Beyond the Gap (21 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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Another reason days all seemed the same was that they blended into one another so smoothly. A stretch of bright twilight for a couple of hours bracketing midnight, and then the sun came up again. You could travel whenever you pleased, rest whenever you pleased, sleep whenever you pleased.
And then, almost before Hamnet consciously realized it, real night returned to the world. The sun didn't come up quite so far in the northeast, didn't set quite so far in the northwest. It stayed below the horizon longer, and dipped farther below. Hamnet got reacquainted with stars he hadn't seen for weeks.
Birds sensed the change before he did. The sky was a murmur, sometimes a thunder, of wings. Flocks from even farther north began coming down upon and past the travelers. They knew winter was on the way, though the sun still shone brightly and days were, if anything, warmer than they had been when summer first began.
When the deer began to grow restless, even Trasamund acknowledged that the time to think things through had come. “We should turn around and head for the Gap again,” he said, as if no one had ever suggested that before. “We are not going to find the Golden Shrine. Time to put away things of legend and remember the real world.”
Ulric Skakki shook his head. “What a foolish idea! I think we should keep on wandering west through this godforsaken country till we come to the edge of the world and fall off it.”
Trasamund glared at him. “Is that a joke? I don't hear anyone laughing.”
“Then maybe it's not a joke,” Ulric answered. “Maybe turning around is a good idea. Maybe it should have seemed like a good idea to you before this afternoon.”
“I know when to turn back,” the Bizogot jarl rumbled. “I always said I would know when to turn back.”
“People say all sorts of things,” Ulric Skakki observed. “Sometimes they mean them. Sometimes they don't. You never can tell ahead of time.”
Glaring still, Trasamund said, “When we set out again come morning, I will ride south and east. Others may do as they please. Anyone who wants to fall off the edge of the world is welcome to, as far as I am concerned. Nobody will miss a slick-talking Raumsdalian, not one bit. Some folk are too clever for their own good.”
Some folk are too stupid for their own good.
But Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. Trasamund, whatever else you could say about him, was nobody's fool.
Some folk are too stubborn for their own good.
Yes, that fit the Bizogot better.
Hamnet wondered whether Trasamund would have decided to turn around sooner if he himself and Ulric and Liv hadn't kept trying to talk him into it. He wouldn't have been surprised. Trasamund was just the man to dig in his heels and try to go in the direction opposite the one other people urged on him. Count Hamnet was that kind of man himself, so he recognized the symptoms—here, perhaps, more slowly than he might have.
That night was the darkest one Hamnet remembered since passing beyond the Glacier. Maybe his own gloom painted the sky blacker than it was. Maybe the moon's being down added to the way the heavens seemed uncommonly unreachable, the stars small and dim and lost.
And maybe he was feeling something that was really in the air. Audun Gilli and Liv both woke screaming around midnight. That set Gudrid screaming, too. She only wanted to know what was going on, which seemed reasonable enough, but she made an ungodly lot of noise trying to find out.
“Too late!” Audun said.
“Much too late!” Liv agreed. They stared at each other, their eyes enormous and seeming filled with blood in the dim light the embers shed.
Hamnet Thyssen needed a moment to remember that neither of them understood the other's speech. The knowledge sent ice stabbing through him that had nothing to do with the enormous walls of ice he'd passed between.
“Do you hear them, your Ferocity?” Ulric Skakki asked.
“I'd have to be deaf not to,” Trasamund answered, which was true enough. “They both had nightmares. So what?” He was not going to be impressed. No matter what happened, he wouldn't be—he was too determined.
“No, by God,” Count Hamnet said. “They didn't have nightmares. They had the same nightmare. Do you think that's good news?”
“I don't think I can do much about it any which way,” Trasamund said,
and that was also true. He yawned—not quite theatrically, but not quite naturally, either. “About the only thing I can do that will help at all is go back to sleep, so I will … if the rest of you let me.” He rolled himself in his blanket and turned his back on the fire—and on the rest of the travelers.
“What was it?” Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, who lay closer to him than Audun Gilli did.
Whatever it was, it shook her enough to make her forget their quarrel. “It was … bad,” she answered. “It was coming for us. I don't know what it would have done. I didn't want to find out. Maybe I was lucky I screamed myself awake.”
