With half the Bizogots and Raumsdalians mounted but the rest still on foot, the band of refugees moved no faster than it had before. If the clan south of the Snowshoe Hares had enough horses to let everybody here ride, things would pick up. In the meantime, the nags didn’t slow the travelers down.
Liv and Arnora and Marcovefa rode most of the time. The men took turns on the other horses. Hamnet didn’t mind walking. He’d got used to it. He did begrudge their sorry pace, though. “Who knows what the Rulers are doing farther east?” he said.
“Come on – you know and I know and the rest of us know,” Ulric Skakki said. “They’re chewing up every Bizogot clan that gets in their way.”
Hamnet Thyssen winced, not because he didn’t find that likely but because he did. He wished Ulric hadn’t been so blunt. “You don’t think we’ll be able to pull the Bizogots together to fight them, do you?” he said.
“Well, it gets harder when they’re going south faster than we are,” Ulric replied – another painful truth.
“We may have to ride south and warn the Empire,” Hamnet said. “When we get the horses to do it, I mean – and if it’s not too late by then.”
“Yes. If.” Ulric was nothing if not discouraging. But then, with the way things were, there was too much to be discouraged about.
They got no help from the Rock Ptarmigans. Well before they found the clan’s encampment, Hamnet Thyssen began to fear that might be so. His first moment of worry came when the travelers approached a herd of mammoths.
The beasts awed Marcovefa. “The Rulers ride these, you say?” she asked, and Hamnet had no trouble following her.
“That’s right,” Ulric Skakki answered.
“Well, I can see why,” Marcovefa said. Then she added something Hamnet couldn’t follow. Ulric translated: “She wants to know if there are any beasts bigger than these.”
“Some of the forest mastodons get a little bigger, I think, but not much,” Hamnet said. Ulric nodded. As he relayed that, Count Hamnet went on, “But whales are supposed to be a lot bigger than any mammoths or mastodons, aren’t they?”
Getting the idea of whales across to Marcovefa wasn’t easy. Getting the idea of the sea across to her was even harder. She understood what streams and ponds were. But a pond full of salt water, bigger than the Glacier and deeper than a mountain was tall, strained her credulity.
Again, she spoke too fast for Count Hamnet to keep up with her. “She says we’re joking with her. She says that just because the mammoths and the musk oxen turned out to be true, now we think she’ll believe anything,” Ulric reported.
Hamnet Thyssen raised his right hand as if taking an oath. “By God, it’s the truth,” he said. Marcovefa didn’t care much for God, either, and remained unconvinced.
“Nobody’s riding out to see who the demon we are,” Trasamund said. “That’s not how things ought to work.”
He was right. Bizogots were as territorial as bad-tempered dogs. They should have spotted the strangers and come forth to challenge them, maybe to try to order them off the clan’s land. Her voice troubled, Liv said, “I don’t think there are any men with those mammoths.”
As Count Hamnet drew closer to the herd, he decided Liv was right. And that was out of the ordinary, out of the ordinary in a bad way. Hamnet had trouble imagining any innocuous reason why the Bizogots would let a herd of mammoths wander on its own. Those animals meant food and wool and hides to the clan. Knowing where they were at a given moment was no light matter.
Audun Gilli nodded. “No dogs, either.”
“More likely to see dogs around musk oxen than around mammoths,” Trasamund said. “Musk oxen pay attention to them, because dogs remind them of dire wolves. But dire wolves don’t trouble mammoths, except maybe to nip in and kill a calf once in a while, so mammoths don’t care so much about them. Still. . .”
“It’s not a good sign,” Ulric Skakki said, and the jarl of the Three Tusk clan nodded.
The mammoths didn’t seem to care much about strangers on horseback, either. The Rulers really tamed their mammoths. The Bizogots followed them, sometimes guided them, and used them, but the mammoths here below the Glacier remained their own masters in a way dogs and horses and even musk oxen didn’t.
When Trasamund’s Bizogots and the Raumsdalians with them came upon a herd of musk oxen with no riders or dogs nearby, Hamnet Thyssen began to worry in earnest. The Rock Ptarmigans would have had to have someone along to keep an eye on animals even more vital than mammoths . . . wouldn’t they?
