To his relief, Liv took what he did say for a complete sentence. She started passing him strips of meat. He had no trouble eating them. They might even have been a delicacy down in Nidaros. And the company here was better than any he would have known in the imperial capital.
"What's it like making love when the wind is screaming outside?" he asked.
Liv smiled. "You want to find out, I suppose. Well, why not? It's warm enough, and the work will make us warmer."
As long as they lay on their clothes and blankets, it was fine. When Ham-net stuck his foot in the snow for a couple of heartbeats, it put him off his stroke, but he quickly recovered. Afterwards, he dressed in a hurry, and so did Liv. They wrapped themselves in their blankets and fell asleep.
It was dark inside the hut when Count Hamnet woke—the lamp had gone out. The wind still howled and screeched outside. Within the hut, though, it was snug and more than warm enough. The Bizogots knew what they were doing, all right. He yawned, twisted, and went back to sleep.
The next time he woke up, a little light was coming in through the smoke hole. He needed a moment to realize the storm had died. It was almost eerily quiet. Beside him, Liv said, "It's blown itself out. I hoped it would."
"I wondered if it would bury the hut before it did," Hamnet said.
"No—too windy for that. The snow wouldn't stick enough," she said. "We may have to dig out of the entrance, though."
They did. As they shoveled snow with mittened hands, Hamnet Thyssen said, "I hope the horses came through all right."
"So do I. They're your southern beasts, not the ones we breed ourselves." Liv went on digging as she spoke. She broke out into fresh air. "We'll know soon."
Standing up came as a relief to Hamnet. He'd felt as crowded in the snow as he felt small and insignificant traveling across the frozen plains. Everything was frozen now, the ground as far as the eye could see robed in white. Even his furs and Liv's had snow all over them.
He trudged through snow that crunched under his boots to the windbreak Trasamund and Liv had built. The horses were still there, still alive, and eager for food. He had a little sugar made from maple sap down in the Empire. The animals snuffled up the treat and snorted for more.
Liv started digging out the snow in front of the other hut's entrance. Somebody inside said something. Hamnet couldn't make out what it was, but Liv s tart answer told him. "No, I'm not a bear," she said. "It would serve you right if I were."
Audun Gilli, Ulric Skakki, and Trasamund emerged a moment later. "Good thing the sun's in the sky," Ulric said. "Otherwise we wouldn't have any idea which way north was."
"I could use the spell with the needle," Audun said. "It wouldn't be perfect, not up here"—he was ready to admit that now—"but it would give us the right idea."
"If the water didn't freeze before you could finish chanting." Trasamund sounded altogether serious. Hamnet decided he had a right to be. With the air this cold, water would turn to ice in a hurry.
"We've got the sun," the Raumsdalian noble said. "Let's use it." They mounted and rode north. The southern horses did know enough to paw forage up from under the snow. Hamnet hadn't been sure they would. One less thing to worry about, anyhow.
Only last summer's frozen marsh plants sticking up from the snow here and there told the travelers they'd come to the edge of Sudertorp Lake. No screeching waterfowl now—nothing but the silent grip of winter. Count Hamnet looked west, then east. The frozen lake stretched as far as he could see in either direction.
"Which is the shorter way around?" he asked.
"They both look pretty long," Ulric said.
"That both will cost us time," Hamnet said fretfully. The sense that it was slipping away gnawed at him.
"See the southerners," Trasamund said to Liv in the Bizogot language. She grinned and nodded. Whatever amused the jarl, she found it funny, too.
"What's the answer, then?" Hamnet Thyssen asked with as little sarcasm as he could.
"We don't go around," Trasamund answered. "We go straight across, by God. This season of the year, musk oxen and mammoths cross lakes and rivers. If the ice holds them, it will hold us, too."
Hamnet and Ulric and Audun exchanged glances. Hamnet had skated on frozen ponds in winter—what Raumsdalian hadn't? But sending horses across? That was a different story.
"What happens if we fall in?" Audun Gilli asked the question on Ham-net's mind, and surely on Ulric's, too.
"If we're close to shore, we drag you out, get on dry land, build a big fire fast as we can, and maybe you live," the Bizogot jarl answered. "If not so close, you freeze before we can do it." Like a lot of mammoth-herders, he was callous when it came to things nobody could do anything about. He went on, "It won't happen, though. The ice now is as thick as Jesper Fletti's head, and even harder."
