His accent and his long, golden beard announced that, while he wasn’t a Ruler, he wasn’t a Raumsdalian, either. The local herald eyed him as warily as a shepherd might eye a sabertooth. That was sensible of the man, as Trasamund was at least as deadly as one of the big cats. The local soon noticed other big blond warriors among those who might be of his own kind.
“You aren’t those people,” he said again. This time, he added, “But who the demon are you?” Under the circumstances, it was a more than reasonable question.
“I am Trasamund, jarl of the Three Tusk clan.” Trasamund struck a pose on his horse. He was wasting his time; the Raumsdalian knew more of Bizogot clans and their jarls than he did about riding a war mammoth. After a moment, Trasamund saw as much. He simplified things: “I’m with you Raumsdalians. The Rulers are my enemies.”
“Oh.” The man from Fagersta seemed to understand that, anyhow. Whether he believed it was liable to be another question. “But you’re a foreigner,” he said, and waited, as if hoping Trasamund would deny it. When Trasamund didn’t, the local sighed. “Didn’t know much about foreigners till a couple of weeks ago. Don’t much fancy what we found out, neither.”
“There are different kinds of foreigners,” Hamnet Thyssen said. The local only grunted. He wasn’t disagreeing, but he also wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect. Hamnet asked, “What did the Rulers do to this place? And who are you, anyway?”
“Well, my name’s Hrafn Maering,” said the man from Fagersta. He let out a bleak chuckle. “What did they do to this place? Anything they pleased, pretty much. You can see Fagersta’s got some chunks bit out of it.” His wave took in the burned and overthrown buildings all over town. Glumly, he went on, “Me, I was lucky, if you want to call it luck. They killed one of my second cousins, and they forced my wife’s sister—but only two or three of ’em, and they weren’t especially trying to hurt her, just to have a good time. She’ll be all right, we expect, soon as she gets over the worst of the horrors, and she isn’t with child.”
Count Hamnet nodded soberly. Hrafn was right: as these things went, his family was lucky. One death, one not too brutal rape—you could pick up the pieces and go on after something like that. There still was a family to pick up the pieces and go on. Some lines in Fagersta would be destroyed altogether. Others would have a handful of people trying to recover after much worse disasters.
“When did the Rulers ride out of here?” Ulric Skakki asked. “Which way did they go?”
Hrafn Maering eyed him doubtfully, too; his sharp features weren’t those of a typical Raumsdalian. But he spoke the imperial language without accent, and he also spoke with the air of a man entitled to get answers from other people. “It was only maybe ten days ago,” Hrafn said. “They went that way.” He pointed somewhere between south and southeast.
“Have any idea how many of them there were?” Runolf Skallagrim inquired.
“Not for sure,” Hrafn said. “They rode these funny deer, you know?” By the way he said it, the deer were harder to count than horses would have been. But then he added, “They had eight, maybe ten, war mastodons with ’em.”
Chances were he’d never seen a mammoth in his life till the Rulers rode theirs down into the Empire. Mammoths were creatures of the frozen steppe, beyond the evergreen woods to the north. Mastodons, by contrast, roamed the forests of the Empire and the lands on its borders; they were common in the mixed woods near Hamnet’s castle. No wonder, then, that Hrafn called the Rulers’ great mounts by the wrong name.
Somebody none too familiar with sabertooths might easily call them lions by mistake. He’d be wrong, but he wouldn’t be very wrong. You could end up dead as easily, and in most of the same ways, from a saber-tooth as from a lion. And the Rulers would have been just as much trouble riding mastodons as they were on mammothback.
Hamnet wondered what the invaders thought of mastodons. They would surely have found some by now. He also wondered whether the Rulers could turn mastodons into riding animals. They would have a new supply of mounts if they did.
When he asked the first question out loud, Ulric said, “They probably think mastodons are delicious.”
And Hamnet couldn’t even tell him he was wrong, because a mastodon, like a mammoth, was a lot of meat ambling around in one con ve nient package. Taming mastodons would take a long time. Killing and cooking them, on the other hand . . .
“Well, let’s go after the buggers,” Trasamund said.
Hrafn Maering surely spoke for all the survivors in Fagersta: “What about giving us a hand?”
“You’re here. You’re alive. You can put the town back together yourselves,” Hamnet said. “The best thing we can do for you is kill the Rulers—if we can.”
“Sigvat would do better by us,” Hrafn said.
He looked very surprised when all the Raumsdalians and Bizogots within earshot started laughing fit to burst. He got mad when none of them would explain why.
“I’m going to report this to the mayor,” Hrafn said. “He’ll tell the chief of the diocese, and he’ll tell the provincial governor. Then the governor will report you to the Emperor, and then you’ll be in trouble.”
Hamnet and his companions laughed harder than ever. Hrafn Maering looked bewildered. He’d come out with the most fearsome threat he knew how to make, and these people . . . took it for a joke? Count Hamnet didn’t know whether to envy the local or feel sorry for him. He still lived in his secure little world, or thought he did.
The great virtue of the Raumsdalian Empire was that it had let generations of people just like Hrafn live out their lives without needing to worry about barbarians coming down over the border. Its drawback was that, when order broke down, the locals had no idea what to do.
“Good luck to you,” Hamnet told him, and meant every word of it.
“God keep you,” Ulric Skakki added, also in tones of great sincerity.
“You poor, sorry bastard.” Even Trasamund sounded sympathetic, no matter how rough his words were.
They left Hrafn staring after them as they rode past Fagersta. “He is a sorry bugger,” Ulric said. “He doesn’t know whether to crap or go blind.”
“He’s already blind,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “The question is whether he’s better off that way. What he has to see these days isn’t pretty, and he only got a glimpse of it when the Rulers went through there.”
“He would have seen more if they stayed longer,” Trasamund said.
“That’s Hamnet’s point,” Ulric told him. “Yours, on the other hand, is under your hat.” Trasamund needed a moment to understand what he meant. When the jarl did, he and Ulric had a fine time sniping at each other as they rode south in pursuit of the Rulers.
AFTER A WHILE, Ulric came up with something new to talk about. “All right,” he said. “We’ve driven the Rulers away. Raumsdalia is free again.”
“What about the Bizogots?” Trasamund demanded.
“Oh, the Rulers slaughtered them all. They aren’t there any more,” Ulric said. Trasamund bellowed irately. The adventurer held up a hand. “Fine. Fine. The Bizogots are free again, too.”
“That’s more like it,” Trasamund said.
“But I’m still talking about Raumsdalia,” Ulric Skakki said. He turned to Hamnet. “The Rulers are gone. The Empire is free.”
“Yes, you already said that,” Hamnet said. “What am I supposed to do? Shout huzzah?”
“Suppose you already did,” Ulric said. “What happens next? How do we make something that’s broken stand on its own two feet again?”
“Sigvat won’t think there’s any trouble,” Hamnet answered. “He’ll just start giving orders and expect everybody else to follow them. And anybody who doesn’t want to will end up in a dungeon.”
“If Sigvat tries that now, he’ll end up in a dungeon—if he’s lucky,” Ulric said. “More likely, he’ll end up dead.” He nodded toward Runolf Skallagrim. “Or am I wrong?”