She thought about that. Then, roughly, she pushed the boy away from her. “If I get the chance to kill the Rulers, I will. If anyone says anything different, I’ll kill him.” She couldn’t have been more than eleven, but she plainly meant every word.
“Good enough.” Hamnet pulled a chunk of smoked musk-ox meat from his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it, stuck it in her mouth, and began to chew. Bizogots needed strong teeth; the dried meat was almost as tough as wood.
Liv and Audun Gilli and a captive from the Rulers came out of a nearby tent. Liv nodded to Hamnet. “By the racket the dogs made, I thought it might be you,” she said.
“If it’s not me, it’s an attack, and that would be worse,” Hamnet answered.
Liv nodded. She was a striking woman, with proud cheekbones, blue, blue eyes, and golden hair unfortunately hacked off short. It was also dirty and greasy, as Bizogot hair commonly was. (So was Hamnet’s. Washing during the winter on the frozen steppe was asking for chest fever.) She’d been the shaman of the Three Tusk clan till the Rulers smashed it.
She’d also been Hamnet Thyssen’s woman till she decided she liked Audun better. Maybe like called to like; Audun was a wizard, even if one with an unfortunate fondness for guzzling everything he could find. Or maybe that had nothing to do with it. Couples came together. Too often, they also came apart.
Hamnet could look at her and deal with her without wanting to kill her or to kill himself. He could even deal with Audun Gilli without wanting to kill him . . . most of the time. All that struck him as very strange, if not downright marvelous. When Gudrid played him false and left him, he’d lingered—wallowed—in a trough of misery for years.
But Liv hadn’t played him false. She’d only shifted her affections. Amazing, the difference that made. Liv didn’t torment him with bygone days that could never come again, either. Hamnet wondered how it was that she came from the barbarous Bizogots while Gudrid was an allegedly civilized Raumsdalian.
Of course, civilization had its sophisticated pleasures, elaborate revenge among them. Why Gudrid thought she needed elaborate revenge on Hamnet . . . one would have to ask her. Since she was hundreds of miles to the south, all comfortable in Nidaros, he couldn’t very well do that—and he didn’t want to, anyhow.
Marcovefa pointed to the captive. “I see you, Dashru,” she said.
Dashru nodded. “I am seen,” he answered unhappily. He spoke the Bizogots’ language with a thick accent and bad grammar. He was shorter than most Bizogots, but wider through the shoulders. His hair and beard were black and curly, his eyes polished jet, his nose a proud scimitar.
That was the only pride he had left. Rulers who had the bad luck or lack of fortitude to fall into enemy hands were dead to their own folk forever after. They were dead in spirit, too, after suffering such a disgrace. Some slew themselves when they found the chance. Others, like Dashru, lived on, but not happily. Never happily.
“Teach us more of your language,” Hamnet said.
Dashru sighed and nodded again. “I do that. You not learn well, though.”
“We try,” Hamnet said. “You don’t learn the Bizogots’ tongue easily, either.”
“Grunting of deer. Squawking of geese,” Dashru said disdainfully.
“We think the same of your speech,” Hamnet told him. Dashru made a horrible face, as if he’d smelled something nasty.
The trouble was, the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian on the one hand and the Rulers’ tongue on the other were as different as chalk and tobacco. Bizogots and Raumsdalians spoke related languages. The vocabulary wasn’t the same, but here and there words in the one tongue sounded something like those in the other. The Bizogots had more complicated noun declensions than people in the Empire used, while Raumsdalian had a battery of verb tenses the mammoth-herders lacked. But the basic principles underlying both languages were similar.
All the words in the Rulers’ language were different. That was bad enough, but not unexpected: why believe a language that had grown up beyond the Glacier
When the Rulers talked to one another, they used a word order Hamnet found perverse. They slapped pieces of words together to make bigger, more complicated ones. They used particles to show how the pieces fit together. Why anyone would want to talk like that, Hamnet had no idea. But the invaders found it as natural as he found Raumsdalian.
Dashru worked his way through a lesson on numbers. That was one more thing that drove Hamnet crazy. For one of something, the number and the thing it described were singular, and in the subjective case. For two, three, or four of something, the number and what it described were singular—why?—and in the possessive case. For five and above, they were plural and in the possessive case.
“This makes no sense,” Hamnet said.
“He is right,” Marcovefa said. That made Hamnet feel better; he’d wondered if he was missing something he should see.
Dashru only shrugged. “We talk like this. What do you want me to do? Tell you we talk some other way?”
“Because we do,” the captive answered. “Why do you talk like you do? That is
He meant it. Count Hamnet could hear as much. The Raumsdalian turned to Marcovefa. “Can you cast a spell to make the language easier to learn?” he asked her. “Is there a spell for translating from one language to another?”
“Up on the Glacier, we all used the same tongue. We needed no spell like that,” she answered. She eyed Dashru. “Do your shamans use translating spells?”
“Yes, but I don’t know how they work,” he said. “I am herder, fighter. I know nothing of magic.”
Hamnet Thyssen believed him. The Bizogots hadn’t captured any of the Rulers’ wizards. Those wizards were stronger than any shaman except Marcovefa. They were also fierce warriors in their own right—and perhaps even more determined not to be taken alive than the ordinary fighting men of their folk.
