Breath of God

XI

We’ve stayed upin the north too long,” Hamnet Thyssen said as the Bizogots and Raumsdalians and Marcovefa approached the Snowshoe Hares’ encampment.

“Well, God knows I’m not about to argue with you, but why do you say so?” Ulric Skakki asked.

Count Hamnet pointed to the gaggle of tents made from mammoth and musk-ox hides. “Because that’s starting to look like civilization to me.”

“Oh, my dear fellow! Are you well?” Ulric grabbed his arm and made as if to take his pulse. Swearing and laughing at the same time, Hamnet jerked free. Not a bit abashed, Ulric went on, “Much as I hate to admit it, I feel the same way. And if that’s not a judgment on both of us, what would you call it?”

“It can’t really be civilization, though, and I’ll tell you why not,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki made an inquiring noise. Hamnet explained: “Euric may want to listen to us, and Sigvat sure didn’t.”

“There is that,” the adventurer agreed. “Sigvat turned out to be one of the best arguments in favor of barbarian invasion anyone ever saw, didn’t he?”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that, but. . yes,” Hamnet said.

Fierce Bizogot dogs – some of them, by their looks, at least half dire wolf – ran out of the encampment towards the newcomers, barking and snarling. Buccelin and Gunthar shouted at them, which slowed them down but didn’t stop them. When Hamnet and Ulric and several of Trasamund’s Bizogots drew their swords, the dogs did stop – they knew that meant danger. Audun Gilli looked disappointed. He had a spell that made him seem like what God would have been if God were Dog instead, one that terrified even the fiercest beasts. Now he wouldn’t get to use it.

Marcovefa eyed the big dogs and their big teeth. She said something in her language. “What’s that?” Hamnet asked Ulric.

“She says they really are foxes the size of men,” Ulric answered. “One more thing we told her that she didn’t believe.”

“Tell her these are tamed, like the horses. Tell her the real dire wolves are bigger and fiercer,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki did. Marcovefa raised an eyebrow. She said something else. “Well?” Count Hamnet asked.

“She says these will do,” Ulric reported.

“I think so, too,” Hamnet said. He frowned a moment later. He had the feeling you can sometimes get when someone is staring at you from behind – not quite sorcery, but the next thing to it. He also had the feeling he knew who it would be, and he was right. When he turned, not quite so casually as he would have liked, he caught Liv’s eye on him. It was nothing! He didn’t say it, for it was too obviously true to need saying. She eyed him even so.

Had he eyed her and Audun the same way for as little reason? He didn’t shake his head, since Liv was still watching him, but that was how he felt. He hadn’t been thinking anything untoward about Marcovefa. He knew that, down deep inside. He didn’t know what Liv thought about Audun Gilli.

He also didn’t know how unfair that comparison was. But he didn’t know that he didn’t know, and so it did him no good.

The dogs reluctantly moved back and to the sides as the travelers advanced. Children stared at them, too: particularly at Hamnet and Ulric and Audun, who, in spite of their clothes, plainly weren’t Bizogots. Marcovefa stared at everything: the dogs, the children, the tents, the fires burning in front of them, the pots – trade goods up from the south – bubbling on top of those fires. The shaman sighed and spoke.

When Count Hamnet raised a questioning eyebrow, Ulric translated: “She’s going on again about how lucky the Bizogots are. They have big animals to get big hides for their tents. They have big bones to use. They have these big fires because of all the dung. They have those – things – to cook in. She wonders why the men of the Glacier never thought of those.”

Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine the men of the Glacier making pottery. They almost certainly didn’t have the clay they would need. They would have trouble making fires big enough and hot enough to bake the clay even if they did have it. “I didn’t even see any baskets up there, let alone pots,” he said. “I was surprised they could make rope – and what they do make is the strangest stuff I ever saw.”

“That it is,” Ulric said. “It does the job, though.” It had done the job on the descent from the top of the Glacier. No one could ask more from it than that.

Buccelin held open a tent flap. “Here is the jarl. You will show him the respect he deserves.”

“We will,” Trasamund agreed, “if he shows us the respect we deserve.”

Buccelin looked dismayed at that, but did not contradict it. Along with Trasamund, Hamnet and Ulric and Audun went into Euric’s tent. So did Liv and Marcovefa. Liv stayed as far from Marcovefa as she could. Inside the tent, especially with so many people in it, that wasn’t very far.