“Maybe you were,” Hamnet said. “If it comes on us in the waking world, can we get away so easily?”
“The waking world and the other one are less separate than you seem to think,” the shaman said. “They touch, they blend, they mingle. You can't always say for sure that something is part of the one but not of the other.”
Being a man who liked things neat and orderly, with each one in its proper slot, Hamnet Thyssen would like to have argued with her. Here in this land beyond the Glacier, here with the chill of winter in his heart, he found he couldn't. He couldn't sleep again, either, despite the snores rising from Trasamund.
The Bizogot jarl headed back toward the Gap faster than he'd gone before. No matter what he said there in the darkness, he worried about what Audun Gilli and Liv sensed, too.
Everything seemed normal for the next couple of days. Trasamund swore when a herd of mammoths crossed the travelers' path. A moment later, he swore again, in awe and amazement. The great beasts carried men atop them.
W
HEN TRASAMUND'S CURSES ran dry, he said, “But they can't do that.” Hamnet Thyssen was inclined to agree with him. The idea of herding woolly mammoths was astonishing enough from a Raumsdalian point of view. The idea of taming them to the point where they could be ridden … Count Hamnet didn't know whether to be impressed or appalled. He ended up both at once, a stew of emotions that left him queasy.
Some of the mammoth-riders carried lances long enough to skewer someone in front of their enormous mounts. Count Hamnet wouldn't have wanted to try that—how much did one of those things weigh? Others had quivers on their backs. Still others seemed unarmed. After a bit, Hamnet saw that they were the men actually in charge of controlling the mammoths. They had iron-tipped bone goads with which they whacked the enormous animals to get them to do what they wanted.
What they wanted, right then, was to get a closer look at the travelers from the far side of the Glacier. The column of woolly mammoths swung into a line and bore down upon the Raumsdalians and Bizogots as smoothly as one of the Emperor's cavalry squadrons.
“Will you look at that?” Trasamund murmured. “Will you
look
at that?” He sounded as overwhelmed, and as full of yearning, as a boy on the edge of manhood staring at a beautiful woman and contemplating wonderful things he'd never imagined before. His eyes were as big and wide as the youth's might have been, too.
Hamnet Thyssen did not expect he would ever master the art of riding
mammoths. He didn't feel he was suffering any great loss, either. His attention focused not on the shaggy beasts but on the men who rode them.
He did not like their looks. The closer they came, the less he liked it. They were not unhandsome—just the opposite, in a fierce half-eagle, half-lion sort of way. They had swarthy skins, big scimitar noses, proud cheekbones, and gleaming dark eyes. They wore their black beards in elaborate curled waves that rippled halfway down their chests, and their hair in neat buns at the napes of their necks.
Those gleaming eyes, though … Hamnet hoped his imagination was running away with him, but he did not like what he thought he saw in them. The Bizogots were hard. They had to be, living where they did, where so many things were so scarce. They mostly weren't cruel for the sake of cruelty. Hamnet Thyssen wasn't so sure about these strangers.
One of the men cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted something. To Hamnet's ear, it was just guttural nonsense. “I am sorry, my friends, but I don't understand you,” Eyvind Torfinn answered in Raumsdalian.
“Do you speak my tongue?” Trasamund called in the Bizogot language.
More harsh-sounding gibberish came from the strangers. Eyvind and the Bizogot jarl both spread their hands to show they could make no sense of it. Ulric Skakki rode up alongside Count Hamnet and said, “I wonder if they would understand if Audun or Liv hooted like an owl.”
“I wouldn't be surprised,” Hamnet answered.
One of the strangers got down from his mammoth and approached the travelers from beyond the Glacier. He used the beast's long hair for handholds. The mammoth let him, which impressed Hamnet of itself. The man wasn't very tall, but he had some of the widest shoulders Hamnet had ever seen. He was built like a brick, all muscle everywhere.
He wore furs and leather, as the Bizogots did, but there the resemblance ended. The Bizogots wore clothes that fit tightly, while his jacket and trousers were loose and baggy, perhaps to let him stuff in extra padding if he wanted to. He had on enormous felt boots, into which he tucked the bottoms of his trousers. With footgear so large, his gait was more waddle than walk, but it was an impressive waddle.
