Beyond the Gap (20 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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Count Hamnet found himself looking in every direction at once. If the Golden Shrine was somehow sneaking around out there keeping an eye on him, he wanted to catch it in the act. Rationally, that made no sense at all.
He needed a little while to realize as much, but eventually he did. Yet out here beyond the Glacier, things weren't necessarily rational … were they?
He saw nothing that looked like the Golden Shrine—not that he knew what the Golden Shrine looked like. The country was the same as it had been since the travelers came through the Gap—a steppe for the moment green and spattered with flowers, but with all the signs of winter to come. Here and there, snow lingered on slopes that didn't see much of the sun. Here and there, frost heaves made miniature hillocks—the only real relief in the landscape.
“You call those pingoes, don't you?” Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, pointing to one that reared a good hundred yards above the surface of the plain. A thin coating of dirt and clinging plants protected the ice core from melting in the sun.
“That is a pingo, yes,” she answered. “Pingo is the name for such things in our language. That pingo is taller than most of the ones in Bizogot country.”
“I wonder what makes them,” Hamnet said.
“They
are
,” the shaman responded. “How can they be made, except by God?”
“Sudertorp Lake is a lake because of meltwater from the Glacier,” Hamnet said.
“Yes, of course.” Liv nodded. “God made it so.”
“Many, many years ago, Nidaros, the capital of the Empire, sat by the edge of Hevring Lake,” Hamnet said. “Hevring Lake was a meltwater lake, too. Then it broke through the dam of earth and ice that held it, and it drained, and it made a great flood. You can still see the badlands it scoured out. One of these days, Sudertorp Lake will do the same thing.”
“It may be so, but what of it?” the Bizogot shaman said.
Stubbornly, Hamnet Thyssen answered, “The land does what it does for reasons men can see. I can understand why Hevring Lake emptied out. I can see that Sudertorp Lake will do the same thing when the Glacier moves farther north. I don't have to talk about God to do it. So what shaped a pingo?”
Liv looked at him. “Speak to me of the Glacier without speaking of God. Speak of why it moves forward and back without speaking of God. Speak of how the Gap opened without speaking of God. Speak of the Golden Shrine without speaking of God.”
Count Hamnet opened his mouth, but he did not know what to say.
“You see?” Liv told him, not in triumph, but in the manner of someone who has pointed out the obvious.
“Well, maybe I do,” he admitted. “Or maybe I simply don't know enough about the Glacier to speak of it without speaking of God.”
“I know what your trouble is,” she said. Hamnet didn't think he had trouble, or at least not trouble along those lines. No matter what he thought, the Bizogot woman went on, “You live too far south, too far from the Glacier. You do not really feel the Breath of God in the winter, when it howls down off the ice. If you did, you would not doubt.”
Bizogots always spoke of the Breath of God. Count Hamnet had gone up among the mammoth-herders in winter, but never in a clan like Trasamund's that lived hard by the Glacier. He wasn't sorry. The cold he'd known was bad enough that he didn't want to find out about worse.
It was as cold outside as it was in my heart,
he thought. Could anything be colder than that? He didn't believe it. He wouldn't believe it.
But he didn't want to quarrel with Liv, either, and so he said, “Well, you may be right.”
“I am.” She had no doubts. She reached out and tapped his arm. “Tell me this—does your shaman, that Audun Gilli, does he think terrible thoughts about God, too? If he does, how can he make magic work?”
“I do not know what Audun Gilli thinks about God,” Hamnet answered. “I never worried about it.”
“You never worried about God. You never worried about what he thinks of God.” Liv sounded disbelieving. “You southern folk are strange indeed.”
“If you want to know someone from the south who thinks about God, talk to Eyvind Torfinn,” Hamnet said.
Liv rolled her eyes, which told him she already had. “He tells me more than I want to hear,” she said. “He says now one thing, now another, till I don't know whether my wits are coming or going.”
“You see? We cannot make you happy,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“That is not so,” Liv said. “I am happy—why shouldn't I be? But I am confused about what you think. Of the two of us, you are the unhappy one.”
She wasn't wrong. Hamnet tried to avoid admitting that, saying, “What I think about God has nothing to do with whether I am happy or not.”
“Did I say it did?” the Bizogot shaman returned. “All I said was that you were not happy, and I was right about that. I am sorry I was right about it. People should be happy, don't you think?”
“That depends,” Count Hamnet said. “Some people have more to be happy about than others.”
“Do you want to be happy?” she asked, and then, with Bizogot bluntness, “Do you think I could make you happy, at least for a while?”
He couldn't very well mistake the meaning of that. He could, and did, shake his head before he even thought about it. “Thank you, but no,” he said. “Women are what made me the way I am now. I do not believe the illness is also the cure.”
Liv looked at him for a moment. “I am sure you were a fool before a woman ever made one of you,” she said coolly, and swung her horse away from his. Even if shed stayed next to him, he had no idea how he would have answered her.
 
