“Nicely done,” Count Hamnet said, his tone as neutral as he could make it. “Would it work for more than one riding deer at a time?”
“I don’t think so.” Audun watched the animal’s antics with solemn fascination. “I was surprised it worked once.”
“So was he,” Hamnet said. Then they were past the Rulers. Hamnet spied Trasamund a couple of bowshots ahead and to the left. He waved and shouted. After a moment, the jarl waved back and steered his horse over towards them. Misery loves company, Hamnet thought.
“What now? Up the Glacier?” Plainly, Trasamund didn’t mean it.
He blinked when Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “Have you got a better idea?” Hamnet asked.
Trasamund spat. “I have no ideas left, and nothing else, either. If you say you want to take it out and piss your way through the Glacier, I’ll try to follow. Everything I’ve tried, everything I’ve done, has turned to dung in my hands.”
Count Hamnet shivered. It wasn’t altogether in response to Trasamund’s despair; here close by the Glacier, it was colder than it had been even a couple of miles farther south. This was where winter lived. The growing warmth might have weakened it, but it was a long way from dead.
They’d ridden past a house-sized chunk when Hamnet heard a shout from Ulric Skakki: “Over here!” Beside him, Arnora pressed a chunk of moss to a cut that split her cheek. She wouldn’t be pretty any more, but that was a worry for later, if there was a later. Now, Ulric said, “Well, here we are, in this jolly place. Where do we go next?”
Hamnet told him.
VII
“This is madness,”Trasamund said, scrambling up over a tilted block of ice. “Madness, I tell you.”
“Of course, Your Ferocity,” Ulric Skakki said politely. He pointed down towards the edge of the frozen steppe, which now lay some distance below them. “Would you like to explain to the Rulers how mad it is?”
Hamnet Thyssen paused for a moment at the top of another jagged chunk of ice. He looked down towards the ground, too. The Rulers weren’t coming after the dozen or so Bizogots and Raumsdalians who were trying to use the avalanche to climb to the top of the Glacier. In their boots, Count Hamnet wouldn’t have, either. They were doing about what he would have done were their positions reversed: they were standing there pointing at the fugitives and laughing themselves silly.
“We got a chance to kill a couple of horses and hack off some of the meat,” Liv said. “With the musk ox, that will keep us going … for a while, anyhow.”
“Horseflesh tastes like glue,” Ulric Skakki complained.
“How much glue have you eaten?” Hamnet asked.
“Well, I’ve eaten more crow, I must say,” Ulric answered. “And it’s plain enough I haven’t eaten enough glue to know when to keep my mouth shut.” He still sounded like a man on a lark, not someone fleeing for his life without much hope that even fleeing would stretch it very far.
“One thing,” Audun Gilli said. “We can keep our meat fresh as long as we need to. We won’t have any trouble putting it on ice.” The wizard’s laugh sounded slightly hysterical, or perhaps just slightly cracked.
That didn’t mean he was wrong. Most of the ice in the world was either under their feet or ahead of them. Hamnet Thyssen was glad he had his winter mittens. Without them, his hands not only would have frozen but also would have been cut to ribbons: much of the ice over which he struggled was almost swordblade-sharp.
A couple of Bizogot men were without mittens. They’d wrapped cloth around their palms, which was better than nothing but probably not good enough. One of them, a big, blocky fellow named Vulfolaic, said, “Some of that horsemeat still has the hide on, yes? I can cut strips from that when we stop.”
“It will spoil,” Audun said, proving he really was learning the Bizogots’ speech.
“Not if I piss on it a few times,” Vulfolaic answered. “Not proper tanning, but it will have to do.”
“Er – yes.” The wizard’s expression said he would rather do without gauntlets than wear that kind. Vulfolaic wasn’t so fussy. Squeamish Bizogots wouldn’t last long.
How long will we last anyhow? Hamnet wondered. Climbing to the top of the Glacier – if they could – might give them their best chance to escape the Rulers, but he knew that best was none too good. If they died here, and if scavengers didn’t find them, they might stay perfectly preserved for a long time. What held true for horsemeat also held for human flesh.
“Come on,” he said. “We ought to get as high as we can while the daylight lasts.”
“What if we touch off another avalanche?” With the wound to her cheek, Arnora’s voice was mushy and indistinct.
Hamnet Thyssen only shrugged. “If we do, we won’t need to worry anymore.”
That made Vulfolaic laugh. “Spoken like a Bizogot, by God! I wouldn’t have thought you southerners had the manhood to say such things – and to mean them.”
“If I had a copper for every time a Bizogot wondered how long my prong was, I’d be too rich to want to leave Nidaros,” Ulric Skakki said.
“He wasn’t questioning yours – he was questioning mine,” Hamnet answered. “And as long as Arnora doesn’t worry about yours, I don’t see that it’s anybody else’s business.”
“You’re no fun,” Ulric told him. “Life would be so much duller if people didn’t get all hot and bothered over stupid little things.”
“You mean like being invaded? Like being beaten?” Count Hamnet said. “I’m bothered. I can’t very well say I’m not. But I defy anyone to stay hot climbing the Glacier.”
“Well, you’ve got something there.” Ulric reached up to him. “Give me a hand, will you? You made it to the top of that block, but I don’t think I can, not by myself. You’re taller than I am.”
“I wish I had hobnails in the bottom of my boots,” Hamnet said, grabbing Ulric’s wrist and yanking him upwards. With a grunt, the adventurer scrambled onto the top of the ice boulder beside him. “They’d make climbing a lot easier.”
“Hobnails? No!” Trasamund shook his head. “You wear hobnails on ice or in snow, they bleed heat right out of your feet. Maybe they’re all right in Raumsdalia, where it’s warm, but not up here.”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” Count Hamnet admitted. “You may be right. If we had boots with a couple of layers of hide between our soles and the nails, though . ..”
“If we had wings, we could fly up to the top of the Glacier,” Trasamund said. “And we could piss on the miserable Rulers down below, too.”
Hamnet shut up.
When he looked down to the Bizogot steppe now, he could hardly make out the invaders down there. They might have been ants or fleas or other small annoyances. They might have been, but they weren’t. He looked behind, and then he looked ahead. How far had they come? Maybe a third of the way, he guessed. The going got no easier as they moved on. If anything, the slope grew steeper. Without the titanic avalanche, they wouldn’t have had a prayer of reaching the top of the Glacier. Even with it, the climb wouldn’t be easy. Anything but.
And something else was wrong, or at least different. He seemed to need an extra breath or two whenever he struggled up onto a new chunk of ice. Hauling Ulric after him had made his heart pound.
Then a light dawned. “We’re climbing a mountain!” he exclaimed. “The air’s getting thinner!”
“It would do that, wouldn’t it?” Liv said. “No wonder I’m breathing so hard.”
“Do you have a magic that would let us breathe the way we do down on the plain?” Hamnet asked her.
“I don’t,” she answered. “We never needed anything like that. What about you, Audun?”
Audun Gilli shook his head. “Maybe someone in the Empire does – someone in the west, most likely, who has to worry about mountains more than people around Nidaros do. But I’ve never needed a spell like that, either. Too bad.”