Breath of God

XIX

Getting any of the soldiers fleeing from disaster in the woods to stop long enough to say exactly what had gone wrong up in the north was Hamnet’s biggest problem. The men who’d escaped wanted nothing more than to put distance between themselves and the Rulers. They didn’t want to talk: that slowed them down.

Some of them warned of mammoths. Some babbled about magic. None of that told Hamnet Thyssen anything he didn’t already know. He finally had to capture a Raumsdalian soldier as if the man belonged to an enemy army, not the one Hamnet was going to command.

“Who the demon are you? What do you think you’re doing?” the cavalry trooper demanded. He stared at the Bizogots who made up most of Hamnet’s strength. Seeing that they were northerners, he went on, “Are you in league with the devils in the woods?”

“No, you idiot,” Hamnet said. “The Rulers attacked the Bizogots before they ever got down here.”Not that I could make anybody pay attention to what was going on north of the tree line. But the trooper wouldn’t care about that. Hamnet went on, “I am Count Hamnet Thyssen. The Emperor has given me command in the north against the invaders.” He flourished his orders without unrolling them. “Now who are you? Why are you running away?”

“I won’t get in trouble?” the trooper asked warily.

“Not if you give me straight answers and stop wasting my time,” Hamnet said.

“Well, my name’s Ingolf Rokkvi,” the rider said. “I was part of Count Steinvor’s army. We heard the barbarians had done something nasty up near where the trees stop, but we didn’t know just what was going on. We figured it was Bizogots kicking up their heels like they do sometimes.”

“Oh, good,” Ulric Skakki said. “That’s the way to guarantee you win your battles – make sure your soldiers know exactly what they need to do.”

Ingolf scratched his head. “Is he joking, uh, Your Grace?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.

“I wish he were,” Hamnet said, while Ulric snorted. Waving the adventurer to silence, Count Hamnet nodded to the trooper. “Go on.”

“Well, I was trying to,” Ingolf Rokkvi said. “We rode north up the forest tracks, looking for the savages. We figured we’d give them a hiding, and they’d run like they usually do, and then we could go home.”

Trasamund and Marcomer and several other Bizogots growled at that scornful assessment of their prowess. Count Hamnet waved them to silence, too. His glare was enough to keep them from reaching for their weapons. He told Ingolf Rokkvi, “Go on,” again.

“I will, if you let me,” Ingolf said. “We were riding along, and all of a sudden the worst blizzard in the world blows up, right in the middle of the woods. You wouldn’t think something like that could happen, but it did.”

Hamnet glanced at Liv and Audun Gilli and Marcovefa. They all nodded. Liv and Audun looked worried, which meant they wouldn’t have wanted to try a spell like that – Hamnet supposed that was what it meant, anyhow. Marcovefa looked amused, which could have meant.. . anything at all. “Then what happened?” Hamnet asked Ingolf Rokkvi.

“Mammoths happened, that’s what!” Ingolf said. “By God, they did. Mammoths with soldiers on em. They were built like bricks, with big curly beards.”

“The mammoths?” Ulric Skakki asked.

“The soldiers,” Ingolf Rokkvi said reproachfully. “They speared us, they trampled us – you can’t make a horse stand against a mammoth, on account of he’s just not big enough – and they laughed while they did it.”

“What happened then?” Count Hamnet asked.

“What do you think happened?” Ingolf’s look told him he was short on brains. “We tried to get away from them. That’s what you do when you haven’t got a chance of winning, and we cursed well didn’t. There was more horrible weather in the woods, and short-faced bears and dire wolves jumping out at us like they had no business doing, and all the time it was like we heard those savages laughing at us, like they thought we were the biggest joke in the world.”

“Would you fight them again?” Hamnet asked.

Ingolf Rokkvi needed some time to think about that. “Maybe I would,” he said at last, “if I thought we had some kind of prayer of winning. A lot of the ones who weren’t on mammoths were on these funny deer, and they weren’t anything special. A regular horseman doesn’t hardly need to worry about ‘em. But the mammoths, and the magic . ..” He scowled. “That’s a pretty scary business.”

“We can beat them. By God, we can,” Hamnet said. Ingolf Rokkvi’s scowl got deeper. He didn’t believe a word of it. After what he’d been through, Hamnet had a hard time blaming him. A little desperately, the Raumsdalian nobleman went on, “We have a wizard who can match anything they do.” He pointed to Marcovefa.

