"So I did." Hamnet Thyssen shook his head like a musk ox the Bizogots were slaughtering. They'd herded it and tended it and warded it all its life— why were they doing this to it now? The beast couldn't understand. Even after all this time, part of Hamnet couldn't, either. "So I did," he repeated heavily. "And much good it did me, eh?"
"Maybe for a while," she said.
He shook his head again. "I used to think so, but I don't any more. What good is love when the person you love is laughing behind your back? You're only fooling yourself. I was a fool. I'm not the first. I won't be the last, God knows." He rode on.
XVIII
As Liv went deeper into the Raumsdalian Empire, as the travelers made their way over to the Great North Road and went down it, she saw plenty of towns larger and finer than Naestved. Each seemed grander than the one just farther north had been. Each time, she would ask, "And is Nidaros like this?"
And each time, Hamnet Thyssen would smile and say, "No, not really. Wait till you see the capital. Then you'll understand."
But when at last they came to the city on the long-vanished shore of long-outflooded Hevring Lake, Liv could see very little, and neither could any of the rest of the weary travelers. The blizzard roaring down from the north would not have been despised in the Bizogot country—would not have been despised in the land of the Three Tusk clan. The Breath of God could reach all the way down to Nidaros and beyond. It didn't always, but it could.
Hamnet got a glimpse of Nidaros' great gray frowning walls through swirling snow, but only a glimpse. Of the towers and spires that showed above the walls in good weather, he could see nothing at all. As they neared the city, Liv said, "The wall is very tall, isn't it?" A little later, she added, "The gate seems very strong."
"It is," Hamnet said. She might as well have been examining a mammoth by closing her eyes and feeling first its trunk, then a tusk, then a leg, and finally its tail. She would know something about mammoths after she did that, but probably not as much as she thought.
The guards had as much trouble spying the travelers as Count Hamnet and Liv did seeing the city—maybe more, for the guards had to peer straight into the storm. The travelers were almost on them before they cried, "Halt! Who comes?"
"I am Earl Eyvind Torfinn," Eyvind said. "With me ride Count Hamnet Thyssen, Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk clan, and the rest of our comrades. We have come to report success to his Majesty. We have gone beyond the Glacier, and we are here to tell the tale."
"Well, they're here to tell a tale, anyhow," one of the guards said to another, not bothering to keep his voice down. "You really think there's anything beyond the Glacier?"
"How could there be?" the other guard returned. "You keep on going north, it's just Glacier forever. Only stands to reason."
Audun Gilli muttered to himself. His hands twisted in a few quick passes. One of the soldiers' spearheads grew a face that was a nasty caricature of the man holding it. "D'you suppose there are really such things as guards?" it asked in a shrill, squeaky voice.
"How could there be?" the other guard's spearhead answered. It too now looked like its owner... its owner as seen by somebody with a wicked sense of humor. "We fly through the air all by ourselves. Birds do, so we must. Only stands to reason." It crossed its eyes and stuck out an iron tongue.
Both guards goggled. So did their sergeant. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. Told you so, Ulric mouthed. Hamnet nodded, remembering when Audun Gilli worked that same spell on their winecups.
"I think you had better pass on in," the sergeant said. "They can deal with you at the palace, by God." His spearhead blew him a wet, slobbery kiss. He looked as if he wanted to wring its wooden neck. The other guards' spearheads made more sarcastic gibes.
"Maybe you'd better let them quiet down," Hamnet Thyssen murmured as the travelers rode into the city.
"They will as soon as I get far enough away," Audun Gilli answered. "That spell takes work to keep up, and I'm not going to bother."
"It is a good magic, a funny magic," Liv said in her new and halting Raumsdalian. "You teach me? Make people laugh when I go north again."
Not if I go north again, Hamnet noted. When. She sounded very sure of what she wanted to do. And he couldn't suppress a stab of jealousy when Audun walked her through the spell step by step. Her face was bright and shiny, full of excitement. She and Audun shared something she never could with him.
He scowled and muttered and clasped the reins tightly. He hadn't left himself open to a woman's wounding since Gudrid left him. Liv wasn't hurting him on purpose, which didn't mean she wasn't hurting him.
