“And sometimes the fist breaks knuckles when it hits the chin,” Hamnet said.
“Sometimes,” the Bizogot jarl echoed gloomily. He’d broken knuckles on both hands. But he went on, “Most of the time, the fist strikes home and the fellow with the chin goes down.” He looked at the clansmen all around. “By God, Raumsdalian, what do we do if they smash us again? Where do we run? Where can we run?”
“The thing to do, Your Ferocity, is make sure they don’t smash us.” Count Hamnet hoped the Bizogots could do that. Trasamund wasn’t wrong – another defeat would ruin the Red Dire Wolves. Another defeat might also persuade a lot of other clans to roll on their backs for the Rulers. Easier and safer to yield than to go up against an overwhelmingly strong foe in hopeless battle. So the nomads might believe, anyhow.
Or they might not. Hamnet Thyssen knew he was thinking like a civilized man, like a Raumsdalian, himself. The Bizogots were a proud and touchy folk. They might decide they would rather die than admit the invaders from beyond the Glacier were their superiors. He had no way to know ahead of time. He would have to see for himself.
When he said as much to Ulric Skakki, the adventurer said, “Here’s hoping we don’t have to find out, Your Grace.” He turned Count Hamnet s title of nobility into one of faint reproach.
“How do you mean?” Hamnet asked.
“If we can beat the Rulers, we don’t have to worry that they’ll panic the rest of the clans into going belly-up.”
“Oh. Yes. There is that.” Hamnet sounded as dubious as Trasamund had a little while before.
“If you don’t think we can, what are you doing here?” Ulric spoke in a low voice. He took Count Hamnet by the elbow and steered him away from Trasamund and the other Bizogots. The steppe squelched under their boots. The Bizogot country, which had been white for so long, was green now, the green of grass and rocks and tiny shrubs, all splashed with red and yellow and blue flowers. The brief beauty effectively disguised what a harsh land it was.
“What am I doing here?” Hamnet echoed. “The best I can.”
“Don’t make yourself out to be that big a hero,” Ulric said. “You would have stayed down in the Empire if Liv stayed with you.”
“Yes, I like her company,” Hamnet said. “So what? I’m entitled to a little happiness if I can find it.”
“Nobody is entitled to happiness. You’ll lose it if you think you are.” Ulric spoke with unusual conviction. “You may stumble over it now and again, but that’s not because you’re entitled to it.”
He was likely to be right. No – as far as Hamnet could see, he was bound to be right. Recognizing as much, the noble changed the subject: “Even if I’d gone down to my castle instead of coming up here, I would have met the Rulers sooner or later. Or will you tell me I’m wrong about that?”
“I wish I could.” Ulric Skakki sighed. “Well, you don’t always get what you want. Sometimes you’re stuck with things. We’re stuck with the Bizogots now, and with the slim chances they have.”
“See? You think so, too,” Hamnet said.
“They’re doing something, anyhow.” Ulric sighed again, even more mournfully than before. “I wish they were doing more. I wish they knew how to do more. I wish they had some tiny notion of how to work together. And I wish Sigvat would have taken his head out of his . ..” He sighed one more time. “I said it myself a minute ago – you don’t always get what you want.”
“How about what you don’t want?” Count Hamnet asked. Ulric Skakki made a questioning noise. Hamnet explained: “I don’t want to get beaten again.”
“Oh. That,” Ulric said airily. “We’ll find out.”
Fighting among hisown countrymen, Hamnet Thyssen wouldn’t have ridden out as a scout to keep an eye on what the enemy was up to. The Raumsdalians had soldiers who specialized in such things, as they had specialists who had dealt with catapults, sharpshooting archers, and others who could do one thing very well and the others not so well.
Up in the Bizogot country, shamans were the only specialists. Everyone else had to be able to do all the things people needed to do to live on the frozen steppe; there wasn’t enough surplus to let the nomads be able to specialize. In bad years, there was no surplus at all – there wasn’t enough. Starvation was an uncommon misfortune down in the Empire, but a fact of life here.
Motion drew Hamnet s eye. It wasn’t a riding deer or a war mammoth in the distance, but a vole or lemming scurrying from one tussock to another almost under his horse’s hooves. A moment later, a weasel streaked after the other little animal. Most of the weasel’s coat had gone brown, with only a few small white patches left. The beasts needed no calendar to know spring was here.
Birds of all sizes from larkspurs to teratorns crowded the Bizogot country. Most of them fed on the bounty of bugs the springtime ponds brought. Others ate the birds that ate the bugs – hawks and owls lived here, too.
More waterfowl bred on the edges of Sudertorp Lake, south of the Red Dire Wolves’ grazing grounds, than anywhere else. But others found smaller ponds and puddles good enough. A goose rose from a pond and flew away as Hamnet came near. The bird couldn’t know he wasn’t hunting it. If he were hungry, he might have been.
He kept staring east. He was getting close to where the Bizogot had spotted the Rulers. The invaders’ scouts would probably be prowling out this way. They would want to know how alert the Bizogots were.
