"No, let it burn," he said, and then, feeling that wasn't enough, "You're so pretty, you're worth seeing."
She smiled. She had very white, very even teeth. "You say kind things," she told him. "What kind of men are outlanders?" Before long, he was naked, too. She eyed him and nodded. "You are man enough, without a doubt."
She seemed surprised when he teased her and stroked her instead of just opening her legs and taking his pleasure—surprised, but not unhappy. Far from unhappy, in fact. She purred with pleasure. That pleased Hamnet— and heated him, too.
"Oh," the Bizogot girl said softly when he went into her—a sound he thought was likely the same in any language.
He brought her to the peak an instant before he spent himself. He stroked her cheek and told her how wonderful she was. The afterglow didn't last long—it never did. What had been delight quickly turned to disgust. It wasn't that Marcatrude had a strong smell or that her hair was greasy and matted. Hamnet Thyssen took no long-lasting pleasure in Raumsdalian women, either. He'd scratched an itch, and now it wouldn't trouble him for a while. That was how he looked at it.
If a woman wasn't Gudrid, she wasn't worth bothering with.
And if a woman was Gudrid . . . she wasn't worth bothering with, either.
He wondered where that left him. Nowhere good was the only answer he'd ever found. While true, it didn't seem helpful.
"Would you like to go again?" Marcatrude asked.
"Thank you, dear, but no," Hamnet answered. To make her feel better, he added, "Once with you is like twice with anybody else."
"You do say sweet things," she told him, so at least he was a successful hypocrite. She didn't seem particularly put out with him for not rising to the occasion again. He had gray in his beard, so how surprising was it that once sufficed for him? Marcatrude asked, "Will you spend the night with me?"
Was that fondness, or did she aim to steal what she could while he slept? "I will," he said. "But in the morning, if anything of mine is missing, I will make you unhappy. I know how to do that, too. Do you believe me?"
If she were a man, he would have insulted her by being so blunt. But a man, even one who wasn't a mammoth-herder himself, could speak as he pleased to a Bizogot woman. Marcatrude's nod said the thought of thievery did cross her mind. "If I don't steal, will you give me something to remember you by?" she asked.
"Maybe I already did," he said, and she made a wry face at him. She might remember him very well indeed nine months from now. But that wasn't what she meant, and he knew it. He went on, "I will—if you don't."
"I said that," she told him, and pulled more skins over both of them, enough to keep them warm even though they were naked. Then she blew out the lamp. The darkness that had been hovering at the top of the tent and near the edges spread its wings and swooped.
He couldn't recall the last time he actually slept with a woman. Marcatrude's smooth warmth proved a bigger distraction than he expected. And in that darkness absolute, she could have been anyone, anyone at all, even.. . His arms tightened around her. She laughed, deep in her throat. Maybe she'd had that in mind, too.
After the second round, they both fell asleep almost at once. Hamnet woke up sometime in the night. Marcatrudes arm lay on his shoulder. Her legs were twined with his. She murmured when he disentangled them, but didn't really rouse. He lay awake a long time himself.
When morning came, he checked carefully, but found himself unplundered. He gave her a silverpiece with Sigvat IIs beaky profile on it. Bizogots didn't mint coins, but they used the ones they got in trade from lands farther south.
"I thank you," she said. "May your travels farewell. I will remember you."
"And I you." Hamnet Thyssen told the truth, as he usually did. He joined with women seldom enough these days to make each of them stand out in his mind.
When the travelers rode north, Gudrid guided her horse next to Ham-net's. He didn't want her attentions. When he tried to steer away from her, though, she rode after him. "Well?" she said, a certain malicious relish in her voice.
"Well, what?" he asked. If she got it out of her system, maybe she would go away and leave him alone.
"How was it, touching her with one hand and holding your nose with the other?"
He looked at her. He looked through her. "Better than attar of roses," he said.
If she slapped him this time, he intended to deck her. If Jesper Fletti didn't like it, Hamnet intended to deck him, too, or do whatever else he needed to do. But Gudrid only laughed. "Who would have thought you'd turn into a liar?" she said, and rode off.
Count Hamnet stared after her. She wasn't altogether wrong. And yet.. . Even if he wasn't immune to her, he knew she was poisonous. And the Bizogot girl wasn't. In that sense, he'd told Gudrid nothing but the truth.