"I thank you," she told Audun Gilli when he finished. "It is clever. I can do it. I am sure I can do it."
"Not hard," Audun said. "Not good for much, but fun."
"Fun is good." Liv looked around, seemed to come back to herself, and nodded to Count Hamnet. "I begin to see what you mean. This city is... very large. Look at all the big buildings, and at all the people in the streets. And not just people. All the beasts, too."
A string of loaded mules was coming up toward the north gate. The plump merchant leading it had some pungent things to say about the travelers who blocked his path. Then the lead mule screwed up his face and said, "Oh, sure, you think they're as bad as you are, don't you? Fat chance!"
It spoke clearly, distinctly, loudly. The merchant's jaw hit his chest with what should have been an audible clank. The travelers squeezed past the column of loaded mules. The animal in the lead went right on telling the merchant what it thought of him. He didn't stand there gaping long. When anyone—anything—insulted him, he shot back hard. Telling off a mule? He didn't mind. He'd likely done it countless times when the beast couldn't say anything.
"You've got more demon in you than I thought," Hamnet told Audun Gilli.
"Who, me?" the wizard said modestly. "What makes you think that had anything to do with me?"
"I'll tell you what—if Liv tried it, the mule would have had a Bizogot accent."
"I was going to do it," Liv said. "Audun did it first."
"Well, you've got more demon in you than I thought, too," Hamnet said. Liv stuck out her tongue at him. They both laughed, his jealousy dissolving.
Behind them, the merchant called the mule something really unlikely. The mule called the merchant something even worse. Chances were they were both right. Before long, the mule would lose the power of speech as Audun Gilli moved too far away to sustain the spell. The merchant was guaranteed the last word, and all the words after that. But Count Hamnet would have bet the man would never trust the mule not to tell him off again one day.
They moved deeper into Nidaros, streets zigzagging to blunt the Breath of God. The farther they went, the wider Liv's eyes got. "There really is ... quite a lot of it, isn't there?" she said. "How do you feed so many people?"
"Me? I don't," Hamnet answered. "You've seen the way I cook. These folk would sooner starve than eat that."
She sent him a severe look. "And you said I had a demon in me."
"All right, then. A lot of food comes up from the south. We have markets. We have storehouses. Meat mostly keeps fresh through the winter, though that's shorter than it is up in the Bizogot country. Grain will last a long time if you store it where mice and rats can't get at it and it can't go moldy."
"How long is a long time?"
"I don't know exactly. Years, anyhow."
"Years," she echoed. "You are luckier than we are. These are the riches that let you build the things we can't, aren't they?"
"I suppose so," Hamnet said. "We have more left over at the end of a year than you do—unless the year is very bad, I mean."
"There's something else about having extra food," Ulric Skakki put in. "We don't all have to hunt or gather all the time. Some of us can make the things Bizogots don't have, yes. And some of us can try to think up new things, things even we don't have, things it would be nice if we did have."
"New things." Liv frowned. "Like what? When you have all this, what more could you want?"
"If I knew, I'd think up new things myself," Ulric said.
"Old men say that when their grandfathers were boys no one made lamps with mirrors behind them to shed more light. I've heard that more than once," Hamnet Thyssen said. "It's a small thing, but it's the kind of thing I mean. Every craft probably has secrets someone thought of not so long ago. Wizards make new spells all the time. Audun Gilli would know more about that than I do." There—he'd said it.
"Thank you, your Grace. That's what I was talking about, sure enough," Ulric Skakki said.
"We do come up with new spells now and then," Liv said. "The rest of the way we live . . . That hasn't changed much, not so far as anyone can remember."
"Ah, but the Three Tusk clan lives hard by the Glacier," Ulric said. "The Bizogot clans farther south trade with the Empire." He turned to Hamnet Thyssen. "Remember those ugly wool caps the Musk Ox Bizogots wore?"
"I'm not likely to forget them," Hamnet said with a shudder. To Liv, he went on, "You're lucky we came back farther west, so you didn't have to see those. But some of the Bizogots take things we make and use them in ways we'd never think of. And the Leaping Lynxes, up by Sudertorp Lake—the shorebirds they take there let them live in a town half the time. They're having to figure out how to do that when most of them have never seen a real town."