Beyond the Gap (15 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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He wished Ulric Skakki hadn't ducked out on him. If Ulric intoned something solemn like,
He's right
, it might help make Gudrid believe him. Or maybe nothing would do that. “Trasamund will listen to me,” Gudrid said with her usual assurance.
“Why? Because you're special? Do you think you're any more special than any of the women he's with now?” Hamnet asked. Before Gudrid could answer or even nod, he went on, “Do you think he thinks you're more special than any of them? If you do, you're fooling yourself even worse than usual.”
“By God, you are a hateful man!” Gudrid said.
“Anyone who tells you anything you don't want to hear is a hateful man,” Hamnet answered. “And anybody who tells you anything true you don't want to hear is even more hateful. So I suppose I qualify, yes.” He bowed.
Gudrid snarled something foul. He bowed again, as if at a compliment. Gudrid whirled and stormed off. Count Hamnet had no idea if he'd convinced her. If he hadn't, he wouldn't be sorry. She would.
But she didn't bother Trasamund. For that her former husband was duly grateful, because, whether Gudrid did or not, he knew he hadn't been joking or even exaggerating the danger. Sometimes you measured progress not by
what people did but by what they didn't do. As far as Hamnet Thyssen was concerned, this was one of those times.
 
IN DUE COURSE, Trasamund emerged from his tent. He looked indecently pleased with himself—that struck Hamnet as the right word, sure enough. Gudrid went right on staying away from him. She probably thought she was punishing him. Hamnet was convinced he either didn't notice she was avoiding him or thought it was funny if he did. As long as neither of them actually
did
anything, though, that was all right.
Hamnet had no qualms about approaching Trasamund. “When do you plan on traveling north again, your Ferocity?” he asked.
“I've been going into gaps all night long.” The jarl threw back his head and laughed. “Now you want me to worry about another one?”
After a dutiful grin, Hamnet said, “You were the one who came down to Nidaros. You will know best how important you think this journey is. The farther north we go, the shorter the time the weather will stay good—or even tolerable.”
“I am not a child. You are not my mother. You do not need to tell me things a mother would tell a foolish little boy,” Trasamund said. “This is my clan, and I have been away for a long time. I have a lot of things I need to set straight before we fare forth again.”
“Is
that
what you were doing last night?” Count Hamnet murmured.
Trasamund laughed again. “By God, Raumsdalian, you've never seen anything straighter! And hard! It was hard as that Jesper's head.” Had Gelimer already talked with him? Or had he come to his own conclusions about Jesper Fletti while traveling north with him? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised. He thought the guards officer on the rockheaded side, too.
But no matter what Hamnet thought about Jesper, that wasn't the point. “If we know when we're leaving, we can be ready on the day,” he persisted. “If we don't have a day, we'll just waste time.”
Sending a sour stare his way, the jarl said, “You're as stubborn as that woman you used to sleep with, aren't you?”
“Almost,” Hamnet answered. “It's one of the few things we have in common.”
“Ha! That's what you think,” Trasamund said.
“Oh, really?” Of itself, Hamnet Thyssen's hand slid toward his swordhilt. If the Bizogot thought he would stand there and let himself be insulted,
that was the last mistake Trasamund would ever make. Hamnet had stopped caring whether he lived or died after Gudrid left him. Honor was a different story. He would uphold his own even knowing the Three Tusk clansmen would slay him after he killed their jarl.
But Trasamund answered, “Yes, by God! You're both annoying, and you're both here!”
Count Hamnet relaxed. He even smiled a crooked smile. The truth, by the very nature of things, couldn't be an insult. He couldn't very well deny he and Gudrid were both annoying. He couldn't deny they were both here, either, however much he wished Gudrid weren't.
Then one corner of his mouth turned down. Did Trasamund think Gudrid was a nuisance when they were both in Nidaros? He chuckled under his breath. What was that phrase the barristers used? An attractive nuisance, that was it. Chances were that summed up just what the Bizogot thought of her.
“I am here, yes,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “But I didn't come north to be
here
, your Ferocity. I came north to pass through the Gap and go beyond the Glacier. I thought you came north for the same reason.”
Trasamund turned red. He took a deep breath. But before he could start roaring at Count Hamnet, someone behind the Raumsdalian noble said, “He is right, you know, your Ferocity.”
That wasn't Ulric Skakki. Ulric was still nowhere to be seen. It was Liv, the Three Tusk shaman. Trasamund glared at her, but he didn't roar. That spoke volumes about how well respected she was. “This is none of your business,” the jarl growled.
“Oh, but it is.” Liv shook her head. Her golden hair flipped back and forth. So did the amber pendants that dangled from her earlobes. Hamnet eyed those with a certain queasy fascination. Raumsdalian women wore earrings that clipped to their ears. The Bizogots bored holes in their earlobes through which to hang their ornaments.
