"Do you hear them, your Ferocity?" Ulric Skakki asked.
"I'd have to be deaf not to," Trasamund answered, which was true enough. "They both had nightmares. So what?" He was not going to be impressed. No matter what happened, he wouldn't be—he was too determined.
"No, by God," Count Hamnet said. "They didn't have nightmares. They had the same nightmare. Do you think that's good news?"
"I don't think I can do much about it any which way," Trasamund said, and that was also true. He yawned—not quite theatrically, but not quite naturally either. "About the only thing I can do that will help at all is go back to sleep, so I will . . . if the rest of you let me." He rolled himself in his blanket and turned his back on the fire—and on the rest of the travelers.
"What was it?" Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, who lay closer to him than Audun Gilli did.
Whatever it was, it shook her enough to make her forget their quarrel. "It was . . . bad," she answered. "It was coming for us. I don't know what it would have done. I didn't want to find out. Maybe I was lucky I screamed myself awake."
"Maybe you were," Hamnet said. "If it comes onus in the waking world, can we get away so easily?"
"The waking world and the other one are less separate than you seem to think," the shaman said. "They touch, they blend, they mingle. You can't always say for sure that something is part of the one but not of the other."
Being a man who liked things neat and orderly, with each one in its proper slot, Hamnet Thyssen would like to have argued with her. Here in this land beyond the Glacier, here with the chill of winter in his heart, he found he couldn't. He couldn't sleep again, either, despite the snores rising from Trasamund.
The Bizogot jarl headed back toward the Gap faster than he'd gone before. No matter what he said there in the darkness, he worried about what Audun Gilli and Liv sensed, too.
Everything seemed normal for the next couple of days. Trasamund swore when a herd of mammoths crossed the travelers' path. A moment later, he swore again, in awe and amazement. The great beasts carried men atop them.
XI
When Trasamund's curses ran dry, he said, "But they can't do that." Hamnet Thyssen was inclined to agree with him. The idea of herding woolly mammoths was astonishing enough from a Raumsdalian point of view. The idea of taming them to the point where they could be ridden . .. Count Hamnet didn't know whether to be impressed or appalled. He ended up both at once, a stew of emotions that left him queasy.
Some of the mammoth-riders carried lances long enough to skewer someone in front of their enormous mounts. Count Hamnet wouldn't have wanted to try that—how much did one of those things weigh? Others had quivers on their backs. Still others seemed unarmed. After a bit, Hamnet saw that they were the men actually in charge of controlling the mammoths. They had iron-tipped bone goads with which they whacked the enormous animals to get them to do what they wanted.
What they wanted, right then, was to get a closer look at the travelers from the far side of the Glacier. The column of woolly mammoths swung into a line and bore down upon the Raumsdalians and Bizogots as smoothly as one of the Emperor's cavalry squadrons.
"Will you look at that?" Trasamund murmured. "Will you look at that?" He sounded as overwhelmed, and as full of yearning, as a boy on the edge of manhood staring at a beautiful woman and contemplating wonderful things he'd never imagined before. His eyes were as big and wide as the youth's might have been, too.
Hamnet Thyssen did not expect he would ever master the art of riding mammoths. He didn't feel he was suffering any great loss, either. His attention focused not on the shaggy beasts but on the men who rode them.
He did not like their looks. The closer they came, the less he liked it. They were not unhandsome—just the opposite, in a fierce half-eagle, half-lion sort of way. They had swarthy skins, big scimitar noses, proud cheekbones, and gleaming dark eyes. They wore their black beards in elaborate curled waves that rippled halfway down their chests, and their hair in neat buns at the napes of their necks.
Those gleaming eyes, though .. . Hamnet hoped his imagination was running away with him, but he did not like what he thought he saw in them. The Bizogots were hard. They had to be, living where they did, where so many things were so scarce. They mostly weren't cruel for the sake of cruelty. Hamnet Thyssen wasn't so sure about these strangers.
One of the men cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted something. To Hamnet's ear, it was just guttural nonsense. "I am sorry, my friends, but I don't understand you," Eyvind Torfinn answered in Raumsdalian.
"Do you speak my tongue?" Trasamund called in the Bizogot language.
More harsh-sounding gibberish came from the strangers. Eyvind and the Bizogot jarl both spread their hands to show they could make no sense of it. Ulric Skakki rode up alongside Count Hamnet and said, "I wonder if they would understand if Audun or Liv hooted like an owl."
"I wouldn't be surprised," Hamnet answered.
One of the strangers got down from his mammoth and approached the travelers from beyond the Glacier. He used the beast's long hair for handholds. The mammoth let him, which impressed Hamnet of itself. The man wasn't very tall, but he had some of the widest shoulders Hamnet had ever seen. He was built like a brick, all muscle everywhere.
He wore furs and leather, as the Bizogots did, but there the resemblance ended. The Bizogots wore clothes that fit tightly, while his jacket and trousers were loose and baggy, perhaps to let him stuff in extra padding if he wanted to. He had on enormous felt boots, into which he tucked the bottoms of his trousers. With footgear so large, his gait was more waddle than walk, but it was an impressive waddle.
He stopped about twenty feet in front of Trasamund and said something. "I don't understand you," the Bizogot jarl said.
Hamnet Thyssen didn't understand him, either, but he had a pretty good notion of what the stranger was saying. If it wasn't something like Who are you and what the demon are you doing on my land? he would have been very surprised.
The stranger paused and scowled. He looked as if he hated everyone in the world, but especially Trasamund. He said the same thing over again, louder this time. He seemed to think everybody ought to understand his language, and ought to speak it, too.
"I still don't understand you," Trasamund told him.
This time, the noises the stranger made were different. They seemed angrier—no mean feat, when his whole vocabulary sounded angry. Either he was calling the jarl several different kinds of idiot or he was swearing at him—maybe both at once.
Audun Gilli rode forward a few paces. The stranger snarled something that sounded vile at him, too, and jumped back and drew a long, straight sword. Its highly polished edge glittered in the sunlight. He stood ready to fight and kill, ready to attack, even though Audun was surely the most inoffensive-looking of the travelers.
"No, no." Audun even sounded inoffensive, which Trasamund might not have. "You misunderstand, my friend. I come in peace." He held up his right hand, palm open—a gesture anyone on the far side of the Glacier, from the Bizogots to the folk who dwelt in the hot countries well south of the Raumsdalian Empire, would have understood.
If this stranger understood it, he didn't want to let on. He growled something that sounded unflattering. He brandished the sword again, but didn't rush the wizard. He looked even more scornful than he had when he was snarling at Trasamund. Maybe that was because Audun seemed so inoffensive; the Bizogot, at least, pretty plainly knew how to take care of himself.
Then Audun said, "I am a sorcerer." If Hamnet Thyssen had known he was going to do that, he would have tried to stop him—he didn't want to show these people too much (or anything at all) before he had to. He was briefly relieved to remember that the stranger seemed to know no Raumsdalian. "Maybe I can find a spell to let us understand each other," Audun went on, as if doing his best to give Count Hamnet heart failure.