Ears heating (some of those noises might have been his), Count Hamnet said, "The Bizogots don't keep cats."
"That must be why he didn't, then," Ulric said blandly.
"Er—right."
Hamnet didn't have one of the fresh horses, but even the animal he was riding seemed glad of the longer than usual rest it had got the night before. The travelers hadn't been riding for more than a couple of hours before they came upon a herd of mammoths, with a couple of Bizogots steering it toward the best foraging. Trasamund shouted back and forth with the herders. He eyed the mammoths in a way he hadn't before. "How would you climb up on their backs without making them want to squash you flat?" he murmured.
"Personally, I wouldn't," Hamnet Thyssen said quietly. Laughing, Ulric Skakki nodded.
But Trasamund, with the thought in his mind, didn't want to turn loose of it. "How would you?" he repeated. "Do you suppose it takes magic, Liv? Do the Rulers spell their mammoths into quiet so they can mount them?"
"I don't know, your Ferocity," she answered. "I saw no sign of that, but I can't prove anything."
"I want to try it." Trasamund seemed ready to jump off his horse—he rode one of the fresh ones—and onto the back of the closest mammoth.
"This is perhaps not the ideal time for experimentation," Eyvind Torfinn said. "We have news to deliver, important news, and your untimely demise would assist only the raiders from beyond the Glacier."
"What untimely demise?" the jarl demanded indignantly. "Nothing would happen to me."
One of the mammoths swung up its trunk and let out a sound that reminded Hamnet Thyssen of a blaring bugle filled with spit. It also made him wonder if the enormous beast was giving Trasamund the horse laugh.
A glance at Ulric Skakki's raised eyebrow made him suspect the adventurer was thinking the same thing. "There's a time and a place for everything, your Ferocity," Hamnet said. "This probably isn't the time to try riding mammoths."
Trasamund glared at him. To the Bizogots, the time to do something was the time when you thought of doing it. But the jarl, unlike most of his countrymen, had gone down to the Empire and at least understood the idea of waiting, even if he didn't much care for it. "All right," he said grudgingly. "All right. It will keep, I suppose." He let out a martyred sigh that filled the air in front of him with fog. If he was going to pass up the opportunity, he wanted everyone around him to recognize what a fine fellow he was for doing it.
When the Bizogot herdsmen learned that the Rulers rode mammoths, they too were wild to try it for themselves. They weren't going anywhere important; they had nothing to do but guide the beasts in their charge. If they wanted to clamber aboard one of those beasts, they could ... as long as the mammoth let them.
"I wonder if they're going to do something they'll regret," Ulric said.
"Well, if it goes wrong, they won't regret it long," Hamnet answered.
"A point. A distinct point," Ulric said. "But look at them. They think they'll be mammoth-lancers by the time the Rulers come through the Gap."
"The Rulers shouldn't come through the Gap—Liv's dead right about that," Hamnet said. "We ought to be able to stop them right there if they try."
"We ought to be able to do all kinds of things," Ulric Skakki said. "What we will do . . ."
Count Hamnet wished he hadn't put it like that. Plainly, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians wouldn't be able to do some things, no matter how obvious it seemed that they should. Trasamund's clansmen hated the idea of letting other Bizogots, let alone warriors from the Empire, cross their land even to fight the Rulers. Every other Bizogot clan would probably be just as unhappy to let its neighbors cross its grazing grounds. As for the Empire . . . Who could say whether the Empire would take the idea of a threat from beyond the Glacier seriously at all?
"We may have made the greatest journey in the history of the world for nothing, you know," Hamnet Thyssen said.
"Yes, that occurred to me." Ulric Skakki sounded surprised it had taken so long to occur to Hamnet. Then he glanced over toward Liv and smiled a little. "But you wouldn't say it was for nothing any which way, would you?"
"For myself? No," Hamnet answered. "I was talking about things bigger than any one person's affairs." He waited for Ulric to make some lewd pun on that.
The adventurer didn't. Instead, he asked, "How many people ever think past their day-to-day affairs?" And he answered his own question. "Not many, by God."
"Some do," Hamnet said. "Some have to, in the Empire. If they didn't, we'd be as barbarous as the Bizogots."
"Do you think we're not?" Before Count Hamnet could respond to that, Ulric Skakki held up a hand. "Never mind, never mind. I know what you're saying. But people like that are thinner on the ground than you think, your Grace. Not everyone comes with your sense of duty nailed inside his chest."
"You make it sound so wonderful," Hamnet Thyssen said.
