The warriors on mammothback charged again and again, but the Bizogots and Raumsdalians simply rode out of their way and kept shooting arrows at them from the sides and rear. After a while, the last enemy soldier slumped down on the mammoth’s back, either dead or too badly hurt to go on fighting. The mammoth itself must have been almost mad from pain; it had nearly as many arrows sticking out of its hide as a porcupine had quills.
“I feel sorry for the poor thing,” Ulric Skakki said as the mammoth lumbered off toward the south. “Not its fault the people who trained it are a pack of dire wolves who walk on two legs.”
“Maybe not,” Hamnet said, “but if my neighbor has a dog that tries to bite me, I’m going to kill it before it can.”
“We ought to kill that mammoth-put it out of its misery,” Ulric said.
“Go ahead,” Count Hamnet told him. The adventurer gave back a reproachful look.
“You want it dead?” Marcovefa said. Before either Ulric or Hamnet could answer, she pointed at the mammoth and chanted something in her peculiar dialect. The huge beast walked along for another couple of strides. Then it fell over. Its sides heaved only once or twice before they stilled. It was, without a doubt, dead.
“Good God!” Hamnet said. “How did you do that?”
“I put-how do you say it?-a clog in its heart,” Marcovefa answered. “Nothing can live with that. Not vole, not fox, not man, not mammoth. It is a very easy spell to make. Can be countered, but easy to make.”
Hamnet Thyssen looked at her. “You can kill anyone you want, whenever you want?”
She shook her head. “No, no, no. Spell takes some time-you saw that. And I have to see the man-or the animal-to use it. And it can be countered. Even one of your puny amulets will stop it most of the time. I didn’t know if the Rulers warded their mammoths that way. They didn’t ward this mammoth. Shall we butcher it? Plenty of meat.”
Some of the Bizogots were already riding over to do just that. Hamnet wasn’t wild about mammoth meat. It was tough and gamy. But it was meat, and it was there. He had a little sausage and some hard bread in his belt pouch. A bellyful of meat-even tough, gamy meat-didn’t sound bad at all.
And it didn’t turn out bad at all. He ate and ate. “You can stuff yourself like a Bizogot, by God,” Trasamund said admiringly.
“I’ve got used to going without,” Hamnet answered. “When there’s plenty, I make the most of it.”
“Here.” A Bizogot used a hatchet to split a bone that had been lying in the fire. “Want some marrow?”
“I won’t say no.” Hamnet scooped some out with a chunk of meat so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. The marrow tasted stronger than any that came from cows or sheep or pigs or horses. But it was good. He suspected even teratorn marrow would be good, though he hoped he never got desperate enough to find out.
“Let me have a bit of that.” Ulric Skakki didn’t worry about whether the marrow was hot. He reached in, grabbed what he wanted, and stuffed it into his mouth. Maybe his fingers and palm were even more callused than Hamnet’s. Maybe he was just hungrier.
Marcovefa sighed and patted her stomach. “Up on the Glacier, we don’t have feasts like this. Unless-” She broke off with a sly smile. “Seems a shame to waste the warriors, but when you have game this big, I suppose I can see why you don’t bother with them.”
“You . . . eat people?” Per Anders didn’t know what things were like up on top of the Glacier.
“Not really people-never anybody from my clan, and those are the only true people,” the shaman answered. She smacked her lips. “But two-legged meat, once you cook it well, is the best there is. Better than mammoth, better than mutton, better than duck, better than anything.”
Per glanced toward Count Hamnet. Was he slightly green, or was it only Hamnet’s imagination? “You can tell her to stop teasing me now,” he said. “No matter how she goes on, I won’t believe her.”
“You’d better,” Hamnet answered. “She means it.”
“Don’t you start!” Per Anders was determined not to believe.
“By God, Anders, I’m not joking,” Hamnet said. Ulric and Trasamund nodded to show Hamnet meant it. Hamnet went on, “They don’t waste anything up there, anything at all. They can’t afford to. And that includes waste the meat that comes off an enemy’s carcass.”
Per Anders looked from one of them to the next. He must have decided they weren’t joking, because he got up shaking his head and walked away from them. Hamnet Thyssen let out a sour chuckle. “See how we win friends wherever we go?” he said.
“He is a foolish man,” Marcovefa said.
“No, he’s just a man who’s never been up on top of the Glacier,” Hamnet said.
“A lucky man, in other words,” Ulric Skakki put in.
Marcovefa sent him a dirty look. “I never knew we were poor. I never knew we were missing so many things. You do not miss what you never had.” She licked her lips. “But I do miss man’s flesh. I had that up there, but it would turn your stomachs if I ate it here.”
“You’re right-it would,” the adventurer agreed. “I’ve eaten a lot of nasty things in my time. You can’t believe some of the things you’ll try if you get hungry enough. I never did turn cannibal, though. I haven’t got a lot to be proud of, but that’s something, by God.”
“Pooh!” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Man’s flesh isn’t nasty. Man’s flesh is good. Like I say, the best meat there is.”
“Well, you’re welcome to my body-but only after I’m done using it,” Ulric Skakki said.
“You’ve already got my body, but not for stewing, I hope,” Count Hamnet added. Marcovefa thought that was funny. After a moment, so did Hamnet. Winning a skirmish made everything look better.
They pushed South, picking up more Raumsdalians who wanted to fight the Rulers. Some of the men from armies the invaders had shattered had gone home. Others had turned bandit. Still others seemed willing to try again as long as they had someone to lead them against the enemy.
“Our own officers ran away,” one man angrily told Hamnet. “What the demon good are they if they won’t stand and fight?”
“They didn’t all run away,” a new recruit said. “But most of the ones who did fight got killed.” He paused, then admitted, “Watching them get killed set some of the others running.”
Count Hamnet made a grinding noise deep in his chest. “I sometimes wonder whether Raumsdalia deserves to live.”
“Who do you suppose appointed the officers?” Ulric answered his own question: “Sigvat did, that’s who. And what did Sigvat do when the Rulers got to Nidaros? He ran away, that’s what. It’s no wonder the officers take after their master.”
The new recruits stared at him. “If one of our captains heard you say something like that, he’d horse whip you,” said the soldier who’d complained that the officers had run.
“He might think so,” Ulric said lightly.
“Oh, he’d do it, all right. He’d . . .” The soldier seemed to take his first good look at the adventurer. He paused, then changed course: “Well, maybe not. He was mighty fond of his own skin.”
“A sensible fellow,” Ulric said. “Of course, if we were all that fond of our own skins, nobody would ever hurt anybody else for fear of what would happen to him. But it doesn’t work that way, worse luck.”