Breath of God

III

The sun shonewarm in a bright blue sky – not merely above freezing, but warm. Just as the Breath of God could reach past Nidaros in the wintertime, southerly breezes came up onto the Bizogot steppe, even up to the edge of the Glacier itself, when days lengthened. After only a few hours of such weather, the snow started looking threadbare. Drips and puddles were everywhere.

“Mosquitoes any day now,” Ulric Skakki said mournfully. “We go straight from the scratching season to the slapping season. Isn’t it grand?”

“Maybe, but maybe not,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “There’ll be another blizzard or two before winter says good-bye for the year. And the birds are coming north to eat the bugs.”

He was right about that. Even so early in the season, the air was murmurous with the sound of fluttering wings. Birds of every size, from larkspurs and flycatchers up to swans, came to the Bizogot plains to breed and to feast upon the brief bounty they offered when they thawed out.

Ulric Skakki only shrugged. “They don’t eat all the bugs. They don’t even eat enough of them. Plenty of bloodsuckers left alive. Anybody who comes up here when the sun shines has reason to know about that.” He mimed smacking at himself.

Count Hamnet nodded. “Not just bloodsuckers on the plains these days,” he said. “We’ve got bloodspillers, too.” As usual, his gaze turned to the north.

“We’ve done everything we could,” Ulric said. “We’ve got scouts out. They’ll warn us when the Rulers move. The Red Dire Wolves are as ready to fight as they ever will be. And we’ve sent messengers to the clans close by. Maybe we’ll get reinforcements.”

“Yes, maybe we will.” Hamnet didn’t sound as if he believed it. And he didn’t. “We can’t make the other Bizogots join us. Since we can’t, chances are they won’t.”

“Well, why should they?” As it often did, acid rode Ulric Skakki’s voice. “They’re free. If you don’t believe me, just ask them. They can do whatever they choose, whatever they please – no matter how idiotic it is.”

They spoke Raumsdalian, which kept most of the mammoth-herders around them from following what they said. Trasamund, though, was an exception. “You don’t understand my folk,” he told Ulric.

“By God, Your Ferocity, I hope I don’t,” the adventurer answered.

“You Raumsdalians are a servile people. You need people to tell you what to do,” said the jarl of the Three Tusk clan.

Both Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen burst out laughing. Trasamund scowled first at one, then at the other, then at both of them together. “Oh, yes, Your Ferocity, I obey orders like any other slave,” Hamnet said. “When Sigvat commanded me to come back to Nidaros, I turned around and went. That’s why I’m sleeping in silk sheets on a feather bed in the capital now, instead of up here getting ready to fight the Rulers.”

“And everyone down in Raumsdalia told me how smart I was to come north again,” Ulric Skakki added. “Everyone there knows how important this fight is. Everyone cheered me on.”

Trasamund’s scowl darkened. “You make fun of me.”

“Wouldn’t you say that’s the chance you take when you come out with something funny?” Ulric said.

“But you are not like most of your folk,” the Bizogot said.

“Then why talk about us as if we were?” Hamnet Thyssen asked.

They might have gone on bickering, but someone at the northern edge of the encampment raised a shout: “Scout coming in!”

Hamnet Thyssen tensed. He could think of only one reason a scout would come back to the Red Dire Wolves’ camp – to warn that the Rulers were on the move at last. He hurried forward, wondering what the man would say. Several Bizogots waved to the scout. “Is it war?” they cried.

“It’s war!” the scout yelled back, and hope and fear went to war inside Count Hamnet. The rider went on, “Where are the others? Haven’t you heard before me? I’m the third one who set out with the news.”

“You’re the first who got here,” Totila said, and Hamnet’s fear jeered at his hope. What had the Rulers done to the other scouts? Reached out with their dark magic? He couldn’t think of anything else likely. Totila, meanwhile, continued, “You have seen the Rulers face-to-face. What do you make of them?”

