“Thrilled. But of course,” Hamnet said tightly. Ulric Skakki gave him an impudent grin. Hamnet hastened to change the subject: “Where do we go from here? What can we do to make sure the Rulers don’t wreck Raumsdalia?”
“Wait till they kill Sigvat, and then beat them,” Ulric answered without the least hesitation. The cynicism in that took Count Hamnet’s breath away. The look on his face must have said as much, because Ulric laughed harshly. “What? Do you think I’m joking?”
“No. I think you’re not. And I think I ought to cry for Raumsdalia because you’re not,” Hamnet said.
“Don’t waste your tears. Do you suppose Sigvat would cry for you?” Ulric Skakki answered his own question: “If you do, you’re a different kind of fool from the one I’ve seen. Sigvat only has tears for himself.”
“And what kind of fool have you seen?” Hamnet Thyssen asked, as dispassionately as he could.
“You’re too stubborn for your own good. You’re too innocent for your own good. And you don’t know enough about women for your own good.” Before Hamnet could say anything to that, Ulric added, “Well, no man knows enough about women for his own good. But you knew even less than most of us poor twits. If you don’t believe me, go ask—”
“Gudrid?”
“I was going to say Marcovefa,” Ulric replied. “If you want to go ask Gudrid, well, you can do that. You want to know what I think, though? If you do, it only proves you’re a fool about women. Anybody who wants to have anything to do with that one . . .” He gave a theatrical shiver.
“Eyvind seems to,” Hamnet said.
“By God, Eyvind’s a fool about women. Even a fool about women like you should be able to see that,” Ulric said. And Count Hamnet nodded, because he could. Ulric patted him on the back. “There. You see? If you can see that, maybe he’s a bigger fool than you are. And they said it couldn’t be done!”
Hamnet got up and walked away from the fire. Ulric’s laughter pursued him.
THE QUESTION HAMNET Thyssen had asked Ulric kept gnawing at him. What could they do to beat the Rulers? They didn’t have enough warriors to do it in battle. He’d banked on Marcovefa’s magic to make up the difference in manpower. Now he saw that, while it could make up some of the difference, it would need strange and unusual help to make up all of it.
What that help might be, he unfortunately couldn’t imagine.
Marcovefa didn’t want to talk about it. “Everything will be all right,” she said when he raised the subject.
“Do you know that?” Hamnet persisted. “Does your magic tell you so? If it does, is it bound to know what it’s talking about?”
“Everything will be all right . . . as long as you don’t keep bothering me.” She paused. “If you do keep bothering me like this, you can find someone else to bother. I have listened to as much as I want to hear. Do you understand me?”
He couldn’t very well not understand her. “Yes,” he growled, and swung his horse’s head away so he could ride off by himself. No matter how big a fool about women he was, he could see he was on the edge of losing this one. How much bigger a fool would that make him?
He looked around. Ulric Skakki was out of earshot. That was something, anyhow—not much, but something.
A scout from the rear guard galloped up to the van. “Rulers!” the Raumsdalian shouted. “Rulers coming down from the north!”
“Let’s bag them!” Trasamund said. “They may not even know we’re anywhere close by. If they’re just coming down into the Empire, chances are they think it’s all over down her except the mopping up.”
“If they do, they’re wrong,” Runolf Skallagrim declared. “Yes, let’s welcome them to Raumsdalia.”
Swinging about and heading north again was a matter of minutes. Hamnet stayed away from Marcovefa instead of asking her what she would do. Maybe he could learn. Maybe.
Since he didn’t talk to her, she rode over and talked to him. That was bound to be a lesson of one kind or another. Which kind, Hamnet wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Shall we look like them?” Marcovefa said. “Will that surprise them and make things easy for us?”
“What do I know?” Hamnet answered. “Talk to Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf. If they think it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it.”
Marcovefa talked to the others. “They say to go ahead,” she told Hamnet. “So I go ahead. The Rulers will see the spell. Not us. We do not see anything out of the sameness.”
“Out of the ordinary, you mean,” Hamnet said.
