“You’ve made yourself very plain,” Grippo said. “I will do … what I do. Whatever it is, I won’t harm you by it. I could, you know. If I seized you, if I gave you to the Rulers, I’d win favor from them. Will you tell me I’m wrong?”
“You wouldn’t enjoy it long.” That was as much as Count Hamnet could say. If he tried to tell Grippo the Rulers wouldn’t reward him for turning over such persistent nuisances, the jarl would know he was lying.
“So I judge,” Grippo replied calmly.
Marcovefa said something – a long, angry burst in her own language. How much of the talk had she understood? She was learning the usual Bizogot tongue, and she had that gift for understanding whether she knew the words or not. She glanced expectantly towards Ulric Skakki. Well – go on, her attitude said.
And he did: “She says you have her curse, Grippo, if you go against what is best for your folk for the sake of what you think best for you.” Marcovefa nodded, as if satisfied with the feel of the translation.
“How much should this worry me?” By the way Grippo asked the question, he thought the answer was not much.
Marcovefa muttered to herself. Grippo started to say something else, something that probably would have been sardonic or cruel or crude. What came out instead was a deep, gabbling honk – the honk a goose the size of a man might have made. Grippo looked astonished. Then he started pecking for seeds on the ground. His face wasn’t built for that the way a goose’s was, but he didn’t seem to care. And then he started preening. Unlike a goose, a man had no business being able to stick his head into his armpit. Grippo’s neck seemed to stretch to accommodate. He honked some more, now seeming seriously alarmed.
“Tell her she’s made her point,” Hamnet Thyssen whispered to Ulric. “Too much is too much, same as it would have been with Euric. She should let him be a man again.” Ulric nodded and spoke in Marcovefa’s language.
Grippo raised his head. He went on honking for a few heartbeats, but then found ordinary words: “What the demon did you do to me?”
Ulric translated his question and then her reply: “She says she showed you what a silly goose you would be if you kissed the Rulers’ backside.”
“By God! I guess she did!” the jarl of the Green Geese said. “It was the oddest thing. Some of the seeds I found there were really good. Now I know they had to be disgusting, but I sure liked them when I pecked them up. And I knew what my honks meant, even if you didn’t.”
“Shamans sometimes take beast shape themselves, you know,” Liv said.
“Oh, yes.” Grippo nodded. “I’ve seen that. But I never thought I’d do it. I’m a man, and that’s flat. But now I’m a man with a different look at things.”
“I hope it’s a look that says dealing with the Rulers wouldn’t be such a good idea,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” Grippo nodded again and shivered at the same time. “Next time, if there were a next time, your shaman might turn me into a bird louse instead of a bird.”
Marcovefa gave him a grin full of teeth. No one had said anything about her eating habits atop the Glacier. That grin suggested them despite the silence. Grippo flinched from it, and from the idea that she’d followed him without knowing his language.
When the travelers rode south the next morning, the Green Geese gave them more horses and everything they asked for in the way of supplies. Count Hamnet had the feeling Grippo would have done anything at all to get them away from his clan. Unlike Euric, he didn’t invite Marcovefa to sleep with him. Hamnet thought he would sooner have slept with a serpent – and Grippo had never seen a serpent in his life.
“She does make an impression on people, doesn’t she?” Hamnet said as the tents of the Green Geese shrank behind them.
“Who? Our cannibal princess? Oh, just a little,” Ulric Skakki replied. “Yes, just a little. And if he gave her half a chance, she would make an impression on him.” He mimed biting down hard. Hamnet Thyssen winced. That wasn’t what he’d meant, which didn’t mean it wasn’t so.
The sun seemed to stay in the sky forever. It was high summer on the northern plains. For a few weeks, you could forget all about the Glacier unless the Breath of God decided to blow down from the north even at that time of year. If it did, all kinds of strange things could happen, from snowstorms that blighted a growing season to twisters that picked up anything from a mammoth to a whole Bizogot encampment and flung it across the landscape.
But now the Breath of God might have been a million miles away. It got as hot as it ever did down in Nidaros – maybe hotter. The hunting was good … and Grippo sent one of his men with the travelers down to the edge of his grazing lands. The man from the Green Geese ordered musk-ox herders to kill a beast for the Bizogots and Raumsdalians passing through.
“What? Are you sure?” one of the herders said. “Grippo never tells us to do things like that.”
“He did this time.” The other Bizogot sent Marcovefa a sidelong glance. He didn’t explain his jarl’s embarrassment, not in public, but he sounded very sure of himself. The herder stopped grumbling.
Audun Gilli shaved bits from the musk ox’s horns after it fell. “Why are you doing that?” Liv asked him.
