"Eyvind Torfinn knows all sorts of things," Trasamund allowed. Then he spoiled it by asking, "So why doesn't he know his wife disgraces him whenever she pleases?"
"Maybe he doesn't choose to look," Hamnet said. "That can happen, especially when a man who isn't so young has a wife who isn't so old. Or maybe he doesn't care."
"Doesn't care? Do you say he has no ballocks at all, then?" Trasamund demanded.
Count Hamnet shook his head. "No. I wondered about that myself before I got to know him on this journey, but no. He isn't a warrior—he doesn't pretend to be a warrior—but he's no craven, either."
"Well, then, what do you say?" Trasamund's frown was half anger, half incomprehension.
"That men and women and how they get along—or don't get along—are more complicated than you'd guess," Hamnet answered. "I won't judge Eyvind Torfinn, and I hope he won't judge me. Sometimes not judging someone is the biggest kindness you can do him—or her."
"It sounds very pretty," the Bizogot said. "Tell me this, then—do you not judge Gudrid?"
He was a boor, a brute, a barbarian. He was a shrewd boor, a clever brute, a sly barbarian. Hamnet Thyssen’s lips tightened. His hands also tightened on the reins, as if the leather straps were Trasamund's neck ... or possibly Gudrid's. He didn't want to answer the question, and didn't see how he could help it. "I judge her," he said after a pause he hoped wasn't too long. "Yes, I do. But just because I do, that doesn't mean someone else has to. If Eyvind Torfinn wants to, he may. If he chooses not to, who am I to tell him he should? Who are you?"
Trasamund opened his mouth. Someone who spread his wife's legs. That was what he was about to say, that or something like it. But at the last moment, instead of saying anything, he jerked his horse's head to one side and rode off.
"He shouldn't have put you through that," Liv said quietly.
"The only way I could make him stop was to kill him," Hamnet said with a shrug. "It isn't worth that. I've killed one man over Gudrid, but I was married to her then. Now? Now it's Earl Eyvind's worry, if he feels like worrying about it."
"How did it happen that you killed him?"
"About the way you'd expect. I found out he was bedding her. No room for doubt. No room to look away—I'd already done too much of that. We fought a duel. Swords. He would have killed me, too. You've seen that scar on my left arm, up near the shoulder, and the one that streaks my beard with white?"
She nodded. "Oh, yes."
"Ingjald gave me those. Ingjald Oddleif, his name was. But I killed him anyway. I was proud of myself. What a man I was! Gudrid acted like I had a cock the size of a bull mammoth's. For about a week, she acted that way. Then she went out and found somebody else to sleep with. She must have decided I wouldn't kill her."
"You loved her," Liv said.
"So I did." Hamnet Thyssen shook his head like a musk ox the Bizogots were slaughtering. They'd herded it and tended it and warded it all its life— why were they doing this to it now? The beast couldn't understand. Even after all this time, part of Hamnet couldn't, either. "So I did," he repeated heavily. "And much good it did me, eh?"
"Maybe for a while," she said.
He shook his head again. "I used to think so, but I don't any more. What good is love when the person you love is laughing behind your back? You're only fooling yourself. I was a fool. I'm not the first. I won't be the last, God knows." He rode on.
XVIII
As Liv went deeper into the Raumsdalian Empire, as the travelers made their way over to the Great North Road and went down it, she saw plenty of towns larger and finer than Naestved. Each seemed grander than the one just farther north had been. Each time, she would ask, "And is Nidaros like this?"
And each time, Hamnet Thyssen would smile and say, "No, not really. Wait till you see the capital. Then you'll understand."
But when at last they came to the city on the long-vanished shore of long-outflooded Hevring Lake, Liv could see very little, and neither could any of the rest of the weary travelers. The blizzard roaring down from the north would not have been despised in the Bizogot country—would not have been despised in the land of the Three Tusk clan. The Breath of God could reach all the way down to Nidaros and beyond. It didn't always, but it could.
