Riding north seemed to speed up autumns passage into winter, which would have come fast enough anyhow. The storms blowing down from the Glacier seemed fiercer and colder; more and more snow covered the ground, and the thaws between snowfalls grew shorter and shorter and finally stopped. Hamnet Thyssen was resigned to bad weather; the Bizogots were resigned to worse. As for Marcovefa . . .
“Yes, it’s cold. So what?” she said when they camped one evening. She shared his tent as a matter of course these days. “We all know what to do about cold. We do it, and we go on. Why get excited?”
“Sometimes I think you’re too sensible for your own good.” Full of roast mutton, Hamnet didn’t feel like getting excited – not about the cold, anyhow.
Marcovefa wrinkled her nose and laughed at him. “I can be as foolish as anyone else. But cold . . . just is. I lived on the Glacier, and on the mountain above it. I never got away from cold, not till I came down. I never knew about hot baths, for instance. Some things are good.”
“Oh, yes.” Hamnet nodded. The regular Bizogots rarely bathed, either. Getting truly clean was a luxury he cherished whenever he came into the Empire. If a copper tub and steaming water weren’t some of the most important hallmarks of civilization, what was?
On campaign, he’d be dirty again. But so would everybody around him. After a while, he’d get used to it. He wouldn’t be so rank as he would when he traveled up in the Bizogot country, and neither would the people he dealt with. For that matter, when the nose smelled the same stinks for long enough, it stopped noticing. He’d had plenty of experience with that in the dungeon, and before.
He’d also had plenty of experience making love with women who ended up breaking his heart. Somehow, he never got tired of it. What would Marcovefa do to leave him sorry he’d ever touched her? Something: he was sure of that. In the meantime, though, what she had to give was better than anything he could find anywhere else. Sorrow later? Probably – that seemed to be what happened with him. Pleasure now? Without a doubt.
“Thank you,” he said after gasping his way to completion.
She laughed at him. “It takes two. Do you think you do not please me? Are you so much a fool?” She set his hand on her left breast. Her firm nipple and thudding heart said she had indeed kindled. “You see?” She laughed again.
“Yes,” Hamnet said. Marcovefa might have told him something more after that. If she did, he didn’t hear it. He plunged deep into sleep. Staying on horseback all day took more out of him than he’d expected. Maybe he was getting old. Maybe his time in the dungeon had drained him worse than he thought.
Marcovefa shook him awake in the morning. She seemed fresh and well rested, even if she’d fallen asleep after him. Was she using magic to lend herself strength and go without much rest? If she was, what price would she have to pay later? Count Hamnet wondered if she could do for him whatever she was doing for herself.
Asking her about it slipped his mind. He had a command here, one for which he was responsible. Bizogots liked sleep no less than anyone else. Ulric Skakki would have gone into hibernation for the winter if Hamnet gave him the chance. Hamnet was resigned to getting sworn at every morning, even if not enamored of it.
They started off later than he wished they would have. That happened every morning, too. He didn’t know what he could do about it – he didn’t think he could do anything.
It particularly galled him this morning because they were nearing the north woods. Somewhere ahead were the Rulers. He wanted to hit the mammoth-riders while they were still in among the firs and spruces. They would have trouble deploying in the woods – they were used to wide open spaces where no trees grew.
As usual, the gap between what he wanted and what he got yawned wide. He took no special notice of the first few men who rode past him, heading south as fast as their horses would take them. They might have been ordinary traders on business of their own. The odds were long, but they might have been.
But the fellow who still slung an imperial shield on his back . . . Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t pretend he was anything but a fleeing soldier. “Where are you going?” he called. “What are you running from?”
The cavalryman’s eyes showed white all around the irises, like those of a spooked horse. “Savages!” he said. “There’s savages in the woods, and they’re killing anything that moves!” He booted his horse into a weary trot and rode on.
XIX
Getting any of the soldiers fleeing from disaster in the woods to stop long enough to say exactly what had gone wrong up in the north was Hamnet’s biggest problem. The men who’d escaped wanted nothing more than to put distance between themselves and the Rulers. They didn’t want to talk: that slowed them down.
Some of them warned of mammoths. Some babbled about magic. None of that told Hamnet Thyssen anything he didn’t already know. He finally had to capture a Raumsdalian soldier as if the man belonged to an enemy army, not the one Hamnet was going to command.
“Who the demon are you? What do you think you’re doing?” the cavalry trooper demanded. He stared at the Bizogots who made up most of Hamnet’s strength. Seeing that they were northerners, he went on, “Are you in league with the devils in the woods?”
“No, you idiot,” Hamnet said. “The Rulers attacked the Bizogots before they ever got down here.” Not that I could make anybody pay attention to what was going on north of the tree line. But the trooper wouldn’t care about that. Hamnet went on, “I am Count Hamnet Thyssen. The Emperor has given me command in the north against the invaders.” He flourished his orders without unrolling them. “Now who are you? Why are you running away?”
“I won’t get in trouble?” the trooper asked warily.
“Not if you give me straight answers and stop wasting my time,” Hamnet said.
“Well, my name’s Ingolf Rokkvi,” the rider said. “I was part of Count Steinvor’s army. We heard the barbarians had done something nasty up near where the trees stop, but we didn’t know just what was going on. We figured it was Bizogots kicking up their heels like they do sometimes.”
“Oh, good,” Ulric Skakki said. “That’s the way to guarantee you win your battles – make sure your soldiers know exactly what they need to do.”
Ingolf scratched his head. “Is he joking, uh, Your Grace?” he asked Hamnet Thyssen.
“I wish he were,” Hamnet said, while Ulric snorted. Waving the adventurer to silence, Count Hamnet nodded to the trooper. “Go on.”
“Well, I was trying to,” Ingolf Rokkvi said. “We rode north up the forest tracks, looking for the savages. We figured we’d give them a hiding, and they’d run like they usually do, and then we could go home.”
Trasamund and Marcomer and several other Bizogots growled at that scornful assessment of their prowess. Count Hamnet waved them to silence, too. His glare was enough to keep them from reaching for their weapons. He told Ingolf Rokkvi, “Go on,” again.
“I will, if you let me,” Ingolf said. “We were riding along, and all of a sudden the worst blizzard in the world blows up, right in the middle of the woods. You wouldn’t think something like that could happen, but it did.”
Hamnet glanced at Liv and Audun Gilli and Marcovefa. They all nodded. Liv and Audun looked worried, which meant they wouldn’t have wanted to try a spell like that – Hamnet supposed that was what it meant, anyhow. Marcovefa looked amused, which could have meant.. . anything at all. “Then what happened?” Hamnet asked Ingolf Rokkvi.
“Mammoths happened, that’s what!” Ingolf said. “By God, they did. Mammoths with soldiers on em. They were built like bricks, with big curly beards.”
“The mammoths?” Ulric Skakki asked.
“The soldiers,” Ingolf Rokkvi said reproachfully. “They speared us, they trampled us – you can’t make a horse stand against a mammoth, on account of he’s just not big enough – and they laughed while they did it.”