She could have reassured him. She could have . . and she hadn’t. He feared she was as out of sorts with him as he was with her. That wouldn’t do anybody any good. It was, in fact, a recipe for disaster. Sitting down and talking with her might help – if they ever found a moment to sit down together, and if he could figure out what to say if they did. They hadn’t yet, and he hadn’t yet, either, and the silence between them was starting to fester.
And Trasamund got to his feet, saying, “We have to find a herd, and we have to find the folk in charge of it. We need food, and we need mounts, and we need to get back into the fight against the invaders. Come on. Let’s get going.”
As Count Hamnet wearily rose, too, and started trudging across the Bizogot plain, he almost hated the jarl. The nobleman needed other things, too, and Trasamund wasn’t giving him a chance even to figure out how to find them. The things he needed were much less important in the grand scheme. He knew as much. Knowing was scant consolation, if any at all, because what he needed was no less important to him.
They were onthe Snowshoe Hares’ grazing grounds. They found out when two horsemen pulled away from a herd of musk oxen and rode up to look them over. Marcovefa stared at them. Then she stared at Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen. And then she started to laugh. She said something.
Hamnet thought he understood it. When Ulric translated, he proved right: “So you weren’t making it up after all.” Ulric said something in reply, something on the order of, Did you really think we were? And Marcovefa answered, “Well, you never know. Who would have thought beasts could truly grow so big?” Again, Hamnet followed her well enough to get meaning from her words before Ulric turned them into the ordinary Bizogot speech.
“Who are you ragamuffins?” one of the Snowshoe Hares shouted. “What the demon are you doing on our land?”
“We escaped the Rulers,” Trasamund answered. “We had to climb up onto the Glacier and then come down again, so we did that.”
The Snowshoe Hare laughed in his face. “By God, I’ve heard some liars in my time, but never one who came close to you.”
Marcovefa stepped forward to get a better look at him. She said something in her language. “She says you’re a noisy fool even if you can ride a horse,” Ulric translated, helpfully adding, “She’s never seen anybody ride before, so that impresses her more than it does us.”
“What do you mean, she’s never seen anybody ride a horse before?” the Snowshoe Hare demanded.
“I usually mean what I say. You should try it. It works wonders,” Ulric said. “And she’s never seen anybody ride a horse because the biggest animals up on top of the Glacier – except for people – are foxes.”
“More of those lies!” the Bizogot from the Snowshoe Hares jeered.
Marcovefa spoke again. Hamnet Thyssen was afraid he understood what she said. Ulric’s translation confirmed it: “She says she’s eaten better men than you, and she doesn’t mean it any way you’d enjoy. Believe me, she doesn’t.”
The expressions on the faces of the other Raumsdalians and the Bizogots with them told both riders from the Snowshoe Hares exactly how Marcovefa did mean it. As soon as they understood, they looked revolted, too. “Why don’t you kill her, then, if she does things like that?” asked the one who’d done the talking.
“Because she’s a shaman, for one thing,” Ulric answered. “Because two-legged meat is a good bit of what they’ve got to eat up there, for another. It’s a hardscrabble life on top of the Glacier, believe you me it is.”
“Maybe.” The way the Snowshoe Hare said it made it sound like an enormous concession. In his mind, it probably was.
“Now will you answer what I asked you?” Trasamund demanded. “Are you still free of the Rulers? Have the White Foxes gone down before them yet?”
That made the two horsemen put their heads together. When they separated, neither one looked happy. “Something’s happened to the White Foxes, anyway,” admitted the one who liked to hear himself.
“We thought it was a feud inside the clan,” the other one said, proving he wasn’t mute after all.
“It’s worse than that, by God.” Trasamund gave his own name, continuing, “You may have heard of me. I am the jarl of the Three Tusk clan – and what’s left of the free Three Tusk clan stands here in front of you. The Rulers are that bad.”
“Well, they haven’t troubled us,” the talkier Snowshoe Hare said. The other one nodded.
“They’re probably heading south instead,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Toward the Empire,” Audun Gilli added.
How much would that matter to the Snowshoe Hares? Not much, not unless Count Hamnet missed his guess. The Raumsdalian Empire seemed barely real to most Bizogots up here by the Glacier, just as their world was strange and alien to the folk who dwelt below the tree line, and especially to those who lived south of the great forests.
“Let us talk to your jarl,” Trasamund said. “Feed us, if you will – we’re not your foes. If you don’t help us, you help the God-cursed Rulers.”
