"You call those pingoes, don't you?" Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, pointing to one that reared a good hundred yards above the surface of the plain. A thin coating of dirt and clinging plants protected the ice core from melting in the sun.
"That is a pingo, yes," she answered. "Pingo is the name for such things in our language. That pingo is taller than most of the ones in Bizogot country."
"I wonder what makes them," Hamnet said.
"They are," the shaman responded. "How can they be made, except by God?"
"Sudertorp Lake is a lake because of meltwater from the Glacier," Hamnet said.
"Yes, of course." Liv nodded. "God made it so."
"Many, many years ago, Nidaros, the capital of the Empire, sat by the edge of Hevring Lake," Hamnet said. "Hevring Lake was a meltwater lake, too. Then it broke through the dam of earth and ice that held it, and it drained, and it made a great flood. You can still see the badlands it scoured out. One of these days, Sudertorp Lake will do the same thing."
"It maybe so, but what of it?" the Bizogot shaman said.
Stubbornly, Hamnet Thyssen answered, "The land does what it does for reasons men can see. I can understand why Hevring Lake emptied out. I can see that Sudertorp Lake will do the same thing when the Glacier moves farther north. I don't have to talk about God to do it. So what shaped a pingo?"
Liv looked at him. "Speak to me of the Glacier without speaking of God. Speak of why it moves forward and back without speaking of God. Speak of how the Gap opened without speaking of God. Speak of the Golden Shrine without speaking of God."
Count Hamnet opened his mouth, but he did not know what to say.
"You see?" Liv told him, not in triumph, but in the manner of someone who has pointed out the obvious.
"Well, maybe I do," he admitted. "Or maybe I simply don't know enough about the Glacier to speak of it without speaking or God."
"I know what your trouble is," she said. Hamnet didn't think he had trouble, or at least not trouble along those lines. No matter what he thought, the Bizogot woman went on, "You live too far south, too far from the Glacier. You do not really feel the Breath of God in the winter, when it howls down off the ice. If you did, you would not doubt."
Bizogots always spoke of the Breath of God. Count Hamnet had gone up among the mammoth-herders in winter, but never in a clan like Trasamund's that lived hard by the Glacier. He wasn't sorry. The cold he'd known was bad enough that he didn't want to find out about worse.
It was as cold outside as it was in my heart, he thought. Could anything be colder than that? He didn't believe it. He wouldn't believe it.
But he didn't want to quarrel with Liv, either, and so he said, "Well, you may be right."
"I am." She had no doubts. She reached out and tapped his arm. "Tell me this—does your shaman, that Audun Gilli, does he think terrible thoughts about God, too? If he does, how can he make magic work?"
"I do not know what Audun Gilli thinks about God," Hamnet answered. "I never worried about it."
"You never worried about God. You never worried about what he thinks of God." Liv sounded disbelieving. "You southern folk are strange indeed."
"If you want to know someone from the south who thinks about God, talk to Eyvind Torfinn," Hamnet said.
Liv rolled her eyes, which told him she already had. "He tells me more than I want to hear," she said. "He says now one thing, now another, till I don't know whether my wits are coming or going."
"You see? We cannot make you happy," Hamnet Thyssen said.
"That is not so," Liv said. "I am happy—why shouldn't I be? But I am confused about what you think. Of the two of us, you are the unhappy one."
She wasn't wrong. Hamnet tried to avoid admitting that, saying, "What I think about God has nothing to do with whether I am happy or not."
"Did I say it did?" the Bizogot shaman returned. "All I said was that you were not happy, and I was right about that. I am sorry I was right about it. People should be happy, don't you think?"
"That depends," Count Hamnet said. "Some people have more to be happy about than others."
"Do you want to be happy?" she asked, and then, with Bizogot bluntness, "Do you think I could make you happy, at least for a while?"
He couldn't very well mistake the meaning of that. He could, and did, shake his head before he even thought about it. "Thank you, but no," he said. "Women are what made me the way I am now. I do not believe the illness is also the cure."
Liv looked at him for a moment. "I am sure you were a fool before a woman ever made one of you," she said coolly, and swung her horse away from his. Even if she'd stayed next to him, he had no idea how he would have answered her.
When Liv made a point of avoiding him after that, it came as something of a relief. She gave him the uneasy feeling she knew things he didn't know, and not things her occult lore had taught her, either.
He wondered just how big a fool she thought he was. He didn't feel like a fool, not to himself. All he'd done was tell her the truth. If that was enough to anger her. . . then it was, that was all.
After Liv stayed away from him for a couple of days, Gudrid rode up alongside him. He tried to pretend she wasn't there. It didn't work. "It's your own fault," she said, sounding as certain as she always did.
"You don't know what you're talking about," Hamnet Thyssen answered stonily, but under the firm words lay a nasty fear that she really did.
Her rich, throaty laugh only made that fear worse. "Oh, yes, I do," she said. "I don't know what you see in that Bizogot wench, but plainly you see something. God couldn't tell you why—she smells like a goat."
"So does everybody up here—including you," Hamnet said. Just then, as if to mock him, the breeze brought him a faint whiff of attar of roses. If Gudrid smelled like a goat, she smelled like a perfumed goat.
He couldn't even make her angry. She just laughed some more. "As if you care," she said. "You chased her too hard, and you went and put her back up, and it serves you right."
Hamnet Thyssen gaped. That was so wrong, on so many different levels, that for a moment he had no idea how to respond to it. "You really have lost your mind," he said at last.
"I don't think so." Gudrid, in fact, sounded maddeningly sure. "I know you better than you know yourself."
"Oh, you do, do you?" Hamnet scowled at her. "Then why didn't you know what you'd do to me when you started playing the whore?"
Gudrid yawned. "I knew. I just didn't care."
He wanted to kill her. But if he did, she would die laughing at him, and he couldn't stand that. "You came all this way to torment me, didn't you?"
Gudrid buffed her nails against the wool of her tunic—an artful display. Everything she did seemed carefully calculated to drive him mad. "Well, I wasn't doing anything else when Eyvind decided to come," she answered.
Cursing, Hamnet Thyssen rode away from her. He really might have tried to murder her had she followed. She didn't, but her laughter pursued him.
As they did south of the Glacier, woolly mammoths roamed the plains here. The travelers gave them a wide berth. Hamnet would not have wanted to go mammoth hunting with the men and weapons they had along, if they were starving, if no other food presented itself—then, maybe. As things were, he found the great beasts better admired at a distance.
"Mammoths make me believe in God," Trasamund said one bright midnight. The Bizogot jarl was roasting a chunk of meat from one of the swarms of deer that shared the plain with the mammoths. "They truly do. How could mammoths make themselves? God had to do it."