“You are quite mad,” Trasamund said.
Ulric Skakki inclined his head like a nobleman receiving a coveted compliment. “Your most humble and sometimes obedient servant, Your Ferocity. In point of fact, though, when the wind blows from the south I do know a hawk from a heron. The herons are the ones that nest in the reeds.”
“Mad,” Trasamund repeated. Hamnet Thyssen was inclined to agree with him.
They saw a few of the Rulers’ riding deer as they traveled east along the northern shore of Sudertorp Lake. The deer weren’t in large herds, though, and the Bizogots and Raumsdalians didn’t come across any of the squat, ferocious invaders from beyond the Gap. Count Hamnet supposed the deer were stragglers that wanted to wander the Bizogot plains on their own without caring about what the Rulers wanted.
He sympathized with them. The Bizogots wanted to do exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, the Rulers had other plans.
“Such strange beasts.” Marcovefa set the thumbs of both hands on her forehead above her eyes and spread her fingers wide, miming antlers. None of the animals that lived atop the Glacier, Hamnet recalled, had antlers or horns. They had to seem odd to Marcovefa: odder even than the horns of musk oxen or cattle, because the antlers had so many tines.
“They fend off enemies with them. They dig with them. The males fight with them,” Hamnet said. “Down in the Empire and nearby lands, only stags have antlers—the does do without. But with these riding deer, both sexes carry them, though the males’ are larger.”
“Why don’t we kill them?” the shaman asked.
“The Bizogots like waterfowl better, when they can get them,” he answered. “Don’t you?”
She shrugged. “I ate birds up on the Glacier. Mostly small ones, yes, but sometimes ones like these, too. The deer are new. They don’t taste like musk ox or anything else. New tastes are more interesting to me.”
Venison was different from musk ox. But it wasn’t as different as duck or goose. “If you want to shoot one, you can do that,” Count Hamnet sad. “I’ll help you eat it if you do.”
“Do you want me to?” Marcovefa asked.
“I’d just as soon eat fat goose,” he answered. “If you’d rather have venison, though, I won’t complain. I’ll help you put it away, the way I said I would.”
“That would be good. I don’t want to waste it,” Marcovefa said seriously. Even more than the regular Bizogots, the folk who lived atop the Glacier had a horror of waste. Count Hamnet supposed that was why they were cannibals. Understanding it didn’t make him want to imitate it.
When the riders spotted a deer wandering along, Marcovefa strung her bow. She sang to the arrow she nocked. The chant was in her own dialect, which meant Hamnet could make out only a few words. He guessed the charm was to make the arrow fly straight and true, but he would have guessed the same thing if he couldn’t have understood any of it.
Marcovefa drew the bow to her ear and let fly. The arrow, charmed or not, struck the deer just behind the left shoulder. The animal started to run, but its legs went out from under it after a few strides. It fell to the steppe, thrashing feebly.
“Good shot,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Can you charm them against men the same way?”
“Sometimes. Not always. Men are harder,” Marcovefa answered.
“Countercharms?” Hamnet wondered.
“Those, too. But men don’t want to be shot. Their will opposes the spell,” she said. “Animals don’t know anything about it till it happens. To an animal, everything is a surprise.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Hamnet said. “I never imagined it would matter in magic.”
“Everything matters. Finding out where, finding out how—that’s what a shaman does.” Marcovefa dismounted and went over to the riding deer. Hamnet would have waited till it stopped kicking, but it didn’t try to savage her. She swiped a knife across its throat. With a human-sounding sigh, it died as its blood rivered out.
Up atop the Glacier, they would have saved that blood for puddings and sausages. They might have down on the Bizogot steppe, too, if they weren’t traveling. Marcovefa gutted the deer. They would have used more of the offal up atop the Glacier, too. She looked not so much unhappy as resigned when she pushed the rest of the carcass away from the steaming pile of guts.
“Too much left for the big foxes again,” she said.
“Nothing to worry about,” Hamnet said. Venison steak was just about as good as waterfowl. When it came to a choice between venison chitterlings and, say, roast duck, he would have plumped for roast duck.
As usual, people carrying big slabs of raw, bloody meat made the horses snort and flare their nostrils and sidestep. Count Hamnet fed his mount a few early-ripening berries. Bribery worked almost as well as it would have with people.
THEY ROUNDED THE easternmost corner of Sudertorp Lake. Hamnet rode bareheaded. The sun was warm enough to make him sweat. He wasn’t the only one, either; he watched Audun Gilli undo his jacket and swipe a sleeve across his forehead. “By God!” Hamnet exclaimed as inspiration stuck. “We could bathe here. We really could.”
Everybody stared at him. He didn’t blame the Bizogots and Audun and Ulric for gaping. Chances to bathe didn’t come often on the frozen steppe. But it wasn’t frozen now, which was exactly the point. It was a pleasant day, they had plenty of water, and even the lake wouldn’t be too cold.
“Why not?” Trasamund said. “Why not, by God? The women here with us know what men look like, and the men know what women look like. Anyone who lets his hands get gay, I hope he drowns.”
Dying was easy among the Bizogots. Drowning wasn’t. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he’d ever heard the word in their language before. The literal meaning was smothers in water, so he couldn’t doubt what Trasamund meant.
The jarl told off a few men to hold horses while the rest washed. They would take their turn later. The rest of the Bizogots and the three Raumsdalians stripped off their clothes and splashed at the edge of the lake. Everyone had a tan face and hands and was pale everywhere else.
“Not all that bloody warm,” Ulric Skakki muttered, trying to rub dirt off his arms.
“We won’t get chest fever from it,” Hamnet said. “Up here, that will have to do.” He was filthy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Nobody else was any cleaner, though. If you were no dirtier than anyone around you, how dirty you were could stop mattering for a while.
“Not as good as a tub, but better than anything I knew before I came down off the Glacier,” Marcovefa said. “No lakes like this there. Even the springs freeze in the wintertime.”
Hamnet did and didn’t want to stare at her lean, athletic body. Seeing it in the sunshine pleased him, yes. Despite chilly water, though, he didn’t want to show everyone else how much it pleased him, and he feared he would.
When he got a glimpse of Liv, he deliberately turned away. Seeing her naked only reminded him of what had been and wasn’t any more. He splashed himself and scrubbed hard.
“I hate the idea of getting back into my grimy clothes,” Audun Gilli said.
“If you want to stay naked, you can do that—for a few weeks, anyhow.” Count Hamnet didn’t want to put on the smelly furs again, either. He knew too well he had no choice.
Somebody splashed somebody else. In a heartbeat, everybody was splashing everybody else. Pretty soon, the men started ducking one another. It was a good thing they’d all left their weapons behind on the shore. A hulking Bizogot tried to shove Ulric underwater. The mammoth-herder flew over the adventurer’s shoulder and splashed into the lake on his back.
He came up coughing and puffing and blowing, water dripping from his beard and the end of his nose. But his blue eyes glowed. “How did you do that? Teach me!”
“Another time, maybe,” Ulric said. “When we’ve got our clothes on again.”
A woman let out an irate squawk. Then she did her best to smother with water the Bizogot who hadn’t listened to the jarl. The man tried to apologize, but he was spluttering too hard—and laughing too hard, too. Then she hauled off and hit him. Bizogot women were solid and strong. She packed a mean punch. The man stopped laughing and howled instead.