Butter-burning lamps and the open tent flap gave what light there was inside. The smell of the lamps warred with that of indifferently cured hides and with the smell of Euric himself. He was a big, burly man a few years younger than Hamnet. Nodding to Trasamund, he said, “Hello, Your Ferocity. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you, too, Your Ferocity.” Seeing that Euric did treat him as an equal made Trasamund preen.

“Tell me who your comrades are,” the jarl of the Snowshoe Hares said. Trasamund named them one by one. When he got to Marcovefa, Euric’s eyebrows leaped upwards. “Men from the south are one thing,” the other Bizogot observed. “A woman from the north – a woman from the north and from on high – is a different story.”

“We were there,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “We had to go up there, or the Rulers would have killed us. They are another story, too, and one you need to worry about. You won’t find the men of the Glacier coming down to eat your musk oxen.”

“Or your clansmen,” Ulric Skakki added, too quietly for Euric to hear.

“We’ve heard there is trouble with the Three Tusk clan, and lately with the White Foxes, too,” Euric said.

“Worse than trouble,” Trasamund said. “The only free folk left from the Three Tusk clan are with me here. The White Foxes have also been broken.”

“So have the Red Dire Wolves, south of the Three Tusk clan’s grazing grounds,” Count Hamnet said. “The Rulers make bad enemies.”

“Do they make good friends?” Euric asked, proving himself as practical and cynical a diplomat as any Raumsdalian ever born.

Hamnet Thyssen, Ulric Skakki, and Trasamund all looked at one another.

They’d come looking for an ally, not an opportunist. Ulric had the quickest tongue among them, and he gave an answer upon which Hamnet couldn’t have hoped to improve: “Good luck, Your Ferocity.”

Euric grunted. He was neither foolish nor innocent enough to imagine that Ulric meant the words literally. “How do you know?” he asked. “Did you try?”

“We spent a good bit of time talking with them when we went through the Gap last summer,” Hamnet said. “As far as they’re concerned, anyone who isn’t of their folk is less than human. They call other people herds. It’s hard to make friends with somebody who thinks he can drive you or shear you or slaughter you whenever he wants.”

The Snowshoe Hares’ jarl grunted again. “Well, you may be right,” he said – hardly a ringing endorsement. “But then, you don’t seem to have had much luck fighting them, either.”

“They’re not easy, by God!” Trasamund burst out. “They ride mammoths, and – ”

“I’d heard that,” Euric broke in. “I didn’t know whether to believe it.”

“It’s true.” All the Bizogots and Raumsdalians who’d met the Rulers spoke together in a mournful chorus.

Euric didn’t seem to know whether to be appalled or amused. He finally just nodded. “All right. I believe it now.”

“And their magic is stronger than anything we use,” Liv added. “They can do things we can’t, and they hurt us when they do. They’ve won battles because of it.”

Marcovefa said something. Euric stared at her in surprise. Her speech sounded as if it might belong to the Bizogot language, but when you tried to understand it you couldn’t. “What’s that?” the jarl asked.

As usual, Ulric Skakki translated: “She says the Rulers’ wizards aren’t so strong as Liv makes them out to be. I should point out that she’s never seen them, let alone tried to match her power against theirs.”

“Fat lot she knows about it, then,” Euric said scornfully.

Scorning Marcovefa was not a good idea. Had Euric asked him, Hamnet Thyssen would have said as much. The shaman from the mountain refuge atop the Glacier murmured more incomprehensibilities to herself.

Euric started to say something else. Instead, looking much more surprised than he had a moment earlier, he developed a sudden and apparently uncontrollable impulse to stand on his head. Then he whistled like a longspur. Then he yipped like a fox. Then he croaked like a raven. Marcovefa didn’t know much about horses or musk oxen or mammoths, or the jarl probably would have impersonated them, too.

“Tell her that’s enough,” Hamnet whispered to Ulric. “We want him to respect us, not hate us.”

“Right. I hope she listens to me.” Ulric spoke to Marcovefa. She shook her head. He spoke again, this time with a definite pleading note in his voice. She sniffed, but at last she nodded and murmured to herself once more.

Euric collapsed in a heap. He needed a moment to sit up straight, and another moment to regain his aplomb. When he did, he proceeded to prove himself no fool, for he inclined his head to Marcovefa and said, “I cry pardon, wise woman.”

