Trasamund was telling anyone who would listen about the slaughter he’d wreaked on the Rulers. All the slaughter in the world, though, wouldn’t give him back his clan. He had to know that. Maybe the tale kept him from brooding about it… so much.
Silent as a snowflake, Ulric Skakki appeared behind Hamnet. The adventurer had a cut on his right arm, and one on his right cheek. He spoke out of the left side of his mouth: “She’s awake.”
“By God!” Count Hamnet said. “That’s the first thing that’s gone right in awhile. How is she?”
“She asked the same thing about you,” Ulric answered. “She wanted to come see you, but she’s still too wobbly on her pins.”
“I’ll go to her.” Hamnet hurried away.
Marcovefa sat on a wounded horse that had foundered and died. They’d laid her on the animal when they stopped here, to keep her out of the snow and in the hope that what was left of its warmth would help her. Maybe it had. Hamnet wasn’t sure about anything anymore – except that he was glad to see her with reason in her eyes.
“How are you?” He and she asked the same question at the same time. They both smiled. If his smile was as shaky as hers … he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.
“My head hurts.” Marcovefa touched her temple very lightly, then jerked her hand away.
“I believe it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “A slingstone got you. I told you to move farther back from the fighting.”
To his amazement, her smile got wider. “So you people say, ‘I told you so,’ too? Not just us on top of the Glacier?”
“We say it,” Hamnet answered. “Sometimes we have reason to say it.”
“Well, yes.” She waved that aside as casually as if they’d been married for years. “What happened after I got hurt?”
“They threw magic at us. They threw fear at us. We lost,” Hamnet said. “Why do you think we’re down here? Without you … we lost. Without you …” He wondered how to go on. “Without you, it wouldn’t have mattered so much if we won.”
“I like you, too, but fight is more important now,” Marcovefa said. Count Hamnet bit his lip, but he couldn’t even tell her she was wrong. She looked around. “Can we fight more?”
“No,” Hamnet said bluntly. “Even with your magic, I don’t think we could make the men stand and fight again soon. The stone knocked you out. You didn’t feel the fear the Rulers threw at us.”
“I felt it. I held it off,” she said. What that would have been like hadn’t occurred to Hamnet Thyssen. Maybe he was lucky. Marcovefa shook her head very, very carefully. “Don’t think I can do it again now. Head hurts too much. All scrambled up in there.”
“I believe it. You almost got scrambled for good,” Hamnet said. “This much over” – he held his hands maybe three digits apart – ”and the stone doesn’t hit you sideways.”
“I know.” Marcovefa looked unhappy. “I fight the magic to a standstill, and a stupid rock does for me. Not seem fair.” Count Hamnet wouldn’t have argued. Where was God while all this was going on? Probably on holiday at the Golden Shrine – there was no sign of him here. Marcovefa went on, “What do we do now, then?”
“Well, I suppose I have to send messengers back to Nidaros and let Sigvat know we lost.” Hamnet sighed. “I’m really looking forward to that.”
“You did everything you could. We all did everything we could,” Marcovefa said. “We lost. It happens. Happens up on top of the Glacier, too.”
“When the Emperor sends someone he doesn’t like out to do a job, that fellow better do it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If he doesn’t, the Emperor will blame him. Otherwise, Sigvat would have to blame himself, and the next time he does that will be the first.”
“As long as I don’t get my head knocked, we win,” Marcovefa said.
“But you did,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “And we didn’t.”
“Don’t do it,” Ulric Skakki said when Count Hamnet chose a messenger to deliver the bad news.
“I have to,” Hamnet said stolidly.
“No, don’t,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “We’ll go back to Kjelvik. If we hold there, everything will look a lot better.”
“How many of the towns in the woods held?” Hamnet said. “What does the Rulers’ magic do to walls?”
“What will Sigvat do to you when he finds out you lost?” Ulric Skakki returned, which echoed Hamnet’s thoughts uncomfortably well.
“Won’t the wizard from the north hold those buggers off?” Runolf asked.
“Not for a while. She can’t do anything much in the way of magic now,” Hamnet answered. “She came too close to getting her head broken like a dropped egg.”
“How long do we have to wait?” Runolf sounded suddenly apprehensive.
“No way to tell,” Ulric Skakki said before Count Hamnet could reply. “You get hit in the head, you could be all right in a day or two, or you could go on having headaches and such for weeks.”
“You sound like someone who knows what he’s talking about,” Hamnet remarked.
“And don’t I wish I didn’t!” Ulric said. “I’ve got clobbered more times than I wish I had – I’ll say that. Probably why I’m the way I am today.”
Hamnet, by contrast, had got hit in the heart too often. He reflected that he probably would again. Did you ever get used to such wounds? Could you? Liv hadn’t hurt him so badly as Gudrid, but that wasn’t because he’d got hardened in the intervening years. Far from it. The only difference was, Gudrid took a malicious glee in tormenting him, while Liv seemed sorry she’d decided she had to go.
Being sorry didn’t stop her, of course. When did it ever?
Trasamund methodically cleaned blood from his sword and honed it against a whetstone to sharpen the edge and get the nicks out. He nodded to Hamnet. “We’ll have another go at them,” he said. “We almost licked em this time, by God.”
“Yes.” Hamnet let it go at that. He didn’t want to lower the spirits of anyone who stayed ready to carry on. But he couldn’t help thinking that a horse which almost escaped a sabertooth got eaten just the same.
And, no matter what Ulric said, Count Hamnet sent the courier off to Nidaros. Sigvat II needed to know what had happened up in the woods. For better or for worse – for better and for worse – the fate of the Empire rested in his hands. And after that. .
Hamnet hunted up Runolf Skallagrim. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll go down to Kjelvik, the way you said.”
“About the best thing we can do,” agreed the commandant of that town. “At least we’ll have somewhere to fight from. The wall’s in tolerable shape – you’ve seen it, for God’s sake. And we’ve still got a lot of food in the granaries . . and we’ll be bringing back some more in the supply wagons.”
“That was my next question,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
How good were the Rulers at siege warfare? They were nomads like the Bizogots. He couldn’t imagine them settling down around Kjelvik and building catapults and siege towers, the way a Raumsdalian army would. But, after a little thought, he could imagine them knocking down the walls with sorcery. How soon would Marcovefa be able to stop them if they tried?
Runolf had a different thought: “What if they just go on by us, go deeper into the Empire?”
“They wouldn’t do that!” Hamnet exclaimed – by which he meant he wouldn’t do that himself. But the Rulers? They might be a different story. So what if they had enemy soldiers behind them? If they were confident they could beat any force that came up against them, why would they worry? And wouldn’t they have more warriors moving down into Raumsdalia off the Bizogot plains?
I’m full of cheerful notions today, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Nothing like losing a battle to bring such ideas bubbling to the surface like noxious gases from the asphalt pits of the far southwest.
Wounded men’s moans did nothing to lift his spirits. He spotted Audun Gilli doing what he could to help some of the worst-hurt men with his magic. After a while, Audun looked up and nodded to him. The wizard looked weary, and who could blame him?