"Oh, it is, it is." Ulric smiled a crooked smile that showed a great many sharp teeth. "If you don't believe me, ask Gudrid."
For a red moment, Count Hamnet wanted to kill him. Then, grudgingly, he nodded, saying, "You have a nasty way of making your points."
"Why, thank you," Ulric Skakki said with another carnivorous smile. Hamnet had no answer for that at all.
When the travelers found the Three Tusk clan's main encampment, everyone celebrated—everyone but Hamnet Thyssen, For him, it seemed more an end than a beginning, and an end he didn't want.
The smile on Liv's face flayed him. "This is my home," she said, and the words cut like flensing knives. "How I've missed these tents!" she went on, carving another chunk from his happiness. He wasn't used to being happy. Back before he was, he would have borne up under anything. Now . ..
"Would you like to see Raumsdalia?" he asked, and worked with his tongue to free a chunk of musk-ox meat caught between two back teeth.
She looked surprised. "I hadn't even thought of that. I hadn't thought of anything past coming back to the tents of my clan."
Ulric Skakki knew what he was talking about, sure enough, Hamnet thought. "I don't want to leave you," he said. "I... hoped you didn't want to leave me."
"I don't," Liv said, and peered at the dung fire over which the meat cooked. "No, I don't. But I don't think I can turn into a Raumsdalian, either."
"No more can I make myself into a Bizogot," Hamnet Thyssen said.
"Are you sure?" Liv asked. "You would be an ornament to my folk, an ornament to my clan. You are strong and brave and wise—and a man, as I should know." She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "What holds you to the Empire?"
"Loyalty," he said at once. "I must go down to Nidaros and let the Emperor know what I have seen, what I have done, and what I think we need to do in times to come."
Liv gave him a nod that was almost a bow. "Your answer does you honor. But once you've shown your loyalty, why not come north again and lead the free life of the tents with me? What would you be losing?"
Hamnet had never thought of himself as a man who set much store by material things. But things were what sprang to mind when he asked himself why he didn't want to live the mammoth-herders' life for the rest of his days. Books. Beds. Linen. Bread. Ale. Beer. Wine. Mead. Even the language he'd known from his cradle was a thing ot sorts. He could get along in the Bizogot tongue—he could, indeed, do better than get along—but it wasn't his, and never would be. He laughed a little when he thought of tobacco. It was Ulric's vice, not his; he'd smoked only enough to convince himself he didn't want more. But the herb came up to Raumsdalia from the south, and it hardly ever came any farther north. The only Bizogots who used it were men who'd learned the habit in the Empire. But never having the chance to smoke again . . . That seemed a bigger thing.
How much would he miss the society of his fellow Raumsdalians? Not much, not most of the time; he was honest enough to own up to that. But, most of the time, he stayed in his castle, and his countrymen had the courtesy to leave him the demon alone. Escaping the Bizogots if he came north to live would be much harder. It might well prove impossible. For all the vast plains they roamed, the barbarians lived in clumps and knots of people, especially in winter. If they were going to survive, they had to. Hamnet Thyssen imagined himself cooped up with a tentful of nomads for months on end. The picture didn't want to form. The more he thought about it, the less that surprised him.
He sighed. "You have your place; I have mine. Maybe you wouldn't fit in mine. I don't know if that's so, but I can see how it might be. But I'm sure I would never make a Bizogot. I need to be by myself too much."
He wondered if that would make any sense to her. To his relief, and a little to his surprise, she nodded at once. "Yes, I saw as much when we traveled," she said. "Few Bizogots have such a need. Is it common in your folk?"
"Not very," Hamnet admitted. Liv nodded again; all the other Raumsdalians up here, even hapless Audun Gilli and scholarly Eyvind Torfinn, were more outgoing than he. He continued, "But what others of my folk feel is not the problem. What I feel is."
"You seem to want my company." Liv didn't mean only that he wanted to sleep with her, though that was in her voice, too.
And now Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "I do," he said. "Aside from that"— he wasn't going to deny it was there; he hardly could, things being as they were—"I like talking with you. And one of the reasons I like talking with you is that you don't feel as if you have to talk all the time. You . .." He groped for words. "You keep quiet in a pleasant tone of voice."
He waited. That would have said what he wanted to say in Raumsdalian. He wasn't so sure it did in the Bizogot language. When Liv smiled, so did he, in relief. "I thank you," she said. "I'm not sure I ever got higher praise."
Now Hamnet wasn't sure whether she was sincere or sarcastic. "I meant it for such."