“A point. Three points, in fact,” Ulric said. “All right. Fine. Have it your way. I’m not surprised. It makes perfect sense.”
“Nothing makes perfect sense.” Hamnet eyed the adventurer. “Including you.”
Ulric clutched his heart. “I am wounded to the slow-which has a harder time getting out of the way than the quick.”
“What are you going on about?” Trasamund asked, and then answered his own question: “More Raumsdalian foolishness, I doubt not.”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect us to spout Bizogot foolishness, would you, Your Ferocity?” Ulric replied in calm, reasonable tones. “We leave that to you.”
The jarl muttered under his breath. “The day will come when you’ve joked once too often.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Ulric said. “All the more reason to enjoy myself before it does, don’t you think?” He studied Trasamund the way a natural phi los o pher might study a nondescript beetle. “Or do you think?”
Hamnet Thyssen studied Trasamund, too, and studied the tide of red rising from his neck to his cheeks. “I think that’s enough of that,” he said. “Do recall, we are supposed to be on the same side.”
“Oh, I recall. My insults to my enemies are more pointed.” Ulric mimed drawing and loosing a bow. “In the next engagement, in fact, I’ll use the points you made about ea gles’ nests, or the absence thereof.”
“You are quite mad,” Trasamund said.
Ulric Skakki inclined his head like a nobleman receiving a coveted compliment. “Your most humble and sometimes obedient servant, Your Ferocity. In point of fact, though, when the wind blows from the south I do know a hawk from a heron. The herons are the ones that nest in the reeds.”
“Mad,” Trasamund repeated. Hamnet Thyssen was inclined to agree with him.
They saw a few of the Rulers’ riding deer as they traveled east along the northern shore of Sudertorp Lake. The deer weren’t in large herds, though, and the Bizogots and Raumsdalians didn’t come across any of the squat, ferocious invaders from beyond the Gap. Count Hamnet supposed the deer were stragglers that wanted to wander the Bizogot plains on their own without caring about what the Rulers wanted.
He sympathized with them. The Bizogots wanted to do exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, the Rulers had other plans.
“Such strange beasts.” Marcovefa set the thumbs of both hands on her forehead above her eyes and spread her fingers wide, miming antlers. None of the animals that lived atop the Glacier, Hamnet recalled, had antlers or horns. They had to seem odd to Marcovefa: odder even than the horns of musk oxen or cattle, because the antlers had so many tines.
“They fend off enemies with them. They dig with them. The males fight with them,” Hamnet said. “Down in the Empire and nearby lands, only stags have antlers-the does do without. But with these riding deer, both sexes carry them, though the males’ are larger.”
“Why don’t we kill them?” the shaman asked.
“The Bizogots like waterfowl better, when they can get them,” he answered. “Don’t you?”
She shrugged. “I ate birds up on the Glacier. Mostly small ones, yes, but sometimes ones like these, too. The deer are new. They don’t taste like musk ox or anything else. New tastes are more interesting to me.”
Venison was different from musk ox. But it wasn’t as different as duck or goose. “If you want to shoot one, you can do that,” Count Hamnet sad. “I’ll help you eat it if you do.”
“Do you want me to?” Marcovefa asked.
“I’d just as soon eat fat goose,” he answered. “If you’d rather have venison, though, I won’t complain. I’ll help you put it away, the way I said I would.”
“That would be good. I don’t want to waste it,” Marcovefa said seriously. Even more than the regular Bizogots, the folk who lived atop the Glacier had a horror of waste. Count Hamnet supposed that was why they were cannibals. Understanding it didn’t make him want to imitate it.
When the riders spotted a deer wandering along, Marcovefa strung her bow. She sang to the arrow she nocked. The chant was in her own dialect, which meant Hamnet could make out only a few words. He guessed the charm was to make the arrow fly straight and true, but he would have guessed the same thing if he couldn’t have understood any of it.
Marcovefa drew the bow to her ear and let fly. The arrow, charmed or not, struck the deer just behind the left shoulder. The animal started to run, but its legs went out from under it after a few strides. It fell to the steppe, thrashing feebly.