As they drew closer to the Glacier, they found they'd outrun spring. Sooner or later, the warm winds from the south would make it up to the very edge of the ice. A new meltwater lake was forming, there where the Glacier retreated. Grass and shrubs and flowers would burst forth from the ground for a few weeks. Streams would melt. Midges and mites and mosquitoes would buzz and breed with desperate urgency. And, when the season ended, the Glacier would have moved a few feet farther north than it had been the year before.
But spring wasn't here yet. By the look of the ground and the feel of the air, it wouldn't get here any time soon, either. Thick gray clouds blowing down from the north hid the sun. Snow lay on every north-facing slope, and on some ground that didn't face north. The hares that dug through the snow for dead grass from the last brief summer stayed white, though their cousins farther south were going brown. The foxes that hunted them were also white.
Wolves remained gray. The travelers saw a small pack of dire wolves trotting along in search of anything they could eat, from rabbits to musk oxen. The wolves saw them, too, or scented them, and came over for a closer look. Unlike the pack the travelers had met earlier, these wolves seemed to decide right away that they were more trouble than they were worth—or maybe these wolves weren't so hungry, and didn't need to press an attack. After shadowing the travelers for a while, the dire wolves loped off across the frozen plain.
"I am not sorry to see them go, the miserable, skulking things," Jesper Fletti said.
"Neither am I," Ulric Skakki said. "If they had lawyers instead of teeth, they'd be as bad as people."
Jesper gave him a puzzled look. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"What it says. I commonly say what I mean. Don't you?" Ulric was the picture of innocence. Jesper Fletti scratched his head but decided to let it drop.
"Do you enjoy baiting him?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.
"Some," Ulric answered. "He's not as much fun as you are, because he hasn't got the brains to shoot back."
"I'd think that would make him more fun, not less," Count Hamnet said.
"No, no, no." Ulric Skakki shook his head. "No sport to it."
"I see." Hamnet bowed in the saddle. "So glad to provide you with amusement. If you ever get bored with me, you can always pull the wings and legs off flies." He slapped at himself. "Enough of them at this season of the year. Too many, in fact."
Ulric slapped, too. "Way too bloody many, if anyone wants to knowwhat I think. They don't just take pain, either, the way Jesper does—they give it out, too. That makes it a fair fight."
"If you want to be on the receiving end, you can always quarrel with dear Gudrid," Hamnet said.
"No, thanks," Ulric answered. "I'd be the unarmed one there." His shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather. "Meaning no disrespect, your Grace, but I don't know what you saw in her. Well, I know what you saw— she's a fine-looking woman, even now. But I don't know how you put up with her as long as you did."
"Everything was fine—everything was wonderful—till all of a sudden it wasn't." That was as much as Hamnet Thyssen had said about the downfall of his marriage since Gudrid left him. He scowled at Ulric Skakki, wondering how the other man tricked the words out of him. Ulric stared back blandly, as if to say he had nothing to do with it.
And, listening to himself, Hamnet Thyssen realized he'd been a fool to believe that then, and was a bigger fool if he still believed it now. Things couldn't have been all right between him and Gudrid, even if he failed to notice anything wrong. A happy spouse didn't start running around for no reason at all—which could only mean Gudrid hadn't been happy long before he realized she wasn't. How many lovers did she have that he never suspected?
Maybe things would have been different if she'd had a child or two in the first few years they were married. Well, things certainly would have been different if she had. Maybe they would have been better. He'd never know now.
Off in the distance, a bull mammoth wandered by itself. The bad bulls were probably the most dangerous animals on the frozen steppe. They were fierce and clever and swift and strong and very hard to kill.
Ulric Skakki kept looking from the woolly mammoth to Hamnet and back again. That almost made Hamnet laugh. He was strong and swift, and could be fierce. He dared hope he was hard to kill. Clever? Hadn't he just proved himself a fool in his own eyes? Didn't a teratorn, a bird that needed no more in the way of brains than what was required to sneak up on a corpse, have wits sharper than his? So it seemed to him, anyhow.
"May I ask you something else, your Grace?" Ulric said.
Harshly, Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "Go ahead."
"Do you know why your, ah, formerly beloved took it into her head to come up here?"