Marcovefa and the raven croaked back and forth some more. But all Hamnet got from her was another shrug. “The bird doesn’t know,” she reported. “Why should it care about people who aren’t dead?”
“They’ll make us dead if they get the chance,” the Raumsdalian noble said. “But I don’t suppose the raven cares about us while we’re alive, either. Well, maybe about you-a little, anyhow.”
“A little,” Marcovefa agreed. “It thinks I’m interesting because we understand each other some. If we didn’t, it would only want to peck out my eyeballs after I’m gone.”
“You say the most cheerful things,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. The Bizogots were more fatalistic than most Raumsdalians. And Marcovefa was more fatalistic than most Bizogots. Part of that might have been her own character. Part was surely growing to womanhood atop the Glacier. Just as the Bizogots had a harsher life than denizens of the Empire, so Marcovefa’s clan lived in a way that would horrify-had horrified-any Bizogots who saw it.
“Do I tell lies?” Marcovefa asked.
“Not here,” Hamnet said. She grinned, unoffended. He went on, “Do you know any way to make ravens interested in live people? If we had flying eyes, that would help us a lot.” He told her about the Rulers’ wizard who’d turned himself into an owl to spy on the Bizogots and Raumsdalians.
“A raven is a smart bird, but only a bird,” Marcovefa said. “Why should it care?”
Plainly, she didn’t think Hamnet would have an answer for her. But he did: “If we can find the Rulers, we can fight them. If we fight them, the ravens will get plenty of fresh food.” Maybe including us, he thought. He’d run that risk whenever he went into battle. Sometimes, though, it seemed bigger than others.
Marcovefa grinned again, this time in delight. She blew him a kiss. “Yes, that may work . . . if the bird can see so far ahead. Have to find out.” She started croaking at the raven. It made strange, throaty noises back at her. She croaked again and again.
The raven tilted its head to one side. If it wasn’t thinking things over, Count Hamnet had never seen anything, man or beast, that was. What went on behind those bright jet eyes? How much could a bird anticipate? Hamnet was no bird, so he didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, ravens were more clever than most other flying feathered creatures. But could this one understand the promise of more meat down the line if it did something rather than something else?
It said something to Marcovefa. Ravens could learn to speak human words, but this one wasn’t doing that. It had its own way of getting ideas across, one only vaguely connected to human language. Had Marcovefa needed magic to learn it, or had study sufficed?
He couldn’t ask her now; whatever she was using, she needed to concentrate hard to get meaning from the sounds the raven was making. When it finally finished, she said, “It will try. Maybe it will forget. Maybe the other ravens won’t understand what it needs. But it will try.”
“As much as we can expect, I suppose.” Hamnet expected nothing from the raven. That way, he couldn’t possibly be disappointed. Anything he did hear from the bird or its fellows would come as a pleasant surprise.
He looked at life the same way. The view had advantages and disadvantages, as everything did. When things went wrong, he had little trouble accepting it-most of the time-because he’d looked for nothing better. (Where he did look for something better, as with Gudrid and Liv, disillusionment proved doubly bitter.) When things went well, he tried not to show the surprise too much.
“This is right on the edge of what a raven can do,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe over the edge. The bird here is smart, even for a raven. I don’t know if all of them can do what it can.”
She croaked some more at the big black bird. Count Hamnet knew nothing of the language of ravens, and knew he never would. If he had to guess from tone, though, he would have said she was telling this one how bright it was. It preened-literally. Did that mean it understood the praise and accepted it? You would have to be a raven-or Marcovefa-to know.
The bird sprang into the air. Wind whistled out between its wing feathers as it flapped. It wasn’t an arrow with a beak, the way a falcon was. But it could outsoar and outmaneuver a falcon. Ravens harried hawks for the sport of it, then tumbled out of the way in the air to keep the birds of prey from turning on them.
Ravens harried hawks, jays harried ravens, mockingbirds harried jays, kingbirds harried mockingbirds, hummingbirds harried kingbirds . . . and dragonflies probably harried hummingbirds. Hamnet Thyssen looked for a lesson there, but couldn’t find one he liked. Everything large and fearsome had something small and feisty that annoyed it. No, not much of a lesson.
Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true, on land as well as in the air. Right now, the Bizogots seemed small and feisty, the Rulers large and fearsome. That was how things looked if you were a Bizogot or a Raumsdalian up here beyond the tree line, anyhow. The Rulers probably had a different view of it.
The only view of the Rulers Hamnet wanted was one of their backs as they rode off beyond the Gap once more. He wondered if he would ever get a view like that. He feared he wouldn’t, even if the Bizogots and the Empire somehow beat the invaders. The Rulers would be part of the political landscape from now on. The Gap would be open from now on, too. More Rulers-or even other invaders-could sweep down out of the north. The world had got bigger and more complicated.
When he said as much to Marcovefa, she gave him a wry smile. “This happened to me when I came down off the Glacier,” she said. “Everything new, everything strange, everything-” She threw her arms wide to show how much her world had expanded.
“You’ve done well,” Hamnet told her.
She shrugged. “People are still people. That’s the biggest thing. The world is strange. The animals are strange. But people? No.”
“People are always strange,” Count Hamnet said. Especially women, he added, but only to himself.
Marcovefa smiled again and nodded. “But they’re strange the same way here as they are in my clan up on the nunatak.”
“On the what?” Hamnet said.
“Nunatak,” Marcovefa repeated. “That’s our word for a mountaintop that sticks out above the Glacier.”
“Oh.” Hamnet Thyssen had probably heard the term while he was atop the Glacier himself, and while he was on that mountaintop-that nunatak. If he had, though, it had gone clean out of his mind. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t been at his best up there. None of the Bizogots or Raumsdalians had. He thought for a moment longer. “It doesn’t sound like a Bizogot word at all.”
“Maybe it isn’t. Our songs say other folk were up there when our forefathers came,” Marcovefa answered.
“What happened to them?” Hamnet asked.
“We ate them,” she answered calmly.
He didn’t splutter and make disgusted noises, because she so obviously wanted him to do just that. All he said was, “Seems as though you ate some of their words, too.”
“It could be.” Marcovefa’s expression was comically disappointed. Yes, she’d aimed to get more of a rise out of him.
One corner of his own mouth quirked upward. People didn’t get everything they wanted-not even a powerful shaman like Marcovefa. Nobody got everything. Maybe that meant the Rulers wouldn’t.