All the same, both Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki smiled. They weren’t Bizogots, born to the northern plains, but they could manage. Smiling still, Ulric said, “Yes, Mother dear.”

Trasamund’s snort birthed a young fogbank. “Scoff all you please,” he said. “Any Bizogot clan will tell you about Raumsdalian traders who ended up stiff clean through because they thought they knew more about this country than they really did.”

“We’ll get there,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He wheeled his horse. The beast seemed glad to face away from the Breath of God. Hamnet and Ulric rode south, towards the encampment housing the remnants of the Three Tusk clan and the Red Dire Wolves, who guested them and who, reluctantly, joined them in the war against the Rulers.

One stretch of snowy, windswept ground really did look a lot like another. Count Hamnet was starting to wonder whether he and Ulric had bragged too soon when the Bizogots’ mammoth-hide tents appeared in the distance. The mammoths’ thick skins and the long, shaggy dark brown hair on them offered a barrier formidable even to the fiercest gales.

All the same, entrances invariably faced south. They did down in the Empire, too. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki tethered their horses behind a snow-block wall that shielded the animals from the worst of the wind. They’d bought the horses in Nidaros, but the animals were of the small, shaggy Bizogot breed, better suited to the harsh northern weather than other horses.

Hamnet ducked into the tent belonging to Totila, the jarl of the Red Dire Wolves. He needed a moment to get used to the gloom inside. A couple of bone lamps burning butter made from the milk of musk oxen and mammoths gave only a dim, flickering light. A brazier that burned dried dung added a little heat, but not much.

The brazier and lamps did contribute to the pungency. Hamnet Thyssen knew his nose would soon get used to it, but it was fierce when he’d just come in from the fresh if frigid steppe. Chamber pots of leather and wicker-work had tight lids, and people emptied them often, but their reek hung in the air. So did that of unwashed bodies, Hamnet’s own among them. Bathing in winter in the Bizogot country was asking for anything from chest fever to frostbite.