Marcovefa looked thoughtful. “A spell like that shouldn’t be too hard to shape,” she said. “The law of similarity would apply. One word for a thing or an idea is bound to be similar to another for the same thing or idea. They both point toward the same original, which makes them point toward each other, too.”
That probably made perfect sense to her. It made more sense to Hamnet than the way the Rulers counted, but not much more. He would never make any kind of wizard, and he knew it. The aptitude wasn’t there.
“Do you want to go on, or do you want to make a magic?” Dashru asked in the Bizogot language.
“We go on,” Hamnet replied in the Rulers’ speech. That seemed a simple enough answer, but Dashru’s wince told him he’d made a hash of it somehow. Resignedly, he asked, “What did I say wrong?”
First, Dashru told him what he did wrong asking what he did wrong. Then the prisoner told him what he did wrong saying they would go on. He could hear the mistakes, too. He doubted he would ever speak without making them fairly often. If he could get the Rulers to understand him and could understand some of what they said, that would do.
“I don’t aim to be a poet in their tongue,” he told Marcovefa.
“It is an ugly language,” she agreed. “It is even uglier than Raumsdalian.”
Dashru was offended. “The Rulers’ tongue is not ugly!” he said. “It is full of strength, full of power. It is fit for . . . well, for rulers. No wonder you folk do not care for it. You are part of the herd, for us to milk and shear and slaughter as we please.”
“If you think that way, if you act that way, you will make everyone on this side of the Glacier fight you to the death,” Hamnet said.
“So what?” Dashru returned. “After we kill you all, we settle the land ourselves. We do what we want with it.” For a moment, he sounded like a proud warrior, part of a proud folk. But only for a moment. As he remembered where he was, he deflated like a pricked bladder. “I will not see that, I who am nothing.”
“I can tell you what you will see,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “You will see the Rulers whipped back through the Gap, back beyond the Glacier, like the dogs and sons of dogs they are.”
Dashru laughed in his face. “A bison may bellow before it goes over the cliff, but it goes over all the same. And even the bison here have small horns. They are weak, as the folk here are weak.”
“Do not laugh too soon,” Marcovefa warned him.
The prisoner laughed again. “You are another who pretends to be stronger than she is.”
Marcovefa looked at him. She muttered something in her own dialect of the Bizogot language. It really was almost a separate tongue in its own right; Hamnet couldn’t recognize more than a couple of words. Her hands shaped quick passes, all of them aimed at Dashru.
He stared defiantly back at her. After a moment, defiance changed to alarm. He shouted something in his own language. Hamnet Thyssen made out “Away with you!” in the midst of guttural gibberish. Dashru’s fingers twisted in a sign much like the one the Bizogots used to turn aside evil.
That seemed to buy him a few heartbeats of relief, but no more. Marcovefa went on muttering. Dashru started to have trouble breathing. His face went a mottled purple above the edge of his beard.
“Will you kill him?” Hamnet asked.
“Unless he admits I am stronger, I will. And I will roast his heart afterwards and eat it, too.” Marcovefa would have sounded more excited talking about an unexpected shower. And when she spoke of roasting Dashru’s heart, she meant it. Up atop the Glacier, captives from another clan were meat, nothing more.
The Rulers were a proud folk. Many of them would have died before yielding in a trail of strength, especially against someone from outside their own folk. But Dashru had already yielded once. Maybe that prompted him to drop to his knees. Or maybe getting sorcerously asphyxiated would have weakened almost anyone.
Whatever the reason, he choked out, “Mercy!” with what had to be close to his last breath.
By the look in Marcovefa’s eye, she would sooner have butchered and cooked him than given him what he wanted. But he’d done what she said he had to—or most of it, anyway. “I am stronger, yes?” she demanded in the Rulers’ language.
“Mercy!” Dashru said again, and then, reluctantly, “Yes.”
A moment later, he was sucking in great gulps of air. He got back his usual swarthy coloring. “You insult me again?” Marcovefa asked.
Dashru shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, wizard lady.”
“Better not.” Marcovefa made as if to spit in his face, but contemptuously turned her back instead.
“Enough lesson of speech?” Dashru asked Hamnet Thyssen. He wasn’t going to have anything more to do with Marcovefa, not if he could help it. Count Hamnet had no trouble understanding that.
“Enough language lessons, yes,” he answered. Dashru got out of there as fast as he could. Again, Hamnet would have done the same thing.
“You are too soft on him,” Marcovefa said. “He is a captive, a rabbit on the fire. He should remember.”
“He isn’t likely to forget, not now,” Hamnet said.
“If he hadn’t got out of line, he wouldn’t have needed the lesson,” Marcovefa said, adding, “Did you see how useless his countercharm was?”
“Yes.” Count Hamnet wondered whether the countercharm would have been useless against Liv’s sorcery, or Audun Gilli’s. He didn’t think so, though he wasn’t sure.
“Now I know more of what the Rulers do. I know more of how they think. I want to fight them. I want to beat them,” Marcovefa said.
“You’d better want to. And you’d better do it, too,” Hamnet said. “Without you, we haven’t got much chance.”
“Foosh!” Marcovefa said—a dismissive noise. “Their magic is not so much. You shouldn’t have such trouble with it.” She paused. “Of course, the magic you people down here
