Beyond the Gap (39 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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Liv grunted thoughtfully, the way a man would. She squeezed his hand. “Fair enough. You have a point. I always thought it was because the southern Bizogots were too weak and puny to be worth much themselves, but your soldiers have to be able to fight, too. Do you think they'll be able to fight warriors who ride mammoths?”
It was Hamnet's turn to grunt. “I don't know,” he admitted. “The Bizogots will have to worry about that, too.”
“At least we
know
mammoths,” Liv said.
Hamnet Thyssen started going on, in Raumsdalian, about two Bizogots and two mammoths gossiping about the clan that lived next door to theirs. For a little while, Liv didn't understand what he was doing. When she did get it, she was affronted at first. Then, in spite of herself, she started to giggle. “I didn't mean we know them like
that
,” she said.
In the voice of one of the mammoths—a snooty one—Hamnet said, “Well,
we
don't say we know Bizogots like that, either.” He made an indignant gesture with his arm, as if it were a trunk. Giggling still, Liv hit him. It was a most successful shopping trip.
 
IT WAS SNOWING when Count Hamnet and Liv and Trasamund set out from the imperial palace. That seemed fitting to Hamnet. It also seemed fitting to Trasamund, who said, “Now we go back to a land with proper weather, by God.”
“If you say so, your Ferocity.” Hamnet didn't feel like arguing with him.
One of the stablemen said, “Good fortune go with you, your Grace.”
“Why, thank you, Tyrkir.” Hamnet Thyssen was surprised and touched. “I thought everybody here was glad to get rid of me.”
“Oh, no.” Tyrkir shook his head. “You know how to take care of a horse, and you always treat us like people when you come to the stables. We aren't just—things that can talk, not to you. Not like some I could name.”
Another attendant hissed at him. He left it there. Hamnet found himself wondering as he rode off. Was Tyrkir talking about the Emperor like that? He couldn't very well ask, but it made for an interesting question all the same.
“Nidaros is a fine place to visit. Nidaros is a wonderful place to visit, in fact,” Trasamund said as they rode out, with a smile like a cat's that has fallen into a pitcher of cream. “I wouldn't want to have to stay here, though.”
“Neither would I,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Plainly not, or you wouldn't come with me,” the jarl said.
Count Hamnet shook his head. “I've always thought so. Too many people crowded together. Too many ambitious people crowded together. Whenever I could stay away from the place, I would. Sometimes you can't help it, though.”
“It's not just the people crowded together. It's all the
things
crowded together, too,” Liv said. “The houses and the shops and everything in the shops …” Her shiver had nothing to do with the weather. “It's marvelous, I suppose, but I'd go mad if I stayed here much longer.”
As if to prove her point, they got stuck behind a wagon that had overturned on the icy road, spilling sacks of beans or barley or something of the sort. The driver tried to keep people from darting in and stealing the sacks, but some would distract him while others did the taking.
“We Bizogots don't steal inside the clan,” Trasamund said loftily.
“Why do these people do it?” Liv asked.
“Maybe to sell what they grab. More likely because they're hungry and they need something to eat,” Hamnet answered.
“Here, some have too much and many have not enough. That is not good,” Liv said. “Among the Bizogots, if someone goes hungry, it's because everyone in the clan goes hungry. That way is better, I think.”
“Maybe so,” Hamnet said. “Things are more equal among you—you
'
re right. But you've seen we can do things you can't.”
“Oh, yes.” The shaman nodded. “We talked about the price you pay for being able to do them. This is another part of that price, wouldn't you say?”
Although Hamnet Thyssen hadn't thought of it like that, he found himself nodding, too. “Yes, I'd have to say it is.”
“Let's turn around and take another road,” Trasamund said. “Otherwise, we'll be here till they steal the wheels off that poor fool's wagon and the tail off his horse.”
“I can get us to the north gate on side streets, I think,” Hamnet said. “We'll have to do some zigzagging, but we would anyway.” A boulevard that ran straight north would have given the Breath of God a running start. Raumsdalian winters were mitder—or at least less regularly frigid—than the ones the Three Tusk clan knew, but people still had to do all they could to fight the cold.
Hamnet would have embarrassed himself if he'd got lost in the maze of lanes and alleys that sprouted from the main road. He knew more than a little relief when he got back onto it. With luck, neither of the Bizogots with him noticed.
If it was snowing here, what was it like up by the Glacier?
