With a little luck, Raumsdalian horsemen would ride down the slingers before long anyhow. They were bending the Rulers on riding deer back and back on their flanks. If they could surround the enemy altogether, this whole army might get wiped out. Not even Sigvat II could complain about that. . Hamnet supposed.
He couldn’t worry about the Emperor, either. A warrior on a mammoth came much too close to skewering him with a long lance. He couldn’t do anything about that but duck, hack at the spearshaft, and sidestep his horse to get out of the way. He shook his head, angry at himself. If you didn’t pay attention to what was going on around you, you almost deserved to get speared.
Was Marcovefa paying as much attention as she should? This was her first big battle. Did she know enough to stay alive on the field? Where had she disappeared to, anyway? Count Hamnet stared across the field in growing alarm.
Spotting her, he sighed in relief. That was all right. But then, quite suddenly, it wasn’t any more. He chanced to be looking her way when a sling-stone caught her in the side of the head. It was a glancing blow. If it hadn’t been, it would have smashed in her skull like a hammer smashing a rotten melon. Yet even a glancing blow proved quite bad enough. She swayed in the saddle and started to crumple to the ground.
“No!” Hamnet howled, a cry of despair both for himself and for the fight.
A Raumsdalian trooper held Marcovefa upright. If she did fall off her horse, she’d soon get trampled by friends and foes impartially. Hamnet spurred towards her, hacking past any enemy warriors who tried to stand against him. He saw them less as foemen than as obstacles like boulders and tree trunks.
“Hullo, Your Grace,” the trooper said when Hamnet rode up. He was one of the men who’d run from the Rulers once and been forced back into the army at Kjelvik. “She got one right in the pot, I’m afraid.”
“I saw it,” Hamnet Thyssen answered grimly. He shook Marcovefa. Her limbs were as limp as a fresh corpse’s. His thumb found her wrist. Her pulse still throbbed, and strongly. She lived, anyhow. He had a skin with beer in it on his belt. Holding it to her lips, he wished it were wine.
She choked, but then swallowed. Her eyelids fluttered. But she wasn’t awake, not in any real sense of the word. Count Hamnet had no idea how badly she was hurt: he was neither healer nor wizard.
He hoped the Rulers didn’t know how badly she was hurt. When she got knocked cold, what happened to the sorcery that held their spells at bay? Wouldn’t it dissolve like mist on a hot day? How long would they need to realize that?
He got the answer faster than he wanted to. It wasn’t quite a shout of triumph echoing across the battlefield, but it might as well have been. As soon as the enemy wizards found they could at last work unhindered here … they did. And the battle, which had inclined towards the Raumsdalians, swung the Rulers’ way as well.
The trooper grabbed Count Hamnet’s left arm, the one that wasn’t steadying Marcovefa. He pointed into the cloudy sky. “By God!” he shouted. “Did you see that? Did you see it?”
Maybe because Hamnet was holding Marcovefa, maybe because he was too stubborn to yield easily to anyone’s magic, he hadn’t seen anything. “What?” he asked, his heart sinking.
“A teratorn!” the trooper cried. “Its claws almost tore my eyes out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hamnet said. “There are never any teratorns on a battlefield till the fighting’s over.”
For a couple of heartbeats, the trooper looked doubtful. He knew that, too, once someone reminded him of it. But then he ducked and quivered. “Another one!” he yelled.
And Hamnet Thyssen saw it, too, and felt the wind of its passage, and smelled the stench of corruption clinging to its feathers. Was it there? Was it real? If he thought it was, if his senses told him it was, how could he doubt it? Who could guess what the wizards of the Rulers could do with no one there to thwart them?
Cries of dismay came from all over the field. Whatever the enemy’s wizards were doing here, they were doing everywhere. Fear seemed to rise up from the ground like a poisonous fog and choke the flame of Raumsdalian hopes, which had burned so bright a moment before.
Desperately, Count Hamnet looked around for Audun Gilli and Liv and the wizards Endil Gris had brought north with him. They probably wouldn’t be able to beat the Rulers’ wizards – nobody but Marcovefa had done that. But they might slow down the enemy’s sorcery and give the Raumsdalians a chance to do with weapons what they couldn’t now with magic.
There was Audun, incanting as if his life depended on it – which was, no doubt, all too true. A puff of snow leaped up from nowhere and hit him in the face – almost the same trick he’d used against the Rulers’ slingers. It wasn’t deadly. But it made Audun cough and splutter and clap his mittened hands to his face to get snow out of his eyes. While he was busy with that, he couldn’t chant or make passes. When he started again … he got another sorcerous snowball right between the eyes.
Where was Liv? Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t see her, or the Raumsdalian wizards. He was sure they were doing all they could – Liv herself had her share and more of stern Bizogot courage. Whatever she and the Raumsdalians were doing wasn’t enough. Even Hamnet felt despair and darkness rising inside him like mold crawling up a dank board.
Hoping against hope – the only kind of hope he had left – he shook Marcovefa. If only she would come back to herself, everything might yet be saved.
She moaned and muttered something, but didn’t wake. For all he knew, her skull was broken. She might stay like this for days, or months, or years. Or she might die in the next few minutes.
“No, God,” Hamnet whispered, as if God were in the habit of paying any attention to what he wanted.
He leaned over and kissed Marcovefa. The familiar feel of his lips . .. didn’t do much. She murmured again. What could have been the ghost of a smile flitted across her face for a moment. Then it was gone as if it had never been. Hamnet Thyssen swore softly. He might have known his kisses held no magic.
“What’s wrong, Thyssen?” Runolf Skallagrim cried.
“Our wizard’s down, curse it,” Hamnet answered.
“Then we’re ruined!” Runolf was no coward, not without magic curdling his marrow. But he wheeled his horse and rode off to the south as fast as it would go.
All at once, the Rulers’ riding deer seemed bigger and fiercer than Raumsdalian war horses. Rationally, Hamnet knew that couldn’t be so, but terror drowned common sense. It’s only magic! his mind yammered. It was magic, but it wasn’t only. The mammoths seemed twenty, thirty, fifty feet high, and broad in proportion.
The Raumsdalian army melted away like the snow when spring finally came to the Bizogot steppe. It was flee or die, flee or be overwhelmed by what didn’t seem to be phantasms at all. And once flight started, it took on a momentum of its own. Hamnet Thyssen was one of the last to leave the field. He brought Marcovefa away in his arms. Even he – or maybe especially he – knew a disaster when he saw one.
XXI
Hammnet Thyssen and what was left of his army made it out of the woods again. The one and only piece of good news he took from the lost battle was that the Rulers didn’t press their pursuit. Maybe that showed how close they’d come to losing. If it did .. . well, so what? They hadn’t lost.
And when would the Empire get out of the woods? Not soon, Count Hamnet feared. He’d had his chance to stop the barbarians, had it and failed with it. Now Raumsdalia lay open to invasion once more. He wouldn’t get this army to fight again, not the way it had.
He looked around to see who’d lived through the battle. He didn’t see Endil Gris, or Kormak Bersi, either. Where was Marcomer, the Leaping Lynx Bizogot?
Liv was here. She had a bandage on her forehead. A sword slash, someone had told Hamnet. Even though she wasn’t his anymore, he didn’t like to think of that stern beauty marred. Maybe Audun Gilli knew a spell to hide scars or defeat them altogether. Hamnet could hope so, anyhow.