“Good shot,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Can you charm them against men the same way?”
“Sometimes. Not always. Men are harder,” Marcovefa answered.
“Countercharms?” Hamnet wondered.
“Those, too. But men don’t want to be shot. Their will opposes the spell,” she said. “Animals don’t know anything about it till it happens. To an animal, everything is a surprise.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Hamnet said. “I never imagined it would matter in magic.”
“Everything matters. Finding out where, finding out how-that’s what a shaman does.” Marcovefa dismounted and went over to the riding deer. Hamnet would have waited till it stopped kicking, but it didn’t try to savage her. She swiped a knife across its throat. With a human-sounding sigh, it died as its blood rivered out.
Up atop the Glacier, they would have saved that blood for puddings and sausages. They might have down on the Bizogot steppe, too, if they weren’t traveling. Marcovefa gutted the deer. They would have used more of the offal up atop the Glacier, too. She looked not so much unhappy as resigned when she pushed the rest of the carcass away from the steaming pile of guts.
“Too much left for the big foxes again,” she said.
“Nothing to worry about,” Hamnet said. Venison steak was just about as good as waterfowl. When it came to a choice between venison chitterlings and, say, roast duck, he would have plumped for roast duck.
As usual, people carrying big slabs of raw, bloody meat made the horses snort and flare their nostrils and sidestep. Count Hamnet fed his mount a few early-ripening berries. Bribery worked almost as well as it would have with people.
They rounded the easternmost corner of Sudertorp Lake. Hamnet rode bareheaded. The sun was warm enough to make him sweat. He wasn’t the only one, either; he watched Audun Gilli undo his jacket and swipe a sleeve across his forehead. “By God!” Hamnet exclaimed as inspiration stuck. “We could bathe here. We really could.”
Everybody stared at him. He didn’t blame the Bizogots and Audun and Ulric for gaping. Chances to bathe didn’t come often on the frozen steppe. But it wasn’t frozen now, which was exactly the point. It was a pleasant day, they had plenty of water, and even the lake wouldn’t be too cold.
“Why not?” Trasamund said. “Why not, by God? The women here with us know what men look like, and the men know what women look like. Anyone who lets his hands get gay, I hope he drowns.”
Dying was easy among the Bizogots. Drowning wasn’t. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he’d ever heard the word in their language before. The literal meaning was smothers in water, so he couldn’t doubt what Trasamund meant.
The jarl told off a few men to hold horses while the rest washed. They would take their turn later. The rest of the Bizogots and the three Raumsdalians stripped off their clothes and splashed at the edge of the lake. Everyone had a tan face and hands and was pale everywhere else.
“Not all that bloody warm,” Ulric Skakki muttered, trying to rub dirt off his arms.
“We won’t get chest fever from it,” Hamnet said. “Up here, that will have to do.” He was filthy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Nobody else was any cleaner, though. If you were no dirtier than anyone around you, how dirty you were could stop mattering for a while.
“Not as good as a tub, but better than anything I knew before I came down off the Glacier,” Marcovefa said. “No lakes like this there. Even the springs freeze in the wintertime.”
>
Hamnet did and didn’t want to stare at her lean, athletic body. Seeing it in the sunshine pleased him, yes. Despite chilly water, though, he didn’t want to show everyone else how much it pleased him, and he feared he would.
When he got a glimpse of Liv, he deliberately turned away. Seeing her naked only reminded him of what had been and wasn’t any more. He splashed himself and scrubbed hard.
“I hate the idea of getting back into my grimy clothes,” Audun Gilli said.
“If you want to stay naked, you can do that-for a few weeks, anyhow.” Count Hamnet didn’t want to put on the smelly furs again, either. He knew too well he had no choice.
Somebody splashed somebody else. In a heartbeat, everybody was splashing everybody else. Pretty soon, the men started ducking one another. It was a good thing they’d all left their weapons behind on the shore. A hulking Bizogot tried to shove Ulric underwater. The mammoth-herder flew over the adventurer’s shoulder and splashed into the lake on his back.
