“Whatever I do, it will be wrong. Everybody will blame me for it, whatever it turns out to be,” Hamnet muttered. But that wasn’t the worst. He knew what the worst was. “Whatever it turns out to be, I’ll blame myself for it.”
Did he want to blame himself for doing nothing or for doing something? Either one might be wrong. If he did nothing, things wouldn’t change. That seemed obvious. If he did something . . . his suspicion was that things wouldn’t change anyway. Then he would have done something he would much rather not have, and would have done it for no reason.
His mittened hands folded into fists. “It will be wrong,” he said again.
Marcovefa would have laughed at his dithering. He could hear her inside his mind. She never seemed to have doubts. Yes, and look what not having them got her, Hamnet thought.
Stamping along by himself didn’t do him any good. He went back to the camp. Liv was feeding Marcovefa bits of broiled hare and giving her sips of water melted from snow. If Marcovefa couldn’t chew and swallow, she would have starved by now. As things were, she’d lost flesh; her skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. They’d all done the best they could to give her enough, but feeding her as much as she would have eaten on her own wasn’t easy.
“Any change?” Hamnet asked.
Liv shook her head. “None I can find.” She might have said more-Hamnet could see that. She might have, but she sensibly didn’t. She understood Hamnet well enough to know that trying to push him toward something was more likely to make him go away from it.
Trasamund and Ulric Skakki had never figured that out. Actually, Hamnet wasn’t so sure about Ulric. Say what you would about the adventurer, but he was a clever fellow. Chances were he knew how Hamnet worked. Sometimes, though, he used what he knew for his own amusement, not for what others might think of as the general good.
Count Hamnet brought himself back to what lay before him. “Is she wet?” he asked.
“Let me see.” Liv reached under the waistband of Marcovefa’s trousers, as she might have with a toddler. She shook her head again. “No, she’s still dry. I changed her not long ago.” She paused. “She’s eaten about as much as it looks like she’s going to, too.”
“All right. I’ll take her to my tent for the night.” Hamnet bent and lifted Marcovefa. Yes, she’d lost weight since the mistletoe arrowhead struck her down. Her lips shaped a smile as Hamnet straightened with her in his arms. Her eyelids fluttered, but her eyes didn’t open. Not for the first time, Hamnet wondered how much went on inside her head. And, not for the first time, he owned himself baffled-he had no way to know.
Keeping Marcovefa from freezing while the Breath of God blew was hardly easier than keeping her fed. They swaddled her in furs and blankets and hoped for the best. So far, the best had been good enough. She hadn’t even got frostbitten fingers or toes. Raumsdalians knew a lot about fighting cold. Bizogots knew even more.
Hamnet’s tent had thick mammoth-hide walls, with the long, dark hair still on the outside. It was crowded for two, but that was all right; it let their body heat warm the air inside faster.
No one but he would know what went on inside the tent. Well, Marcovefa might, but he didn’t really believe she would. That was what had held him back ever since Trasamund suggested . . . what he suggested. The idea reminded Hamnet too much of lying with a corpse.
But if he tried it once, after it failed he could tell Trasamund . . . and Ulric Skakki . . . and Liv . . . and Gudrid . . . and Runolf Skallagrim . . . and anyone else who asked him that it had failed. Then maybe people would leave him alone. He could hope so, anyhow. Of course, the odds were that after it failed the Rulers would overrun them pretty soon. In that case, he would be too dead to need to justify himself to anybody.
He looked at Marcovefa, there in the gloom barely pushed back by one sputtering, fat-stinking lamp. She might have lain peacefully asleep-but he knew too well she didn’t.
If it does some good, she’ll forgive you. If it doesn’t, she’ll never know, he thought. The same thing had occurred to him many times before. What had always stopped him was that, if it did no good, he would know.
Maybe it was worth one try, for the sake of the fight against the Rulers. He knew he wouldn’t be doing it for his own pleasure. And, a moment later, he knew he was talking himself into doing what he’d intended not to do.
And so he did. No one would be able to say any more that he hadn’t done everything he and anybody else could think of. He still had trouble believing it would make a difference when nothing else had. But there is-I suppose there is-the chance I’m wrong. As if I’ve never been wrong before!
He made love to her as if she really were there with him, as if she could enjoy it, too. If he was going to rouse her, didn’t he need to rouse her in a different way first? Or did he? Was the connection between this and waking her entirely mystical?
Was it entirely imaginary? Even as he moved, that struck him as much more likely.
He finished. Then he pulled up his trousers and put Marcovefa’s back onto her. Even with the tent flap closed, even with the two of them in that small space, it wasn’t warm in there.
Then he waited. And he waited. And he waited a little longer. And, when nothing happened, he went on waiting till the lamp ran out of fat and went dark, plunging the inside of the tent into something that would do for darkness absolute till he met the genuine article.
And then, weary and despairing, he lay down beside Marcovefa. He didn’t intend to fall asleep. No matter what he intended, he did.
“What happened in that fight? How did I get back here? Why don’t I remember? Did I get drunk last night? I don’t feel hung over.”
Hamnet Thyssen opened his eyes. That did him some good-daylight leaked in through the tent flap, and a bit more under the bottom of the tent. Marcovefa was sitting up beside him. For a moment, he simply accepted that. Then, more slowly than he might have, he took in what it meant. “By God,” he whispered. “It worked. It really did.”
“What did?” she asked. Before he could answer, she repeated, “I don’t feel hung over,” and went on, “But why am I so-so tired? It’s like I haven’t done anything for a long time, so even sitting up like this wears me out.”
“Yes.” Hamnet nodded dizzily. “It’s just like that, as a matter of fact.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcovefa, by contrast, sounded irritable. Her stomach rumbled. “I’m hungry,” she declared, as if daring him to doubt it. “It’s like I haven’t had enough to eat for weeks.”
“It’s just like that, too,” Hamnet told her.
“Will you please make sense?” She’d gone beyond irritable-she sounded as if she’d hit him if he didn’t do what she told him in a hurry.
“I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.” Hamnet Thyssen told the story as quickly as he could.
Marcovefa heard him out. She stayed quiet for some time afterwards. Then she said, “We are on the steppe again? Not in the forest? If you are making some kind of joke with me . . .”
“Why would I do that?” Hamnet said. “All you have to do is stick your head out of the tent. You’ll find out whether I’m telling the truth about that.”
“Yes,” Marcovefa admitted. Another silence followed. Then she asked, “What is this mistletoe? I never heard of it. We don’t have it up on top of the Glacier.”