Beyond the Gap (32 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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“That's right.” Trasamund nodded. “He doesn't have to move around so much, so he thinks he's better than the people who do.”
“If I thought not moving around made me better, would I have gone beyond the Glacier?” Ulric asked. “Twice?” he asked to himself.
“But you are a man of sense,” the Bizogot jarl said. “Riccimir is an overstuffed mammoth turd.”
“What does he call you?” Hamnet Thyssen asked.
“Who cares?” Trasamund answered, which might have meant he truly didn't care or might have meant he couldn't see the boot might fit on the other foot as well. Hamnet would have bet on the latter; Trasamund was better at seeing other people's weaknesses than at noting his own.
The travelers came upon the Leaping Lynxes' winter encampment, their wandering encampment, a day after the pause by Sudertorp Lake. It seemed like any other Bizogot camp—but, then again, it didn't. The mammoth-herders were doing the same sort of things as all their fellows did, and doing them about as well as the other Bizogots did. But every other clan
Hamnet Thyssen had seen took those labors altogether for granted. The Leaping Lynxes seemed faintly embarrassed at living in tents and following the herds. They knew another way of life. They not only knew it, they preferred it.
When Riccimir gave his guests roasted musk-ox meat, he said, “It's not fat goose, my friends, but it's what we have.”
“Nothing wrong with musk ox,” Trasamund said, his lips shiny with grease.
“Nothing wrong with it, no,” the jarl of the Leaping Lynxes agreed. “But it's not as fine a flesh as waterfowl. I'm not just speaking of geese, mind you, though they're common and they're easy to take. But when you eat snipe and woodcock through the fat season of the year, you aren't so happy with the leaner days.” He shrugged broad shoulders. “It can't be helped. I know it can't be helped—it's the way God made things work for us. But I wish it were different, and I don't know a Leaping Lynx who doesn't.”
“You like living soft,” Trasamund said, without rancor. Hamnet Thyssen wouldn't have put it that way. He would have said the Leaping Lynxes took advantage of their springtime abundance. Maybe those amounted to the same thing. He wasn't sure, and he would have bet Trasamund wasn't, either.
As for Riccimir, he replied, “What if we do? You'd live the way we do, too, if only you could. Will you call me a liar?”
“No,” Trasamund said. If he'd said yes, it would have meant a fight to the death. But he went on, “Be careful how soft you get, or some other clan will drive you away from Sudertorp Lake. Then you'll go back to wandering all through the year, if you're lucky enough to hold together as a clan.”
“We've been attacked before,” Riccimir said. “We still hold our lands. Anyone who ever tried to take them came to grief. What does that tell you?”
“That you've done what you needed to do—so far,” Trasamund said. “But you have to win every single time. If you lose even once, you're ruined.”
“And for which Bizogot clan isn't that so?” Riccimir said. Trasamund had no answer for him.
Neither did Hamnet Thyssen. What Riccimir said spoke of the differences between the Bizogots and the Raumsdalian Empire. The riches of Sudertorp Lake in springtime let the Leaping Lynx clan approach civilization, but it was still as vulnerable as any other clan. One defeat meant disaster. The Empire could draw upon more resources. Losing one fight wouldn't—or wouldn't have to—mean collapse for it.
What about the Rulers?
Hamnet wondered.
How much in the way of failure can they stand
? Before too long, he worried that he would find out.
 
DOWN TOWARD THE tree line, where the frozen plains ended and forests began, the Bizogots yielded to the Raumsdalian Empire. Hamnet Thyssen knew how tenuous Raumsdalian rule over the northern part of the Empire was. In the north, everything was tenuous; there wasn't enough food and weren't enough people to make life as relatively safe and secure and rich as it was down by Nidaros.
Trasamund kept looking back over his shoulder and shaking his head. Even when the weather was clear, the Glacier had fallen below the horizon. “Doesn't seem natural,” he said. “The north looks naked.”
