With that less than ringing endorsement, Hamnet did ride south with the rest of the travelers. Once they got out of earshot of the border post, Ulric Skakki said, "By now, I hardly care whether I tell the Emperor what we've seen or not. All I care about is finding a town with a bathhouse. Did you see those guards? Some time not too long ago, they had baths. Both of them! Isn't that something?" He scratched.
As usual, that made Hamnet scratch, too. How many different kinds of bugs was he carrying around on his person and in his clothes? Too many— he was sure of that.
Liv stared at the firs and spruces through which they rode. "So big," she murmured in an awestruck voice. "Are they really alive?"
"They really are," Hamnet assured her, his voice grave. "We make things from the wood, and we use it for fires instead of dung."
"Yes, I can see how you might. So much of it in each tree, there for the taking," the Bizogot shaman said. "Truly this is a rich land."
Hamnet Thyssen's jaw dropped. These northern provinces were heart-breakingly poor—back-breakingly poor, too, if you had to try to claw a living from them. Woodsmen and trappers were almost the only people who could. He eyed Liv with something that went deeper than astonishment, because what she said spoke volumes about how different they were. In her eyes, this miserable country seemed rich beyond compare.
And why wouldn't it? Summer here probably lasted six weeks longer than it did up where she lived, hard by the Glacier. The ground wasn't permanently frozen. Liv had never seen a tree before in all her life. A land warm enough to let them grow . . . was a land richer than any the Bizogots inhabited.
Realizing that almost left Hamnet embarrassed to be a Raumsdalian. How much his own folk took for granted! They sneered at the Bizogots for all the things the mammoth-herders lacked. But that wasn't the Bizogots' fault; it was the fault of the country in which they lived.
The Rulers lived even farther north than the Bizogots. Hamnet had seen that they used iron. Did they forge it themselves, or did they get it in trade from some unknown land far to the west and south, as the Bizogots got it from the Empire? Hamnet didn't know—by the nature of things, how could he? But he was sure of one thing. If the Rulers reached Raumsdalian territory, even these hardscrabble provinces along the northern border, they would think the land was as rich as Liv did.
That wasn't good news, not as far as Raumsdalia was concerned.
Up in a tree, a blue jay screeched at the travelers. "What makes that noise?" Liv asked.
"A jay." Hamnet Thyssen pointed up to it. The bird didn't like that— maybe it thought his outstretched arm and hand were an arrow aimed its way. Screeching still, it flapped off to another fir farther away.
Liv laughed and clapped her mittened hands. "It's a piece of the sky with wings!" she exclaimed. "I've never seen anything so pretty. How many other birds do you have that we never see up by the Glacier?"
"How many? I don't know. Earl Eyvind might be able to tell you, or one of the savants down in Nidaros," Hamnet answered. "But there are lots of them. Jays, warblers, orioles, woodpeckers . . ."
They were only names to Liv. "Woodpeckers?" she echoed uncertainly. Count Hamnet translated the word into the Bizogot tongue. Then he told how they pounded their bills into trees, going after insects and grubs. Liv laughed when he finished. "You're making that up," she said, as Trasamund had when he heard about glyptodonts. "You're telling me a story because I don't know any better, the way we might talk about a musk ox with a trunk if we were making sport of a Raumsdalian who thought he knew it all."
"It's not a story—it's the truth," Hamnet said. "By God, it is. Ask any other Raumsdalian you please. Ask your jarl—chances are he's seen them, or maybe heard them drumming."
"Drumming." Liv repeated that, too. "Why don't their heads fall off from all that banging, if they do what you say they do?"
"I don't know." Count Hamnet had never worried about it. "And we have bats, too, though not this far north. Think of a vole or a lemming. Give it big ears and sharp teeth and wings that are all bare skin—no feathers or anything. That's what bats are. They hunt at night, and they eat bugs."
"Next you'll probably tell me you have things that live in the rivers but aren't fish," Liv said with a scornful sniff.
"We do." Hamnet talked about frogs. He talked about turtles. He talked about alligators and crocodiles, finishing, "Those live only in the far south. There are probably a few alligators in the southern part of the Empire, but not many."
Liv eyed him. "You aren't making these things up."
"No, I'm not. By God, I'm not," Hamnet Thyssen said. "We have lots of creatures you don't, because your winters would kill them." He talked about toads and salamanders. He talked about lizards. He talked about snakes. This time, he finished, "Some of them have poisonous fangs. If they bite you, it can kill. If it doesn't, it will make you very sick."
He wondered if she would think he was lying about those. Her face thoughtful, she said, "A trader from the Empire came up to the Three Tusk country a few years ago and talked about creatures like those. We all thought he was the biggest liar in the world, even if we didn't say so."
"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 bee
n 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.
When he and Ulric opened the door, Jesper Fletti and Eyvind Torfinn glowered at them. "Took you long enough," Jesper said.
