either.”
“Do they wonder about how herd animals think?” Hamnet used the Rulers’ name for other people.
“As little as they can get away with, I suspect, or likely something less than that,” Ulric said, which struck Hamnet as cynical and probable at the same time.
Whatever the reason, the Rulers didn’t harass their foes in the forest except for the fallen trees. The Bizogots breathed loud sighs of relief when they came out into open country once more. Pointing to an apple orchard ahead, Trasamund said, “A few trees every now and then are all right. We can go around them—we don’t have to get stuck amongst ’em.”
Another Bizogot added, “It won’t be like they’re trying to eat us up.”
Count Hamnet and Ulric and even Audun Gilli exchanged amused glances. Only someone who didn’t know trees was likely to imagine them as predators. Hamnet thought of the plums near his castle. He tried to imagine one of them waylaying passersby. The picture didn’t want to form.
“Remember,” Trasamund said, “if you see anybody riding a deer, he’s the enemy. Kill the bastard before he kills you.”
“Always a good idea with enemies,” Ulric agreed. “They hardly ever give you a hard time once they’re dead.”
“Hardly ever?” Hamnet Thyssen said. “What do you do with the ones who haunt you?”
“Exorcise ’em,” Ulric answered at once. “Everybody needs a little exorcise now and then.” Hamnet gave him a reproachful stare, which he ignored.
Most of the time, travelers coming down from the south would have seen horses and cattle and sheep in the fields. Not now. Count Hamnet was saddened but not surprised. The Rulers would have stolen or killed as many animals as they could get their hands on. And the local farmers would have fled with the rest: off to the west or east or south, any direction but the one from which the invaders were coming.
Even without livestock, the land seemed rich to the Bizogots. Something else about it surprised them, too. “You use some of the land for one thing and some for another,” a mammoth-herder said. He might have been talking about a clever piece of sorcery. “I can tell by what grows and the way you have fences.” Up on the broad, trackless steppe, fences were only a waste of time and work.
“We have the notion that land belongs to the person who works it,” Hamnet said. Things were more complicated than that, but it would do for a start.
And it was plenty to shock the Bizogot. “Land belongs to the clan,” he declared. He might have been stating a law of nature. He probably thought he was.
“Different peoples have different customs,” Count Hamnet said. “Not always right. Not always wrong. Just different.”
“Land belongs to the clan,” the Bizogot repeated. His folk, for instance, rejoiced in stubbornness—mulishness, a Raumsdalian would have called it.
“Never argue with a blockhead,” Ulric Skakki said in Raumsdalian. “You won’t convince him, and it only irks you.”
“Who are you calling a blockhead?” the Bizogot demanded, also in Raumsdalian.
“You,” Ulric answered calmly. “Just because you can be a blockhead in more than one language doesn’t mean you’re not a blockhead.”
“By God, I ought to cut your liver out for that,” the mammoth-herder said.
“We need Skakki.” Trasamund’s voice went hard and flat. “Anyone who wants to fight him has to fight me first.”
“I don’t have to hide behind your skirts. If this unwashed ruffian thinks he can take me—” Ulric began.
Trasamund cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture while the offended Bizogot shouted angrily. “I know you don’t need to hide,” the jarl said. “I know you can cut Ottar here into dogmeat, too.” The Bizogot—Ottar—shouted again. Trasamund took no more notice of him than Ulric had of Hamnet not long before. He went on, “We need you, too, Ottar, only not so much. If I have to choose between the two of you, I choose Skakki.”
“He’s not even of our blood,” Ottar said. “Since when do you choose people who sit around all the time over proper nomads?”
Before Trasamund could say anything to that, Ulric laughed in Ottar’s face. “You go back and forth over the same range all the bloody time, and you call yourself a nomad? Have you traveled beyond the Gap? Have you gone up onto the Glacier? Have you ever seen the deserts in the far southwest? Have you been through the jungles beyond the desert? Nomad? Ha!” He laughed again.
Count Hamnet eyed Ottar, wondering what he’d do next. When Ulric went after a man, he flayed him with his tongue. Would Ottar try to wipe out the insult with blood? Or would he go off somewhere and lick his wounds?
He did neither. He tried to fight back with words, jeering, “Talk is cheap. Just because you say you’ve been to those places doesn’t mean you have.”
“I’ve been through the Gap with him. I’ve been up on the Glacier with him, too,” Trasamund said. “The hot places I don’t know, but they wouldn’t surprise me.”
“I’ve been in the desert,” Hamnet Thyssen added. “It is the way Ulric says it is. I haven’t been in the jungle myself—I haven’t fared that far south. But what I’ve heard about it from other people makes me believe Ulric’s been there, too.”
Ottar looked at him. He looked at Trasamund. And he looked at Ulric Skakki. Then, shaking his head, he rode away from the adventurer. Hamnet thought that was one of the smarter things he could have done.
A SQUAD OR SO of Raumsdalian soldiers sat around a fire, roasting a sheep they’d probably lifted. They looked up in alarm when the Bizogots rode down on them. A couple of men stared to run, but they really had nowhere to run to. “Hold it right there!” Trasamund bawled, and hold it they did.
“You aren’t the new barbarians. You’re the other barbarians.” The Raumsdalian who spoke sounded almost indignant, to say nothing of confused.