She acknowledged him with another sniff, this one quite regal. Hamnet understood what she said next. Since Euric probably wouldn’t, Ulric Skakki translated: “And well you might.”

“What do you people want from the Snowshoe Hares?” Euric asked, this time with the air of someone who might think about giving it. Getting turned upside down – literally – might do that to a man.

Trasamund took advantage of the edge they’d gained: “Food to keep us going, and horses to let us move as fast as the Rulers.”

“I can give you meat and suet and berries. We’ve had a good year with such things,” Euric said. “But horses for so many?” He shook his head, even though he sent Marcovefa an apprehensive look while he did it. “I cry your pardon, too, Your Ferocity, but we haven’t got so many beasts to spare.” He might have – would have – said no before, but he said it much more politely now.

“How many can you give us?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. “If we can get some from you, maybe the next clan farther south will give us more.”

“The Rock Ptarmigans?” Euric didn’t quite laugh in his face, but he came close. “Well, maybe they will, since your shamans are so strong. But most of the time you can’t pry a dried musk-ox turd out of them, let alone anything worth having.”

In Raumsdalian, Ulric said, “I wonder what the Rock Ptarmigans have to say about the Snowshoe Hares.”

“Nothing good, I’m sure,” Euric said in the same language, “but they’re only the Rock Ptarmigans, so what do they know?”

Hamnet Thyssen had rarely seen Ulric abashed, but he did now. “You caught me by surprise there, Your Ferocity,” the adventurer admitted.

“That will teach you to talk behind somebody’s back in front of his face,” Euric said. Then he swung back towards Count Hamnet. “How many horses can we spare? A dozen, at the most.” He looked horrified as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Plainly, he’d wanted to name some smaller number. Just as plainly, he hadn’t been able to.

Marcovefa looked pleased and innocent at the same time. Did some small spell of hers make the Snowshoe Hares’ jarl tell the truth regardless of what he wanted? Hamnet wouldn’t have been surprised.

By Euric’s sour expression, neither would he. On his own, he probably would have said four and haggled up to eight or so. “Well, I will not make myself out to be a liar,” he said now. “You may take them. But when times come right again, you will pay the clan for the use you got of them.”

“Agreed,” Count Hamnet and Trasamund said in the same breath. And Marcovefa nodded. She might not speak the usual Bizogot language, but sometimes she understood it even so.

When Euric clasped hands with the Raumsdalian noble and his fellow jarl to seal the bargain, he also held out his big, square hand to the shaman from atop the Glacier. That struck Hamnet as only fair; without her, they wouldn’t have had a bargain. They certainly wouldn’t have had the one they had. More than a little relief in his voice, Euric said, “And now – we feast.”

Bizogots could usually out-eat Raumsdalians, not least because the mammoth-herders went hungry more often. When Marcovefa got a chance to show what she could do, her appetite amazed even the Bizogots. “I’ve seen a man twice her size who couldn’t put away that much,” Euric said admiringly.

“You may have hard times here, Your Ferocity, but I promise you that it’s worse up on top of the Glacier,” Count Hamnet said. “No horses or musk oxen or mammoths, just hares and voles and little animals halfway between called pikas. When Marcovefa’s folk get hungry, they get hungry.”

“I suppose so,” the Snowshoe Hares’ jarl said. He no longer seemed to doubt that the shaman did come from the top of the Glacier. Thoughtfully, he added, “I’m surprised they don’t start eating each other when times get tough.”

Hamnet Thyssen decided it might be just as well to pretend he didn’t hear that. He counted himself lucky that Euric left it there.

Someone passed him a skin of smetyn. Next to wine or even beer, fermented milk was no great delight, but he was glad to drink something besides water. And, even if the Bizogots’ brew was thin and sour, pouring down enough of it would let him forget his troubles for a while.

Trasamund started drinking as if he intended to forget about his troubles for a month. When Marcovefa tasted the smetyn, she looked puzzled. She asked a question of Ulric Skakki. “What does she say? Does she like it?” Euric asked.

“She asks, what is it you drink besides water?” Ulric said.

That set Trasamund laughing. He’d already downed enough to let almost anything set him laughing. “What do we drink besides water?” he echoed. “Anything we can, by God! Anything we can.”

“Why?” Marcovefa asked. Hamnet Thyssen understood her on his own; the question was almost identical to the Bizogot phrase, Because of what?

“Tell her she’ll find out after she drinks for a while.” Trasamund laughed some more, this time in anticipation.