“What we heard before from the strangers and foreigners seems to be true, Your Ferocity,” the scout replied. “They have lancers and archers on mammoths. The rest of their warriors ride deer. They keep in straight lines where we would ride in groups.”

Discipline, Hamnet Thyssen thought, not for the first time. The Rulers had it – had, perhaps, even more of it than the Empires soldiers. The Bizogots? The Bizogots didn’t even have a word for it, and had to talk around it when they saw it.

But the Bizogots were fierce. Totila shook his fist. “Straight lines, is it? Well, we’ll put some kinks in them, by God! See if we don’t!” His clansmen bawled their approval. “To horse!” he roared, and they ran for their mounts.

Liv asked the scout, “Did you see anything of their magics? Did you feel as if something passed close to you but didn’t strike?”

“No, lady shaman.” The man touched his right fist to his forehead in token of respect. “But may the teratorns take me if I know what happened to the other two men who rode south with the news.”

“How lucky are we that even one got through?” Ulric Skakki murmured to Count Hamnet. “And what will we be riding into when we go against those devils?”

“We beat them once, up in Three Tusk country,” Hamnet said.

“Yes? And so? A raid. And we caught them by surprise,” Ulric said. “This time, they’ll know we’re coming. And they’ll be ready.”

“If you don’t think we have a chance, maybe you’d better not come along,” Hamnet said.

“Oh, no. I might be wrong. I don’t think so, but I might.” Ulric grinned a crooked grin. “And if admitting that doesn’t prove I’m no Bizogot, demons take me if I know what would.”

“Well, we’ll know pretty soon,” Hamnet said. “Sometimes finding out is better than waiting.”

“So it is. And sometimes it’s worse, too,” Ulric said, which, unfortunately, was also true. Instead of answering, Hamnet went to mount. So did Ulric Skakki. The smile on the adventurer’s face might have meant anything.

Most of the Red Dire Wolves and all the surviving men from the Three Tusk clan rode with Totila and Trasamund. The rest of the Red Dire Wolves were driving their musk oxen and mammoths off to the south and west to give them something to fall back on if they had to. Part of Hamnet Thyssen said that that was wrong, that the Bizogots should act as if they were sure of winning.

He soon decided that part was being stupid. Wasn’t it the part that had clung to Gudrid, the part that had refused to see anything wrong? Wasn’t it the blind part, the brainless part? He thought it was. The Red Dire Wolves were only being sensible.

But even as he nodded to himself, he worried. If you planned for the worst thing that could happen, weren’t you more likely to bring it about? Wouldn’t your warriors be more cautious, thinking, Well, even if we lose here, it isn’t the end of the world? If you went into battle, shouldn’t you go into it thinking you had to win no matter what?

Wasn’t that, in fact, what made Bizogots fiercer than Raumsdalians most of the time? Raumsdalians, with all the resources of the Empire behind them, could more easily afford to lose than the mammoth-herders could. The Empire’s soldiers could come back and win another day. The Bizogots lived, and fought, in the moment.

And the Rulers? What of them? As far as Hamnet could see, they couldn’t afford to lose here. They had to go forward. Back, back towards the Gap and even beyond it, would be nothing but disaster for them.

Someone pointed. Shouts rang out. “There they are!” the Bizogots yelled. “Now we’ll get them!” Totila’s men were brave enough, no doubt of that.

“Revenge!” Trasamund bellowed. All his clansmen took up that cry. Liv’s voice rang clear and high among the deeper ones. She was his woman, but she was a Three Tusk Bizogot, too, and always would be.

Mammoths in the center, riding deer on the outthrust wings. If Hamnet had commanded the Rulers, he would have deployed his forces the same way. Where were their wizards? That was another worry. Hamnet glanced to Liv, to Audun Gilli, to Odovacar farther away. They’d held off the spirit hawks, whatever those were. They’d barely done it, but they had. Could they withstand the invaders once more?

