snow. He looked away. He also rode farther away, lest the mammoth decide he and his horse stood in its way, too.
After their leader died, a few of the Rulers tried to surrender. That went against everything the iron-souled invaders were supposed to hold dear. Count Hamnet had seen it happen before even so, in the invaders’ rare defeats. The urge to live could corrode even the sternest discipline.
But the Bizogots’ lust was up, too: theirs for blood hardly less than that of the Rulers’ beasts for coupling. Hamnet and Ulric Skakki both shouted that some of the enemy should be spared. Trasamund shouted the same thing, which surprised Hamnet – was the jarl finally discovering what a good idea staying practical could be?
Much good it did him if he was. His fellow Bizogots paid no more attention to him than they did to the foreigners among them. More blood dappled the white of the frozen steppe. And then it was over: there were no more Rulers left to kill.
Even Trasamund seemed pleased. “By God, this’ll give the musk-ox buggers something to think about,” he boomed, looking around the trampled field. The iron stink of blood filled the frosty air.
“Well, so it will,” Ulric Skakki said. “And the first thing they’ll think about is how to do in the bastards who did this to them.”
That struck Hamnet Thyssen as being altogether too likely. But battle fever thrummed in his veins, too, and he said, “Let them try! As long as we’ve got Marcovefa, they don’t stand a chance.”
Ulric mimed a slingstone glancing off someone’s head. Then he mimed a slingstone catching someone between the eyes. Hamnet glared at him, not because he was being foolish but because he wasn’t. It could happen. It almost had. But it hadn’t.
“We can hurt them now,” he said. “We can hurt them badly, maybe even stop them from getting down into the Empire.”
“Hurrah!” Trasamund said sourly. “What good does that do my land? What good does that do my folk?” His wave encompassed the whole of the Bizogot country.
“If no more warriors or wizards of the Rulers can get down into Raumsdalia, maybe the Empire will be able to deal with the ones who are there now,” Count Hamnet said. “That weakens the enemy everywhere, not just in the south. It’s all one big fight, you know.”
“Ha! Easy for you to say.” Trasamund wasn’t convinced.
“Last summer, the Bizogots didn’t think it was one big fight,” Ulric Skakki reminded him. “They tried to take on the Rulers clan by clan – and look what that got them.”
Trasamund glared at him – again, not because he was wrong but because he was right. “You are an impossible pest,” the jarl growled. Ulric bowed in the saddle, as if at a compliment. That made Trasamund no happier.
Hamnet Thyssen looked around one more time, now to make sure Liv was all right. She wasn’t his anymore, but… .
There was Liv, binding up a wound on Audun Gilli s arm and chanting a healing charm over it. Catching Hamnet s eye, she nodded gravely to him. He made himself nod back. Unlike Gudrid, Liv plainly wished him no harm. That helped, but not enough.
He forced himself back to matters he could do something about. “We’ll plunder them,” he called, not that the Bizogots weren’t already tending to that. “We’ll plunder them, and we’ll slaughter their riding deer -”
“And I, by God, will ride off on one of their mammoths!” Trasamund shouted.
And, to Hamnet s amazement, he did. After Marcovefa let her spell lapse, the mammoths and deer soon calmed down. A woolly mammoth let the Bizogot jarl clamber aboard and guide it along. Trasamund whooped with joy and pride. He was a boy with a new toy – a toy that could kill him if he got the least bit careless, but he didn’t worry about that, not then.
Count Hamnet didn’t worry about it, either. For once, he didn’t worry about anything, and wondered why not. His gaze slid towards Marcovefa. She grinned back at him, then eyed an enemy corpse and reached for a knife, as if to butcher it. She was only half joking, if that much. Hamnet didn’t care. Savage or not, cannibal or not, she gave him hope. And when you had hope, what else did you need?
