That only made Hamnet ride harder. He neither knew who they were nor wanted to find out. Whoever they were, he agreed with the guard: anybody who started a fire inside a city was an idiot.
“At least the Breath of God isn’t blowing,” Trasamund said.
If it were, whatever the Rulers hadn’t ruined in Nidaros might go up in flames. And . . . “I don’t think the maniac with a torch cared,” Hamnet said.
“Somebody ought to cut him in half and leave the pieces where people can see them,” Trasamund said. “That’s what we’d do up on the steppe. Anybody else who gets ideas can see what they’d cost him.”
“I hope somebody does,” Count Hamnet said. “But it isn’t my worry, thank God. Raumsdalia can sort it out without me.” He sat straighter on his horse, as if a heavy weight had lifted from his shoulders. “Have you got any idea how good it feels to be able to say that?”
“You can stay in your castle place for a while,” Marcovefa said shrewdly. “Sooner or later, though, the world will come looking for you again.”
Hamnet Thyssen didn’t argue with her; she was much too likely to be right. He just said, “Later, I hope.” He and Marcovefa and Trasamund rode away from Nidaros, and from the new plume of black smoke climbing above it.
SWEAT RAN DOWN Marcovefa’s face. “Does it get this hot every summer down here?” she asked.
“Most summers, anyhow,” Hamnet said. He didn’t find the weather especially hot. But then, he hadn’t spent most of his life atop the Glacier.
“How do you stand it?” Marcovefa asked.
“It’s pretty warm, all right,” Trasamund added.
“All what you’re used to.” Hamnet left it there. “People who grow up south of here wouldn’t be able to stand the winters in the Bizogot country.” He didn’t say anything about the winters in Marcovefa’s homeland. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand those himself.
“More and more of these broad-leaved trees. I think they look funny.” Suddenly, Marcovefa turned into a connoisseur of forests, although she’d never so much as imagined a tree, broad-leaved or otherwise, till she descended from the Glacier. “What good are they?”
“There’s always the wood,” Hamnet said. He took that for granted, but Marcovefa wouldn’t; even Trasamund might not. “And some of them have nuts that are good to eat. And in the autumn, before the leaves fall off, they turn red and orange and gold. For a little while, the forest looks as if it’s on fire—not in a bad way, you understand. It’s beautiful, but it never lasts.”
“I’ve seen a little of that,” Trasamund said, and Marcovefa nodded. The jarl went on, “I’ve never understood why the leaves change colors before they die.”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone else can, either,” Hamnet said. “My best guess is, it just happens, the way a man’s hair goes gray when he gets older.”
“Maybe.” Trasamund lost interest in the question. He pointed toward something at the edge of the woods. “Good God! What’s that?”
“A mastodon,” Hamnet answered. “Haven’t you seen them before, coming down into Raumsdalia?”
“I’ve had glimpses, but that’s all.” The Bizogot stared and stared. “It looks like a woolly mammoth, if you can imagine a woolly mammoth made by somebody who’s heard about them but never seen one. Its back is too flat—it ought to slope down like this.” He gestured.
“I’ve seen woolly mammoths,” Hamnet pointed out.
He might as well have saved his breath. Trasamund went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “Its ears are the wrong shape. They’re too big, too. And look at the funny way its tusks curl. And mammoths are supposed to be almost black, not that . . . that tree-bark brown, I guess you’d call it.”
“They can be pests,” Hamnet said. “They raid orchards and they trample down grain fields.”
“You don’t bother to tame them, do you?” Trasamund asked.
“I’ve heard that lumbermen sometimes do. Mastodons are big enough and strong enough to shove tree trunks around better than just about any other beasts. But apart from that, no,” Hamnet replied. “We hunt them, though. We use the meat and the hides and the ivory and the hair.”
“Woolly mammoth hair is better,” Trasamund said. “It’s longer and thicker. I like the color better, too.”
“Which is all very well, I’m sure, only we haven’t got any woolly mammoths in Raumsdalia. Plenty of mastodons in the forests near my castle. They’re nuisances there. That’s the other reason we hunt them: to keep them from tearing up the crops.”
“How much farther to your castle?” Marcovefa asked. To her, mastodons were only a little stranger than mammoths; she’d come to know both beasts since descending from the Glacier.
“Maybe a week’s traveclass="underline" a little less if we were in a tearing hurry,” Hamnet answered.
“How long do you aim to stay?” Marcovefa asked, and then, “How long will we stay?”
“I don’t know how long I’ll stay. A while, anyhow. Till things settle down a bit—if they ever do,” Hamnet said. “And I can’t really say how long you’ll stay, can I?”
“You have something to do with it. If I decide you make me angry and don’t make me happy, I go,” Marcovefa said. But she added, “So far you haven’t—quite.”
Trasamund guffawed. “High praise, Thyssen!”
“Better than I’ve done with women up till now,” Hamnet said, as calmly as he could. “Maybe I’ve learned something. Maybe Marcovefa just puts up with more than Gudrid or Liv did.” He glanced over at her. “What do you think?”
“Me? I think you know me better than to think I put up with much,” Marcovefa replied. “So far you are not too bad, in bed or out.”
Trasamund started laughing again. Hamnet’s ears felt as if they’d caught fire. He made the most of it he could, saying, “Thank you—I think.”
“You’re welcome—I suppose,” Marcovefa told him. But she was smiling when she said it. Now Trasamund laughed at both of them. They took no notice of him; lacking encouragement, he eventually ran down. They all rode on in what was—Hamnet hoped—a companionable silence.
SOMEHOW, NEWS OF Sigvat’s fall spread faster than Hamnet had imagined it could. He thought he and Marcovefa and Trasamund would be the outermost ripple of news from the pebble that had dropped in the palace at Nidaros. But they weren’t. Whenever they stopped in a village or a town, people had heard that the Emperor was Emperor no more. Some of them had even heard that he’d fled because the Golden Shrine judged him unworthy to rule.
“I heard that, all right,” said the tapman at a serai about halfway to Hamnet’s keep. “Don’t know that I believe it, but I heard it. Till all this talk started, I don’t know that I believed there was any such thing as the Golden Shrine. People talk about it, sure, but people talk about all kinds of things that aren’t real. But I’ve never heard ’em talk about it the way they do nowadays, so maybe there’s something to it after all.”
“It’s true,” Hamnet said solemnly. Marcovefa and Trasamund nodded. Hamnet went on, “I wouldn’t mind another mug of ale. It’s tasty.”
“I thank you for that—I brew it myself,” the tapman said, not without pride. As he dipped up another mug for Hamnet, he continued, “You folks sound like you know what you’re talking about.” Hamnet had listened to a lot of tapmen in his time. He knew this fellow wasn’t necessarily saying he believed them.
“We do,” Trasamund said. “We were there.”
“Where? At the Golden Shrine or in the palace?” No, the tapman didn’t believe they’d set eyes on either place.