talk about lice and fleas and bedbugs than deal with them in person.' He looked at the specks floating in his bathwater. How many of them were drowned bugs? Too many—he was sure of that. Had he killed them all? He was just as sorrowfully sure he hadn't.
'Have to take the bad with the good.' Ulric s shrug made water slosh out of his tub. 'Not everyone sees that.' He paused. 'Sometimes I think hardly anyone sees that.'
'Everyone sees why the other fellow needs to take the bad with the good,' Hamnet Thyssen said. 'Why he needs to do it himself. .. That's a different story.'
Somebody banged on the bathhouse door. 'Haven't you two turned into prunes yet?' Jesper Fletti called through the spruce planks. Almost all the wood up here was fir and spruce, drawn from the enormous northern forests. 'Some of the rest of us want to see what color we really are, too,' Jesper added.
'All right. All right. We'll get out,' Ulric said regretfully. Under his breath, he went on, 'Talk about taking the bad with the good.'
'Or after the good, anyhow.' Hamnet sighed as he got out of the tub. The water was starting to get cold, but it hadn't got there yet. In spite of the fire roaring in the hearth, the air in the bathhouse was chilly. He went and stood in front of the flames to dry off and warm up. Ulric Skakki stood beside him. Hamnet was the bigger man, but saying which of them was harder wouldn't have been easy. Hamnet eyed Ulric's scars. 'You've been in a scrape or three, haven't you?'
'Oh, you might say so.' Ulric Skakki surveyed Hamnet s hairy arms and torso. 'Now that you mention it, so have you.'
'The other fellows will fight back now and again,' Hamnet said. 'Treacherous dogs, but what can you do?'
'Kill ‘em fast, before they have the chance to do anything to you,' Ulric answered.
'Good advice. Anyone would know you were a fighting man.' Hamnet ran a comb through his hair and beard. Then he stared at the bone tool. 'I hope it's not covered with nits. If it is . . .'
'If it is, you'll know about it before long.' Ulric, who was also combing himself, paused to mime scratching. 'At least we can bathe now. That will help. And if we soak our hair in oil, that will help more.'
'I suppose so.' Count Hamnet put on a robe the landlord swore was pest-free. Ulric Skakki donned another one. The Bizogot-style clothes they'd worn on their travels were being fumigated with burning sulfur. The stinking smoke would kill most of the pests the garments carried. As for the ones that survived . .. Well, now that the travelers were back in civilization, they could always fumigate the furs again. They could even get new clothes.
The Bizogots would have thought nothing of skinning and tanning hides up on the frozen steppe. Hamnet might have tried it himself in a pinch, but he was glad he hadn't had to. The mammoth-herders were bound to be better at it than he was.
When he and Ulric opened the door, Jesper Fletti and Eyvind Torfinn glowered at them. 'Took you long enough,' Jesper said.
'Wait till the next pair start yelling at you,' Hamnet said. 'And they will. They will.'
'I suspect he may be right,' Eyvind Torfinn said.
'I don't care if he is,' Jesper Fletti said. He turned and shouted in the direction of the kitchens. 'Where's that clean hot water, by God? Do you expect me to soak in somebody else's swill?'
'So charming,' Ulric Skakki murmured. Hamnet Thyssen carefully didn't smile. Jesper Fletti gave Ulric a sharp look. But the bathhouse attendants came up just then, and Jesper went back to yelling at them instead. Count Hamnet thought that wise. Jesper Fletti was a large, strong, tough man. If he got into a fight with someone ordinary, he would win, and win easily. If he got into a fight with Ulric, his size and strength and toughness might keep him alive an extra half minute or so. Or, on the other hand, they might not.
Eyvind Torfinn didn't quarrel with the attendants. He eyed them as if they were the most wonderful people he’d ever met. 'To be clean,' he said. 'I shall be clean.' Hamnet Thyssen walked down the hall before Eyvind could finish the conjugation. Not that he didn't sympathize, but he already knew how the verb worked.
Next morning, he found fresh bites. In a way, that infuriated him. In another way, it showed he'd made progress. For weeks, for months, he'd been bitten so often that he hardly noticed new marks—one itch blended into another. Now he had few enough that they stood out. Maybe one day before too long, if he kept bathing and went on fumigating his clothes, he wouldn't have any. Wouldn't that be something?
Fat snowflakes frisked on the breeze as the travelers rode out of Naestved. Liv looked back over her shoulder, watching the palisade disappear behind them. When she sighed, the wind blew her breath, too. 'Everyone talks about how rich the Empire is,' she said, and sighed again. 'Trasamund has come down here before, and I've listened to him go on about it. But I never imagined it could be as rich as ... this.' Her wave encompassed both the town they were leaving and the dour forest around it.
'Naestved isn't anything much,' Hamnet Thyssen said truthfully.
Liv stared at him, sure he was joking. When she saw he wasn't, she sighed one more time. 'I think you have so many. . . things .. . that you take them all for granted.' Plainly, she chose her words with care.
'Maybe we do,' Hamnet said. 'Plenty of priests would be happy to tell you how right you are—you can bet on that.'
What she said about priests would have horrified any of them who heard her. It made Eyvind Torfinn and Ulric Skakki whip their heads around in astonishment. 'I did not mean anything that has to do with my comrades here,' she went on in more moderate tones. 'But you Raumsdalians do have so many things that I wonder how you can stand to do without them when you come up to the Bizogot country.'
That thought had also crossed Hamnet Thyssen's mind. 'A lot of us wouldn't want to,' he admitted uncomfortably. 'A lot of us wouldn't be able to. But things are only things. Either you own them—or they own you. If you can't do without them, they own you. I don't want to be owned, thank you very much.'
'You even talk like a Bizogot,' she said. 'How? You say Naestved is nothing much. That means you must have seen better, though I don't know what could be finer than that. Hot water to bathe in ... Things to put the hot water in . . .'
'Tubs,' Count Hamnet said helpfully.
'Tubs,' Liv repeated. 'Soft things to sleep on . . .'
'Beds.'
'Beds,' she said. 'And the food made from ground grain .. . Bread.' She found the word before he gave it to her. 'And the tents with wooden walls . . . Houses. So much wood everywhere. Even wood around the town to keep out enemies.' She shook her head in wonder.
'So many things,' Liv went on. 'This is because you don't have to wander, to follow the herds, isn't it?'
'Partly. Maybe even mostly,' Hamnet answered. 'It would be hard to carry bathtubs around in a mammoth-hide tent. But also partly because the country is different. It would be hard to herd mammoths and musk oxen through the forest.'
'I think so!' Liv exclaimed. 'I look at these .. . trees . . . and I think they all lean toward me. I think they all want to fall on me. We go through them, and I feel they are all squeezing in on me.' She gestured with her hands.
'Some Raumsdalians, when they come up into the Bizogot country, they feel the land is too big. They feel like flies walking across a plate.' Hamnet Thyssen gestured, too. 'They feel the land is so wide and they are so small that God has forgot them.'
She laughed. 'Really?' After Hamnet nodded, she asked, 'Did you ever feel this way?'
He thought she expected him to say no, but he nodded again. Sure enough, she looked surprised. 'On the Bizogot plains, I feel small,' Count Hamnet said. 'If a mammoth could think, it would feel small out on the Bizogot plains. But some of my countrymen have it worse than I do. Some of them feel as if they're about to disappear.'
'How funny. How strange,' Liv said. 'But the forest doesn't bother them?'
'I've heard Raumsdalians say they feel crowded here,' Hamnet replied. 'Farther south, we have forests and