Do I really want to know?
he wondered. He shrugged. Ulric Skakki had gone that way, and gone by himself, without the Bizogots' knowing.
What he can do, I can do, by God
. Hamnet Thyssen muttered under his breath. He still wished Ulric were coming along. The adventurer was a good man to have beside you when you ran into trouble—or when it ran into you.
He pointed. “There's the gate.”
“So it is.” Trasamund nodded in satisfaction. “On the way home at last. Even getting out of Nidaros, getting into the countryside here, will feel like an escape. It's not the plains, but I won't feel closed in all the time, either, the way I do now.”
“Closed in. Yes, by God!” Liv said. “When you leave the tents, there's a whole big world around you, and you can see it. When you leave a house, what do you see? More walls!” She shuddered. “It's like being tied up, like being caged.”
“All what you're used to,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “I told you before—out on your plains, sometimes I feel as if there's too much nothing around me.” He mimed curling up into a little ball.
The gate guards asked their names. When the sergeant heard them, he said, “Oh, you're
that
lot. Yes, you can go through. By all we've heard, it's good riddance to the lot of you.”
“We love you, too,” Hamnet said mildly. He
had
offended Sigvat, then. Well, too bad. And as a matter of fact, it
was
too bad. Trasamund said something even more unflattering in the Bizogot language. Luckily, none of the guards understood him.
Liv really did sigh with relief when they put the gray stone walls of Nidaros behind them. “Free!” she said, and threw her arms wide. Her horse twitched its ears, doubtless wondering why its rider was acting so strange.
Hamnet Thyssen wondered why two horsemen—tough-tooking rogues, he thought, peering at them through the swirling snow—sat waiting by the side of the Great North Road. Was Sigvat angry enough to set bravos on him to make sure he didn't get to the Bizogot country? He wouldn't have thought so, but … When he got a little closer, his jaw dropped. “Ulric!” he said. “Audun! What the demon are you doing here?”
U
LRIC SKAKKI TILTED back his head so he could look down his long, straight nose at Hamnet. “You're more persuasive than you have any business being, Thyssen,” he said severely. “If you set your mind to it, you could probably sell snow to the Bizogots.”
“I don't need to sell it.” Hamnet held out a mittened hand till a few flakes fell on it. “It's right here. And I'm glad to see you, even if I didn't think I'd put any horse traders out of business.” He sketched a salute to the wizard. “I'm glad to see you, too, Audun—you'd best believe I am. What made you decide to come?”
Audun Gilli's nondescript features lit up when anyone paid attention to him. “I thank you, your Grace. What made me decide to come? Ulric here kidnapped me.”
For a moment, Count Hamnet believed him. Then Ulric Skakki laughed. “Well, it's nice to know I'm innocent of
something
, anyway. We got to talking after Eyvind Torfinn's gruesome bash, and we decided we'd do better going north than staying here after all. Yes, curse you, you were right. There—I've said it. Now how much more snow are you going to sell me?”
“You
will
remember that I am the jarl of the Three Tusk clan?” Trasamund thumped his chest with his right fist and glowered in turn at Ulric and Audun.
“Yes, your Ferocity,” Audun said. He wasn't likely to raise that kind of trouble any which way.
Ulric pointed toward Hamnet Thyssen. “Why aren't you thundering at him?”
“He already understands,” Trasamund answered. “Do you?”
“I don't want to be jarl. I have trouble enough telling myself what to do,” Ulric Skakki answered. “You're welcome to the job, as far as I'm concerned.”
“I did not think you wanted to lead my clan. You are no witling. You know they would not follow you.” Trasamund gave Ulric his fiercest stare. “But when you are among my clansfolk, will you follow me? That is what I must know.”
Ulric thought hard before saying, “Unless I think you're wrong enough about something to make a real mess of it.”
“That's not good enough,” the Bizogot said.
“Youd better take it,” Ulric Skakki advised. “It's as much as you'll get, and a lot more than I'd give most people.”
Trasamund went right on looking fierce. Hamnet Thyssen could have told him that was the wrong way to go about intimidating Ulric. Luckily, Hamnet didn't need to tell him; he figured it out for himself. “I would kill any Bizogot who was so insolent to me,” he snarled.
“Well, you're welcome to try,” Ulric Skakki said politely.
Trasamund muttered into his thick, curly beard. Then he booted his horse up the Great North Road. So did Liv. So did Count Hamnet and Audun Gilli. And so did Ulric Skakki. And if he had a smile on his face, he often had a smile on his face. He wasn't openly mocking Trasamund—not so the jarl could prove it, anyhow.
