“Enough lesson of speech?” Dashru asked Hamnet Thyssen. He wasn’t going to have anything more to do with Marcovefa, not if he could help it. Count Hamnet had no trouble understanding that.
“Enough language lessons, yes,” he answered. Dashru got out of there as fast as he could. Again, Hamnet would have done the same thing.
“You are too soft on him,” Marcovefa said. “He is a captive, a rabbit on the fire. He should remember.”
“He isn’t likely to forget, not now,” Hamnet said.
“If he hadn’t got out of line, he wouldn’t have needed the lesson,” Marcovefa said, adding, “Did you see how useless his countercharm was?”
“Yes.” Count Hamnet wondered whether the countercharm would have been useless against Liv’s sorcery, or Audun Gilli’s. He didn’t think so, though he wasn’t sure.
“Now I know more of what the Rulers do. I know more of how they think. I want to fight them. I want to beat them,” Marcovefa said.
“You’d better want to. And you’d better do it, too,” Hamnet said. “Without you, we haven’t got much chance.”
“Foosh!” Marcovefa said-a dismissive noise. “Their magic is not so much. You shouldn’t have such trouble with it.” She paused. “Of course, the magic you people down here know isn’t so much, either.”
“That’s why we need you,” Count Hamnet said. “If anything happens to you . . .” He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about that. He would lose his woman. In the ordinary run of things, with the sorrows he’d known in his love life, that would have been disaster enough and then some. Since the Bizogots and the Empire would likely go under the Rulers’ yoke in short order, his love life, for once, wasn’t his biggest worry.
The lewd glint in Marcovefa’s eye said she thought he was thinking about it. “You find some other woman to give you what you want,” she teased.
“Where will I find another woman who can give me the Rulers driven back beyond the Gap?” he asked.
She pointed north. “Same place you found me-up on top of the Glacier.”
“I didn’t want to make that trip once. We wouldn’t have tried to climb the ice then if the Rulers weren’t going to kill us if we stayed on flat ground.” Hamnet shuddered at the memory of that fearsome ascent. “We wouldn’t have had a chance if that big avalanche hadn’t made the slope less impossible than it usually is.”
“It is not easy,” Marcovefa admitted. “If it were, my folk would have come down from the Glacier long ago. Our enemies drove us up there, too-so our songs say. I believe them. No one would have gone up there unless he had to.”
“All right, then,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Don’t talk foolishness. Everyone on this side of the Gap needs you.” He slipped his arm around her waist. “I need you in a way the rest of the people don’t, though.”
“You think so, do you?” She gave him a sidelong glance and a mocking smile. “So no other men on this side of the Gap would want me?”
That wasn’t true. She was pretty enough that any man might want her. Hamnet answered with guile of his own: “You’d scare most of them off once they found out you might carve them into steaks if they made you unhappy.”
“Foosh!” Marcovefa said again. “I don’t butcher anyone from my own clan-and a lover is about the same as a clansman.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Hamnet was kidding, but kidding on the square. He and Marcovefa both started to laugh. The world might be coming to pieces around them. Might be? It was. If the Glacier hadn’t come to pieces, none of what happened since would have been possible. But you couldn’t keep looking at anything so large for very long, not without your mind snapping. If something funny came along close by, you’d laugh.
Which didn’t mean the bigger troubles went away. Not looking at them for a little while helped them seem more tolerable, though. Whether they really were . . . was a question Hamnet ignored for the time being.
A scout rode into the Bizogots’ camp. He pointed north and east. “There’s a band of those musk-ox turds riding south,” he said. “They won’t pass too far from us.”
“How big a band?” Trasamund asked. That was the right question, sure enough. If it was too large, these remnants of half a dozen shattered Bizogot clans would have to fight shy of it for fear even a hard-won victory would leave them too weak to fight again.
The scout considered. “Maybe half a dozen war mammoths,” he said. “More of the miserable mushrooms on their riding deer, of course, but not too many. I think we can take them.”
“I bet he’s right,” Ulric Skakki said to Hamnet. “Scouts always see bigger forces than the ones that are really there.”
“Most of the time, anyhow,” Hamnet said. He raised his voice to question the Bizogot: “Did they look like men who intended to settle down when they found good grazing, or did they seem on their way to somewhere else?”
“Hard to know for sure,” the scout said, and Hamnet Thyssen nodded impatiently. After more thought, the man went on, “If they wanted to stop, the grazing was good where they were. They were moving pretty steady.”
“Heading for the Empire,” Ulric murmured.
Count Hamnet nodded again. The Rulers already had an army down there fighting against Sigvat II’s soldiers. Hamnet wondered whether Sigvat wished he’d taken all the warnings he’d got more seriously. Too late to worry about that now, for Sigvat and for everybody else.
Trasamund made a fist and slammed it into his thigh. “Let’s hit them!”
Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. “What do you think?” Ulric asked.
“We might as well,” Hamnet asked. “If we can break the links between the Rulers’ big army down in the south and the Gap, we’ve done something useful. They’d better have a tough time reinforcing their men down in the Empire.”
“I suppose so.” Ulric didn’t sound thrilled. After a moment, he explained why: “Any time you say something that starts with ‘If we can . . . ,’ I start worrying about it.”
“Me in particular, or anybody?” Hamnet inquired.
“Anybody,” the adventurer replied.
“Well, good. I wouldn’t want to be singled out,” Count Hamnet murmured.
Trasamund went on shouting, trying to fire up the Bizogots and get them moving that very moment. A crack squadron of imperial cavalry would have had trouble riding off to war as fast as he wanted the mammoth-herders to move. When the Bizogots didn’t get cracking fast enough to suit him, he yelled louder than ever.
A Bizogot who wasn’t from the Three Tusk clan complained, loudly and profanely. Trasamund knocked him down and kicked him. The man came up with a knife in his hand. Trasamund kicked him again, right where it did the most good. The other Bizogot crumpled, clutching at himself.
“He isn’t going to ride to war,” Hamnet said.
“I don’t think so,” Ulric agreed in shrill falsetto. He lowered his voice in two different ways to continue, “Trasamund’s going to get killed if he keeps doing that. One of these days, the other fellow will stick him before he can kick.”
“Well, you don’t see Bizogots living to get old very often, do you?” Hamnet said. “It’s a rough life up here, and they don’t make it any easier on themselves.”
“They never make anything easy on anyone, including themselves.” Ulric shrugged. “It makes them tough-if the Empire had to take the beating the nomads have, it would have gone belly-up to the Rulers a long time ago. But you’re right-they pay the price for it.”