come north. She follows her own will, no one else's.' One more understatement.
'I have heard that you imperials are soft with your women. I see it is so,' Sarus said. 'Beat her a few times and she will follow her husband's will, no one else's.' He folded one large hand into a hard fist. 'It works for us.'
Hamnet had hit Gudrid when he first found out she was unfaithful to him. She tried to give him hemlock in his beer. She tried to slip a knife between his ribs while he slept. He hit her again, and told her he wouldn't do it any more if she stopped trying to do away with him. She did. Did that mean beating her worked? He didn't think so.
It didn't stop her from being unfaithful, not to him. And nothing stopped her from being unfaithful to Eyvind Torfinn, either.
What was he supposed to tell Sarus? He didn't want to admit Gudrid was once his—and his worry—so he said, 'You have your ways, we have ours. Some ways work for some folk, others for others.'
'It could be so,' the Bizogot said politely. 'But what if ways do
'Nothing in this world is perfect,' Hamnet Thyssen said, and smiled a little. Who would have dreamt that what held true for the defensive herds of musk oxen also held for women? He wondered what Gudrid would have thought of that. Not much, most likely.
'God is perfect,' Sarus said. 'How could God not be perfect? He would not be God.'
'God is perfect,' Hamnet agreed. 'But is God in this world or above it?'
Sarus grunted. That was a different sort of argument. Instead of taking it up, the jarl's son said, 'The Golden Shrine is perfect.'
'Is it?' Hamnet said. 'I have never known a man who has seen it. I have never heard a man who says he knows a man who has seen it.' He had no idea what, if anything, Trasamund had told the Bizogots on his way down to Nidaros. Did they even know the Gap had melted through and Trasamund had fared beyond the Glacier? If they didn't, Hamnet was not about to tell them.
'The Golden Shrine must be perfect,' Sarus said. 'If God is in the world at all, he is in the world there.'
'Well, maybe.' Count Hamnet didn't care to quarrel. 'Down in the Raumsdalian Empire, we hear all sorts of stories of lands still farther south, lands where it's like summer the whole year around, lands where there are strange animals and stranger birds. Tales about places you have not seen . . . Who knows what to believe?'
'Travelers' tales are mostly lies,' Sarus said.
'Mostly, but not always,' Hamnet said. 'Sometimes the travelers will bring hides with them, hides of beasts that do not live in the Empire or any neighboring country. And do you know of opossums? Have they come this far north?'
'I have seen one or two.' Sarus made a face. 'Horrible things, like big rats with pointed faces. What about them?'
'In the olden days, when the Glacier still covered this country, they would not even come up as far as Nidaros,' Hamnet Thyssen said. 'As the Glacier has moved north, as the weather has grown warmer, opossums have moved north, too. The people who live south of us say the beasts once came up through their lands, and there were times when they did not know them. Opossums would have been travelers' tales in long-gone days. But now they have their own tails, and hang by them.'
He hoped the pun worked in the Bizogot language. Sarus made another face, so evidently it did. 'You will believe travelers' tales about these ugly animals,' the Musk Ox clansman said. 'But you will not believe them about the Golden Shrine or about God. What does this say of you?'
'That I believe what I see with my own eyes, what I touch with my own hands,' Hamnet answered. 'I already knew this about myself. Anyone else who deals with me for even a little while comes to see it is true.'
Sarus thought about it for a little while. Then he nodded, as if to say he had already seen it. And then he rode away, as if to say that, having seen it, he did not find it pleasing. Hamnet Thyssen was unsurprised. He'd met that reaction before.
More dogs barked and howled when the Raumsdalians and Trasamund rode into the Musk Ox clan's encampment. But, though the big, ferocious-looking beasts made halfhearted rushes toward the newcomers, they did no more. Count Hamnet glanced toward Audun Gilli. The wizard gave back a smile of sorts.
Maybe his magic held dogs at bay. Bizogots were another story. Men, women, and children swarmed out of their tents of musk-ox skins and mammoth hides, drawn to the strangers like iron to a lodestone. They would steal if they saw a chance. Hamnet Thyssen knew that from experience. He hoped the Bizogots wouldn't have too many chances to steal from his comrades—hoped without particularly expecting his hopes would come true.
Instead of poles, mammoth ribs and leg bones supported the Bizogots' tents. Here beyond the line where trees could grow to a useful size, wood was scarce and precious. The fires burning in braziers weren't from seasoned timber, either. They were of dried mammoth or musk-ox dung, which gave food cooked over them a certain unique piquancy.
The Bizogots claimed meat roasted over dung fires was especially smoky and juicy and flavorful. They claimed mere wood couldn't come close to matching dung in any of those ways. Travelers up from the south were dubious about their claims. Hamnet Thyssen didn't think joints cooked over dung had any marked superiority over those he was more used to. While up on the frozen plains, he generally tried not to think at all about how his meat was cooked.
Ulric Skakki had also come up here before. When he smelled the dung fires, one of his eyebrows quirked up in wry amusement. He caught Ham-net's eye and shrugged a shrug half resigned, half melodramatic. 'How long will the rest of them need?' he asked, and didn't finish the question. Sooner or later, all the Raumsdalians would realize how the Bizogots had to cook.
No one needed long to realize how little the Bizogots bathed. There Hamnet Thyssen had a hard time blaming the mammoth-herders. Even in summer, warm water was a rare luxury here. In winter, water for drinking and cooking, let alone for bathing, had to be melted from snow or ice—and shedding one's clothes invited frostbite if not worse. But even if he understood why the Bizogots behaved as they did, the strong, sour reek that rose from them made his nostrils flare.
Their jarl, Sarus's father, looked like a larger, older version of the man who’d brought the Raumsdalians to the camp. Gray streaked Leovigild's greasy hair and shaggy beard. Thick, heavy gold hoops hung from his ears. A thicker golden necklace flashed against the gray and dun of his wolfskin jacket. And, when he smiled, glittering gold covered or replaced most of his front teeth. Many a Raumsdalian banker or pawnbroker would have envied his smile.
He spoke with Sarus first, to find out what arrangements his son had made with the strangers. When he knew, he turned to the Raumsdalians and Trasamund and boomed, 'Welcome, my guests! Welcome! Three times welcome! Use our encampment as your own while you bide with us.'
'We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your hospitality. We thank you for your generosity,' Eyvind Torfinn said politely.
'Come north and use my camp as I use yours now,' Trasamund boomed back.
He and Leovigild stared at each other in what seemed part appraisal, part challenge. They had come out of the same mold, though Leovigild was out longer and had seen more hard use. 'You think you're so special, traveling along by the edge of the Glacier,' the Musk Ox jarl said. 'All it means is, your clan couldn't get better grazing ground.'
'Shows what you know, you old raven,' Trasamund answered. 'Every year, the Glacier falls back. All the new land that shows when it does is mine.' He made a fist and thumped it against his broad chest. 'Mine!' He thumped his chest again. Hamnet Thyssen had never met a subtle, restrained Bizogot, never once.
Trasamund and Leovigild exchanged more brags and barbs. They seemed more good-natured than otherwise. Maybe that meant they both remembered the obligations guesting gave them, or maybe that they didn't dislike each other as men even if their clans did not get on well. Hamnet accepted the good humor without worrying overmuch about the wherefores behind it.
His time to worry came a little later, when Leovigild rounded on the Raumsdalians and demanded, 'And you people, what are you doing north of the tree line?'
The jarl eyed him and Eyvind Torfinn in particular. He found that interesting. Audun Gilli was easy to ignore—
