Breath of God

XXII

Gunnlaug Jofrid rode back towards the south. Count Hamnet didn’t much want to let him go; he feared the courier would land Runolf Skallagrim in trouble. But the only other choice did seem to be slaughtering Gunnlaug, and Hamnet didn’t have the stomach for it, not in cold blood.

“Don’t worry. It will probably work out all right,” Audun Gilli told him.

“Easy for you to say,” Hamnet growled. “Runolf is a friend of mine. I don’t like running out and leaving him in the lurch.”

“I don’t think you are,” the wizard answered. “By the time Gunnlaug gets down to Nidaros again – if he ever does – how many Rulers will be between him and Kjelvik? With the worst will in the world, how much can Sigvat do to your friend?”

Hamnet Thyssen thought that over. His nod was grudging, but it was a nod. “Well, you’ve got something there,” he said, and worried about it less. Too late now to do anything but what he’d done, anyhow.

“Now we find our fellow Bizogots, our fellow sufferers,” Trasamund boomed. He seemed to have no doubts about what came next. “We fire them with our fury, and we lead them to victory against the accursed invaders.”

He made it sound easy. Had it been easy, the Bizogots would have done it when the Rulers first swarmed down through the Cleft. Trasamund was always one to overlook details like that. Ulric Skakki said, “Finding enough to eat through the winter here ought to be interesting all by itself.”

“We Bizogots don’t starve,” Trasamund declared.

“Except when we do.” Liv had a better grasp on reality than the jarl did. Hamnet had known that for a long time. She went on, “Even with our herds, it isn’t always easy. And we’ll have to hunt without mammoths and musk oxen to fall back on.”

“Dire wolves do it. So can we,” Trasamund said.

“We can rob them, too,” Ulric said. “What’s left of a musk ox or a baby mammoth or one of the Rulers’ riding deer that strayed will feed us for a while.”

For a while, Hamnet thought. When the Breath of God blew hard from the north up here, folk needed more food than they did down in Nidaros, with fireplaces and braziers and double walls handy to hold cold at bay. You had to keep the hearth inside you burning hot, or else the Breath of God would blow it out.

Peering north, then northeast, then northwest, Count Hamnet saw… snow. No mammoths. No musk oxen. No riding deer. No geese or swans. No ducks or ptarmigan. No white-pelted hares. No voles or lemmings, either. He knew game of all sizes lived on, in, and under the snowdrifts, but finding any wouldn’t be easy.

The horses would have to keep going, too. Unlike musk oxen or mammoths, they didn’t always know enough to dig through the snow to find fodder underneath. Sooner or later – most likely sooner – the travelers would probably end up killing and eating the pack horses. Once the supplies they carried were gone, what point to fussing over them? He wasn’t fond of horse-meat, but he wasn’t fond of hunger, either.

“Come on!” Trasamund said. “Let’s ride!”

He booted his horse forward as if he had not a care in the world. Up here in the Bizogot country, maybe he didn’t. Whether he should or not . . wasn’t the same question. Count Hamnet urged his mount forward, too.

When he came north the winter before, he’d looked forward to running into people. The Bizogots guested strangers generously, knowing they might need guesting themselves one day before long. The Rulers, though, would be enemies no matter what. He made sure his sword stayed loose in its scabbard.

Nothing . . . Only snow and chill and rolling ground under the horse’s hooves. Trasamund started singing a song about how splendid the countryside was. The jarl couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. He didn’t care, but Count Hamnet didn’t feel like listening to him.

“How are you?” Hamnet asked Marcovefa.

“I’ve been better,” she answered. “My head still feels . .” She made a face. “Things in there aren’t right.”

“A slingstone will do that,” Hamnet said.

“But to knock out working magic?” She made another face, an angrier one. “It did that. I don’t like it. I feel stupid.”

“I can’t work magic at all,” Hamnet said. “Am I stupid?”

By her expression, the question was. “Suppose you go blind. Are you the same as you were before? I feel like I am blind in there.” She carefully touched the right side of her head.

Liv pointed northwest and called, “A herd that way!”

Hamnet Thyssen saw nothing out of the ordinary when he looked that way. “How can you tell?” he asked. Even so simple a question hurt.

