. “The Bizogots are fools, but at least they’re fighting fools. Down in Nidaros, Sigvat II is a blind fool. If you ask me, that’s worse.”
    â€œWell, maybe,” Ulric Skakki said. “But where are we going to find some people who aren’t fools? That’s