They are barbarians
, he thought.
“How is it your affair? How?” Trasamund demanded. “We will go north. When
I
decide, we will go north. And when we do, you will stay with the clan. You will stay among the tents. Is that plain enough?”
“More than plain enough, your Ferocity.” Liv was the picture of politeness. But she shook her head again all the same. Even some of the fringes on her shoulders and above her breasts moved when she did. “It is more than plain enough, but it is wrong.”
“Whaaat?” Trasamund stretched the word out so he could pack the most possible scorn into it. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what I say, your Ferocity. I commonly do. I will not stay with the clan. I will not stay among the tents. I will go beyond the Glacier with you. By God, I will.” Liv's face shone in the morning sun like a lamp, like a torch, like a bonfire. “By God I said, and by God I also meant. Do you not travel to the Golden Shrine? If I cannot learn of God there, where in all the world will I?”
“You can't do that,” Trasamund said. Hamnet Thyssen had rarely seen him taken aback. He did now. The jarl looked as if someone had landed a solid punch on the point of his chin.
“I can,” Liv said. “I will. I must. I hardly slept in the night, your Ferocity. I took divinations instead.” Trasamund had hardly slept, either, but he wasn't taking divinations. Liv went on, “The answer was always the same. This is meant to be. God wills it.”
Trasamund looked as if he wanted to say something unkind about God. Whatever he wanted to do, he didn't do it. Not even a Bizogot jarl dared blaspheme right out loud. You never could tell if God was listening, or what He would do if He was.
“Chances are you read the signs wrong,” he said instead. That put the blame on Liv, not God.
She shook her head. “I did not, your Ferocity. Shall I do it over for you? Then you will see for yourself, and can have no possible doubt. Let me get the knucklebones, and I will ask the question aloud before I cast them.”
“Never mind,” Trasamund said quickly. For a moment, that surprised Hamnet Thyssen. But then he understood. If the jarl did see for himself, he couldn't possibly argue. And he plainly didn't believe Liv was making up what she claimed. He tried a different tack. “Having another woman along will cause nothing but trouble.”
“How can I possibly cause more trouble than the woman who is already traveling with you?” Liv asked. Count Hamnet snorted. He didn't intend to; it was startled out of him. Trasamund sent him a baleful stare all the same. Liv eyed the jarl. “Well?”
“You are being impossible,” Trasamund grumbled.
“I am following the will of God,” the shaman said. “Can you tell me the same?”
“I can tell you—” Trasamund broke off. What could he tell her? That the
land beyond the Glacier was no place for a woman? Then what of Gudrid? Scowling, Trasamund said, “I can tell you that you don't fight fair.”
“When I fight, I don't fight to be fair. I fight to win,” Liv said. Trasamund turned away. She'd won this time.
T
RASAMUND WAS STILL muttering into his beard when the travelers rode north four days later. Liv, perched on a dun gelding, paid no attention to him. She rode with Audun Gilli and Hamnet Thyssen. A lot of the time, she wanted to talk shop with the Raumsdalian wizard. That left Hamnet as interpreter, and left him fuming quietly. He'd warned them he didn't know how to translate magical terms very well either way, but they both blamed him when they couldn't make themselves clear.
He tried talking with Liv about other things besides sorcery or shamanry or whatever the right name for it was. To him, the scenery was magnificent—the two great cliffs of ice, one to the northwest, the other to the northeast. Once, they'd joined together and crushed all the north under their unimaginable bulk. They were still magnificent, still awesome, still terrifying … to Count Hamnet.
To Liv, they were part of the landscape she'd seen every day of her life, barring fog or rain or blizzard. She took them as much for granted as anyone could. “It's only the Glacier.”
“No.” Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. “For me, there is no
only.”
The Bizogot woman laughed. “This is very foolish,” she said. “It is always here. It will always be here. Why get excited about it?”
“If it will always be here, why is the Gap open now, when it was closed?” Whenever Hamnet said the name in the Bizogot language, he felt he was being obscene. But Liv took it in stride. Seeing as much, he went on, “Why is there a gap between the eastern Glacier and the western at all? There didn't used to be.”
She frowned thoughtfully. “These are good questions. I have no answers for them. Maybe we will find the answers at the Golden Shrine.”
“Maybe.” Hamnet Thyssen started to ask her something else. Before he could, she asked Audun Gilli a question. Hamnet had to translate as best he could.
“Having fun?” Ulric Skakki asked him a while later.
“How did you guess?” Count Hamnet answered, so sourly that Ulric laughed. “Want to take over for me?” Hamnet asked. “You speak both languages, and you'll probably have more luck with the technical terms than I am.”
