“Well, you were right. There. I said it again. Does it make you happy? His Majesty does say the same thing. Does that make you happy?”
“Kicking Sigvat in his iron arse might make me happy-or not so unhappy, anyway,” Count Hamnet replied.
“You’d only give him a concussion of the brain.” Ulric Skakki sounded bright and pleasant, eager to be useful.
“Will you help us? Can you help us? I’m supposed to take your answer back to Nidaros,” Gunnlaug said.
“So you get to run the gauntlet twice? God help you,” Hamnet said. “And I might have known Sigvat would want us to help him. He doesn’t care a fart’s worth what happens up here.”
“It’s not Raumsdalia,” Ulric said. “Why should he?”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” said the messenger from the Empire. “Can you help us? Will you? What word do I take back to His Majesty?”
“He has the whole Empire,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “We have one wizard from Raumsdalia, a few shamans, and some Bizogots.” One of the shamans was Marcovefa, but he didn’t mention that. He went on, “What are we supposed to be able to do that Sigvat can’t? Why are we supposed to be able to do it?”
“You are supposed to be able to beat the Rulers, Your Grace,” Gunnlaug told him. “I don’t know why, and His Majesty doesn’t know why, either. But for whatever reason, you worry them. They want you. They want you enough to put a fat price on your head, alive or not.”
Count Hamnet had heard that before. He’d heard it often enough by now that he had to believe it-which was not to say it made any sense to him. “Even the Rulers can be stupid sometimes,” he growled.
“And so can Sigvat, God knows,” Ulric Skakki added. “We have our worries, and he has his. Some of them are the same-some, yes, but not all.”
“You want to beat the Rulers, too, don’t you?” Gunnlaug Kvaran sounded anxious. And well he might, for he continued, “You wouldn’t . . . go in with them . . . would you?”
Trasamund answered that before either Hamnet or Ulric could: “No! We aim to boot them off the Bizogot plain! We aim to beat them back beyond the Gap! We aim to kill them all, if we can! You can tell your precious Sigvat that. You can tell him he cursed well should have listened to Count Hamnet here, too. In fact, you’d better tell him that-you hear me, Kvaran?”
“I hear you, Your Ferocity,” Gunnlaug said, without promising he would take the jarl’s words back to the Raumsdalian Emperor. Hamnet wondered how much it would matter. Even if Sigvat still held Nidaros, could his messenger get through the Rulers again? What were the odds? Bad, Hamnet was sure.
“Sigvat has heard me, too, by God,” Trasamund said. “If not for me, Count Hamnet and Ulric never would have fared north. They never would have gone beyond the Gap. They never would have seen the marvels on the far side.”
“We never would have bumped into the Rulers, either,” Ulric said. “We have a lot to blame you for, Trasamund.”
Trasamund bared his teeth in what might have been a friendly smile or might have been something else altogether. Gunnlaug Kvaran wore the expression of an outsider at a family squabble. Hamnet suspected Ulric Skakki was shading the truth. Even had Sigvat sent other Raumsdalians beyond the Gap, the Rulers would still have broken in. In that case, the noble and the adventurer would have been fighting them down in the Empire instead of up here. Would that have been better, worse, or just different? No way to know.
Gunnlaug Kvaran bowed to him and to Trasamund. “I go to take your reply to His Majesty,” he said.
“Not right this minute, you bloody idiot!” Ulric burst out. “Stay a while. Rest. Eat some more. Let your horse rest, too. You still have to make it back across the plains before you even try sneaking through to Nidaros.”
That was such obvious good sense, not even Gunnlaug argued against it very hard. Plainly a duteous man, the messenger had to see that duty also involved keeping himself and his horse fit. A couple of Bizogots carrying fat geese back from the marshes at the edge of Sudertorp Lake didn’t hurt in changing his mind, either.
He was gnawing on a roasted duck leg when he saw Tahpenes and recognized her for what she was. He almost dropped the leg in his lap. “What’s she doing here?” he demanded.
“The laundry, a little cooking . . . she sweeps the floors of our huts, too,” Ulric answered. “If you want your horse curried, I daresay she could attend to that.”
Gunnlaug scowled. “You are not a serious man, Skakki. His Majesty warned me about you, and I see he was right.”
“Thank you,” Ulric replied, which left the messenger without much of a reply. The adventurer often had that effect on people, as Count Hamnet had found to his own discomfiture.
Tahpenes also eyed Gunnlaug with a certain amount of surprise. What was going through her mind? How much did she care that one set of her folk’s enemies had managed to link up with the other? Did she wonder if the Raumsdalian newcomer was an avenue to escape?
One thing she didn’t seem to realize was that her captors wanted her to get away. They couldn’t make that obvious without making her wonder why. One day soon, though, she probably would contrive to escape. Count Hamnet hoped so, anyhow. Then everyone here could relax.
Hamnet spoke to Trasamund about that. The jarl heard him out, then grinned and laid a finger by the side of his nose. “It might work,” he said. “Has a halfway decent chance, anyhow, which is more than I can say for some other notions that have come up.”
They feted Gunnlaug Kvaran. They gave him a fresh horse. Hamnet and Ulric and Trasamund and even Audun Gilli gave him encouraging messages to take back to Sigvat II.Why not? Count Hamnet thought cynically. Talk is cheap.
Gunnlaug proved less eager to leave after tasting Bizogot hospitality. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t know if one of the big blond women with the band took him into a hut and gave him something to remember her by, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. The mammoth-herders were an earthy folk, and took-and gave-their pleasures as they saw the chance.
Almost all of them turned out to say farewell to Gunnlaug when he finally did ride off to the south once more. Men clasped his hand and clapped him on the back. Women hugged him and kissed him and wished him well. A little wistfully, Ulric Skakki said, “The only times I ever got fancy sendoffs were when lots of nasty people were chasing me. Gunnlaug doesn’t know how lucky he is.”
“He’s getting a fancy sendoff for a reason, too,” Hamnet replied. “If we’re all here telling him what a fine fellow he is-”
“Yes, I know,” Ulric broke in. “If we’re all making much of Kvaran, we’ve got an excuse for not paying attention to Tahpenes. Now we see if she’s smart enough to figure that out, too.”
Gunnlaug Kvaran rode away. Some of the Bizogots trotted after him for as far as half a mile. As far as Count Hamnet was concerned, if they wanted to work that hard, it was up to them. He just watched the Raumsdalian messenger get smaller and smaller in the distance.
When he went to look for Tahpenes after the farewells, she was nowhere to be found. He went and told Trasamund. The jarl told the Bizogots. The mammoth-herders made a great show of beating the bushes for their escaped captive. Everyone was so disappointed when they didn’t catch her.
“May I talk to you, Your Grace?” Audun Gilli asked.
“You’re doing it,” Count Hamnet answered gruffly. “Go ahead.”