"Why didn't you?" Hamnet asked. "You Bizogots are quick enough to call Raumsdalians liars most of the time."

Liv wrinkled her nose at him. "Well, a lot of the time you are liars. But no, we didn't call him on his stories. They were new to us, and they helped make the time go by. We didn't believe them? So what? We still enjoyed them."

"Fair enough, I suppose," Hamnet said with a smile of his own.

"Your Ferocity!" Liv called—Trasamund was half a bowshot ahead of her on the trail through the forest. He looked back over his shoulder and waved to show he'd heard. She booted her horse up into a trot to catch up to him. Hamnet Thyssen sped up, too. When Liv got close enough to the jarl to talk without shouting, she said, "Remember that Raumsdalian trader who told us tales about the legless things with the poison teeth?"

Trasamund threw back his head and laughed. "I'm not likely to forget him. He could spin them, couldn't he?"

"He was telling the truth," Liv said. "He must have been. Hamnet here just told me about the same creatures."

"Oh, he did, did he?" The Bizogot jarl eyed Count Hamnet. "Who's to say he's not lying through his beard, too?"

"I could tell you the chances of two men making up the same strange animal are slim," Hamnet said. "Or I could just tell you I'm not lying, and if you want to make something out of it and say I am, go ahead."

Trasamund eyed him. "You wouldn't fight over a no-account thing like a story. A Bizogot might, but a Raumsdalian wouldn't. So I suppose you are telling the truth. Who would have believed it? These beasts are real?"

"They are," Count Hamnet said. "Have you ever heard the phrase 'a snake in the grass'?" He shifted to his own tongue for the last few words.

"Yes. It means something sneaky and dangerous."

"That's right. Snakes crawl around in the grass, and it's easy to miss them. With the poison in their fangs, though, they can make you sorry if you do."

"Well, well." Trasamund plucked at his beard. "How many 'snakes in the grass' do you suppose we have with us?" Hamnet Thyssen found no good answer for that, in Raumsdalian or the Bizogot tongue.

XVII

BY the standards of Nidaros, the hostel in the northern town of Naestved would have been third-rate at best. But even a third-rate hostel boasted a bathhouse. A big, hot fire blazed in a hearth near the two copper tubs that sat side by side. The travelers rolled dice for the order in which they would bathe. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki had to wait far into the night. Hamnet didn't care.

Neither did Ulric. "Did you hear the landlord squawk about how much water he'd have to heat?" he said, and then ducked himself and scrubbed at his hair. He came up blowing like one of the whales seacoast people talked about. "The poor dear."

"You'd think we weren't paying for the wood," Hamnet Thyssen said, doing some scrubbing of his own. The steaming bathwater had been clean when he stepped into his tub. It wasn't clean any more. It was grayish brown and scummed with soapsuds. His own skin, by contrast, was getting toward the color he remembered its being once upon a time.

"Oh, but we're making his servants work for their living. They don't like it any better than anybody else would." As usual, Ulric Skakki had enough cynicism for two or three ordinary people.

"I want to wallow here for the next week," Hamnet said. "This is almost as wonderful as I thought it would be." Only two things separated him from perfect bliss. For one thing, the soap the landlord gave them was harsh and strong-smelling. For another. . .

Ulric leered at him. "You wish Liv were in this tub instead of me. Or more likely you wish she were in that tub along with you."

Hamnet s ears heated. That was exactly what he wished. He wondered if Liv had ever had a real bath before. He doubted it. Among the Bizogots, hot water, except for cooking, was hard to come by. They washed their hands and faces. Sometimes they steamed themselves, pouring water onto fire-heated stones. But he was sure they'd never heard of bathtubs.

She would have to bathe with Gudrid. That filled Hamnet with misgivings. Gudrid might try to lead Liv astray for the fun of it. But if Liv watched what Gudrid did herself, she wouldn't go far wrong.

"These tubs are narrow to fit two," Ulric went on. "Of course, if you fit one on top of the other. . ."

"Oh, shut up," Hamnet told him.

This time, Ulric didn't leer. He just grinned—he'd wanted to get under Hamnet's skin, and he'd done it. "Down in Nidaros," he said, "they make tubs a little wider, because they know people will want to sport in them."

"Do they?" Hamnet said. "And is this something you've heard, or have you tried it for yourself?"

"Oh, I've tried it," Ulric Skakki said cheerfully. "Doing things is a lot more fun than talking about them. Some people will tell you the opposite, but they're liars—or if they're not, I'm sorry for them."

"Doing some things is more fun than talking about them," Hamnet said. "I'd sooner talk about lice and fleas and bedbugs than deal with them in person." He looked at the specks floating in his bathwater. How many of them were drowned bugs? Too many—he was sure of that. Had he killed them all? He was just as sorrowfully sure he hadn't.

"Have to take the bad with the good." Ulric s shrug made water slosh out of his tub. "Not everyone sees that." He paused. "Sometimes I think hardly anyone sees that."

"Everyone sees why the other fellow needs to take the bad with the good," Hamnet Thyssen said. "Why he needs to do it himself. .. That's a different story."

Somebody banged on the bathhouse door. "Haven't you two turned into prunes yet?" Jesper Fletti called through the spruce planks. Almost all the wood up here was fir and spruce, drawn from the enormous northern forests. "Some of the rest of us want to see what color we really are, too," Jesper added.

"All right. All right. We'll get out," Ulric said regretfully. Under his breath, he went on, "Talk about taking the bad with the good."

"Or after the good, anyhow." Hamnet sighed as he got out of the tub. The water was starting to get cold, but it hadn't got there yet. In spite of the fire roaring in the hearth, the air in the bathhouse was chilly. He went and stood in front of the flames to dry off and warm up. Ulric Skakki stood beside him. Hamnet was the bigger man, but saying which of them was harder wouldn't have been easy. Hamnet eyed Ulric's scars. "You've been in a scrape or three, haven't you?"

"Oh, you might say so." Ulric Skakki surveyed Hamnet s hairy arms and torso. "Now that you mention it, so have you."

"The other fellows will fight back now and again," Hamnet said. "Treacherous dogs, but what can you do?"

"Kill ‘em fast, before they have the chance to do anything to you," Ulric answered.

"Good advice. Anyone would know you were a fighting man." Hamnet ran a comb through his hair and beard. Then he stared at the bone tool. "I hope it's not covered with nits. If it is . . ."

"If it is, you'll know about it before long." Ulric, who was also combing himself, paused to mime scratching. "At least we can bathe now. That will help. And if we soak our hair in oil, that will help more."

"I suppose so." Count Hamnet put on a robe the landlord swore was pest-free. Ulric Skakki donned another one. The Bizogot-style clothes they'd worn on their travels were being fumigated with burning sulfur. The stinking smoke would kill most of the pests the garments carried. As for the ones that survived . .. Well, now that the travelers were back in civilization, they could always fumigate the furs again. They could even get new clothes.

The Bizogots would have thought nothing of skinning and tanning hides up on the frozen steppe. Hamnet might have tried it himself in a pinch, but he was glad he hadn't had to. The mammoth-herders were bound to be better at it than he was.