“Look at the air.” Liv sounded as matter-of-fact as if they were strangers. “You can see the fog of all the animals breathing together.” She pointed again. Once Count Hamnet knew where to look and what to look for, he could see it, too. That made him feel a little better, but not much. Liv went on, “I think they’re musk oxen, but I’m not sure. The air doesn’t look quite right.” Hamnet couldn’t tell the difference between fog from musk oxen and that from any other beasts. Could Liv, really? Maybe she could. The Bizogots had to learn such things if they wanted to go on living.

“I think they’re musk oxen,” Trasamund said. “I think we ought to slaughter one or two of them, too. We can use the meat. It will keep us going longer than the bread we brought north. Bread is all very well when you have no meat, but when you do….”

Hamnet wondered who was watching that herd or flock or whatever the word was. If the outriders were Bizogots, there probably wouldn’t be any trouble. If they were Rulers, there certainly would. His hand fell to his sword hilt again. He was ready for trouble, or hoped he was.

“Let’s ride,” Trasamund said once more. Nobody told him no. Ulric Skakki looked dubious, but Ulric looked dubious about half the time. He very often had good reason to look dubious, but Hamnet chose not to remember that.

Before long, the herd itself came into sight: a brown smudge on the horizon. The travelers hadn’t gone much farther before Liv exclaimed, “Those aren’t musk oxen!”

“I don’t know what the demon they are,” Trasamund said. Hamnet Thyssen still wasn’t convinced they weren’t musk oxen. But he had to believe the Bizogots knew better than he did.

Still, it wasn’t a Bizogot who said, “They’re riding deer, aren’t they?” It was Ulric Skakki. He might look dubious, but he was also an adaptable man. Before long, Hamnet could see he was right here.

“What do we do?” Audun Gilli asked: all things considered, a more than reasonable question.

“I’m in the mood for roast venison,” Hamnet said. His comrades bayed agreement.

“What if the Rulers have herdsmen with their deer?” Audun asked.

“Then in a little while they won’t,” Hamnet answered grandly. That got him more cheers. He began to string his bow. So did Ulric.

Sure enough, a herdsman rode out towards them … on a riding deer rather than a horse, which said by itself that he was a warrior of the Rulers. “You goes away!” he shouted in the Bizogot tongue, his accent and pronunciation terrible. “Goes away! Thises our deers is!”

“We ought to kill him just so we don’t have to listen to him,” Ulric murmured.

“Oh, we’ve got better reasons than that,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

He and Ulric reached over their shoulders and nocked arrows at the same time. The enemy warrior seemed astonished that anyone on the frozen steppe would presume to disobey him. They’d both let fly before he even started to reach for an arrow. He hadn’t finished drawing his bow before one shaft caught him in the chest and the other in the face. He slid out of the saddle and crashed down in the snow.

“Well shot!” Hamnet and Ulric shouted at the same time. Marcovefa pounded Hamnet on the back.

Another herdsman rode around from the far side of the flock to find out what was going on. Seeing his comrade down, he wheeled his deer and galloped off as fast as it would run.

Liv pointed at the deer and murmured . . something. Suddenly, though the deer seemed to be running as hard as ever, it was hardly moving at all. The warrior of the Rulers beat it and cursed it, none of which did him any good. When the invaders had no shaman with them, they were vulnerable to Bizogot magic. Hamnet had seen that before.

The warrior leaped down from the ensorceled riding deer as the travelers drew near. He must have seen he had no hope for escape, for he charged them with drawn sword. Trasamund dismounted and met him blade-to-blade. “The Three Tusk clan!” the jarl cried.

He beat down his foe’s guard with a few fierce cuts. The killing stroke almost took off the enemy fighter’s head. The warrior of the Rulers staggered, blood gushing from a wound he couldn’t hope to stanch. After a few lurching steps, he crumpled, the sword slipping from his fingers.

“If only there were one neck for the lot of them!” Trasamund cleaned his blade in a snowdrift.

“Would make things simpler, wouldn’t it?” Ulric Skakki said. Hamnet Thyssen nodded.

The riding deer shifted nervously, half spooked by the shouting and by the stink of blood. But the beasts were more nearly tame than so many musk oxen would have been. The travelers had little trouble cutting several of them out of the herd and leading them downwind so the smells of their slaughtering wouldn’t frighten the others so much.