“Do I? I suppose I do.” Marcovefa shrugged and got busy with her magic. She didn’t explain it, the way she often did. She simply went ahead with the spell. Hamnet Thyssen looked at his comrades. They didn’t look like Rulers to him. She’d told him they wouldn’t. He felt obscurely disappointed even so.
There were the Rulers. They were on mammoths and deer, and rode through the Empire as if they had not a care in the world. When they spied the Bizogots and Raumsdalians in front of them, they waved cheerfully. Their foes looked like friends to them, anyhow.
The two bands had got quite close to each other before one of the real Rulers called out something in their incomprehensible language. Hamnet and a few others had learned tiny fragments of that tongue. No one he led spoke it well enough to fool someone for whom it was a birth-speech. The men on his side did the best they could: they kept their mouths shut.
Frowning, the broad-shouldered, curly-bearded man repeated himself. Hamnet recognized the same syllables over again. He also caught the annoyance in the—chieftain’s?—voice. Whatever the Ruler said, he expected some kind of answer, and he wasn’t getting it. Which meant . . .
“Let’s hit ’em!” Hamnet, Trasamund, and Runolf all shouted the same thing at almost the same time. Ulric wasted no time on chatter. He simply drew his bow and shot the man who’d called out to people he thought friends. The Ruler looked almost comically astonished when the arrow sprouted in the middle of his wide chest. He slid off his riding deer’s back.
More Rulers tumbled from their mounts. Count Hamnet cut one down before his foe had even drawn his sword. Doing something like that wasn’t fair, which didn’t mean it didn’t work.
Only a few of the enemy warriors aboard riding deer found much chance to fight back. Bizogot and Raumsdalian archers also did everything they could to shoot the Rulers on the war mammoths, and to shoot the mammoths themselves as often as they could. If the beasts went wild with pain, they wouldn’t do what their masters wanted them to.
But a mammoth plucked a Raumsdalian trooper out of the saddle with its trunk and threw him to the ground. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly when the mammoth’s forefoot crushed the life from him. From everything Hamnet had seen, even large animals didn’t like stepping on people. Like it or not, the mammoth did it, as other war mammoths had before. Maybe the Rulers had some training trick to get the best of their reluctance.
“The illusion is broken,” Marcovefa called.
“Get back out of slingstone range!” Hamnet yelled at her. She made a face, but for once did as he asked without arguing. Almost getting her skull smashed before made her less than eager to risk it again.
Another Ruler yammered nonsense at Hamnet. It wasn’t nonsense to the man from beyond the Gap, of course, but it meant not a thing to the Raumsdalian noble. “Give up!” Hamnet shouted back. The Ruler either didn’t understand or didn’t want to.
Their swords would have to speak for them, then. Iron rang against iron. Sun-bright sparks flew. Hamnet wondered whether two swordsmen fighting in dry grass or on dry moss had ever started a fire. Then, as he beat the Ruler’s blade aside the instant before it would have ruined his face, he wondered if he would live through this.
A Bizogot’s arrow caught his opponent in the ribs. The Ruler grunted and then screamed. Hamnet finished him with a stroke to the neck. Body contorting in death spasms, the invader crashed to the ground.
Hamnet looked for someone else to fight. The unfair skirmish was almo
st over. One of the war mammoths was still fighting even though arrows pincushioned it. A few real Rulers kept up the struggle against the ambushers, but they fell one after another.
“Surrender!” Hamnet shouted in the Rulers’ language—that was a word he’d made sure he learned from the few prisoners his side had taken. Only a handful of the invaders ever did it. Most preferred death in battle to what they thought of as the worst of disgraces.
For his trouble, he got abuse showered on him now. The surviving Rulers made it plain they weren’t about to give up. He couldn’t understand much of what they called him, but he was sure they weren’t tossing him endearments.
“If they don’t want to, they don’t have to,” Trasamund said. He drew his bow, took careful aim, and shot one of the Rulers off the war mammoth still in the fight. The rest of the enemy warriors cheered. They saw nothing wrong with dying. Quitting was another story.
Die they did. Marcovefa tried her heart-stopping sorcery on the mammoth, but it didn’t work. She shrugged. “Warded,” she said. “The spell is easy to block.”
