He and his comrades squeezed their way onto the benches at a long table near the hearth. Merchants sat closer together to make room for them. Half a dozen men asked one of two questions—"Where are you from?" and "Where are you bound?"—at more or less the same time.
Before answering, Trasamund shouted an order for a fat roast goose. A passing barmaid waved to show she heard. "And mead!" Trasamund added. "Plenty of mead, by God!" The woman waved again.
"We're out of Nidaros, heading for the lands of the Three Tusk clan and the Gap," Ulric Skakki said.
That couldn't have been better calculated to make everyone else blink and gape. "At this season of the year?" asked a grizzled merchant who found his tongue sooner than the rest. "What will you do there? Besides freeze, I mean?"
Ulric looked not at Trasamund but at Hamnet Thyssen. Why not? Ham-net thought. The more who know, the better. If Sigvat doesn't like it, too bad for him. "Some of you will have heard the Gap has melted through," he said. "It's true. There's land beyond the Glacier. There are folk beyond the Glacier, too—the Rulers, they call themselves. They're warlike and dangerous. Chances are they'll try to come down into the country we know. We aim to try to stop them."
"You by yourselves?" The gray-bearded trader laughed raucously.
Audun Gilli murmured to himself. Count Hamnet thought his chant sounded familiar. He was right, too. A moment later, the merchant's plate grew a face that looked like a twisted version of his own. "You wouldn't have the ballocks to come along, that's certain sure," it jeered.
He stared at it. So did several of the men around him. Their laughs were even coarser than his had been. He picked up his pewter mug and slammed it down on the plate, which shattered like the cheap earthenware it was—or had been.
"You'll pay for that, by God!" a barmaid said. "You can't go breaking crockery for the fun of it."
"It called me a coward!" the trader exclaimed.
The barmaid rolled her eyes. "I didn't figure you for one who saw snakes and demons when he put down too much ale," she said. "Only shows I'm not as smart as I thought I was, doesn't it?" She strutted away, swiveling her hips in magnificent scorn.
Another merchant turned to Hamnet and said, "Next thing you'll tell me is that you went and found the Golden Shrine off beyond the Glacier."
"No." He shook his head. "We looked, but we didn't see any sign of it. It may be there, or it may not. I can't tell you one way or the other."
"I'd like to go back and look again," Ulric Skakki added. "I didn't believe there was any such thing till I went beyond the Glacier. I didn't believe you could go beyond the Glacier till I went and did it."
"Neither did I," Hamnet Thyssen said.
"Nor I," Trasamund rumbled. "I didn't know what would happen when I rode up into the narrowest part of the Gap the first time. But I kept going, and I found there was another side after all."
"What about the—what did you call them?—the Rulers, that was it?" yet another trader asked.
"Yes, the Rulers," Count Hamnet said. "What about them? They're dangerous, that's what. For one thing, they ride mammoths to war. They carry lancers and archers aboard the beasts. For another, they're stronger wizards than any we have on this side of the Glacier."
"That's so," Audun Gilli said quietly.
"It is," Liv agreed in her deliberate, newly acquired Raumsdalian.
"The other reason the Rulers are dangerous is that they're sure God or whatever they worship wants them to go out and rule all the other folk around them," Ulric Skakki said. "They don't want to talk to other folk. They just want to tell them what to do. And they may be tough enough to get away with it, too."
"Huh!" the trader said. "They haven't bumped into Raumsdalians before."
"Or Bizogots." Trasamund's tone and the warning gleam in his eye challenged the merchant to argue with him.
The man didn't rise to the challenge. "Or Bizogots," he said quickly. Trasamund subsided.
"Why isn't the Emperor doing anything about these Rulers?" somebody said.
"You would have to ask his Majesty about that." But Hamnet couldn't leave it there. "I wish he would have seemed more interested," he added.
"You .. . talked to him?" the merchant said slowly.
"I talked to him." Hamnet's voice was hard as stone, cold as the snowdrifts outside. He waited to see if the merchant called him a liar, and how. Whether the man went on breathing after that depended on such things.
Before the trader could speak, Ulric Skakki said, "This is the famous Count Hamnet Thyssen. If he says a thing is so, you may rely on it. You'd better rely on it."
Some of the men at the long table had plainly never heard of Hamnet Thyssen, famous or not. To others, he was famous for the wrong thing. "He's the one whose wife . . ." one of them whispered to his neighbor, not quite quietly enough. The trader who'd asked if Hamnet had spoken to the Emperor didn't challenge him. Part of him was relieved, part disappointed. Sometimes fighting was simpler than talking.
"What can we do about the, uh, Rulers?" a merchant asked.
That meant more talking. Count Hamnet sighed. Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn't. "Spread the word," he said. "The more people who know trouble's coming, the more who know what kind of trouble it is, the better off we'll be." He could hope that was true, anyhow.
He paid the serai-keeper extra for a private room with Liv. "Do you think they believed you?" she asked as they got ready for bed. "Or was it all another travelers tale to them?"
"Some of them believe some of it, anyhow." Hamnet smiled at his convoluted answer. "Maybe spreading the news will do some good. Maybe some more people will ask Sigvat questions he doesn't want to hear. That may help, too. Who knows? Who knows if anything we do means anything at all?"
Liv lay down on the bed. The frame creaked under her weight. "I've got used to sleeping soft," she said. "It won't be so easy to lie on a mat or wrapped in a hide on the ground when we get back to the Bizogot country."
Hamnet lay down beside her. "Well, then," he said, "you can always lie on me instead."
Her eyes glinted. "I can do that now." She blew out the lamp. And she did.
Twice up the Great North Road in the same year. Twice up into the Bizogot country. Count Hamnet had stayed in his castle most of the time after Gudrid left him. He traveled because he had to, not because he enjoyed it for its own sake. He would get where he was going, and he would try to do what needed doing.
Ulric Skakki, now, savored each new day, each new sight. He couldn't stand doing the same thing all the time. Everything interested him—the fading of the fields, the approach of the forest that stretched north to the tree line. Trasamund and Liv were the same way. They were nomads from a nomad folk. Where Ulric came by his wanderlust was harder to fathom.
Audun Gilli? The wizard was always hard to fathom, at least for Hamnet. He rode along, never saying much. Sometimes he got drunk when the travelers stopped at a serai. If he did it all the time, Hamnet would have tried to make him stop or sent him back to Nidaros. But he didn't. Some nights he stayed sober. If he drank for amusement and not because he had to, Count Hamnet didn't see that he had any business complaining.
Serais grew fewer, too. They'd done the same thing the last time Hamnet came north, but he didn't notice it so much then. In spring, mosquitoes were the only things wrong with camping outdoors. They could come inside, too, as he had reason to know. If you didn't have a good notion of what you were doing during the winter, though, you could easily freeze to death—and the more easily the farther north you went.