“I know,” Audun said. “That’s what worries me.”
“What do we do now?” Even Trasamund’s big voice was unwontedly soft.
“We smash the barrier. Then we smash what lies behind it.” Marcovefa sounded as eager as if she were a young girl going to her lover.
“Just like that?” Hamnet said.
“Yes. Just like that.” She aimed a peremptory forefinger at the barrier only she could sense. When she spoke again, she used her own dialect of the Bizogot tongue. Ulric might have been able to follow it, but Hamnet couldn’t.
He also couldn’t deny it had an effect. The peaceful scene ahead wavered, as someone’s reflection in a pool would waver if he dropped a pebble into the water. Then it disappeared, as a reflection would if someone dropped in a handful of pebbles. It had concealed a swarm of sabertooths and lions and dire wolves and short-faced bears. Roaring and snarling, they sprang toward Hamnet and his comrades.
XIII
Did we really have to ride toward this?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. Without conscious thought, his hands strung the bow and found an arrow to set on the string.
“To tell you the truth, I would have been glad enough to do without it,” Ulric Skakki replied. He was readying his bow with quick competence, too.
Marcovefa started laughing again. Hamnet and Ulric looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. So did everyone else, which made Hamnet feel a little-a very little-better. In the next minute or so, unless he was luckier than he deserved to be, he was much too likely to end up torn limb from limb.
“Will you share the joke?” he asked.
“They put a mask on an illusion and think it will serve,” she said.
Count Hamnet thought it would serve, too. The sabertooth heading his way was almost close enough to spring. If he didn’t let fly in the next few heartbeats, it would. He had to hope he could hurt it and scare it away. If he didn’t . . .
He preferred not to think about that. Even if he did frighten off the sabertooth, he would have to worry about a lion or a short-faced bear next. He preferred not to think about that, too, but feared he had little choice.
Then Marcovefa pointed once more at the oncoming beasts. Laughing still, she cast another spell-to Hamnet Thyssen’s relief, a brief one. As soon as the spell struck home, Hamnet cried out in astonishment. So did the rest of the Raumsdalians and Bizogots.
Rather than a swarm of ferocious wild beasts, a ragged gaggle of naked Rulers rushed toward them. The invaders from beyond the Gap must have sensed that their covering spell had failed, for they stopped in confusion, looking quite humanly astonished. A man behind them-well out of bowshot behind them-must have been the wizard who’d set the barrier and disguised his countrymen as beasts. He seemed astonished, too: astonished and infuriated. He hadn’t expected to be found out, let alone outdone.
The sabertooth-turned-Ruler would have done better to keep coming. Hamnet shot him in the belly. He said “Oof!” loud enough to let Hamnet hear him clearly. Then he shrieked a good deal louder than that. The Rulers were brave, strong, and stubborn warriors, but hardly any man from any folk could have hoped to stay silent after that kind of wound.
As if the shriek were a signal, most of the other riders let fly. More of the broad-shouldered, burly men went down. The rest turned and ran as fast as they could. The Rulers seldom fled-their stern way of making war frowned on falling back for any reason. But maybe their code of honor or whatever it was granted dispensations when they got caught with their breeches down. Hamnet seldom sympathized with their predicaments, but with that one he did.
Watching them pelt back toward him only made their wizard angrier. He wasn’t naked-he wore the Rulers’ usual fur and leather, decorated with a shaman’s fringes and crystals. Hamnet was busy speeding the departing warriors on their way with arrow after arrow, but he kept glancing at the enemy sorcerer. With the men routed, the wizard was the only danger left.
He must have felt Marcovefa was the only danger to him-and he might well have been right. Even across more than a furlong, Hamnet could see him quiver with rage. The Ruler aimed his finger with as much purpose as Marcovefa had ever shown.
Count Hamnet waited for her to swat his spell aside, the way she had with the concealment and shapeshifting sorceries. Instead, to his horrified dismay, she swayed in the saddle. She might have taken a sharp right to the chin.
She shook herself, the way someone who’d taken a sharp right to the chin might do. The snarl that followed made the efforts of all the Rulers masquerading as beasts seem halfhearted beside it. That made Hamnet Thyssen feel better. Even if she had a foe worthy of her, she didn’t seem downhearted about it.
And the Rulers’ wizard did seem astonished that she still sat her horse-or maybe that she hadn’t burst into flames. Hamnet got the feeling he would be vulnerable to anything Marcovefa did to him.
Before he could find out, Trasamund yelled, “Forward! After them! Kill them all, the stinking dire-wolf turds!” By the way the Bizogots and Raumsdalians spurred ahead, they were every one of them relieved to be chasing naked men and not battling lions and sabertooths. Hamnet understood that. How could he not, when he felt the same way?
But Marcovefa swore in her own dialect. All those men and horses between her and the enemy shaman must have blocked the spell she wanted to cast. She paused and began another one. While she was doing that, the Rulers’ wizard also turned and ran. Like most of his folk, he was short and stocky. He showed a fine turn of speed even so.
Marcovefa held out her hands. The enemy wizard sprang into the air, higher than a man had any business doing. When he came down, he ran even faster. Marcovefa said something that should have scorched his backside all over again. Hamnet realized she’d intended to destroy him, not just singe his breeches.
“Never mind,” Hamnet said. “You broke two masks and you beat him.”
She gave him a look that was anything but satisfied. “These foolish little people! I shouldn’t only beat them. I should make them sorry their mothers ever let them out of the nest.”
She went right on scowling at the corpses of the Rulers who’d been magicked into predators’ shapes. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians also scowled at them. That Count Hamnet understood: how could you steal anything from a naked man? He needed longer to fathom Marcovefa’s annoyance. But then he did-to her, the bodies lying on the ground were wasted meat.
“You want to pick out a plump one, don’t you?” he said.
“We all should,” she said. “They could feed us for a couple of days. You leave so much on the ground, it surprises me your carrion birds aren’t too fat to fly.”
“We don’t eat man’s flesh, not unless we’re starving,” Hamnet said. “Even then, we don’t talk about it later.”
“Up on the Glacier, we are always hungry,” Marcovefa answered. Hamnet nodded; he’d seen the truth of that. She went on, “But the flesh of someone from another clan-that is not man’s flesh, not to us. And these are not just from another clan. They might as well be from another world.”
Hamnet felt the same way about them. But he said, “You have narrow rules for who is a man and who is not. Ours stretch wider. A good thing, too-if they didn’t, what would we do with you?”