The jarl frowned. "Me? Probably not much, not by my lonesome. It's a long way off, and . .." His voice trailed away. He sent Ulric Skakki a perfectly poisonous glare. "You have a nasty way of making your point."
"Ah, God bless you, your Ferocity. You say the sweetest things," Ulric crooned. Trasamund muttered into his beard. Not for the first time, Ulric's gratitude for things that weren't meant as compliments succeeded in confusing the person who'd aimed the unpleasantry his way.
"He's right, I'm afraid," Hamnet Thyssen said gloomily. "When the Rulers bump up against these clans, they'll worry about them. Till then, folk from the far side of the Glacier don't seem real to them."
"But they ought to," Trasamund said. "You Raumsdalians can see the problem even though it isn't right on top of you."
"Well, we've gone beyond the Glacier, too," Hamnet said. "We hope the Emperor will see it. But you need to remember—" He broke off, not wanting to offend the jarl.
"Remember what?" Trasamund asked. "What, by God?"
Hamnet Thyssen knew he needed to pick his words with care. What he meant was that the Bizogots were nothing but barbarians, and so of course they didn't worry much about what would happen in a few months. No matter what he meant, he didn't want to say that. For one thing, it would anger Trasamund. For another, he had no guarantee that the future meant anything more to Sigvat II than it did to a fleabitten mammoth-herder.
He scratched. Plenty of fleas had bitten him, too. Flow he looked forward to a long soak and, best of all, to clean clothes!
He still had to answer Trasamund, who waited impatiently. "You need to remember, the Rulers will seem less real to the Emperor than even to your own folk. Nidaros is much farther away from the Gap than your camps are."
"And so the Raumsdalians will try to use the Bizogots as a shield, the way they bribe the southern clans now to help hold out the fiercer men from the north." Trasamund thumped his own chest with a big, hard fist, reminding Count Hamnet he was one of those fiercer men himself.
"How can you imagine we would do such a thing?" Hamnet said, as innocently as he could.
The Bizogot jarl laughed in his face. "By God, your Grace, I would if I lived in Sigvats palace. We are mammoth-herders—you think you can get away with being Bizogot-herders. But there is a difference. The mammoths don't know what we're doing to them. Bizogots aren't blind men, or deaf men, either. Sooner or later, you Raumsdalians will be sorry."
He was likely to be right. No, he was bound to be right. Once upon a time, back in the days when history and legend blurred together, the Raumsdalians had roamed the frozen steppe (in those days, it ran much farther south than it did now). Hamnet Thyssen's distant ancestors had torn the meat from the bones of the empire that preceded Raumsdalia. One of these days, maybe the Bizogots would storm Nidaros and set up their own kingdom on its ruins.
Or maybe the Rulers would swarm down through the Gap and beat the Bizogots to the punch. Hamnet Thyssen didn't know that the barbarians from the far side of the Glacier could do any such thing. He didn't know they could, no. But he didn't know they couldn't, either, and that worried him.
"I can see that the Rulers are a danger," Trasamund said. "If Sigvat II can't, maybe he doesn't deserve to be Emperor anymore. Maybe something will happen so he isn't. One thing God does—he makes sure fools pay for their folly."
"Well, you're right about that." Hamnet wasn't thinking about Sigvat and the Rulers.
"Liv . . . likes you." Now Trasamund spoke hesitantly. Even a jarl took care talking about a shaman.
"Yes," Hamnet said. "I like her, too."
"Be careful with her. I don't want her hurt. She isn't just a good shaman. She's a good Bizogot, and a good woman, too."
"If she weren't a good woman, I wouldn't like her the way I do." Hamnet Thyssen hoped that was true.
"If you were a Bizogot.. ." Trasamund's voice trailed off. A moment later, he tried again, saying, "If you were a Three Tusk Bizogot. . ."
"I'm not," Hamnet said. "I'm never going to be. You know that as well as I do, your Ferocity. I don't expect Liv to turn into a Raumsdalian. That won't happen either. I know it."
"I should say not. But she would lose something if she turned into one of your folk. You would gain something if you turned into a Bizogot."
"My folk would say it the other way around, you know," Count Hamnet said. Trasamund laughed uproariously. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Hamnet Thyssen had known he would. If barbarians recognized that they were barbarians, they wouldn't be so barbarous any more.
He, of course, was right and full of reason when he declined to think about becoming a Bizogot. That was as plain as the nose on his face. At the moment, the nose on his face had a muffler over it, to keep the blizzards from freezing it off him. He rode on toward the south, but winter rode ahead of him.
In spring, Sudertorp Lake had been a marvelous place, full of ducks and geese and swans and waders and shore scuttlers—every manner of bird that lived in or near the water seemed to want to breed in the bushes and marshes and reeds that lined the immense meltwater lake. In winter, though .. . Hamnet Thyssen had never seen Sudertorp Lake in the wintertime before. He was sorry to see it now.
Under a gray sky, the water and ice of Sudertorp Lake in winter were the color of phlegm. The north wind—the Breath of God—whipped the water to waves and whitecaps that tossed sullenly. . . where they could. Toward the shore, the surface of the lake was frozen. Count Hamnet supposed the ice would advance across the water till the turning of the sun made it retreat once more.
Right now, that turning looked a long way off, a long, long way indeed.
The bushes and reeds and rushes were yellow and brown and dead. The turning of the sun would also bring them back to life, but that seemed likelier to be legend than truth. Hamnet would have been sure of it if he hadn't come through here in the springtime.
In spring, the Leaping Lynx clan camped by the eastern shore of Sudertorp Lake. The Bizogots of that clan lived off the fat of the land then. So many birds bred and foraged here, a clan's worth of hunting mattered no more to them than a mosquito bite to a man.
In winter, though, the Leaping Lynxes' lakeside houses stood empty. The Bizogots had to go forth and follow their herds and flocks like any other clan. Trasamund surveyed the empty stone buildings with a certain somber satisfaction. "Serves them right—you know what I mean?" he said. "In the springtime, Riccimir gets above himself. He might as well be a Raumsdalian."
"A Raumsdalian?" Ulric Skakki said.
"That's right." Trasamund nodded. "He doesn't have to move around so much, so he thinks he's better than the people who do."
"If I thought not moving around made me better, would I have gone beyond the Glacier?" Ulric asked. "Twice?" he asked to himself.
"But you are a man of sense," the Bizogot jarl said. "Riccimir is an overstuffed mammoth turd."
"What does he call you?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.
"Who cares?" Trasamund answered, which might have meant he truly didn't care or might have meant he couldn't see the boot might fit on the other foot as well. Hamnet would have bet on the latter; Trasamund was better at seeing other peoples weaknesses than at noting his own.
The travelers came upon the Leaping Lynxes' winter encampment, their wandering encampment, a day after the pause by Sudertorp Lake. It seemed like any other Bizogot camp—but, then again, it didn't. The mammoth-herders were doing the same sort of things as all their fellows did, and doing them about as well as the other Bizogots did. But every other clan