When the Bizogots came to Sudertorp Lake, they came to its western edge, where a natural dam of rock and permanently frozen earth contained the waters that had flowed into its basin as the Glacier retreated across the Bizogot steppe. “All this water!” Marcovefa exclaimed. “Not frozen water!”
“Not now, no,” Hamnet agreed. “It freezes every winter, though.” Winter before last, he’d ridden across the ice covering Sudertorp Lake. He’d almost died, too, when the Rulers’ magic split the ice and nearly spilled his comrades and him into the freezing waters below.
“And this is supposed to be a great thing?” Marcovefa laughed at him. “Where I come from, the Glacier never thaws.”
“Really. I didn’t notice when I was there.” Count Hamnet didn’t do light sarcasm as well as Ulric Skakki, but he did manage to squeeze a chuckle from the shaman from atop the Glacier.
Swifts and swallows skimmed low above the water, snatching insects out of the air. Ducks and geese and swans and coots and grebes and loons nested amidst the reeds and rushes. Tall herons stabbed fish out of the water with swordlike beaks.
Hamnet wondered what the fish ate during the winter. One another, probably. He imagined Sudertorp Lake holding one very large, very ferocious fish at the start of each new spring. Obviously, the picture was impossible. That didn’t stop it from forming.
A lion drinking at the edge of the lake looked up when it heard or smelled or saw the Bizogots bearing down on it. Its snarl showed formidable fangs-not fangs to match those of the sabertooths farther south, but formidable all the same. When the snarl didn’t intimidate the Bizogots, the lion trotted away, dark-tufted tail tip held proud and high.
On the other side of the Glacier, big hunting cats had stripes instead of a mane. The Rulers called them tigers. Hamnet Thyssen wondered whether any of them had come down through the Gap. Just our luck if they have, he thought. But the Rulers were worse predators than tigers or lions or dire wolves or bears.
“I’m surprised we don’t see more ea gles up here, getting fat off all the waterbirds,” Ulric Skakki remarked.
“They make their nests out of twigs. They build them in trees or on cliff-sides,” Count Hamnet said. “No twigs. No trees.” He waved. “No cliffs, either.”
“A point. Three points, in fact,” Ulric said. “All right. Fine. Have it your way. I’m not surprised. It makes perfect sense.”
“Nothing makes perfect sense.” Hamnet eyed the adventurer. “Including you.”
Ulric clutched his heart. “I am wounded to the slow-which has a harder time getting out of the way than the quick.”
“What are you going on about?” Trasamund asked, and then answered his own question: “More Raumsdalian foolishness, I doubt not.”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect us to spout Bizogot foolishness, would you, Your Ferocity?” Ulric replied in calm, reasonable tones. “We leave that to you.”
The jarl muttered under his breath. “The day will come when you’ve joked once too often.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” Ulric said. “All the more reason to enjoy myself before it does, don’t you think?” He studied Trasamund the way a natural phi los o pher might study a nondescript beetle. “Or do you think?”
Hamnet Thyssen studied Trasamund, too, and studied the tide of red rising from his neck to his cheeks. “I think that’s enough of that,” he said. “Do recall, we are supposed to be on the same side.”
“Oh, I recall. My insults to my enemies are more pointed.” Ulric mimed drawing and loosing a bow. “In the next engagement, in fact, I’ll use the points you made about ea gles’ nests, or the absence thereof.”
“You are quite mad,” Trasamund said.
Ulric Skakki inclined his head like a nobleman receiving a coveted compliment. “Your most humble and sometimes obedient servant, Your Ferocity. In point of fact, though, when the wind blows from the south I do know a hawk from a heron. The herons are the ones that nest in the reeds.”
“Mad,” Trasamund repeated. Hamnet Thyssen was inclined to agree with him.
They saw a few of the Rulers’ riding deer as they traveled east along the northern shore of Sudertorp Lake. The deer weren’t in large herds, though, and the Bizogots and Raumsdalians didn’t come across any of the squat, ferocious invaders from beyond the Gap. Count Hamnet supposed the deer were stragglers that wanted to wander the Bizogot plains on their own without caring about what the Rulers wanted.
He sympathized with them. The Bizogots wanted to do exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, the Rulers had other plans.
“Such strange beasts.” Marcovefa set the thumbs of both hands on her forehead above her eyes and spread her fingers wide, miming antlers. None of the animals that lived atop the Glacier, Hamnet recalled, had antlers or horns. They had to seem odd to Marcovefa: odder even than the horns of musk oxen or cattle, because the antlers had so many tines.
“They fend off enemies with them. They dig with them. The males fight with them,” Hamnet said. “Down in the Empire and nearby lands, only stags have antlers-the does do without. But with these riding deer, both sexes carry them, though the males’ are larger.”
“Why don’t we kill them?” the shaman asked.
“The Bizogots like waterfowl better, when they can get them,” he answered. “Don’t you?”
She shrugged. “I ate birds up on the Glacier. Mostly small ones, yes, but sometimes ones like these, too. The deer are new. They don’t taste like musk ox or anything else. New tastes are more interesting to me.”
Venison was different from musk ox. But it wasn’t as different as duck or goose. “If you want to shoot one, you can do that,” Count Hamnet sad. “I’ll help you eat it if you do.”
“Do you want me to?” Marcovefa asked.
“I’d just as soon eat fat goose,” he answered. “If you’d rather have venison, though, I won’t complain. I’ll help you put it away, the way I said I would.”
“That would be good. I don’t want to waste it,” Marcovefa said seriously. Even more than the regular Bizogots, the folk who lived atop the Glacier had a horror of waste. Count Hamnet supposed that was why they were cannibals. Understanding it didn’t make him want to imitate it.
When the riders spotted a deer wandering along, Marcovefa strung her bow. She sang to the arrow she nocked. The chant was in her own dialect, which meant Hamnet could make out only a few words. He guessed the charm was to make the arrow fly straight and true, but he would have guessed the same thing if he couldn’t have understood any of it.
Marcovefa drew the bow to her ear and let fly. The arrow, charmed or not, struck the deer just behind the left shoulder. The animal started to run, but its legs went out from under it after a few strides. It fell to the steppe, thrashing feebly.
“Good shot,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Can you charm them against men the same way?”
“Sometimes. Not always. Men are harder,” Marcovefa answered.
“Countercharms?” Hamnet wondered.
“Those, too. But men don’t want to be shot. Their will opposes the spell,” she said. “Animals don’t know anything about it till it happens. To an animal, everything is a surprise.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Hamnet said. “I never imagined it would matter in magic.”
“Everything matters. Finding out where, finding out how-that’s what a shaman does.” Marcovefa dismounted and went over to the riding deer. Hamnet would have waited till it stopped kicking, but it didn’t try to savage her. She swiped a knife across its throat. With a human-sounding sigh, it died as its blood rivered out.