Ha! Count Hamnet thought. If people could see trouble coming as easily as that, we’d all have less of it.
Small plumes of smoke rose from dried dung on flat stones. The air above the fires shimmered with heat. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians cooked small animals. Marcovefa roasted the abominable meat she liked better.
“Now what?” Hamnet asked, carefully licking all the grease from his fingers.
Ulric’s head swiveled as he surveyed the Glacier all around. “As far as I can tell, the plan is for us to sit here till we starve.” He didn’t sound like a man who was joking, but he did sound absurdly cheerful at the prospect.
“No.” That wasn’t Hamnet Thyssen; it was Audun Gilli. The wizard shook his head. “Oh, no.”
“You know something.” Count Hamnet sounded accusing, even to himself. “What is it?”
“Something is about what I know,” Audun agreed. “Something is going to happen, and happen soon. What?” He spread his hands and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine, maybe better.”
“Will it happen before we starve?” Hamnet asked. “That would be nice, because Ulric’s right – we’re going to.”
“By God, we won’t starve to death up here,” the wizard said. “I don’t know what will happen to us, but not that.”
“You so relieve our minds,” Ulric said.
“You notice Marcovefa isn’t coming over here and slapping him silly – well, sillier,” Hamnet said, which won him a wounded look from Audun Gilli. That worried him not at all. He went on, “Must mean she thinks he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Happy day,” Ulric said. “Which of them is crazier, do you suppose?”
“Both of them,” Count Hamnet answered. That confused the wizard, but Ulric nodded in perfect understanding. Marcovefa eyed Hamnet as if wondering whether to say anything. When she didn’t, he was more relieved than he hoped he showed.
“What are we going to do today?” Trasamund demanded. “Sit around here freezing our arses off?”
“If you do much sitting around here, you will freeze your arse off,” Count Hamnet said. “On the other hand, where do you propose to go?”
“Back to the edge of the Glacier?” But Trasamund didn’t sound sure of himself – almost a first for the big, rambunctious Bizogot.
“Why?” Ulric asked. “What can you do there besides jump off? How long do you suppose you’d have to regret that before you went splut!”
He picked a particularly expressive noise to describe how Trasamund would sound when he hit. The jarl glared and muttered into his beard. Then he walked away shaking his head.
“Sometimes the worst thing you can do to somebody is tell him the truth,” Count Hamnet remarked.
“No doubt,” Ulric said. “And do you have any idea how many people get old and gray without ever once figuring that out?”
“Too many, or I miss my guess,” Hamnet said.
Marcovefa seemed happy enough sitting around doing nothing. Once, halfway through the day, a raven flew up and landed on her shoulder. It sat there as if it belonged, preening and making soft croaking noises and peering around with disconcertingly clever beady black eyes. Marcovefa took its presence for granted. She scratched its head. Instead of pecking her with its formidable bill, it bent forward like a cat so her hand could better find its itches.
“A familiar?” Ulric wondered out loud.
“Not exactly, or I don’t think so,” Audun Gilli said. “Seems more like a friend.”
The longer Count Hamnet watched, the more he thought Audun was right. Marcovefa croaked, too, as if she and the raven shared a language where she didn’t share one with the Bizogots and Raumsdalians all around her. The big black bird seemed to understand what she was saying, and she also seemed to follow it. Hamnet told himself nothing the shaman could do surprised him much anymore. He’d already told himself the same thing several times, and been wrong every one of them.
After a while, the raven flew off towards the edge of the Glacier. Ulric’s eyes followed it. “Good bit of meat on a bird that size,” he remarked. “Those cursed things have got fat off us on every battlefield since the beginning of time. We could start paying them back.”
Even as he spoke, his gaze slid to Marcovefa. He might have known she would understand the essence of what he was saying. She came over to him and pulled his ear, exactly as if he were a naughty boy. Then she gave him a piece of her mind in her own language.
“She eats man’s flesh, but she draws the line at raven.” Audun Gilli shook his head.
“Maybe she does. She’s sure making Ulric eat crow, though,” Count Hamnet said, deadpan.
Audun started to nod. Then he caught himself and drew back from Count Hamnet as if the Raumsdalian noble had some rare, dangerous, and highly contagious disease. Chances were he did, too. At any rate, people often treated foolishness that way.
An hour or so later, the raven came back. No one tried to catch it or kill it. It perched on Marcovefa’s shoulder again and croaked in her ear. One of the croaks sounded like soon to Hamnet Thyssen. He scratched his ear, wondering if he’d heard that or only imagined it. He knew ravens could be trained to speak, but he had trouble believing this one had been. He had even more trouble believing it had been trained to speak a language he understood.
Was he becoming like Marcovefa, then, and gaining the ability to grasp meaning even without knowing a language? He had an enormous amount of trouble believing that.
The shaman scratched the base of the raven’s beak with a forefinger. That beak might have been able to bite the finger off. Instead, the raven nuzzled her like a lovesick pup. Getting it to do something like that – getting it to want to do something like that – probably wasn’t magic in any ordinary sense of the word, but Hamnet had a hard time deciding what else to call it.
A warm breeze ruffled his beard and the raven’s feathers. For the moment, maybe even for the season, the Breath of God, the cold, ravening wind from the Glacier, had failed. It would blow again when the year turned; Hamnet was sure of that. But for now, even here, the wind came up from the south.
Liv and Audun Gilli both stiffened at the same time, like two hunting dogs taking a scent. Liv stared at Marcovefa. Audun exclaimed, “She really did!”
Hamnet Thyssen felt the Glacier shudder under his feet. Earthquake, he thought. He was safer here than he would have been in Nidaros. In bad earthquakes, people died when heavy things fell on them. The only thing that could fall on him here was the sky.
Along with the shaking came a deep bass rumble from the south, a rumble and a crashing and a roar. When Hamnet looked that way, he didn’t see anything. Maybe his wits were slow, because he didn’t grasp what the noise might mean.
Clever as usual, Ulric did. His trouble was different: he tried hard not to believe it. “She couldn’t have known an avalanche was coming, . . could she?” he said, his own doubt showing in the last two words.
Although the raven fluttered its wings when the shaking and rumbling started, it stayed on Marcovefa’s shoulder. The shaman stroked the bird, calming it. Did she look pleased with herself? If she didn’t, Hamnet lacked the words to describe the way she did look.
At last, the commotion subsided. Marcovefa said something in her language. Everyone else looked towards Ulric for a translation. Reluctantly, he gave one: “She says we can go down now.”
“She knew. She knew.” Audun Gilli made it sound more like an accusation than praise. “Even back on the mountainside, she saw the avalanche coming.”