They’d better, Hamnet Thyssen thought. We all go down if they fail. He looked over at Liv again. If she failed, she wouldn’t just be in danger of losing a battle. She risked dying a dreadful death by sorcery. His mind shied from that thought like a horse shying from a snake.

While the mammoths were off in the distance, they seemed like … animals. As they neared, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians got a better notion of their size. They seemed to swell and swell. If they charged, when they charged . .. Hamnet didn’t know how the horsemen riding to either side of him could stand up to that.

“They look funny,” a Bizogot said.

“They look wrong,” another one agreed.

“Why, those sneaky sons of whores!” Ulric Skakki exclaimed in Raumsdalian. “They put leather armor on their God-cursed beasts.”

He was right. That armor wouldn’t stop everything, but it would turn some arrows and keep some of the woolly mammoths from running wild when they were wounded. It also proved that the Rulers paid attention to what their foes did. Trasamund’s Bizogots had harried the mammoths with arrows in their raid up into their own grazing lands. They wouldn’t have such an easy time of it now.

“Forward the Three Tusk clan!” Trasamund shouted. “There are the murderers, in front of us in a fair fight! Now we pay them back!”

Liv rode with the rest of Trasamund’s clansmen. That meant Hamnet Thyssen also rode with the Three Tusk Bizogots. Nothing would happen to her if he could possibly help it. And if he couldn’t help it, he wanted whatever happened to her to happen to him, too.

Shaking his head, Ulric Skakki stuck close to Count Hamnet. The adventurer would never have charged into battle on his own – Hamnet was sure of that. Striking from ambush was much more Ulric’s style. But he spoke not a word of complaint. He just strung his bow, nocked an arrow, and peered ahead for a likely target.

Audun Gilli stayed with Hamnet and Ulric. Count Hamnet was sure no strategy went into the wizards thoughts. He just didn’t want to be separated from the only other two Raumsdalians for many, many miles. But his choice also pulled the Red Dire Wolves forward faster than they might have gone otherwise. With Liv and Audun speeding into the fight, Totila didn’t want his clansmen warded by Odovacar alone. Hamnet Thyssen had a hard time blaming him for that. If the Red Dire Wolves stayed near the other two who knew magic, they might stay under their protection.

If they have any protection to give, Hamnet thought. Well, we’ll find out.

Totila’s Bizogots shouted their jarl’s name. Trasamund’s followers kept roaring, “Revenge!” And now Hamnet Thyssen could hear the Rulers’ battle cries, too. They were deep and harsh, and in his ears might as well have been the calls of some fierce animals. No one on this side of the Glacier understood a word of the Rulers’ language. One more thing we should have started pulling from our prisoners, Hamnet thought. We’ve got to take care of that after the fight – if we have the chance.

A warrior of the Rulers on mammothback bent his horn-strengthened bow and let fly. His arrow fell short and kicked up a little puff of snow. Ulric Skakki grinned. “See?” he said. “They get buck fever, too.”

“So they do,” Count Hamnet said. In every battle in which he’d fought, archers opened up before they had any chance of hitting their foes. It was only human – if you could see the enemy, you thought you could kill him.

Some of the Bizogots also started shooting too soon. Their hate burned hot and clean and pure. And then, well before Hamnet Thyssen would have loosed a shot, a deer with one of the Rulers aboard crumpled and crashed to the ground, pinning the fighting man under its thrashing body. That was a prodigious shot, one Hamnet would have had trouble believing if he hadn’t seen it himself.

Trasamund thumped his chest. “Mine!” he bellowed, and held his bow over his head in triumph. “First blood to the Bizogots! First blood to the Three Tusk clan! Revenge!”

“Revenge!” his clansmen cried. Count Hamnet yelled, too, to make the war cry sound louder and fiercer. Whether that would do any good he had no idea. He was pretty sure it couldn’t hurt.

Then the Rulers’ arrows also started to bite. Bizogots and horses tumbled. Wounded horses screamed, high and shrill. So did wounded men. The horses sounded as if they suffered worse, and they probably did. The Bizogots at least knew why they were wounded. To the horses, it was all a dreadful, incomprehensible surprise.

