“Well, I’m damned if I want to be the only one who does,” Ulric answered. “She says she’s going with us, to the edge of the Glacier and over it.”
“But what about her clan?” Hamnet said. “Won’t they end up a feast for some of the others up here if she leaves them? How can she do it?”
The adventurer spoke to her. She pointed to a young man scraping flesh from the inside of a pika hide with a sharpened bit of flint. “That’s Dragolen,” Ulric said. “He’s well on his way to turning into a shaman himself. By what she can tell, nothing too horrendous happens – not will happen, but happens – to the clan till he finishes learning the things he needs to know.”
“Tell her we don’t eat man’s flesh down below,” Hamnet said. “Maybe that will make her want to stay here.”
But Marcovefa only shrugged at the news. Like a lot of shamans and wizards, she could be imperious when she chose. “I go,” she said, and even Hamnet couldn’t misunderstand her – however much he might have wanted to.
No matter whatMarcovefa thought of Dragolen as an up-and-coming shaman, Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether the clan chief – he didn’t have enough people under him to count as a jarl in the Raumsdalian’s mind – would be eager to let her leave. But he said not a word against her. He was probably so glad to get rid of the dangerous strangers that losing his shaman seemed small by comparison.
Hamnet asked both Liv and Audun Gilli if they foretold trouble by bringing Marcovefa along. Liv simply shook her head. On matters that didn’t touch their private lives, she and Hamnet still worked well together. On those that did … they didn’t.
“We’re already in so much trouble, what’s a little more?” Audun said. Having no good answer for that, Hamnet walked away shaking his head.
Ulric dickered with the clan chief over how many hares and pikas and voles the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would take with them when they left. When he didn’t like the deal the chief proposed, he sweetened it by offering to leave a couple of swords behind with the men of the Glacier. That made the chief cheer up.
“Swords won’t help them catch rabbits,” Audun said, a puzzled note in his voice.
Ulric eyed him with something approaching pity. “Rabbits aren’t the only meat they hunt, and swords will help them with the other.”
“The other…? Oh!” Light – a revolted light – shone in the wizards eyes.
Marcovefa led them off the mountainside and down onto the surface of the Glacier. Count Hamnet shook his head in wonder. He’d never dreamt he would need to descend to travel over the Glacier. He’d never dreamt of a lot of the things that happened to him till they did. A good many of them, he would have been happier to avoid. That was afterwards, though, and afterwards was always too late.
Here and there, puddles dotted the top of the Glacier. Marcovefa eyed them dubiously. She said something. When Hamnet looked a question at Ulric, the adventurer translated: “In her grandfather’s grandfathers days, this didn’t happen, she says.”
“Is she sure she’s not talking about her grandchildren’s days?” Hamnet asked. “She’s the one who can’t keep time straight.”
Before Ulric could render that into Marcovefa’s dialect, she sent Hamnet a severe look, as if he were a child acting snippy around grownups. That shouldn’t have been easy to bring off; he thought he was older than she was. But when she wanted to, she could assume as many years and as much dignity as she pleased. It was an unusual gift, and not a small one, either.
She led the Bizogots and Raumsdalians south and west with a fine display of confidence. Count Hamnet wondered what lay behind it. He wondered if anything did. Maybe she was willing to sacrifice herself to strand them on the Glacier and rid her clan of the threat they posed. But when that thought bubbled up from the dark places at the bottom of his mind, he shook his head. He could imagine it, but he couldn’t believe it. She acted like someone who knew what she was doing and where she was going.
Of course, a madwoman would act that way, too. Hamnet was much less certain Marcovefa and the real world touched each other very much.
Why are you following her, then? he asked himself. But the answer to that was all too plain: even if she was leading them to disaster, what did they have to lose? Staying up here was only disaster of a different kind. The miserable cannibal life the men of the Glacier led showed that all too clearly.
He skirted another puddle atop the Glacier. “What do you suppose would happen if it all melted?” he asked.
“Never happen,” Trasamund said. “Not while we still live.”
Those two things weren’t the same, though the jarl didn’t seem to understand it. Even if he and Hamnet Thyssen lived to grow long white beards – which seemed most unlikely at the moment – they would die in an eyeblink of time as far as the world went. Not so far long ago, as far as the world went, the Glacier had pushed down to not far north of Nidaros. The country around the present capital was much like the Bizogot steppe in those days. If the Glacier disappeared, this northern land might turn out not to be so useless, too.
But Trasamund wouldn’t be here to see it. To him, nothing else mattered. Well, that made a certain amount of sense, or maybe more than a certain amount. But Hamnet tried to take a longer view.
Marcovefa said something. Ulric answered. She said something else. Ulric translated:” ‘The day is coming,’ she says, or maybe, ‘The day is here.’“
“Not here yet, by God,” Hamnet said. “Or what are we walking on?”
Again, Ulric turned that into words Marcovefa could understand. She gave back one word. “Illusion,” Ulric said.
“Well, as long as it fools my feet, I’m not going to worry about it,” Hamnet said.
The Bizogots caught a few voles in patches of greenery. Marcovefa had a bird net and a chant that seemed to lure birds into it. But there weren’t many to lure. They steadily went through the meat they’d got from the shaman’s clan. Count Hamnet began to wonder if they would have enough to get back to the crag at need. Before long, he stopped wondering: they wouldn’t. Marcovefa led them towards the edge of the Glacier – the rim of the world, she called it – with perfect and sublime certitude.
When they got there, they could look down at a sea of curdled white clouds that hid the Bizogot country from the eye. Count Hamnet and Ulric stared at each other, both appalled, but neither, somehow, enormously surprised. Liv glanced over towards Marcovefa as if wondering what her fellow shaman would do now. Audun Gilli, by contrast, only shrugged, as if to say, Well, this is interesting, isn’t it?
But Trasamund exploded like a tightly shut pot forgotten atop a fire. He didn’t just curse Marcovefa – he screamed at her. He pulled his two-handed sword from the sheath he wore on his back and brandished it, bellowing, “We ought to carve steaks off you, you worthless, mangy trull!”
Marcovefa answered more calmly than Hamnet Thyssen thought he could have managed under such circumstances. She said something that set Ulric giggling helplessly. “What was that?” Hamnet asked.
“Something like, ‘Why didn’t your mother spank you when you were little?’ “ the adventurer answered.
Trasamund didn’t ask for a translation. He kept on raving. When Count Hamnet thought he really might swing that sword, his feet went out from under him and he sat down, hard, on the Glacier. He was lucky the sword didn’t skewer or slice him. Marcovefa looked the slightest bit smug – enough to convince Hamnet that the Bizogot’s pratfall was no accident.
Even Trasamund seemed convinced after trying four times to stand and failing again and again. “Give over!” he told Marcovefa, holding up a hand in token of surrender. “I’ll put the blade away. By God, I will!”
The shaman didn’t speak the ordinary Bizogot tongue. What Trasamund said couldn’t have meant much to her. But she seemed to grasp the essentials behind or under language. She knew what the jarl meant even if she didn’t know what he said. With a nod whose somber dignity the Raumsdalian Emperor might have envied, she signaled that he was free from her spell. When he tried to get to his feet once more, he succeeded.