Since he didn’t talk to her, she rode over and talked to him. That was bound to be a lesson of one kind or another. Which kind, Hamnet wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Shall we look like them?” Marcovefa said. “Will that surprise them and make things easy for us?”
“What do I know?” Hamnet answered. “Talk to Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf. If they think it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it.”
Marcovefa talked to the others. “They say to go ahead,” she told Hamnet. “So I go ahead. The Rulers will see the spell. Not us. We do not see anything out of the sameness.”
“Out of the ordinary, you mean,” Hamnet said.
“Do I? I suppose I do.” Marcovefa shrugged and got busy with her magic. She didn’t explain it, the way she often did. She simply went ahead with the spell. Hamnet Thyssen looked at his comrades. They didn’t look like Rulers to him. She’d told him they wouldn’t. He felt obscurely disappointed even so.
There were the Rulers. They were on mammoths and deer, and rode through the Empire as if they had not a care in the world. When they spied the Bizogots and Raumsdalians in front of them, they waved cheerfully. Their foes looked like friends to them, anyhow.
The two bands had got quite close to each other before one of the real Rulers called out something in their incomprehensible language. Hamnet and a few others had learned tiny fragments of that tongue. No one he led spoke it well enough to fool someone for whom it was a birth-speech. The men on his side did the best they could: they kept their mouths shut.
Frowning, the broad-shouldered, curly-bearded man repeated himself. Hamnet recognized the same syllables over again. He also caught the annoyance in the-chieftain’s?-voice. Whatever the Ruler said, he expected some kind of answer, and he wasn’t getting it. Which meant . . .
“Let’s hit ’em!” Hamnet, Trasamund, and Runolf all shouted the same thing at almost the same time. Ulric wasted no time on chatter. He simply drew his bow and shot the man who’d called out to people he thought friends. The Ruler looked almost comically astonished when the arrow sprouted in the middle of his wide chest. He slid off his riding deer’s back.
More Rulers tumbled from their mounts. Count Hamnet cut one down before his foe had even drawn his sword. Doing something like that wasn’t fair, which didn’t mean it didn’t work.
Only a few of the enemy warriors aboard riding deer found much chance to fight back. Bizogot and Raumsdalian archers also did everything they could to shoot the Rulers on the war mammoths, and to shoot the mammoths themselves as often as they could. If the beasts went wild with pain, they wouldn’t do what their masters wanted them to.
But a mammoth plucked a Raumsdalian trooper out of the saddle with its trunk and threw him to the ground. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly when the mammoth’s forefoot crushed the life from him. From everything Hamnet had seen, even large animals didn’t like stepping on people. Like it or not, the mammoth did it, as other war mammoths had before. Maybe the Rulers had some training trick to get the best of their reluctance.
“The illusion is broken,” Marcovefa called.
“Get back out of slingstone range!” Hamnet yelled at her. She made a face, but for once did as he asked without arguing. Almost getting her skull smashed before made her less than eager to risk it again.
Another Ruler yammered nonsense at Hamnet. It wasn’t nonsense to the man from beyond the Gap, of course, but it meant not a thing to the Raumsdalian noble. “Give up!” Hamnet shouted back. The Ruler either didn’t understand or didn’t want to.
Their swords would have to speak for them, then. Iron rang against iron. Sun-bright sparks flew. Hamnet wondered whether two swordsmen fighting in dry grass or on dry moss had ever started a fire. Then, as he beat the Ruler’s blade aside the instant before it would have ruined his face, he wondered if he would live through this.
A Bizogot’s arrow caught his opponent in the ribs. The Ruler grunted and then screamed. Hamnet finished him with a stroke to the neck. Body contorting in death spasms, the invader crashed to the ground.
Hamnet looked for someone else to fight. The unfair skirmish was almost over. One of the war mammoths was still fighting even though arrows pincushioned it. A few real Rulers kept up the struggle against the ambushers, but they fell one after another.
“Surrender!” Hamnet shouted in the Rulers’ language-that was a word he’d made sure he learned from the few prisoners his side had taken. Only a handful of the invaders ever did it. Most preferred death in battle to what they thought of as the worst of disgraces.
For his trouble, he got abuse showered on him now. The surviving Rulers made it plain they weren’t about to give up. He couldn’t understand much of what they called him, but he was sure they weren’t tossing him endearments.
“If they don’t want to, they don’t have to,” Trasamund said. He drew his bow, took careful aim, and shot one of the Rulers off the war mammoth still in the fight. The rest of the enemy warriors cheered. They saw nothing wrong with dying. Quitting was another story.
Die they did. Marcovefa tried her heart-stopping sorcery on the mammoth, but it didn’t work. She shrugged. “Warded,” she said. “The spell is easy to block.”
“Too bad. A lot of meat there.” Trasamund shrugged. “Oh, well. We’ll still butcher the deer and the horses that went down.”
“I wish it were easy to put the mammoths out of their misery one way or another,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He imagined himself wandering around with needles and skewers jabbed into his flesh. That had to be something close to what the great beasts were feeling now-and they didn’t even know why it had happened.
“Well, if you want to ride up close and try for a shot in the eye . . .” The way Trasamund’s voice trailed off told what he thought Count Hamnet’s chances were. After a moment, he went on, “Of course, if you miss, the mammoth’ll likely stamp you into the mud.”
“That did cross my mind, yes,” Hamnet said. “Since it was your good idea, you can try it.”
For a heartbeat, he feared Trasamund would. Challenging a Bizogot could be dangerous, because he might feel compelled to meet the challenge no matter how preposterous it was. But the jarl shook his head. “I’ve seen it tried, thanks,” he said. “I’ve even seen it work once or twice. And I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t.” This time, his pause had a meditative quality to it. “Not pretty.”
“You sure aren’t,” Ulric Skakki agreed. “Or isn’t that what you were talking about?” He had a knack for hearing and responding to the bits of talk that would start the most trouble.
“We were talking about putting mammoths out of their misery.” Trasamund eyed Ulric. “Might be worthwhile doing the same thing to you.”
“Only misery I’m in right now is from the company I keep,” the adventurer said. “I can put myself out of it if I want to-all I need to do is ride away.” He made as if to do just that.
“Hang on,” Hamnet said.
“All right, since it’s you that asks,” Ulric said. “You haven’t insulted me any time lately, anyhow. I don’t quite know why not, but you haven’t.”
“Give me a chance and I’m sure I will,” Hamnet replied. “Where do we go from here? What do we do next?”
Ulric struck a pose. “Do I look like an oracle? Am I the Golden Shrine?” He looked down at himself. “If I am, the architect could have done better. My body is a temple-but not that one.”