XII
Hamnet grew hardened to the saddle. With the horses from the Rock Ptarmigans’ camp, the travelers could switch mounts as beasts tired, which let them travel till they got too weary to go on themselves. The long days and twilight-filled nights of the Bizogot steppe in summer also kept them going longer than they would have at any other season of the year.
Riding straight south, or rather a little east of south, would have taken them to Nidaros by the shortest route. Hamnet would have liked to go that way. But trying it was also more likely to make them bump into the Rulers. And so they went south and west, away from the newcomers who had irrupted into the land of the Bizogots.
Trasamund and his clansmates didn’t know much about the clans who dwelt on that part of the plain. Ulric Skakki, by contrast, had been there before, and was on good terms with several of the jarls they met.
“This is embarrassing,” Trasamund whispered to Hamnet Thyssen after the jarl of the Green Geese greeted Ulric like a long-lost brother. “What business does a Raumsdalian have knowing Bizogots better than a Bizogot does?”
“Why ask me?” Hamnet said. “Why not ask Ulric, or even Grippo here?” Grippo was jarl of the Green Geese. Hamnet went on, “Ulric would tell you. You know that.”
“And he’d gloat while he was doing it,” Trasamund said. “He gloats even when he doesn’t know he’s gloating.”
Ulric did enjoy trotting out what he knew and showing it off. “Well, ask Grippo, then,” Hamnet said.
“I can’t. I don’t know him. And Ulric Skakki does, curse it.”
Grippo raised a skin of smetyn to Ulric in salute. “Warmer than the last time you were here, isn’t it?” the jarl of the Green Geese said.
“Oh, just a little,” Ulric answered. “Couldn’t very well be colder, by God.”
“When were you here before?” Trasamund inquired.
“A couple of winters ago,” Ulric Skakki answered lightly. He glanced over towards Trasamund. “That was the winter I slipped up through the Gap.”
Trasamund looked as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or curse. He ended up doing some of each. “Why, you lying sack of horse turds!” he burst out. “You expect me to believe that? You would have had to go right on past the Three Tusk clan without ever letting us know you were around.”
“Yes? And so? What’s so hard about that?” Ulric said. “You stuck by your tents and by your herds. No one had any idea I was there.”
“You can’t make me believe that,” Trasamund said. “By God, I was the first one through the Gap, the first one to see what was on the other side of the Glacier. Why would I have come down to the Empire if I wasn’t?”
“Because you’re not as smart as you think you are?” Ulric Skakki suggested. His voice stayed mild, but he had no give in him.
Trasamund sent a glance of appeal to Hamnet Thyssen. “Tell him to ease off, Your Grace,” he said, as if Ulric weren’t standing there a few feet away. “Tell him I don’t want to thump him, but I will if he doesn’t quit spewing nonsense like this.”
“Your Ferocity, I don’t think it is nonsense,” Count Hamnet answered. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I believe him. He told me about this when we were going up through the Gap last summer. He sounded like somebody who knew what he was talking about, too, and when we got beyond the Glacier some of the things he said turned out to be true.”
He might have stabbed Trasamund in the back. “You want me to think a Raumsdalian is as good up here as any Bizogot?” the jarl said. “You want me to think a Raumsdalian is better up here than most Bizogots? I won’t do it!”
“Do you know what you sound like?” Ulric said. “You sound like one of those tiresome Raumsdalians who go on and on about how Bizogots are too barbarous to do this, that, or the other thing. They’re stupid bores, if you ask me.” He didn’t say what Trasamund was if you asked him, but you didn’t need to be a scholar of logic to figure it out.
Trasamund certainly had no trouble. “If any of your drivel is true, why didn’t you come out with it a long time ago?” he demanded.
“Well, I did tell Count Hamnet here – and I told him to keep it quiet,” Ulric Skakki replied. “I didn’t tell you before because I thought you’d get tiresome yourself if you knew – and I was bloody well right, wasn’t I?”
“I ought to thump you from here to Nidaros and back again,” Trasamund snarled.
“You’re welcome to try,” Ulric said politely. Trasamund was much the bigger man. Ulric was quicker and, as Hamnet Thyssen had painfully discovered, knew more fighting tricks than anyone had any business knowing. If the Bizogot and the adventurer fought, Count Hamnet knew which way he’d bet.