Ingolf eyed her the way a man will eye a good-looking woman, not like a soldier eyeing someone who might help his cause. “Well, if you say so,” he said after a moment: he didn’t believe a word of it.

His horse looked back at him and said, “Don’t be dumber than you can help. She really can. She’s not running from them the way you are, is she?”

That wasn’t Marcovefa’s style of magic. Audun Gilli enjoyed putting words in the mouths of things that didn’t normally have mouths, or at least had no business talking. Audun looked innocent when Hamnet Thyssen glanced his way – ostentatiously innocent, as a matter of fact. Hamnet didn’t love him and never would, but for the time being decided he wasn’t sorry to have him along.

Ingolf’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “How did you do that?” he demanded of Marcovefa.

She really was innocent – of this, anyway. In her accented Raumsdalian, she said, “Is my fault if beast has more sense than you do?”

The cavalry trooper gathered himself. Hamnet had feared he might go to pieces – he’d been through a lot lately. But he didn’t. “All right. I’ll try,” he said. “If I end up dead … I reckon the lot of you will be there beside me. Have I got that right?”

“Yes,” Hamnet said simply. “The next town ahead is Kjelvik, isn’t it? Does it have a decent garrison?”

“Not too bad,” Ingolf answered. “I don’t know whether they’ll want to fight or bug out, though.”

“We’ll see,” Hamnet Thyssen said. They all rode north.

They came across more soldiers fleeing the Rulers before they got into Kjelvik. Some of them they persuaded to turn around and resume the fight. Others, seeing a body of armed men coming their way from out of the south, rode around them no matter how far out of their way that took them. Hamnet didn’t try to round up those soldiers; they were too far gone to be of much use.

Kjelvik sat on a low hill. There were no tall hills or steep slopes in the northern part of the Empire. The Glacier had lain here too recently, and had ground such things down under its immense weight. As Count Hamnet neared the top of the hill, he could look ahead and see the dark smudge of the north woods out on the horizon. He was getting close. So were the Rulers.

He got a less than overwhelming reception from the gate guards. “Who the blazes are you, and why are you coming the wrong way?” a sergeant asked.

Instead of answering with words, Count Hamnet displayed Sigvat’s commission, all adorned with seals and gorgeous with ornate calligraphy. “What’s it say, Sergeant?” one of the guards asked. “I can’t read for beans.”

“What? You think I can?” the underofficer said. “I went to work when I was a brat, same as most people. I didn’t have the time to waste on my letters.”

“This is an order from His Majesty, the Emperor,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “It gives me command in the north against the new invasion of the barbarians.”

“Right. And rain makes apple-sauce,” the sergeant jeered. “Nobody in his right mind’d want to go fight these savages. They ride mammoths, I hear. Ride ‘em – would you believe it?” Ingolf Rokkvi shuddered – he believed it, all right.

And so did Count Hamnet, who had also seen it with his own eyes. He growled, “Go get an officer – someone who actually can read. He’ll tell you whether I’m lying or not, by God.”

Grudgingly, the sergeant sent off one of his guards. In due course, the man returned with a young officer. “I am Osvif Grisi,” he said. “What do you want, stranger? What do you need?”

“I want to drive the barbarians out of the Empire. I need Kjelvik’s garrison to help me do it,” Hamnet answered. Osvif gaped. Hamnet displayed his commission again.

“Is he a fraud, sir?” the sergeant asked. “If he is, we’ll give him what-for like he wouldn’t believe.”

Osvif Grisi stared at the impressive parchment. He reached Sigvat’s peremptory commands, his lips moving. Count Hamnet didn’t think the less of him for that; he read the same way himself, as did most people who could read at all. The more Osvif read, the wider his mouth fell open. By the time he finished, his thinly bearded chin was hanging on his chest.

“Well?” Hamnet said.

The youngster’s jaw shut with an audible click. He stiffened to a parade-ground attention. “Give me whatever orders you think right, Your, uh, Grace,” he said. “I am at your service in all ways, as is Kjelvik.”

“He’s real?” Now the sergeant’s jaw dropped.

“He’s real, all right,” Osvif said grimly. “If he told me to hang you from a pole off the battlements, you’d be hanging there now.” The sergeant gaped. Osvif Grisi turned back to Hamnet. “What do you want from Kjelvik, sir?”

