Up atop the Glacier, they would have saved that blood for puddings and sausages. They might have down on the Bizogot steppe, too, if they weren’t traveling. Marcovefa gutted the deer. They would have used more of the offal up atop the Glacier, too. She looked not so much unhappy as resigned when she pushed the rest of the carcass away from the steaming pile of guts.
“Too much left for the big foxes again,” she said.
“Nothing to worry about,” Hamnet said. Venison steak was just about as good as waterfowl. When it came to a choice between venison chitterlings and, say, roast duck, he would have plumped for roast duck.
As usual, people carrying big slabs of raw, bloody meat made the horses snort and flare their nostrils and sidestep. Count Hamnet fed his mount a few early-ripening berries. Bribery worked almost as well as it would have with people.
They rounded the easternmost corner of Sudertorp Lake. Hamnet rode bareheaded. The sun was warm enough to make him sweat. He wasn’t the only one, either; he watched Audun Gilli undo his jacket and swipe a sleeve across his forehead. “By God!” Hamnet exclaimed as inspiration stuck. “We could bathe here. We really could.”
Everybody stared at him. He didn’t blame the Bizogots and Audun and Ulric for gaping. Chances to bathe didn’t come often on the frozen steppe. But it wasn’t frozen now, which was exactly the point. It was a pleasant day, they had plenty of water, and even the lake wouldn’t be too cold.
“Why not?” Trasamund said. “Why not, by God? The women here with us know what men look like, and the men know what women look like. Anyone who lets his hands get gay, I hope he drowns.”
Dying was easy among the Bizogots. Drowning wasn’t. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he’d ever heard the word in their language before. The literal meaning was smothers in water, so he couldn’t doubt what Trasamund meant.
The jarl told off a few men to hold horses while the rest washed. They would take their turn later. The rest of the Bizogots and the three Raumsdalians stripped off their clothes and splashed at the edge of the lake. Everyone had a tan face and hands and was pale everywhere else.
“Not all that bloody warm,” Ulric Skakki muttered, trying to rub dirt off his arms.
“We won’t get chest fever from it,” Hamnet said. “Up here, that will have to do.” He was filthy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d bathed. Nobody else was any cleaner, though. If you were no dirtier than anyone around you, how dirty you were could stop mattering for a while.
“Not as good as a tub, but better than anything I knew before I came down off the Glacier,” Marcovefa said. “No lakes like this there. Even the springs freeze in the wintertime.”
Hamnet did and didn’t want to stare at her lean, athletic body. Seeing it in the sunshine pleased him, yes. Despite chilly water, though, he didn’t want to show everyone else how much it pleased him, and he feared he would.
When he got a glimpse of Liv, he deliberately turned away. Seeing her naked only reminded him of what had been and wasn’t any more. He splashed himself and scrubbed hard.
“I hate the idea of getting back into my grimy clothes,” Audun Gilli said.
“If you want to stay naked, you can do that-for a few weeks, anyhow.” Count Hamnet didn’t want to put on the smelly furs again, either. He knew too well he had no choice.
Somebody splashed somebody else. In a heartbeat, everybody was splashing everybody else. Pretty soon, the men started ducking one another. It was a good thing they’d all left their weapons behind on the shore. A hulking Bizogot tried to shove Ulric underwater. The mammoth-herder flew over the adventurer’s shoulder and splashed into the lake on his back.
He came up coughing and puffing and blowing, water dripping from his beard and the end of his nose. But his blue eyes glowed. “How did you do that? Teach me!”
“Another time, maybe,” Ulric said. “When we’ve got our clothes on again.”
A woman let out an irate squawk. Then she did her best to smother with water the Bizogot who hadn’t listened to the jarl. The man tried to apologize, but he was spluttering too hard-and laughing too hard, too. Then she hauled off and hit him. Bizogot women were solid and strong. She packed a mean punch. The man stopped laughing and howled instead.
“Enough!” Trasamund shouted. He could sound authoritative even naked-no mean feat. “You gave him what he deserved. He still needs to be able to fight.”
When Hamnet came out of Sudertorp Lake, he let the sun and the southerly breeze dry him. Then he climbed back into his clothes. They seemed even nastier now than he’d thought they would. And, of course, they were crawling with lice. Before long, he would be once more, too. And, before long, he wouldn’t notice the sour stink that clung to them any more.
As Ulric dressed, he made a face and said, “Some people weren’t very good at keeping clean.” No one would ever have imagined he might be one of those people.
The Leaping Lynxes’ stone huts weren’t far from the eastern end of Sudertorp Lake. They’d built them by the marshes where the waterfowl nested most thickly. Some of the refugee Leaping Lynxes sighed to be coming home under such sorry circumstances. Other Bizogots seemed surprised and impressed that their countrymen had built any kind of permanent housing.
Then a man came out of one of the stone huts. He wasn’t especially tall, but thick in the chest and wide through the shoulders. He had black hair and a long, thick, elaborately curled beard. In short, he belonged to the Rulers. He carried a bone staff in his right hand. Fire leaped from it as he pointed it at the Bizogots.
III
Flame engulfed A mammoth-herder and his horse. The man screamed. So did the animal, and galloped across the steppe. Fire still clung to it, and to its rider. The horse ran on long after it should have dropped. Hamnet wondered whether the sorcerous conflagration burned and preserved at the same time, to make torment last and last.
Laughing, the wizard raised the bone staff and pointed it at another Bizogot. The man ducked, not that that would have done him any good. Flame sprang forth from the staff once more.
Marcovefa raised a hand and spoke sharply in her own dialect. The flame stopped before it reached the Bizogot. The wizard from the Rulers stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then the streak of fire started to slide back toward him, faster and faster. He stared again, this time plainly in horror, and shouted something in his guttural language.
More Rulers came out of other huts. Some of them must have been wizards, too, for they carried staves like the first man’s. When they added their strength to his, they stopped the fire just before it recoiled on him.
Marcovefa bit her lip as the flame ever so slowly began to move out again, this time toward her. Audun Gilli and Liv began incanting, too, to give her what aid they could. All together, though, they were not quite a match for the sorcerous power the Rulers had gathered here.
But there were ways around that. Hamnet Thyssen needed a few heartbeats longer than he might have to realize as much. When he did, he wasted no more time. He strung his bow, aimed at the closest enemy wizard, and let fly. The Rulers’ sorcerers normally brushed arrows aside with some small spell or another. Putting forth all their strength against Marcovefa, they had no time or energy for such minor wizardries.