Women scraped fat from the back of the mammoth hide. Some of them used iron knives that had come north in trade, others flint tools that might have been as old as time or might have been made that morning. The Bizogots never had as much iron as they wanted, and eked it out with stone tools.
Dogs danced and begged by the edge of the hide. Every so often, a woman would throw some scraps their way. The dogs yelped and snapped at the food and at one another. The women laughed at the sport.
They carefully saved the rest of the fat. Some of it would get cooked in the feast. The rest would be pounded with lean mammoth meat and berries to make cakes that would keep for a long time and would feed a traveling man.
Once the hide had not a scrap of fat or flesh clinging to it, the women rubbed it with a strong-smelling mix. Audun Gilli s nose wrinkled. "What's that stuff?" he asked.
"Piss and salt, to cure the hide," Count Hamnet answered.
"Oh." The wizard looked unhappy. "Why don't they use tanbark, the way we do?"
Both Hamnet and Ulric laughed at him. "Think about it," Ulric said.
Audun did. "Oh," he said again, this time in a small voice. Tanbark required oaks, and all the oaks grew well south of the tree line.
"What is the news?" Trasamund asked. "Who has died? Who still lives? Who is born? Who is well? Who is sick or hurt?" He had a lot of catching up to do, and was trying to do it all at once. In the Empire, that would have been impossible. The Three Tusk clan was small enough to give him a fighting chance.
"Who are these mouths up from the south?" a Bizogot asked him. That was how the Raumsdalians seemed to the locals—people who had to be fed as long as they were here. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how he liked being called a mouth. Not very well, he decided.
Trasamund named names, which would mean little to a clansman. He called most of the Raumsdalians warriors, styling Audun Gilli and Eyvind Torfinn as shamans. The Three Tusk shaman, easily identifiable by the same kind of fringed and embroidered costume as Witigis had worn, eyed them with interested speculation.
"What about the woman?" another Bizogot called. Actually, he said, What about the gap? That made Hamnet look north toward the gap between the two great sheets of ice that had once been one. This time, Gudrid didn't show any signs of understanding.
"Is she just yours, or can we all have her?" still another mammoth-herder asked. A woman gave him an elbow in the ribs. Was she his wife, or just jealous of competition?
"She is the old shaman's woman," Trasamund answered. Count Hamnet glanced over to see how Eyvind Torfinn liked hearing that again and again. By the fixed smile on his face, he didn't like it much. Trasamund went on, "They are all our guests. They are not to be stolen from."
"Ha!" Ulric Skakki said. Hamnet Thyssen nodded. Guest-friendship would keep the Raumsdalians' persons safe while they stayed with the Three Tusk clan. Their personal property? No. Having so little themselves, Bizogots were born thieves.
"My guests, will you feast with my folk?" Trasamund said.
"We will," answered Hamnet, Ulric, and Eyvind, the only three Raumsdalians who spoke any useful amount of the Bizogot language. "We thank you."
After the Raumsdalians dismounted, Bizogot youths led their horses off to the line where those belonging to the mammoth-herders were tied. The shaman made a beeline for Audun Gilli and spoke to him in the Bizogot tongue. His eyebrows leaped. "A woman!" he exclaimed in Raumsdalian.
"I thought you could tell the difference before they talked," Hamnet Thyssen said dryly. "She's got no beard, and that's a pretty good hint."
The shaman turned to him. "You speak your language, and you speak ours. Will you interpret for me?"
"If I can," Hamnet answered. "If you speak of secret things, I will not know your words for them, and I may not know ours, either. I am no spellcaster."
She looked at him. "You think not, do you?" While he was wondering what to make of that, she went on, "Ask his name for me, please, and tell him I am Liv."
"He is Audun Gilli," Hamnet said. He translated for the wizard.
"Tell her I am glad to meet her," Audun said. "Tell her I hope we can learn things from each other."
"I hope the same." Liv eyed Hamnet again. "And who are you!" He gave her his name. She shook her head with poorly hidden impatience. "I did not ask you for that. I ask who you were. It is not the same thing."
Hamnet Thyssen scratched his head. He wondered if the shaman for Trasamund's clan was slightly daft, or more than slightly. "I am a soldier, a hunter, a loyal follower of my Emperor." Did she know what an emperor was? "Think of him as a jarl ruling many clans."