Hamnet Thyssen hoped he didn’t ask the other Bizogot for horses for all his comrades. The Snowshoe Hares were unlikely to have enough to give them to him. They were less likely to want to do it even if they did have horses to spare.
But Trasamund must have made the same mental calculation himself. Instead of barking out more demands, he stood there waiting with as much calm dignity as he could muster, doing his best to seem like a man who’d asked for no more than he was entitled to.
Calm and dignity were in short supply among the Bizogots, and so all the more impressive when they did get used. The two Snowshoe Hares put their heads together again. Then the mouthier one said, “Yes, come with us. We’ll feed you, and we’ll take you to Euric, and he’ll decide what to do next. I’m Buccelin; this is my cousin, Gunthar.”
One by one, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians with Trasamund named themselves. Marcovefa came last – or Count Hamnet thought she would, anyhow. But after she told Buccelin and Gunthar her name, the raven on her shoulder croaked out a few syllables, too. Was that a coincidence, or was it also naming itself? Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure. By the way Buccelin and Gunthar muttered, they weren’t, either.
Marcovefa? She smiled and scratched the big black bird’s formidable beak. The raven couldn’t very well smile back, but Hamnet got the feeling that was what it was doing.
The Snowshoe Hares led the travelers who’d come down from the Glacier off towards the southwest. They traveled at what was a slow walk for their horses, so the men and women on foot wouldn’t fall behind. Marcovefa watched them intently. After a couple of miles, she spoke up.
“She says she’d like to try to ride for a little while – she’s never done it before,” Ulric said.
Plainly, the mounted Bizogots wanted to say no. Just as plainly, they didn’t have the nerve. Their eyes kept going from her face to the raven and back again. Gunthar reluctantly reined in and dismounted. He showed Marcovefa how to set her left foot in the stirrup and swing up over and onto the horse’s back.
She managed more smoothly than Hamnet would have expected. When she was in the saddle, she smiled again. “She says she feels so tall!” Ulric said. “She says she can see as far as the raven can.”
Gunthar laughed. “Is she witstruck?”
“Not the way you mean,” Hamnet answered. “Everything down here is new to her. They haven’t got much, there up on top of the Glacier.”
“You’re still going on about that, are you?” the Snowshoe Hare said.
“It’s the truth,” Hamnet Thyssen said stonily. “If you don’t believe it, try crossing Marcovefa and see what happens.”
“No, thanks,” Gunthar said. “I don’t know where the demon she’s from. For all I can say, she fell from the back side of the moon. But I know a shaman when I see one. We’ve had a witstruck shaman or two in our clan. It doesn’t mean they can’t use spells well enough.”
Buccelin showed Marcovefa how to use the pressure of her legs to urge the horse forward, and how to guide it to the right and left with the reins. She proved an apt pupil. The first question she asked was, “How do you make these big beasts your slaves?”
“We train them, starting when they’re small,” Buccelin answered.
After Ulric translated, the shaman nodded. Then she asked, “And what do you do when they rebel?”
“She really doesn’t know anything about this business, does she?” Buccelin remarked. With a shrug, he went on, “We train them some more. We punish them. If we still can’t break them, we can always kill them and eat them.”
“Ah,” Marcovefa said. “You are men, sure enough.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” the Bizogot demanded. The woman from atop the Glacier said not another word. After a few more minutes, she dismounted, and did so with more grace than she’d used getting up on the horse. Buccelin mounted. Marcovefa sketched a salute. He gave back a brusque nod, then made a point of not riding anywhere near her.
In midafternoon, they approached a herd of musk oxen. Marcovefa pointed towards them. “So many large animals! Do you get up on top of these, too?”
“Maybe we could, but we don’t.” By then, Buccelin seemed resigned to playing guide. “We use them for their meat and hides and milk and wool and bones and horn.” He chuckled. “Everything but the grunt.”
Marcovefa thought that was funny, which proved she came from the back of beyond. A couple of other Snowshoe Hares rode out from the herd. “Who are these ragamuffins?” one of them shouted. “Where did they come from? Down off the Glacier?” He threw back his head and laughed at his own wit.
“Yes, I think they really did,” Buccelin answered, which made the other Bizogot’s jaw drop. “We’re taking them to Euric. They know what the mess to the east is all about. This one” – he aimed a thumb at Trasamund – ”used to be jarl of the Three Tusk clan.”