Ulric did eat some more, then mimed pulling down his trousers. Totila laughed harder than ever. In Raumsdalian, Hamnet Thyssen said, "I see you've found your true level."
"I'll cut your heart out and eat it for that," Ulric answered. "And what kind of fool will I act like then?"
"A jealous fool, I'd say," Hamnet answered. "And I ought to know about those." He remembered the feel of his point grating off the ribs of Gudrid's first lover—the first one he found out about, anyhow—and then sliding deep to pierce the man's heart. He remembered the anguished surprise on Ingjald Oddleif's face. This can't be happening to me, he must have thought, there at the end. But it was.
Totila found girls for Trasamund and Ulric Skakki. He would have found one for Audun Gilli, too, but the wizard was using the bits of the Bizogot tongue he'd painfully acquired to try to talk shop with the deaf old man who was the Red Dire Wolves' shaman. Audun would have liked to find someone to translate for him, but the rest of the travelers were otherwise occupied—Hamnet and Liv had crawled under a mammoth hide together, too. Audun had to do the best he could on his own.
When the travelers rode out of the Red Dire Wolves' encampment the next morning, the wizard said, "I think Odovacar told me there were changes in the north."
"Their shaman? Has he had bad dreams, too?" Ulric Skakki asked. By his self-satisfied smirk, whatever dreams he'd had after enjoying the Bizogot woman weren't bad at all.
But he sobered when Audun Gilli nodded. "He has. I'm almost sure of it," Audun said. "That makes it more likely the Rulers are sending the dreams, not the Emperor. Why would imperial wizards trouble a shaman's dreams?"
"Why would the Rulers?" Hamnet Thyssen asked in turn. "If they're plotting something, wouldn't they want to keep shamans in the dark as long as they could?"
In the dark was the right phrase. The sun rose late and set early, scuttling across the sky from southeast to southwest and never rising high above the southern horizon. Beyond the Glacier, it wouldn't come up even this far. Hamnet remembered Ulric's account of winter up there.
"Sometimes spells wash out farther than you wish they would," Liv said in Raumsdalian, and Audun Gilli nodded. She went on, "Odovacar may have felt bits and pieces of what was aimed somewhere else."
"Aimed at us?" Hamnet asked.
"It could be," Liv said. "Or maybe—" She broke off.
"Maybe what?" Audun Gilli asked.
She didn't answer. She stopped speaking Raumsdalian. In her own language, she called out to Trasamund, saying, "I fear the Rulers may have struck at our clan. God grant it not be so, but I fear it."
"Would they dare?" the jarl said.
"Never doubt what the Rulers would dare," Ulric Skakki said in the Bizogot tongue. "They may not always get everything they want, but they want a lot."
"God be praised we come in time to stop them here, then," Trasamund said.
"If we do," Hamnet Thyssen said. Trasamund sent him a horrible stare. He looked back steadily. The Bizogot was assuming that what he wanted was true. But was it really? We'll find out soon, the Raumsdalian thought.
On they rode. The weather was clear but very cold. Totila had given them some mammoth meat to take with them on their journey. They also killed hares. Even so far north, though, those had next to no fat on them, relying on their thick white fur for warmth. They would feed a man, but wouldn't keep him going indefinitely by themselves. In such weather, people needed fat for fuel to keep from freezing.
"Now we ride into the lands of the Three Tusk clan," Trasamund said a couple of days after they left the Red Dire Wolves' encampment. "Now we join the grandest clan among the Bizogots." He looked around. "I see no herds, not yet. They will be wandering elsewhere, no doubt. Our grazing range is vast."
And needs to be, Hamnet Thyssen thought. If the land up here by the Glacier were better, the musk oxen and mammoths could have lived on less of it. By the ironic glint in Ulric Skakki's eye, he saw the same thing. Neither of them pointed it out to Trasamund. That would have enraged him without being able to change anything.
Late in the afternoon, Liv pointed north across the snow-covered plain. "Those are people, I think, heading our way."
They were no more than wiggling dots at the edge of visibility to Count Hamnet. "If you say so," he told her.
"My own folk, coming to greet me." Smug pride rang in Trasamund’s voice.
Before long, he got a closer look at his clansfolk, and pride changed to horror. They weren't welcoming him—they were fleeing disaster. Some were wounded, others terribly burned. "Invaders!" Gelimer gasped when he saw his chieftain. "Invaders from the north!"
XXII
nor all the survivors from the Three Tusk clan even wanted to linger long enough to talk with Trasamund and his comrades. The Bizogots wanted to flee, lest worse befall them. They had been struck, and they had been broken. They’d never imagined such a blow could fall on them, not from that direction. Even though Trasamund spoke of the Rulers on the far side ot the Glacier, the danger must have seemed no more real to his folk than to Sigvat.
"Why didn't you patrol the Gap?" the anguished jarl asked Gelimer.
"We did—for a while. But the hunting is bad up there, so the men came back," Gelimer answered. He had a new cut across his forehead and a bandage on his left arm. "We didn't look for invaders, not at this season of the year." He grimaced. "I wish we would have."
"The Rulers . . . can do all kinds of unpleasant things," Hamnet said. Gelimer nodded, and then bit his lip. Moving his head had to hurt.
"How far behind you are they?" Ulric Skakki asked—a good, relevant question.
"Not far enough, by God!" the Bizogot exclaimed. "But they aren't chasing as hard as they might be. Why should they bother? What's left of us can't do them any harm, and they have to know it."
"My clan!" Trasamund howled. "You threw away my clan because you wouldn't listen to me. What I ought to do to you . . ."
"What's the point, your Ferocity?" Hamnet Thyssen said wearily. "Whatever you want to do, the Rulers have already done worse."
"If I'd stayed—"
"It might not have mattered," Ulric said. "They still would have surprised you, eh?"
"I would have beaten them anyhow." Even in disaster, Trasamund clung to his arrogance.
"They had—riding mammoths. Riding mammoths with lancers on them!" Gelimer said, for all the world as if the travelers hadn't told him about that when they came south from the Gap, as if he hadn't wanted to ride mammoths himself. "How could we hope to stand against them? And the ones who weren't on mammoths rode deer. They might as well have been horses! And their shamans—their shamans blasted our camp with lightning."
Liv put her face in her hands. "I might have stopped that if I were there," she said in a broken voice. "I've met the Rulers. I have some notion of what they can do. Anyone who didn't.. . would have been easy meat for them." She swiped at her eyes. "I can't even cry, not now. My eyelids will freeze shut."
"What... do we do?" Audun Gilli asked in a very small voice.
"We can't keep riding north—that seems plain enough. If we do, we run into the Rulers, and then ..." Ulric Skakki didn't go on, but he didn't have to. The rest of the travelers could draw their own pictures.
"How many other clansfolk got away?" Trasamund asked Gelimer. "Are there parties in back of you, or did they flee in different directions?"
"I don't know, your Ferocity," Gelimer said miserably. "I think the only ones behind us are those horrible, God-cursed demons from beyond the Glacier."