Suddenly the mammoths loomed up right ahead, seeming as tall and vertical as the Glacier. Archers shot down from them with wicked effect. A lancer speared a Bizogot out of the saddle. The man shrieked as if demons had seized his soul.

The mammoth raised its trunk to trumpet. Could war mammoths feel triumph? Maybe they could. If this one did, its celebration proved premature. Ulric Skakki shot it in the tender and seldom exposed underside of the trunk. The spit-filled bugle call of victory turned to a squeal of pain.

One of the warriors of the Rulers on the mammoth’s back whacked it with an iron-tipped goad when it started to rear. However well the Rulers trained their beasts, they didn’t train them well enough to stay reliable when wounded. Hamnet Thyssen had seen that in an earlier skirmish. It didn’t surprise him. Horses were liable to run wild if they got hurt. So were the camels the Manches and other southwestern raiders rode. He would have been surprised if the same didn’t hold true for mammoths.

Of course, a mammoth wild with pain could do more than a horse or even a camel. This one decided it didn’t feel like being walloped. It reached up with its bleeding trunk, plucked the driver off its back, and threw him to the ground. He screamed, just as any man born on this side of the Glacier might have done. Then the mammoth stepped on him. Count Hamnet heard his ribs crunch as his chest caved in. The scream abruptly cut off.

Still trumpeting in pain, the mammoth lumbered off, careless of the other men on its back. “There’s one of the big cows out of the fight,” Ulric said cheerfully.

“So there is,” Hamnet answered. But how many mammoths were still in it? Too many, too cursed many.

An arrow hissed past his head like an angry serpent. Did the Rulers know about snakes, or were they as ignorant of them as the Bizogots? Liv hadn’t wanted to believe there were such creatures. No snake could survive winters like these. The Rulers might get some horrible surprises as they moved farther south – if they moved farther south. Hamnet hoped they didn’t get the chance.

He shot at a heavily bearded man on a deer. His arrow missed the enemy warrior but struck the deer in the haunch. It bounded away with the warrior still trying to fight it under control. He didn’t have much luck.

At its rider’s command, another deer lowered its head and charged Hamnet’s horse. The rider brandished a heavy curved sword. Even though the tines of those antlers weren’t pointed, Hamnet knew they could hurt or frighten his horse. He guided the animal to one side and slashed at the enemy fighting man with his own blade.

Yammering something Hamnet couldn’t understand, the warrior turned the stroke. He cut at Hamnet, too. The Raumsdalian noble beat aside the curved blade. He was taller in the saddle than the man from beyond the Glacier, as his horse stood several hands higher than the deer. He chopped down and laid open the deer’s shoulder. The enemy warrior couldn’t give all his attention to his swordplay after that, and combat was too serious for anything less. Hamnet Thyssen hacked him out of the saddle.

Mounted on horses, the Bizogots also had the advantage of height on the deer-riding Rulers. Wherever horses confronted deer, the Bizogots surged forward. But the enemy’s mammoths were another story. They dominated their part of the field. The Bizogots could not stand against them.

“Hold fast! Hold fast!” Trasamund and Totila shouted, both separately and together. Hamnet admired the Bizogots for not giving way to panic. It was as if they were fighting a swarm of fortresses that moved as fast as any horse.

Hamnet looked around for Liv. He did that as often as he could. Getting into the battle meant he couldn’t stay as close to her as he would have liked. But when he saw her with her arms upraised and a furious look on her face as she cried out to the heavens, he spurred towards her as fast as he could.

“No!” she shouted. “By God, no!”

She looked as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders, as if she were trying to bear up under more than anyone was supposed to carry. Hamnet Thyssen slashed the air with his sword, hoping to help as he had when her spirit flew north to see what the Rulers were doing. If that did any good, he couldn’t see it or sense it.

