plain as the nose on his face. At the moment, the nose on his face had a muffler over it, to keep the blizzards from freezing it off him. He rode on toward the south, but winter rode ahead of him.
In spring, Sudertorp Lake had been a marvelous place, full of ducks and geese and swans and waders and shore scuttlers—every manner of bird that lived in or near the water seemed to want to breed in the bushes and marshes and reeds that lined the immense meltwater lake. In winter, though .. . Hamnet Thyssen had never seen Sudertorp Lake in the wintertime before. He was sorry to see it now.
Under a gray sky, the water and ice of Sudertorp Lake in winter were the color of phlegm. The north wind— the Breath of God—whipped the water to waves and whitecaps that tossed sullenly. . . where they could. Toward the shore, the surface of the lake was frozen. Count Hamnet supposed the ice would advance across the water till the turning of the sun made it retreat once more.
Right now, that turning looked a long way off, a long, long way indeed.
The bushes and reeds and rushes were yellow and brown and dead. The turning of the sun would also bring them back to life, but that seemed likelier to be legend than truth. Hamnet would have been sure of it if he hadn't come through here in the springtime.
In spring, the Leaping Lynx clan camped by the eastern shore of Sudertorp Lake. The Bizogots of that clan lived off the fat of the land then. So many birds bred and foraged here, a clan's worth of hunting mattered no more to them than a mosquito bite to a man.
In winter, though, the Leaping Lynxes' lakeside houses stood empty. The Bizogots had to go forth and follow their herds and flocks like any other clan. Trasamund surveyed the empty stone buildings with a certain somber satisfaction. 'Serves them right—you know what I mean?' he said. 'In the springtime, Riccimir gets above himself. He might as well be a Raumsdalian.'
'A Raumsdalian?' Ulric Skakki said.
'That's right.' Trasamund nodded. 'He doesn't have to move around so much, so he thinks he's better than the people who do.'
'If I thought not moving around made me better, would I have gone beyond the Glacier?' Ulric asked. 'Twice?' he asked to himself.
'But you are a man of sense,' the Bizogot jarl said. 'Riccimir is an overstuffed mammoth turd.'
'What does he call you?' Hamnet Thyssen asked.
'Who cares?' Trasamund answered, which might have meant he truly didn't care or might have meant he couldn't see the boot might fit on the other foot as well. Hamnet would have bet on the latter; Trasamund was better at seeing other peoples weaknesses than at noting his own.
The travelers came upon the Leaping Lynxes' winter encampment, their wandering encampment, a day after the pause by Sudertorp Lake. It seemed like any other Bizogot camp—but, then again, it didn't. The mammoth- herders were doing the same sort of things as all their fellows did, and doing them about as well as the other Bizogots did. But every other clan
Hamnet Thyssen had seen took those labors altogether for granted. The Leaping Lynxes seemed faintly embarrassed at living in tents and following the herds. They knew another way of life. They not only knew it, they preferred it.
When Riccimir gave his guests roasted musk-ox meat, he said, 'It's not fat goose, my friends, but it's what we have.'
'Nothing wrong with musk ox,' Trasamund said, his lips shiny with grease.
'Nothing wrong with it, no,' the jarl of the Leaping Lynxes agreed. 'But it's not as fine a flesh as waterfowl. I'm not just speaking of geese, mind you, though they're common and they're easy to take. But when you eat snipe and woodcock through the fat season of the year, you aren't so happy with the leaner days.' He shrugged broad shoulders. 'It can't be helped. I know it can't be helped—it's the way God made things work for us. But I wish it were different, and I don't know a Leaping Lynx who doesn't.'
'You like living soft,' Trasamund said, without rancor. Hamnet Thyssen wouldn't have put it that way. He would have said the Leaping Lynxes took advantage of their springtime abundance. Maybe those amounted to the same thing. He wasn't sure, and he would have bet Trasamund wasn't, either.
As for Riccimir, he replied, 'What if we do? You'd live the way we do, too, if only you could. Will you call me a liar?'
'No,' Trasamund said. If he'd said yes, it would have meant a fight to the death. But he went on, 'Be careful how soft you get, or some other clan will drive you away from Sudertorp Lake. Then you'll go back to wandering all through the year, if you're lucky enough to hold together as a clan.'
'We've been attacked before,' Riccimir said. 'We still hold our lands. Anyone who ever tried to take them came to grief. What does that tell you?'
'That you've done what you needed to do—so far,' Trasamund said. 'But you have to win every single time. If you lose even once, you're ruined.'
'And for which Bizogot clan isn't that so?' Riccimir said. Trasamund had no answer for him.
Neither did Hamnet Thyssen. What Riccimir said spoke of the differences between the Bizogots and the Raumsdalian Empire. The riches of Sudertorp Lake in springtime let the Leaping Lynx clan approach civilization, but it
Down toward the tree line, where the frozen plains ended and forests began, the Bizogots yielded to the Raumsdalian Empire. Hamnet Thyssen knew how tenuous Raumsdalian rule over the northern part of the Empire was. In the north, everything was tenuous; there wasn't enough food and weren't enough people to make life as relatively safe and secure and rich as it was down by Nidaros.
Trasamund kept looking back over his shoulder and shaking his head. Even when the weather was clear, the Glacier had fallen below the horizon. 'Doesn't seem natural,' he said. 'The north looks naked.'
The cold wind that blew down from the Glacier left Hamnet Thyssen in no doubt that it hadn't gone away. He said as much, adding, 'It won't, either, not for many, many generations.'
'Even to think that it might one day is as strange as thinking God might get old and die,' Trasamund said.
Eyvind Torfinn rode close enough to hear him. 'Some men in the Empire have been known to wonder about that, your Ferocity,' he said. 'They argue that everything else grows old and dies, that even the Glacier is falling back and may leave us one day, so why shouid the same not hold true for God?'
'Really?' Trasamund said. 'What do you do with men who ask things like that?'
'Yes, what?' Hamnet Thyssen echoed. 'I don't remember hearing about men with those ideas, and I'd think it would kick up a scandal.'
'It did,' Earl Eyvind answered. 'This was about a hundred and twenty-years ago, you understand, in the reign of Palnir I. If I remember rightly, one of the philosophers got fifty lashes, the other two got twenty-five apiece, and they were all exiled to a town in the far southwest, where they could watch ground sloths and glyptodonts and hope the Manches didn't nip in and cut their throats.'
'I'm surprised they got away with their lives,' Hamnet said.
'Palnir had a name for being merciful,' Eyvind Torfinn said. 'He told them he wouldn't kill them himself—he would leave that to God.'
'You Raumsdalians are softer than the Leaping Lynxes,' Trasamund said. 'But what's a glyptodont?'
'Do you know what an armadillo is?' Hamnet Thyssen said. The Bizo-got shook his head. Hamnet wasn't surprised; armadillos and their bigger cousins liked warm weather and didn't come up anywhere near Nidaros. He went on, 'Imagine a pot with a long handle. Turn it upside down. Make the handle its tail—sort of a bony club. Give it a head and four short legs, also armored in bone. Make it ten feet long from nose to tailtip, and three or four feet high. It's not very bright, and it only eats plants, but a sabertooth will break his fangs before he can puncture it.'
'You're having me on,' Trasamund said. 'That's the craziest beast I ever heard of.'
'No, he's telling the truth,' Eyvind Torfinn said.
'I don't believe it,' Trasamund said stubbornly. 'You figure you've got a fool of a Bizogot here, and you think