“Every soldier you can put on a horse,” Hamnet Thyssen answered. “We’re going to have to scrape together some kind of army to fight the Rulers, you know.”

“I suppose so, yes.” The young officer licked his lips. “I think you’d better talk to the town’s commandant.”

“Yes, I think so, too,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “I’ve been trying to do that, and people keep getting in my way.” He eyed the sergeant, who did his best to hide in plain sight. Maybe he imagined himself kicking his life away up on the battlements. Hamnet wouldn’t have ordered him hanged, but he didn’t have to know that. The noble nodded to Osvif. “Take me to him.”

Kjelvik’s garrison wasn’t big enough to hold the walls for long against a determined foe. The keep wasn’t strong enough to keep out an invader once he’d broken into the city. So Hamnet s professional eye told him, anyhow. The guards outside the keep’s portcullis stared at the Bizogots behind him.

“I thought some different barbarians were loose in the north,” one of them said to his friend.

“Me, too. Shows what we know,” the other guard said. Then he noticed Osvif with Hamnet’s party. “What’s going on, sir?”

“This noble” – Osvif pointed to Hamnet – ”is in charge of all defenses in the north, by His Majesty’s command.” That made all the guards spring to attention. Osvif went on, “I am taking him to Baron Runolf.”

“Is that Runolf Skallagrim?” Hamnet asked. He hoped so – if the local commander was a man he knew, things would go smoother.

And Osvif nodded. “That’s right. You’ve met him?”

“Awhile ago, but yes,” Hamnet replied.

Runolf Skallagrim was about his own age, a little heavier, a little softer – a little happier-looking, if you wanted to get right down to it. “By God,” he said when Osvif led Count Hamnet into his chamber. “Look what the hound dragged in!” As he rose to clasp Hamnet s hand, he went on, “What the demon are you doing here? Last I heard, you’d got jugged.”

“That’s old news now.” Hamnet Thyssen displayed his commission.

Runolf looked it over. In due course, he nodded. “Well, that’s better than sitting in a dungeon, I must say.”

“Is it?” Hamnet asked bleakly. “In the dungeon, I don’t have to worry about a mammoth stepping on my head.”

“There is that,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “So what do you want from me?”

“As many men as you’ve got, as many fugitives from the armies that have already lost to the Rulers as you can round up, and enough food for them to take north.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Runolf said.

“If you’ve got three times that many men in your pocket, I’ll gladly take em,” Hamnet said. “Oh – any wizards in town? We need them, too.”

“A supply train’ll be hard enough to come by.”

That was much too likely to be true. Kjelvik wasn’t a town from which anyone in the Empire had expected an army to sortie. If Raumsdalia needed to move against invaders from a town this far south, they’d penetrated farther and done worse than anybody would have guessed possible. Well, so they had. “Do what you can, Runolf, please,” Count Hamnet said. “I’ve met these Rulers before. They come from beyond the Glacier, and they’re more trouble than you can imagine.”

“Beyond the Glacier?” The garrison commander looked and sounded intrigued. “So those stories about a way melting through don’t just come from merchants off the Bizogot steppe getting drunk and telling tales in taverns, eh?”

“No, they’re true, all right. I’ve been up there. It’s a different world. We haven’t had anything to do with it since the Glacier walled it off, God only knows how many thousand years ago. But we do now.”

Runolf Skallagrim grunted. “I will do what I can, Thyssen. And I think the first thing I’ll do is set my men to rounding up the soldiers who’ve come south out of the woods. My bet is, we’ll need a show of force before a lot of those buggers’ll want to remember why the Emperor pays them.”

“My bet is, you’re right,” Count Hamnet said. “Fair enough. Do that first. After they comb them out of the fields and the taprooms and the whorehouses, we’ll see what we’ve got. Don’t waste time on it, though. The way it looks to me is, we’ve wasted all the time we can afford, or maybe a little more than that.”

The soldiers lined up in front of Hamnet Thyssen and Baron Runolf were a sorry-looking lot. Some of them were obviously hung over. Some were still drunk. Several were wounded, though none seemed seriously hurt – a man with a bad wound wouldn’t have been able to come so far so fast. They all glared at him. They knew he wanted them to fight the Rulers again, and they were anything but keen on the idea.

