“Where can we get down, though, except where we climbed up?” Trasamund said. “If we try that, the Rulers are liable to be waiting for us.”
“I doubt it. We’re only an afterthought to them – if that, by now,” Hamnet said. “They’ve got bigger things to worry about farther south – not just the Bizogot clans down there, but the Empire. Odds are they’ve forgotten about us.”
“Maybe.” The Bizogot didn’t sound as if he believed it. He was so self-important, he couldn’t imagine that anyone else, even his enemies – perhaps especially his enemies – wouldn’t think him important, too.
“At least we’re here in the summer.” Hamnet felt like stretching in the sun like a cat. It was almost as warm as it would have been down on the Bizogot plains. And, up so high, the sun was harder on the skin than it would have been down there. A swarthy man, Hamnet had got darker. Many of the fairer Bizogots were sunburned, some of them badly.
With a grunt, Trasamund nodded. “Winter up here wouldn’t be much fun.” From a Bizogot, especially a Bizogot who’d lived his life hard by the edge of the Glacier, that was no small admission.
“No, not much.” Count Hamnet didn’t want Trasamund outdoing him at understatement. “Maybe, though, it will melt enough of the Glacier to touch off a new avalanche at the edge. And maybe we can use that to get down.”
“Even if it does, how would we know?” Trasamund replied. “And how long do you want to wait around and hope? You were the one who said we couldn’t wait long, and I think you’re right.”
“If a big chunk does let go, we might hear it even though we’re a long way from the edge of the Glacier,” Count Hamnet said. “Not a lot of other noise between there and here.” He growled, down deep in his chest. “As for the other. . . You’re right, I did say that, and it’s true, curse it. Not enough food up here to keep guests long.”
“What are you talking about?” Trasamund retorted. “Up here, guests are food.”
“Not for us. If we turn cannibal, there’s no point going down again. Next to that, the Rulers are welcome to do as they please.”
“Not to me they’re not, by God,” the Bizogot said. “I’d eat man’s flesh if it was that or starve. Not before, but then. It happens in hard winters once in awhile.”
“Mm, I can see how it might.” Hamnet tried to sound calm and judicious, not revolted. “But what do you think afterwards of the people who did it?”
“Depends. If they really had no other choice, then it’s just one of those things. If it’s not like that, or if the friends and kin of the ones who got eaten decide it’s not like that. . . Well, the cannibals don’t last long then.”
Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding. By the Bizogots’ rough standards, that seemed fair enough. Even down in the Empire, there were stories of men who ate neighbors and relatives when the Breath of God blew strong and the harvest failed. People laughed at those stories more often than not, which didn’t mean some of them weren’t true. Sometimes you laughed because screaming was the only other choice.
Ulric was translating for Audun Gilli and the shaman from the men of the Glacier, whose name was Marcovefa. The adventurer suddenly straightened and stiffened like a dog that had taken a scent. “Ha!” he said, turning, Thyssen!
“I’m here,” Hamnet answered. “What do you need?”
“Come over here, why don’t you? That way, I won’t have to yell,” Ulric said. “Besides, you may understand pieces of this in the original, and it’s better if you try. I might make a mistake.”
Grunting, Hamnet got to his feet. Parts of him creaked and crunched as he moved. He had enough years to feel sleeping on hard ground after marching and fighting, enough years to make him feel half again as old as he really was. He creaked again when he squatted beside Ulric and Marcovefa and Audun. He had to make himself nod to the Raumsdalian wizard. Audun nodded back as if nothing was wrong.
“What’s the story?” Hamnet asked.
“She may know another way down,” Ulric answered.
That got Hamnet s interest, all right. “Tell me more,” he said.
Ulric spread his hands in frustration. “I can’t – or not much more, anyhow. The verbs are driving me crazy. Here. Wait. I’ll have her tell you what she told me. Maybe you’ll be able to make some sense out of it.”
“I couldn’t,” Audun Gilli said. But Audun had needed a year to get something more than a smattering of the ordinary Bizogot language. Whatever his talents as a wizard, he made anything but a cunning linguist.
“Well, I’ll try.” Hamnet knew he sounded dubious. He thought he recognized words here and there in the language the men of the Glacier used. A couple of times, he’d made out a sentence, as long as it was short and simple.
Ulric spoke to Marcovefa. Hamnet thought he said something like, Tell him what you just told me. He wouldn’t have bet anything he cared about losing, though.
Marcovefa answered. It was her birthspeech; she didn’t stumble or hesitate the way Ulric did. That made her harder for Hamnet Thyssen to follow, not easier. He frowned, listening intently.
When she finished, he said, “Didn’t she say she knows where a way down will be?”
“Ha! You heard it like that, too!” Ulric said. “Maybe the verbs are strange, but that sure sounds like a Bizogot future tense, doesn’t it?”
“It did to me,” Hamnet said. “Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’ve tried. It didn’t help.” Ulric sighed and tried again.
“Past? Now? Later? All the same.” That was what Hamnet thought Marcovefa said. He looked a question at Ulric.
The adventurer sighed. “I think she’s saying there’s no difference between one time and another. Crazy little bird, isn’t she?”
He spoke in Raumsdalian, which the shaman couldn’t possibly understand. Nothing in his face or his tone of voice gave him away. But Marcovefa let out an indignant sniff and slapped his arm the way a mother would slap a child who’d done something rude and silly. She might not have followed the words, but she knew – she knew – he hadn’t treated her with the respect she deserved.
“Maybe there’s more to it than you think,” Count Hamnet said slowly.
“Maybe.” Ulric didn’t sound as if he believed it, but now he didn’t sound as if he dared disbelieve it, either. That left him sounding . . . confused. He went on speaking Raumsdalian: “Maybe up here there’s so little going on that now and then can blend like salt and garlic in a stew. Nothing up here would surprise me very much anymore. I mean, what is time but a way to keep everything from happening at once?”
Hamnet Thyssen half – more than half – expected Marcovefa to slap him again for being flip. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she was crazy, at least by the standards that prevailed at the bottom of the Glacier. This was too strange and too harsh and too different a world to expect standards to stay the same. But instead of being insulted, the shaman nodded vigorously. She let out what was, to Hamnet, mostly a stream of gibberish.
By the bemused look on Ulric s face, he understood a good deal more of it, but was none too happy that he did. “What was that all about?” Hamnet asked when Marcovefa finally fell silent.
“She says I get it after all,” Ulric replied, shaking his head. “She says she thought I was as vacant as a vole – which is a demon of a phrase, even in her weird dialect – till I made my snide joke. But everything I said was true, she told me. She feels it in her heart.”
Marcovefa laid a hand over her left breast. She might not understand Raumsdalian in any ordinary sense of the world, but she could sense truth and falsehood … or she thought she could, anyhow. By what Hamnet was seeing here, he would have had a hard time telling her she was wrong.
Then she said something else, something that sounded very self-assured. Ulric’s jaw dropped. “What now?” Hamnet asked. “Do I really want to know?”