For the first hour or so, Trasamund rode as if trying to shake off pursuers. Then he seemed to decided Ulric really was on his side, or would be if he let him. He slowed down. That had to relieve his horse; the Bizogot was a big, beefy man, and couldn't have been easy to carry.
Liv pointed to little sparrowlike birds hopping around on the snow-covered ground off to the side of the road. “Larkspurs!” she said. “So this is where they go during the winter.”
“I suppose so.” Hamnet thought for a few heartbeats. “We did see them up in the Bizogot country in summertime, didn't we?” He hadn't paid much attention to the birds. They were too wary to be easily caught, and too small to be worth eating unless a large batch of them were baked in a pie or something of the sort.
“We saw them beyond the Glacier, too,” Liv said. “Do those birds fly through the Gap to come here? Do they fly over the Glacier? Or do they winter in the lands we don't know, the lands to the far southwest?”
There was an interesting question. “I don't know,” Hamnet admitted. “How would you go about finding out?”
“You might be able to enchant a bird in the summer and then use the spell to see where it went in wintertime,” Liv answered. “Of course, something might eat it between the time you cast the spell and the time you tried to check it. And you might not be able to tell anything if the larkspurs beyond the Glacier do go to that other land. God only knows how far away it is.”
That was liable to be literally true. No man on this side of the Glacier knew; that was certain. Maybe the Rulers did. And, come to that, maybe the larkspurs did. “
You
might be able to enchant a bird in the summer,” Hamnet said. “I never could.” He paused, then added, “You enchanted me.”
Liv blushed and shook her head. “That was no magic, not the way you mean. It was … the two of us.”
“Well, good.” Hamnet had always believed that was so. But he'd believed things about Gudrid that didn't turn out to be true. Could he stand it if he and Liv went sour?
Slowly, he nodded. He could stand their going sour. That was the chance you took, the risk you had to accept. Life wasn't perfect; neither were people. If Liv lied to him, though … He would be a long time getting over that, if he ever did.
He didn't think she would. He hoped she wouldn't. And, right now, what else could he do? On he rode, after Trasamund, toward the Bizogot country, toward war with the Rulers, away from Nidaros, away from the Empire, away from everything he held dear. Sometimes you had to break the patterns that had run your life—and run it into the ground. Was he doing that here? Again, he thought so. He hoped so. Whether he was right or not … sooner or later, he'd find out.
 
STOPPING AT THE first serai north of Nidaros made him nervous. He breathed a silent—or maybe a not so silent—sigh of relief when there was no sign of Gudrid in the common room. The only women in the place were barmaids and slatterns.
The men in there fell into two groups: merchants on their way down to Nidaros, and merchants on their way up from Nidaros. They ate and drank together, gossiping and doing their best to find out what lay ahead. They all eyed the party with two Bizogots in it with curiosity they hardly bothered to
hide. Hamnet Thyssen supposed he accounted for some of that curiosity, too. He might have been a great many things, but few men would ever have accused him of buying and selling things for a living. Everything about him, from his face to the very way he walked, said he had no compromise in him.
He and his comrades squeezed their way onto the benches at a long table near the hearth. Merchants sat closer together to make room for them. Half a dozen men asked one of two questions—“Where are you from?” and “Where are you bound?”—at more or less the same time.
Before answering, Trasamund shouted an order for a fat roast goose. A passing barmaid waved to show she heard. “And mead!” Trasamund added. “Plenty of mead, by God!” The woman waved again.
“We're out of Nidaros, heading for the lands of the Three Tusk clan and the Gap,” Ulric Skakki said.
That couldn't have been better calculated to make everyone else blink and gape. “At this season of the year?” asked a grizzled merchant who found his tongue sooner than the rest. “What will you do there? Besides freeze, I mean?”
Ulric looked not at Trasamund but at Hamnet Thyssen.
Why not?
Hamnet thought.
The more who know, the better. If Sigvat doesn't like it, too bad for him.
“Some of you will have heard the Gap has melted through,” he said. “It's true. There's land beyond the Glacier. There are folk beyond the Glacier, too—the Rulers, they call themselves. They're warlike and dangerous. Chances are they'll try to come down into the country we know. We aim to try to stop them.”
“You by yourselves?” The gray-bearded trader laughed raucously.
