Totila found girls for Trasamund and Ulric Skakki. He would have found one for Audun Gilli, too, but the wizard was using the bits of the Bizogot tongue he'd painfully acquired to try to talk shop with the deaf old man who was the Red Dire Wolves' shaman. Audun would have liked to find someone to translate for him, but the rest of the travelers were otherwise occupied—Hamnet and Liv had crawled under a mammoth hide together, too. Audun had to do the best he could on his own.
* * * *
When the travelers rode out of the Red Dire Wolves' encampment the next morning, the wizard said, "I think Odovacar told me there were changes in the north."
"Their shaman? Has he had bad dreams, too?" Ulric Skakki asked. By his self-satisfied smirk, whatever dreams he'd had after enjoying the Bizogot woman weren't bad at all.
But he sobered when Audun Gilli nodded. "He has. I'm almost sure of it," Audun said. "That makes it more likely the Rulers are sending the dreams, not the Emperor. Why would imperial wizards trouble a shaman's dreams?"
"Why would the Rulers?" Hamnet Thyssen asked in turn. "If they're plotting something, wouldn't they want to keep shamans in the dark as long as they could?"
In the dark was the right phrase. The sun rose late and set early, scuttling across the sky from southeast to southwest and never rising high above the southern horizon. Beyond the Glacier, it wouldn't come up even this far. Hamnet remembered Ulric's account of winter up there.
"Sometimes spells wash out farther than you wish they would," Liv said in Raumsdalian, and Audun Gilli nodded. She went on, "Odovacar may have felt bits and pieces of what was aimed somewhere else."
"Aimed at us?" Hamnet asked.
"It could be," Liv said. "Or maybe—" She broke off.
"Maybe what?" Audun Gilli asked.
She didn't answer. She stopped speaking Raumsdalian. In her own language, she called out to Trasamund, saying, "I fear the Rulers may have struck at our clan. God grant it not be so, but I fear it."
"Would they dare?" the jarl said.
"Never doubt what the Rulers would dare," Ulric Skakki said in the Bizogot tongue. "They may not always get everything they want, but they want a lot."
"God be praised we come in time to stop them here, then," Trasamund said.
"If we do," Hamnet Thyssen said. Trasamund sent him a horrible stare. He looked back steadily. The Bizogot was assuming that what he wanted was true. But was it really? We'll find out soon, the Raumsdalian thought.
On they rode. The weather was clear but very cold. Totila had given them some mammoth meat to take with them on their journey. They also killed hares. Even so far north, though, those had next to no fat on them, relying on their thick white fur for warmth. They would feed a man, but wouldn't keep him going indefinitely by themselves. In such weather, people needed fat for fuel to keep from freezing.
"Now we ride into the lands of the Three Tusk clan," Trasamund said a couple of days after they left the Red Dire Wolves' encampment. "Now we join the grandest clan among the Bizogots." He looked around. "I see no herds, not yet. They will be wandering elsewhere, no doubt. Our grazing range is vast."
And needs to be, Hamnet Thyssen thought. If the land up here by the Glacier were better, the musk oxen and mammoths could have lived on less of it. By the ironic glint in Ulric Skakki's eye, he saw the same thing. Neither of them pointed it out to Trasamund. That would have enraged him without being able to change anything.
Late in the afternoon, Liv pointed north across the snow-covered plain. "Those are people, I think, heading our way."
They were no more than wiggling dots at the edge of visibility to Count Hamnet. "If you say so," he told her.
"My own folk, coming to greet me." Smug pride rang in Trasamund’s voice.
Before long, he got a closer look at his clansfolk, and pride changed to horror. They weren't welcoming him—they were fleeing disaster. Some were wounded, others terribly burned. "Invaders!" Gelimer gasped when he saw his chieftain. "Invaders from the north!"
XXII
Not all the survivors from the Three Tusk clan even wanted to linger long enough to talk with Trasamund and his comrades. The Bizogots wanted to flee, lest worse befall them. They had been struck, and they had been broken. They’d never imagined such a blow could fall on them, not from that direction. Even though Trasamund spoke of the Rulers on the far side ot the Glacier, the danger must have seemed no more real to his folk than to Sigvat.
"Why didn't you patrol the Gap?" the anguished jarl asked Gelimer.