“Too bad. A lot of meat there.” Trasamund shrugged. “Oh, well. We’ll still butcher the deer and the horses that went down.”
“I wish it were easy to put the mammoths out of their misery one way or another,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He imagined himself wandering around with needles and skewers jabbed into his flesh. That had to be something close to what the great beasts were feeling now—and they didn’t even know why it had happened.
“Well, if you want to ride up close and try for a shot in the eye . . .” The way Trasamund’s voice trailed off told what he thought Count Hamnet’s chances were. After a moment, he went on, “Of course, if you miss, the mammoth’ll likely stamp you into the mud.”
“That did cross my mind, yes,” Hamnet said. “Since it was your good idea, you can try it.”
For a heartbeat, he feared Trasamund would. Challenging a Bizogot could be dangerous, because he might feel compelled to meet the challenge no matter how preposterous it was. But the jarl shook his head. “I’ve seen it tried, thanks,” he said. “I’ve even seen it work once or twice. And I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t.” This time, his pause had a meditative quality to it. “Not pretty.”
“You sure aren’t,” Ulric Skakki agreed. “Or isn’t that what you were talking about?” He had a knack for hearing and responding to the bits of talk that would start the most trouble.
“We were talking about putting mammoths out of their misery.” Trasamund eyed Ulric. “Might be worthwhile doing the same thing to you.”
“Only misery I’m in right now is from the company I keep,” the adventurer said. “I can put myself out of it if I want to—all I need to do is ride away.” He made as if to do just that.
“Hang on,” Hamnet said.
“All right, since it’s you that asks,” Ulric said. “You haven’t insulted me any time lately, anyhow. I don’t quite know why not, but you haven’t.”
“Give me a chance and I’m sure I will,” Hamnet replied. “Where do we go from here? What do we do next?”
Ulric struck a pose. “Do I look like an oracle? Am I the Golden Shrine?” He looked down at himself. “If I am, the architect could have done better. My body is a temple—but not that one.”
“Your body is a—” Trasamund broke off. He was bigger than Ulric Skakki, and thicker through the shoulders, but no one could accuse the adventurer of being soft. “A temple to your foul mouth,” the Bizogot finished, and looked pleased with himself for coming up with something.
“While you’re as pure as snow is black,” Ulric said.
Trasamund started to nod, then almost hurt himself stopping when he heard the whole gibe. He sent Ulric a venomous stare. “I did not believe there really were things like snakes till I finally saw one down here, no matter what some fast-talking Raumsdalian traders said. When I got to know you, though, I understood what they meant.”
“Ah, well.” Ulric gave back an elaborate shrug. “For a long time, your Ferocity, I felt the same way about vultures.”
Trasamund purpled. Before they could turn insults into a brawl, Count Hamnet said, “Now, children . . .” That made them both glare at him, which was—he supposed—better than having them glare at each other. He went on, “The idea is to fight the Rulers—remember? If we fight each other, we help them? We don’t do ourselves any good.”
“But we can have some fun.” Ulric was in no mood to be helpful.
“You want fun, go to a brothel,” Trasamund growled. “This is war, curse it. We have to smash the Rulers—smash them, do you hear?”
“Think so, do you?” Ulric wasn’t about to give up his sport. “And here all the time I thought the idea was to hand them flowers when they came by.”
“Flowers, is it?” Trasamund told him what he could do with his flowers. It struck Hamnet as uncomfortable, especially if he used roses.
“You, too,” Ulric said. “Sideways.” He paused for a moment. “We didn’t kill all of them, I don’t think. Some will go on south and tell the rest of the Rulers where we are.”
“That’s part of the idea, eh?” Trasamund said. “We want them to come after us. Then we can deal with them.”
“I wish the Raumsdalian armies down south would give us a little help,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “They haven’t yet, not so far as anybody can tell.”
“Too right they haven’t,” Ulric agreed. “The generals are probably afraid of the Rulers, and we know too bloody well that Sigvat’s afraid of them.”