The cold wind that blew down from the Glacier left Hamnet Thyssen in no doubt that it hadn't gone away. He said as much, adding, “It won't, either, not for many, many generations.”
“Even to think that it might one day is as strange as thinking God might get old and die,” Trasamund said.
Eyvind Torfinn rode close enough to hear him. “Some men in the Empire have been known to wonder about that, your Ferocity,” he said. “They argue that everything else grows old and dies, that even the Glacier is falling back and may leave us one day, so why should the same not hold true for God?”
“Really?” Trasamund said. “What do you do with men who ask things like that?”
“Yes, what?” Hamnet Thyssen echoed. “I don't remember hearing about men with those ideas, and I'd think it would kick up a scandal.”
“It did,” Earl Eyvind answered. “This was about a hundred and twenty years ago, you understand, in the reign of Palnir I. If I remember rightly, one of the philosophers got fifty lashes, the other two got twenty-five apiece, and they were all exiled to a town in the far southwest, where they could watch ground sloths and glyptodonts and hope the Manches didn't nip in and cut their throats.”
“I'm surprised they got away with their lives,” Hamnet said.
“Palnir had a name for being merciful,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “He told them he wouldn't kill them himself—he would leave that to God.”
“You Raumsdalians are softer than the Leaping Lynxes,” Trasamund said. “But what's a glyptodont?”
“Do you know what an armadillo is?” Hamnet Thyssen said. The Bizogot shook his head. Hamnet wasn't surprised; armadillos and their bigger
cousins liked warm weather and didn't come up anywhere near Nidaros. He went on, “Imagine a pot with a long handle. Turn it upside down. Make the handle its tail—sort of a bony club. Give it a head and four short legs, also armored in bone. Make it ten feet long from nose to tailtip, and three or four feet high. It's not very bright, and it only eats plants, but a sabertooth will break his fangs before he can puncture it.”
“You're having me on,” Trasamund said. “That's the craziest beast I ever heard of.”
“No, he's telling the truth,” Eyvind Torfinn said.
“I don't believe it,” Trasamund said stubbornly. “You figure you've got a fool of a Bizogot here, and you think you can tell him funny stories and have a laugh afterward.”
“Go ask Ulric if you don't believe me,” Hamnet said.
The Bizogot jarl shook his head again. “Not me. You probably all cooked it up amongst yourselves beforehand.” He rode away, his head still going back and forth. Not much later, though, Hamnet watched him riding along next to Jesper Fletti. Trasamund might have thought Hamnet wouldn't conspire with Gudrid's chief bodyguard—and if he did, he was right. By Jesper's gestures, he knew what a glyptodont was. Trasamund threw his hands in the air.
Hamnet Thyssen began looking for border stations. They were thinly scattered, and wouldn't have been easy to spot if not for the smoke that rose from them all through the winter. A lot of Bizogots skirted the stations when they came down into the Empire. Some succeeded in smuggling their goods or themselves into Raumsdalia. Others ran into customs inspectors in the small northern towns and paid duty there.
A smoke plume led the travelers to a border post. The guards wore furs that made them look like Bizogots. One of them stared at the newcomers and said, “If you're not the raggediest-looking bunch of buggers I've ever seen, bugger me with a pine cone if I can think of who is.”
“If you're not a disgrace to the uniform you aren't wearing, God's more merciful than I thought,” Hamnet Thyssen retorted.
Hearing unaccented, educated, angry Raumsdalian burst from the mouth of the shaggy ragamuffin in front of him gave the border guard pause. “Uh, who are you, anyway?” he asked, his own voice suddenly much less scornful.
“You might have wondered sooner. I am Count Hamnet Thyssen. With my companions here, I've traveled beyond the Glacier, and I have come back to tell the late—but to the Emperor, not to the likes of you.”
The guard's jaw dropped. “You're the people who went beyond the Glacier? You really did?” He turned to his comrades. “God let them come back, Vigfus!”
“Somebody did, anyhow,” Vigfus allowed. “Or so they say. Do you suppose we ought to believe 'em?”
