Trasamund drew his great two-handed blade and swung it in circles so it thrummed through the air. “Let them come!” he roared. “Let them come, by God, and I will make them go!” The men of the Glacier exclaimed and pointed. They’d never seen anything like the weapon – and maybe they’d never seen anything like the Bizogot jarl, either.
Shouting, the members of the other clan or tribe or whatever it was trotted forward. If the sight of strangers with strange weapons fazed them, they didn’t let on. One of them drew his bow and let fly. His arrow fell short, splintering against the Glacier. Before long, though, the missiles would start to bite.
Trasamund shouted a command much used in Bizogot warfare: “Chaaarge!” He lumbered towards the attackers. So did the rest of the Bizogot men. And so did Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki.
Hamnet threw himself flat on the ice when an arrow hissed through the space where his head had been a couple of heartbeats earlier. As he scrambled to his feet again, he said, “If we can close with them, we’ll slaughter them. They don’t have shields or armor or swords.”
No sooner had the words passed his lips than he suddenly felt as if he were running through porridge, not air. The band of barbarians that captured him and his comrades might not have had a shaman along. These newcomers did.
A Bizogot howled and fell when an arrow pierced his leg. The attackers might pincushion all of them if something didn’t happen in a hurry.
“Liv!” Count Hamnet bawled. “Audun! Do something!” Even in that moment of desperation, he wished he weren’t calling for the two of them together. But he couldn’t do anything about that now except hope they had a counterspell handy.
They must have, for all at once he could move normally again. One of the attackers, a fellow with streaks of gray in his beard (and how many men of the Glacier lived long enough to go gray?), hung back a little from the rest. When the counterspell freed the Bizogots and Raumsdalians from the magic that had slowed them, he stamped his foot and swore. The gesture was so obvious, and so universal, it would have got a big laugh on the stage in Nidaros. Having stamped and sworn, he started incanting again.
Hamnet Thyssen resolved to kill him before he could finish his new spell.
Resolving to do it and doing it were two different things, as Hamnet knew too well. But he got one lucky break, for an arrow from a man of the Glacier on his side pierced an attacker’s hand before that attacker could finish pointing his arrow at Hamnet’s midsection. The wounded archer howled, broke the arrow, and pulled it from the wound, exactly as any other injured warrior might have done. Seeing Hamnet bearing down on him, he took a stone knife from a sheath on his belt and got ready to defend himself.
A stone knife made a good enough weapon . . . against another stone knife. Against a good iron sword, it was hardly any weapon at all. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t let the man of the Glacier close with him and grapple. A slash sheared off two fingers when the fellow tried. He stood there astonished, staring at the spouting stumps, till Hamnet cut deep into his neck with another stroke.
Then Count Hamnet ran on, towards the attackers’ shaman. The man’s eyes blazed at him, blue as the depths of the Glacier. They radiated power and hatred.
With a shout, the shaman started to aim a spell at him. Before the man of the Glacier could finish it, Hamnet swung his sword. Nimble as a hare dodging a fox, the shaman ducked away. He shouted something Hamnet couldn’t understand. Whatever it was, though, he doubted it was an endearment.
Hamnet Thyssen swung the sword again. Again, the grizzled man of the Glacier evaded the cut. Again, it disrupted his magic. And again, he cursed Count Hamnet – the Raumsdalian noble thought so, anyhow. One of the phrases the shaman used sounded something like the Bizogot words for go away.
That Count Hamnet didn’t intend to do. This time, he thrust instead of slashing. The man of the Glacier didn’t know what to do about that. Hamnet felt the sword grate on a rib as it went home.
Those blue, blue eyes opened enormously wide, in astonishment and dismay and pain. The shaman opened his mouth, too, to shriek, but more blood than noise came from it. Slowly, he crumpled to the Glacier. Hamnet’s wrist twisted as he pulled the blade free: a veteran’s trick to enlarge the wound and make sure it killed. He probably didn’t need it here, but drill-masters had beaten it into him when he was young, and he used it whenever he got the chance.
With the enemy’s wizard dying at his feet, he looked around to see how the rest of the fight was going. At least half a dozen of the barbarians were down, their blood steaming on the ice. One Bizogot was dead; a stone knife had slashed his throat. The man wounded during the spell was swearing with that arrow through his leg. Several men of the Glacier were running off as fast as they could go.
Ulric Skakki wiped blood from his sword on a dead man’s trousers. “Thrusting it into earth would clean it better,” Ulric said, “but earth’s a little hard to come by right here.”
“Just a little,” Hamnet Thyssen allowed. “They’ve forgotten what to do about swords.”
“A good thing, too, or they would have been tougher,” Ulric said. “They put up a better fight than I thought they could. When you scragged their shaman, that took a lot of heart out of them.”
“Did it?” Hamnet had been too busy to notice.
“Oh, yes. They must have thought he was the finest thing since raw meat.” Ulric Skakki eyed the shaman’s corpse. “Now he is raw meat. I wonder if our charming friends will turn him into the main course. And I wonder if they’ll expect us to share.”
“You come up with the most delightful ideas,” Hamnet said. Ulric made as if to bow. As Hamnet s stomach twisted, he went on, “Maybe I could turn cannibal to keep from starving. Maybe. Just to feed myself? No. I hope not, anyway.”
“Up here, the difference between needing to feed yourself and starving isn’t likely to be very big,” Ulric said.
Hamnet Thyssen grunted. Before he could say anything, a man of the Glacier came up to him and pounded him on the back. The fellow poured out a torrent of gibberish. “What’s he saying?” Hamnet asked Ulric Skakki.
“That you’re a demon of a warrior,” the adventurer answered. “That he didn’t think anybody could kill old Leudigisel, but you made it look easy. Uh, that you’re entitled to his heart and liver and ballocks if you want them.”
Reflecting that his stomach had twisted too soon, Count Hamnet said, “Tell him I don’t want to offend him, but that’s not our custom. Tell him I wouldn’t pollute myself by eating any part of old what’s-his-name.”
“I’m not sure I can say that, but I’ll try.” Ulric Skakki did. He must have made his point, for the man of the Glacier said something and pointed to Hamnet. “He likes what you said,” Ulric translated. “He says it shows a manly attitude.” The man of the Glacier spoke again. “He asks if you mind if his clan feeds on their dead foes’ flesh.”
“They can do whatever they want,” Hamnet replied. “We didn’t come up here to reform them. We didn’t even know they were here when we did come up.” He switched to Raumsdalian so the man of the Glacier couldn’t possibly understand: “And I’d rather have them butcher the shaman than us, by God.”
“Yes, that crossed my mind, too,” Ulric Skakki said. He spoke haltingly in the tongue the men of the Glacier used, the tongue related to an obscure Bizogot dialect.
The man with whom he was talking shouted to his comrades. They started butchering their fallen enemies. Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t watch for long. He’d butchered many animals and slain many men, but he’d never seen people deliberately cut up human corpses for meat.
No man of the Glacier ate any raw man’s flesh. Through Ulric, Count Hamnet asked why not. The man who answered him explained that there was a curse on the practice. “I bet they come down sick when they eat their neighbors raw,” Ulric guessed shrewdly. “You have to cook pork gray to keep that from happening, and it’s bound to be worse with your own kind. Lots of curses have common sense behind them if you know where to look.”