“We have to do it on our own, then.” Trasamund spoke with a certain lonely pride. Every Bizogot jarl saw his clan as being alone against its neighbors. Trasamund was bound to see this force as alone against the world. He wasn’t so far wrong, either.
“What if we can’t do it on our own?” Ulric Skakki went on trying to get under his skin.
This time, it didn’t work. Trasamund eyed the adventurer with something close to infinite scorn. “Then we die,” he said. “Bravely, I hope.” Not even Ulric found a good comeback for that. Count Hamnet didn’t even try. He didn’t want to die bravely. He wanted the Rulers to die bravely.
And, if such a thing were possible, he wouldn’t have minded seeing Sigvat II die bravely, too.
RAUMSDALIANS AND BIZOGOTS turned and moved south again. Hamnet pushed them to move fast. He had his reasons, though he didn’t speak of all of them. If the warriors moved fast enough, maybe they would leave the followers behind. He could hope he would leave Eyvind Torfinn and Gudrid behind, anyhow.
But, no matter what he hoped, it didn’t happen. Gudrid had kept up as they traveled through the Gap and beyond the Glacier. And she kept up now. Every once in a while, she even grinned at him. She knew he didn’t want her around. His not wanting her around had to give her one more reason to stay.
The Rulers took a while, but they proved able to learn from experience. They stopped sending big armies against the band Marcovefa backboned. Instead, they began to put raiders all around them, the way dire wolves would if they were harrying a herd of musk oxen. Now one outriding Bizogot, now two or three Raumsdalians, would go missing. Sometimes they would take enemies with them, sometimes not. But the band began to shrink.
Hamnet didn’t want to push Marcovefa about it. It seemed too small a matter to fuss about, too small a matter to draw the notice of a large talent. After the fourth time a small party of outriders got picked off, he changed his mind. The force needed scouts. If he couldn’t send them out without sending them out to get killed, he had a problem, and so did his little army.
“I see what I can do,” Marcovefa said when he told her what was wrong. “Maybe I ride with some scouts, see if I can lure the Rulers into coming after us. They get a surprise then, yes?”
That made Hamnet wish he’d kept his mouth shut. “We can’t afford to lose you. You know that,” he said.
“Foolishness,” Marcovefa sniffed. “Any shaman who knows anything should be able to beat t
hese foolish Rulers.” Then she sighed. “But your shamans and wizards don’t know much, do they?”
“We used to think so,” Hamnet said. “Now . . . You and the Rulers have taught us some lessons we’d rather not have had.”
“You were like this.” Marcovefa closed one eye and squinted through the other one. “You were all like this, so you didn’t know it. The Rulers are like this.” She opened the one eye a little wider. “You need to be like this.” She opened both eyes very wide. Then she winked at Hamnet.
“You’re bound to be right,” he said, ignoring the wink. “But even if you are, you can’t always stay away from arrows or slingstones. And we can’t do without you, even if you think we should be able to.”
“You have a trouble, a problem. You bring it to me. Now you don’t want me to fix it,” Marcovefa said. “Where is the sense in that?”
“Losing scouts is a problem,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Losing you is a catastrophe.” Then he had to explain what a catastrophe was: “Worse than a problem. Much worse.”
“But you won’t lose me,” Marcovefa said. “Don’t think so, anyway.”
“You don’t think so,” Hamnet echoed discontentedly. “Don’t you see? That isn’t good enough. Without you, we’re nothing.”
“You are more than you think you are,” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know how much you are. You have no idea.”
“Do you mean me, or do you mean all of us?” Hamnet’s wave encompassed the ragtag army he’d helped build.
“Yes,” Marcovefa answered, making herself as annoying as if she were Ulric Skakki.
Count Hamnet fumed, but only to himself. “Which?” he asked.
“I mean you, and I mean everyone,” Marcovefa said. “It is not a question with only one answer. If you were not stronger than you think, the Rulers would have won a long time ago. Don’t you see that?”
“Well . . . maybe.” Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. He’d got used to looking down on himself. Why not, when everyone else did. That was how his thoughts ran, anyway. Losing first Gudrid and then Liv did nothing to make him feel better about himself, either.
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