Most of them still had swords. If he hadn’t had the Bizogots and some of Runolf’s archers backing him, he wouldn’t have been surprised if they tried to mob him and mutiny. His guess was that bad odds were the only thing holding them back.

“So you’ve met the mammoth-riders,” he said.

“What do you know about it, you blue-blooded son of a whore?” one of the soldiers said. “Somebody told you they could do that, did he? Do you know what it means, though? Not bloody likely, not if you’re coming up from Nidaros.”

“I fought them half a dozen times, up on the Bizogot plains,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He waved back towards Trasamund and the other big blonds. “So did they.”

The soldier blinked and shut up. Another one found a bitter question: “Why the demon didn’t you whip them? Then they wouldn’t have set on us.”

“We didn’t because we couldn’t.” As usual, Hamnet used the truth, however unpalatable it was.

“How come you think you’ll do any better this time, then, curse you?” the second soldier demanded.

“Because this time we have a wizard who can beat anything the Rulers throw at her.” Count Hamnet waved to Marcovefa. She took a step forward and nodded to the soldiers as if they were first-rate fighting men, not the flotsam and jetsam of a campaign gone wrong.

“Another Bizogot twat – huzzah,” the second soldier said, slathering on his scorn with a trowel.

Maybe he thought Marcovefa didn’t speak his language. Maybe he just didn’t care. If he didn’t, he made a bad mistake. As Gudrid could have told him, angering a wizard you couldn’t kill on the instant was commonly a mistake.

It was here. Marcovefa murmured to herself. The soldier developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to disrobe. Once he was naked in front of his staring comrades, he acted like a jackass – literally. He brayed, got down on all fours, and started pulling scraps of dead grass up from between cobbles with his teeth. He also relieved himself like an animal, calmly and without shame.

Marcovefa murmured again. The soldier came back to himself – and cried out in horror as he realized what he’d done. Marcovefa suffered him to dress and return to the ranks with no further afflictions.

“Any other donkeys here?” Hamnet Thyssen inquired.

Nobody said anything. The unhappy survivors of one encounter with the Rulers looked apprehensively from him to Marcovefa and back again. Something like a sigh rippled through their ragged ranks.

Count Hamnet understood the sigh all too well. His nod was precisely calibrated between scorn and sympathy. “That’s right,” he said. “You can turn around and have another go at the barbarians – this time with a real chance of winning – or you can face us now. Which one looks like a better bet?”

Even after Marcovefa’s magic, the question didn’t seem to have the quick and obvious answer he’d hoped for. He knew what that meant: the Rulers had beaten the Raumsdalian army even worse than he’d feared. They’d made the men afraid of them, sure another beating lay around the corner.

But they also looked at the soldier who’d done such a humiliating impression of an ass. If that could happen to him, what was liable to happen to them if they tried to tell Hamnet no?

“We’ll go, I guess,” said a man with the look of a sergeant. “If the savages kill us, at least it’s over with in a hurry.” Most of the men assembled with him nodded; he’d summed up what they were thinking.

“We fought them again and again on the Bizogot steppe,” Hamnet said again. “We lost more than we won – I won’t tell you anything different, because I can’t. But you can beat them. By God, you can! And we’ll do it.”

He didn’t expect them to break into frantic cheers. A good thing, too, because they didn’t – that kind of thing happened only in bad romances. A few of them looked thoughtful, which was about as much as he’d hoped for.

He turned to Runolf Skallagrim. “What do you think?”

“They’ll march. They’ll fight.. . some,” the commander of Kjelvik replied. “If they win the first time out, they’ll fight harder after that. If they lose the first time, they’ll run away so fast, their shadows won’t keep up with em.”

“Heh.” Hamnet hadn’t remembered that Runolf had such a gift for pungent truth. Then he added the most he could: “We’re better off with ‘em than without em.”

“You hope,” Runolf said.

“That’s right.” Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I hope.”

He’d come into Kjelvik with a troop of Bizogots. He rode out of it with an army of Raumsdalians. It wasn’t exactly the army he would have wanted, not when it was made up of garrison troops and men who’d already run away from the Rulers once. But it was an army, and it could fight. It could. Whether it would . ..

“We’re going in the right direction,” he told Ulric Skakki. “We’re moving towards the enemy.”