“Maybe we ought to use them for pack animals and slaughter the extra horses,” Audun Gilli said. “They fend for themselves better than horses do up here.”

“But we can ride the horses if we have to.” Trasamund was a staunch conservative. “We don’t know how to do that with them.”

“And they are beasts of the Rulers,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe, if they stay alive, Rulers can use magic to track them.”

Audun pursed his lips. “Yes, that could be,” he said. “I should have thought of it myself.”

And so they slaughtered the deer, wrapped the meat they wanted to take in the animals’ hides, and loaded it onto the pack horses. Then they pressed north, up towards Sudertorp Lake and what had been Leaping Lynx country. But the Leaping Lynxes, these days, were as shattered as Trasamund’s own clan.

“What can we do up here?” Hamnet said. “What hope have we got of putting a piece of this clan and a chunk of that one together and making an army that can stand up to the Rulers?”

“I don’t know,” Ulric answered. “But I do know Sigvat can’t put you in a dungeon up here, so that leaves us ahead of the game right there. Or do you think I’m wrong, Your Grace?” He used Hamnet’s title of respect with irony.

“I only wish I did,” Hamnet said. They rode on.

Marcovefa looked at the snow. She frowned in concentration, and maybe in a little pain, as she whistled a strange tune in a wailing, minor key. Then she muttered to herself. “That’s not right,” she said.

“Try it again,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. “Your magic’s bound to come back to you sooner or later, isn’t it?” He fought not to show his fear.

“Well, I hope so. I don’t want to be mindblind the rest of my days,” she answered. Mindblind wasn’t really a word in Raumsdalian, which didn’t keep Hamnet from understanding it – and from understanding that he wasn’t the only fearful one here.

Marcovefa eyed the drifted snow again. She nodded to herself, as if to say, I can do this. Then she whistled again. The tune was almost the same as it had been before – almost, but not quite. Hamnet couldn’t have defined the difference, but he knew it was there.

Suddenly, a vole popped out of the snow. It stared at Marcovefa with small, black, beady eyes. Then, as if recognizing her as one of its own kind, it scurried towards her. Her smile blazed brighter than the weak northern sun. She stopped whistling. The vole let out a high-pitched squeak of horror, almost turned a somersault spinning around, and scooted away.

She let it go. As she turned to Hamnet, her eyes shone with triumph. “There!” she said. “I did it! I called the vole to me!”

“Good,” he said. “Would you hunt that way up on top of the Glacier?”

“Sometimes I would, if I had to,” she replied. “But you see? I did a magic! Not a big magic yet, but a magic! My head is not ruined, not for good.”

“God be praised for that,” Hamnet said gravely. “Do you suppose you can call mammoths the same way when you get better?”

He was teasing her, but she took him seriously. “I don’t know. I never try anything like that up on the Glacier. No big animals up on the Glacier, not except for people.” She bared her teeth. Maybe she was teasing him back. Or maybe she was remembering the taste of man’s flesh. Then her grin faded. She touched the side of her head, still swollen and bruised. “I have myself back again. I have myself back again.” She made Hamnet hear the pause in the middle of the word.

“Good.” He could imagine what that meant to her. And he knew what it meant to the fight against the Rulers. Without Marcovefa, there was no fight against the Rulers . . . unless Sigvat could somehow mount one. From everything Hamnet had seen, that struck him as unlikely.

She whistled again. Another little furry head popped out of the snowbank. Another ensorceled vole started towards her. This time, she took it in her hands before relaxing the spell. Count Hamnet wondered if the vole would die of fright. It didn’t – it just twisted loose and ran away.

“Not an accident. Not a happenstance,” Marcovefa said happily. “I can really do this.”

“Good,” Hamnet said. “If any of the Rulers stick their heads out of the snow all of a sudden, we know just how to take care of them.”

Marcovefa laughed. Hamnet was joking, and then again he wasn’t. She’d worked magic, but she hadn’t worked strong magic. If this was the most she could do, how could she stand against the Rulers? And if she couldn’t stand against the Rulers, what was the point to anything?

“Suppose we meet the Rulers in the ordinary way,” Hamnet persisted. “What can you do then?”

