A stone in the house behind the hecklers head suddenly sported a mouth. In a vicious, whiny imitation of his voice, it squawked, “Why did you screw that broad next door?”
“What? I never – ” But the local looked horrified. And the man standing next to him, who was both larger and better muscled, looked first suspicious and then furious.
Hamnet Thyssen rode on before he learned how that drama turned out. He looked around for Audun Gilli. When he spotted the wizard, he nodded his thanks. He’d never thought he would do that, not after Audun took Liv from him, but he did. Life was full of surprises, not all of them as nasty as one would think.
The garrison cooks came up with meals tastier than charred horseflesh. A bed in a room off the barracks made a better place to sleep with Marcovefa than snow-covered ground. A charcoal brazier gave the chamber at least a little warmth.
“How are you?” he asked as the two of them sat down on the bed.
“Hurts,” Marcovefa answered matter-of-factly.
Not tonight – I have a headache. Hamnet wondered if he was losing his wits or just too tired to see straight. He’d seldom felt less lecherous. He might want to hang on to Marcovefa through the night for reassurance – and warmth, which was in short supply despite the brazier. Anything more could wait… for the next year or two, by the way his eyelids sagged.
Sometimes things looked better after you woke up in the morning. This wasn’t one of those times for Count Hamnet. The brazier had run out of fuel during the night, which left the room as cold as the inside of a snowball, almost as cold as the inside of Sigvat s heart. Hamnet still remembered defeat much too well. And when he looked over at Marcovefa lying there beside him, the bruise on the side of her head was much too plain.
He lay quiet, letting her sleep as long as she would. Her eyes opened about half an hour later. She smiled at him and said, “I need to piss.”
“So do I,” he answered. “I didn’t want to bother you. How do you feel?”
“Not so bad,” Marcovefa said, but she winced when she sat up and then stood. “Not so good, either.” She used the pot first. As usual, she was much less self-conscious about such things than Raumsdalians, or even ordinary Bizogots. On that mountain up above the Glacier, privacy wasn’t even a word. “What do we do now?” she asked as Hamnet got up and eased him-self.
Lick our wounds, was the first thought that came to mind. “Try to find out what the Rulers are doing,” he said out loud: it had the virtue of sounding better, anyhow. “See if we have to stand siege here.”
“Can we?” Marcovefa asked – a much too pointed question.
“For a while, anyhow,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Till we’re relieved, or till their magic knocks down the wall, or till your magic comes back. If yours comes back soon, we can last a lot longer.”
She frowned in concentration, then shook her head, then winced again, regretting that. With a sigh that puffed fog from her mouth even indoors, she said, “Not there yet. Like my head all clogged up inside.”
“You’re lucky you really don’t have a rock in there,” Hamnet said.
“This is luck?” Marcovefa started to shake her head once more, but thought better of it. “With luck, the stone misses. With luck, we win the fight.”
Hamnet had had those thoughts when someone told him something bad was really lucky. All it boiled down to was, Well, things could be worse. He supposed they could. That didn’t make them wonderful the way they were.
“Let’s go get something to eat,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, but the thought of breakfast didn’t cheer her up, either. “Food makes me . .” She couldn’t find the word, but mimed puking.
“Nauseated,” Hamnet supplied.
“Nauseated. Yes. I thank you,” she said. “But I try to eat. I am a fire inside. I need dung to burn.”
A plains Bizogot would have said the same thing. It still sounded odd in Hamnet s ears. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s see what they’ve got.”
As in most towns where armies have suddenly arrived, breakfast was uninspiring. Oat-and-rye porridge with not enough butter or salt and a mug of sour beer didn’t satisfy Hamnet’s tongue. His stomach, though, quieted down. There was enough for the moment, anyhow.
Marcovefa ate without complaint, even though the food was strange to her. “You have so much,” she said. “You get food, and you don’t have to hunt for it even in wintertime. Do you know how lucky you are?”
Plains Bizogots said the same thing. They had enough themselves to appreciate how much more the Raumsdalians enjoyed, and to want it for themselves. Marcovefa’s tone was different. Her folk had so little up there atop the Glacier, she might have come to the Empire from the dark side of the moon. She was beyond jealousy. Everything she saw surprised her.
She didn’t always admire it: “Because you don’t hunt so much, I see some of you sit around and get fat. You had better watch out. Such people are good only for roasting. Your foes will feast on you if you are not careful.”
Count Hamnet’s stomach did a slow lurch. He’d managed to make himself forget his prized shaman, his prized lover, had eaten enemy clansmen. No doubt those foes had also devoured men from her clan. Did that mean what she’d done was any better? Maybe a little, Hamnet thought.
And then she said, “If I ever catch the scut who hit me with that stone, I’ll eat his liver without salt.” A Raumsdalian would have meant it for a joke. An ordinary Bizogot would have, too, though a Raumsdalian who heard her might have wondered. Marcovefa was dead serious. And if she did find that slinger, he would be dead, too, dead and butchered.
Toward noon, a scout rode in. “They’re out of the woods,” he reported. “We skirmished a little, and then fell back.”
“Are they heading for Kjelvik?” Count Hamnet demanded tensely. Could he stand siege here? If he couldn’t, he would have to retreat now. If he did, Sigvat II would have one more reason not to love him.
But the scout shook his head. “No, uh, Your Grace. They’re going southeast across country. You ask me, sir, they’re heading straight for Nidaros.”
“Can we strike at their flank, then?” Hamnet aimed the question more at himself than at the rider who’d just come in. Regretfully, he rejected the idea. His men had no spirit for another fight yet. And, without Marcovefa’s sorcerous aid, they might as well have gone into battle without shields against an army of archers.
“What do we do if we don’t hit them, Your Grace?” the scout asked.
The question was more pointed than Hamnet Thyssen wished it were. Wait for the axe to drop was the first answer that sprang to mind. He didn’t come out and say that; he feared the scout would believe him. Worse, he feared he would believe himself. “I’ll talk with the others,” was what he did say, and that satisfied the scout, who didn’t see – or didn’t want to see – how little it told him.
When Count Hamnet gathered Ulric Skakki, Trasamund, and Runolf Skallagrim, none of them seemed eager to assail the advancing enemy. If Trasamund in particular held back, that told Hamnet the thing couldn’t be done. And the Bizogot jarl did. “No point hitting em unless we hit ‘em hard, and we can’t right now, curse it,” he said unhappily.
“Looks that way to me, too, I’m afraid,” Ulric Skakki said.
“And to me,” Runolf agreed. “If we’re going to get squashed if we poke our noses outside the walls . . well, then we don’t, that’s all.”
Had Hamnet Thyssen had any great hopes of victory, he would have argued against the others. Since he didn’t, he accepted their argument. Sometimes the best thing you could do was nothing.
He did send another courier down to Nidaros, warning that the Rulers were loose in the Empire below the northern woods and that he lacked the force to do anything about it. “Maybe a miracle will happen,” he told Ulric. “Maybe the Emperor will send me more soldiers.”