"Wait till the next pair start yelling at you," Hamnet said. "And they will. They will."
"I suspect he may be right," Eyvind Torfinn said.
"I don't care if he is," Jesper Fletti said. He turned and shouted in the direction of the kitchens. "Where's that clean hot water, by God? Do you expect me to soak in somebody else's swill?"
"So charming," Ulric Skakki murmured. Hamnet Thyssen carefully didn't smile. Jesper Fletti gave Ulric a sharp look. But the bathhouse attendants came up just then, and Jesper went back to yelling at them instead. Count Hamnet thought that wise. Jesper Fletti was a large, strong, tough man. If he got into a fight with someone ordinary, he would win, and win easily. If he got into a fight with Ulric, his size and strength and toughness might keep him alive an extra half minute or so. Or, on the other hand, they might not.
Eyvind Torfinn didn't quarrel with the attendants. He eyed them as if they were the most wonderful people he’d ever met. "To be clean," he said. "I shall be clean." Hamnet Thyssen walked down the hall before Eyvind could finish the conjugation. Not that he didn't sympathize, but he already knew how the verb worked.
Next morning, he found fresh bites. In a way, that infuriated him. In another way, it showed he'd made progress. For weeks, for months, he'd been bitten so often that he hardly noticed new marks—one itch blended into another. Now he had few enough that they stood out. Maybe one day before too long, if he kept bathing and went on fumigating his clothes, he wouldn't have any. Wouldn't that be something?
* * * *
Fat snowflakes frisked on the breeze as the travelers rode out of Naestved. Liv looked back over her shoulder, watching the palisade disappear behind them. When she sighed, the wind blew her breath, too. "Everyone talks about how rich the Empire is," she said, and sighed again. "Trasamund has come down here before, and I've listened to him go on about it. But I never imagined it could be as rich as ... this." Her wave encompassed both the town they were leaving and the dour forest around it.
"Naestved isn't anything much," Hamnet Thyssen said truthfully.
Liv stared at him, sure he was joking. When she saw he wasn't, she sighed one more time. "I think you have so many. . . things .. . that you take them all for granted." Plainly, she chose her words with care.
"Maybe we do," Hamnet said. "Plenty of priests would be happy to tell you how right you are—you can bet on that."
What she said about priests would have horrified any of them who heard her. It made Eyvind Torfinn and Ulric Skakki whip their heads around in astonishment. "I did not mean anything that has to do with my comrades here," she went on in more moderate tones. "But you Raumsdalians do have so many things that I wonder how you can stand to do without them when you come up to the Bizogot country."
That thought had also crossed Hamnet Thyssen's mind. "A lot of us wouldn't want to," he admitted uncomfortably. "A lot of us wouldn't be able to. But things are only things. Either you own them—or they own you. If you can't do without them, they own you. I don't want to be owned, thank you very much."
"You even talk lik
e a Bizogot," she said. "How? You say Naestved is nothing much. That means you must have seen better, though I don't know what could be finer than that. Hot water to bathe in ... Things to put the hot water in . . ."
"Tubs," Count Hamnet said helpfully.
"Tubs," Liv repeated. "Soft things to sleep on . . ."
"Beds."
"Beds," she said. "And the food made from ground grain .. . Bread." She found the word before he gave it to her. "And the tents with wooden walls . . . Houses. So much wood everywhere. Even wood around the town to keep out enemies." She shook her head in wonder.
To keep out the Bizogots, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Here in the north, there were no other enemies. He shook his head. There hadn't been any other enemies, not till the Gap melted through. Now the Rulers would come through, come down onto the Bizogots' frozen plains—which would seem familiar enough to them—and then, if they got this far, into the Empire.
"So many things," Liv went on. "This is because you don't have to wander, to follow the herds, isn't it?"
"Partly. Maybe even mostly," Hamnet answered. "It would be hard to carry bathtubs around in a mammoth-hide tent. But also partly because the country is different. It would be hard to herd mammoths and musk oxen through the forest."
"I think so!" Liv exclaimed. "I look at these .. . trees . . . and I think they all lean toward me. I think they all want to fall on me. We go through them, and I feel they are all squeezing in on me." She gestured with her hands.
"Some Raumsdalians, when they come up into the Bizogot country, they feel the land is too big. They feel like flies walking across a plate." Hamnet Thyssen gestured, too. "They feel the land is so wide and they are so small that God has forgot them."
She laughed. "Really?" After Hamnet nodded, she asked, "Did you ever feel this way?"
He thought she expected him to say no, but he nodded again. Sure enough, she looked surprised. "On the Bizogot plains, I feel small," Count Hamnet said. "If a mammoth could think, it would feel small out on the Bizogot plains. But some of my countrymen have it worse than I do. Some of them feel as if they're about to disappear."
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