“That’s old news now.” Hamnet Thyssen displayed his commission.
Runolf looked it over. In due course, he nodded. “Well, that’s better than sitting in a dungeon, I must say.”
“Is it?” Hamnet asked bleakly. “In the dungeon, I don’t have to worry about a mammoth stepping on my head.”
“There is that,” Runolf Skallagrim agreed. “So what do you want from me?”
“As many men as you’ve got, as many fugitives from the armies that have already lost to the Rulers as you can round up, and enough food for them to take north.”
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” Runolf said.
“If you’ve got three times that many men in your pocket, I’ll gladly take em,” Hamnet said. “Oh – any wizards in town? We need them, too.”
“A supply train’ll be hard enough to come by.”
That was much too likely to be true. Kjelvik wasn’t a town from which anyone in the Empire had expected an army to sortie. If Raumsdalia needed to move against invaders from a town this far south, they’d penetrated farther and done worse than anybody would have guessed possible. Well, so they had. “Do what you can, Runolf, please,” Count Hamnet said. “I’ve met these Rulers before. They come from beyond the Glacier, and they’re more trouble than you can imagine.”
“Beyond the Glacier?” The garrison commander looked and sounded intrigued. “So those stories about a way melting through don’t just come from merchants off the Bizogot steppe getting drunk and telling tales in taverns, eh?”
“No, they’re true, all right. I’ve been up there. It’s a different world. We haven’t had anything to do with it since the Glacier walled it off, God only knows how many thousand years ago. But we do now.”
Runolf Skallagrim grunted. “I will do what I can, Thyssen. And I think the first thing I’ll do is set my men to rounding up the soldiers who’ve come south out of the woods. My bet is, we’ll need a show of force before a lot of those buggers’ll want to remember why the Emperor pays them.”
“My bet is, you’re right,” Count Hamnet said. “Fair enough. Do that first. After they comb them out of the fields and the taprooms and the whorehouses, we’ll see what we’ve got. Don’t waste time on it, though. The way it looks to me is, we’ve wasted all the time we can afford, or maybe a little more than that.”
The soldiers lined up in front of Hamnet Thyssen and Baron Runolf were a sorry-looking lot. Some of them were obviously hung over. Some were still drunk. Several were wounded, though none seemed seriously hurt – a man with a bad wound wouldn’t have been able to come so far so fast. They all glared at him. They knew he wanted them to fight the Rulers again, and they were anything but keen on the idea.
Most of them still had swords. If he hadn’t had the Bizogots and some of Runolf’s archers backing him, he wouldn’t have been surprised if they tried to mob him and mutiny. His guess was that bad odds were the only thing holding them back.
“So you’ve met the mammoth-riders,” he said.
“What do you know about it, you blue-blooded son of a whore?” one of the soldiers said. “Somebody told you they could do that, did he? Do you know what it means, though? Not bloody likely, not if you’re coming up from Nidaros.”
“I fought them half a dozen times, up on the Bizogot plains,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He waved back towards Trasamund and the other big blonds. “So did they.”
The soldier blinked and shut up. Another one found a bitter question: “Why the demon didn’t you whip them? Then they wouldn’t have set on us.”
“We didn’t because we couldn’t.” As usual, Hamnet used the truth, however unpalatable it was.
“How come you think you’ll do any better this time, then, curse you?” the second soldier demanded.
“Because this time we have a wizard who can beat anything the Rulers throw at her.” Count Hamnet waved to Marcovefa. She took a step forward and nodded to the soldiers as if they were first-rate fighting men, not the flotsam and jetsam of a campaign gone wrong.
“Another Bizogot twat – huzzah,” the second soldier said, slathering on his scorn with a trowel.
Maybe he thought Marcovefa didn’t speak his language. Maybe he just didn’t care. If he didn’t, he made a bad mistake. As Gudrid could have told him, angering a wizard you couldn’t kill on the instant was commonly a mistake.
It was here. Marcovefa murmured to herself. The soldier developed a sudden, uncontrollable urge to disrobe. Once he was naked in front of his staring comrades, he acted like a jackass – literally. He brayed, got down on all fours, and started pulling scraps of dead grass up from between cobbles with his teeth. He also relieved himself like an animal, calmly and without shame.
Marcovefa murmured again. The soldier came back to himself – and cried out in horror as he realized what he’d done. Marcovefa suffered him to dress and return to the ranks with no further afflictions.
“Any other donkeys here?” Hamnet Thyssen inquired.
Nobody said anything. The unhappy survivors of one encounter with the Rulers looked apprehensively from him to Marcovefa and back again. Something like a sigh rippled through their ragged ranks.
Count Hamnet understood the sigh all too well. His nod was precisely calibrated between scorn and sympathy. “That’s right,” he said. “You can turn around and have another go at the barbarians – this time with a real chance of winning – or you can face us now. Which one looks like a better bet?”
Even after Marcovefa’s magic, the question didn’t seem to have the quick and obvious answer he’d hoped for. He knew what that meant: the Rulers had beaten the Raumsdalian army even worse than he’d feared. They’d made the men afraid of them, sure another beating lay around the corner.
But they also looked at the soldier who’d done such a humiliating impression of an ass. If that could happen to him, what was liable to happen to them if they tried to tell Hamnet no?
“We’ll go, I guess,” said a man with the look of a sergeant. “If the savages kill us, at least it’s over with in a hurry.” Most of the men assembled with him nodded; he’d summed up what they were thinking.
“We fought them again and again on the Bizogot steppe,” Hamnet said again. “We lost more than we won – I won’t tell you anything different, because I can’t. But you can beat them. By God, you can! And we’ll do it.”
He didn’t expect them to break into frantic cheers. A good thing, too, because they didn’t – that kind of thing happened only in bad romances. A few of them looked thoughtful, which was about as much as he’d hoped for.
He turned to Runolf Skallagrim. “What do you think?”
“They’ll march. They’ll fight.. . some,” the commander of Kjelvik replied. “If they win the first time out, they’ll fight harder after that. If they lose the first time, they’ll run away so fast, their shadows won’t keep up with em.”
“Heh.” Hamnet hadn’t remembered that Runolf had such a gift for pungent truth. Then he added the most he could: “We’re better off with ‘em than without em.”
“You hope,” Runolf said.
“That’s right.” Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I hope.”
He’d come into Kjelvik with a troop of Bizogots. He rode out of it with an army of Raumsdalians. It wasn’t exactly the army he would have wanted, not when it was made up of garrison troops and men who’d already run away from the Rulers once. But it was an army, and it could fight. It could. Whether it would . ..
“We’re going in the right direction,” he told Ulric Skakki. “We’re moving towards the enemy.”
“So we are,” the adventurer said. “If only we had to move father before we bumped into those bastards.”
Runolf Skallagrim said, “What I don’t understand is, why didn’t the Emperor do something about these Rulers sooner?” He seemed glad to be out of Kjelvik. He kept reaching for his sword and pulling it halfway out of the scabbard, as if ready to go into battle then and there. If all the soldiers who followed were as eager as the baron, the Rulers really might have something to worry about.