Ulric Skakki put that into Marcovefa’s tongue. She nodded as if accepting a challenge and began to drink as seriously as she’d eaten. Before long, her eyes grew bright, her smile went slack, and she swayed even though she was sitting down.

“They don’t have smetyn on top of the Glacier?” Euric asked, his voice dry.

“We didn’t see any or hear of any,” Hamnet answered. “Would you want to try to milk a rabbit or a vole?”

“Well, no,” the jarl said with a wry smile.

Marcovefa said something else. “She wants to know why her head is spinning,” Ulric said. “She says she hasn’t eaten any shaman’s mushrooms, but she’s all dizzy anyway.”

Liv looked interested when she heard that. “They have magic mushrooms up on that rock, do they?” she said. “I can’t say I’m very surprised. Mushrooms grow almost everywhere.”

“She’s talked about them before,” Count Hamnet said.

“I didn’t notice.” Liv’s voice was chilly.

“Tell her people down here use smetyn and things like it instead of mushrooms most of the time,” Audun Gilli said.

Ulric Skakki did. Marcovefa spoke in return. “She says this isn’t as good. She doesn’t see all the colors she would with mushrooms, and she doesn’t feel as if the sky were about to break.” Hamnet didn’t know what that meant; by Liv’s nod, she evidently did. Marcovefa added something else. “She says this isn’t bad, mind you – just not as good.”

“In the morning, she’ll feel like her head’s about to break,” Audun Gilli said. “And so will Trasamund.”

“Yes, but Trasamund will know why,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “For Marcovefa, it’ll be a big surprise, and not one she likes very much.”

“Everything that happens to Marcovefa down here is a surprise,” Ulric Skakki said. “Some of the surprises, she’ll like. Others? Her first hangover? Well, maybe not.”

Some of the Snowshoe Hares began pairing off. That was another thing that happened at Bizogot feasts. Euric found women for Trasamund and the Bizogots who accompanied him, and one for Audun Gilli as well. They weren’t all beauties, but Hamnet didn’t think any of the Bizogots would have to close his eyes to lie down with one of them.

Then Euric surprised him. The jarl inclined his head to Marcovefa and said, “If you feel like it. ..”

Yes, the shaman from atop the Glacier sometimes understood what people meant without understanding what they said. She also surprised Count Hamnet – she smiled and nodded and, none too steadily, got to her feet and went back into Euric’s tent with him.

“Well, well,” Ulric said, a slightly bemused grin crossing his foxy face. “That ought to be interesting.”

Arnora set a hand on his shoulder and shook him. “What about us?” she said with drunken intensity. “Don’t you want to be intereshting – interesting – too?”

“My reputation would never be the same if I said no,” the adventurer replied. “I aim to please, and God forbid I should fail in my aim.” He rose, too, more smoothly than Marcovefa had done, and went off into the deepening twilight with his scar-faced lady friend.

That didn’t quite leave Hamnet and Liv all alone, but not many people were close by, and none of them paid any attention to the Raumsdalian noble and the Bizogot shaman. “Well?” Liv said, an odd note of challenge in her voice. “Shall we?”

“I’m with Ulric,” Hamnet replied. “I aim to please, too.”

They went into one of the tents and slid under a mammoth-hide blanket. Bizogots lived in one another’s pockets, especially during the long, hard northern winters, and needed less in the way of privacy than Raumsdalians did. They were better at looking the other way and pretending not to hear, too. By now, Hamnet had spent enough time among them to worry less about who might be watching and listening than he would have down in Nidaros.

All the same, he wasn’t sure how well he would respond after everything he’d eaten and drunk. Making love with a full belly took more effort nowadays than it had when he was younger. And his quarrels with Liv didn’t help, either.

But he succeeded. By the way she responded, he was better than good enough tonight. “You do still care,” she murmured as they lay in each other’s arms afterwards, their hearts slowing towards calm.

“I’ve always cared,” he answered.

“Too much, maybe.” Liv had said that before.

Hamnet Thyssen frowned. “How can a man care too much about a woman?”

“Easy enough,” Liv said. “If you care so much, if you worry so much, that you drive her away instead of pulling her towards you, isn’t that too much?”

“Are you saying I do that?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” she replied, which was just polite enough to hold off a row. “But sometimes not, too.” She caressed him. “Not is better.”

“Better for you, maybe,” he muttered.