Where was Audun Gilli? Could he come to Liv’s aid? Count Hamnet heard his angry cry – he too sounded like a man in over his head. What were the Rulers’ wizards doing? Whatever it was, they were putting a lot of strength into it.

Hamnet looked around for Odovacar. If that wasn’t a measure of his desperation, he couldn’t imagine what would be. He didn’t see the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman. A moment later, he did hear a howl that sounded as desolate as the shouts that came from Liv’s throat and from Audun’s. No ordinary dire wolf would come so close to a battlefield till it could feed on corpses, so that had to be Odovacar.

And then, despite everything the Bizogot shamans and the Raumsdalian wizard could do, the sorcerous storm broke on the army Trasamund and Totila led. Hamnet Thyssen thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, making him see enemies where there were none, where there could be none.

But then a warrior of the Rulers almost killed him. Not all the foes he thought he saw came from his imagination alone. He watched Bizogots fall because they could not tell false foes from true. And he suspected, though he could not prove, that some of the false foes turned true because the Bizogots thought them true.

Liv cried out again. Her hands twisted in furious passes. For a moment, Hamnet s vision cleared – but only for a moment. And the effects of Liv’s spell didn’t reach very far. Bizogots more than a bowshot from her seemed as bedeviled as they ever had.

“No!” Trasamund’s deep roar reached across the battlefield. “These lying mammoth turds can’t get away with that!”

But the Rulers could. They did. And, with their enemies reeling in confusion, their wizards threw another spell at them. From what seemed every direction at once, icicles flew at the Bizogots like arrows. Shields turned some; thick leather clothes stopped others. But some struck home, wounding men and horses alike. The spell probably would have been more dangerous, more deadly, in the heart of winter than at the tag end of the season, but it was bad enough as things were.

“Stop them!” a Bizogot screamed at Liv, blood running down his face. “Don’t let them do that!”

“I’m trying!” she screamed back. None of the darting, plunging icicles had struck or even struck at her. She seemed able to protect herself. Hamnet had shattered one with his sword, but only one. She could ward him, too, to some degree. She lacked the strength to extend her reach to the whole Bizogot host.

So did Audun Gilli and Odovacar. If they could have, they would have – Hamnet Thyssen was sure of that. Coping with wizardry and war mammoths both all but unstoppable … How long could the Bizogot army hold together?

Ulric Skakki shot a fellow who was plainly a leading officer among the Rulers off his mammoth. The man had been yelling orders and pointing this way and that, directing his men as a band leader might direct his musicians. Hamnet Thyssen hoped his fall – and he did fall, bleeding, into the snow – would throw the enemy into disarray and buy the Bizogots time to regroup.

Losing their commander did discomfit the Rulers … for a minute or two. Then another of their officers, noting or learning that the commander was down, took over for him. He shouted orders. He pointed this way and that. And the enemy army pulled itself together and went back to the business of crushing its opponents.

“They’re good, God curse them,” Ulric Skakki said.

“They’re better than good. They’re smoother than we are, let alone the Bizogots,” Count Hamnet said. “We couldn’t lose a captain and shrug it off like that.” He didn’t even talk about what would happen if Trasamund or Totila were badly wounded here. He knew, and so did Ulric – the Bizogots would fall to pieces.

Even without losing their chieftains, they fell to pieces anyhow. It didn’t happen all at once, the way it might have if a jarl fell. No one could deny the Bizogots’ courage. But when courage without much direction ran up against courage with discipline, and against war mammoths and superior sorcery, it came up short.

At first by ones and twos, then in small groups, then in clusters, the Red Dire Wolves – those who could – broke free of the press and rode off to the southwest. They knew where their herds roamed. If they were to survive as a clan, they had to protect the beasts. Men from the Three Tusk clan rode with them. Fierce and desperate as Trasamund’s Bizogots were, they were made of flesh and blood; they had limits. The Rulers inflicted enough punishment on them to push them to those limits and beyond.

“Cowards!” Trasamund roared, watching his own clansmen retreat with the Red Dire Wolves. “Where are your ballocks?”

