"May we pass on?" he asked.
Simple respect was the only thing the guards were looking for. "Yes, your Grace," replied the one who wasn't named Vigfus. "Pass on to the south. Tell the folk there what you've told us. See if they believe you anymore than we do."
With that less than ringing endorsement, Hamnet did ride south with the rest of the travelers. Once they got out of earshot of the border post, Ulric Skakki said, "By now, I hardly care whether I tell the Emperor what we've seen or not. All I care about is finding a town with a bathhouse. Did you see those guards? Some time not too long ago, they had baths. Both of them! Isn't that something?" He scratched.
As usual, that made Hamnet scratch, too. How many different kinds of bugs was he carrying around on his person and in his clothes? Too many— he was sure of that.
Liv stared at the firs and spruces through which they rode. "So big," she murmured in an awestruck voice. "Are they really alive?"
"They really are," Hamnet assured her, his voice grave. "We make things from the wood, and we use it for fires instead of dung."
"Yes, I can see how you might. So much of it in each tree, there for the taking," the Bizogot shaman said. "Truly this is a rich land."
Hamnet Thyssen's jaw dropped. These northern provinces were heart-breakingly poor—back-breakingly poor, too, if you had to try to claw a living from them. Woodsmen and trappers were almost the only people who could. He eyed Liv with something that went deeper than astonishment, because what she said spoke volumes about how different they were. In her eyes, this miserable country seemed rich beyond compare.
And why wouldn't it? Summer here probably lasted six weeks longer than it did up where she lived, hard by the Glacier. The ground wasn't permanently frozen. Liv had never seen a tree before in all her life. A land warm enough to let them grow . . . was a land richer than any the Bizogots inhabited.
Realizing that almost left Hamnet embarrassed to be a Raumsdalian. How much his own folk took for granted! They sneered at the Bizogots for all the things the mammoth-herders lacked. But that wasn't the Bizogots' fault; it was the fault of the country in which they lived.
The Rulers lived even farther north than the Bizogots. Hamnet had seen that they used iron. Did they forge it themselves, or did they get it in trade from some unknown land far to the west and south, as the Bizogots got it from the Empire? Hamnet didn't know—by the nature of things, how could he? But he was sure of one thing. If the Rulers reached Raumsdalian territory, even these hardscrabble provinces along the northern border, they would think the land was as rich as Liv did.
That wasn't good news, not as far as Raumsdalia was concerned.
Up in a tree, a blue jay screeched at the travelers. "What makes that noise?" Liv asked.
"A jay." Hamnet Thyssen pointed up to it. The bird didn't like that— maybe it thought his outstretched arm and hand were an arrow aimed its way. Screeching still, it flapped off to another fir farther away.
Liv laughed and clapped her mittened hands. "It's a piece of the sky with wings!" she exclaimed. "I've never seen anything so pretty. How many other birds do you have that we never see up by the Glacier?"
"How many? I don't know. Earl Eyvind might be able to tell you, or one of the savants down in Nidaros," Hamnet answered. "But there are lots of them. Jays, warblers, orioles, woodpeckers . . ."
They were only names to Liv. "Woodpeckers?" she echoed uncertainly. Count Hamnet translated the word into the Bizogot tongue. Then he told how they pounded their bills into trees, going after insects and grubs. Liv laughed when he finished. "You're making that up," she said, as Trasamund had when he heard about glyptodonts. "You're telling me a story because I don't know any better, the way we might talk about a musk ox with a trunk if we were making sport of a Raumsdalian who thought he knew it all."
"It's not a story—it's the truth," Hamnet said. "By God, it is. Ask any other Raumsdalian you please. Ask your jarl—chances are he's seen them, or maybe heard them drumming."
"Drumming." Liv repeated that, too. "Why don't their heads fall off from all that banging, if they do what you say they do?"
"I don't know." Count Hamnet had never worried about it. "And we have bats, too, though not this far north. Think of a vole or a lemming. Give it big ears and sharp teeth and wings that are all bare skin—no feathers or anything. That's what bats are. They hunt at night, and they eat bugs."
"Next you'll probably tell me you have things that live in the rivers but aren't fish," Liv said with a scornful sniff.
"We do." Hamnet talked about frogs. He talked about turtles. He talked about alligators and crocodiles, finishing, "Those live only in the far south. There are probably a few alligators in the southern part of the Empire, but not many."
Liv eyed him. "You aren't making these things up."
