“They know the scouts are,” she answered.
His exasperated snort sent steam from his nostrils, as if he were a hard-running horse. “I know that,” he said. “Do they know this army is here?”
She laughed. “Of course not, darling,” she said. “I keep telling you and telling you – they are not very smart.”
Maybe they weren’t. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t so sure about that, but maybe they weren’t. But they were very strong, or they wouldn’t have come so far so fast. As arrogance could ape stupidity, so strength could do duty for wisdom.
More and more riders burst into the clearing. One was wounded, while another rode a horse with an arrow in the rump. Then a man on a riding deer trotted into the open space. All the way across it, Hamnet could see his leather armor and his thick, dark, curly beard – he was a man of the Rulers, sure enough.
Marcovefa proved right – he hadn’t known a Raumsdalian army was on its way north. At the sight of so many soldiers drawn up in neat ranks, the enemy rider reined in frantically. Hamnet could read his thoughts – he had to get away and warn his friends.
“Loose!” Hamnet shouted. A good many archers had already strung their bows. Almost in one motion, they nocked and let fly. The arrows sang through the air. The warrior of the Rulers had time to throw up his shield, but it did him no good. The iron-headed shafts pierced both him and his riding deer. Together, they crumpled to the snow. Their blood streaked the clean whiteness and sent steam up into the air.
“Well, there’s one of the buggers down,” Runolf Skallagrim said. “He didn’t seem so tough.”
“No,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “One by one, or even a few at a time, they’re nothing special. But when you put a few of them together, or more than a few .. .”
For the next little while, the Rulers’ outriders drifted into the clearing by ones and twos and threes. Plainly, their wizards had no idea an army awaited them there. The Raumsdalians started cracking jokes as they shot down the invaders. If the Rulers kept blundering into them in driblets, they could keep killing barbarians till they ran out of arrows.
But it wouldn’t last, as Hamnet knew too well. A couple of warriors saw the carnage in the clearing soon enough to wheel their riding deer and bucket off to the north before the Raumsdalians could slay them. Before long, Marcovefa said, “They know, curse them.”
“Now the real fight starts,” Hamnet Thyssen said. Marcovefa nodded. The shaman from atop the Glacier would bear a lot of the burden on the Raumsdalian side. Hamnet bit his lip. That was a great deal to ask of anyone, and especially of a lover. Liv hadn’t been able to shoulder such a weight, try though she did. The Rulers proved too strong for her up on the Bizogot plains. Hamnet had to hope the same thing wouldn’t happen with Marcovefa here.
The ground trembled beneath his horse’s hooves. The beast snorted and shied as a low rumble filled the air and then vanished again. Some snow fell from the branches of the trees lining the clearing.
“Just what we need,” Kormak Bersi said: “a little earthquake right at the start of the battle.”
“Somehow, I don’t think that was supposed to be a little earthquake,” Count Hamnet answered.
Marcovefa nodded. “They want to squash us.” Her teeth flashed as she grinned. “They not get what they want.” She looked towards the north. “Now they come down on us. They think we all – ” She ran out of words, but gestured.
“Flattened?” Hamnet said.
“Flattened, yes. I thank you.” Marcovefa smiled again, for all the world as if a forgotten verb were the only thing she had to worry about.
A rumble came from the north. More snow fell from tree branches on that side of the clearing. The ground seemed to shake again. This time, Marcovefa couldn’t do anything about it, but Hamnet Thyssen didn’t expect her to. With cries like horns full of spit, the mammoths with warriors aboard them thundered into the clearing.
“Loose!” Hamnet shouted once more, pointing towards the great beasts.
Hundreds of arrows hissed through the air. As the mammoths had up on the Bizogot plains, they wore armor of leather dipped in boiling wax. That kept most of the Raumsdalian shafts from biting, but not all.
Wounded mammoths’ screams were even more blood-curdling than their usual cries. Some of the great beasts pulled riders off their backs with their trunks and dashed them to the ground, as if blaming them for the pain they suffered. And if they thought that, were they far wrong? Others broke formation. One or two trampled down the riding deer on either flank, smashing swaths of chaos through the Rulers’ ranks.
But most of the mammoths kept coming in spite of the barrage of arrows. “Forward!” Hamnet Thyssen shouted. The Raumsdalian trumpeters amplified the command. Momentum of your own was the best way to meet a charge. Even of mammoths? Hamnet wondered. But by then his horse was already getting up into a gallop.
He knew he didn’t want to try to withstand a line, even a disarrayed line, of charging mammoths on a horse that was standing still. He also knew men on horseback could beat men on riding deer. He’d seen that up in the Bizogot country. It ought to be even more surely true here, the Raumsdalians being better trained, better armored, and better disciplined than the big blond barbarians who lived north of them.
Nothing on this side of the Glacier could withstand a charge by heavy cavalry. Those big horses … suddenly didn’t seem so big, when men on mammothback shot down at riders from above and speared them out of the saddle with long, long lances.
Still, the Rulers didn’t have it all their own way – not even close. Count Hamnet slashed at a mammoth’s leg, hoping to hamstring the monster. It didn’t topple, but a squall of torment rewarded him. Another rider thrust his lance deep into a mammoth’s unarmored belly. Even on so huge a beast, that was bound to be a mortal wound. Blood poured from it in great gouts. The mammoth sank to its knees, then rolled over on its side.
Something buzzed past Count Hamnet s head like an angry wasp. That wasn’t an arrow – it was a slingstone. The realization made him want to duck. Especially if made of lead, those could be worse than arrows. Sometimes they sank into the wounds they created and disappeared.
You couldn’t use a sling from horseback or mammothback or even, he supposed, deerback, not if you hoped to hit anything. Hamnet looked around till he spotted the detachment of enemy slingers, who had just come out of the forest and into the clearing, where they had the room they needed to set up.
“Get them!” he shouted, pointing their way. But a lot of enemy warriors stood between the slingers and the Raumsdalians. He looked around for Marcovefa. “Can you take out the slingers?” he asked her.
She didn’t even know what they were. “I have other things to worry about,” she answered. “Muchly magickings!”
Hamnet Thyssen hadn’t felt any magic from the Rulers. Now he realized why he hadn’t. Keeping their wizards busy was much more important than knocking out their slingers, who, in the big scheme of things, were no worse than nuisances.
So he told himself, not knowing how bad a nuisance could be.
But he had other things to worry about, too. An unhorsed – or undeered, or unmammothed – warrior of the Rulers cut at him. He took the blow on his shield and slashed back. His stroke caught the enemy warrior in the side of the neck. The warrior groaned and toppled, spouting blood.
“To me, Three Tusk clan! To me, Bizogots!” Trasamund roared. “Revenge is ours! Death to the Rulers!”
“Death!” cried his clansmates and the other Bizogots from clans all across the frozen steppe. “Death to the Rulers!”
They dealt out plenty of death, too. They steered clear of the mammoths, at which Hamnet Thyssen could hardly complain. But, big men on big Raumsdalian horses, they worked a fearful slaughter against the archers mounted on the Rulers’ riding deer. The enemy warriors were brave enough and to spare; no one ever questioned the Rulers’ courage. The horses towered over the deer, though, and gave the Bizogots a decided close-range advantage over their foes.