“If it's all the same to you, I'd rather pass,” Ulric said. It wasn't all the same to Hamnet, but he couldn't do anything about it. Ulric Skakki gave an extravagant wave of the hand. “You never get tired of this scenery, do you?”
“You do if you're a Bizogot,” Hamnet answered.
It's only the Glacier
, Liv had said.
“Well, I'm bloody well not, thank God,” Ulric Skakki said. “I've got plenty of things wrong with me, but that isn't one of them.” Only then did he eye Liv. “She doesn't speak Raumsdalian, does she? No, of course not. You wouldn't be translating if she did.”
“No, but don't forget she's a shaman,” Hamnet said. “She may not need to understand what you say to understand what you mean.”
“Now there's a cheery thought.” Ulric glanced at Liv again. She wasn't paying any attention to him, but keeping flies off her horse with a mammoth-hair whisk. He looked relieved. In a lower voice, he said, “She wouldn't be bad if she cleaned herself up.”
That was true of a lot of Bizogot women. Hamnet Thyssen shrugged. It worked out the other way around. The Bizogots never got clean. People who came among them got dirty. Then his own thoughts went in a different direction. “What's it like, passing through the Gap where it's narrowest?”
“It's like being born again,” Ulric answered seriously. That startled Count Hamnet, who hadn't thought the much-traveled adventurer had room in him for figures of speech. “It really is,” Ulric insisted. “You come out on the other side, and everything is different. Well, lots of things are different, anyhow. And besides, going through …”
“Yes, tell me about that,” Hamnet said.
Ulric Skakki shook his head. “I can't. There are no words. You'll see for yourself before too long. And you won't be able to tell anybody else about it, either. It's like being in love … What the—?”
Hamnet Thyssen pulled savagely at his horse's reins, jerking the animal away from Ulric Skakki—and, incidentally, away from Audun Gilli and Liv. Ulric started to go after him, then saw the black scowl on his face and forbore.
“What did you say to him?” Hamnet heard Liv ask.
“Beats me.” Ulric shrugged an elaborate shrug.
“Can you explain about the law of contagion in the Bizogot language?” Audun asked.
“I doubt it,” Ulric said. “I can't even explain the law of contagion in Raumsdalian.” He rode off, whistling. Audun muttered under his breath. Whatever he said, it didn't change Ulric Skakki into a lemming on the spot. Hamnet thought that was too bad.
He rode by himself. Ulric rode by himself. So did Trasamund. So did Eyvind Torfinn. And so did Gudrid. Audun Gilli and Liv rode together, but they couldn't talk to each other. The knot of Raumsdalian guardsmen followed Gudrid, but far enough away to keep her from screaming at them.
We're a happy bunch
, Hamnet thought.
A teratorn circled high above them. With the air blowing down off the Glacier the way it did, what were the wind currents like for birds here? The huge scavenger had no trouble staying airborne, anyhow.
Audun Gilli watched the great bird soar for a while. Then he asked Liv, “Do you suppose it's an omen?”
Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble understanding him. The shaman, however, spoke no Raumsdalian. “What are you talking about?” she asked in her own tongue—which Audun couldn't follow.
The wizard threw up his hands in frustration. Then, after casting a glance of appeal that Count Hamnet stonily ignored, Audun pointed up into the sky at the teratorn. Liv pointed at it, too. They agreed on that much—and on no more. Audun tried to use gestures to explain what he meant. They didn't seem to mean anything to Liv.
To no one in particular, Ulric Skakki said, “We'd better find the Golden Shrine, and we'd better find it soon. We aren't fit to have anything to do with one another unless we find it.” Unlike the wizard and the shaman, he spoke the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian, and put his plaintive comment into both languages.
“That is well said,” Eyvind Torfinn said, first in one tongue and then in the other.
“Yes, true enough.” Trasamund used his own language first, then unbent enough to say the same thing in Raumsdalian.
Several travelers eyed Hamnet Thyssen. He realized he was the other one who knew both the Empire's language and the Bizogots'. Liv had only the nomads' tongue. Gudrid might understand some of that, but she showed no signs of speaking it, while Audun and the guardsmen knew only Raumsdalian. Count Hamnet didn't want to say anything; he would rather have ridden along stewing in his own juices. But those stares wore him down faster than he thought they would. “Yes, yes,” he said grudgingly, first in one tongue, then in the other.
“Thank you,” Audun Gilli said, maybe to him, maybe to Ulric Skakki, maybe to all the men who could use both languages. The wizard added, “Will someone please translate for me?”
At almost the same time, Liv said, “Will someone please tell me what the southern wizard is trying to say about the teratorn?”
“I'll do it,” Hamnet said, heaving a sigh. Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow in surprise. Hamnet caught his eye. With malice aforethought, he went on, “Better to translate than never.”
