answered. She deliberately looked away from him. He hadn't expected anything else. 'As for telling you what to do,' he went on, 'well, let's see. For one thing, I outrank you. You should say, 'Who do you think you are, your Grace?' For another, I've been up here in the north before. Have you? And, for a third, I hope I know better than to get any wizard angry at me.'
Jesper Fletti glowered and spluttered. Whatever he was feeling, he didn't try to put it into words. Hamnet Thyssen had landed too heavy a load of truth on him. He looked away from Hamnet, too. Gudrid did it with more panache.
'I thank you, your Grace,' Audun Gilli said in a low voice.
'You're welcome. I've seen you aren't lazy or weak,' Count Hamnet answered. 'If he asked if you were drunk or hungover, I would have had less to say to him.'
Audun's mouth tightened. 'Don't you think saying something like that might make a wizard angry at you?'
'I hope not,' Hamnet replied. 'A man who gets angry at the truth will have a hard time in life, don't you think?'
'It could be so,' Audun Gilli answered after considering the question longer and more seriously than Hamnet had looked for. 'Yes, it could be so. Of course, you might say the same about a man who gets drunk whenever he finds the chance.'
'Yes, you might,' Hamnet agreed. 'Far be it from me to deny that. But there's a simple answer, don't you think? An obvious answer, too.'
'For almost every problem, there is an answer that is simple, obvious— and wrong,' Audun said. Hamnet Thyssen pondered that, then inclined his head. The wizard left him with no good comeback.
Trasamund got down from his horse, tossing the reins to Ulric Skakki. He walked over to the dire wolf and butchered it. 'Anyone but me want a chunk of raw liver?' he asked, holding up the dripping purplish organ. Plainly, he was ready to laugh at effete Raumsdalians when they told him no.
Gudrid gulped. When she looked away this time, she wasn't acting or posing; she was truly revolted. But Audun Gilli said, 'Give me some. What better way to take in the spirit of this land?'
'I'll eat some, too,' Hamnet said. 'The dire wolf would have gnawed my liver. The least I can do is pay him back.'
'Now that—that is spoken like a Bizogot, by God!' Trasamund said. Count Hamnet knew the jarl meant it for praise. If it felt like an insult, he could keep that to himself.
'I'll eat wolf liver. Why not? It's meat,' Ulric Skakki said. He might well have eaten it before, but he didn't want Trasamund to know this wasn't his first visit to the frozen plains.
Trasamund turned to Eyvind Torfinn. 'What about you, your Splendor?'
'With respect, your Ferocity, I will decline,' Eyvind answered. 'I have my own land, and do not wish to become mystically attuned to this one. Besides, unless starving and without choice I prefer my meat cooked.'
The jarl took it in good part, saying, 'Well, you know your own mind, anyway.' He ate his gobbet with every sign of relish, then passed another one to Audun Gilli—the wizard was the first Raumsdalian volunteer.
Audun screwed up his face and stuffed the bloody meat into his mouth. He chewed. 'Could be worse,' he said once he got it down.
'At least that wasn't, 'Tastes like chicken,'' Ulric Skakki murmured.
Dire-wolf liver didn't taste like chicken. Hamnet Thyssen had no time to point that out to Ulric, for Trasamund handed him his own chunk of still-warm meat. He ate it without thinking about what he was doing, and swallowed it without too much trouble. When he saw Gudrid’s mocking expression, he smiled back at her with his mouth still full. That made her turn away in a hurry.
Ulric Skakki ate his ragged slice of liver without any fuss. Jesper Fletti and the rest of Gudrid's guardsmen declined to partake. They were less smooth about it than Earl Eyvind, but Trasamund didn't harry them on account of that. He'd got three Raumsdalians to try his delicacy, which was probably three more than he expected.
Trasamund went back to his butchery. He wrapped the meat in the dire wolf's hide and tied it on a pack horse. The animal snorted and rolled its eyes at the scent of blood and the smell of dire wolf, but did not try to bolt. Trasamund left the wolf's entrails steaming on the ground.
