one of you. And even if you think they’re bad wizards, they’re better than anyone else down here below the Glacier except you. You need to be careful, the same way you would have up on the Ice. The shamans from those other clans up there were as strong as you were, right?”
“Oh, yes. Some of them were stronger,” Marcovefa said at once. “But they were—are—of my own folk. Not these Rulers. Do you like to think your horse is smarter than you are?”
“Hold on!” Hamnet held up a hand. “The Rulers are the ones who call everybody else ‘the herd.’ They think they can do whatever they want with other people because they think other people are just beasts. I don’t want us to think that way. If we do, how are we any better than they are?”
Marcovefa gave him a sharp-toothed grin. “They are much uglier.”
Stubbornly, Count Hamnet shook his head. “That’s not good enough. Curse it, I’m serious about this.”
“Yes, I see you are. But I wonder why,” Marcovefa said. “Is it that important?”
“I think so,” Hamnet said. “Up on the Glacier, suppose another clan made a great magic by eating some of its own people. Would you use that same kind of sorcery yourself?”
“Eat its own people to make magic?” Marcovefa looked revolted, which made Hamnet sure he’d picked a good example. “No, we would never do that. That would be wickedness itself. It—” She broke off and sent Hamnet a sour stare. “All right. I see what you are saying.”
“Good. I’m glad.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped he didn’t show just how glad he was. If Marcovefa hadn’t seen his point, he would have worried about her almost as much as he worried about the Rulers. She wasn’t quite so alien to the Bizogots and Raumsdalians as they were, but she wasn’t far removed from it, either.
He must not have kept his face as still as he hoped, because Marcovefa laughed at him. “After we beat the Rulers, then you can bash me over the head,” she said.
His ears heated. “The Rulers are a menace because they don’t care anything about our ways and don’t want to learn. You do want to learn—and you follow our customs now that you’re down here with us. You haven’t eaten man’s flesh since you came down from the Glacier.”
Marcovefa mimed picking her teeth. “How do you know?”
“Stop that!” Count Hamnet said. “You’re just sticking thorns in me to make me jump.”
“And why not?” Marcovefa replied. “I did some jumping of my own today. That was more of a magic than I thought the Rulers had in them.”
A warrior with a sword and a helmet and a byrnie could easily beat armorless foes who carried only daggers. If he faced a lot of foes like that, who could blame him for getting careless? But if he stayed careless against an enemy with gear like his own, odds were he’d end up bleeding on the ground. Count Hamnet didn’t know magic worked the same way, but he couldn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.
He wondered if he ought to point that out to Marcovefa. Reluctantly, he decided not to. If she couldn’t see it for himself, she wouldn’t want the lecture. She might need it, but she wouldn’t want it.
“What did you do to the wizards who were sending the sickness?” he asked instead. That seemed safe enough—and he wanted to know.
“I made them stop,” Marcovefa answered. “Past that, I don’t know. I don’t care very much, either.”
“All right.” Hamnet wasn’t sure it was. Up till now, Marcovefa had thrashed the Rulers’ wizards with monotonous regularity. Well, it would have been monotonous, anyhow, if it hadn’t been so essential. If it got to the point where she couldn’t thrash them like that . . .
If it got to that point, the Bizogots and the Raumsdalian Empire were in a lot of trouble. As far as Count Hamnet knew, Marcovefa was the one effective weapon they had against the Rulers. If she wasn’t so effective—what did they have then? As far as he could see, they had nothing.
“I think I need a slug of smetyn,” he said. “It’s been a hard day.”
“Harder for me, so bring me some, too,” Marcovefa said. She drank cautiously most of the time, being new to smetyn and ale and beer and wine. She’d hurt herself the first couple of times she tried drinking. She hadn’t had any idea what a hangover was. She did now, and respected the morning after . . . again, most of the time.
The way she poured the fermented milk down today said she wasn’t worrying about the next morning. Hamnet didn’t suppose he could blame her. She’d just had a brush with a very nasty death. So had he, come to that. He drank more than a slug himself.
Marcovefa sent him an owlish stare. “What are you sitting there for?” She didn’t slur her words, but spoke with exaggerated precision. “Aren’t you going to screw me?”
“Well . . .” That question had only one possible answer, unless he wanted an unholy row. “Yes.” Some time later, he asked, “Is that better?” He rubbed his left shoulder, then sneaked a look at the palm of his hand. She hadn’t bitten him
She stretched like a lion after a kill. “What do you think?”
“If it got any better than that, I don’t know if I’d live through it.” Hamnet was stretching things, but not by much. Never a dull moment with Marcovefa.
Her smile said she liked the answer. She drank more smetyn. Then she said, “In a little while, we do it again.”
“I’ll try,” he said. “I may need some magic to hold up my end of the bargain.”
“I can do that,” Marcovefa said, and he’d seen that she could. She went on, “Or we could do other things besides just screwing.”
“Whatever you please,” Hamnet Thyssen said. They weren’t prudes, up there on top of the Glacier. They didn’t have much in the way of entertainment, so they made the most of what they did have—lovemaking included.
And he ended up doing more than he’d thought he could. There were advantages to having a shaman for a lover. There were also disadvantages. Liv had left him, but she hadn’t hated him. He hoped Marcovefa wouldn’t hate him, either, if she ever decided to leave. If she did hate him, he’d need to look for a place to hide—and he’d need to hope he could find a place like that with a shaman after him.