He came up coughing and puffing and blowing, water dripping from his beard and the end of his nose. But his blue eyes glowed. “How did you do that? Teach me!”
“Another time, maybe,” Ulric said. “When we’ve got our clothes on again.”
A woman let out an irate squawk. Then she did her best to smother with water the Bizogot who hadn’t listened to the jarl. The man tried to apologize, but he was spluttering too hard-and laughing too hard, too. Then she hauled off and hit him. Bizogot women were solid and strong. She packed a mean punch. The man stopped laughing and howled instead.
“Enough!” Trasamund shouted. He could sound authoritative even naked-no mean feat. “You gave him what he deserved. He still needs to be able to fight.”
When Hamnet came out of Sudertorp Lake, he let the sun and the southerly breeze dry him. Then he climbed back into his clothes. They seemed even nastier now than he’d thought they would. And, of course, they were crawling with lice. Before long, he would be once more, too. And, before long, he wouldn’t notice the sour stink that clung to them any more.
As Ulric dressed, he made a face and said, “Some people weren’t very good at keeping clean.” No one would ever have imagined he might be one of those people.
The Leaping Lynxes’ stone huts weren’t far from the eastern end of Sudertorp Lake. They’d built them by the marshes where the waterfowl nested most thickly. Some of the refugee Leaping Lynxes sighed to be coming home under such sorry circumstances. Other Bizogots seemed surprised and impressed that their countrymen had built any kind of permanent housing.
Then a man came out of one of the stone huts. He wasn’t especially tall, but thick in the chest and wide through the shoulders. He had black hair and a long, thick, elaborately curled beard. In short, he belonged to the Rulers. He carried a bone staff in his right hand. Fire leaped from it as he pointed it at the Bizogots.
III
Flame engulfed A mammoth-herder and his horse. The man screamed. So did the animal, and galloped across the steppe. Fire still clung to it, and to its rider. The horse ran on long after it should have dropped. Hamnet wondered whether the sorcerous conflagration burned and preserved at the same time, to make torment last and last.
Laughing, the wizard raised the bone staff and pointed it at another Bizogot. The man ducked, not that that would have done him any good. Flame sprang forth from the staff once more.
Marcovefa raised a hand and spoke sharply in her own dialect. The flame stopped before it reached the Bizogot. The wizard from the Rulers stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then the streak of fire started to slide back toward him, faster and faster. He stared again, this time plainly in horror, and shouted something in his guttural language.
More Rulers came out of other huts. Some of them must have been wizards, too, for they carried staves like the first man’s. When they added their strength to his, they stopped the fire just before it recoiled on him.
Marcovefa bit her lip as the flame ever so slowly began to move out again, this time toward her. Audun Gilli and Liv began incanting, too, to give her what aid they could. All together, though, they were not quite a match for the sorcerous power the Rulers had gathered here.
But there were ways around that. Hamnet Thyssen needed a few heartbeats longer than he might have to realize as much. When he did, he wasted no more time. He strung his bow, aimed at the closest enemy wizard, and let fly. The Rulers’ sorcerers normally brushed arrows aside with some small spell or another. Putting forth all their strength against Marcovefa, they had no time or energy for such minor wizardries.
The arrow caught the sorcerer square in the chest. He looked absurdly surprised as he clutched at himself. His knees buckled; he slumped to the ground. Ulric Skakki and the Bizogots started shooting right after Hamnet did. Two or three other sorcerers fell, wounded or killed. That meant the lot of them couldn’t concentrate on Marcovefa any more. And she proved more than equal to anything but the lot of them.
They might have paid less attention to the fire one of them had first unleashed. She didn’t. When they shielded themselves against arrows, they left themselves vulnerable to the flames. They screamed when their bone staves caught fire, and screamed again when they did.
They dashed this way and that, trying to quell the flames. Some of them had the presence of mind to plunge into Sudertorp Lake. But not even water quenched the fire. Like sulfurous oil, they went right on burning. Steam rose from the lake.