Hamnet got a glimpse of Nidaros' great gray frowning walls through swirling snow, but only a glimpse. Of the towers and spires that showed above the walls in good weather, he could see nothing at all. As they neared the city, Liv said, "The wall is very tall, isn't it?" A little later, she added, "The gate seems very strong."
"It is," Hamnet said. She might as well have been examining a mammoth by closing her eyes and feeling first its trunk, then a tusk, then a leg, and finally its tail. She would know something about mammoths after she did that, but probably not as much as she thought.
The guards had as much trouble spying the travelers as Count Hamnet and Liv did seeing the city—maybe more, for the guards had to peer straight into the storm. The travelers were almost on them before they cried, "Halt! Who comes?"
"I am Earl Eyvind Torfinn," Eyvind said. "With me ride Count Hamnet Thyssen, Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk clan, and the rest of our comrades. We have come to report success to his Majesty. We have gone beyond the Glacier, and we are here to tell the tale."
"Well, they're here to tell a tale, anyhow," one of the guards said to another, not bothering to keep his voice down. "You really think there's anything beyond the Glacier?"
"How could there be?" the other guard returned. "You keep on going north, it's just Glacier forever. Only stands to reason."
Audun Gilli muttered to himself. His hands twisted in a few quick passes. One of the soldiers' spearheads grew a face that was a nasty caricature of the man holding it. "D'you suppose there are really such things as guards?" it asked in a shrill, squeaky voice.
"How could there be?" the other guard's spearhead answered. It too now looked like its owner... its owner as seen by somebody with a wicked sense of humor. "We fly through the air all by ourselves. Birds do, so we must. Only stands to reason." It crossed its eyes and stuck out an iron tongue.
Both guards goggled. So did their sergeant. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. Told you so, Ulric mouthed. Hamnet nodded, remembering when Audun Gilli worked that same spell on their winecups.
"I think you had better pass on in," the sergeant said. "They can deal with you at the palace, by God." His spearhead blew him a wet, slobbery kiss. He looked as if he wanted to wring its wooden neck. The other guards' spearheads made more sarcastic gibes.
"Maybe you'd better let them quiet down," Hamnet Thyssen murmured as the travelers rode into the city.
"They will as soon as I get far enough away," Audun Gilli answered. "That spell takes work to keep up, and I'm not going to bother."
"It is a good magic, a funny magic," Liv said in her new and halting Raumsdalian. "You teach me? Make people laugh when I go north again."
Not if I go north again, Hamnet noted. When. She sounded very sure of what she wanted to do. And he couldn't suppress a stab of jealousy when Audun walked her through the spell step by step. Her face was bright and shiny, full of excitement. She and Audun shared something she never could with him.
He scowled and muttered and clasped the reins tightly. He hadn't left himself open to a woman's wounding since Gudrid left him. Liv wasn't hurting him on purpose, which didn't mean she wasn't hurting him.
"I thank you," she told Audun Gilli when he finished. "It is clever. I can do it. I am sure I can do it."
"Not hard," Audun said. "Not good for much, but fun."
"Fun is good." Liv looked around, seemed to come back to herself, and nodded to Count Hamnet. "I begin to see what you mean. This city is... very large. Look at all the big buildings, and at all the people in the streets. And not just people. All the beasts, too."
A string of loaded mules was coming up toward the north gate. The plump merchant leading it had some pungent things to say about the travelers
who blocked his path. Then the lead mule screwed up his face and said, "Oh, sure, you think they're as bad as you are, don't you? Fat chance!"
It spoke clearly, distinctly, loudly. The merchant's jaw hit his chest with what should have been an audible clank. The travelers squeezed past the column of loaded mules. The animal in the lead went right on telling the merchant what it thought of him. He didn't stand there gaping long. When anyone—anything—insulted him, he shot back hard. Telling off a mule? He didn't mind. He'd likely done it countless times when the beast couldn't say anything.
"You've got more demon in you than I thought," Hamnet told Audun Gilli.
"Who, me?" the wizard said modestly. "What makes you think that had anything to do with me?"
"I'll tell you what—if Liv tried it, the mule would have had a Bizogot accent."
"I was going to do it," Liv said. "Audun did it first."