“WHAT DO YOU suppose the Rulers think about us right now?” Ulric Skakki came up with interesting questions to make time go by while riding on patrol.
“Nothing good, I hope,” Count Hamnet said.
Ulric dropped the reins in his lap for a moment so he could sarcastically clap his hands. “Brilliant, Your Grace! Bloody fornicating brilliant! A lesser mind would be incapable of such analysis.”
“Oh, bugger off,” Hamnet said, which made the adventurer laugh out loud.
But Ulric didn’t give up: “If you were the Rulers, how would you try to get rid of us?”
“Annoy us to death?” Hamnet suggested, and Ulric laughed again. But the question got Hamnet thinking. Slowly, he said, “Magic didn’t work—came close, but it didn’t work. Little raids haven’t worked, either. What’s left? Using an anvil to swat a fly—coming down on us with everything they’ve got. Or do you have some different kind of scheme in mind?”
“No, not me.” Ulric shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I hoped you did.”
“Afraid not,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Pity.” Ulric didn’t let the chatter stop him from looking around every few heartbeats. “What do we do if they decide to land on us with both feet like that?”
“Probably can’t fight if they come at us with everybody and his favorite mammoth,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki nodded, which disappointed him; he’d wanted the adventurer to tell him he was wrong. Sighing, Hamnet went on, “If we can’t hold them off, we’d better run.”
“Seems logical,” Ulric agreed. “Next question is, where? Sort of all over the landscape, or some place in particular?”
Count Hamnet smiled in spite of himself. “Chances are, going somewhere in particular would be smart.”
“Oh, good! I knew you were a clever fellow.” Ulric made as if to clap his hands again. Hamnet made as if to punch him; sarcasm could wear thin. As if ignorant of that, the adventurer went on, “Now let’s see how clever you really are. If you have to run somewhere, where do you want to run?”
That required some thought. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t like the first answer he came up with, so he tried to see if he could find a better one. To his dismay, he couldn’t. Reluctantly, he gave the first one: “The Empire. Better my own people should jail me than the Rulers should kill me . . . I suppose.”
“Yes, I suppose so, too,” Ulric Skakki said. “And no, I don’t like it any better than you do. But what choice have we got? The Bizogots are shattered, all up and down the plain, and as far across it to east and west as we can reach. The Empire isn’t doing all that well, but it isn’t shattered, either.”
“Well, it wasn’t when that last messenger made it up here, anyhow,” Hamnet said.
“You’re right. It wasn’t then.” Ulric nodded. “He said Nidaros hadn’t fallen. If it has by now, Sigvat II’s bound to be dead, and—”
“And that’s bound to help what’s left of Raumsdalia,” Count Hamnet broke in.
Ulric showed his teeth in what looked like a grin but wasn’t. “How right you are! It’s no wonder His Majesty has brown eyes, is it?”
“Eh?” Hamnet was a beat slow getting the joke. Then he did. “Oh. No, no wonder at all, by God. Whatever they find to take his place—even if it’s the old drunk who sweeps out the stables—is bound to be better.”
“You don’t
“He stuck his head up his arse when we found the Rulers. He stuck me in a dungeon when I kept reminding him about that. And he stuck us with Gudrid when we went up through the Gap. Why the demon should I like him?”
“Interesting which one you put last,” Ulric murmured.
“Oh, shut up. So I’m not over Gudrid yet. So chances are I never will be. So what are you going to do about it?” Hamnet said.
“Mm, when you put it that way, probably nothing,” the adventurer replied. “All right—back to the Empire . . . if we can get there. Good-sized army of Rulers already down there, remember. If they move up against us—”
“Why would they do that?” Hamnet said. “It’d be like a sabertooth walking away from a buffalo carcass to chaster after a yappy little fox.”
“A sabertooth wouldn’t be that stupid,” Ulric admitted. “I’m not so sure about people. And we haven’t just yapped at the Rulers. We’ve nipped them a few times—and nobody else on this side of Glacier seems able to do even that much. They have their reasons from coming after us. Besides, they’re afraid of you, remember.”
Hamnet Thyssen laughed bitterly. “If they are, they’re every bit as stupid as you make them out to be. Too much to hope for, though, I fear.”
“They’re smarter than you are, because they’ve got some notion of what’s dangerous to them,” Ulric said.
“Oh, I know what’s dangerous to me, all right,” Hamnet said. “I ought to, after all the mistakes I’ve made with them.”
“You may be dangerous to women. That doesn’t mean they’re dangerous to you,” Ulric told him.
“If they’re not, God save me from running into anything that is,” Count Hamnet said.
“You take things too seriously,” the adventurer said.
“I’ve had things happen to me that need to be taken seriously,” Hamnet retorted. “Not everybody slides through life with a greased hide the way you do.”
“Just goes to show you don’t know me as well as you think.” Ulric shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, not really. We decided what we needed to decide. Only thing left now is convincing Trasamund.”
That sent Hamnet laughing again. “You don’t ask for much!”
“Oh, he’ll come around. He’ll yell and fuss and bellow till he works all the indigestion out of his system, and then he’ll be fine. He doesn’t sit around brooding like some people I