He was lucky: she didn’t hear him. She sprawled across him, warm and soft and, for the moment, happy. He found himself yawning. He didn’t usually fall asleep right after making love, but he didn’t usually eat and drink as much as he had beforehand, either. His eyes slid shut. He and Liv both started to snore about the same time.

Liv woke Hamnet the next morning by poking him in the ribs. His automatic response was to grab for his sword. Then he discovered he wasn’t wearing it – or anything else. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered. “But it’s noisy out there, and it doesn’t sound like good noise. We’d better find out.”

Hamnet listened and found himself nodding. No, the racket out there didn’t sound happy. If that wordless keening wasn’t a woman in mourning, then it was a woman desperately ill. The groaning man also sounded none too healthy.

Despite the noise, some of the Bizogots in the tent stayed asleep. Others, like him and Liv, were waking up. Down in the Empire, Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to get out from under the blanket and dress with so little privacy. He especially wouldn’t have wanted Liv to put herself on display like that. Bizogot customs were different, though. He didn’t worry about it… much.

The bright sunlight hurt his eyes and made his head ache. Yes, he’d poured down too much smetyn the night before. But he wasn’t nearly so bad off as Trasamund and Marcovefa. Their moans and groans had fooled Liv and him into thinking some real disaster had befallen the Snowshoe Hares.

Trasamund found a skin of water and poured it over his head. He came out blowing and snorting like a grampus. Then he found a skin of smetyn. That he applied internally. “I’ll be better in a while,” he said. “The hair of the dire wolf that bit me.”

Marcovefa said something that sounded pitiful. Hamnet Thyssen looked around for Ulric Skakki and didn’t see him. Maybe the adventurer figured out what the commotion was about. Or maybe he was just an uncommonly sound sleeper. Without Ulric around, Hamnet had to work out for himself what Marcovefa meant. He pointed to a skin of water and mimed pouring it over her. She looked at him through bloodshot eyes, then nodded.

She spluttered and coughed, then gasped out something Hamnet only half followed. He thought it meant, This is supposed to make me feel better?

“Here.” Trasamund thrust a skin of smetyn at her and showed her she was supposed to drink from it.

She recoiled in horror, water dripping from her hair and her chin and the end of her nose. The way she held out her hands as she spoke told Hamnet what she had to mean – that she didn’t want to get near smetyn ever again.

“Curse it, Thyssen, tell her it’ll make her feel better, not worse,” Trasamund said.

“I’ll try,” Count Hamnet told him. And he did, with the regular Bizogot speech and the few words of Marcovefa’s dialect he thought he knew and a lot of gestures. She didn’t want to believe him, for which he could hardly blame her. If it had poisoned her once, why wouldn’t it poison her again?

He tried to show her that a little would help but a lot would make things worse. At last, warily, she drank. It wouldn’t be a miracle cure; Hamnet knew that from somber experience. But chances were it would do her some good.

Euric looked more sympathetic than Count Hamnet had thought he would. He even kissed Marcovefa on the cheek. She must have pleased him when they went back into his tent together. What would she be like under a blanket? That was probably not the kind of question Liv wanted him asking himself.

Even if Marcovefa had pleased the jarl of the Snowshoe Hares, Euric did his best to wiggle out of the bargain he’d made with her the day before. He didn’t refuse to turn over a dozen horses. He did do his best to give the refugees the dozen worst the clan owned. A couple of them were visibly on their last legs. None of the ones he wanted to turn over looked capable of anything more than a lazy canter.

A few swigs of smetyn had made Marcovefa more nearly reconciled to staying alive. Ulric took her aside and murmured in her ear. When she pointed at Euric, he blanched. She spoke. Ulric translated: “She says not to be niggardly. If you can’t give with both hands, at least give with one.”

“But – ” Euric began. Then he swallowed whatever else he might have been about to say. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble figuring out why. After what he and Marcovefa had done the night before, she was able to work the most intimate kind of magic against him. He didn’t know she would, but he didn’t know she wouldn’t, either. Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to take that chance himself.

Then he glanced over to Liv – glanced more nervously than he wished he would have. Whatever Marcovefa could do to Euric, Liv could do to him . . . if she decided she wanted to. When you fell in love with, or even made love with, a shaman, you took chances you didn’t with an ordinary woman.