“Whatever I have to do, I can do,” Marcovefa replied.

That was encouraging, or it would have been had Hamnet had more confidence in it. But he didn’t want to show Marcovefa he had no confidence; if he did show her that, wouldn’t it hurt her confidence? And confidence that she could beat the Rulers was one big advantage she enjoyed over both the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians. She’ll always thought she could, and she’d been right most of the time – till that slingstone made her wrong at just the wrong moment.

“Voles,” Hamnet Thyssen muttered.

“If I see any mammoths hiding in the snowdrift, I am able to call those, too,” Marcovefa said brightly.

“Oh, good,” Count Hamnet said. Marcovefa couldn’t always tell when he was being sarcastic. This time, she noticed, and thought it was funny. Hamnet went on, “Suppose they aren’t hiding there. Suppose they’re just.. . mammothing along. Could you call them then?”

“Mammothing? Is that a word?”

“It is now.”

“I don’t know if I could or not,” Marcovefa answered. “I tell you this, though – I want to find out.”

“So do I.” Hamnet said. If she could call mammoths the way she called voles … Well, what good would it do the Rulers to ride them, if they wouldn’t go where their riders wanted them to? Sometimes mammoth corpses got buried in floods or cave-ins and frozen underground for years or even centuries, then came to the surface again. Some of the people who found them that way thought they lived like moles and died when air touched them. How much of a difference was there between moles and voles?

If you were a vole or a mole, a lot. Otherwise?

“I have my magic back,” Marcovefa said. “Nothing else matters.” Count Hamnet was inclined to agree with her.

Coming up to the steppe before, Hamnet had passed smoothly from one Bizogot clan’s territory to the next. As often as not, riders near the edge of one clan’s lands – or the fierce dogs they had with them – would let him know when he’d come within the bounds of a new jarl’s domain.

Now the Rulers had shattered the arrangements that prevailed for so long. In a broad swath down the center of the frozen plain, the invaders had beaten and broken up the clans that had roamed there for so long. The Rulers had commandeered as many of the herds as they could lay hold of, but others still wandered with no one to protect them from lions and short-faced bears and dire wolves . . and from hungry Bizogots as much on their own as the musk oxen and mammoths and horses were.

Chaos and banditry, of course, spread far beyond the clans the Rulers had actually broken. Refugees and fugitives went where they would, went where they could, and turned their swords and bows against the Bizogots already holding those grounds and herds. Some of the clans the Rulers hadn’t touched got smashed to pieces by their own folk . . and then they spread disorder farther yet.

In the midst of such madness and uncertainty, a knot of hard-bitten travelers who weren’t afraid to fight had no trouble gathering a following. Men who wanted to hit back at the invaders but saw no way to do it on their own were glad to join people who did have a plan.

“How does it feel, being most of the way towards a king?” Ulric Skakki asked Hamnet after they’d collected a pretty fair beginning to an army.

Hamnet rolled his eyes. “How does it feel, being out of your head?”

“I enjoy it most of the time,” Ulric said easily. “Now answer my question.”

“I’m not a king. I’m not a jarl, either. I’m barely even a general,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If Trasamund wanted that slot, he could take it. I wouldn’t say a word. This is his country, not mine.”

“That’s why he’s standing back and letting you have it,” Ulric said. Before Hamnet could tell him he was crazy again, Ulric went on, “Up here, he’s just another Bizogot – and just another Bizogot who’s lost to the Rulers. But you, you’re -”

“Just another Raumsdalian who’s lost to the Rulers,” Hamnet broke in.

Ulric Skakki shook his head. “You’re a foreigner. You’re interesting. You’re exotic. You carry hope.”

“And other diseases,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

“Ow!” Ulric wasn’t easy to wound with words, but he flinched then. Gathering himself, he said, “Well, the Rulers would agree with you.”

“Bugger the Rulers. Bugger em with a pine cone,” Count Hamnet said.

“That’s what we’re here for,” the adventurer reminded him.

“I know,” Hamnet said. “We’re going to have to hit them. If we don’t, the Bizogots will decide we’re good for nothing. They’ll ride off and leave us, and then -”

“We will be good for nothing,” Ulric Skakki finished for him. “Well, the world has been telling me I’m good for nothing for a long time. Maybe it’s been right all along. You never can tell.”

