In the battle, he shouted, “Ha! See how you like it!” He shot an enemy warrior who’d fallen from his mammoth, and then another one. They would have done the same to him. They’d tried to do the same to him. But he’d succeeded against them. And Liv and Audun and Odovacar had succeeded against their wizards.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he discovered it did not do to count the Rulers’ wizards out too soon. The air suddenly darkened around the Bizogots. Hamnet had thought he knew everything there was to know about bugs in the north when the steppe unfroze. He quickly found out how naive he’d been.
As Liv and her comrades called voles and lemmings to the Rulers’ mammoths, so the enemy wizards called insects to the Bizogots and their horses. Some always buzzed about; all you could do was slap and swear. But now the mosquitoes and gnats and flies descended in a cloud as thick and choking as if woven from the long hairs of the woolly mammoth. Horses bucked and thrashed in torment, lashing their tails against the overwhelming onslaught.
Fighting was next to impossible with so many bugs assailing every unclothed inch of skin. Even breathing wasn’t easy. Hamnet Thyssen coughed and choked. Something nasty that wiggled and tasted of blood crunched between his teeth. Gnats kept getting in his eyes. He rubbed frantically.
The bugs didn’t seem to bother the Rulers or their animals, or no worse than usual. Why am I not surprised? Hamnet thought bitterly. The enemy’s war mammoths were still distracted, but the warriors on riding deer seemed unaffected by either side’s sorcery.
Not far from Hamnet, Liv was slapping and scratching and spitting as desperately as he was. “Make it stop!” he shouted to her. “By God, you have to!”
“If we do, we’ll have to let go of the spell that calls the little animals to their mammoths,” she answered.
He might have guessed that. “I think you’d better do it anyhow,” he said. “They’re hurting us worse than we’re hurting them.” Saying that tasted bad .. . but not so bad as the insects that filled his mouth and furred his teeth.
Liv said something that should have made every insect in the world burst into flames. It should have, but it didn’t. She shouted to Odovacar, who didn’t hear her, then to Audun Gilli, who did. Audun nodded – indistinctly, through the curtain of bugs.
A Bizogot right in front of Hamnet caught an arrow in the throat, gurgling when he tried to scream and drowning in his own blood. That could have been me, the Raumsdalian thought, and shuddered, and got another gnat, or another three, in his eye. He ducked to rub at himself, and an arrow hissed past just above his head. If he were sitting straight on his horse, it would have caught him in the forehead. Sometimes whether you lived or died was nothing but luck.
He could tell when Liv and Audun and possibly Odovacar began to fight the mad swarm of insects the Rulers’ wizards had summoned. The bugs went from impossible to intolerable all the way down to extremely annoying. He could spit bugs out of his mouth faster than they flew in. He wasn’t swallowing or inhaling so many. He could even see, sometimes for a minute or two at a time.
And what he could see was that everything had its price. As soon as the Bizogot shamans and Audun Gilli abandoned their spell to fight the one the Rulers were using, the lemmings and voles they’d called to the battlefield did what anyone would expect little animals to do in the presence of big ones – they ran away. And the war mammoths, no longer bedeviled, surged forward once more.
“We can beat them!” Trasamund shouted again and again. He went on shouting it after he pulled an arrow out of his left hand. He went on shouting it after the Bizogots, having fought as hard as anybody could fight, had to retreat anyhow. He went on shouting it as retreat turned to rout. He went on shouting it – roaring it out at the top of his lungs – long after he must have stopped believing it.
Ulric Skakki was bleeding from a gashed ear – the kind of wound that splattered gore all over the place without meaning much. “How come we’re going the wrong way if we can beat them?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.
“Oh, shut up,” Count Hamnet explained.
Ulric nodded gravely, as if the explanation meant something. “Makes as much sense as anything I could have come up with myself,” he said.
Hamnet pointed south – actually, a little west of south. “Are those riding deer?” he asked.
“Well, they aren’t glyptodonts – that’s for sure,” Ulric said.
“They’re cutting us off from the other half of the army. They ‘re cutting us off from the Red Dire Wolves’ herds, too,” Hamnet said.
“They’re good at war. They’re better than the Bizogots, because they come into fights with a plan,” Ulric said. “They’re going to be a lot of trouble.”
“They’re already a lot of trouble,” Count Hamnet said. “And they’re herding us the way you’d herd musk oxen – or even sheep.”
“Baaa,” Ulric said – or was it Bah?. Hamnet couldn’t tell. The adventurer went on, “What do you think we can do about it?”
“Right now? Not a cursed thing,” Hamnet answered.
“Well, that’s what I think we can do about it, too,” Ulric Skakki said. “Nice to see we agree about something, isn’t it? And it’s nice to see the Rulers can run a pursuit when they feel like it, eh?”
“Fornicating wonderful,” Hamnet said. Ulric laughed, for all the world as if that were funny … for all the world as if anything were funny.
“Where’s Totila?” Ulric Skakki asked after looking around.
Count Hamnet also looked for the Red Dire Wolves’ jarl. “Don’t see him.”
“He must be with the other bunch – if he’s still anywhere,” Ulric said. Glumly, Hamnet nodded. He didn’t see Odovacar any more, either. Was the shaman still alive? Hamnet wondered if he would ever know.
Then he had more urgent things to worry about. A warrior of the Rulers, shouting something unintelligible, slashed at him with a sword. He parried and gave back an overhand cut. The enemy fighting man turned it with a little round leather buckler he wore on his left arm. His riding deer tried to prod Hamnet’s horse with its antlers. The Raumsdalian cut again. He wounded the deer’s snout. The animal let out a startled snort and started to buck, just the way a horse would have. The man on it had everything he could do to stay in the saddle. Hamnet Thyssen got a good slash home against the side of his neck. Blood spurted. The warrior let out a gobbling wail and crumpled.
A tiny victory – too tiny to mean anything in the bigger fight. The Rulers went right on driving this band of Bizogots north and west, away from the larger group farther south. Every so often, an arrow would bite, and a man or a horse would go down.
Spring days had stretched in a hurry. That let the Rulers push the pursuit longer and harder than they could have at a different season or, say, down in the Empire. After what seemed a very long time, night finally fell.
“We must be backup in the lands of the Three Tusk clan,” Liv said when the Bizogots – and Hamnet, and Ulric, and Audun Gilli – finally stopped to rest. She sounded ready to fall over from exhaustion, or possibly from despair.
“What are they going to do – chase us till they smash us against the Glacier?” Maybe Ulric meant it for a sour joke. But it sounded much too likely to Hamnet Thyssen.
Vl
The sun cameup too early. Count Hamnet munched smoked mammoth meat. He scooped up water with his hands from one of the countless ponds, and hoped it wouldn’t give him a flux of the bowels.
And then one of the rearguard shouted that the Rulers were coming. Swearing wearily, Hamnet climbed up onto his horse. The animal’s sigh sounded all too human, all too martyred. It was weary, too. Hamnet didn’t care. If he didn’t ride, the Rulers would kill him. If he did, he might get away to fight again later on.
“What did we do to deserve this?” Trasamund groaned as they headed north and west again. “Why does God hate us?”