“Your Ferocity, what more can we do here but get killed to no purpose?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. “Can we beat the Rulers in this fight?”

Trasamund sent him a look full of hate. “Not you, too? Well, run away if you want to. I came here to fight, by God!” He’d done plenty of that; his great two-handed sword was smeared and splashed with blood all along the blade.

“Did you come here to throw yourself away?” That wasn’t Count Hamnet – it was Liv. “We’ve lost this battle. We’re beaten. If we try again, when we try again, it will have to be somewhere else. We still must have our revenge. But can’t you see we won’t win it here?”

Plainly, Trasamund didn’t want to heed her. Just as plainly, she was right. Totila called, “We’ve got to get away, save what we can!”

Seeing his fellow jarl flee the field seemed to bring Trasamund to his senses. “Away, then,” he said bitterly. “Away! Will we spend the rest of our lives running away from the accursed Rulers?”

It’s possible, Count Hamnet thought. If the invaders could bring in enough men and mammoths through the Gap, they would be very dangerous indeed. Hamnet had feared they would fight well. They turned out to fight even better than he’d expected.

How hard would they pursue? If they pressed the chase with everything they had in them, they might shatter the Red Dire Wolves forever. But they didn’t seem willing – or, more likely, able – to do that. They’d won, yes, but not easily. And so the Bizogots escaped them and broke off the fight. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how much difference it would make.

Not many thingsin the world were grimmer than the camp of an army that had just lost a battle. The wounded were sullen, feeling they suffered pointlessly. The men who’d got away safe were angry and embarrassed, having done their best to no purpose. And everyone was apprehensive, fearing the enemy would fall on them while their spirits were at a low ebb.

The warm weather around the camp made the snow melt, and the drips reminded Hamnet Thyssen of tears shed for the cause. That was more fanciful than he usually got, but he couldn’t help it.

Several Bizogots screamed at Trasamund and Totila when their chieftains tried to get them to go on sentry duty. Trasamund had to knock one of the nomads down and kick him before he would. “Are we still warriors?” the jarl roared furiously. “Or are we made into voles and lemmings, sport for any weasel that would bite our throats?”

“Do you feel squeaky?” Ulric Skakki asked Count Hamnet. Somehow, the adventurer made his whiskers seem remarkably like a vole’s.

Hamnet knew he should have smiled. He couldn’t make himself do it, try as he would. “They beat us,” he said gloomily.

“So they did,” Ulric agreed. “Did you really look for anything different? The Bizogots haven’t figured out this is no game yet.”

“What will it take before they do?” Hamnet asked. “War mammoths trampling the lot of them?”

“Maybe.” Ulric Skakki didn’t sound as worried or as wearied as most of the men around him. “That would bring the Rulers down to the Empire’s northern border – and Sigvat II hasn’t realized this is no game, either.”

“Marvelous,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “By your logic, almost everyone ought to be almost ready to fight just when it’s too late to do any good.”

“Yes, that sounds about right,” Ulric agreed. “Or don’t you think so?”

The trouble was, Hamnet did think so, even if he didn’t want to. “We have to find some way to beat them. If we don’t, we’re ruined.”

“No one has to do anything. Haven’t you noticed that yet?” Ulric Skakki said. “It would be nice if we did, but there’s no guarantee.” He gestured at the misery all around. “You can see for yourself there isn’t.”

Hamnet Thyssen winced. “You know what I mean.”

“So what?” Ulric said. “Where’s the connection between what you mean and what is? If you can’t find one, what does what you mean have to do with the price of peas? We’re in trouble. Wishing we weren’t won’t get us anywhere. Am I right or wrong?”

“Oh, you’re right, sure enough,” Hamnet said. “Do you suppose wishing you’d shut up anyway would get me anywhere?” Ulric Skakki laughed, for all the world as if he were joking. Any sort of cheery sound made most of the people who heard it stare at him, plainly wondering if he’d lost his wits.

