Ulric looked bemused. “She says we’ve been going on and on about how strong their magic is, but it wasn’t anything much.”
“How does she know?” Hamnet said. “They had no wizard with them.”
“Good point.” Ulric Skakki put the question into Marcovefa’s tongue. Knowing what he was going to say helped Count Hamnet follow some of it.
Marcovefa answered volubly. When she spoke, Hamnet could find a word here and there, but not enough to piece together into meaning. “She says you can always tell,” Ulric Skakki reported. “She says you can taste it on the wind, smell it in their sweat.”
The adventurer shrugged. “I don’t know whether to take that literally or not. Considering her eating habits up on top of the Glacier, I hope I’m not supposed to.”
Marcovefa scowled at him. She had to understand what he meant. She could follow the regular Bizogot language, but not Raumsdalian, which he’d used – not usually, anyhow. But when she decided to, she understood whatever she wanted. Now she chose to be affronted, or at least to act affronted. It wasn’t the same thing. Were she really angry, she would have made Ulric as sorry as Grippo.
Trasamund bowed in the saddle to Marcovefa. “For your aid I give thanks, wise woman,” he said. “Any blow against the Rulers is a good one.”
“They are not so much,” Marcovefa said clearly in the Bizogot tongue. Then she added something Hamnet couldn’t follow.
Neither could Trasamund. “What was that?” he asked.
She repeated it. This time, Ulric translated: “They deserve drowning, like little beasts a mother cannot raise. They will get what they deserve.”
“By God, may it be so,” the jarl boomed. He pointed to the corpses dotting the steppe. “If you’re hungry, you’re welcome to them.”
Again, Marcovefa spouted gibberish. Again, Ulric translated: “She says she would not touch ill-omened flesh.”
“That suits me. Let the crows have them, then,” Trasamund said. “We ride on.” And they did.
They’d swung even farther west than Hamnet Thyssen thought. He expected they would have to travel along the northern edge of Sudertorp Lake, and looked forward to showing Marcovefa the wide expanse of water. (She’d lived her life above a much wider expanse of water, but that didn’t occur to him till later. The Glacier yielded meltwater, yes, but it didn’t really cross his mind when he thought of the lake. It was, or felt like, something altogether different.) But they were west of its westernmost tip, and had to find a way to cross the little Sudertorp River, which flowed out of it. He was stuck with talking about the lake instead of having it there in front of him.
Through Ulric Skakki, Marcovefa asked, “Why does the water stay in the lake? Why doesn’t it all run out through the river?”
Count Hamnet frowned at him. “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”
“Well, yes, but so what?” Ulric said. “You were playing tour guide, and I wasn’t. You do the explaining.”
“Fine.” Hamnet pointed east, back towards the outlet to the lake. “Tell her about all the dirt and rocks and ice that dam up the end and hold the water in the lakebed. Tell her they’re leftovers from the days when the Glacier came this far south.”
Ulric did. Hamnet could follow bits and pieces of what he said to Marcovefa, and of what she said to him. That meant he was braced when Ulric translated another question from her: “What would happen if the dam gave way?”
The idea was plenty to make him shudder. “The biggest flood anybody ever saw. You know about the badlands west of Nidaros, where Hevring Lake flooded and tore everything to pieces. Tell her about those, and tell her we’d have more just like them up here if Sudertorp Lake broke the dam.”
Ulric did, with gestures. Marcovefa seemed suitably impressed, but Hamnet wondered how much she really understood. How much could she understand, when she’d had so little to do with running water before descending from the Glacier?
“Where’s the closest ford?” he asked Ulric.
The adventurer pointed west. “About an hour’s ride that way, I think. There’s a closer one we could use if the water were lower, but I don’t think we could get away with it now.” He knew the steppe like a Bizogot – knew it better than a lot of Bizogots, in fact, for he’d ranged it widely while they stayed on their clan’s grazing grounds most of the time.
Dire wolves drank by the river. Their heads rose when they saw or heard or smelled the riders coming. They peered towards the approaching Bizogots and Raumsdalians, as if wondering whether to stand their ground and fight. One of them let out a querulous whine. That must have been the signal for all of them to leave. They trotted away, tails held high as if to say they weren’t really afraid.
“Big foxes,” Marcovefa remarked. “Friendly foxes. They go in bunches, like the musk oxen.” Yes, she was learning the regular Bizogot tongue.
