“At the stone houses!” Marcomer went pale. Now he understood what Count Hamnet and Trasamund were talking about. “We’d better send someone over there to warn the jarl.” Without any kind of farewell, he rode back towards the mammoths, shouting at his fellow herders as he went.
“Well, we livened up his morning, didn’t we?” Ulric Skakki sounded more proud of himself than anything else.
Before long, Marcomer and another horseman trotted east. Hamnet Thyssen silently wished them luck. Maybe they could warn the rest of the Leaping Lynxes. He feared they were more likely to run headlong into disaster. But that was also part of life – an all too common part.
“Let’s ride,” Trasamund said. “They won’t kill a mammoth calf for us – I’m sure of that. We need to go on till we find a herd of musk oxen.”
“Before too very long, we’ll be able to see the tree line,” Hamnet said. “We’re more than halfway across the Bizogot steppe. When we started, I never would have believed we could get this far.”
“Something to that.” One corner of Ulric Skakki’s mouth quirked up. “I wonder what the Rulers will think of trees. I wonder what their mammoths will think of them.”
That hadn’t occurred to Count Hamnet. No denying Ulric had something, though, or at least might have something. The land beyond the Glacier was also far beyond the tree line. The unfamiliar terrain might slow down the invaders. Or, on the other hand, it might not.
After that, riding on came as something of a relief.
The worst, or something close to it, had befallen the Leaping Lynxes. Two days after the meeting by the mammoth herd, Marcomer and several other Bizogots from the lakeside caught up with the travelers from the north from behind. Along with his companions, Hamnet Thyssen had feared they might be warriors of the Rulers.
“I never got to the stone houses. These – Rulers – attacked before I could,” Marcomer said. “They struck the clan, and they scattered us. Riccimir is dead. He had his quirks, but he was a good jarl.”
“He was,” Hamnet agreed. The Leaping Lynxes had the richest hunting grounds in the Bizogot country. Riccimir defended them well against other clans, some bigger and stronger than his, that wanted to take them for themselves.
“Some of our houses fell down,” said one of the Bizogots – a woman – with Marcomer. “The mammoth-riders made a magic, and the houses fell down. The jarl died in the wreck of his, when a rock smashed his head. Then the strangers swept down on us. We tried to fight, but how could we? God only knows what happened to the ones who couldn’t get away.”
“They’re part of the Rulers’ herd now,” Hamnet Thyssen said. That did nothing to cheer the Leaping Lynxes. He hadn’t thought it would.
“What can we do?” Marcomer asked. “I want to go back and kill as many of those demons as I can before they get me.”
That might have done well enough if he were likely to kill any of the Rulers at all before they killed him. As things were, Hamnet answered, “You have a better chance for revenge if you come with us. We think the Empire can fight back against the invaders.”
Marcovefa said something incomprehensible. Hamnet looked a question towards Ulric Skakki. The adventurer didn’t sound happy as he translated: “She doesn’t understand why we’re getting so upset about the Rulers. She says they’re nothing much.”
She’d said that before. She’d proved it, too . . . against a raiding party that had no wizard of its own along. “When she beats their shamans, she may talk anyway she pleases,” Trasamund said. “Till then, seeing as we’ve been running from the Rulers ever since we came down from the Glacier – before that, too! – I wish she’d keep her mouth shut.”
Count Hamnet waited for Marcovefa to resent that, and to show it by making Trasamund do something embarrassing or absurd. But she didn’t – she just smiled and blew him a kiss. The jarl muttered under his breath. He also seemed willing to leave it there, though.
Audun Gilli tried to look on the bright side: “We’re a stronger party now. If we have to fight the Rulers, we stand a better chance.”
“Something you really need to learn is the difference between
When they came down to the tree line the year before, they’d been racing winter – and winter moved south faster than they did. This time, summer was sliding towards fall, but hadn’t got there yet. Although days were getting shorter, nights hadn’t yet outdistanced them. The firs and spruces remained dark, no snow stippling their needles.
“I’ve heard about trees,” Marcomer said. “I never thought they’d be so big, though.” Up on the Bizogot plain, which began where the forest could no longer grow, wood was an imported luxury, scarce and expensive.
“I thought they would be bushes,” Marcovefa said. “I thought they would be bushes taller than me. But they aren’t really like that, are they? And he is right. I never thought they would be this big.”
Hamnet Thyssen, Ulric Skakki, and Audun Gilli all smiled, then tried to pretend they hadn’t. So did Trasamund and Liv, who’d come south before. They knew about trees. For the rest of the Bizogots, as for Marcomer and Marcovefa, these scraggly samples just below the line where the ground froze were far and away the biggest living things they’d ever seen.
As Hamnet peered first east and then west, Ulric sent him a quizzical stare. “What are you looking for?” the adventurer demanded.
“A border station,” Count Hamnet answered.
Ulric arched an eyebrow. “Why? Those snoops are nothing but nuisances. And, if you remember the way we left, they’re liable to have orders to arrest us on sight.”
“Let them try,” Hamnet said. “We’ve got thirty warriors and three wizards with us. If that isn’t enough to make border guards leave us alone, we’re in real trouble. And when we find a station, we’ll find a road leading south from it.”
“Mm, there is that,” Ulric admitted. He looked along the edge of the forest, too. “It would be easy in the wintertime.”
“So it would,” Hamnet Thyssen said. During the winter, the border guards kept big fires blazing to stay warm. A column of smoke pointed the way to each post. At this season of the year, though, the men didn’t need to worry about freezing. Hamnet shrugged. “I don’t see one, but our wizards can tell us which way to go to find one close by. They’d better be able to, anyhow.”
Audun Gilli had a bit of lodestone on a string that he used for finding directions. The spell wasn’t so accurate up in the far north as it was in the Empire, but the wizard thought it would work here. Count Hamnet judged him likely to be right, but they didn’t need enormous precision now. Knowing whether to ride east or west would do.
“West,” Audun said after chanting and making passes and watching the way the lodestone swung.
They went west. Marcovefa tried to question Audun about his charm. Ulric Skakki translated with a martyred expression on his face. Hamnet understood that; for a non-wizard, nothing was more boring than trying to render sorcery’s technical terms from one tongue to another. He’d done it himself before Audun learned the Bizogot tongue. Now he wasn’t sorry to see Audun talking with Marcovefa and not with Liv.
They reached the border post in a couple of hours; the stations were scattered thinly across the frontier between civilization and barbarism. This one looked like all the others Hamnet Thyssen had seen: a wooden hut held by a handful of Raumsdalian soldiers who didn’t have the clout to get posted anywhere else. The Raumsdalians seemed horrified to see such a large party approaching them.
“What you do?” one of them shouted, using the Bizogot language badly but understandably. “No war here!”
“No, no war here yet,” Hamnet answered in Raumsdalian. “But how long will it be? Have you heard of the