'Let's go,' he said. 'Maybe the others will come back to feed on their friend.'
'I think not.' Ulric Skakki pointed up into the sky. 'Are those just ordinary vultures, or are they teratorns?'
'Teratorns.' Eyvind answered before Trasamund could. 'You can tell by the pattern of white and black under the wings.'
'By the size, too, when they get lower,' Trasamund added. 'But they won't, not while we're hanging around the offal.'
Sure enough, when the travelers rode north, the three or four teratorns spiraled down out of the sky to squabble over the bounty Trasamund left behind. They were enormous birds, with a wingspan as wide as two tall men. And down in the south, Hamnet Thyssen had heard, there were bigger teratorns still, their grotesque naked heads wattled and striped in shades of blue and yellow. All vultures were ugly. Those southern teratorns seemed to take ugliness to an almost surreal level, one where even grotesqueness took on a beauty all its own.
'Do Bizogots also eat teratorn meat?' Eyvind Torfinn asked.
'If we have to. If we are starving. Otherwise . . .' Trasamund shook his head. 'It is a foul bird. It eats filth and carrion. Its flesh tastes of its food, the same as any vulture's.' He made a nasty face. Did that mean he was once— or more than once— hungry enough to have to eat flesh like that? Hamnet Thyssen wondered, but he didn't ask.
Like the totem animal for which it was named, the Vole clan was small. But the jarl of the clan, a burly fellow named Wacho, had more than his share of pride. 'Oh, yes, voles are little beasts,' he said. 'But the frozen plain would die if not for them. Who feeds the weasels? Who feeds the foxes? Who feeds the lynxes? Who feeds the snowy owls? The vole. Give the vole its due.'
Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine someone down in Nidaros singing the praises of the house mouse. He couldn't do it. For one thing, folk in Nidaros had plenty of other things to worry about. For another, the Bizogots were more closely attuned to nature than his own people. To Raumsdalians, house mice were nuisances, to be trapped or poisoned or hunted with cats. To Bizogots, voles were part of the vast web of life that spread across their land.
Who was right? Who was wrong? Hamnet shrugged. Life for the mammoth-herders was harder than it was in the Empire. By the nature of things, it had to be. He’d grown up in the Raumsdalian way himself, and he preferred it. But sometimes the question was one of difference rather than right and wrong. He thought that was so here.
As usual when a clan guested the travelers, they feasted till they neared the bursting point. 'I think the idea is to give us a layer of blubber like a mammoths,' Ulric Skakki said, gnawing the meat from yet another musk-ox rib.
'That's all very well,' Hamnet said, 'but if we don't fit into our clothes, the blubber won't do us enough good to make up for it.'
Audun Gilli started to say something. He wasn't a big man, but he had a respectable pile of bones in front of him. Before he could speak, someone new came into Wacho's tent—a fantastically dressed Bizogot whose jacket and trousers were elaborately embroidered and fringed, so that he seemed almost to be wearing a pelt. The resemblance was only strengthened by the bear claws at his wrists and ankles, and by the bearskin mask now pushed back from his face.
'This is Witigis,' Wacho said. 'He is the shaman of the Voles.'
Witigis's gaze was quick and darting, more the look of a wild animal than a man. Shamans said they had closer ties to God than Raumsdalian priests dreamed of winning. Hamnet Thyssen wondered if Witigis was a holy man or simply a madman. His vacant features didn't promise much in the way of brains.
But when his gaze fell on Audun Gilli, he stiffened. So did the Raumsdalian wizard. They stared at each other. Without looking as he took it, Witigis grabbed a rib and started chewing on the meat. Grease glistened around his mouth. His eyes never left Audun Gilli's.
'Like calls to like,' Ulric whispered.
'Maybe,' Count Hamnet answered. 'But if that's so, which one of them did you just insult?' Ulric laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.
