“I wish I had hobnails in the bottom of my boots,” Hamnet said, grabbing Ulric’s wrist and yanking him upwards. With a grunt, the adventurer scrambled onto the top of the ice boulder beside him. “They’d make climbing a lot easier.”
“Hobnails? No!” Trasamund shook his head. “You wear hobnails on ice or in snow, they bleed heat right out of your feet. Maybe they’re all right in Raumsdalia, where it’s warm, but not up here.”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” Count Hamnet admitted. “You may be right. If we had boots with a couple of layers of hide between our soles and the nails, though . ..”
“If we had wings, we could fly up to the top of the Glacier,” Trasamund said. “And we could piss on the miserable Rulers down below, too.”
Hamnet shut up.
When he looked down to the Bizogot steppe now, he could hardly make out the invaders down there. They might have been ants or fleas or other small annoyances. They might have been, but they weren’t. He looked behind, and then he looked ahead. How far had they come? Maybe a third of the way, he guessed. The going got no easier as they moved on. If anything, the slope grew steeper. Without the titanic avalanche, they wouldn’t have had a prayer of reaching the top of the Glacier. Even with it, the climb wouldn’t be easy. Anything but.
And something else was wrong, or at least different. He seemed to need an extra breath or two whenever he struggled up onto a new chunk of ice. Hauling Ulric after him had made his heart pound.
Then a light dawned. “We’re climbing a mountain!” he exclaimed. “The air’s getting thinner!”
“It would do that, wouldn’t it?” Liv said. “No wonder I’m breathing so hard.”
“Do you have a magic that would let us breathe the way we do down on the plain?” Hamnet asked her.
“
Audun Gilli shook his head. “Maybe someone in the Empire does – someone in the west, most likely, who has to worry about mountains more than people around Nidaros do. But I’ve never needed a spell like that, either. Too bad.”
“I hope there will be enough air to keep us going when we get to the top,” Count Hamnet said.
“Don’t you think you should have worried about that
“Maybe we’ll die up there,” Hamnet said. “But maybe we won’t. If we’d stayed down on the Bizogot plain, we’d all be dead by now.” That wasn’t quite true; the Rulers might have let Liv and Arnora live for a while, but the women wouldn’t have been glad if they did. Most of the time, people didn’t know what they were talking about when they spoke of a fate worse than death. Serving the enemy’s lusts till he decided to knock you over the head, though .. . That came much too close to the real thing.
He started climbing again so he wouldn’t have to think about it. Liv went up the broken blocks of ice beside him. Her face was particularly grim. Maybe she was trying not to think about what the Rulers would have done to her, too.
After a while, Ulric pointed to the plain far below and said, “Look. You can watch sunset spreading over the land.”
Was it sunset or the shadow of the Glacier? After a moment, Hamnet Thyssen decided the two were one and the same. The sun wouldn’t come up again till morning. And he could see the shadow or the sunset line or whatever it was stretching farther and farther till everything down there – the whole world he’d known up till now – was swallowed in deepening blue shadow. The sun kept on shining on his comrades and him for some little while. He watched the shadow creep up the avalanche from below them. At last, the sun set halfway up the Glacier, too, or however far they were.
“Well,” Trasamund said as it got darker and chillier, and then again, “Well.” He didn’t go on; it was as if he couldn’t go on.
When nothing came after those two false starts, Ulric Skakki nodded sagely and said, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”
The Bizogot jarl glowered at him. “Your whole world has just turned to a steaming pile of mammoth turds. Go ahead. Tell me how you feel about it.”
“Well . . .” Ulric let it hang, too. Was he mocking Trasamund or sympathizing with him? Count Hamnet couldn’t tell. By the way Trasamund muttered to himself, neither could he. Hamnet wondered whether even Ulric Skakki knew.
Raw meat made an uninspiring supper. Hamnet Thyssen had gone without often enough, though, to know how much better it was than no supper at all. As a smith stoked a furnace, so he fueled himself.
He wished he could have found a furnace somewhere closer than hundreds of miles away. A cold wind wailed down off the top of the Glacier. Even wrapped in a mammoth hide, he was chilly. Like any traveler, he carried tinder and a way to start a fire. He used flint and steel; the Bizogots, who didn’t work iron, made do with firebows instead. But how they would have got a fire going didn’t matter now, for they had nothing to sustain it.
Liv sat up for a while, talking about wizardry with Audun Gilli. Count Hamnet was too weary to be jealous, or to wait for her to go to sleep, too. The rough ice on which he lay might have been a feather bed. Exhaustion clubbed him down.
Summer morning camesoon in the north country. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t want to wake up, but light sneaking in between his eyelids left him little choice. He yawned and stretched. Down below, on the steppe, night still reigned.
Methodically, Hamnet cut bite after bite from a chunk of cold raw horse-meat. He chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. He’d had breakfasts he relished more, but he knew he would miss the meat when it was gone. He ate now, while he still had the chance.
Not far away, Vulfolaic was doing the same thing. After swallowing a bite, he said, “I sat up a while in the night and watched.”
“Did you, by God? Well, more power to you. You’re a stronger man than I am.” Count Hamnet made as if to tip the hat he wasn’t wearing. “You didn’t see the Rulers sneaking up on us – that’s plain enough.”
“No.” Vulfolaic shook his head. He sent Hamnet a quizzical look. No Bizogot would have admitted another man was stronger than he, yet the Raumsdalian had fought bravely in all the battles and skirmishes just past. He scratched his head, then crushed something between his thumbnails.
When he didn’t say anything more on his own, Hamnet prompted him: “Well, what did you see? You must have seen something, or you wouldn’t bother telling me you did sentry duty.”
“True enough.” Now Vulfolaic seemed impressed at how clever he was. Count Hamnet wanted to pound his head against the Glacier. After another pause, Vulfolaic went on, “I didn’t see the Rulers, no, but a big snowy owl flew around us. It must have known men well, for it stayed out of bowshot.”
He blinked when not only Hamnet but also Liv, Audun Gilli, and Ulric Skakki exclaimed. “That was the Rulers, looking us over,” Liv said.
“They won’t be back, either – that’s a sure thing,” Ulric said.
“Why not?” Audun didn’t follow.
The adventurer clicked his tongue between his teeth, as if surprised such naivete could exist. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “The owl will have taken one look, laughed till it almost fell out of the sky, and flown away. Why bother coming back? I’m surprised they bothered checking at all. A ragged bunch like us won’t give the Rulers any trouble even if we don’t end up frozen for our trouble.”
“Oh,” the wizard said in a small, unhappy voice. He didn’t try to argue.
Hamnet Thyssen wouldn’t have, either. He saw things the way Ulric did. He and his comrades were likely just putting off the inevitable – and, chances were, not for very long, either.
Trasamund sucked horse blood out of his mustache. “Let’s get going,” he said. “If we have to do this, we’ll
Hamnet admired his determination. Living up to it was something else again. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back groaned when he got moving. He’d done too much the day before, and he hadn’t slept on a feather bed after all. “I feel my age,” he said.
“If you weren’t old when you started this climb, you would be by the time you finished,” Ulric Skakki said, which also held a painful amount of truth.
Whether they could finish the climb grew less and less certain as the day wore along. The slope got steeper
