Trasamund shook his head. “We lost them a long time ago. We wouldn’t have gone up there if we hadn’t.”
Marcovefa asked a question. Ulric answered. By the way he kept going back and forth, he was having a hard time getting her to believe him. She kept screwing up her face and making derisive gestures. At last, he said something that turned her thoughtful. “She doesn’t want to believe the musk oxen are as big as I say,” Ulric said. “I reminded her of the chunks of horseflesh we had when we got to her mountain. Beasts really do grow bigger down below the Glacier.”
The raven croaked in Marcovefa’s ear. She answered it as seriously as she’d replied to Ulric. It croaked again. She shrugged and nodded.
“She’d sooner believe the bird than you,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Proves she knows them both,” Trasamund put in.
“I laugh. Ha. Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha,” Ulric said.
Hamnet pointed to the ground in front of the musk oxen. “We really are getting close,” he said.
“Pay attention to where you are, not to where you want to be,” Trasamund said. “We’re still plenty high enough for the Glacier to kill us if it sees a chance.”
He spoke of it as if it were alive and malevolent. After two long climbs, one up, one down, and a little while atop its frozen immensity, Hamnet would have been hard pressed to tell him he was crazy. And he gave good advice. A careless mistake now could still be the last one somebody ever made.
They all talked one another down. Hamnet let out a sigh of commingled exhaustion and relief when his boots squelched in mud made soft and slimy by meltwater. Trasamund knelt down to kiss the dirt. That should have been laughable. Somehow, it wasn’t.
“There is a world below the Glacier. Who would have believed it?” Marcovefa said, Ulric translating.
“In one way, it’s no different from the world you just left,” Count Hamnet said. After Ulric did the honors, Marcovefa made a questioning noise. Hamnet explained: “Plenty of enemies will want to kill you here, too.”
As the sun set,the Glaciers shadows stretched farther and farther and darker and darker across the Bizogot plain. The travelers had moved a couple of miles south from the Glacier, not least because they didn’t want to risk another avalanche thundering down on their heads. Marcovefa marveled at everything she saw: the swarms of birds, the variety of voles and mice and lemmings in the undergrowth, and the sheer scope and exuberance of the undergrowth itself.
“This land is so rich,” she said through Ulric. “So wide, so many plants, and even the air makes me think I’ve chewed magic mushrooms.”
“So much more air to breathe down here, it’s probably making her drunk,” Hamnet Thyssen said, again remembering the thin stuff atop the Glacier. “I hope it doesn’t make her sick.”
“Nothing we can do about it if it does – short of sending her off to the mountains, I suppose,” Ulric said.
Marcovefa almost stepped in a mammoth turd. When she realized what it was, she stared down at it in disbelief, then yammered in her own language. Whatever she said, it set Ulric laughing. “Well?” Trasamund said. “Tell all of us.”
“She wants to know if a mountain shit here, or maybe the Glacier,” Ulric told him. Marcovefa added something else. “She says no animal could be big enough to leave a turd like that.”
“She may say it, but that doesn’t make it so,” the jarl said. “Now maybe she’ll believe we weren’t pulling her leg when we told her what the beasts down here were like. She’d better, or she’ll have a thin time of it when she meets her first lion or dire wolf.”
Ulric translated that for the shaman from the men of the Glacier. Count Hamnet found he could make out more words now than he’d been able to when he first met that folk. It was a dialect of the Bizogot tongue, sure enough, but a strange one, and a very old-fashioned one as well.
“You just told her a dire wolf was a fox that weighs as much as a man, didn’t you?” he asked the adventurer.
“That’s right,” Ulric said. “Do you want to take over some of the interpreting? I wouldn’t miss it, by God.”
“I don’t think I could,” Hamnet said. “I can figure out what some of the words are when I hear other people say them, but I don’t know how to say them myself.”
“Does make it harder,” Ulric allowed. “Marcovefa’s got to learn the ordinary Bizogot language. Trouble is, till we made it up to the top of the Glacier she didn’t imagine there were any other languages. I don’t know if she’ll have an easy time finding new words for things.”
Marcovefa looked down at the mammoth turd again. She quickly lost Count Hamnet when she spoke again; he had an easier time following Ulric’s efforts to speak her tongue. With a small sigh, Ulric did the honors: “She says we can have big fires whenever we want if we’ve got turds like that to burn.”
