“Careful, Audun!” Count Hamnet pitched his voice to carry through the howling wind. “If you get too close, you’ll spook them.”
“If I stay this far away, though, I have trouble seeing the front part of the herd,” the wizard answered.
Patiently, Hamnet said, “Other riders are up there. We’re not doing this by ourselves, you know. We worry about the beasts close to us, they worry about the ones close to them, and when we put everything together the job gets done.”
“I suppose so.” Audun Gilli sounded distinctly dubious. “Better one person should be able to take care of everything.”
That was a wizard’s way of looking at the world. Wizards had as much trouble cooperating as cats did, and used weapons sharper and deadlier than fangs and talons. Working together meant sharing power and secrets, and power and secrets didn’t like to be shared. Audun and Liv had teamed up a couple of times against sorcery from the Rulers, but it wasn’t easy or natural for them.
“One person would need to use magic to take care of a whole herd of musk oxen,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you want to try?”
Audun thought about that. It didn’t take a whole lot of thought. “Well, no,” he admitted, shaking his head.
“Good,” Hamnet said. “If you’d told me yes, I would have thought you were as arrogant as one of the Rulers.”
“I hope not!” Audun exclaimed. “The worst thing about them is, they have the strength to back up their arrogance. That makes them think they have some natural right to it, the way they think they have the right to lord it over all the folk they can reach.”
“No,” Count Hamnet said. “The worst thing about the Rulers is, they can reach folk on this side of the Glacier because of the Gap.”
“I think we said the same thing,” Audun Gilli replied.
“Well, maybe we did.” Hamnet looked north, towards the Gap that had finally melted through the great Glacier and towards the two enormous ice sheets that remained, one to the northwest, the other to the northeast. He couldn’t have seen the opening in the Gap anyway; it lay much too far north. Swirling clouds and blowing snow kept him from getting even a glimpse of the southern edge of the Glacier now. When the weather was clear, those frozen cliffs bestrode the steppe like the edge of any other mountains, but steeper and more abrupt.
He’d had an odd thought not long before. There were mountains in the west. They ran north and north, till the Glacier swallowed them. Did any of their peaks stick out above the surface of the ice? Did life persist on those islands in the icebound sea? Were there even, could there be, men up there? No one had ever seen fires burning on the Glacier, but no one had ever gone up there to look at close range, either.
This time, his shiver had nothing to do with the frigid weather. Trasamund had told him once that Bizogots had tried to scale the Glacier to see if they could reach the top. It had to be at least a mile – maybe two or three – almost straight up. The mammoth-herders hadn’t managed it. They were probably lucky they hadn’t killed themselves. One mistake on that unforgiving climb would likely be your last. You might have too long to regret it as you fell, though.
Hamnet Thyssen imagined men roaming from one unfrozen mountain refuge to another. He imagined them trying to come down to the Bizogot country, stepping off the edge of the Glacier as if off the edge of the world. Descending might be even harder than reaching the top of the Glacier. Down near the bottom, you had at least some margin for error. Up above, the tiniest mischance would kill you, sure as sure.
He suddenly realized Audun Gilli had said something to him. “I’m sorry. What was that?” he said. “You caught me woolgathering.”
Above the woven wool that muffled his mouth and nose, the wizard’s eyes were amused. “I must have. You seemed as far away as if someone had dropped you on top of the Glacier.”
That made Hamnet shiver again. Wizards . .. knew things. Sometimes they didn’t know how they knew or even that they knew, but know they did. “Well, ask me again,” Hamnet said. “I’m here now.”
“How lucky for you.” Audun still seemed to think it was funny. “I said, what do we do when the Rulers strike the Red Dire Wolves?”
“The best we can. What else is there?” Hamnet answered bleakly. “How good is the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman? How much help can he give you and Liv?”
“Old Odovacar?” Audun Gilli rolled his eyes. “Liv’s got more brains in her little finger than he does in his head. He turned them all into beard.”
Audun wasn’t far wrong about the shaman’s beard; it reached almost to his crotch. Even so, Count Hamnet said, “Are you sure? You can talk with Liv now – she’s learned Raumsdalian.” And why haven’t you learned more of the Bizogots’ tongue? But that was an argument for another day. Hamnet went on, “Odovacar might be clever enough with spells in his own language.”
“Yes, he might be, but he isn’t,” Audun said. “I’ve talked with him through Liv. He has one spell down solid – he can take the shape of a dire wolf. But even when he’s in man’s form, he hasn’t got any more sense than a dire wolf. I’m surprised nobody’s caught him sitting on his haunches licking his ballocks.”
That started a laugh out of Hamnet. Even so, he said, “Odovacar must be able to do more than that. Shamans can’t be shamans on so little. Whoever he learned from surely taught him other things, too.”
“Oh, I suppose he can find lost needles and read the weather and do some other little tricks that won’t help us against the Rulers at all,” Audun said. “But the one thing the shaman of the Red Dire Wolves has to do is commune with dire wolves, and by God Odovacar can do that. And since he can, they forgive him for all the things he cursed well can’t do, starting with learning anything he didn’t get from his teacher a thousand years ago.”
“Don’t exaggerate.” Mock severity filled Hamnet Thyssen’s voice. “Odovacar can’t be a day over eight hundred.”
“Ha!” The Raumsdalian wizard laughed for politeness’ sake alone, because he plainly didn’t find it funny. “However old he is, he’s outlived his usefulness. If you don’t believe me, talk to your lady love. She’s as fed up with him as I am.”
Talk to your lady love, Audun Gilli had lost his wife, too, in circumstances more harrowing than Hamnet s. But he didn’t seem jealous that the other Raumsdalian had won Liv’s love. Hamnet was glad he wasn’t. Audun might have made a rival, since he and Liv had sorcery in common. If I thought she cheated on me the way Gudrid used to, I’d worry about Audun now. Hamnet shook his head. If you let thoughts like that grow, they would poison whatever good you’d found in your life.
When he pulled his mind away from that notion, it lit on a different one. “Odovacar communes with real dire wolves, you say?”
“Well, he doesn’t smoke a pipe with them or anything like that, but he goes out wandering when he wears wolf shape,” Audun Gilli answered. “He must meet real dire wolves when he does, and they haven’t eaten his scrawny old carcass yet.”
“That’s what I’m driving at,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Do you suppose he could go out as a dire wolf and rally the real ones against the Rulers?”
Audun started to shake his head, but then caught himself. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It might be worth a try. The Rulers wouldn’t like packs harrying their riding deer, would they? Harrying them, too, come to that, if Odovacar can bring it off. And if he goes out in a wolfskin and doesn’t come back, the Red Dire Wolves might be better off.”