Audun Gilli murmured to himself. Count Hamnet thought his chant sounded familiar. He was right, too. A moment later, the merchant's plate grew a face that looked like a twisted version of his own. “
You
wouldn't have the ballocks to come along, that's certain sure,” it jeered.
He stared at it. So did several of the men around him. Their laughs were even coarser than his had been. He picked up his pewter mug and slammed it down on the plate, which shattered like the cheap earthenware it was—or had been.
“You'll pay for that, by God!” a barmaid said. “You can't go breaking crockery for the fun of it.”
“It called me a coward!” the trader exclaimed.
The barmaid rolled her eyes. “I didn't figure you for one who saw snakes
and demons when he put down too much ale,” she said. “Only shows I'm not as smart as I thought I was, doesn't it?” She strutted away, swiveling her hips in magnificent scorn.
Another merchant turned to Hamnet and said, “Next thing you'll tell me is that you went and found the Golden Shrine off beyond the Glacier.”
“No.” He shook his head. “We looked, but we didn't see any sign of it. It may be there, or it may not. I can't tell you one way or the other.”
“I'd like to go back and look again,” Ulric Skakki added. “I didn't believe there was any such thing till I went beyond the Glacier. I didn't believe you
could
go beyond the Glacier till I went and did it.”
“Neither did I,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Nor I,” Trasamund rumbled. “I didn't know what would happen when I rode up into the narrowest part of the Gap the first time. But I kept going, and I found there was another side after all.”
“What about the—what did you call them?—the Rulers, that was it?” yet another trader asked.
“Yes, the Rulers,” Count Hamnet said. “What about them? They're dangerous, that's what. For one thing, they ride mammoths to war. They carry lancers and archers aboard the beasts. For another, they're stronger wizards than any we have on this side of the Glacier.”
“That's so,” Audun Gilli said quietly.
“It is,” Liv agreed in her deliberate, newly acquired Raumsdalian.
“The other reason the Rulers are dangerous is that they're sure God or whatever they worship wants them to go out and rule all the other folk around them,” Ulric Skakki said. “They don't want to talk to other folk. They just want to tell them what to do. And they may be tough enough to get away with it, too.”
“Huh!” the trader said. “They haven't bumped into Raumsdalians before.”
“Or Bizogots.” Trasamund's tone and the warning gleam in his eye challenged the merchant to argue with him.
The man didn't rise to the challenge. “Or Bizogots,” he said quickly. Trasamund subsided.
“Why isn't the Emperor doing anything about these Rulers?” somebody said.
“You would have to ask his Majesty about that.” But Hamnet couldn't leave it there. “I wish he would have seemed more interested,” he added.
“You … talked to him?” the merchant said slowly.
“I talked to him.” Hamnet's voice was hard as stone, cold as the snowdrifts outside. He waited to see if the merchant called him a liar, and how. Whether the man went on breathing after that depended on such things.
Before the trader could speak, Ulric Skakki said, “This is the famous Count Hamnet Thyssen. If he says a thing is so, you may rely on it. You'd better rely on it.”
Some of the men at the long table had plainly never heard of Hamnet Thyssen, famous or not. To others, he was famous for the wrong thing. “He's the one whose wife …” one of them whispered to his neighbor, not quite quietly enough. The trader who'd asked if Hamnet had spoken to the Emperor didn't challenge him. Part of him was relieved, part disappointed. Sometimes fighting was simpler than talking.
“What can we do about the, uh, Rulers?” a merchant asked.
That meant more talking. Count Hamnet sighed. Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn't. “Spread the word,” he said. “The more people who know trouble's coming, the more who know what kind of trouble it is, the better off we'll be.” He could hope that was true, anyhow.
He paid the seraikeeper extra for a private room with Liv. “Do you think they believed you?” she asked as they got ready for bed. “Or was it all another traveler's tale to them?”
“Some of them believe some of it, anyhow.” Hamnet smiled at his convoluted answer. “Maybe spreading the news will do some good. Maybe some more people will ask Sigvat questions he doesn't want to hear. That may help, too. Who knows? Who knows if anything we do means anything at all?”
Liv lay down on the bed. The frame creaked under her weight. “I've got used to sleeping soft,” she said. “It won't be so easy to lie on a mat or wrapped in a hide on the ground when we get back to the Bizogot country.”
Hamnet lay down beside her. “Well, then,” he said, “you can always lie on me instead.”

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