“We really need to beat the Rulers. Fighting fools can do that – may be able to do that, anyhow,” Hamnet said. “Blind fools won’t.”

They were both using Raumsdalian again; it let them speak their minds without worrying that the Bizogots would overhear and get angry. Ulric Skakki rolled his eyes. “All the Bizogots in the world couldn’t stop the army that beat us today. God knows the Bizogots are brave. But God knows they’re stupid, too. And the more I see of the Rulers, the more I see that they aren’t. They’re cruel bastards, but they aren’t dumb bastards.”

“And that sorcery .. .” Count Hamnet let the words hang in the air.

“That was pretty bad,” Ulric agreed. “Some of those flying icicles almost skewered me. And some of them did skewer Bizogots – or else distracted them so the Rulers had an easy time killing them.”

“Do you suppose our best wizards could have stopped the spell?” Ham-net asked.

“I don’t know,” the adventurer said. “One day before too long, chances are we’ll find out.”

“God help the Empire if its wizards don’t have better luck than the Bizogot shamans up here,” Hamnet said.

“God help the Empire. That’ll do,” Ulric Skakki said. “Somebody’d better, and it’s not as if Sigvat’s up to the job.”

“God should help the Bizogots, too – and if he doesn’t, we should lend a hand,” Count Hamnet said. “Do you know whether Totila and Trasamund aim to send messengers to the other clans and tell them what’s happened to the Red Dire Wolves?”

“I know they haven’t done it yet. I know I haven’t heard them talk about doing it,” Ulric answered. “Whether the thought has trickled through their beady little minds .. . that I can’t tell you.”

“Beady little minds,” Hamnet echoed sourly. The phrase fit much too well. “All right, then. We’d better make sure they do think of it. And we’d better make sure they don’t just think of it, too. We’d better make sure they do it.”

“You don’t have much faith in them, do you?” Ulric said.

Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “Now that you mention it, no.”

IV

Spring. Down inthe Empire, it was a time of renewal, return, rebirth. In the Bizogot country it was all of that and more, jammed into a few frantic weeks. When the snow up on the northern plains melted, everything turned to mud and marshes and ponds. Getting from here to there became a challenge. Getting from here to there in a hurry became a joke.

Bare mud and shallow water didn’t last long. (There was no deep water on the frozen steppe, which stayed frozen a few feet down regardless of the season.) Plants came to mad life, coating the ground with green and bursting into bloom. And in the marshes and puddles, the eggs mosquitoes and flies and midges had laid the year before thawed out and hatched and gave birth to a new generation of buzzing biters.

Hamnet Thyssen squelched and slapped and swore. The air was thick not only with bugs but also with the birds that battened on them. The birds grew fat and nested and laid eggs so their succeeding generation could feast off bugs yet unborn. But far too many bugs remained uneaten.

“Can’t you do anything about it?” Hamnet asked Liv, not for the first time.

“Bear grease on your face and hands helps some,” she answered. She was bitten, too. So were all the Bizogots. So were their dogs and musk oxen and mammoths, all of which shed their winter coats just in time to give the mosquitoes tempting targets.

“You should have a magic to keep the bugs away,” he said.

She looked at him. “You Raumsdalians like to think you’re stronger than the world around you. Up here, shamans know better. God lets us live on the plains … as long as we don’t push our luck too hard. How could one shaman hold off all the bugs that spawn every spring?”

Put that way, it was a different kind of question. Count Hamnet said, “Can’t you hold off some of the bugs?”

That only made Liv smile. “What if we did? Don’t you think the rest would be plenty to drive men and beasts wild?”

“Umm . . . Probably.” Hamnet Thyssen managed a smile of his own, a crooked one. “You’re telling me to give up and leave this alone, aren’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, yes – except for the bear grease,” Liv said. “That helps – as much as anything, anyhow.” With a sigh, Hamnet smeared some on. Maybe it helped a little. On the other hand, maybe it didn’t.

The Rulers didn’t try to drive the Red Dire Wolves to destruction – not right away, anyhow. They could have pursued much harder than they did. Maybe the spring thaw slowed them down. Maybe they awaited reinforcements from beyond the Glacier. Maybe they just didn’t care what the beaten Bizogots did. Hamnet had no way of knowing. He welcomed the respite, whatever the reason for it.

It also gave the Red Dire Wolves’ messengers the chance to warn other clans. It gave them the chance, yes. How seriously the rest of the Bizogots took those messengers . .. One of the horsemen came back to the Red Dire Wolves’ camp that evening. Days got long faster in springtime up here in the north than they did in the Empire; already the sun’s setting point had swung far to the northwest, and twilight lingered late.

The slowly gathering gloom descending on the camp didn’t come close to matching the gloom on the messenger’s face. He bit into a leg from a roasted partridge and swigged from a skin of smetyn, but neither the food nor the fermented mammoth’s milk did much to lighten his mood.

“They wouldn’t believe me,” he told Totila and anyone else who would listen. “By God, Your Ferocity, they wouldn’t! They laughed at me. They asked me if I was chewing mystic mushrooms.”

“They have their nerve!” Odovacar said indignantly – somehow, the deaf old shaman heard that fine. “Mystic mushrooms are shamans’ food. The visions they send drive ordinary men mad.”

Liv smiled behind her hand. “That doesn’t stop ordinary men from eating them now and then,” she whispered to Count Hamnet.

“I’m not surprised,” he answered. “If smetyn were against the law, people would still drink it.” She nodded.

Totila scowled at the messenger. “Did you manage to persuade em you had all your wits about you?”

“I showed em this.” The messenger pulled up his sleeve and showed off a long cut on his arm, which was still held closed by several musk-ox-sinew stitches. “Even then, they had the nerve to ask me if I did it to myself when the mushrooms made me crazy. I told em I’d fight the next fool who asked me a question like that. They heard me out after that, anyhow. But even when they listened, they wouldn’t believe.”

“Why not?” Totila’s face was a study in helpless rage.

“Almost makes you wonder if the Rulers have a spell in the air to turn Bizogots’ wits to horse manure,” Ulric Skakki said. His usual view was that Bizogots’ wits weren’t far removed from horse manure anyhow, but nothing in his tone or attitude suggested that now.

“Could it be so?” Trasamund asked.

“Not likely, Your Ferocity,” Ulric said. “People can be plenty stupid all by themselves. They mostly don’t need magic to help em along.”

“I wasn’t asking you,” the Three Tusk jarl said. “I was asking the shamans here.” He looked from Liv to Odovacar to Audun Gilli.

“I don’t think it’s likely, either, Your Ferocity,” Liv said. Audun nodded; he’d finally picked up enough of the Bizogot language to get by in it, though he still butchered the grammar and threw in Raumsdalian words when he spoke it himself. As for Odovacar, he didn’t seem to have heard Trasamund this time.

Trasamund looked dissatisfied. He’d seldom looked any other way since learning of the disaster that had overwhelmed his clan, but he seemed even less happy than usual now. “I don’t want to know what you think,” he rumbled. “I want to know what your magic tells you.”

“Don’t take me seriously here, for heaven’s sake,” Ulric Skakki said. “I was only joking.”