He stopped about twenty feet in front of Trasamund and said something. “I don't understand you,” the Bizogot jarl said.
Hamnet Thyssen didn't understand him, either, but he had a pretty good notion of what the stranger was saying. If it wasn't something like
Who are you and what the demon are you doing on my land? he
would have been very surprised.
The stranger paused and scowled. He looked as if he hated everyone in the world, but especially Trasamund. He said the same thing over again, louder this time. He seemed to think everybody ought to understand his language, and ought to speak it, too.
“I still don't understand you,” Trasamund told him.
This time, the noises the stranger made were different. They seemed angrier—no mean feat, when his whole vocabulary sounded angry. Either he was calling the jarl several different kinds of idiot or he was swearing at him—maybe both at once.
Audun Gilli rode forward a few paces. The stranger snarled something that sounded vile at him, too, and jumped back and drew a long, straight sword. Its highly polished edge glittered in the sunlight. He stood ready to fight and kill, ready to attack, even though Audun was surely the most inoffensive-looking of the travelers.
“No, no.” Audun even sounded inoffensive, which Trasamund might not have. “You misunderstand, my friend. I come in peace.” He held up his right hand, palm open—a gesture anyone on the far side of the Glacier, from the Bizogots to the folk who dwelt in the hot countries well south of the Raumsdalian Empire, would have understood.
If this stranger understood it, he didn't want to let on. He growled something that sounded unflattering. He brandished the sword again, but didn't rush the wizard. He looked even more scornful than he had when he was snarling at Trasamund. Maybe that was
because
Audun seemed so inoffensive; the Bizogot, at least, pretty plainly knew how to take care of himself.
Then Audun said, “I am a sorcerer.” If Hamnet Thyssen had known he was going to do that, he would have tried to stop him—he didn't want to show these people too much (or anything at all) before he had to. He was briefly relieved to remember that the stranger seemed to know no Raumsdalian. “Maybe I can find a spell to let us understand each other,” Audun went on, as if doing his best to give Count Hamnet heart failure.
Hamnet wasn't the only one who wished Audun would keep his mouth shut. “He's a trusting soul, isn't he?” Ulric Skakki whispered.
“He's a trusting fool, is what he is.” Hamnet didn't bother keeping his voice down.
If Audun Gilli heard him, he paid no attention. That the mammoth-riding strangers could be dangerous didn't seem to cross the wizard's mind.
He just saw them as people with whom he couldn't speak—and maybe as a way to let him seem important to his comrades.
“I'm a sorcerer,” he repeated. This time, he showed the bad-tempered barbarian—so Hamnet reckoned the man, anyhow—just what he meant. “Behold, I shall become invisible,” he said, as if the stranger could understand him (and Hamnet had no sure proof the man could not).
Audun reached into his belt pouch and drew forth an opal. The stone sparkled in the sun, showing glints of red and blue and silver. The wizard began to chant. The opal seemed to draw more and more sunlight to itself as the spell went on. It sparkled brighter and brighter. Before long, it grew too dazzling for Hamnet Thyssen to look at. He had to turn away. And, since he could not look at the stone, he could not look at the man who held it, either. Audun was effectively, if not actually, invisible.
Looking away from Audun Gilli, Count Hamnet looked toward Liv. She watched the Raumsdalian wizard with avid interest. Her lips moved silently, perhaps in a charm of her own that let her go on looking at Audun and the opal after Hamnet Thyssen and the others close by had to avert their gaze.
Then Hamnet glanced in the stranger's direction. He screwed up his face and squinted at Audun—better that, he seemed to say, than to admit he was dazzled. But at last narrowed eyes availed him no more. He had to turn away.
When he did, he shouted back toward his comrades, who still sat on their mammoths. One of them stirred. They were more than a bowshot away, so Hamnet Thyssen could not tell exactly what their wizard or shaman or whatever he was did. Whatever it was, it served his purpose. The opal in Audun Gilli's hand shattered into fragments. The dazzling, coruscating light that flowed from it died.
“You see?” the stranger said in the Bizogot tongue. “You think you are so high and mighty, but in truth you are only a maggot like all your foul kind.”
Audun Gilli stared at his hand, and at the tiny bits of opal still left in it. The mammoth-rider's speech meant nothing to him, because he did not speak the Bizogots' language.