"We did—for a while. But the hunting is bad up there, so the men came back," Gelimer answered. He had a new cut across his forehead and a bandage on his left arm. "We didn't look for invaders, not at this season of the year." He grimaced. "I wish we would have."
"The Rulers . . . can do all kinds of unpleasant things," Hamnet said. Gelimer nodded, and then bit his lip. Moving his head had to hurt.
"How far behind you are they?" Ulric Skakki asked—a good, relevant question.
"Not far enough, by God!" the Bizogot exclaimed. "But they aren't chasing as hard as they might be. Why should they bother? What's left of us can't do them any harm, and they have to know it."
"My clan!" Trasamund howled. "You threw away my clan because you wouldn't listen to me. What I ought to do to you . . ."
"What's the point, your Ferocity?" Hamnet Thyssen said wearily. "Whatever you want to do, the Rulers have already done worse."
"If I'd stayed—"
"It might not have mattered," Ulric said. "They still would have surprised you, eh?"
"I would have beaten them anyhow." Even in disaster, Trasamund clung to his arrogance.
"They had—riding mammoths. Riding mammoths with lancers on them!" Gelimer said, for all the world as if the travelers hadn't told him about that when they came south from the Gap, as if he hadn't wanted to ride mammoths himself. "How could we hope to stand against them? And the ones who weren't on mammoths rode deer. They might as well have been horses! And their shamans—their shamans blasted our camp with lightning."
Liv put her face in her hands. "I might have stopped that if I were there," she said in a broken voice. "I've met the Rulers. I have some notion of what they can do. Anyone who didn't.. . would have been easy meat for them." She swiped at her eyes. "I can't even cry, not now. My eyelids will freeze shut."
"What... do we do?" Audun Gilli asked in a very small voice.
"We can't keep riding north—that seems plain enough. If we do, we run into the Rulers, and then ..." Ulric Skakki didn't go on, but he didn't have to. The rest of the travelers could draw their own pictures.
"How many other clansfolk got away?" Trasamund asked Gelimer. "Are there parties in back of you, or did they flee in different directions?"
"I don't know, your Ferocity," Gelimer said miserably. "I think the only ones behind us are those horrible, God-cursed demons from beyond the Glacier."
"I wish I could know for sure," the jarl said. "I don't like to leave anyone behind who might somehow get away. If I go forward—"
"You throw yourself away," Hamnet Thyssen broke in. "Will you charge a squadron of war mammoths singlehanded? Some people would call that brave. But isn't it stupid? What would you do afterwards? Nothing, because you'd be dead."
"With my clan murdered, I deserve to be," Trasamund said.
"No." Count Hamnet shook his head. "This war is all the Bizogots, all the folk below the Glacier, against these invaders. The Three Tusk clan has lost a fight. But the Bizogots are still your folk. They need you. They need what you can do. They need what you know. Ulric's right. If we charge now, we lose. We have to regroup and figure out what to do next, how to fight the Rulers."
"Talk, talk, talk. This is what Raumsdalians do," Trasamund said. "Not Bizogots. Bizogots go out and fight."
"And then wish later that they'd done some talking instead," Ulric Skakki said. Trasamund scowled at him—and at the world.
"The Raumsdalians are right, your Ferocity," Liv said.
She nodded. "I'm sorry, but yes. Going forward, charging ahead, is useless now. We need to save ourselves for a fight we can hope to win."
"Our grazing grounds! The mammoths! The musk oxen!" Trasamund beat his fists against his legs in misery.
"They're lost now, your Ferocity," Ulric said. "If we win, you can reclaim them. If you lose now, will you ever see them again? How likely is it? Tell me the truth, not what your heart wants to hear."
Trasamund growled like a wild beast, down deep in his throat. "Better to die than to live the exile's life!" he cried.
"If you really want to die, it won't be hard," Ulric said. "If you're just making noise because things hurt so much right now, that's a different story. But be careful what you say, because you may decide to do something your mouth means but your heart doesn't."
"He is right," Liv said again. "What we really need is vengeance. Don't throw yourself away before we can take it."
Trasamund turned his ravaged gaze on Hamnet Thyssen. "Well, Raumsdalian? Are you going to preach me a sermon, too?" He spoke in the Empire's language; his own had no word for sermon.