“So we are,” the adventurer said. “If only we had to move father before we bumped into those bastards.”

Runolf Skallagrim said, “What I don’t understand is, why didn’t the Emperor do something about these Rulers sooner?” He seemed glad to be out of Kjelvik. He kept reaching for his sword and pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, as if ready to go into battle then and there. If all the soldiers who followed were as eager as the baron, the Rulers really might have something to worry about.

“You’d have to ask His Majesty about that,” Hamnet replied. “I really couldn’t tell you.” He didn’t want to shout that Sigvat was a purblind idiot, even if that explanation made more sense than any other.

“Well, it’s too bad any which way,” Runolf said.

Count Hamnet nodded – that too was an understatement. The sky was gray and lowering, with clouds that seemed almost close enough to the ground to let him reach up and touch them. Snow swirled through the air – not a lot, but enough to compress the horizon to not much farther than bowshot. The wind blew out of the north. It didn’t have the howl of the true Breath of God, but it was no gentle zephyr, either. The season felt like what it was: autumn well north of Nidaros, heading towards winter.

Sheep and cattle huddled in the fields, scraping up what fodder they could from under the snow. Army outriders scooped them up as they came across them. Outraged herders howled protests. Hamnet paid them for the animals the army took. That made them less angry, but didn’t end all their rage.

Scowling down at the silver in his mittened palm, one shepherd snarled,

“Why shouldn’t we pull for the stinking barbarians, when the soldiers who’re supposed to be protecting us pull a stunt like this?” By the way he said it, Count Hamnet might have been paying him for the corpses of his family.

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Hamnet answered. “Because the Rulers, if they come this far, will take your sheep, they won’t give you even a copper, and they’ll cut your throat if you complain, or maybe just if they spot you. That’s why.”

“You say so, anyhow,” the shepherd growled, calling the noble a liar without quite using the word.

“Yes, by God, I do say so,” Hamnet replied. “I’ve fought them before, which is more than you have. You don’t know anything about them.”

“I sure don’t,” the shepherd said. “But I know more than I want to about the likes of you.” He spat in the snow at Hamnet Thyssen’s feet and stumped off, his oversized Bizogot-style felt boots leaving equally oversized footprints behind him.

“Nice to know you’ve charmed the natives, isn’t it?” Ulric Skakki remarked.

“We need the meat,” Hamnet said. “He really doesn’t know how lucky he is.”

“And it’s our job to make sure he doesn’t find out, too.” Ulric winked. “Aren’t we lucky?”

“Speak for yourself,” Count Hamnet said, which only made Ulric laugh. Annoyed, Hamnet went on, “If I were really lucky – ”

“You wouldn’t have me bothering you,” the adventurer put in.

Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “Well, that, too, but it isn’t what I was going to say. I was going to say, if I were really lucky, I’d have an honest-to-God army with me, not a garrison that doesn’t know how to fight and a bunch of odds and sods who’ve already run away once and don’t want to fight.”

“I don’t follow that at all,” Marcovefa said. “Say in the Bizogot language, please.”

“Why not?” Hamnet translated his own words.

The shaman from atop the Glacier rode up alongside him and kissed him on the cheek. “Sometimes you get what you wish for,” she said, as if she were personally responsible for arranging it. No matter how much Hamnet looked around, though, he saw only the men he’d mustered in Kjelvik. They were better than nothing – but, as far as he was concerned, not nearly enough better.

On he rode. They might not have been enough better than nothing, but they were what he had. The storm got stronger. Now the wind did start to feel like the Breath of God. The snow swirled thicker. Just staying on the road towards the northern woods was anything but easy.

Another road, a broader highway, came up from the southeast to join the one Hamnet and his men were on, which ran almost straight north. If Runolf Skallagrim hadn’t warned Count Hamnet the crossroads was coming up, he never would have known it. “Which road do we take?” Runolf asked.

Hamnet wanted to laugh, or maybe to cry. “You’d do better to ask some of the men who came south,” he answered. “They have a better notion where the Rulers are than I do. And they have a much better notion where the Rulers are than Sigvat does, not that that’s saying much.”

Runolf’s coughs sent steam rising from his lips and nostrils. They also suggested that Count Hamnet had said quite enough, or maybe too much.

