Hamnet gave up. All right, so Ulric found a way to take advantage of something where nobody else could. What was so surprising about that?
The Rulers skirmished with the scouts the Bizogots and Raumsdalians set out. They didn’t seem eager to close with them, though. Hamnet wondered at that. Actually, he wondered less than he marveled. “They’re afraid of you,” he said to Marcovefa. “That’s the only thing holding them back.”
“If they were smart, they would strike soon,” she answered. “But they are the Rulers. They are not smart—not as smart as they think they are. Not as strong as they think they are, either.”
He looked at her. “How long did you lie there with your spirit disconnected from your body?”
Marcovefa shrugged, as if to say that was of no account. “If I had stayed all together, we would not have come up here onto the steppe,” she said. “We need to be up here.”
“Why?” Count Hamnet asked bluntly.
She only shrugged again. “I do not know yet. When the time comes, I will know. I think I will, anyhow.”
“What happens if you don’t?” Hamnet inquired.
“Then maybe the song does not have the ending the singer first intended to give it,” Marcovefa said. “But I do not think it will turn out like that. When I need to know something, I know it. Till then . . . Till then, I only think I need to know it.”
She could be almost as maddening as Ulric. The one thing she lacked was his smiling insolence. But if she only thought she needed to know something now, Hamnet couldn’t be too angry at her for not actually knowing it. He didn’t suppose he could, anyhow.
More and more Rulers came down from the direction of the Gap and up from Raumsdalia. As far as fighting strength went, they could have crushed their foes in a couple of hours, if not sooner. But more than fighting strength went into the balance. So did sorcerous strength. There, thanks to Marcovefa, the Rulers felt less confident.
When Bizogots encamped, their mammoth-and musk-ox-hide tents scattered all over the landscape, each one pitched wherever its owner happened to want it. Raumsdalian army encampments weren’t much neater. No one in the Empire had seen much point to imposing order on something likely to get torn down the next day.
As they were in so many ways, the Rulers were different. Hamnet Thyssen had seen that the moment he first set eyes on one of their camps out beyond the Gap. They pitched tents in rows and in squares. No matter where they were, each of their camps always looked like all the others.
And when a troop encamped in different places night after night, each man’s tent always sat in the same place in the grid. Their warriors always knew where to find a friend or a superior or a shaman. Their beasts were always tethered in the same positions.
That had its advantages, especially in emergencies. It was one more reason they beat the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians far more often than they lost to them.
Count Hamnet watched from the natural dam of rocks and dirt and underground ice that contained Sudertorp Lake as more and more of those dark squares filled the low-lying lands to the west. War mammoths and riding deer went back and forth among the encampments. Count Hamnet supposed men on foot did, too, but most of them were too far away for him to see.
He turned to Ulric Skakki. “I didn’t know they had so many men,” he remarked, and quickly went on, “If you say, ‘Life is full of surprises,’ I’ll bash you over the head with a boulder.”
“In that case, I’d have to be bolder than I am to say it.” The adventurer’s eyes twinkled. “As a matter of fact, they’ve got more men than I figured, too.”
“What are we going to do about it?” Hamnet asked heavily.
“Good question,” Ulric said. “What are we going to do about it?” If he couldn’t be difficult one way, he would be another.
“I was hoping you might have an answer,” Hamnet said.
“You should always hope. That way, when things don’t work out, you’ll be properly disappointed.” As usual, Ulric was most outrageous when he sounded most reasonable.
“Sooner or later—probably sooner—the Rulers will decide they’ve got enough mammoths and men and magicians to smash us flat,” Hamnet said. “Then they’ll set out to do it. How do you propose to stop them?”
“I expect I’ll fight,” Ulric answered. “If fighting looks hopeless, I expect I’ll run. Not many more choices, are there?”
“Well, there’s always dying,” Hamnet said.
“I’ll do that. So will you. But you can bugger me with a pine cone if I’ll do it by choice,” Ulric said.
Marcovefa walked over to them. Eating greasy goose and duck agreed with her. She wasn’t hollow-eyed any more, and her cheekbones no longer showed as sharp promontories under tight-wrapped skin. “What are you two going on about?” she asked.
“Dying.” Only Ulric could make the word sound so cheery.
Marcovefa looked back at Sudertorp Lake, at the marsh plants springing up all around it, and at the waterfowl whose wingbeats sometimes made speech difficult because of their astounding abundance. She turned and looked at the Rulers’ encampments to the west. Then she looked down at the mossy boulder she was standing on, and at the ice that still survived in the shadowed crevice between it and the dirt around it.
And then she started to laugh. Whatever was going on in her mind, it was so funny that she had trouble stopping. Laughing still, she kissed Ulric. Before Hamnet’s jealousy could flare, she kissed him, too. As he held her, her shoulders shook with mirth.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Dying,” she said. “Oh, there will be a great dying, all right.” That might have been the best joke in the world. She laughed so much, she got the hiccups. Hiccuping and giggling and shaking her head, she ambled back toward the forlorn encampment the Bizogots and Raumsdalians had set up just south of the earthen dam.
“I knew I was a funny fellow,” Ulric Skakki remarked, “but I didn’t think I was that funny.”
“Neither did I,” Hamnet assured him. “Now we need to find out one more thing.” Ulric made a questioning noise. Hamnet explained: “Whether you really are.”
WHEN THE RULERS finally decided they were ready to move forward against the ragtag band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians still opposing them, they took their time forming a battle line. Maybe they wanted their foes to see everything they had and to despair. If so, they knew how to get what they wanted.
Hamnet Thyssen had never seen—had never dreamt of—so many war mammoths drawn up side by side. He’d never imagined so many riding deer all in the same place. More than a few Rulers were on horse back, too; the invaders had quickly learned to make the most of what this new land offered them.
They couldn’t keep that large a force fed for long. Soon, the mammoths and deer and horses would strip every growing thing from the ground around their encampments. Even sooner, Hamnet thought, the enemy warriors would eat everything bigger than a mosquito.
Of course, the Rulers didn’t have to hold their army together long. As soon as they’d disposed of their foes, they could disperse across the broad Bizogot steppe.
Trasamund shaded his eyes with the palm of his hand. “I wonder how many of them I can kill before they finally drag me down,” he said.
“I wonder if we’d have a better chance fighting somewhere else.” Hamnet didn’t want to talk about running, not with Trasamund. Unlike Ulric, the jarl would take it the wrong way. Seeing what the Rulers were about to hurl at them made him cast about for ways to do it, though.
“Some of us can get away. Maybe most of us can.” Ulric himself came closer to directness. But he added, “I don’t know how much of a fight we’ll ever put up afterwards if we do ride out.”
“How much of a fight can we put up here and now?” Runolf Skallagrim asked: a painfully cogent question.