“Yes—that’s us, the other barbarians,” Count Hamnet said. Hearing perfect Raumsdalian come from his lips, seeing a swarthy man among the blond mammoth-herders, only confused the soldiers more.
“Who the demon are you?” one of them asked.
“Count Hamnet Thyssen,” Hamnet answered, and waited to see what would happen next.
The name meant nothing to some of them. Others, though, jerked as if stung by wasps. “Hamnet Thyssen!” exclaimed the soldier who’d asked his name. “There’s a fat price on your head. Did you know that?”
“No, but I’m not surprised,” Hamnet said. “Since the Emperor sent a man”—he waved toward Per Anders—“to bring me back to Raumsdalia, I don’t think you could collect that price right now.”
“Of course, you could be wrong,” Ulric Skakki said silkily.
“I suppose so,” Count Hamnet said. With Sigvat II, being wrong was easy. His ingratitude towered higher than the Glacier and sank deeper than the bottom of Sudertorp Lake. If you trusted him, you had only yourself to blame.
“What do we do with them?” Trasamund asked—a good, practical question.
“What are they doing here?” Ulric added—another good question. Hamnet suspected the soldiers were there because they’d been part of an army the Rulers shattered. A few questions proved he was right. Ulric asked the stragglers, “Are you ready for another go at the bastards who beat you before?”
Some of the Raumsdalians nodded without hesitation. Others just sat there looking unhappy. They didn’t want another go at the Rulers. All they wanted was to stay where they were, run away from danger, and scavenge as they got the chance.
“Come on,” he told them. “If Raumsdalia loses, none of this will do you any good. You’ll just be part of the Rulers’ herd, and they’ll cull you whenever they feel like it. Is that any way for a man to live?”
“Beats getting an arrow through your brisket or some nasty magic coming down on your head,” a soldier said.
“That will happen anyhow,” Hamnet said. “It won’t happen today, maybe, because the Rulers are busy farther south. But if they win down there, they’ll clean you out up here, too. Or do you think I’m wrong, too?”
By the miserable, hangdog expression on the soldier’s face, he didn’t think Count Hamnet was wrong, however much he wished he did. “I don’t ever want to fight those buggers again,” he mumbled.
“Would you rather they came hunting you after they cleaned out everybody else?” Hamnet asked. The Raumsdalian trooper looked unhappier yet.
Trasamund lost patience with him, as the jarl was apt to do: “Or would you rather we rolled over you and then went on and fought the Rulers ourselves? We’ll use you people if we can, but we won’t waste time on account of you.”
That persuaded the Raumsdalians. Hamnet Thyssen might have known it would. They couldn’t hope to fight the host in front of them. How well they’d fight against the Rulers . . . Hamnet and Trasamund would just have to wait and see. But if they were going to build their fighting tail, they would have to use odds and sods like these. How many bands, some only four or five men, some perhaps a couple of dozen, wandered through the northern part of the Empire these days? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? Hamnet couldn’t know, but he thought his guesses were pretty good.
“You can persuade people to do nearly anything,” Ulric Skakki remarked, “as long as all their other choices seem worse.”
“If that’s not philosophy, it ought to be,” Hamnet said.
“Ha!” the adventurer said. “Save that kind of nonsense for Earl Eyvind. There are tricks to riding a horse, and there are tricks to driving people. That’s one of them—or it sure looks like one to me.”
“To me, too,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Why else are we here?”
Trasamund answered that before Ulric Skakki could: “We’re here to beat the Rulers. If we don’t do that, we’re just pissing into the wind.”
A Raumsdalian would have talked about spitting into the wind. That made the jarl crude by imperial standards. It didn’t make him wrong, however much Count Hamnet wished it would have.
He glanced over to Marcovefa. Without her, this motley band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians had little chance against the invaders beyond the Glacier. Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. He laughed at his own foolishness. Without Marcovefa, this ragtag band had
Yet she herself was almost as alien to her comrades as the Rulers were. In some ways, she was more alien. Yes, Rulers who failed at anything important or who found themselves about to be captured often killed themselves to escape what they saw as disgrace. But they didn’t devour the corpses of their defeated foes. Hamnet knew why Marcovefa’s folk had become cannibals. Up atop the Glacier, meat of any sort was too scarce, too precious, to let any of it go to waste. It made her no less strange, no less appalling, to those who didn’t share her customs.
One of the Bizogots pointed southeast. “There’s one of the God-cursed riding deer the God-cursed Rulers use!” he shouted.
Men looked to their weapons. Marcovefa, Audun Gilli, and Liv were warriors only in emergencies. That didn’t mean they weren’t about to fight. And their fight might prove harder and more dangerous than anything swordsmen and archers and lancers faced. Without Marcovefa, it surely would have been. With her, the odds improved.
Before Hamnet could wonder how much they improved—the sorcery-spread sickness had jolted Marcovefa’s confidence—a Raumsdalian who’d just joined them asked, “What did the fellow with the yellow whiskers say?”
Hamnet swore under his breath. He and Ulric were both fluent in the Bizogots’ tongue. Audun Gilli, Per Anders, and Marcovefa could get along in it. Most of the mammoth- herders knew at least some Raumsdalian. But these imperial troopers had never had any reason to learn the northerners’ speech.
