“A border station,” Count Hamnet answered.
Ulric arched an eyebrow. “Why? Those snoops are nothing but nuisances. And, if you remember the way we left, they’re liable to have orders to arrest us on sight.”
“Let them try,” Hamnet said. “We’ve got thirty warriors and three wizards with us. If that isn’t enough to make border guards leave us alone, we’re in real trouble. And when we find a station, we’ll find a road leading south from it.”
“Mm, there is that,” Ulric admitted. He looked along the edge of the forest, too. “It would be easy in the wintertime.”
“So it would,” Hamnet Thyssen said. During the winter, the border guards kept big fires blazing to stay warm. A column of smoke pointed the way to each post. At this season of the year, though, the men didn’t need to worry about freezing. Hamnet shrugged. “I don’t see one, but our wizards can tell us which way to go to find one close by. They’d better be able to, anyhow.”
Audun Gilli had a bit of lodestone on a string that he used for finding directions. The spell wasn’t so accurate up in the far north as it was in the Empire, but the wizard thought it would work here. Count Hamnet judged him likely to be right, but they didn’t need enormous precision now. Knowing whether to ride east or west would do.
“West,” Audun said after chanting and making passes and watching the way the lodestone swung.
They went west. Marcovefa tried to question Audun about his charm. Ulric Skakki translated with a martyred expression on his face. Hamnet understood that; for a non-wizard, nothing was more boring than trying to render sorcery’s technical terms from one tongue to another. He’d done it himself before Audun learned the Bizogot tongue. Now he wasn’t sorry to see Audun talking with Marcovefa and not with Liv.
Jealous? Me? he thought, and then, Well, yes.
They reached the border post in a couple of hours; the stations were scattered thinly across the frontier between civilization and barbarism. This one looked like all the others Hamnet Thyssen had seen: a wooden hut held by a handful of Raumsdalian soldiers who didn’t have the clout to get posted anywhere else. The Raumsdalians seemed horrified to see such a large party approaching them.
“What you do?” one of them shouted, using the Bizogot language badly but understandably. “No war here!”
“No, no war here yet,” Hamnet answered in Raumsdalian. “But how long will it be? Have you heard of the coming of the Rulers?”
“What we hear and what we see are two different things,” the soldier answered. “When we see these Rulers or whoever they are, maybe we’ll worry about them. If they deserve it, I guess we will. Meantime, though, who the demon are you?”
“I am Count Hamnet Thyssen.” Hamnet waited to see what would happen next.
One of the border guards started violently. “He’s that one!” he exclaimed.
“That’s right. I’m that one. What are you going to do about it?” Hamnet asked with a certain somber pride.
Before answering, the guards put their heads together. Then one of them said, “What’ll you do after we let you into the Empire?”
“Try to persuade people there really is a danger to the north. You’ll see for yourself soon enough. So will everybody, and it won’t be much longer.”
The border guards put their heads together again. When they drew apart, they all wore almost identical unpleasant smiles. “Pass on,” one of them said. “You’ll do worse to yourselves than anything we can do to you.”
“Thank you so much.” Count Hamnet wasn’t about to show that he thought they were much too likely to be right. He translated the permission to advance for the Bizogots who spoke no Raumsdalian. Ulric rendered it into Marcovefa’s dialect. She said something in return: something he didn’t translate. “What’s the closest town down this road?” Hamnet asked the guards.
“Malmo,” answered the man who’d spoken before. “It’s about half a day’s ride from here.” He sighed wistfully. “I sure wish it were closer.” Hamnet believed that. A stretch at a border station could seem too much like one in jail.
As they rode past the border station, Marcovefa murmured to herself. Her hands twisted in quick passes. The guards got down on all fours and started cropping grass. When a noise from the travelers startled them, they bunched together in a ring, heads facing out. They weren’t musk oxen, but they didn’t seem to know they weren’t.
“How long will the spell last?” Count Hamnet asked.
“A day. Maybe two.” Marcovefa seemed pleased with herself.
Hamnet looked over his shoulder. The border guards were grazing again. He hadn’t cared for their arrogance. Maybe they wouldn’t act quite so high and mighty when they regained full humanity. Or maybe they wouldn’t notice any difference. Either way, they weren’t his worry.
“On to Malmo,” he said, and Marcovefa nodded.
The shaman from atop the Glacier wasn’t so happy by the time she reached the forest town. Several Bizogots from the frozen steppe were also in a bad way. “These trees!” one of them said with a shudder. “They’re pressing in on me!”
“Where is the sky?” another one added. “Where is the . . . the space?” He threw his arms wide, as if to push back the branches that hung out over the road – which was hardly more than a track – and the dark trees from which they grew.
Out on the plains to the north, Count Hamnet often felt he was too small and the landscape much too large. Here where things closed in, Bizogots had the opposite trouble. He’d seen that before when traveling towards Nidaros with Trasamund and Liv. Liv didn’t seem too happy now, but she’d been through this then and knew what to expect now. The mammoth-herders who hadn’t, got an unpleasant surprise. So did Marcovefa, who’d also lived her life in a land of wide horizons.
She sighed in relief when they rode out into the clearing that surrounded Malmo. “The sun!” she said. “Not shadows in my face all the time.” Then she dropped into her own tongue.
“What’s she saying?” Hamnet asked Ulric Skakki. “Something about wood, but I can’t make out what.”
“She’s excited about all the ways you can use it,” Ulric said. “The palisade, the houses . . She called them wooden tents.”
That was amusing and clever at the same time. “Wait till she sees the fires at the serai,” Hamnet said. Malmo wasn’t a very big town, but it was bound to have a place where travelers could stay. . wasn’t it?
As things turned out, it was. The serai was nothing special, even by the standards of provincial towns. But it had a bathhouse and cooked food and rooms with beds. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t inclined to be fussy. After so long among the Bizogots – to say nothing of the sojourn on top of the Glacier – even the rough edges of civilization seemed wonderful.
Marcovefa marveled at everything. She’d never known real buildings before. Bathing in hot water with soap must have seemed indescribably luxurious to her. She didn’t want to come out and let some of the other travelers wash.
At supper, she ate roast pork. When she first tried it, she looked surprised. “Is this – ?” she started.
Count Hamnet knew what she was driving at. “No, by God, it isn’t,” he told her. “When it cooks, it smells like that, but it’s not.”
“It tastes like that, too,” she said. “Maybe not just like that, but close.” She added something else in her own dialect.
Ulric translated: “She didn’t think we ate each other, but she would have believed you if you told her that was what it was.”
“We don’t. It isn’t.” Hamnet Thyssen drained a mug of ale, glad to be spared at least one sin. After smetyn, ale seemed very good to him. He didn’t ask for wine. The tapman might have had some, but this far north it was bound to be painfully expensive. Ale would do.
Through Ulric, Marcovefa asked, “If I drink a lot of this, will my head want to fall off tomorrow morning?”
“Yes.” Hamnet and Ulric and Trasamund and Audun Gilli all said the same thing at the same time.