“I don’t know, not exactly.” The wizard sounded a little sheepish. “But here we are, and here I am, and here’s the musk ox, and the horns are strong, and they may be good for some kind of magic one of these days.”
That sounded like a stretch to Hamnet Thyssen, but Liv only nodded. “I do the same sort of thing sometimes,” she said. “My tent used to be full of this and that and the other thing – back when the clan was strong, I mean. And maybe I would have used some of what I gathered and maybe I wouldn’t, but I had it just in case.”
“When I had a house down in Nidaros, it was the same way,” Audun said.
Wonderful, Count Hamnet thought. They’ve found something else they have in common – they’re both packrats. Liv kept telling him he was worrying over nothing. Every time he looked, though, the nothing seemed bigger.
“What about you?” Liv asked Marcovefa. “Do you save things even when you don’t know if you can use them?”
“Yes,” Marcovefa answered in the regular Bizogot tongue. She was learning what she needed to know – or maybe her capacity for understanding helped whether she knew the words or not.
“You’re going to be out of a job when she can speak for herself all the time,” Count Hamnet remarked to Ulric Skakki.
“Well, it won’t break my heart,” Ulric answered. “Arnora already says I spend too bloody much time talking with her and talking for her.” He rolled his eyes. “Women won’t leave you alone when they think you might be fooling around.”
“Right.” Hamnet showed less enthusiastic agreement than he might have. Would Liv have said something like, Men won’t leave you alone when they think you’re fooling around! Would she have pointed at him when she said it? Would she have had reason for pointing at him that way?
Then Marcovefa pointed off into the middle distance and said something in her own dialect. What are those? – that was what it had to mean.
Those were lions: a couple of males, three or four females, and several cubs. Maybe the smell of blood from the butchered musk ox drew them. They were wise in the ways of men, though, for they stayed well out of bowshot. Whatever was left of the carcass, they would take after the Bizogots moved on.
Awry, self-mocking smile on his face, Ulric explained about lions. Marcovefa seemed intrigued – maybe even impressed. She said something more. Ulric translated: “She asks if we’ll spare one if she calls it close enough to get a good look at it.”
“Can her shamanry make sure it spares us?” Trasamund asked.
Instead of answering in words, Marcovefa walked over and patted him on the cheek, as if she were reassuring a nervous little boy. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan muttered something that probably wasn’t a compliment. Marcovefa ignored him. She began a crooning chant, one that made Liv prick up her ears. “We use that tune for summoning spells,” she said.
“The men of the Glacier spring from Bizogots,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Should you be surprised they still share some things with you?”
“When you put it that way, I guess not. I -” Liv broke off. The larger male lion trotted towards Marcovefa.
Hamnet Thyssen started to string his bow, then cut off the move before it was well begun. An arrow seemed more likely to enrage the big cat than to kill it outright. And Marcovefa had a way of knowing what she was doing. Of course, if she turned out not to this time, it would be the wrong moment for a mistake. . .
Down in the Empire, lions had manes not much more than stubble. This one boasted a full, luxuriant growth. Its coat was thinning with summer, but still far heavier than any the beasts in the south grew. It needed all the help it could get against the ferocious winter weather in these parts.
When the lion drew near to the shaman from atop the Glacier, it flopped down on the ground and rolled with its paws in the air, for all the world like a pampered house cat. But these paws could rip the guts out of a man – or, for that matter, a horse. Marcovefa scratched the lion under its chin. A deep, rasping purr rewarded her. The beast yawned, exposing fangs that wouldn’t match a sabertooth’s but that were more than savage enough for all ordinary use. She rubbed its belly, and the purr got louder.
“By God, I wouldn’t want to do that,” Ulric Skakki muttered.
“I’d want to,” Trasamund said, “but I wouldn’t dare.” From the fierce Bizogot, that was no small admission.
When Marcovefa had seen as much of the lion as she cared to, she chanted a new song. The great murderous beast stopped acting like a happy kitten. It got to its feet and trotted away from her. Only when it got back to the rest of the pride did the spell suddenly seem to wear off. The lion began washing and washing, going over its hide with its large, rough tongue.
“Cleaning the stink of us off it,” Ulric said, amusement in his voice. “It doesn’t think we’re fit to associate with.”
“It must have met people before, then,” Count Hamnet said, and the bitterness in his voice made everyone who heard him either stare or else look away from him in embarrassment.
What kind of embarrassment? he wondered. That I made a fool of myself? Or that I told a truth that hurts but that they can’t deny? He shrugged. What difference did it make? Anyone who still took a sunny view of human nature after what the Rulers visited upon the Rock Ptarmigans was too big a fool to deserve to wander the Bizogot plains alone, anyhow.