"South winds in the winter?" A smile bright as the sun, and much warmer, still lit Liv's face. It might have been the funniest thing she'd ever heard. "In the winter, in Three Tusk country, there is no wind. Or, more often, there is the Breath of God." She gave a melodramatic shiver. "Now you have met the Breath of God in truth."
"A lazy wind," Hamnet Thyssen agreed gravely.
"Lazy?" Liv started to scorch him, but then very visibly checked herself. "Wait. You mean something by that. Tell me what."
"What we call a lazy wind is one that blows straight through you because going around is too much bother."
"Ah." She thought it over. After a few heartbeats, her smile came back— she must have decided she liked it. "Truth. That is a truth. Has Trasamund heard it?"
"I don't know," Hamnet answered. "If he has, he hasn't heard it from me."
Liv called to the jarl. "What is it?" Trasamund rumbled.
"Do you know what a lazy wind is?" Liv asked.
"Is that what happens when Jesper Fletti talks?" Trasamund said with a sly grin. Jesper wasn't close enough to hear himself slandered. If he had been, if he'd chosen to take offense .. . Count Hamnet would have bet on Trasamund in a fight.
Liv made a face at her clan chief. "No," she said when they got done scowling at each other. She told him what a lazy wind was.
He weighed it. Then he nodded. "Not bad. No, not bad at all. The Raumsdalians don't lack for wit—no one would ever say they did. Some other things, maybe, but never wit. I wouldn't have come down to Nidaros for help with the Golden Shrine if I thought different." Even on that relatively warm day, steam surged from his lungs when he sighed. "Turned out we didn't need help with the Golden Shrine after all."
"Not this trip," Hamnet Thyssen said. "But chances are we'll go beyond the Glacier again. It may be there. If it is, Eyvind Torfinn knows more about it than any other man alive."
"Eyvind Torfinn knows all sorts of things," Trasamund allowed. Then he spoiled it by asking, "So why doesn't he know his wife disgraces him whenever she pleases?"
"Maybe he doesn't choose to look," Hamnet said. "That can happen, especially when a man who isn't so young has a wife who isn't so old. Or maybe he doesn't care."
"Doesn't care? Do you say he has no ballocks at all, then?" Trasamund demanded.
Count Hamnet shook his head. "No. I wondered about that myself before I got to know him on this journey, but no. He isn't a warrior—he doesn't pretend to be a warrior—but he's no craven, either."
"Well, then, what do you say?" Trasamund's frown was half anger, half incomprehension.
"That men and women and how they get along—or don't get along—are more complicated than you'd guess," Hamnet answered. "I won't judge Eyvind Torfinn, and I hope he won't judge me. Sometimes not judging someone is the biggest kindness you can do him—or her."
"It sounds very pretty," the Bizogot said. "Tell me this, then—do you not judge Gudrid?"
He was a boor, a brute, a barbarian. He was a shrewd boor, a clever brute, a sly barbarian. Hamnet Thyssen’s lips tightened. His hands also tightened on the reins, as if the leather straps were Trasamund's neck ... or possibly Gudrid's. He didn't want to answer the question, and didn't see how he could help it. "I judge her," he said after a pause he hoped wasn't too long. "Yes, I do. But just because I do, that doesn't mean someone else has to. If Eyvind Torfinn wants to, he may. If he chooses not to, who am I to tell him he should? Who are you?"
Trasamund opened his mouth. Someone who spread his wife's legs. That was what he was about to say, that or something like it. But at the last moment, instead of saying anything, he jerked his horse's head to one side and rode off.
"He shouldn't have put you through that," Liv said quietly.
"The only way I could make him stop was to kill him," Hamnet said with a shrug. "It isn't worth that. I've killed one man over Gudrid, but I was married to her then. Now? Now it's Earl Eyvind's worry, if he feels like worrying about it."
"How did it happen that you killed him?"
"About the way you'd expect. I found out he was bedding her. No room for doubt. No room to look away—I'd already done too much of that. We fought a duel. Swords. He would have killed me, too. You've seen that scar on my left arm, up near the shoulder, and the one that streaks my beard with white?"
She nodded. "Oh, yes."
"Ingjald gave me those. Ingjald Oddleif, his name was. But I killed him anyway. I was proud of myself. What a man I was! Gudrid acted like I had a cock the size of a bull mammoth's. For about a week, she acted that way. Then she went out and found somebody else to sleep with. She must have decided I wouldn't kill her."
"You loved her," Liv said.
"So I did." Hamnet Thyssen shook his head like a musk ox the Bizogots were slaughtering. They'd herded it and tended it and warded it all its life— why were they doing this to it now? The beast couldn't understand. Even after all this time, part of Hamnet couldn't, either. "So I did," he repeated heavily. "And much good it did me, eh?"
"Maybe for a while," she said.
He shook his head again. "I used to think so, but I don't any more. What good is love when the person you love is laughing behind your back? You're only fooling yourself. I was a fool. I'm not the first. I won't be the last, God knows." He rode on.
XVIII
As Liv went deeper into the Raumsdalian Empire, as the travelers made their way over to the Great North Road and went down it, she saw plenty of towns larger and finer than Naestved. Each seemed grander than the one just farther north had been. Each time, she would ask, "And is Nidaros like this?"
And each time, Hamnet Thyssen would smile and say, "No, not really. Wait till you see the capital. Then you'll understand."
But when at last they came to the city on the long-vanished shore of long-outflooded Hevring Lake, Liv could see very little, and neither could any of the rest of the weary travelers. The blizzard roaring down from the north would not have been despised in the Bizogot country—would not have been despised in the land of the Three Tusk clan. The Breath of God could reach all the way down to Nidaros and beyond. It didn't always, but it could.
Hamnet got a glimpse of Nidaros' great gray frowning walls through swirling snow, but only a glimpse. Of the towers and spires that showed above the walls in good weather, he could see nothing at all. As they neared the city, Liv said, "The wall is very tall, isn't it?" A little later, she added, "The gate seems very strong."
"It is," Hamnet said. She might as well have been examining a mammoth by closing her eyes and feeling first its trunk, then a tusk, then a leg, and finally its tail. She would know something about mammoths after she did that, but probably not as much as she thought.
The guards had as much trouble spying the travelers as Count Hamnet and Liv did seeing the city—maybe more, for the guards had to peer straight into the storm. The travelers were almost on them before they cried, "Halt! Who comes?"
"I am Earl Eyvind Torfinn," Eyvind said. "With me ride Count Hamnet Thyssen, Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk clan, and the rest of our comrades. We have come to report success to his Majesty. We have gone beyond the Glacier, and we are here to tell the tale."
"Well, they're here to tell a tale, anyhow," one of the guards said to another, not bothering to keep his voice down. "You really think there's anything beyond the Glacier?"