"Well, you've got more demon in you than I thought, too," Hamnet said. Liv stuck out her tongue at him. They both laughed, his jealousy dissolving.
Behind them, the merchant called the mule something really unlikely. The mule called the merchant something even worse. Chances were they were both right. Before long, the mule would lose the power of speech as Audun Gilli moved too far away to sustain the spell. The merchant was guaranteed the last word, and all the words after that. But Count Hamnet would have bet the man would never trust the mule not to tell him off again one day.
They moved deeper into Nidaros, streets zigzagging to blunt the Breath of God. The farther they went, the wider Liv's eyes got. "There really is ... quite a lot of it, isn't there?" she said. "How do you feed so many people?"
"Me? I don't," Hamnet answered. "You've seen the way I cook. These folk would sooner starve than eat that."
She sent him a severe look. "And you said I had a demon in me."
"All right, then. A lot of food comes up from the south. We have markets. We have storehouses. Meat mostly keeps fresh through the winter, though that's shorter than it is up in the Bizogot country. Grain will last a long time if you store it where mice and rats can't get at it and it can't go moldy."
"How long is a long time?"
"I don't know exactly. Years, anyhow."
"Years," she echoed. "You are luckier than we are. These are the riches that let you build the things we can't, aren't they?"
"I suppose so," Hamnet said. "We have more left over at the end of a year than you do—unless the year is very bad, I mean."
"There's something else about having extra food," Ulric Skakki put in. "We don't all have to hunt or gather all the time. Some of us can make the things Bizogots don't have, yes. And some of us can try to think up new things, things even we don't have, things it would be nice if we did have."
"New things." Liv frowned. "Like what? When you have all this, what more could you want?"
"If I knew, I'd think up new things myself," Ulric said.
"Old men say that when their grandfathers were boys no one made lamps with mirrors behind them to shed more light. I've heard that more than once," Hamnet Thyssen said. "It's a small thing, but it's the kind of thing I mean. Every craft probably has secrets someone thought of not so long ago. Wizards make new spells all the time. Audun Gilli would know more about that than I do." There—he'd said it.
"Thank you, your Grace. That's what I was talking about, sure enough," Ulric Skakki said.
"We do come up with new spells now and then," Liv said. "The rest of the way we live . . . That hasn't changed much, not so far as anyone can remember."
"Ah, but the Three Tusk clan lives hard by the Glacier," Ulric said. "The Bizogot clans farther south trade with the Empire." He turned to Hamnet Thyssen. "Remember those ugly wool caps the Musk Ox Bizogots wore?"
"I'm not likely to forget them," Hamnet said with a shudder. To Liv, he went on, "You're lucky we came back farther west, so you didn't have to see those. But some of the Bizogots take things we make and use them in ways we'd never think of. And the Leaping Lynxes, up by Sudertorp Lake—the shorebirds they take there let them live in a town half the time. They're having to figure out how to do that when most of them have never seen a real town."
"I see." Liv nodded. "Every folk has clever people and fools in it. But in the Empire your clever people have more room to be clever than they do up on the plains."
"Yes, I think that's likely so," Count Hamnet said.
"Maybe. Or rather, sometimes," Ulric Skakki said. "Just remember, most people in the Empire live on farms, not in towns. They're born on a farm, they grow up on a farm, they get old—if they get old—on a farm, and they die on a farm. The clever ones might make better farmers than their stupid neighbors, but that's about it. Farmers don't change the way they do things any faster than Bizogots do. Sometimes they don't change any faster than their beasts."
"You sound like you know what you're talking about," Hamnet remarked. Ulric was always chary of talking about his own past. Was he doing it now without naming names?
His foxy features were perfectly opaque as he smiled at Hamnet. "Well, I try to do that. Harder to be taken for a fool when you do, eh?"
"Er—yes." Hamnet had to drop it. Ulric left nothing on which to get a conversational grip.
The street zigzagged again. Jesper Fletti, who was riding ahead of Hamnet and Liv and Ulric, let out a war whoop no Bizogot in the world would have been ashamed to claim. "The palace!" he shouted. "The palace!" He might have spotted water in the southwestern desert. In an instant, all the guardsmen who'd gone north with Gudrid were shouting the same thing. "The palace! The palace!"'They'd come home at last, and probably all of them had wondered if they ever would.