“Packs. We call them packs,” Trasamund said. “And you wouldn’t think they were so friendly if you ran into them by yourself.”
Count Hamnet wondered about that. If anyone could stay safe in the company of hungry dire wolves, the shaman from atop the Glacier seemed a likely candidate. But she hadn’t meant they were friendly to people; she was talking about how they behaved with one another.
Rocks sticking up out of the water showed where the first possible ford lay. Seeing the white water churning around them, Hamnet shook his head. “I don’t think we want to try to get across there,” he said. “Looks like a good way to drown.”
“I told you it wouldn’t be good with this much water in the river,” Ulric Skakki said.
“You tell me all kinds of things,” Hamnet replied. “Some of them are true. Some . . .”
“I’m so insulted.” Ulric laughed out loud.
They reached the real ford a little later. The water there didn’t get up past the horses’ bellies. It was cold, but that was no great surprise. Marcovefa watched with eyes as wide as a child’s as the horse carried her across to the southern bank. Up above the Glacier, were any streams big enough to make such a thing possible, even if they’d had horses up there? Hamnet didn’t think so.
“Is this still Leaping Lynx country?” he asked after splashing up onto the far bank.
“I think so. Or maybe their lands end farther east,” Ulric Skakki answered. “Either way, they’ll be in trouble when the Rulers get this far south.”
Hamnet Thyssen nodded. The Leaping Lynx clan were rarities: semi-sedentary Bizogots. In winter they roamed like any other mammoth-herders. But in the warm season they lived in stone houses near the eastern edge of Sudertorp Lake. The swarms of waterfowl that bred in the reeds and marshes there gave them so much food, they didn’t have to roam. They wouldn’t even be a moving target when the invaders swept down on them.
“Hard to feel real sorry for the Leaping Lynxes,” Trasamund said. “They aren’t really proper Bizogots at all.”
“Set against the Rulers, everybody from this side of the Glacier is proper,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If we lose sight of that, we lose, and there’s the end of it.”
The Bizogot jarl grunted. He didn’t want to lose his particularism – it suited him too well. Anything bigger than a clan had to feel artificial to him. “People across the steppe are saying, ‘Well, the Three Tusk clan can’t be proper Bizogots, because they lost a battle and lost their grazing lands,’ “ Ulric Skakki said. “Are they right?”
“No, by God!” Trasamund shouted.
But he couldn’t or wouldn’t see that that had anything to do with the way he looked at the Leaping Lynxes. Ulric sighed but didn’t seem surprised. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t surprised, either – saddened, yes, but not surprised. Trasamund always had trouble seeing that he’d made a mistake, or even that he could.
There wasn’t really time to worry about it or time to quarrel about it. Audun Gilli asked, “Are the Rulers over this river yet?” That was the burning question.
“If they are, we may find out about it soon,” Hamnet said. “Sudertorp Lake will have pushed them either this way or off to the east. If it is to the east, God help the Leaping Lynxes.” And if it’s not, God help us, he thought.
“This land is so rich,” Marcovefa said. “It can hold so many. Such a shame to need to fight over it.”
Hamnet and Ulric looked at each other. She saw the land was richer than the mountaintop sticking up through the Glacier. But she didn’t see how very poor that was. Rich by comparison didn’t mean truly rich – not even close.
Trasamund pointed. “There are mammoths,” he said.
In the days before the Gap melted through, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians would have welcomed that news. It would have meant more mammoth-herders were close by. Now it might mean mammoth-riders were near. The difference sounded small, but was even bigger than the one between Marcovefa’s homeland and the Bizogot steppe. It was the difference between safety and disaster.
They approached the mammoths with as much caution as they could muster. If the great beasts belonged to the Rulers, what could Trasamund and those with him do but flee? And what kind of chance would they have if they did? Not good, Hamnet Thyssen thought. No, anything but good.
But they breathed easier when the man who rode out to see who they were and what they were up to rode a horse, not a deer. The hair under his fur hat was Bizogot yellow, not the shiny black of the Rulers. Even his brand of bluster sounded familiar: “Who the demon are you, and what the demon do you think you’re doing here?”
“You’re Marcomer, aren’t you?” Hamnet Thyssen shouted back, pleased he remembered the fellow’s name. “We met when I guested with the Leaping Lynxes last year.”