Hamnet Thyssen glowered at him. “We haven’t got much of an army here. If we strike at the Rulers and lose. ..” He shook his head. “If that happens, we’re ruined.”

“We wouldn’t be way the demon up here if plenty of people didn’t already think we were ruined,” Ulric said. “So far, we’ve hurt the Rulers here on the steppe. We’ve killed their men and slaughtered their animals. And have they hurt us? Have they even touched us? They haven’t, and you know it.”

Reluctantly, Hamnet nodded. He did know it, but knowing it brought no reassurance. “Pinpricks,” he said. “We’ve given them pinpricks, and they haven’t bothered noticing. But they will if we hit them hard.”

Ulric Skakki set his mittened hands on Hamnet s shoulders. “You can stay invisible, or you can make a proper enemy. The way it looks to me, those are your only choices. And you can’t do both at once. So which would you rather?”

“What do you think?” Hamnet asked.

“Well, I hoped I knew,” Ulric Skakki answered.

“You do,” Hamnet said grimly. Ulric nodded and stopped bothering him, one of the more sensible things the adventurer ever did.

For all their bold talk, Hamnet and Ulric didn’t lead their growing band across the frozen top of Sudertorp Lake, the way they’d gone north the year before. They’d almost died the year before, too, when magic from the Rulers cracked the ice and nearly spilled them into the freezing water.

Maybe Marcovefa could have shielded them from a repeat of that fright. She seemed sure her sorcery was close to full strength. All the same, Count Hamnet didn’t want to test her before he had to. And, despite the confidence she showed, she didn’t seem eager to test herself, either. Ready, yes, but not eager.

“When the time comes, I will do what wants doing,” she said. “Till then … Well, each day I am stronger. Each day my head is clearer.”

“That’s what I want to hear,” Hamnet said.

“I do not say it because you want to hear it. I say it because it is true,” Marcovefa told him.

“All right. Good.” He didn’t want to quarrel with her. He looked across the rolling, snow-covered landscape. With no trees, the Bizogot steppe grew boring in winter. “I wonder if the Golden Shrine is anywhere near here. If it is, you’d probably heal right away if you went inside.”

“We knew of the Golden Shrine up on top of the Glacier, too,” Marcovefa said. “We thought it was up there – somewhere up there. Sometimes we went looking for it, but no one ever found it.”

“When your ancestors first went up atop the Glacier, they already knew about the Golden Shrine,” Hamnet answered. “Most folk say it’s the oldest thing in the world. Some say it was there before the Glacier first came down from the north. Eyvind Torfinn believes that, I think.”

“He is a strange man. He has no magic in him, but he is wise. I did not think that could be, but it is.” Marcovefa paused. “He is wise, except for the woman he chose. She is pretty, but….”

“You know she was mine once,” Hamnet said.

“I know she was wed to you once, yes. But she was never yours. Gudrid is only Gudrid’s.”

“Well, yes,” Hamnet agreed. “But I didn’t know that then, and I paid for the lesson.” Gudrid was even prettier in those days, too, which made the price dearer – or at least seem dearer to a man who was younger himself.

“The Golden Shrine . . .” Marcovefa seemed willing not to talk about Gudrid, which suited Count Hamnet fine. “We say you find it if you don’t expect it. If you look for it, it is never there.” Her grin was impish. “We must have looked for it. It was never there for us.”

“We say the same kinds of things about it,” Hamnet agreed. “I didn’t believe it was there at all till I learned of the lands beyond the Glacier. Now I think maybe there is such a thing. But it is where it wants to be, not where we want it to be. Does that make any sense at all?”

“More than you know, maybe,” Marcovefa said.

Before Hamnet could ask her what she meant, a scout came galloping back. “We found them!” he shouted. “We found the stinking mammoth turds! Now let’s go kill every cursed one of them!”

The Bizogots who formed the bulk – formed almost all – of Hamnet’s army roared like the predators they were. Everyone thundered forward. Hamnet didn’t much want a battle just then. He had one anyhow. Now he had to try to lead it. If he didn’t, one thing seemed plain: the army wouldn’t be his anymore.

