"Well, what?" he asked. If she got it out of her system, maybe she would go away and leave him alone.
"How was it, touching her with one hand and holding your nose with the other?"
He looked at her. He looked through her. "Better than attar of roses," he said.
If she slapped him this time, he intended to deck her. If Jesper Fletti didn't like it, Hamnet intended to deck him, too, or do whatever else he needed to do. But Gudrid only laughed. "Who would have thought you'd turn into a liar?" she said, and rode off.
Count Hamnet stared after her. She wasn't altogether wrong. And yet.. . Even if he wasn't immune to her, he knew she was poisonous. And the Bizogot girl wasn't. In that sense, he'd told Gudrid nothing but the truth.
As they drew closer to the Glacier, they found they'd outrun spring. Sooner or later, the warm winds from the south would make it up to the very edge of the ice. A new meltwater lake was forming, there where the Glacier retreated. Grass and shrubs and flowers would burst forth from the ground for a few weeks. Streams would melt. Midges and mites and mosquitoes would buzz and breed with desperate urgency. And, when the season ended, the Glacier would have moved a few feet farther north than it had been the year before.
But spring wasn't here yet. By the look of the ground and the feel of the air, it wouldn't get here any time soon, either. Thick gray clouds blowing down from the north hid the sun. Snow lay on every north-facing slope, and on some ground that didn't face north. The hares that dug through the snow for dead grass from the last brief summer stayed white, though their cousins farther south were going brown. The foxes that hunted them were also white.
Wolves remained gray. The travelers saw a small pack of dire wolves trotting along in search of anything they could eat, from rabbits to musk oxen. The wolves saw them, too, or scented them, and came over for a closer look. Unlike the pack the travelers had met earlier, these wolves seemed to decide right away that they were more trouble than they were worth—or maybe these wolves weren't so hungry, and didn't need to press an attack. After shadowing the travelers for a while, the dire wolves loped off across the frozen plain.
"I am not sorry to see them go, the miserable, skulking things," Jesper Fletti said.
"Neither am I," Ulric Skakki said. "If they had lawyers instead of teeth, they'd be as bad as people."
Jesper gave him a puzzled look. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"What it says. I commonly say what I mean. Don't you?" Ulric was the picture of innocence. Jesper Fletti scratched his head but decided to let it drop.
"Do you enjoy baiting him?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.
"Some," Ulric answered. "He's not as much fun as you are, because he hasn't got the brains to shoot back."
"I'd think that would make him more fun, not less," Count Hamnet said.
"No, no, no." Ulric Skakki shook his head. "No sport to it."
"I see." Hamnet bowed in the saddle. "So glad to provide you with amusement. If you ever get bored with me, you can always pull the wings and legs off flies." He slapped at himself. "Enough of them at this season of the year. Too many, in fact."
Ulric slapped, too. "Way too bloody many, if anyone wants to knowwhat I think. They don't just take pain, either, the way Jesper does—they give it out, too. That makes it a fair fight."
"If you want to be on the receiving end, you can always quarrel with dear Gudrid," Hamnet said.
"No, thanks," Ulric answered. "I'd be the unarmed one there." His shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather. "Meaning no disrespect, your Grace, but I don't know what you saw in her. Well, I know what you saw— she's a fine-looking woman, even now. But I don't know how you put up with her as long as you did."
"Everything was fine—everything was wonderful—till all of a sudden it wasn't." That was as much as Hamnet Thyssen had said about the downfall of his marriage since Gudrid left him. He scowled at Ulric Skakki, wondering how the other man tricked the words out of him. Ulric stared back blandly, as if to say he had nothing to do with it.
And, listening to himself, Hamnet Thyssen realized he'd been a fool to believe that then, and was a bigger fool if he still believed it now. Things couldn't have been all right between him and Gudrid, even if he failed to notice anything wrong. A happy spouse didn't start running around for no reason at all—which could only mean Gudrid hadn't been happy long before he realized she wasn't. How many lovers did she have that he never suspected?
Maybe things would have been different if she'd had a child or two in the first few years they were married. Well, things certainly would have been different if she had. Maybe they would have been better. He'd never know now.
Off in the distance, a bull mammoth wandered by itself. The bad bulls were probably the most dangerous animals on the frozen steppe. They were fierce and clever and swift and strong and very hard to kill.
Ulric Skakki kept looking from the woolly mammoth to Hamnet and back again. That almost made Hamnet laugh. He was strong and swift, and could be fierce. He dared hope he was hard to kill. Clever? Hadn't he just proved himself a fool in his own eyes? Didn't a teratorn, a bird that needed no more in the way of brains than what was required to sneak up on a corpse, have wits sharper than his? So it seemed to him, anyhow.
"May I ask you something else, your Grace?" Ulric said.
Harshly, Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "Go ahead."
"Do you know why your, ah, formerly beloved took it into her head to come up here?"
"By God, I don't," Hamnet exploded. "Because she does what she pleases when she pleases, and worries about it later if she ever worries about it at all. Any other questions?"
"Why didn't you kill her? You must have had your chances."
The answer to that seemed much too clear. "Because I'm a fool."
"Soon, now," Trasamund said. "Soon we enter the grazing grounds of the Three Tusk Bizogots, the grandest land God ever made." He sat up straight on his horse and puffed out his chest. He felt grand himself, and he wanted the world to know he felt grand.
Hamnet Thyssen, on the other hand, had to work to hold his face straight. He didn't know exactly where the grandest land God ever made lay, but he thought it had to be somewhere south of the Raumsdalian Empire. The Empire was far enough south for farming to be possible through most of it, though its northern reaches lay beyond the limits of agriculture. Its strength lay less in its soil than in its people. They were tested by adversity—and by raids from the Bizogots, from farther north still.
Were the rest of the Raumsdalians here thinking the same thing? Count Hamnet didn't see how they could think anything else. Yet not a one of them, not even Jesper Fletti, not even Gudrid, said a word. For one thing, whether this was God's country or not, it wasn't theirs. They needed help from the Bizogots if they were to keep on pushing north, up through the Gap. For another. . .
For another, whether this was God's country or not, spring did eventually reach it. Warm—well, warmer—breezes blew up from the south, driving back the clouds and mist and spatters of snow and sleet that had dogged the travelers for so long. The sun shone from a blue sky. If the blue was watery, if the sun didn't climb as high above the southern horizon as it did even down in Nidaros, those were details. When the clouds receded, when the mist retreated, when the sun shone, the travelers got their first clear look at something they never would have seen if they stayed down in the Empire.
The Glacier.
That wall of ice to the north might have been a mountain range. It stood as tall as many mountains. Did it reach a mile up into the sky? Two miles? Three? Hamnet Thyssen couldn't say. Here and there, storms blew dust and dirt over it, so that from a distance it looked as if it might be made of rock and soil.