Before Runolf could ask anything of the soldiers, Hamnet heard hoofbeats – lots of them – off to the right. He would have caught them sooner if the falling snow hadn’t muffled them. He peered in that direction, but the snowflakes dancing on the north wind kept him from seeing much.

His first thought was that a caravan of merchants was coming to the crossroads on the other highway. That was close to laughable, too. The traders would be sorry if they got in front of his force and found the Rulers first. And they would slow him down if they blocked the road. He didn’t want to have to swing out into the fields to get around them.

And then a peremptory shout came through the howling wind: “You there! Strangers! Clear the road for His Majesty’s soldiers!”

“What?” If Hamnet hadn’t been wearing mittens, he would have dug a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard straight. When he decided he had, he shouted back: “The demon you say! We’re His Majesty’s soldiers!”

“D’you know what’ll happen to you for lying?” In case he didn’t, the still invisible man at the head of the – other army? – went into grisly detail.

“I’m no liar, you – ” Hamnet Thyssen shouted back something even nastier. It seemed to shock the other side’s herald into silence. Hamnet gestured to Runolf Skallagrim, Ulric Skakki, and Trasamund, and, a moment later, to Marcovefa. “Ride with me,” he told them. He raised his voice and called “Hold up!” to the rest of his force.

He and his handful of companions trotted towards the challenge. He wasn’t overwhelmingly surprised to find a party coming out from the other host to see who he was. An officer wearing the hame of a dire wolf as a headpiece shouted, “What do you think you’re doing, interfering with His Majesty’s army?”

“I told you – we’re His Majesty’s army!” Hamnet produced the orders he had from Sigvat II and thrust them at the other man. “Here. Do you read?”

“Yes,” the officer in the wolfskin said angrily. He snatched the parchment away from Count Hamnet. Then fear filled Hamnet for a moment. What if Sigvat had reneged on his promises? What if this force had orders to ignore one Hamnet Thyssen, or to clap him in irons? If Gudrid had been working to get her way with the Emperor, it wasn’t impossible. It wasn’t even unlikely, as Hamnet knew all too well.

But, by the way the other officer’s eyes widened, it hadn’t happened. Hamnet blew out a fog-filled sigh of relief. “You see?” he said.

“I see,” the other officer said unhappily. “You’d better come with me and show this . . this thing to Count Endil.”

“Endil Gris?” Hamnet asked.

“That’s right,” the officer said. “You know him, uh, Your Grace?”

“We’ve met,” Hamnet answered. Endil Gris was a warrior with a considerable reputation for his wars against the savages who raided Raumsdalia’s southwestern frontier. So far as Hamnet knew, Endil had never fought in the north before. Sigvat must have figured a capable general on one border would prove just as capable on another. Maybe the Emperor was right. On the other hand, maybe he wasn’t.

“Come with me, then,” the officer said, “you and your, ah, friends.” His gaze lingered longest on Trasamund and Marcovefa when he said that. After a moment, though, he added, “You have some experience against these new barbarians, I’ve heard. Is that right?”

“Yes, it is,” Hamnet answered. “Not happy experience, not a lot of wins, but experience. I gather that puts me one up on Count Endil?”

Instead of answering, the man in the wolf-hame only grunted. Endil Gris’ army put him one up, or more than one, on Count Hamnet. Endil had more soldiers than Hamnet did, many more, and they were men with the look of regulars, tough and composed and ready – they thought – for whatever lay ahead of them. Quite a few of Endil’s men also had suntans that said they’d come up from the south with him. They couldn’t have turned so brown on northern duty, anyhow.

Endil himself wore a black leather patch over his left eye. “Thyssen, by God!” he said. “What are you doing here?” Even in mittens, his handclasp felt odd; along with his eye, he was also missing his right middle finger.

“Show him what I’m doing here,” Hamnet told the officer in the wolf-hame, who still carried his orders. Reluctantly, the man passed the parchment to Endil Gris.

Count Endil held it out at arm’s length to read it. Count Hamnet had to do more and more of that himself. When Endil finished, one of his bushy eyebrows leaped. “How the demon did you get the Emperor to appoint you god of the north? That’s what this amounts to.”

“Hamnet always did have a charming smile,” Ulric Skakki said.

Endil glanced at him. “Skakki, isn’t it?” As Ulric nodded, the veteran soldier went on, “I’ve heard of you, for good and for … well, for not so good.”