“I wonder what she’d think if she saw rounds of hickory burning in a fireplace down in Nidaros,” Hamnet said. “Anyone who imagines the Bizogot country is rich – ”
“Has been living on a mountaintop above the Glacier her whole life long,” Ulric finished for him.
That wasn’t what Hamnet would have said, which made it no less true. “Maybe you ought to tell her about horses and riding deer and riding mammoths,” he remarked. “We may have to travel fast now that we’re down here again.”
“Why? Just because we’ll be one jump ahead of the Rulers again – one jump ahead if we’re lucky?” Ulric had a knack for knowing where the worst troubles lay, all right. He went on, “Well, I’ll try. She’s not going to understand about riding, you know, not till she sees somebody doing it.”
He spoke slowly to Marcovefa. He had to keep backing up and starting over. At last, he had Hamnet get down on hands and knees and straddled him to show what riding meant. Marcovefa went into gales of giggles; it might have been the funniest thing she’d ever seen. “Why didn’t you let me do the riding?” Hamnet asked irritably.
“Because I didn’t want to look like an idiot?” Ulric suggested, and Hamnet tried to buck him off. Marcovefa laughed harder than ever. Un-fazed and unthrown, Ulric went on, “Besides, you’re bigger than I am, even if you make a fractious horse. I wanted to show her people ride bigger brutes.”
“Thank you so much,” Hamnet ground out. “Now that you’ve shown her, get the demon off me.”
Ulric did, which was lucky for him. Count Hamnet’s next move would have been to stand. Ulric couldn’t very well have ridden him then, any more than he could have sat in someone’s lap after the former lapholder rose.
“Well?” Hamnet said, an ominous rumble in his voice. “Does she understand what riding’s all about now?”
After more back-and-forth between Ulric and Marcovefa, the adventurer nodded. “She understands it, all right,” he said. “She isn’t sure she believes it. She isn’t sure it’s any good. But now she knows what the word means, and she didn’t before.”
Hamnet Thyssen had to think about that for a little while. He’d made cracks about how impoverished the men of the Glacier were. Now he saw he’d barely begun to understand that. Even their language was a poor, starveling thing. So many things they couldn’t do … and if you couldn’t do something, you didn’t need words to talk about it. So the words had fallen out of their vocabulary, and taken the ideas with them.
He looked back towards the Glacier, and then up towards the top. Both the layer of clouds through which he’d descended and gathering darkness kept him from seeing all the way up. But he didn’t really need to. He knew where he’d been and what he’d done. And if the rest of the world didn’t want to believe him, that was the world’s lookout, not his.
Then he looked south. “I suppose we ought to be glad the Rulers weren’t waiting for us when we got to the ground again,” he said.
“And I suppose you’re right,” Ulric said. “Don’t lose any sleep over it, though. They aren’t likely to leave us alone very long.”
“No, I suppose not,” Hamnet said.
Nothing could have made him lose sleep that night. Slightly muddy ground made a better mattress than ice or bare rock. But he suspected he could have lain down on a porcupine the size of a glyptodont and still started snoring two heartbeats after he closed his eyes.
The sun had to climb up over the Glacier before morning came to the land by its base. That won him more sleep than he would have had a little farther south. He woke grabbing his sword hilt when Trasamund shook him. “We need food,” the Bizogot said. “We need to find out whose land this is, too, and turn them against the Rulers if they aren’t already.”
“Are we still on the White Foxes’ grazing grounds?” Hamnet asked. “Or have we come farther west than that? Which clan lies west of theirs?”
“West of the White Foxes are the Snowshoe Hares,” Trasamund answered. He knew, and had to know, the Bizogot plain the way a native of Nidaros knew the capital’s streets. “They chase the Foxes more often than the Foxes chase them.”
“For all we know, the Rulers are here ahead of us,” Liv said. “Everything that’s held true on the steppe for generations is scrambled now. Even if we beat the Rulers, sorting things out afterwards will take years.”
“We’ll spill a lot of blood doing it, too.” Trasamund sounded matter-of-fact about that, not dismayed the way a Raumsdalian would have. “But at least that will come by our own choosing, not on account of these God-cursed invaders.”
“Not that the people who get maimed and killed will care,” Ulric said.
“Of course they’ll care,” Trasamund insisted. “In a fight, doesn’t who wounds you matter?”
“I’d rather not let anybody wound me, if it’s all the same to you,” Ulric said.