But it meant something to Trasamund. “Who do you call maggot, dog?” the jarl demanded. “I asked if you knew my speech, and you would not give me a yes or a no.”
“I give you nothing,” the stranger said. “It is what you deserve. Soon enough, it is what the Rulers will give all who are not men.”
Trasamund turned red. “You say I am no man?” he growled. The stranger
nodded. “What am I, then?” Trasamund asked, his voice suggesting bloodshed would follow if he didn't like the answer.
The stranger only yawned. If he was trying to be offensive—and no doubt he was—he was succeeding. “Vermin,” he said.
“Why, you flyblown son of a mammoth turd!” Trasamund shouted. He started to climb down from his horse. “By God, I'll kill you for that!”
“Wait, both of you,” Eyvind Torfinn said in the Bizogot tongue. “We are newly met. We should not war. There is no quarrel between our folk.”
“There is a quarrel between this wretch and me,” Trasamund said.
“No, there is no quarrel,” the stranger said. “The Rulers do not quarrel with lesser breeds. How could we? We do not quarrel with dogs, either. I, Parsh”—he jabbed a thumb at his own broad chest—“say this, and I speak the truth. We do not waste our time lying to lesser breeds, either.”
“And I, Eyvind Torfinn, say you are provoking us on purpose.”
Parsh yawned in his face. “I care nothing for what you say. Soon enough, your folk, whoever they are, will bend the knee before the Rulers. If they do not, we will destroy them as easily as Samoth there destroyed your silly wizard's stone.”
“
These
are the people who hold the Golden Shrine?” Ulric Skakki whispered to Count Hamnet. Not much bothered Ulric—or if it did, he didn't let it show—but he sounded scandalized now. Hamnet wasn't surprised; the notion horrified him, too.
“Maybe they don't,” he whispered back. “We don't know where the Golden Shrine is, and we don't know how much land these, uh, Rulers rule. Maybe they just talk big.”
Talk big they did. “You will come to our encampment,” Parsh said. “My chief will want to see what manner of lesser men you are.”
“And if we don't care to come with you?” Eyvind Torfinn asked.
“However you please.” Parsh shrugged broad shoulders. “But in that case, we will have to kill you here.” Now he didn't sound boastful. He sounded matter-of-fact, like a man who had to talk about getting rid of mice.
Hamnet Thyssen eyed the mammoths and the men riding them. He didn't like the idea of fighting warriors aboard such immense animals. They outnumbered the travelers from the far side of the Glacier. And … “Audun!” Hamnet called in Raumsdalian. “How good is their sorcerer?”
“I heard you have more than one kind of animal grunts,” Parsh said in the Bizogot tongue. “Well, that won't do you any good, either.”
“He … is not weak,” Audun Gilli answered reluctantly.
That would have been Hamnet's guess. But he didn't want to have to go with a guess here. He wanted to be sure. Now that he was, he said, “Let's go with them. We need to learn more about them before we decide what to do.”
“When we get to wherever they camp, I will take care of this Parsh,” Trasamund said—in Raumsdalian.
The man from the Rulers caught his name, even if he didn't understand the words surrounding it. His grin displayed strong white teeth. Hamnet Thyssen couldn't decide whether his canines were uncommonly sharp on their own or they'd been filed to points. Neither notion seemed attractive to contemplate.
“We will go with you to your camp,” Eyvind Torfinn told Parsh.
“Oh, what an honor!” Parsh said. “The vole consents to travel with the—” The last word was one in his language. He bowed mockingly. “Thank you, most gracious and generous vole.”
Hamnet Thyssen had disliked Parsh on first sight. The more he saw of the stranger, the more he despised him. He was sure that was exactly the impression Parsh was trying to create. Well, Parsh knew how to get what he wanted, all right.
“To travel with the what?” Earl Eyvind asked.
“With the
tiger
,” Parsh repeated. “The big, striped cat. Are you too ignorant to know of tigers? By the gods, you must be fools indeed!”
“Fools for putting up with your noise,” Trasamund said. He might have been less enamored of Parsh than Count Hamnet was.
“Come,” the man of the Rulers said. “Come now, or be killed where you stand.”

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