There were things the scout hadn’t said. How many enemies waited ahead? Were they ready to fight? For that matter, Count Hamnet wondered whether his own army was ready to fight. They’d run from the Rulers often enough before. Only one way to find out…

“I see em!” Trasamund bellowed. So did Hamnet Thyssen: a line of men on riding deer, with the bigger lumps of mammoths anchoring the center of their line. They were ready, then.

“Try to stay out of slingstone range!” Hamnet shouted to Marcovefa.

She gave back what was anything but a military salute. Then she blew him a kiss. He wondered what it meant. He wondered if it meant anything. He’d find out – probably sooner than he wanted.

Sooner than he wanted, he found the Rulers had at least one wizard with them. Snow leapt up from the ground. It took the shapes of wolves and of the fierce great cats from beyond the Glacier – tigers, the Rulers called them. Count Hamnet thought they were illusion till one of the snow tigers tore the throat out of a scout’s horse and then killed the Bizogot, too.

If Marcovefa couldn’t do anything about that. . . Would the magic beasts break up the Bizogot charge by themselves, or would they terrify the Bizogots into turning around and fleeing? They weren’t far from scaring Count Hamnet into turning around.

But then they all burst into puffs of steam. Marcovefa laughed in delight. Hamnet thought that was joy at having her power back. He was delighted that she had it back, too.

“Give them something to remember you by!” he yelled.

Marcovefa laughed again. “Oh, they will remember me!” she said. Maybe it was her joy that made her do what she did next. All the Rulers’ riding beasts – deer and mammoths alike – seemed to go into heat at the same time, and into a more fiery heat than any they knew in their proper mating season.

A mammoth interested in rutting with another mammoth was a mammoth rather spectacularly not interested in carrying warriors of the Rulers into battle. The same held true for riding deer. Bucks butted at one another and locked antlers. Does pushed their way towards the males, ignoring the riders trying to push them towards the Bizogots.

Some of the enemy fighting men could still use their bows. Most seemed at least as distracted as their beasts. The Rulers had no hope fighting with swords and spears. Those required cooperation between warriors and mounts, but they had none.

Only a few slingers made life difficult for the Bizogots. The band Hamnet’s men had come across didn’t seem to be an army on campaign, as the one down in Raumsdalia had been. It was probably a clan’s worth of men – if the Rulers used clans. The Bizogots broke their line with ease. Why not, when their own animals had broken it?

Hamnet sent horsemen straight at the slingers. He couldn’t do that so neatly as he would have with Raumsdalian soldiers. The Bizogots didn’t obey for the sake of obeying, as trained troopers would. But when he pointed at the slingers and shouted, enough Bizogots took the hint to do what he wanted done. They charged.

One slingstone hit a horseman in the face and knocked him out of the saddle. But the slingers couldn’t fight cavalry at close quarters. A few who held their ground paid for it. The rest broke and ran, and the Bizogots rode them down, too.

Seeing them run told Hamnet Thyssen what a victory he’d gained. Far more even than Raumsdalians, the Rulers were disciplined warriors. Losing to men from the herds – their contemptuous term for anyone not of their folk – was the worst disgrace they knew. Fleeing from the herds … He wondered if they’d so much as imagined such an enormity.

He pointed Bizogots at the Rulers’ wizards, too. More snow beasts sprang against them – maybe those were this clan’s sorcerous specialty. If so, it did them no good. Marcovefa boiled these monsters out of existence, as she had the others.

Then Count Hamnet got to enjoy the spectacle of wizards running for their lives. Running helped them no more than it had the slingers. Not even a wizard of the Rulers could aim a spell as fast as an archer could aim an arrow. And shrieks of agony disrupted the harsh gutturals of the Rulers’ language.

The enemy commander kept on roaring commands from mammothback till his mammoth, consumed by erotical lust, plucked him off with its trunk and threw him down, hard, onto the frozen ground. Then he shrieked, too, a shriek that ended with horrible abruptness as a mammoth foot descended on his chest. Hamnet Thyssen was close enough to hear ribs snap and crackle and pop, close enough to watch blood splash out to stain the 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… . But what? he asked himself, and found no good answer. He knew too well he would have done the same thing were Gudrid on the field, even though she might hope he died in battle.

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?