Hamnet quietly fumed. He'd hoped the first taste of rough living would send her scuttling back to the capital. That was one of the reasons he'd chosen to camp out here beside the ruins of the serai. She foiled him again.
He volunteered for the first watch. Owls hooted. Off in the distance, dire wolves howled. The wind did come from the north, from the Glacier. Ragged patches of cloud scudded across the sky, now hiding stars, now revealing them.
Someone came up behind him. He whirled. The sword that had been on his belt was suddenly in his hand. Audun Gilli froze. "You don't want to try sneaking up on me," Count Hamnet remarked. "It isn't healthy."
"So I see," the wizard said. "I am not your enemy, your Grace. I hope I am not. I do not wish to be."
"No, you are not my enemy—not unless you make yourself so," Hamnet Thyssen said. "But what are you doing here, anyway?"
"Something besides lying in a gutter clutching a jar of whatever happens to be cheap and strong," Audun answered. "Whatever happens in the north, it has to be better, wouldn't you say?"
"For you, maybe," Hamnet said. "For all of us? Who knows?"
Audun Gilli studied him for a while before saying anything. In the starlight and the dim red glow of the embers from the campfire, the wizard was only a shape in the darkness to the noble. Hamnet couldn't have been much more to Audun Gilli... at least, if the wizard was seeing only by the light of the world.
"You are not as hard a man as you make yourself out to be," Audun ventured at last.
"No, eh? If you’d got a little closer before I heard you, I would have cut you in half," Hamnet said. "That would have given you something to grumble about—for a little while, anyway."
"Maybe," Audun Gilli said. "But maybe not, too. I am not everything a wizard ought to be—God knows that's true, and so do I. But I am not nothing as a sorcerer, either."
Ulric Skakki had also said Audun wasn't a negligible wizard. Count Hamnet was more inclined to believe it from Ulric than from the wizard himself, whether he was negligible or not. Yes, Hamnet remembered those two chattering, bickering mugs. But that was a bagatelle. How Audun Gilli would do if—no, when—they had to rely on his magic .. . was anybody's guess.
Hamnet Thyssen didn't like going into the unknown with a wizard whose true quality was also unknown. Some sort of proper test seemed reasonable—to him, anyway. He said, "Can you divine for me why Gudrid wanted to come north? Is it just to jab spikes into my liver, or does she have some other reason, too?"
Audun didn't answer right away. When he did, he said, "Down in Nidaros, she asked me for a divination about you, your Grace."
"Did she?" Hamnet rumbled. "What did she want to know? What did you tell her?"
"I told her that, since the two of you were long separated, whatever she wanted to know was none of her business," Audun Gilli said. 'As for what it was, your Grace, you don't need to know that. And I would not feel right about divining her reasons for you unless you think she purposes danger to the Empire."
A wizard with scruples? Hamnet Thyssen would have imagined the breed long extinct. He had a hard time imagining the breed ever existed, in fact. But here he had a specimen before his eyes.
Or did he? Was Audun Gilli a wizard with scruples or only a wizard without strength? "We'll find something else for you to do, then," Hamnet said. Audun nodded. If he'd divined what Hamnet was thinking, would he have?
IV
Down in the distant south, where lands were rich, kingdoms and duchies and principalities marked their borders with fortresses and sometimes even walls. The northern frontier of the Raumsdalian Empire wasn't like that. There were occasional customs posts, but that was about all. The Empire didn't so much end in the north as peter out.
Past the point where even the hardiest, quickest-ripening rye and oats wouldn't let farmers put in a crop, past the broad, dark forests that lay beyond the cropland, administering the Empire grew more expensive than it was worth. There weren't enough people to build a wall in the north, and if there had been the Empire wouldn't have been able to feed the soldiers who manned it.
As for a ditch, the northern frontier lay about where the ground started staying frozen all the time. You couldn't dig a proper ditch in soil like that, no matter how much you might want to.
Every so often, then, the Bizogots broke into the Empires northern provinces. Sometimes the Empire mustered an army farther south and drove the barbarians back up onto the frozen plains over which they usually roamed. And sometimes the invading Bizogots realized they hadn't overrun anything worth having and went back to the steppe of their own accord.
When the travelers got to, or at least near, the Raumsdalian frontier— exactly where it lay in those parts was more a matter of opinion than certain, settled knowledge—Eyvind Torfinn pointed north and east and west and said, "It's just as dreary in every direction." He wasn't wrong, and it wasn't much less dreary to the south, either.
"It won't get any prettier, either," Hamnet Thyssen said. Ulric Skakki nodded. So did a couple of the imperial guardsmen who accompanied Gudrid. They'd all been up into the Bizogot country before. None of them seemed enamored of it.
Audun Gilli looked this way and that with curiosity both avid and wary. Probably wondering where his next snootful will come from, Count Hamnet thought.
Before he could say anything—if he was going to—Trasamund burst into song. The Bizogot language was related to the Raumsdalian, but only distantly. To Hamnet Thyssen's ear, the tongue the mammoth-herders used was rolling and guttural and raucous. Any time a Bizogot spoke his own language, he sounded full of himself. He couldn't help it; the language itself made him sound that way.
"How much of the Bizogot tongue do you know?" Ulric Skakki asked Hamnet.
"Enough to get by," the noble answered. "They'll never think I'm a native, but one look at me and they'll know I'm not, so that doesn't matter. How about you?"
"I'm in the same sleigh," Ulric answered.
Trasamund was in full flow, going on about the Breath of God, about mammoth dung and musk-ox meat, about hunting lions in the snow, about God's curtains (which was what the Bizogots called the northern lights), about fighting enemy clans and leading away their sobbing women after a victory, and about everything else that went into a northern nomad—all in long rhymed stanzas with perfect scansion. Hamnet Thyssen didn't admire the way of life the jarl extolled, but he admired the way Trasamund extolled the life.
So, evidently, did Ulric Skakki. "How does he do that?" Ulric said. "He's no bard, but it just pours out of him."
Count Hamnet couldn't answer, because he didn't know, either. But Eyvind Torfinn said, "He has little blocks of poetry that he uses to make his big poem."
Ulric Skakki scratched his head. "Sorry, your Splendor, but I don't follow that."
"Well, listen to him when he's talking about mammoths," Eyvind said. "If he needs four syllables in front of them to pad out his line, they're always heavy-bodied mammoths. Always. That's the four-syllable epithet for mammoths. But if he only needs two syllables, then they're great-tusked mammoths. They're towering mammoths if he needs three, and black mammoths if he needs one. Those are the only epithets you'll ever hear attached to mammoths. He has others for lions and for fire and for snow and for God and for the rest of the things that go into a Bizogot's life. You see? Building blocks."
"By God," Hamnet Thyssen said. "By God!" He sketched a salute to Earl Eyvind. "I thank you, your Splendor. That's been under my nose for years, and I never saw it."
"Nor I," Ulric Skakki said.
"Wizards in the Empire will do the same thing," Audun drilli said. "It makes spells easier to memorize."