Both Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki burst out laughing. “Do you think we were whelped yesterday?” Ulric asked. “No Emperor’s ever grateful for longer than it takes him to pull up his pants again, and Sigvat’s worse than most.”
“Then you won’t come?” Anders sounded tragic. “God help Raumsdalia.”
“If God would help Raumsdalia, Sigvat wouldn’t need us,” Count Hamnet said. “We didn’t tell you we wouldn’t come. But if we do, we’ll do it for our reasons, not Sigvat’s.”
“What reasons have we got?” Ulric seemed genuinely curious.
“What we’ve got to decide is, do we hate Sigvat worse than the Rulers?” Hamnet replied. “I know what Trasamund and Marcovefa will say. So do you.”
Ulric Skakki grimaced. “Well, yes. They will say that. But they don’t know Sigvat the way we do.”
“No. They’re lucky,” Count Hamnet said.
That got a laugh from the adventurer and another wince from Per Anders. The poor courier seemed to do nothing but flinch, listening to the way Hamnet and Ulric roasted his sovereign—and theirs. “If you won’t do it for Sigvat’s sake, do it for the Empire’s,” he said. “Please. I beg you.” He actually dropped to his knees and held out his hands palms up, as if pleading for mercy from foes who’d beaten him.
“Get up, you donkey,” Hamnet said gruffly.
“Yes, do. This is embarrassing,” Ulric agreed.
“I have no pride. I have no shame,” Per said, staying on his knees. “Why should I be embarrassed? I am trying to serve Raumsdalia.”
“With stewed parsnips on the side, I have no doubt,” Ulric Skakki said. The courier looked blank for a moment, then sent him a reproachful stare. Ulric went on, “His Grace is right. Get up. You won’t just have one barbarian invasion on your hands—you’ll have two.”
“We can deal with Bizogots. We’ve always dealt with Bizogots,” Per Anders said.
“Don’t let Trasamund hear you talk like that, or you’ll be talking out of a new mouth in your neck,” Hamnet Thyssen warned. But Anders was right. The Bizogots were a nuisance to the Empire. The Rulers were a deadly danger to it—and to the Bizogots as well.
“You’ll come south, then?” Now Per did rise, and brushed mud from the knees of his trousers.
“I’m afraid we will.” Count Hamnet spoke without enthusiasm. “As you say, not for Sigvat—be damned to Sigvat—but for Raumsdalia.”
“Reasons don’t matter when you’re doing the right thing,” Anders said.
“Reasons always matter.” Hamnet sounded—and was—very sure of himself. Ulric Skakki looked as if he wanted to argue, but held his tongue.
Marcovefa proved willing to go down into the Empire again. Trasamund proved eager. Neither reaction surprised Hamnet Thyssen. “We’ll go! We’ll clean them out in the south, and then we’ll come back and clean them out here in the north, too,” Trasamund boomed. He drew his big sword and flourished it above his head. “By God, we’ll run them back beyond the Glacier!”
“No, we won’t,” Ulric said. “Don’t be a bigger idiot than you can help. Maybe, if we’re lucky enough, we can beat them down in the Empire. Don’t ask God for what he’s not about to give you.”
“Who are you, to say what God can and can’t do?” the jarl retorted. “Has he been talking to you?”
“He has,” Ulric said solemnly, and Trasamund’s eyes widened. The adventurer went on, “He told me, ‘Don’t listen to the big Bizogot with the bad temper, because he doesn’t know what the demon he’s talking about.’ ”
Trasamund snorted and made as if to cuff him. Hamnet had seen that Ulric could flip anybody who came at him, even if the attacker was much the bigger man. He didn’t bother now. He just ducked away.
Per Anders wanted everyone to jump on a horse and ride off on the instant. That didn’t happen; the courier must have known it wouldn’t. The Bizogots rode out the next day. Hamnet thought that was pretty good.
Ulric didn’t seem to. When Hamnet asked him why, he answered, “How much decent weather have we got left?”
Hamnet grunted. When would the Breath of God start blowing down from the north? Summer up here—summer in Nidaros, for that matter—got cut cruelly short by the frigid wind off the Glacier. Some years, it got cut shorter than others. “Nothing we can do about it any which way except go on as long as we can,” Hamnet said.
“No doubt. No doubt.” By the way Ulric said it, he would have bundled up the Breath of God in a leather sack and stolen off with it if only he could. But some things were beyond even his formidable talents.
“I don’t know how much good we’ll do.” Hamnet looked at the small, makeshift army. Bizogots from half the clans on the steppe rode with Trasamund. Maybe they would follow the jarl’s orders, maybe not—which was true of any force of Bizogots ever put together. They might have counted for something in terms of surprise. In pure fighting terms, they weren’t worth much . . . save only Marcovefa.
She could do things no one else could even hope for against the Rulers. She could, yes—but would she? No way to know, not till she did or she didn’t. And if she didn’t, they were all ruined.
“We’ll find out,” Ulric said, which echoed Hamnet Thyssen’s thoughts much too closely for comfort.
VIII
TREES! THANK GOD!” Per Anders pointed toward the southern horizon. Sure enough, a dark smudge of evergreen forest showed up there. The Raumsdalian courier went on, “Up here in the Bizogot country, I keep thinking everything is too big, too wide. I might as well not be there at all—nobody would notice if I disappeared.”
“Well, I know what you mean,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Too much landscape, no edges anywhere. And the sky is even bigger.”
“No edges anywhere,” Per repeated. “Yes, that’s about right. It was better when I got to those shabby little huts by the lake. Then, at least, I could tell where things started and stopped.”
“What do you mean, Anders? ‘Shabby little huts’?” Trasamund said ominously. “I tell you, there is nothing else like them in all the Bizogot country.” He’d complained that the Leaping Lynxes’ permanent dwellings made them seem like Raumsdalians. But, to a man from the Empire he didn’t know well, he naturally seemed proud of what his own folk had done.
“You’ve seen Nidaros, Your Ferocity.” Per Anders tried to stay polite without backing down. “Next to the palaces and mansions there, these, uh, houses aren’t impressive.”
“Yes, I’ve seen Nidaros,” Trasamund agreed. “So what? All those fancy palaces and mansions . . . the Rulers hold ’em now.”
Per bit his lip. That shot went home. And it moved Count Hamnet’s thoughts in a direction they hadn’t found before. “Tell me,” he said, as casually as he could, “do you happen to know whether Earl Eyvind Torfinn got out of Nidaros before the Rulers took the place?”
“I couldn’t say, Your Grace,” Anders answered. “I don’t think he was one of the band who broke free with the Emperor, though.”
“All right. Thanks,” Hamnet said. So maybe Eyvind got away and maybe he didn’t. But that wasn’t really what Hamnet was thinking. So maybe Gudrid got away and maybe she didn’t—that was more like it. Most of the time, you could count on Gudrid to land on her feet . . . or on her back, if that was what she needed to do. But in the chaos of a sack, who could say?
What if she was dead, knocked over the head or forced to serve a gang of men till they got tired of swiving her and cut her throat for one last thrill? I ought to laugh. It would serve her right, Hamnet thought. And part of him did feel like laughing—but not all, not all.
Looking around, he found Ulric Skakki gazing at him with ironic speculation. Did the adventurer know what was going through his mind? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Ulric knew more than was good for him about all kinds of things. Deliberately, Hamnet looked away. Ulric chuckled. No, he wasn’t easy to evade.