Hamnet tasted blood. When he spat, he spat red, but no teeth seemed broken. He’d blacked one of Trasamund’s eyes. Dishonors between them seemed even. That dismayed him; he thought he should have thrashed the Bizogot.
“And what were you gentlemen discussing when you decided words weren’t exciting enough to suit you?” Ulric kept an arrow nocked. His words were more piercing, though.
“What to do next,” Trasamund answered, gingerly rubbing at the eye that had met Count Hamnet’s fist. Lucky it wasn’t my thumb, the Raumsdalian thought.
“Our hero here doesn’t want to do anything much,” Hamnet said. “Just sit around and wait for the Rulers to jump on us.”
“Probably better schemes than that.” Ulric Skakki could also sound judicious when he felt like it.
“If I want to know what you think, Skakki, I’ll ask you,” Trasamund growled.
“Well, I don’t think we want to wait that long,” the adventurer said. “We might have things to do in the meantime.”
“You Raumsdalians can joke and eat fat goose and screw your women and take it easy,” Trasamund said. “You already know no true Bizogots will take you seriously. If I say something, though, you’d better believe they’ll hop to it.” He thumped his chest with his fist and struck a pose.
Hamnet Thyssen didn’t strike him, but he came close. “Then why the demon don’t you say something to them?” he snapped. “If you let things drift, the Rulers will call the tune instead.”
“Must be what he has in mind,” Ulric said helpfully. “After we’re dead, the lions and teratorns can make the plans.”
“Bah!” Trasamund stuck his nose in the air and lumbered off.
After spitting again—still red—Hamnet sighed and said, “He reminds me of a bull musk ox in mating season. All he wants to do is bang heads.”
“And screw,” Ulric said. “Don’t forget screwing.”
There had been times when Hamnet wished he could. But that wasn’t what worried him now. “What are we going to do about it?”
“Nothing much we can do that won’t make things worse,” Ulric replied. “If dear Trasamund comes down with a sudden case of loss of life, who takes over for him? Won’t be us. He’s right about that—the Bizogots won’t follow us. And the rest of the men are worse muttonheads—musk-ox heads, if you’d rather—than he is.”
“We’re stuck with him, I’m afraid,” Count Hamnet said mournfully. “And I’m afraid because we’re stuck with him, too.”
A RAVEN FLUTTERED down out of the sky and landed on Marcovefa’s left shoulder. She reached out and scratched its head as if it were a cat. It brought its formidable beak alarmingly close to her eye before it croaked something in her ear. She croaked back. They might have been conversing. For all Hamnet Thyssen knew, they were.
Several Bizogots stared at the spectacle of woman communing with bird. Hamnet didn’t, but only because he’d seen it before up on the Glacier and during the harrowing descent to the Bizogot steppe. At last, one of the mammoth-herders worked up the nerve to ask, “Is that your fetish animal, wise woman?”
“Not the way you mean it.” Marcovefa caressed the raven some more. It croaked again, with obvious pleasure. She went on, “But it still tells me things.”
“Like what?” Hamnet asked.
“Where the carrion is. I don’t have to watch teratorns. And where the carrion is, most of the time the Rulers are, too.”
“Ah.” The Raumsdalian noble nodded. “That is worth knowing, yes. But why hasn’t one come to you for a while?”
She shrugged. “Ravens do what they want, not what you want. If they were only a little worse, they would make fair people.”
A little worse how? Hamnet wondered. Then he wondered if he wanted to know. He ended up not asking. What he did ask was, “Where is the carrion these days? Where are the Rulers?”
Marcovefa croaked at the raven. The big black bird with the shaggy feathers answered. It swung its head to look northwest. Then it swung it again to look almost due south, toward the Raumsdalian Empire. “You see,” Marcovefa said.
“Well, so I do,” Hamnet agreed. “But have the Rulers come out of the woods, then? Have the left the Empire?” If they had, he thought they were stupid. They would have a much easier time feeding themselves inside the Empire than up here. He wondered if they realized the territory they roamed on the far side of the Glacier was more like the Bizogot steppe than the Empire.
Marcovefa and the raven croaked back and forth some more. But all Hamnet got from her was another shrug. “The bird doesn’t know,” she reported. “Why should it care about people who aren’t dead?”
“They’ll make us dead if they get the chance,” the Raumsdalian noble said. “But I don’t suppose the raven cares about us while we’re alive, either. Well, maybe about you—a little, anyhow.”
“A little,” Marcovefa agreed. “It thinks I’m interesting because we understand each other some. If we didn’t, it would only want to peck out my eyeballs after I’m gone.”
“You say the most cheerful things,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. The Bizogots were more fatalistic than most Raumsdalians. And Marcovefa was more fatalistic than most Bizogots. Part of that might have been her own character. Part was surely growing to womanhood atop the Glacier. Just as the Bizogots had a harsher life than denizens of the Empire, so Marcovefa’s clan lived in a way that would horrify—had horrified—any Bizogots who saw it.
“Do I tell lies?” Marcovefa asked.
“Not here,” Hamnet said. She grinned, unoffended. He went on, “Do you know any way to make ravens interested in live people? If we had flying eyes, that would help us a lot.” He told her about the Rulers’ wizard who’d turned himself into an owl to spy on the Bizogots and Raumsdalians.
“A raven is a smart bird, but only a bird,” Marcovefa said. “Why should it care?”
Plainly, she didn’t think Hamnet would have an answer for her. But he did: “If we can find the Rulers, we can fight them. If we fight them, the ravens will get plenty of fresh food.” Maybe including us, he thought. He’d run that risk whenever he went into battle. Sometimes, though, it seemed bigger than others.
Marcovefa grinned again, this time in delight. She blew him a kiss. “Yes, that may work . . . if the bird can see so far ahead. Have to find out.” She started croaking at the raven. It made strange, throaty noises back at her. She croaked again and again.
The raven tilted its head to one side. If it wasn’t thinking things over, Count Hamnet had never seen anything, man or beast, that was. What went on behind those bright jet eyes? How much could a bird anticipate? Hamnet was no bird, so he didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, ravens were more clever than most other flying feathered creatures. But could this one understand the promise of more meat down the line if it did something rather than something else?
It said something to Marcovefa. Ravens could learn to speak human words, but this one wasn’t doing that. It had its own way of getting ideas across, one only vaguely connected to human language. Had Marcovefa needed magic to learn it, or had study sufficed?
He couldn’t ask her now; whatever she was using, she needed to concentrate hard to get meaning from the sounds the raven was making. When it finally finished, she said, “It will try. Maybe it will forget. Maybe the other ravens won’t understand what it needs. But it will try.”
“As much as we can expect, I suppose.” Hamnet expected nothing from the raven. That way, he couldn’t possibly be disappointed. Anything he did hear from the bird or its fellows would come as a pleasant surprise.
He looked at life the same way. The view had advantages and disadvantages, as everything did. When things went wrong, he had little trouble accepting it—most of the time—because he’d looked for nothing better. (Where he did look for something better, as with Gudrid and Liv, disillusionment proved doubly bitter.) When things went well, he tried not to show the surprise too much.