Ulric flinched. So did Audun Gilli. “What did you tell them?” Liv asked. After a moment's thought, Hamnet was able to duplicate the pun in her language. The Bizogots' tongue and Raumsdalian weren't close enough to let wordplay go back and forth between them all the time, or even very often; he felt a certain somber pride at managing here. By the look on Liv's face, she would have been just as well pleased if he hadn't. Or he thought so, anyhow, till she winked at him. That startled him into a smile of his own. “And now, about the teratorn …” she prompted.
“Will you tell her what I meant?” Audun Gilli asked at the same time.
“I can translate, as long as you don't both talk at once,” Count Hamnet told each of them in turn. He glanced up toward the teratorn, but it had flown away.
Even so, he explained what the wizard said. Liv considered that, then replied, “If it was an omen, if it was a shadow over us, it is gone now, and we go forward without it.” Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding.
 
OUT ON THE frozen plain, Hamnet Thyssen had felt as if he and his companions were so many ants walking across a plate. Here between the riven halves of the Glacier, he had a different feeling, and one even less pleasant. Those great cold cliffs might have been the sides of two crates … and as the travelers went farther and farther north, someone—God, maybe—was pushing the crates closer and closer together. If God shoved once too often …
Better not to think about that.
But the thought got harder to avoid as day followed day. At its southern outlet, the Gap was more than fifty miles wide. When the travelers rode into it, they had the Glacier on the horizon to either side of them, but they could look back over their shoulders and see open land behind. And, while the Glacier serrated the horizon to east and west, there was plenty of sky above it.
With each day's travel, though—sometimes with each hour's—the Glacier grew higher and higher. Those sheer, towering cliffs ate more and more of the sky. Days were shorter than they would have been otherwise, for the sun needed extra time to climb above the Glacier to the east and sank below the Glacier to the west all too soon.
And, with each day's travel, the ground got squashier and the bugs got worse. Meltwater poured from the ice on both sides of the Glacier, more and more as days lengthened. Pools and ponds and puddles, creeks and rills and rivulets, were everywhere. Midges and flies and mosquitoes mated madly. Their offspring rose in ravenous, bloodthirsty hordes.
Gudrid veiled herself in fine, almost transparent cloth. That meant she got bitten less often than the others. It didn't mean she kept all the buzzing biters at bay.
“By God, now I know another reason why the Bizogots breed such shaggy horses,” Hamnet Thyssen said, smashing a fly on the back of his hand.
“What do you mean?” Ulric Skakki asked. The bites blotching his face made him look as if he'd come down with some horrid disease.
“Well, the longer their hair, the better they do in the winters up here. That's plain,” Count Hamnet said, and Ulric nodded. The nobleman went on, “But the longer their hair, the more trouble the bugs have getting at 'em, too.”
“Maybe that's another reason woolly mammoths are woolly, too,” Ulric said after a moment's thought. “But who bred them? They had to be here long before the Bizogots started herding them. They're still closer to wild than tamed.”
“Maybe God bred them,” Hamnet said.
“Maybe he did,” Ulric agreed. “It would give him something to do with his time, anyway.” In another tone of voice, he would have sounded blasphemous. As things were, he seemed to find the idea reasonable. When he slapped a moment later, he did sound blasphemous. And so did Hamnet Thyssen, when something that probably specialized in piercing mammoth
hide bit him in the back of the neck. He didn't get the bug, which made his language fouler still.
Finding dry ground to sleep on got harder and harder. Trasamund and Liv had oiled mammoth hides to unroll beneath them as groundsheets. The Raumsdalians weren't so lucky. “If you've been this way before, you should have warned us it was a bog,” Hamnet said to Ulric in a low voice.
“I couldn't—I didn't know,” Ulric answered. “Everything was nice and hard then.” He looked around to make sure Trasamund and Liv couldn't overhear.
“You came through here in the winter?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. “What was it like?”
“Cold,” Ulric Skakki said, with feeling. “Colder than … Well, cold.” What didn't he say?
Colder than Gudrid's heart
? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised.
“Does the Glacier grow in the wintertime?” Hamnet asked.
Ulric nodded. “Oh, yes.
Oh,
yes. You can almost watch it happen. The way the Glacier goes forward when it's cold, you wonder how it ever goes back.”
“Bad winters, it does come forward and stay there for a while. I know that,” Hamnet said. “On balance, though, it's been moving back more than forward. Otherwise, the Bizogots would be herding mammoths where Nidaros stands.”
“You mean they don't?” Ulric Skakki's eyebrows arched in artfully simulated surprise. “And all this time I thought …”
“All this time, I thought you were a chowderhead,” Count Hamnet said. “And here I see I was right.”
“Your servant, your Grace.” Ulric bowed in the saddle. “And few clammier places have I ever been than this.”

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