The fire didn’t touch the Rulers who weren’t wizards. They tried to flee. The Bizogots rode after them. Slaying enemies who ran from them made ever so much better sport than fleeing themselves.
“I thank you,” Marcovefa said, riding up alongside Hamnet. She leaned toward him and brushed her lips across his. “Even for me, a few too many there at first.” Something kindled in her eyes. “Later on, I thank you properly. We have to make do with words right now.”
“Best thing I’ve heard today,” Hamnet answered, deadpan. Marcovefa laughed. He went on, “Why had so many of their wizards gathered here?”
“Better to ask them than me-except I don’t think any of them are left alive.” Her nostrils flared. “And most are too cooked-too charred, that is the word you use-to be worth eating.”
“Yes.” Count Hamnet left it right there. That stink had invaded his nose, too. At least he didn’t confuse it with the smell of roasting pork, the way he had up atop the Glacier. Remembering how he’d hungered for man’s flesh before realizing what it was still raised his hackles.
“Well, these huts are ours now, by God-ours by right of conquest,” Trasamund said proudly. “The Rulers ran off the Leaping Lynxes, and now we’ve run off the Rulers. We may not be a neat, tidy clan of the old-fashioned kind, but we’ll have to do. Times aren’t what they were before the Rulers came, either.”
Ulric Skakki stared at him in artfully simulated disbelief. “A Bizogot jarl admits the times are changing? What is this sorry old world coming to?”
“I don’t know. By the past couple of years, nothing good,” Trasamund said. “But I’m not dead yet, and some more of those maggoty musk-ox turds are. That, I like. And I know the world is changing. Was I not the first man through the Gap?” He struck a pose, there on horse back.
Ulric didn’t tell him no. But the adventurer had gone through the Gap the winter before him. None of the Three Tusk Bizogots knew Ulric had crossed their grazing grounds, and he didn’t want it known.
Trasamund pointed to the wizards’ blackened corpses. “A good thing these burning bastards didn’t start grass fires. That could have been a nuisance.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re not wrong,” Count Hamnet said.
“Grass fires can be very bad,” Trasamund said. “Not now, but later in the year-at the end of summer and the start of fall, before the first snows. We don’t get much summer rain here, and things dry out. When fires start, they can spread and spread. They can ruin grazing grounds. When that happens, wars follow. You have to
have somewhere to take your herds. Or, if the fires catch the animals, you have to grab someone else’s. When it’s that or die, you do what needs doing.”
“I suppose so,” Hamnet said. He’d fought in plenty of wars with less behind them than life and death.
Trasamund pointed to the stone huts. “Let’s make sure we haven’t got any more vermin skulking in there.” A Raumsdalian would have spoken of serpents or scorpions. The frozen steppe lacked a few unpleasant things, anyhow. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “We can live off the fat-by God, the goose grease-of the land . . . for a while, anyhow. Then things get hard again. They always do, curse them.”
No more Rulers remained. Hamnet Thyssen did wonder why so many wizards had come together. When he wondered out loud once more, Ulric said, “To plot mischief against us. Why else?”
“I can’t think of any other reason, either,” Hamnet replied. “I wish I could.”
“Maybe your lady friends and Audun will figure out what they were up to from the stuff they left behind,” Ulric said.
Hamnet gave him a stony look. “Liv is not my lady friend these days. You may perhaps have noticed.”
“Perhaps.” Nothing bothered Ulric Skakki-or if it did, he didn’t let it show, which served about as well. Still in that blithe vein, he went on, “You don’t have to hate a lover after she leaves you, you know. You can, yes, but it’s not a requirement. Liv’s a lady-no doubt about that-and she makes a good friend whether you’re sleeping with her or not.”
“Do I tell you how to run your life?” Hamnet growled.
“As a matter of fact-yes.”
That caught Hamnet with his mouth open. He closed it before a bug flew in-at this season of the year, a real worry on the Bizogot steppe, not just a way for mothers to scold their children. He feared Ulric was telling the truth. He did like to run other people’s lives, not just his own. Feebly, he said, “Well, I’ll try not to do it any more.”
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