"No, I'm not. By God, I'm not," Hamnet Thyssen said. "We have lots of creatures you don't, because your winters would kill them." He talked about toads and salamanders. He talked about lizards. He talked about snakes. This time, he finished, "Some of them have poisonous fangs. If they bite you, it can kill. If it doesn't, it will make you very sick."
He wondered if she would think he was lying about those. Her face thoughtful, she said, "A trader from the Empire came up to the Three Tusk country a few years ago and talked about creatures like those. We all thought he was the biggest liar in the world, even if we didn't say so."
"Why didn't you?" Hamnet asked. "You Bizogots are quick enough to call Raumsdalians liars most of the time."
Liv wrinkled her nose at him. "Well, a lot of the time you are liars. But no, we didn't call him on his stories. They were new to us, and they helped make the time go by. We didn't believe them? So what? We still enjoyed them."
"Fair enough, I suppose," Hamnet said with a smile of his own.
"Your Ferocity!" Liv called—Trasamund was half a bowshot ahead of her on the trail through the forest. He looked back over his shoulder and waved to show he'd heard. She booted her horse up into a trot to catch up to him. Hamnet Thyssen sped up, too. When Liv got close enough to the jarl to talk without shouting, she said, "Remember that Raumsdalian trader who told us tales about the legless things with the poison teeth?"
Trasamund threw back his head and laughed. "I'm not likely to forget him. He could spin them, couldn't he?"
"He was telling the truth," Liv said. "He must have been. Hamnet here just told me about the same creatures."
"Oh, he did, did he?" The Bizogot jarl eyed Count Hamnet. "Who's to say he's not lying through his beard, too?"
"I could tell you the chances of two men making up the same strange animal are slim," Hamnet said. "Or I could just tell you I'm not lying, and if you want to make something out of it and say I am, go ahead."
Trasamund eyed him. "You wouldn't fight over a no-account thing like a story. A Bizogot might, but a Raumsdalian wouldn't. So I suppose you are telling the truth. Who would have believed it? These beasts are real?"
"They are," Count Hamnet said. "Have you ever heard the phrase 'a snake in the grass'?" He shifted to his own tongue for the last few words.
"Yes. It means something sneaky and dangerous."
"That's right. Snakes crawl around in the grass, and it's easy to miss them. With the poison in their fangs, though, they can make you sorry if you do."
"Well, well." Trasamund plucked at his beard. "How many 'snakes in the grass' do you suppose we have with us?" Hamnet Thyssen found no good answer for that, in Raumsdalian or the Bizogot tongue.
XVII
BY the standards of Nidaros, the hostel in the northern town of Naestved would have been third-rate at best. But even a third-rate hostel boasted a bathhouse. A big, hot fire blazed in a hearth near the two copper tubs that sat side by side. The travelers rolled dice for the order in which they would bathe. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki had to wait far into the night. Hamnet didn't care.
Neither did Ulric. "Did you hear the landlord squawk about how much water he'd have to heat?" he said, and then ducked himself and scrubbed at his hair. He came up blowing like one of the whales seacoast people talked about. "The poor dear."
"You'd think we weren't paying for the wood," Hamnet Thyssen said, doing some scrubbing of his own. The steaming bathwater had been clean when he stepped into his tub. It wasn't clean any more. It was grayish brown and scummed with soapsuds. His own skin, by contrast, was getting toward the color he remembered its being once upon a time.
"Oh, but we're making his servants work for their living. They don't like it any better than anybody else would." As usual, Ulric Skakki had enough cynicism for two or three ordinary people.
"I want to wallow here for the next week," Hamnet said. "This is almost as wonderful as I thought it would be." Only two things separated him from perfect bliss. For one thing, the soap the landlord gave them was harsh and strong-smelling. For another. . .
Ulric leered at him. "You wish Liv were in this tub instead of me. Or more likely you wish she were in that tub along with you."
Hamnet s ears heated. That was exactly what he wished. He wondered if Liv had ever had a real bath before. He doubted it. Among the Bizogots, hot water, except for cooking, was hard to come by. They washed their hands and faces. Sometimes they steamed themselves, pouring water onto fire-heated stones. But he was sure they'd never heard of bathtubs.
She would have to bathe with Gudrid. That filled Hamnet with misgivings. Gudrid might try to lead Liv astray for the fun of it. But if Liv watched what Gudrid did herself, she wouldn't go far wrong.
"These tubs are narrow to fit two," Ulric went on. "Of course, if you fit one on top of the other. . ."
"Oh, shut up," Hamnet told him.