That made both Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen smile. Audun Gilli just nodded seriously and said, "I hope you're right."
"I'm betting my neck, too," Trasamund said. The wizard nodded again.
The horses went out onto the ice without much fuss. They placed their feet carefully. Even with horseshoes—one more thing the Bizogots, who didn't smelt iron, went without—the going was slippery. But Trasamund proved right about one thing—the frozen surface of the lake was more than solid enough to bear the heavy animals' weight. Except for the smoothness, Hamnet couldn't tell he wasn't riding across solid ground; there was no shaking under him to suggest water yet unfrozen lay beneath the ice.
Sudertorp Lake was a long way across. Going around would have been three or four times as long—Hamnet understood as much. But he still felt peculiar with nothing but ice all around. He felt as if he were riding across the top of the Glacier.
When he spoke that conceit aloud, Ulric Skakki clapped his mittened hands. "Now there's a sport no one's likely to try soon," he said. "Men might get to the top, I suppose, but not horses. Your Ferocity!"
"What do you want?" Trasamund often suspected Ulric of laughing up his sleeve at him—and often was right.
But the adventurer sounded serious as he asked, "Have any Bizogots ever tried climbing to the top of the Glacier?"
"Not in my clan," the jarl answered. "Not so anyone remembers. I've heard that men have tried farther west. I don't think anyone ever made it, though. There are mountains that stick up through the Glacier. Some of them are topped with green in the summertime—but what grows on them no one knows. How would you get to them to find out?"
Count Hamnet whistled softly. That wasn't a small thought. Those mountain peaks above the Glacier—what might grow up there? Anything at all. How long had they been there, each by itself? Eons. Could there be people up there, people who did roam the top of the Glacier and had no more hope of coming down than the Bizogots and Raumsdalians did of going up? What would they eat? The top of the Glacier made the Bizogot plains seem paradise by comparison.
"Probably rabbits and lemmings and voles up there," Ulric said when Hamnet put that into words. "Bound to be birds, too, at least in summer. But I wouldn't want to try to live up there, and that's the truth." He shivered.
So did Hamnet Thyssen. And then, unmistakably, so did the ice beneath them. Hamnet thought he heard a crackling noise far below. He pointed at Trasamund, not that pointing with a forefinger in a mitten did much good. "You said this couldn't happen!" he shouted at the Bizogot.
"It can't!" Trasamund shouted back, even though it was.
The crackling grew louder. "I don't know about you people, but I'm making for shore as fast as I can," Ulric Skakki said, and booted his horse up to a trot and then to a gallop.
That seemed like such a good idea, Count Hamnet did the same thing. So did Trasamund and Liv and Audun Gilli. But the crackling followed them and got louder still, even through the drumming thunder of their horses' hooves. "This is sorcery!" Audun shouted. "Someone is making the ice breakup!"
"Well, for God's sake make it stop!" Hamnet shouted back. He thought about what the jarl said about going into the icy water. Having thought about it, he wished he hadn't. To die like that... It would end fast, but not fast enough.
And someone could only mean someone from the Rulers. How did the folk who lived beyond the Glacier track the travelers here? Hamnet had no idea. He wished Audun Gilli or Liv did.
Liv began to chant in the Bizogot tongue. She took her left hand from the reins so she could use it for passes. "I know that spell," Trasamund said.
"Do you?" Hamnet Thyssen looked back over his shoulder. What he saw made him wish he hadn't. Cracks in the frozen surface of the lake stretched toward him like skeletal arms wanting to hold him in an embrace that would last forever.
"I do, by God," the jarl answered. "When snow is very dry, it won't hold together for things like huts. That spell clumps it, you might say."
"Will it do the same for ice?" Hamnet asked.
"I don't know," Trasamund said. "We're going to find out, don't you think?"
Audun Gilli rode up alongside Liv. He reached out and set a hand on her leg. Most of the time, Hamnet would have killed him for that. Now, though, he understood the wizard wasn't feeling her up. Audun was lending her strength. He didn't know the spell; it wasn't one Raumsdalians were likely to use. But he was doing what he could to help.