A gnat flew into his left eye. He rubbed his face and sent Marcovefa a reproachful look. Maybe it was a natural gnat, not one the Rulers had inspired. Maybe Marcovefa was just weakening the spell, not blocking it altogether. He supposed he could forgive her a gnat or two. But why did this one have to find
Trasamund drew his blade and brandished it over his head. It was a two-handed sword, which meant he needed a well-trained horse to use it. He couldn’t hang on to the reins and swing it at the same time. While he used it, he had to guide his mount with knees alone.
Arrows started flying. Hamnet shot again and again, emptying his quiver as fast as he could. The Rulers had used spells to break bowstrings, too. Not this time, or, if they were trying that magic, Marcovefa wasn’t letting it get anywhere.
Here and there, invaders and riding deer crashed to the ground. Some lay still, others writhed and thrashed in pain. Bizogots also went down. Whatever Marcovefa was doing, she wasn’t interfering with the Rulers’ archery. Therein lay her greatest danger: one of those flying shafts might find her.
No sooner had that thought crossed Hamnet’s mind than Marcovefa caught an arrow out of the air. She kissed the tip and threw it back at the Rulers—maybe at the man who’d shot it. Hamnet was able to watch, because it glowed as it flew . . . and it flew faster than any shaft ever launched from a horn-backed bow. It caught an enemy warrior square in the chest, and he didn’t move after he slid off over his riding deer’s tail.
“How did you do that?” Hamnet shouted.
She winked at him. “Magic,” she answered, as if he didn’t know.
“Could you hit a war mammoth with an arrow like that?” he asked. In any fight between Rulers and Bizogots, the invaders had the edge because they could ride mammoths and fight from them.
Marcovefa thought about it. “Maybe,” she said at last. “Those long-nosed marmots have a lot of protection, though.” Did she mean the thick leather armor the mammoths wore or the Rulers’ ward spells? Hamnet didn’t know.
He didn’t have much time to wonder, either. The rival forces came to close quarters. Trasamund worked fearsome execution with that two-handed blade. Hamnet drew his own sword and traded cuts with an enemy warrior till their mounts carried them past each other.
Trasamund guided his horse toward a mammoth. Hamnet wondered if battle fury had driven the Three Tusk jarl out of his wits, but there was method to his madness. He sprang down from the horse and hewed at the mammoth’s left hind leg. The huge beast let out a horrid bleat of pain and toppled, hamstrung.
The warriors atop the mammoth shrieked as it crashed to the ground. One tried to leap clear, only to be crushed by that mountain of falling flesh. Another did jump free, but it did him no good. Trasamund cut him down before he could even get to his feet. Then the jarl remounted and rode toward another mammoth.
“He can’t do that twice!” Ulric Skakki exclaimed.
“I didn’t think he could do it once,” Count Hamnet answered.
Now the Rulers knew what Trasamund had in mind. They shot at him again and again. An arrow in its throat, his horse sank like a ship that had hit a rock. But it had got him close to the woolly mammoth. Careless of his own safety, he dashed forward. His huge sword swung in an arc of mayhem and struck home. The mammoth bugled distress. Like the other great beast, it went down.
And that was as much as the Rulers wanted. Their war mammoths had given them the edge in every fight with the Bizogots. Against a berserk madman who would maim them without caring whether he lived or died, they had no sure defense. They turned and fled north as fast as their riding deer and the mammoths still hale would carry them.
Hamnet Thyssen would have called for a pursuit had the Rulers tried to keep going south. If they were heading away from their army down in the Empire, he was content to let them go. They’d hurt the Bizogots, too. This little band couldn’t stand too much hard use, or it would fall to pieces.
For now, the Bizogots made the most of victory. They dismounted and methodically finished off any wounded Rulers they found. No one went near the thrashing, crippled war mammoths. “I hate to waste all that meat,” a Bizogot said. “It could feed us for quite a while. But . . .”
“If we come back tomorrow, we can fight the lions and the bears and the dire wolves and the foxes and the teratorns for the scraps,” Ulric Skakki said. He was bound to be right. The beasts wouldn’t leave so much flesh lying around for long. But right now those mammoths could still kill.
“We can butcher the deer that went down. They won’t give us any trouble,” Hamnet said.
“And the horses,” Liv added.
“And the horses,” Hamnet agreed without enthusiasm. He wasn’t fond of horse meat, and nothing would ever make him like it. But nothing went to waste on the Bizogot steppe. With meat to be had, the nomads would take it.
Marcovefa looked at the Rulers’ swarthy, curly-bearded corpses. “They would be tasty,” she said. “Plenty of flesh on them—they didn’t go hungry.”
He shook his head. “People down here don’t do that.” Or if they did do it, they never talked about it. Who could say what went on in poor clans in harsh winters? Even the folk who might have talked wouldn’t; the strongest taboo possible lay on admitting one had tasted man’s flesh.
“Seems a shame to let them lie there for your birds and big foxes.” Marcovefa used the name she’d made up for dire wolves.
They’d gone round that pingo before. Instead of doing it again, Hamnet asked: “How strong was the magic the Rulers threw at you?”
“Nothing special,” she answered. “If my folk could ever come down from the top of the Glacier, they would show the Rulers and everyone else what real rulers are.”
