Hamnet Thyssen's laugh was not particularly pleasant. "From what I have seen of men, my friend, you need not have a bear in your soul to make this so."
"If you have a bit of bear in you even when you are a man, do the women like you better for it?" Ulric Skakki grinned a sly grin.
Gudrid made a disgusted noise. Hamnet wondered why. Some of the men she was drawn to were brutes even if not shapeshifters—Trasamund sprang to mind. Did she think that was all right for her but not for someone else? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised. Gudrid always thought rules were for other people.
As for the shaman, he grinned back. "Now and again, I have seen this to be so. Not always, but now and again. Some women like one thing, some another. You never can tell."
"No, you can't. It's almost as if they were people, isn't it?" Ulric said. Witigis scratched his head. At first, that was simple puzzlement. Then it turned businesslike. He squashed something between his thumbnails, Gudrid made another disgusted noise. Count Hamnet silently sighed. He was lousy now himself, and fleabitten, and also bitten by bedbugs. The Bizogots took all that for granted. With their attitude toward bathing, they could hardly do anything else.
"When you go from man to bear, do you leave human fleas and lice behind?" he asked Witigis. "If you stay a bear, do you get a bear's bugs?"
"You people find interesting questions, by God!" the shaman said. "I always wondered why I'm bitten less than most people. Now maybe I know."
"Maybe you do," Hamnet said.
Later, as leather drinking jacks of smetyn passed from hand to hand, he saw Witigis talking with Wacho and pointing his way. He couldn't make out what either the shaman or the jarl was saying, which annoyed him. Coming right out and asking would have been rude. Instead, he drank more than he might have otherwise.
Wacho talked with a Bizogot woman. She nodded. Then she came over and sat down beside Count Hamnet. "I'm Marcatrude," she said.
Hamnet gave his own name.
She nodded again. She couldn't have been much past twenty. She was pretty enough, and nicely shaped. If she was no cleaner than Bizogots usually were . . . Well, Hamnet Thyssen wasn't much cleaner than Bizogots usually were, either. She said, "Wacho has given me to you for the night, if you want me."
If Count Hamnet had drunk less, he might have said no. If he hadn't gone without a woman for such a long time, he might have said no, too. But he had. And, he told himself—drunkenly—refusing the jarl's kindness would be impolite.
"Where shall we go?" he asked. Bizogots worried less about privacy than Raumsdalians did. If this was going to turn into an orgy, he didn't think he could keep up his end of the bargain.
But Marcatrude didn't seem to expect it to. She set her hand on his. Even if he was drunk, he noticed she didn't have the smooth, supple skin of a pampered Raumsdalian woman—of, say, someone like Gudrid. Hamnet shook his head. He didn't want to think about Gudrid now. If he did, he might also fail to keep up his end of the bargain. If Marcatrude's palm was callused and rough from work even when she was so young, then it was, that was all. She would be soft other places, soft where it mattered.
When he got up and left the jarl's tent with her, he felt Gudrid's eyes boring into his back. Absurdly, he felt guilty, as if he were being unfaithful to her. Considering everything she'd done, that was ridiculous, which didn't make the feeling go away.
He and Marcatrude had another mammoth-hide tent to themselves. They lay down together on the cured hide of a short-faced bear. "I can blow out the lamp, if you like," Marcatrude said as he began to undress her. Drink and lust made his fingers clumsy.
"No, let it burn," he said, and then, feeling that wasn't enough, "You're so pretty, you're worth seeing."
She smiled. She had very white, very even teeth. "You say kind things," she told him. "What kind of men are outlanders?" Before long, he was naked, too. She eyed him and nodded. "You are man enough, without a doubt."
She seemed surprised when he teased her and stroked her instead of just opening her legs and taking his pleasure—surprised, but not unhappy. Far from unhappy, in fact. She purred with pleasure. That pleased Hamnet— and heated him, too.
"Oh," the Bizogot girl said softly when he went into her—a sound he thought was likely the same in any language.
He brought her to the peak an instant before he spent himself. He stroked her cheek and told her how wonderful she was. The afterglow didn't last long—it never did. What had been delight quickly turned to disgust. It wasn't that Marcatrude had a strong smell or that her hair was greasy and matted. Hamnet Thyssen took no long-lasting pleasure in Raumsdalian women, either. He'd scratched an itch, and now it wouldn't trouble him for a while. That was how he looked at it.
If a woman wasn't Gudrid, she wasn't worth bothering with.
And if a woman was Gudrid . . . she wasn't worth bothering with, either.
He wondered where that left him. Nowhere good was the only answer he'd ever found. While true, it didn't seem helpful.
"Would you like to go again?" Marcatrude asked.
"Thank you, dear, but no," Hamnet answered. To make her feel better, he added, "Once with you is like twice with anybody else."
"You do say sweet things," she told him, so at least he was a successful hypocrite. She didn't seem particularly put out with him for not rising to the occasion again. He had gray in his beard, so how surprising was it that once sufficed for him? Marcatrude asked, "Will you spend the night with me?"
Was that fondness, or did she aim to steal what she could while he slept? "I will," he said. "But in the morning, if anything of mine is missing, I will make you unhappy. I know how to do that, too. Do you believe me?"
If she were a man, he would have insulted her by being so blunt. But a man, even one who wasn't a mammoth-herder himself, could speak as he pleased to a Bizogot woman. Marcatrude's nod said the thought of thievery did cross her mind. "If I don't steal, will you give me something to remember you by?" she asked.
"Maybe I already did," he said, and she made a wry face at him. She might remember him very well indeed nine months from now. But that wasn't what she meant, and he knew it. He went on, "I will—if you don't."
"I said that," she told him, and pulled more skins over both of them, enough to keep them warm even though they were naked. Then she blew out the lamp. The darkness that had been hovering at the top of the tent and near the edges spread its wings and swooped.
He couldn't recall the last time he actually slept with a woman. Marcatrude's smooth warmth proved a bigger distraction than he expected. And in that darkness absolute, she could have been anyone, anyone at all, even.. . His arms tightened around her. She laughed, deep in her throat. Maybe she'd had that in mind, too.
After the second round, they both fell asleep almost at once. Hamnet woke up sometime in the night. Marcatrudes arm lay on his shoulder. Her legs were twined with his. She murmured when he disentangled them, but didn't really rouse. He lay awake a long time himself.
When morning came, he checked carefully, but found himself unplundered. He gave her a silverpiece with Sigvat IIs beaky profile on it. Bizogots didn't mint coins, but they used the ones they got in trade from lands farther south.
"I thank you," she said. "May your travels farewell. I will remember you."
"And I you." Hamnet Thyssen told the truth, as he usually did. He joined with women seldom enough these days to make each of them stand out in his mind.
When the travelers rode north, Gudrid guided her horse next to Ham-net's. He didn't want her attentions. When he tried to steer away from her, though, she rode after him. "Well?" she said, a certain malicious relish in her voice.