"No," Count Hamnet answered. "The only thing I'll tell you is, I know what watching your world crash down on you feels like. It's happened to me, too. You have a hole where your heart used to be, and you go on anyway. What else can you do?"
"Kill!" Trasamund roared.
"If you kill a little now, your Ferocity, you will die right afterwards." Audun Gilli was almost maddeningly precise. "If you wait for your moment, you can work a great killing on the foe, and still live to hear him mourn. Which would you rather?"
"I want to kill now, and I want to kill later," the jarl answered. "I want to kill and kill and kill. If I drowned the world in blood, it wouldn't glut me. Do you understand, you and your talk of killing? What do you know of death?"
Audun Gilli bit his lip. "I came home one night to watch my family burn.
Is that enough, your Ferocity, or do you want something more? Did you ever smell your wife's charred flesh when you lay down to try to sleep?" He almost quivered with fury. Little weedy man that he was, he was on the point of hurling himself at the burly Bizogot, magic forgot, simply man against man. And Hamnet Thyssen might not have been astonished if he prevailed.
Trasamund stared. In his own moment of agony, he seemed to have forgot that others could know, had known, torment, too. Where Ulric's sarcasm and Hamnet s stolidity failed to remind him of it, the wizard's rage did. Trasamund seemed to slump in on himself like a pingo melting in an uncommonly hot summer. "I will live," he mumbled. "I will avenge. And I will hate myself every heartbeat till I do."
Hamnet Thyssen and Audun Gilli both nodded. "Oh, yes, your Ferocity," Hamnet said. "Oh, yes. That comes with the territory. For now, though, we see about living."
Dully, Trasamund nodded as well.
* * * *
Audun Gilli knew a weatherworking spell that seemed stronger than any Liv had. He used it to call snow down on the travelers' tracks. Maybe that would let them and the survivors from the Three Tusk clan give the Rulers the slip. Or, then again, maybe it wouldn't.
"If you like, I'll ride off by myself," Hamnet said. "The wizards from the Rulers seem to want to kill me in particular, fools that they are. I don't want to bring my troubles down on anyone else."
"You'll do no such thing!" Liv's voice went high and shrill. She does care for me, Hamnet thought. That seemed a stranger, stronger magic than the one Audun used to fill their trail with snowflakes.
"Stay with us, Thyssen," Trasamund said. "Stay with us. If the Rulers want you so much, it follows that you can hurt them if you live. And so we'd better keep you alive if we can." He cared for Hamnet, too, cared for him the same way he cared for his own weapons. Anything he could aim at the Rulers, he would.
Count Hamnet didn't want to leave Liv. And he didn't want to leave Trasamund, either. The Bizogot jarl wanted to hit back at the invaders. That was more than Sigvat II did. Hamnet Thyssen was in the right place, and in the right company. "If you don't think my coming along will endanger you, I'll gladly stay."
"Good. That's good. We need all the enemies of those lion turds to ride together." Trasamund could see that, even if Sigvat couldn't. "And we need to hit back at them as soon as we can without throwing ourselves away."
"How?" Once more, Ulric Skakki asked a bluntly practical question.
He asked it, and the Bizogot waved it aside. "I don't know yet. But we need to do it when we see the chance. We need to show the rest of my folk that we can hit back. If we don't, what's to stop them from rolling on their backs like a dire wolf that's lost a fight and giving the cursed Rulers whatever they want?"
"A point." Ulric didn't sound happy about admitting it, but he did. He was no more honest than he had to be, but was in his own way scrupulous.
"Gelimer!" Trasamund boomed. The other Bizogot nodded miserably. Trasamund went on, "You will know where the herds are, not so?"
"I know where they were, your Ferocity. Where they were before the thunderbolt from the north hit us, I should say," Gelimer answered.
"We warned you. By God, you should have listened." But Trasamund let that go—for a Bizogot, a rare show of magnanimity. "The Rulers will be feeding off the beasts closest to your camp. Guide us to a herd farther away. It will feed us for a while. And, sooner or later, the invaders will come to steal. When they do"—he smacked his hands together—"we strike!" He made it sound simple. Whether it would be ...