She was probably right. It might happen one day, as the ice continued to melt and avalanches offered easier paths down. Hamnet Thyssen refused to worry about it. His great-great-grandchildren could do that, if he ever had descendants of his own. Marcovefa had just been talking about dining on his main worry.
She wouldn’t get away from it, either. “You know,” she said, “with the enemy inside you, you can work real magic against him. You know him in a way you never would without eating him.”
“No,” Hamnet said again. “Not unless you think you can beat the Rulers all by yourself. No one down here wants anything to do with a cannibal. It may be all right for you, but we have strong bans against eating people.”
The alarming thing was, Marcovefa thought about it. Only after that consideration did she reluctantly shake her head. “Maybe not by myself,” she said. “Too much might go wrong. But it is a foolish ban.”
“All customs look foolish to people who don’t follow them.” That wasn’t Hamnet—it was Ulric. “But if you laugh at them, that’s one of the easiest ways I know to make everybody hate you.”
“When we were up on the Glacier, we stayed polite to your clan,” Hamnet added. “We gave them the meat we carried with us—”
“So they wouldn’t eat you instead,” Marcovefa broke in.
“Well, yes,” Hamnet said. “But we didn’t try to stop them from butchering their enemies after a fight we helped them win. And we didn’t say anything when they ate men’s flesh. We just didn’t eat any ourselves.”
“Our customs are right,” Marcovefa maintained.
“For you,” Ulric said. “Not for everybody. Same with ours.”
If he hadn’t added the last three words, the shaman from atop the Glacier would have got angry at him. Hamnet Thyssen could see the warning signs on her face. He wouldn’t have wanted to anger any wizard, let alone one as powerful as Marcovefa. But Ulric managed to disarm her. She gave him a grudging nod. “Maybe,” she said.
The butchery went on. Even if the Bizogots left the hamstrung mammoths alone, they had plenty of meat. Once they saw that, they stopped caring so much about leaving some behind.
“Not elegant, maybe, but it’s a victory,” Ulric said.
“We need victories. We don’t see them often enough,” Hamnet replied. “Now we’ve given the Rulers a poke, and we’ll see what they do next.”
“You have a knack for making everything sound so delightful. You always did.” Ulric Skakki batted his eyes. Count Hamnet picked up a pebble and threw it at him. Ulric’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, but he was laughing. So was Hamnet Thyssen. You could do that after you won a battle.
Somewhere to the north, the Rulers wouldn’t think anything was funny right now.
DAYS STRETCHED AS spring advanced. Nights shrank. The air was murmurous with birds and with bugs. Down at Sudertorp Lake, the reed-choked waters by the shore would be full of nesting ducks and geese and swans.
For years, the Leaping Lynx Bizogots had lived well off the waterfowl: so well that they built stone houses to live in during the spring and summer, though they had to follow the herds the rest of the year. But the Rulers had shattered the Leaping Lynxes the year before.
“Who’s holding Sudertorp Lake now?” Hamnet asked Trasamund. “Anyone? Have the Rulers garrisoned it?”
“I don’t think so,” the jarl answered. “By the time they got down there, most of the birds would have flown. They’re strangers here. They might not even know how rich it gets come spring.”
“Then we ought to go there,” Hamnet said. “If they are taking the waterfowl, we should drive them off if we can. If they aren’t, we ought to take the birds ourselves. The hunting is easy—the Leaping Lynxes show that. We could spend less time tending the herds and more time rousing the Bizogots against the Rulers.”
Trasamund plucked at his beard. “It could be. I hate to walk in on a clan’s territory when I’m not at war with it, but—”
“You know the Leaping Lynxes are shattered,” Count Hamnet said. “We’ve got some of them with us. Put it to them, if you want. Ask if they’d rather see the Rulers eating their waterfowl, or if the birds should go to their own kind.”
The Bizogot chieftain rumbled laughter. “You’re sneakier than you look, Thyssen. If I ask them like that, by God, I know what they’ll say.”
“That’s the idea,” Hamnet said. “If you ask the question the right way, you’ll get the answer you want.”
“Unless I don’t,” Trasamund said. “With Bizogots, you never can tell. We are a free people, we are.” He sounded proud of his folk’s freedom.
Hamnet Thyssen nodded somberly. “Yes. That’s so. And I can’t think of anything that’s done you more harm in your fight against the Rulers. If you made war as a unit instead of by clans that didn’t want to stand with other clans, wouldn’t you have had more luck?”
He strode off, leaving Trasamund staring after him. As he walked, he wondered, too late, if he’d just sunk his own scheme. If the Three Tusk jarl got angry at him, wouldn’t he be less likely to want to follow a suggestion no matter how sensible it was?
But he knew the answer. If something came to him, he was likely to say it. He’d helped ruin things with Liv by blurting out questions he should have swallowed. That might have gone wrong anyway, but he’d sure given it a push.
He must have still been scowling when he came up to Ulric Skakki, because the adventurer said, “What’s gnawing at you now? You look like somebody just told you you’d have rocks for supper.”
“No, the rocks are in my head. I’ve been stupid.” Hamnet explained how he’d botched things with Trasamund.
Ulric raised a quizzical eyebrow. “At least you know you messed up. Most people never figure that out.”