Euric did give with one hand. He still passed on some of his clan’s horrible screws, but he also gave away some horses that didn’t look as if a strong breeze would blow them over. He sighed and moaned and mourned about every one of them, so much so that Hamnet wondered if he was laying it on too thick. But Hamnet knew more than a little about horses himself, and the replacements weren’t bad animals. Euric was just unhappy he had to give them up.

With half the Bizogots and Raumsdalians mounted but the rest still on foot, the band of refugees moved no faster than it had before. If the clan south of the Snowshoe Hares had enough horses to let everybody here ride, things would pick up. In the meantime, the nags didn’t slow the travelers down.

Liv and Arnora and Marcovefa rode most of the time. The men took turns on the other horses. Hamnet didn’t mind walking. He’d got used to it. He did begrudge their sorry pace, though. “Who knows what the Rulers are doing farther east?” he said.

“Come on – you know and I know and the rest of us know,” Ulric Skakki said. “They’re chewing up every Bizogot clan that gets in their way.”

Hamnet Thyssen winced, not because he didn’t find that likely but because he did. He wished Ulric hadn’t been so blunt. “You don’t think we’ll be able to pull the Bizogots together to fight them, do you?” he said.

“Well, it gets harder when they’re going south faster than we are,” Ulric replied – another painful truth.

“We may have to ride south and warn the Empire,” Hamnet said. “When we get the horses to do it, I mean – and if it’s not too late by then.”

“Yes. If.” Ulric was nothing if not discouraging. But then, with the way things were, there was too much to be discouraged about.

They got no help from the Rock Ptarmigans. Well before they found the clan’s encampment, Hamnet Thyssen began to fear that might be so. His first moment of worry came when the travelers approached a herd of mammoths.

The beasts awed Marcovefa. “The Rulers ride these, you say?” she asked, and Hamnet had no trouble following her.

“That’s right,” Ulric Skakki answered.

“Well, I can see why,” Marcovefa said. Then she added something Hamnet couldn’t follow. Ulric translated: “She wants to know if there are any beasts bigger than these.”

“Some of the forest mastodons get a little bigger, I think, but not much,” Hamnet said. Ulric nodded. As he relayed that, Count Hamnet went on, “But whales are supposed to be a lot bigger than any mammoths or mastodons, aren’t they?”

Getting the idea of whales across to Marcovefa wasn’t easy. Getting the idea of the sea across to her was even harder. She understood what streams and ponds were. But a pond full of salt water, bigger than the Glacier and deeper than a mountain was tall, strained her credulity.

Again, she spoke too fast for Count Hamnet to keep up with her. “She says we’re joking with her. She says that just because the mammoths and the musk oxen turned out to be true, now we think she’ll believe anything,” Ulric reported.

Hamnet Thyssen raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “By God, it’s the truth,” he said. Marcovefa didn’t care much for God, either, and remained unconvinced.

“Nobody’s riding out to see who the demon we are,” Trasamund said. “That’s not how things ought to work.”

He was right. Bizogots were as territorial as bad-tempered dogs. They should have spotted the strangers and come forth to challenge them, maybe to try to order them off the clan’s land. Her voice troubled, Liv said, “I don’t think there are any men with those mammoths.”

As Count Hamnet drew closer to the herd, he decided Liv was right. And that was out of the ordinary, out of the ordinary in a bad way. Hamnet had trouble imagining any innocuous reason why the Bizogots would let a herd of mammoths wander on its own. Those animals meant food and wool and hides to the clan. Knowing where they were at a given moment was no light matter.

Audun Gilli nodded. “No dogs, either.”

“More likely to see dogs around musk oxen than around mammoths,” Trasamund said. “Musk oxen pay attention to them, because dogs remind them of dire wolves. But dire wolves don’t trouble mammoths, except maybe to nip in and kill a calf once in a while, so mammoths don’t care so much about them. Still. . .”

“It’s not a good sign,” Ulric Skakki said, and the jarl of the Three Tusk clan nodded.

The mammoths didn’t seem to care much about strangers on horseback, either. The Rulers really tamed their mammoths. The Bizogots followed them, sometimes guided them, and used them, but the mammoths here below the Glacier remained their own masters in a way dogs and horses and even musk oxen didn’t.

When Trasamund’s Bizogots and the Raumsdalians with them came upon a herd of musk oxen with no riders or dogs nearby, Hamnet Thyssen began to worry in earnest. The Rock Ptarmigans would have had to have someone along to keep an eye on animals even more vital than mammoths . . . wouldn’t they?