WHEN LIV MADE a point of avoiding him after that, it came as something of a relief. She gave him the uneasy feeling she knew things he didn't know, and not things her occult lore had taught her, either.
He wondered just how big a fool she thought he was. He didn't feel like a fool, not to himself. All he'd done was tell her the truth. If that was enough to anger her … then it was, that was all.
After Liv stayed away from him for a couple of days, Gudrid rode up alongside him. He tried to pretend she wasn't there. It didn't work. “It's your own fault,” she said, sounding as certain as she always did.
“You don't know what you're talking about,” Hamnet Thyssen answered stonily, but under the firm words lay a nasty fear that she really did.
Her rich, throaty laugh only made that fear worse. “Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “I don't know what you see in that Bizogot wench, but plainly you see something. God couldn't tell you why—she smells like a goat.”
“So does everybody up here—including you,” Hamnet said. Just then, as if to mock him, the breeze brought him a faint whiff of attar of roses. If Gudrid smelled like a goat, she smelled like a perfumed goat.
He couldn't even make her angry. She just laughed some more. “As if you care,” she said. “You chased her too hard, and you went and put her back up, and it serves you right.”
Hamnet Thyssen gaped. That was so wrong, on so many different levels, that for a moment he had no idea how to respond to it. “You really have lost your mind,” he said at last.
“I don't think so.” Gudrid, in fact, sounded maddeningly sure. “I know you better than you know yourself.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Hamnet scowled at her. “Then why didn't you know what you'd do to me when you started playing the whore?”
Gudrid yawned. “I knew. I just didn't care.”
He wanted to kill her. But if he did, she would die laughing at him, and he couldn't stand that. “You came all this way to torment me, didn't you?”
Gudrid buffed her nails against the wool of her tunic—an artful display. Everything she did seemed carefully calculated to drive him mad. “Well, I wasn't doing anything else when Eyvind decided to come,” she answered.
Cursing, Hamnet Thyssen rode away from her. He really might have tried to murder her had she followed. She didn't, but her laughter pursued him.
 
AS THEY DID south of the Glacier, woolly mammoths roamed the plains here. The travelers gave them a wide berth. Hamnet would not have wanted to go mammoth hunting with the men and weapons they had along. If they were starving, if no other food presented itsef—then, maybe. As things were, he found the great beasts better admired at a distance.
“Mammoths make me believe in God,” Trasamund said one bright midnight. The Bizogot jarl was roasting a chunk of meat from one of the swarms of deer that shared the plain with the mammoths. “They truly do. How could mammoths make themselves? God had to do it.”
“You could say the same thing about mosquitoes.” Eyvind Torfinn punctuated the observation by slapping. “You could even say God liked mosquitoes better than mammoths, because he made so many more of them.”
“No.” Trasamund smiled, but he wasn't in a joking mood. “Any old demon could come up with your mosquito. A mammoth, now, a mammoth takes imagination and power. Isn't that so, Thyssen?”
Hamnet started. He sprawled by the fire for no better reason than that he didn't feel like sleeping. “I don't know what God does, or why,” he answered. “If he tells me, I promise you'll be the first to hear.”
Ulric Skakki thought that was funny, whether Trasamund did or not. “If God talks to anybody, he'll probably talk to you, your Grace,” he said. “Me, I don't wonder so much where these mammoths came from. I wonder who herds them, and when the herders are going to show themselves.”
“Haven't seen anyone yet,” Trasamund said. “And the mammoths seem wild.”
“How can you know that?” Eyvind Torfinn sounded curious, not doubtful. He usually sounded curious.
“One of the ways we tame them—as much as we do tame them—is to
give them berries and other things they like,” the jarl answered. “They're clever animals—they soon learn we have treats for them. They sometimes come up and try to get treats from us whether we have any or not.”
“Back in Nidaros, my cat will do the same thing,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “I don't think I would want a woolly mammoth hopping into my lap, though.”
That did make Trasamund laugh, but he said, “These mammoths don't seem to think we have berries for them, so I would guess no one tames them.”
Ulric Skakki made a dubious noise. Liv didn't look convinced, either; they were speaking the Bizogot language, so she had no trouble following along. Hamnet Thyssen also had his doubts.
“Could people tame mammoths some different way?” Ulric asked.
Trasamund looked down his nose at him. “People
could
do all kinds of things,” the Bizogot replied. “They could waste their time with foolish questions, for instance.”
“Thank you so much, your Ferocity,” Ulric Skakki murmured.
“Any time.” Trasamund was too blunt to recognize sarcasm, or maybe too sly to admit to recognizing it.
“We know there are people here,” Liv said. “Either that or the owls in the land beyond the Glacier are sorcerers in their own right.”
She
understood what sarcasm was about, even if not all Bizogots did.
Trasamund refused to let it bother him. “Maybe there are. We haven't seen any people here. That's all I can tell you.”
“We have not seen the Golden Shrine, either,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “Nevertheless, we are confident it's here somewhere.”
“Well, people are probably here somewhere, too,” Trasamund allowed with a show of generosity. “I don't think they're anywhere close by, though. You worriers are just trying to use this to get me to turn around and go back.” He glowered at Hamnet Thyssen.
“Don't look at me that way,” Count Hamnet said. “I didn't even take sides in this argument. You know more about mammoths than I do.”
You ought to. Your hide and your skull are thick enough.
Even though he didn't say that out loud, Trasamund sent him another suspicious stare. The Bizogot was clever enough to know when someone was thinking unkind thoughts about him. Why wasn't he clever enough to know they were thinking those thoughts because he was acting like a fool?
Instead of going back, they went on, though at the slow, halfhearted pace they'd been using for quite a while. One day seemed much like another—
broad plains ahead, behind, and to all sides. People said the sea looked that way, too. Count Hamnet couldn't speak about that; he'd never seen the sea. He did know the low, flat landscape bored him almost to the point of dozing on horseback.
One herd of deer, one herd of mammoths, one flock of ptarmigan or snow buntings came to look much like another, too. The travelers didn't see many of the great striped cats or enormous bears. He wasn't sorry about that, not even a little.

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