“If you do not believe Trasamund, jarl of the Three Tusk clan of Bizogots, God may not punish you,” Trasamund said. “God may not, but I will.” He made as if to draw his great two-handed sword. “Do you call me a liar? Who will mourn for you when you die? Anyone? Or will your flesh feed foxes and teratorns?”
“Keep your hair on, pal,” said Vigfus, who'd surely heard Bizogot bluster before. “If you really made it through the Gap, more power to you.”
“We were supposed to keep an eye out for you people, but I never figured you'd come through here,” the other guard said. “What are the odds?”
“Whatever the odds may be, here we are,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “We have done much, we have traveled far, and we have seen strange things. His Majesty Sigvat II needs to hear of them as soon as we get to Nidaros.”
Vigfus and his friend looked at each other. At the same time, they asked, “Did you find the Golden Shrine?”
“Well, no,” Eyvind Torfinn answered. “But that doesn't mean it isn't there. We'll go back one day, and maybe we'll find it then.”
“We did find white bears, and deer that men ride like horses, and beasts like lions, only without manes and with stripes,” Hamnet said.
“And we found men who ride mammoths,” Trasamund said. “By God, I will ride a mammoth before too much time goes by. I
will
.” He folded his right hand into a fist and brought it down hard on his thigh.
“Men who
ride
mammoths?” said the guard whose name they didn't know. “Are they very brave or very stupid?”
“Yes,” answered Ulric Skakki, who'd kept quiet till then.
“What's that supposed to mean?” the guard asked.
“What it says,” Ulric told him. “I'm like Count Hamnet here—I usually say what I mean. People have a better chance of understanding me when I do. The Rulers are very brave. And, by God, they're very stupid, too.”
“The Rulers? What kind of name is that?” Vigfus said.
Hamnet Thyssen, Ulric Skakki, Eyvind Torfinn, and Trasamund all shrugged together. “It's what they call themselves, or how they say it when they use the Bizogot language,” Hamnet said. “I don't know what you want us to do about it.”
Gudrid rode up to the guards. “Why are you wasting our time here?” she demanded. “Why don't you let us go back to civilization?”
Vigfus looked at her. It wasn't the way a man looked at a pretty woman. With half a year's grime on them, none of the travelers was pretty any more. “Who the demon does she think she is?” the border guard asked no one in particular.
“She thinks she's mywife,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “She's right, too.” Did Gudrid think that? Hamnet had his doubts. When she felt like it, maybe she did.
“Huh!” Vigfus said. “She's a mouthy one, she is. You should belt her more often, teach her to behave.”
Gudrid's squeal was pure rage. “You are speaking to, and of, an earl's wife!” she said shrilly. “Show the proper respect!”
“Oh, shut up,” Vigfus said. Gudrid's jaw dropped; that wasn't what she'd had in mind. She was used to getting her way with men with a wave of the hand and a wink of the eye. Not here, not now. Vigfus went on, “I'm a guard at the most godforsaken post in the Empire. What can you do to me that's worse? Send me to prison somewhere farther south? I'll get down on my knees and kiss your hand, or whatever else you want kissed, if you do. But the way things are, I'll talk however I cursed well please.”
She stared at him. Some men in the Empire were strong enough to take no notice when she said something. She'd never imagined a man who could be weak enough to do the same thing, and neither had Hamnet Thyssen.
“Maywe pass on?” he asked.
Simple respect was the only thing the guards were looking for. “Yes, your Grace,” replied the one who wasn't named Vigfus. “Pass on to the south. Tell the folk there what you've told us. See if they believe you any more than we do.”
With that less than ringing endorsement, Hamnet did ride south with the rest of the travelers. Once they got out of earshot of the border post, Ulric Skakki said, “By now, I hardly care whether I tell the Emperor what we've seen or not. All I care about is finding a town with a bathhouse. Did you see those guards? Some time not too long ago, they had baths. Both of them! Isn't that something?” He scratched.

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