Getting anything across to him wasn’t easy, for he’d grown almost deaf as he aged. He used a hearing trumpet made from a musk-ox horn, but it didn’t help much. Audun Gilli, with his problems with the Bizogot language, didn’t try to talk to the shaman – he left that to Hamnet and to Liv.

She bawled into the hearing trumpet while Hamnet Thyssen shouted into Odovacar’s other ear. The racket they made surely disturbed some of the other Red Dire Wolf Bizogots, but it bothered Odovacar very little because he heard very little of it.

“A wolf? Yes, of course I can shape myself into a wolf,” he said. Many old men’s teeth were worn down almost flat against their gums. Not his – they were still long and sharp and white, suggesting his ties to the Red Dire Wolves’ fetish animal.

Getting him to understand what to do after he went into dire wolf’s shape took the best – or maybe the worst – part of an afternoon. It wasn’t that Odovacar was stupid. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t think it was, anyhow. But he heard so little that getting anything across to him was an ordeal.

With Audun Gilli or another Raumsdalian wizard, Count Hamnet could have written down what he wanted. Nothing was wrong with Odovacar’s eyes, but writing didn’t help him, for the Bizogots had no written language. Hamnet and Liv had to keep shouting over and over again till, one word at a time, one thought at a time, they tunneled through the wall deafness built between Odovacar and the folk around him.

“Ah,” he said at last, his own voice too loud because he wanted to have some chance of hearing himself. “You want me to lead the dire wolves against the invaders from the north.”

“Yes.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped it was yes. Or did Odovacar think he and Liv meant they wanted him to take command of the Red Dire Wolves’ human warriors? By then, nothing would have surprised Hamnet overmuch.