The warriors atop the mammoth shrieked as it crashed to the ground. One tried to leap clear, only to be crushed by that mountain of falling flesh. Another did jump free, but it did him no good. Trasamund cut him down before he could even get to his feet. Then the jarl remounted and rode toward another mammoth.

“He can’t do that twice!” Ulric Skakki exclaimed.

“I didn’t think he could do it once,” Count Hamnet answered.

Now the Rulers knew what Trasamund had in mind. They shot at him again and again. An arrow in its throat, his horse sank like a ship that had hit a rock. But it had got him close to the woolly mammoth. Careless of his own safety, he dashed forward. His huge sword swung in an arc of mayhem and struck home. The mammoth bugled distress. Like the other great beast, it went down.

And that was as much as the Rulers wanted. Their war mammoths had given them the edge in every fight with the Bizogots. Against a berserk madman who would maim them without caring whether he lived or died, they had no sure defense. They turned and fled north as fast as their riding deer and the mammoths still hale would carry them.

Hamnet Thyssen would have called for a pursuit had the Rulers tried to keep going south. If they were heading away from their army down in the Empire, he was content to let them go. They’d hurt the Bizogots, too. This little band couldn’t stand too much hard use, or it would fall to pieces.

For now, the Bizogots made the most of victory. They dismounted and methodically finished off any wounded Rulers they found. No one went near the thrashing, crippled war mammoths. “I hate to waste all that meat,” a Bizogot said. “It could feed us for quite a while. But . . .”