Gelimer seemed to gain a little life at the thought of hitting back. "Off to the west is where most of the musk oxen were. The mammoths roamed closer to our camp. I don't know if those .. . Rulers are breaking them to ride. Even after you said they could do that, who would have thought it was true?"
"You should have," Hamnet Thyssen answered before Trasamund could speak. "Did you think we were making up stories to pass the time?"
"With Raumsdalians, who knows?" Gelimer said. "All you people lie all the time, so how can we tell what to believe?"
Hamnet looked at Liv. She was looking back at him. They both remembered Eyvind Torfinn's paradox. Hamnet wished the Bizogots here hadn't taken it so literally; it might have cost them dear. Or, then again, it might not have mattered. Who could say whether the Rulers would have beaten them anyhow?
"Am I a Raumsdalian? Is the jarl a Raumsdalian?" Liv asked Gelimer. "When we say something is true, you can rely on it. You can, but you didn't. And now you see what happened."
"You don't need to make me feel any worse, Lady," Gelimer said. "I'm already lower than a maggot's belly."
"Killing the enemy will make a man of you again," Trasamund declared. "West, you said the musk-ox herds were? Then west we shall ride, west and north, back into our own lands again."
* * * *
Enough fatty roast meat made the cold all around much easier to bear. The furnace inside Hamnet Thyssen, stoked with such fuel, burned harder and hotter. He seemed warmer, and supposed he really was.
The Bizogots had no trouble cutting an old bull musk ox, half lame and slow, out of the herd and leading it downwind so the smell of blood wouldn't panic the other animals. Killing it took a lot of arrows, but they had them. When it went down at last, bawling in pain and incomprehension, Trasamund finished it with a headsman's stroke from his great two-handed blade.
Gore crimsoned the snow. Some of the hungry Bizogots snatched up that bloody snow and stuffed it into their mouths. They couldn't wait for butchery, let alone a fire. Bodies needed food of any sort in this weather. The nomads grinned with blood on their lips and running down their chins.
Hamnet Thyssen, having eaten better lately, left the blood alone. After the dung fire began to burn, he roasted his meat and gulped it down— burnt on the outside, raw in the middle. He didn't care. You couldn't be very fussy in the Bizogot country, not if you wanted to go on living. He supposed he would eat bloody snow if he got hungry enough. He didn't think he
would grin afterwards, though.
Trasamund seemed to gain strength with food, too. "Where are the Rulers?" he roared. "Let them come now. Yes, let them come, by God! We will kill them by the hundreds, by the thousands!" The remnant of his clan had no more than twenty warriors, counting the newcomers up from the south.
"Let them come, yes—but not too many of them." Wherever you put him, Ulric Skakki had good sense.
"Let them leave their wizards behind, too." That wasn't Trasamund scorning Liv and Audun Gilli. That was Audun himself. "They are stronger than we are, however much I hate to admit it."
"Maybe we can take them by surprise," Liv said. "They'll think we're weak." And they'll be right, too, Hamnet Thyssen thought. The shaman went on, "And they'll think we're afraid. And we will show them they're wrong."
"We're not afraid of them. We were never afraid of them." Gelimer's voice was blurry, because he talked with his mouth full. He was too busy eating to pause very much. "But they beat us. They were too many and too strong."
"They won't come against us with everything they have. That's bound to be true. They won't think they'll need to. And they'll be gathering strength for a raid farther south. That's what I would do if I were one of them, anyhow. They'll push through the Bizogot country so they can attack the Empire."
"What makes you so special?" demanded one of the Bizogots who'd lived through the Rulers' onslaught. "What are you doing here, if you think you're better than we are?"
"I didn't say anything about better. I don't say anything about that," Ul-ric answered. "But we're richer than you are. Our lands are richer than yours. Our weather is warmer than yours. The Rulers will strike south." He defied the Bizogot to disagree with him.
The man wanted to. Hamnet Thyssen could see as much. But the fellow only muttered into his gingery beard and went back to stuffing himself with meat.
Down in Raumsdalia, the musk ox's stones would have been called prairie oysters. Trasamund toasted them over the fire and ate them. "As the bull battered down his rivals and won his mates, so will I beat down the Rulers," he vowed.
Beyond the Gap Page 38