Trasamund was no coward – anything but. He’d hurled himself at the Rulers without the slightest worry about what might happen next. But something in Ulric’s matter-of-fact invitation seemed to give him pause. He grabbed a skin of smetyn and took a long pull. With the air of a man being more magnanimous than he might, he said, “I am going to let you live, and I’ll tell you why.”
“I hang on your every word, Your Ferocity.” Ulric Skakki’s tone suggested that the jarl was welcome to hang himself.
Ignoring it, Trasamund said, “I am going to let you live because the Rulers are the enemies we have to fight. Once they’re beaten, we can worry about each other again.”
“Congratulations,” Ulric said. “You see? You can make sense if you put your mind to it. I wasn’t sure, but you can after all.”
“Enough,” Hamnet Thyssen said quickly. Ulric was working on making Trasamund lose his temper. Volcanic as the Bizogot was, that wouldn’t be hard. It might be good for the sake of Ulric’s amusement. But it also might end in blood – and Trasamund was right when he said fighting the Rulers was more important.
“You’re no fun,” the adventurer said petulantly.
“Yes, I know. That seems to be how things work for me,” Count Hamnet said. “But Trasamund’s trying hard to do the right thing. He deserves credit for it. He doesn’t deserve you pushing him into a brawl he’s doing his best to walk away from.”
Ulric Skakki pushed out his lower lip. “You’re really very ugly when you’re right, too – just in case you didn’t know.”
“Thank you,” Hamnet said. If Ulric was trying to bait fern now, he wouldn’t have any luck. By his sour stare, Ulric was trying to do exactly that.
“You are a band of brothers,” Grippo observed. Before Count Hamnet could figure out a polite way to call the jarl of the Green Geese an idiot, Grippo continued, “My brothers and I, we would fight like dire wolves in mating season. You seem the same way – you know one another too well, and you’ve been too close together too long.”
Instead of calling Grippo a fool, Hamnet Thyssen bowed. “You have good sense, Your Ferocity.”
“Maybe. And even if I do, how much will it help me if these invaders decide to serve us the way they served the Rock Ptarmigans?”
That was a good question. In a way, it was too good a question, because Hamnet had no answer for it. “We’re all doing what we can,” he said, which was true but liable to be less than helpful.
“Will it be enough?” Grippo inquired – another pointed query. “And if it isn’t, then what?”
“I don’t know, Your Ferocity,” Count Hamnet answered. “But if the Rulers win, I don’t expect to be alive to see it.”
“If the Rulers win, not many of us will be,” Grippo said, “not unless we bend the knee to them, anyhow.”
“And maybe not even then,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Anyone who is not of their folk is part of the herd, as far as they’re concerned. Why would they treat a herd of people any better than a herd of mammoths?”
The Bizogot grunted. He lived in a mammoth-hide tent. He slept under a mammoth-hide blanket. He ate mammoth meat, used mammoth fat and butter in his lamps, wore mammoth-leather clothes, and used mammoth ivory for everything from ornaments to arrow points. The mammoths had no say in any of that. Under the Rulers, neither would he.
“By God, any Bizogot who bends the knee to the Rulers deserves whatever happens to him,” Trasamund declared. “Any Bizogot who bends the knee to anyone deserves whatever happens to him. Are we not the free folk? Is it not better to die on our feet than to live on our knees?”
“People say so,” Grippo answered. “The ones who do say so are all alive, though. I haven’t heard what the dead ones say.”
There was a piece of cynicism worthy of any diplomat from Nidaros, worthy even of Sigvat II himself. Hamnet Thyssen bowed his head in admiration of a sort. Euric had shown him that the Bizogots could aspire to civilized deceit. Listening to Grippo, he found that they’d truly mastered the art.
“We ought to bring him with us,” Ulric Skakki murmured in Raumsdalian. “He’d swindle the Emperor right out of his shoes.”
“For which I thank you, though you do me too much honor,” Grippo said in the same language, his accent elegant and educated.
First Euric, then Grippo – again … Count Hamnet had rarely seen Ulric nonplused, but he did now. “You never let on that you could speak Raumsdalian!” the adventurer yelped.
“Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?” replied the jarl of the Green Geese.