Ulric Skakki rode somewhere not too far away, though Hamnet couldn’t see him right now. The frozen steppe looked perfectly flat – and well it might, since the Glacier had lain on it so long and left so recently. But it wasn’t, or not quite; it had its gentle swells and dips. Some of those hid the adventurer from sight.
What do I do if four or five enemies come at me? But Hamnet Thyssen knew the answer to that. If he was outnumbered, he would run away. He wasn’t out to be a hero, or even a fierce warrior. All he wanted to do was make sure the Rulers weren’t heading for the Red Dire Wolves’ encampment along this line.
Something out there on the horizon .. . Hamnet’s eyes narrowed. He shaded them with his left hand, trying to see better. “Animals,” he muttered aloud. He urged his horse forward. Were those some of the Rulers’ herds, or perhaps beasts they’d stolen from the Bizogots? Or was that their army on the move? He had to find out.
As he rode forward, he wondered how the Rulers treated enemies they captured. Not very well, was his best guess. He hadn’t been a captured enemy the last time he stayed at one of their encampments. He’d been – what? A curiosity, perhaps, along with the other Raumsdalians and Bizogots who traveled beyond the Glacier.
But what he’d seen and heard made it clear the Rulers didn’t think men and women of other folk were really human beings. They were hard enough on their own kind, casting them out if taken prisoner and expecting them to kill themselves if defeated. On others? Hamnet Thyssen didn’t want to find out the hard way.
He hadn’t gone very far before a couple of small shapes separated themselves from the larger mass there on the horizon and came his way. He nodded to himself. The Rulers were alert. He might despise them – he did despise them – but they made monstrously good warriors.
He kept going a while longer, long enough to satisfy himself that he was just seeing a herd, not the vanguard of the Rulers’ army. That didn’t let those riding deer – he could plainly make out that they were riding deer now – get within bowshot of his horse, but it did let them come closer than he’d intended. No, he didn’t want to find out how the Rulers treated prisoners. He wheeled his horse and rode back more or less in the direction from which he’d come.
Hoarse shouts rang out behind him, faint in the distance. Had the enemy warriors thought he would oblige them by riding straight into their hands? Too bad for them if they had.
When he looked over his shoulder, they were coming after him as fast as their riding deer would go. He booted his horse up from a trot to a gallop. He kept zigzagging a bit, not wanting to show the Rulers exactly in which direction the Red Dire Wolves’ camp lay.
They kept after him. If they ran their antlered mounts into the ground in the pursuit, they didn’t seem to care. He had more trouble pulling away from them than he’d thought he would.
He began looking around for Ulric Skakki. He didn’t want to be rescued, or not exactly, but he wouldn’t have minded knowing where the adventurer was.
Then he found out. He chanced to be looking back again when one of the Rulers threw up his hands and slid off over his riding deer’s tail. A moment later, an arrow struck the other one’s mount. The deer crashed to the ground, pinning the warrior beneath it. Ulric Skakki galloped up, sprang down from his horse, and finished the man with a swordthrust.
By the time Hamnet rode back to him, he was already mounted again. “That was . .. nicely done,” Hamnet said, reflecting that Ulric made a monstrously good warrior, too, even if he wasn’t showy about it the way the Rulers were.
“Thanks,” Ulric answered now. “You made it easy. They didn’t pay any attention to me till much too late.”
“The foxes chased the hare and didn’t notice the dire wolf?” Hamnet wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being nothing more than someone who distracted the foe from a real danger. He wanted the Rulers to think he was dangerous himself.
Ulric winked at him, disconcertingly sharp. “You’ve got the cutest whiskers.”
“I’m so glad you think so.” Hamnet Thyssen batting his eyes made Ulric laugh out loud. Count Hamnet couldn’t keep his mood light for long. He asked, “Did you get a good look at the herd up ahead?” He pointed east. “How many of the Rulers were there with it?”
“At least these two.” The adventurer pointed to one of the corpses. “I didn’t see that many more. Did you?”
“I didn’t think so,” Hamnet answered. “I’d say we’ve proved the main thrust against the Red Dire Wolves won’t come along this path.”
“I’d say you’re right.” Ulric nodded. “And I’d also say we’d better get back to them anyhow. That thrust is coming, whether it’s coming this way or not. I don’t want to ride into camp and find out there’s no camp left, if you know what I mean.”
Hamnet Thyssen understood him much too well. He didn’t want to think of getting back there and finding the Rulers had broken the Bizogots. If anything happened to Liv . .. He especially didn’t want anything to happen to her if he wasn’t there to do all he could to keep it from happening. That probably didn’t make much sense, but he didn’t care. “Let’s ride,” he said harshly.
Again he had the feeling Ulric Skakki knew exactly what he was thinking. He didn’t care. As long as the adventurer kept his mouth shut about Liv, they would get along fine. If Ulric didn’t. ..
If Ulric didn’t, Hamnet would try to hurt him. He wasn’t sure he could. The last time he tried, he flew through the air with the greatest of ease and ended up, suddenly and painfully, on his back on a hard stone floor. He was bigger than Ulric Skakki, and thought he was stronger. Ulric was faster and trickier. More often than not, that gave him the edge.
“We shouldn’t quarrel among ourselves,” Ulric said, not quite out of nowhere. “We should save it for the Rulers.”