A cow musk ox was trailing the herd. Trasamund and some of the Bizogots from his clan cut the beast away from its fellows and killed it. After the feast Count Hamnet had had with the Snowshoe Hares, he’d been groaningly certain he would never want to eat again. A couple of days of travel showed him how foolish that was. He stuffed himself full of tough, stringy, half-charred musk-ox meat, and he was glad to get it.
When morning came, Ulric Skakki pointed to the southwest. Count Hamnet didn’t need long to spot the carrion birds sliding down from the sky. “There are a lot of them,” he said. “More than there would be for a dead musk ox.”
“More than there would be for a dead mammoth, too,” Ulric said. “What do you want to bet? – that’s where the Rock Ptarmigans had their camp.”
“Keep that bet or find a fool,” Hamnet answered. “I won’t touch it.”
“If we weren’t fools, what would we be doing up here?” Ulric asked: much too good a question.
The Bizogots and Raumsdalians rode and walked towards the spot where the birds were landing. More and more birds kept coming: crows and ravens, vultures and teratorns, even owls and hawks hungry for meat that hadn’t got too high. Before the travelers saw corpses, they saw mammoth-hide tents in the distance and nodded to one another. Yes, this was where the Rock Ptarmigans had lived.
And this was where the Rock Ptarmigans had died. Owls and hawks notwithstanding, the stench of death filled the air. Corpses of Bizogots and their dogs sprawled in unlovely death among the tents. The scavengers rose in skrawking, screeching clouds as the travelers neared. Teratorns, some of them with wingspans more than twice the height of a man, had to run along the ground before they could get airborne.
“Do you see any wounds on those bodies?” Trasamund asked heavily.
“After the birds, would we?” Hamnet Thyssen returned.
“Some,” Trasamund said. “Yes, some, by God. Do you see any arrows? Do you see any broken spearshafts? Do you see any signs of battle?”
Looking around, Hamnet didn’t. Cold chills walked up his back. “What killed them, then?” he asked.
Before Trasamund could answer, Marcovefa and Liv began to keen at the same time. They looked at each other in surprise, but both kept on. Audun Gilli didn’t keen. He was on horseback, and leaned over and noisily lost the meat he’d eaten for breakfast. Spitting and coughing, he gasped out one word: “Magic.”
“Strong magic. Foul magic,” Liv added. Marcovefa said something in her own language. Ulric Skakki didn’t translate it, but Count Hamnet had no trouble guessing what it meant.
“If the Rulers can do this . . .” Trasamund didn’t go on.
Ulric did: “If they can do this, the Empire is in even more trouble than we thought it was. We need to get down there as fast as we can.”
“Bugger the Empire! What about the rest of the Bizogots?” Trasamund roared.
“What about them?” Ulric looked him in the eye. “Odds are we write them off, because they’re already lost anyhow.”
Trasamund gaped. He must not have looked for the adventurer to be so frank. Count Hamnet could have told him that was a mistake. If anyone didn’t like such forthrightness, Ulric Skakki lost no sleep about it.
“If the Empire can beat the Rulers, we’ll redeem the Bizogots,” Hamnet said. “If the Empire loses, we’re all ruined together.”
Audun Gilli pointed past the encampment that death had struck. “Aren’t those the Rock Ptarmigans’ horses?” he said.
The death that had struck men and dogs spared the horses, as it had spared mammoths and musk oxen. Count Hamnet supposed the Rulers expected to use the herd animals for themselves. They wouldn’t have got to use the horses unless they showed up soon, though, not when the beasts were tied in a line. If dire wolves didn’t find them, they would soon perish for want of water and food.
“I didn’t want to get mounts for the rest of us like this,” Trasamund muttered as he cut the animals loose one after another.
“Better us than . . . them.” Hamnet Thyssen looked east. “I wonder if they’re on the way now.”
“We can’t fight them.” Trasamund sounded as if he wanted Hamnet to tell him he was wrong.
But the Raumsdalian nodded. “I know we can’t. The best thing we can do is disappear before they get here. Chances are they’ll just think we’re a band of brigands who happened on the camp before they did.”
“Well, what else are we?” Ulric Skakki sounded proud, not ashamed.