Ulric Skakki nodded again, unembarrassed. “That’s what life is all about, don’t you think? I could say the same thing about you.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” But Endil Gris gave his attention back to Hamnet. “You’ve got all the authority you need, don’t you?” Before Hamnet could answer, Endil continued, “You’ve got it if I say you’ve got it, anyway. Otherwise, you’re just a beggar with a bowl, looking for a handout anywhere you can.”

How to answer that? If Hamnet tried to bluff here, he reckoned he would lose his man. Endil was not a man who gave way to bluffs; if anything, they enraged him. And so Count Hamnet shrugged and said, “Yes, that’s about the size of it. His Majesty’s right about one thing – I know more about the Rulers and how they fight than you do.”

“You couldn’t very well know less. I’ve never seen one of the buggers, not yet,” Count Endil replied. “All I’ve heard about ‘em is from people who ran away from them. So I was going to do the best I could, but. .. .” He shrugged and spread his mittened hands.

“I’ve seen them. I’ve talked with them. I’ve fought them. I’ve run from them, too. It’s what you do when you lose,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “But some of the forces I was with almost won, and I think we’ve got a wizard now who can stand up to anything they throw at us.” He gestured towards Marcovefa.

“The Rulers, they are not so much of a much,” she said in her curiously accented Raumsdalian.

Endil Gris’ long, somber, mutilated face crinkled into an unexpected grin. “Nice to know somebody thinks so, anyway,” he rumbled. “Everybody down in Nidaros was shrieking about how they ate us up without salt.” He swung his good eye back towards Count Hamnet. “I’ll serve under you, Thyssen. I think you’ve got a better chance of making this come out right than I do, and what else matters?”

Plenty of other officers would have made that question anything but rhetorical. To them, their chance for fame and glory came ahead of anything else. Hamnet thought Endil Gris was a man of a different, sterner, school. He hoped Endil was. If the one-eyed noble claimed he was, Hamnet couldn’t afford to do anything but take him at his word. “Thanks,” he said. “As long as we’ve got that settled, let’s go after the barbarians and give them what they deserve.”

“Sounds good to me,” Endil said.

One of his aides had been listening with more and more agitation. “But, Your Grace!” the junior officer burst out. “This is your army! Are you going to let some … some stranger take it away from you?”

“Thyssen’s no stranger,” Endil Gris replied. “Why did we come up here, Dalk? To whip these Rulers right out of their boots, yes? If Count Hamnet can do that, I’ll stand behind him, because I’m not sure I can.”

“But – ” Dalk didn’t want to let it drop.

“Would you like to take it up with His Majesty?” Endil asked. “Would you like to go back to Nidaros and take it up with His Majesty?”

His aide recognized danger when it blew his way. “Uh, no, Your Grace.”

“Very good. Very good.” Count Endil was ponderously sarcastic. “In that case, would you like to salute Count Hamnet Thyssen and do everything you can to help him against these barbarians? That’s what I aim to do, by God.” He did it.

After a moment, so did Dalk. But rebellion still glittered in his eyes as he said, “May you lead us to victory, Your Grace.”

Count Hamnet knew what that meant. He gave the unhappy Dalk a thin smile. “Don’t worry about telling tales to the Emperor if I lose. He’ll hear them from better men than you, I promise. And he pulled me out of the dungeon to do this. If he throws me in again, what have I lost? What has he lost?”

Dalk’s eyes went big and round. “He … pulled you out of the dungeon?”

“I’d heard that,” Endil Gris said. “I hoped it wasn’t true. You’re not the kind of man who ends up in one, except maybe for telling the truth.”

“Well, you got the crime right the first time,” Ulric Skakki said. “Such men are dangerous – and if you don’t believe me, ask Sigvat.”

“Enough.” Hamnet held up a hand. “Only the Rulers get anything if we start slanging each other.”

“You’re right, by God,” Trasamund said. “We Bizogots did that, and we paid for it.” Dalk and Endil Gris both eyed him as if to say, So what? They didn’t want to listen to a Bizogot. Do they really want to listen to me? Hamnet Thyssen wondered. I’ll find out.

Then he realized Marcovefa had told him he would get a real army before he got it. How the demon had she known? How could she have known? She’s a shaman, that’s how, Hamnet thought. A strong one, too, by God. Maybe we’ve got a chance in spite of everything.