A cow musk ox was trailing the herd. Trasamund and some of the Bizogots from his clan cut the beast away from its fellows and killed it. After the feast Count Hamnet had had with the Snowshoe Hares, he’d been groaningly certain he would never want to eat again. A couple of days of travel showed him how foolish that was. He stuffed himself full of tough, stringy, half-charred musk-ox meat, and he was glad to get it.

When morning came, Ulric Skakki pointed to the southwest. Count Hamnet didn’t need long to spot the carrion birds sliding down from the sky. “There are a lot of them,” he said. “More than there would be for a dead musk ox.”

“More than there would be for a dead mammoth, too,” Ulric said. “What do you want to bet? – that’s where the Rock Ptarmigans had their camp.”

“Keep that bet or find a fool,” Hamnet answered. “I won’t touch it.”

“If we weren’t fools, what would we be doing up here?” Ulric asked: much too good a question.

The Bizogots and Raumsdalians rode and walked towards the spot where the birds were landing. More and more birds kept coming: crows and ravens, vultures and teratorns, even owls and hawks hungry for meat that hadn’t got too high. Before the travelers saw corpses, they saw mammoth-hide tents in the distance and nodded to one another. Yes, this was where the Rock Ptarmigans had lived.

And this was where the Rock Ptarmigans had died. Owls and hawks notwithstanding, the stench of death filled the air. Corpses of Bizogots and their dogs sprawled in unlovely death among the tents. The scavengers rose in skrawking, screeching clouds as the travelers neared. Teratorns, some of them with wingspans more than twice the height of a man, had to run along the ground before they could get airborne.

“Do you see any wounds on those bodies?” Trasamund asked heavily.

“After the birds, would we?” Hamnet Thyssen returned.

“Some,” Trasamund said. “Yes, some, by God. Do you see any arrows? Do you see any broken spearshafts? Do you see any signs of battle?”

Looking around, Hamnet didn’t. Cold chills walked up his back. “What killed them, then?” he asked.

Before Trasamund could answer, Marcovefa and Liv began to keen at the same time. They looked at each other in surprise, but both kept on. Audun Gilli didn’t keen. He was on horseback, and leaned over and noisily lost the meat he’d eaten for breakfast. Spitting and coughing, he gasped out one word: “Magic.”

“Strong magic. Foul magic,” Liv added. Marcovefa said something in her own language. Ulric Skakki didn’t translate it, but Count Hamnet had no trouble guessing what it meant.

“If the Rulers can do this . . .” Trasamund didn’t go on.

Ulric did: “If they can do this, the Empire is in even more trouble than we thought it was. We need to get down there as fast as we can.”

“Bugger the Empire! What about the rest of the Bizogots?” Trasamund roared.

“What about them?” Ulric looked him in the eye. “Odds are we write them off, because they’re already lost anyhow.”

Trasamund gaped. He must not have looked for the adventurer to be so frank. Count Hamnet could have told him that was a mistake. If anyone didn’t like such forthrightness, Ulric Skakki lost no sleep about it.

“If the Empire can beat the Rulers, we’ll redeem the Bizogots,” Hamnet said. “If the Empire loses, we’re all ruined together.”

Audun Gilli pointed past the encampment that death had struck. “Aren’t those the Rock Ptarmigans’ horses?” he said.

The death that had struck men and dogs spared the horses, as it had spared mammoths and musk oxen. Count Hamnet supposed the Rulers expected to use the herd animals for themselves. They wouldn’t have got to use the horses unless they showed up soon, though, not when the beasts were tied in a line. If dire wolves didn’t find them, they would soon perish for want of water and food.

“I didn’t want to get mounts for the rest of us like this,” Trasamund muttered as he cut the animals loose one after another.

“Better us than . . . them.” Hamnet Thyssen looked east. “I wonder if they’re on the way now.”

“We can’t fight them.” Trasamund sounded as if he wanted Hamnet to tell him he was wrong.

But the Raumsdalian nodded. “I know we can’t. The best thing we can do is disappear before they get here. Chances are they’ll just think we’re a band of brigands who happened on the camp before they did.”

“Well, what else are we?” Ulric Skakki sounded proud, not ashamed.

Trasamund didn’t gape this time – he glared. However much he must have wanted to, though, he did no more than glare. Count Hamnet took that to mean he feared Ulric was right. Hamnet cut another horse free and watched it start to graze. He feared Ulric was, too.