Totila came up to Count Hamnet and Ulric. “Is it true that you Raumsdalians know more about curing wounds than we do?”

To Hamnet’s way of thinking, it was hard to know less about curing wounds than the Bizogots did. All the same, his nod and Ulric’s were both cautious. Battlefield surgery was a risky business for anybody. “What do you want us to try to do?” Hamnet asked.

“Come see the wound. Judge for yourself,” the Red Dire Wolves’ jarl answered.

A Bizogot warrior writhed and groaned. He had an arrow embedded in his calf. When Hamnet made as if to touch it, the big, burly man said, “Don’t. The point is barbed. You can’t pull it out.”

“Push it through?” Hamnet wondered aloud. The Bizogot groaned again. Count Hamnet understood why. That would add fresh torment and make the wound worse. But they couldn’t leave the arrow where it was, either.

“You see?” the jarl said.

“I see,” Hamnet said glumly. “I see, but I don’t know what I can do. How about you, Ulric?”

Ulric Skakki took from a belt pouch a bronze contraption with a long, flat handle and a curved tip with a small hole in the center. “What’s that?” Totila asked.

“Arrow-drawing spoon,” the adventurer answered. “I slide it down the shaft, get hold of the point with the hole, and pull up. It lets me bring out the point, but keeps the barbs from doing too much more tearing when they leave the wound.”

“Try it,” the injured Bizogot said. “That God-cursed thing has to come out.”

Hamnet Thyssen and Totila held his leg to make sure he couldn’t twist away. “Have you ever used this thing before?” Hamnet asked in Raumsdalian.

“I’ve seen it done,” Ulric answered in the imperial tongue. That wasn’t the same thing. He switched back to the Bizogot language to speak to the wounded man: “I’m going to start. Do your best to hold still.”

“I’ll try.” The mammoth-herder braced himself.

Despite that, he gasped and tried to jerk free when Ulric Skakki pushed the arrow-drawing spoon into the wound. The injured warrior groaned and cursed, none of which did him any good. He gasped again when Ulric tried to slide the very tip of the arrowhead into the hole in the spoon. “I’m sorry,” Ulric said. “Remember, I’m doing this by feel. I’m not hurting you on purpose.”

“I know,” the Bizogot got out. “But that doesn’t mean you’re not hurting me.”

“I’m close, curse it. It should be right about – ” Ulric moved the spoon a little. The Bizogot groaned on a different note. “There!” Ulric exclaimed. “I’ve got it. I can feel it.”

“So can I, by God!” the wounded man said.

“I’m going to bring it out now,” Ulric told him. “I’ll go slow, as slow as I can. Try to hold still. It will help. Are you ready?”

“No,” the Bizogot said honestly. “But go ahead. Waiting won’t make it any better.”

“Hold him tight,” Ulric warned Hamnet and Totila. “He won’t like this, but I’ve got to do it. Here we go.”

The wounded Bizogot bit down hard to keep from screaming. He spat red into the slushy snow, so he was chewing on his lips or tongue. His bunched fists pounded the snow again and again. Hamnet had taken battle wounds. He knew what the younger man was going through. The less he thought about that, the better.

“It’s out!” Ulric said. Not much flesh clung to the barbs on the point; the drawing spoon really had shielded the wound from most of the damage it would have taken otherwise.

“Thank you,” the wounded Bizogot said. “Easier to bear now that that cursed thing isn’t sticking into me anymore.”

“That’s what she said,” Ulric answered, which made the wounded man laugh.

“Let me see that spoon,” Totila said. “Could we make it from bone or horn?”

“I don’t see why not. Here, keep this one if you want to.” Ulric cleaned it in snow and slush before handing it to the Bizogot. Totila studied it and nodded thoughtfully.

Count Hamnet, meanwhile, bandaged the wounded man’s leg. Down in the Empire, bandages would have been made of linen. Here, the Bizogots used musk-ox wool and dried moss to close wounds and soak up blood. If anything, those worked better than their Raumsdalian equivalents.