"Yes, yes." Liv brushed the explanation aside. She looked at him again. She didn't just look at him—she looked into him, with the same disconcerting directness a Raumsdalian wizard might have shown. Lie tried to look away; he had the feeling she was seeing more than he wanted her to. But those cornflower-blue eyes would not release his ... until, all at once, they did. He took a deep breath, and then another one. Facing up to her felt like running a long way with a heavy pack on his back. But all she said was, "You are not a happy man."
"No," Hamnet agreed. "I am not." She didn't need to be sorcerer or shaman to know that. Anyone who spoke with him for a little while realized as much.
He waited for her to ask him why not. But she found a different question instead, inquiring, "Why did you come to the Bizogot country?"
"You will know of the Golden Shrine." He didn't quite make it a question. He didn't quite not make it a question, either. Almost everyone on both sides of the border agreed that Raumsdalians and Bizogots worshiped the same God. Everyone on both sides of the border agreed they did not always worship him the same way.
But Liv nodded. "Oh, yes. What of it?"
"I came to seek it, along with your jarl."
"Oh." If he thought that would impress her, he was disappointed. Later, he found that very little impressed her, and that she admitted to even less. For now, she looked into him again. He scowled. He didn't like it, even if it was somehow not the violation it could have been. After a bit, she asked, "What do you look to find there?"
"I don't know." Hamnet Thyssen frowned. He hadn't worried about that. Finding the ages-lost Golden Shrine seemed worry enough. "Truth. Knowledge. Happiness. God."
"Yes," Audun Gilli said softly when Hamnet remembered to translate that for him.
"Maybe," Liv said. "Yes, maybe. But why do you think these things are there?"
"Where else would they be?" Hamnet burst out.
Liv didn't answer, not in words. Instead, she smiled. Hamnet Thyssen gave back a pace, and he was not a man in the habit of retreating from anything or anyone. Sober, Liv was another Bizogot—stranger than most, but apart from that nothing out of the ordinary. When she smiled . .. her whole face changed. It was as if the sun came out from behind the clouds, and hardly less dazzling. For a heartbeat, altogether in spite of himself, he fell in love.
Angrily, he turned away from her. Wizards and shamans had their tricks, yes. Try as he would, he couldn't imagine one more monstrously unfair than that.
He saw he was not the only one turning away. Audun Gilli couldn't face her, either. "She has more strength than she knows," the wizard whispered. "She has more strength than she even dreams of. What such a one would be in Raumsdalia . . ."
"What would she be but Gudrid?" Hamnet Thyssen snarled. Audun flinched as if Hamnet had hit him. Hamnet didn't care. He would rather have hit Liv. No, nothing could be crueler than reminding him of love.
Little by little, Hamnet Thyssen's temper eased. Filling his belly helped, even if he wouldn't have filled it on mammoth meat, mushrooms fried in musk-ox butter, and berries back in the Empire. Getting somewhere close to drunk helped, too, although he would have used beer or ale or mead or even wine to do the job farther south. If smetyn was what the Bizogots had, Count Hamnet would drink it.
He kept a wary eye on Liv despite his full belly and muzzy head. She didn't do anything especially noteworthy. She ate. She drank. She talked with her fellow clansmen and women, and with some of the Raumsdalians who could use her language. She left Hamnet alone. That suited him fine, or better than fine.
He wanted to ask Trasamund how long it would be before they fared north. He wanted to, yes, but the newly returned jarl was otherwise occupied. Trasamund ate enough for three hungry Raumsdalians, and drank enough for five. When he went off to the tent the Bizogots had run up for him, he went with three big blond women from the clan. Mammoth hide might be thick enough to keep out cold, but it couldn't keep in the moans and sighs that came from that tent.
"He's been away from his own people a long time," Ulric Skakki remarked.
"Well, so he has," Hamnet said. "By the sound of things, he's making some more people in there right now—or trying his hardest, anyhow."
"His hardest, indeed," Ulric murmured, and Hamnet swallowed wrong with a swig of fermented mammoth milk. Ulric had to pound him on the back to get him to stop choking.
"You're a demon, you are," Hamnet wheezed.
Ulric Skakki batted his not very long, not very alluring eyelashes. "You say the sweetest things, my dear." Count Hamnet almost—almost—sent another swallow down the wrong pipe.