Come to that, Hamnet Thyssen had wondered if he would come back to Nidaros, too, even if he was still a long way from his castle in the southeast at the forest's edge. A moment later, very much to his surprise, he found himself shouting, too.
* * * *
Sigvat II didn't stint. He let the travelers use the imperial bathhouse. That was luxury by anyone's standards. Soft robes waited when the newcomers emerged. The gown the Emperor's maidservants presented to Liv told Count Hamnet what a fine figure she really had. Seeing her clean and dressed so was a far cry from the grubby woman in Bizogot-style furs and leathers. Those clothes, the same for women as for men, hardly showed which sex she belonged to. The wine-colored gown left no room for doubt.
It also flustered her. "How do your women stand outfits like this?" she asked Hamnet. "It's drafty!"
The gown did reveal more of her than he'd seen except when they were making love. "It shows the world how beautiful you are," he said.
Liv blushed. Now that she was clean, he could watch the flush rise from her throat all the way to her crown. "It's none of the world's business," she said, which alone would have proved her no Raumsdalian.
"Well, I like the way you look," Hamnet said.
"That's different. You already know more than this. But—" Liv waved her bare arms. "I feel like I'm naked in front of everyone. And it is drafty, even though more fires burn in this palace than in all the tents of the Three Tusk clan put together."
"Which bothers you more? The cold, or everyone looking at you?" he asked.
"Everyone looking at me," Liv said at once. "What will people think?"
"The women will think, I wish I looked that good," Hamnet Thyssen answered. "And the men? The men will think, I wish she were on my arm, not that gray-bearded count's."
Liv flushed again. "Your beard isn't gray," she said. "Only streaked."
"A matter of time." Hamnet didn't worry about his own looks. They were what they were, and he couldn't do much about them. "If things really bother you," he went on, "ask the servingwomen for a fur stole. That will warm you up and cover you up. I think it would be a shame, but do what you like."
"You're a man," Liv said, more or less tolerantly. "Of course you like to look at women."
"Pretty ones, yes."
"There is a what-do-you-call-it at su
nset tonight," Liv said. "Could I really come to it dressed like this?"
"A reception. Gudrid will, or in something that shows even more of her," Hamnet answered. "So will plenty of other noblewomen, and noblemen's mistresses. And they'll all say, Who is that fair stranger?"
"You're making that up." But Liv's back stiffened. Hamnet smiled to himself. She liked the idea of outdoing Gudrid, and she thought she could, too. He judged she was right—she was a fine-looking woman with about a twelve years' head start. If they were born on the same day? Count Hamnet wasn't so sure. But, while the calendar might not be fair, it was part of life.
Liv did wear the gown to the reception. She wore it with a stern, jut-jawed determination that warned people not to dare to look at her twice. Because of that, some didn't look at her even once. Others, of course, couldn't get enough.
Hamnet Thyssen proved right about that, and about Gudrid. Her gown revealed and emphasized instead of concealing. She had a lot to show, and showed it to best advantage. When she strode into the reception hall with Eyvind Torfinn, the men already there gave her a couple of heartbeats of... respectful . . . admiration. Then most of them had to turn to the women they were with and pretend they’d done no such thing.
There, at least, Count Hamnet had no problem with Liv. She knew he was content—more than content—with her, and not ogling the woman to whom he'd once been married. All she said was, "Well, you knew what you were talking about." A bit later, she added, "If she tried to wear that up in the Bizogot country, she'd freeze."
"No doubt." Hamnet hid a smile. "But you're not in the Bizogot country anymore."
"Yes, I'd noticed that," Liv said.
"It has its advantages," he told her. "Come drink some wine."
She'd put up with beer and ale on the way south from the frontier. They were different from the smetyn she was used to, but not necessarily better. Wine, even in Nidaros, was an expensive imported luxury. One thing being Emperor meant, though, was not worrying about expense.
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