Hamnet Thyssen, meanwhile, still stared, but not at Gudrid anymore. He looked into the fire, marveling at his own blindness. So that's it, he thought.
When he'd made love with Gudrid, especially toward the end when the two of them were falling apart, he'd always had to win a fight before she gave in. It wasn't physical; sometimes it wasn't even verbal. But it was always there between them—the idea that he had to overcome her before she yielded herself to him. He'd got used to it, to the point where it became part of what he thought of as lovemaking.
With Liv, it wasn't there. It didn't need to be there. As far as he could tell, she really wanted him. She didn't have to be persuaded or coerced or whatever the right word was. She just. .. wanted him. And if the missing frisson of winning the fight stayed missing . . .
"Well, goodbye to it," Hamnet muttered. If that was what his trouble was, he didn't need it, not one bit.
Like mountain ranges farther south, the Glacier didn't waste much time shouldering its way up over the horizon. As soon as the snowstorm blew through and clear weather returned, there it was. The sweep to the south that marked the Gap lay almost exactly in the direction where Trasamund and Audun Gilli had said it would. Gudrid maintained a discreet silence.
A short-eared fox trotted along just out of bowshot of Hamnet Thyssen, then streaked off after a hare. Both beasts were losing their summer coats and going to winter white. Before long, only their noses and eyes would mark them against the drifted snow.
Every night seemed longer and darker than the one before. The Northern Lights began to dance, higher in the sky than Hamnet Thyssen had ever seen them. "I wonder what makes them," he murmured to Liv as they lay side by side under a mammoth skin.
"We say God warms His hands with them," Liv told him. He liked the poetry of the answer. He also liked the way Liv found to warm her hands a little later. If they were cold, they would have heated; that part of him, lately, had felt as if it were on fire. He hadn't realized a man his age could do so much. Of course, for several years he hadn't wanted to do much at all.
Birds went white for the winter, too. A snowy owl swooped down on a ptarmigan the next morning and carried it away. Count Hamnet hadn't noticed the ptarmigan, but the owl did.
Higher and higher rose the Glacier—and then it vanished as another snowstorm blew down on the travelers from behind. This one would have been a formidable blizzard in Nidaros, but the Bizogots took it in stride. That made the Raumsdalians try to do the same, lest Trasamund and Liv think them soft.
"Was it like this when you came up here before?" Hamnet asked Ulric Skakki. With the wind roaring and moaning, the only way to talk was to ride close together and bawl in each other's ears.
"No," Ulric answered. "It was worse."
"By God!" Hamnet said. "How?"
Ulric Skakki's hat came down over his forehead. A wool muffler covered his mouth and nose. Only his eyes were exposed to the weather. People said eyes by themselves didn't show much. They'd never seen his. "Believe me, your Grace, it had no trouble at all," he said. "The wind doesn't always blow toward the Glacier. Sometimes it comes down off it. Sometimes the wind blowing toward it runs smack into the wind coming down off it. If you think this is bad, imagine a tornado full of snow."
"I'd rather not," Hamnet Thyssen said. Down in the southern part of the Raumsdalian Empire, tornadoes could level a town or scatter a castle's stones across the countryside. Some of those stones had to weigh as much as a mammoth. The savage winds picked them up and flung them anyway.
No wonder weatherworkers have so much trouble, Hamnet thought. How could a mere man hope to control anything so strong?
Ulric Skakki's thoughts ran in a different direction. "When we get down to the right side of the Glacier," he said, "do you think anyone will believe us when we tell people what we've found?"
"The Bizogots will," Hamnet said. "They don't complicate things that don't need to be complicated."
"Or sometimes even things that do," Ulric said. "And the Bizogots move by clan, not as one folk. Even if they do believe, how much good will it do us? They'll spend more time quarreling among themselves than doing anything about the Rulers."
As far as Hamnet Thyssen was concerned, the Bizogots' disunity was a boon for the empire. If they ever found a jarl who could unite them all, they might prove deadly dangerous to Raumsdalia. They might also prove deadly dangerous if they decided to join the Rulers instead of fighting them.
"Will his Majesty pay attention to the word we bring?" Ulric Skakki persisted.
"He sent out this expedition. He let some of his guardsmen come along with it," Hamnet Thyssen said. And how had Gudrid managed that? Did she sleep with Sigvat to persuade him? Hamnet forced his mind back to the question at hand. "If the Emperor isn't convinced—"
"We're all in trouble," Ulric finished for him.
"Maybe. Maybe not, too," Hamnet said. "All we know about the Rulers is from their bragging and the little we saw."
"They don't just herd mammoths. They really tame them, the way we tame horses," Ulric said. "Samoth is a stronger wizard than Audun Gilli dreams of being."
"Well, yes." Hamnet Thyssen looked around to make sure Audun was out of earshot. "But how much does that say about the one, and how much does it say about the other?"
Ulric Skakki gave him a dirty look—and well he might have, when he'd dragged Audun Gilli from the gutter for the journey beyond the Glacier. "Audun will be fine when we really need him."
"I hope so. We all hope so," Count Hamnet said. "But the Rulers are a problem, and you're right—no one who hasn't seen them can understand how big a problem they could be."
"Well, that may take care of itself," Ulric said.
Hamnet frowned. "How do you mean?"
"By next year, chances are that everyone will have seen them, don't you think?" Ulric said. Hamnet only grunted, like a man who takes a fist in the pit of the stomach. Ulric Skakki seemed to think that a full answer. And so perhaps it was.
Before long, Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether he and the other travelers would make it back to the Gap, let alone through the narrow opening that was the only way home. The two sides of the divided Glacier shaped a funnel with that opening as the sole outlet. All the bad weather beyond the Glacier seemed to pour into the funnel—and had no way out.
Snow piled up thick on the ground. This, sages said, was how the Glacier formed in the first place—snow that fell faster than it melted, that never melted from year to year, that hardened into the solid Glacier as the weight of more snow above it squeezed out the air. Finding or forcing a way through got harder by the day.
"Are we going to have to wait till the blizzards stop?" Hamnet asked Trasamund.
"I hope not," the Bizogot answered. Hamnet Thyssen had wanted more. Maybe his face said as much, for Trasamund went on, "This is new for me, too, you know. I'm used to weather that has more, ah, room to move around."
"Think on the bright side," Jesper Fletti said. "If we freeze to death or starve to death up here, chances are the Rulers will, too."
"Oh, joy." Hamnet Thyssen did not like Jesper, and so he took a certain sour pleasure in showing up the other man. "That isn't so, anyhow. The Rulers aren't likely to come through the Gap during winter. Chances are they'll travel when the weather is good—or as good as it gets up here."
Like the rest of the travelers, Jesper was bundled up so only his eyes and a bit of his forehead and the bridge of his nose were exposed to the air. By the way his rime-whitened eyebrows came down and pulled together at the center, Count Hamnet's dart hit home.