“I thank you,” the wounded man said. “Do you think it will heal clean?”

“That’s in God’s hands, not mine,” Hamnet answered. “But I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.”

“Those strangers really do fight from mammothback,” the Bizogot said in wondering tones. “Who would have believed it?”

“We’ve been telling you about it all winter,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out with more than a touch of asperity.

“And so?” The wounded nomad seemed glad to have something to talk about besides the darkening bandage on his leg. “I can tell you about a sky-blue mammoth with pink horns that honks like a goose, but will you expect to see one if I do?”

“It depends,” Count Hamnet said judiciously. “If I know you’re a reliable man, I might. Why would we lie to you? By God, why would what’s left of the Three Tusk clan lie to you? They fought the Rulers. They saw them using war mammoths.”

To his surprise, the man from the Red Dire Wolves had an answer for him: “We all thought you were making them out to be worse than they really are so we’d join you and do what you wanted. We thought it was nothing but a trick to scare us, to make us fall in line behind you. We’re Bizogots. We’re free men. We didn’t aim to do that.”

“And so you had to get crushed before you decided we might know what we were talking about after all?” That sounded like something a Bizogot would do. Hamnet Thyssen counted himself to be lucky in a country where the closest walls – those of the stone houses the Leaping Lynx clan’s summer homes by Sudertorp Lake – were many miles away. Otherwise, he would have been sorely tempted to pound his head against one.

The wounded man nodded. “Sure. Except we didn’t expect to get crushed. We thought we’d do the crushing.”

After rubbing snow on his hands to get the blood off them, Hamnet Thyssen walked away. He put on his mittens to warm himself up again. Ulric Skakki came after him. “This is what we came north for?” Ulric said.

“This is what we came north for,” Hamnet answered stolidly. “The Bizogots are fools, but at least they’re fighting fools. Down in Nidaros, Sigvat II is a blind fool. If you ask me, that’s worse.”

“Well, maybe,” Ulric Skakki said. “But where are we going to find some people who aren’t fools? That’s what we really need.”

“We really need to beat the Rulers. Fighting fools can do that – may be able to do that, anyhow,” Hamnet said. “Blind fools won’t.”

They were both using Raumsdalian again; it let them speak their minds without worrying that the Bizogots would overhear and get angry. Ulric Skakki rolled his eyes. “All the Bizogots in the world couldn’t stop the army that beat us today. God knows the Bizogots are brave. But God knows they’re stupid, too. And the more I see of the Rulers, the more I see that they aren’t. They’re cruel bastards, but they aren’t dumb bastards.”

“And that sorcery .. .” Count Hamnet let the words hang in the air.

“That was pretty bad,” Ulric agreed. “Some of those flying icicles almost skewered me. And some of them did skewer Bizogots – or else distracted them so the Rulers had an easy time killing them.”

“Do you suppose our best wizards could have stopped the spell?” Ham-net asked.

“I don’t know,” the adventurer said. “One day before too long, chances are we’ll find out.”

“God help the Empire if its wizards don’t have better luck than the Bizogot shamans up here,” Hamnet said.

“God help the Empire. That’ll do,” Ulric Skakki said. “Somebody’d better, and it’s not as if Sigvat’s up to the job.”

“God should help the Bizogots, too – and if he doesn’t, we should lend a hand,” Count Hamnet said. “Do you know whether Totila and Trasamund aim to send messengers to the other clans and tell them what’s happened to the Red Dire Wolves?”

“I know they haven’t done it yet. I know I haven’t heard them talk about doing it,” Ulric answered. “Whether the thought has trickled through their beady little minds .. . that I can’t tell you.”

“Beady little minds,” Hamnet echoed sourly. The phrase fit much too well. “All right, then. We’d better make sure they do think of it. And we’d better make sure they don’t just think of it, too. We’d better make sure they do it.”

“You don’t have much faith in them, do you?” Ulric said.

Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”