The lewd glint in Marcovefa’s eye said she thought he was thinking about it. “You find some other woman to give you what you want,” she teased.
“Where will I find another woman who can give me the Rulers driven back beyond the Gap?” he asked.
She pointed north. “Same place you found me—up on top of the Glacier.”
“I didn’t want to make that trip once. We wouldn’t have tried to climb the ice then if the Rulers weren’t going to kill us if we stayed on flat ground.” Hamnet shuddered at the memory of that fearsome ascent. “We wouldn’t have had a chance if that big avalanche hadn’t made the slope less impossible than it usually is.”
“It is not easy,” Marcovefa admitted. “If it were, my folk would have come down from the Glacier long ago. Our enemies drove us up there, too—so our songs say. I believe them. No one would have gone up there unless he had to.”
“All right, then,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Don’t talk foolishness. Everyone on this side of the Gap needs you.” He slipped his arm around her waist. “I need you in a way the rest of the people don’t, though.”
“You think so, do you?” She gave him a sidelong glance and a mocking smile. “So no other men on this side of the Gap would want me?”
That wasn’t true. She was pretty enough that any man might want her. Hamnet answered with guile of his own: “You’d scare most of them off once they found out you might carve them into steaks if they made you unhappy.”
“Foosh!” Marcovefa said again. “I don’t butcher anyone from my own clan—and a lover is about the same as a clansman.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Hamnet was kidding, but kidding on the square. He and Marcovefa both started to laugh. The world might be coming to pieces around them. Might be? It was. If the Glacier hadn’t come to pieces, none of what happened since would have been possible. But you couldn’t keep looking at anything so large for very long, not without your mind snapping. If something funny came along close by, you’d laugh.
Which didn’t mean the bigger troubles went away. Not looking at them for a little while helped them seem more tolerable, though. Whether they really were . . . was a question Hamnet ignored for the time being.
A SCOUT RODE into the Bizogots’ camp. He pointed north and east. “There’s a band of those musk-ox turds riding south,” he said. “They won’t pass too far from us.”
“How big a band?” Trasamund asked. That was the right question, sure enough. If it was too large, these remnants of half a dozen shattered Bizogot clans would have to fight shy of it for fear even a hard-won victory would leave them too weak to fight again.
The scout considered. “Maybe half a dozen war mammoths,” he said. “More of the miserable mushrooms on their riding deer, of course, but not too many. I think we can take them.”
“I bet he’s right,” Ulric Skakki said to Hamnet. “Scouts always see bigger forces than the ones that are really there.”
“Most of the time, anyhow,” Hamnet said. He raised his voice to question the Bizogot: “Did they look like men who intended to settle down when they found good grazing, or did they seem on their way to somewhere else?”
“Hard to know for sure,” the scout said, and Hamnet Thyssen nodded impatiently. After more thought, the man went on, “If they wanted to stop, the grazing was good where they were. They were moving pretty steady.”
“Heading for the Empire,” Ulric murmured.
Count Hamnet nodded again. The Rulers already had an army down there fighting against Sigvat II’s soldiers. Hamnet wondered whether Sigvat wished he’d taken all the warnings he’d got more seriously. Too late to worry about that now, for Sigvat and for everybody else.
Trasamund made a fist and slammed it into his thigh. “Let’s hit them!”
Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. “What do you think?” Ulric asked.
“We might as well,” Hamnet asked. “If we can break the links between the Rulers’ big army down in the south and the Gap, we’ve done something useful. They’d better have a tough time reinforcing their men down in the Empire.”
“I suppose so.” Ulric didn’t sound thrilled. After a moment, he explained why: “Any time you say something that starts with ‘If we can . . . ,’ I start worrying about it.”
“Me in particular, or anybody?” Hamnet inquired.
“Anybody,” the adventurer replied.
“Well, good. I wouldn’t want to be singled out,” Count Hamnet murmured.
Trasamund went on shouting, trying to fire up the Bizogots and get them moving that very moment. A crack squadron of imperial cavalry would have had trouble riding off to war as fast as he wanted the mammoth-herders to move. When the Bizogots didn’t get cracking fast enough to suit him, he yelled louder than ever.
A Bizogot who wasn’t from the Three Tusk clan complained, loudly and profanely. Trasamund knocked him down and kicked him. The man came up with a knife in his hand. Trasamund kicked him again, right where it did the most good. The other Bizogot crumpled, clutching at himself.
“He isn’t going to ride to war,” Hamnet said.
“I don’t think so,” Ulric agreed in shrill falsetto. He lowered his voice in two different ways to continue, “Trasamund’s going to get killed if he keeps doing that. One of these days, the other fellow will stick him before he can kick.”
“Well, you don’t see Bizogots living to get old very often, do you?” Hamnet said. “It’s a rough life up here, and they don’t make it any easier on themselves.”
“They never make anything easy on anyone, including themselves.” Ulric shrugged. “It makes them tough—if the Empire had to take the beating the nomads have, it would have gone belly-up to the Rulers a long time ago. But you’re right—they pay the price for it.”
They rode east as if they never once thought about the price. Hamnet and Ulric rode with them. If Ulric worried, he didn’t show it. Hamnet Thyssen looked worried even when he wasn’t. He was now. He rode close to Marcovefa, to protect her if he could. He understood she was more likely to protect him than the other way around, but he would do what he could.
Audun Gilli and Liv also rode together. Which one of them would protect the other was anyone’s guess. A couple of other Bizogot shamans, dressed like Liv in clothes all fringed and decorated with little bells, rode with the fighters, too. Maybe they could help, maybe not. Hamnet didn’t think they could do any harm.
The land was as flat as if a heavy weight had lain on it not long before. And so one had: the Glacier had lingered far longer here than down in the Empire. Every so often, Hamnet rode past a boulder left behind by the retreating ice.
If the Rulers had a scout up on top of a frost heave—a pingo, the Bizogots called such a thing—he could spot the oncoming horsemen from a long, long way. Count Hamnet didn’t think they would. That was a ploy for an army staying in one spot, not for men moving south as fast as they could.
“Here’s hoping they’re just warriors, with no wizard along,” he said to Ulric Skakki.
“Yes, here’s hoping,” Ulric replied. “We could use an easy fight for a change.”
Snowshoe hares bounded away from the Bizogots. Ptarmigans flew off, wings whirring. The hunting up here was marvelous, especially in the brief burgeoning season of the year. Hamnet thought it was a shame he was hunting a quarry that could hunt him, too.
“They they are!” An outrider pointed due east.
To Hamnet Thyssen, those wiggles on the horizon might have been anything. His eyes weren’t particularly bad, but they weren’t particularly good, either. Before long, he made out mammoths, mammoths with men atop them. Those could only be Rulers. The Bizogots herded mammoths and used them, but didn’t ride them. Till they saw the Rulers in action, riding mammoths had never occurred to them. Now they were wild to learn the art. If they survived and stayed free, maybe they would.