“Do stick him in the guardhouse, Runolf,” Hamnet said. “That will give me time to see who all wants to come along and to load pack horses. Easier than running off before we’re ready.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Runolf promised, and he did.
Hamnet rode out of Kjelvik the next day. Marcovefa rode with him. So did Ulric Skakki. Audun Gilli and Liv came out side by side. Trasamund went along, as did a few of the other Bizogots. Most of the Leaping Lynxes who still lived stayed behind, though, judging their chances better inside the Empire than back up on the frozen steppe. Hamnet Thyssen had to hope they were wrong.
Also accompanying his band was Gunnlaug Jofrid. The imperial courier said, “Do you really imagine you can get away with this?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Count Hamnet answered. “I can’t believe Sigvat will send an army up into the Bizogot country after me. Can you?”
“He’d better not!” Trasamund rumbled. “He’d better not even think about it, by God! We’d swarm down into Raumsdalia and tear his precious Empire up by the roots if he tried. The very idea!” He snorted in disgust.
Ulric Skakki snorted, too, though quietly. An amused smile played over his features for a moment. Hamnet understood why: poor Trasamund had forgotten something. With the Bizogot clans shattered by the Rulers, the big blonds would swarm into the Empire only as refugees, or perhaps as vassals and hirelings of the mammoth-riders. The Bizogots’ independent power would be a long time reviving, if it ever did.
The Rulers were still trickling down into Raumsdalia. Count Hamnet s band rode past several small groups of them even before it reached the edge of the woods. Hamnet led enough men to make the Rulers think twice about quarreling with him. He wasn’t sure whether that pleased Trasamund or disappointed him.
Plunging into the forest again felt strange. Not far ahead lay the clearing where his army had battled the Rulers to a standstill. . till that one unlucky slingstone took Marcovefa out of the fight and let the wizards from beyond the Glacier use the spells she’d blocked up till then.
She didn’t remember much about what had gone on here. Hamnet doubted she ever would. He’d seen that loss of memory before in people who’d taken blows to the head. More often than not, it was a mercy.
Marcovefa didn’t look at it that way. “I want to know what I did!” she complained. “I want to know what all they magicked at me. I want to know what I magicked at them. I know I was doing good – these Rulers are not so tough. But I want to know!”
“Maybe . .” Hamnet Thyssen had to pause, because talking while he was gritting his teeth was hard. He made himself unclench his jaw and go on: “Maybe you could ask Liv and Audun Gilli. If anyone on our side knows, they’re the ones.”
Marcovefa kissed him. That made him glad he’d said what he had; he hadn’t thought anything could. “I do that!” she said. She rode over to the Raumsdalian wizard and the Bizogot shaman. Count Hamnet turned his head and looked the other way. He could suggest it, but he couldn’t like it.
She was still talking with them when Hamnet s band came to the battlefield. Ravens flew away, croaking like big, black frogs. A short-faced bear looked up from a meal of . . well, Hamnet hoped the beast was eating a dead warrior of the Rulers. The bear growled a warning at the newcomers. When they took no notice of it, it loped away, long legs carrying it off at least as fast as a horse could trot.
Marcovefa came back to Count Hamnet. Yes, she does now – but for how long? he wondered. Would he ever be able to get these doubts out of his head? She said, “This is where we fought?”
“That’s right.” He nodded.
“I remember the place. I remember the – the mammoths.” She had to cast about for the word. “I remember the fear the foe threw. But even after I talk, I don’t remember the fight.” She slammed a fist down on her thigh in frustration. “I want to!”
“I don’t know what to do about that,” Hamnet said, in lieu of, I don’t think anyone can do anything about that
They pressed on to the north. A strange truce held whenever they passed bands of Rulers coming down into Raumsdalia. Once, a fellow who was pretty plainly a wizard stared at Marcovefa. Even in her damaged state, he knew her for what she was. When she bared her teeth at him in what was almost a smile, he flinched. The Rulers were made of stern stuff, whatever else you said about them; that didn’t happen every day.
The trees began to thin out. The customs post at the tree line was a burned ruin. To the north, as far as the eye could see – and, Hamnet knew, far beyond that – stretched the snow-covered, gently rolling terrain of the Bizogot steppe.
“Here we are again,” he said to Ulric Skakki.
“Never loses its charm, does it?” the adventurer returned.
“How can you lose what you haven’t got?” Hamnet Thyssen said. Ulric laughed.
XXII
Gunnlaug Jofrid rode back towards the south. Count Hamnet didn’t much want to let him go; he feared the courier would land Runolf Skallagrim in trouble. But the only other choice did seem to be slaughtering Gunnlaug, and Hamnet didn’t have the stomach for it, not in cold blood.
“Don’t worry. It will probably work out all right,” Audun Gilli told him.
“Easy for you to say,” Hamnet growled. “Runolf is a friend of mine. I don’t like running out and leaving him in the lurch.”
“I don’t think you are,” the wizard answered. “By the time Gunnlaug gets down to Nidaros again – if he ever does – how many Rulers will be between him and Kjelvik? With the worst will in the world, how much can Sigvat do to your friend?”
Hamnet Thyssen thought that over. His nod was grudging, but it was a nod. “Well, you’ve got something there,” he said, and worried about it less. Too late now to do anything but what he’d done, anyhow.
“Now we find our fellow Bizogots, our fellow sufferers,” Trasamund boomed. He seemed to have no doubts about what came next. “We fire them with our fury, and we lead them to victory against the accursed invaders.”
He made it sound easy. Had it been easy, the Bizogots would have done it when the Rulers first swarmed down through the Cleft. Trasamund was always one to overlook details like that. Ulric Skakki said, “Finding enough to eat through the winter here ought to be interesting all by itself.”
“We Bizogots don’t starve,” Trasamund declared.
“Except when we do.” Liv had a better grasp on reality than the jarl did. Hamnet had known that for a long time. She went on, “Even with our herds, it isn’t always easy. And we’ll have to hunt without mammoths and musk oxen to fall back on.”
“Dire wolves do it. So can we,” Trasamund said.
“We can rob them, too,” Ulric said. “What’s left of a musk ox or a baby mammoth or one of the Rulers’ riding deer that strayed will feed us for a while.”
For a while, Hamnet thought. When the Breath of God blew hard from the north up here, folk needed more food than they did down in Nidaros, with fireplaces and braziers and double walls handy to hold cold at bay. You had to keep the hearth inside you burning hot, or else the Breath of God would blow it out.
Peering north, then northeast, then northwest, Count Hamnet saw… snow. No mammoths. No musk oxen. No riding deer. No geese or swans. No ducks or ptarmigan. No white-pelted hares. No voles or lemmings, either. He knew game of all sizes lived on, in, and under the snowdrifts, but finding any wouldn’t be easy.
The horses would have to keep going, too. Unlike musk oxen or mammoths, they didn’t always know enough to dig through the snow to find fodder underneath. Sooner or later – most likely sooner – the travelers would probably end up killing and eating the pack horses. Once the supplies they carried were gone, what point to fussing over them? He wasn’t fond of horse-meat, but he wasn’t fond of hunger, either.