Beyond the Gap (42 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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“What happens if we fall in?” Audun Gilli asked the question on Hamnet's mind, and surely on Ulric's, too.
“If we're close to shore, we drag you out, get on dry land, build a big fire fast as we can, and maybe you live,” the Bizogot jarl answered. “If not so close, you freeze before we can do it.” Like a lot of mammoth-herders, he was callous when it came to things nobody could do anything about. He went on, “It won't happen, though. The ice now is as thick as Jesper Fletti's head, and even harder.”
That made both Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen smile. Audun Gilli just nodded seriously and said, “I hope you're right.”
“I'm betting my neck, too,” Trasamund said. The wizard nodded again.
The horses went out onto the ice without much fuss. They placed their
feet carefully. Even with horseshoes—one more thing the Bizogots, who didn't smelt iron, went without—the going was slippery. But Trasamund proved right about one thing—the frozen surface of the lake was more than solid enough to bear the heavy animals' weight. Except for the smoothness, Hamnet couldn't tell he wasn't riding across solid ground; there was no shaking under him to suggest water yet unfrozen lay beneath the ice.
Sudertorp Lake was a long way across. Going around would have been three or four times as long—Hamnet understood as much. But he still felt peculiar with nothing but ice all around. He felt as if he were riding across the top of
the
Glacier.
When he spoke that conceit aloud, Ulric Skakki clapped his mittened hands. “Now there's a sport no one's likely to try soon,” he said. “Men might get to the top, I suppose, but not horses. Your Ferocity!”
“What do you want?” Trasamund often suspected Ulric of laughing up his sleeve at him—and often was right.
But the adventurer sounded serious as he asked, “Have any Bizogots ever tried climbing to the top of the Glacier?”
“Not in my clan,” the jarl answered. “Not so anyone remembers. I've heard that men have tried farther west. I don't think anyone ever made it, though. There are mountains that stick up through the Glacier. Some of them are topped with green in the summertime—but what grows on them no one knows. How would you get to them to find out?”
Count Hamnet whistled softly. That wasn't a small thought. Those mountain peaks above the Glacier—
what
might grow up there? Anything at all. How long had they been there, each by itself? Eons. Could there be people up there, people who did roam the top of the Glacier and had no more hope of coming down than the Bizogots and Raumsdalians did of going up? What would they eat? The top of the Glacier made the Bizogot plains seem paradise by comparison.
“Probably rabbits and lemmings and voles up there,” Ulric said when Hamnet put that into words. “Bound to be birds, too, at least in summer. But I wouldn't want to try to live up there, and that's the truth.” He shivered.
So did Hamnet Thyssen. And then, unmistakably, so did the ice beneath them. Hamnet thought he heard a crackling noise far below. He pointed at Trasamund, not that pointing with a forefinger in a mitten did much good. “You said this couldn't happen!” he shouted at the Bizogot.
“It can't!” Trasamund shouted back, even though it was.
The crackling grew louder. “I don't know about you people, but I'm making
for shore as fast as I can,” Ulric Skakki said, and booted his horse up to a trot and then to a gallop.
That seemed like such a good idea, Count Hamnet did the same thing. So did Trasamund and Liv and Audun Gilli. But the crackling followed them and got louder still, even through the drumming thunder of their horses' hooves. “This is sorcery!” Audun shouted. “Someone is
making
the ice break up!”
“Well, for God's sake make it stop!” Hamnet shouted back. He thought about what the jarl said about going into the icy water. Having thought about it, he wished he hadn't. To die like that … It would end fast, but not fast enough.
And
someone
could only mean
someone from the Rulers
. How did the folk who lived beyond the Glacier track the travelers here? Hamnet had no idea. He wished Audun Gilli or Liv did.
Liv began to chant in the Bizogot tongue. She took her left hand from the reins so she could use it for passes. “I know that spell,” Trasamund said.
“Do you?” Hamnet Thyssen looked back over his shoulder. What he saw made him wish he hadn't. Cracks in the frozen surface of the lake stretched toward him like skeletal arms wanting to hold him in an embrace that would last forever.
“I do, by God,” the jarl answered. “When snow is very dry, it won't hold together for things like huts. That spell clumps it, you might say.”
“Will it do the same for ice?” Hamnet asked.
“I don't know,” Trasamund said. “We're going to find out, don't you think?”
Audun Gilli rode up alongside Liv. He reached out and set a hand on her leg. Most of the time, Hamnet would have killed him for that. Now, though, he understood the wizard wasn't feeling her up. Audun was lending her strength. He didn't know the spell; it wasn't one Raumsdalians were likely to use. But he was doing what he could to help.
Would what he was doing, what Liv was doing, be enough? Count Hamnet looked over his shoulder again. Those grasping cracks were still coming forward as fast as a horse could run—but no faster, or so he thought. So he hoped. He looked ahead. That rise had to be the beginning of solid ground, real ground. It also had to be most of a mile away. Could Liv hold back the sorcery from the north long enough, slow it down enough, to let them all win to safety?
If the horse stumbles under me, I'm a dead man,
Hamnet thought. Even so, he
booted it on as fiercely as he could. If the cracks in the ice caught up with him, he was also dead. When he looked back one more time, he gasped in dismay. He could see black water there where the cracks had widened. No, he didn't want to go into that. “Come on, horse!” he called. “Run, curse you!”
And the horse did run. And its hooves thudded up the slope of Sudertorp Lake's northern bank just as the cracks and black water reached the edge of the lake. Ulric and Trasamund were ahead of him, Liv and Audun just behind.
For a bad moment, he wondered if the spell could tear land asunder as it tore ice. But it
did
stop at the lake's edge. He reined in, breathing almost as hard as his horse was. Then he pulled back his hood in lieu of doffing a cap to salute the shaman and wizard. “I think you saved us,” he said.
Liv was panting, as if she'd run a long way. “I think I did, too,” she said. “And I know—I know—I had help from Audun.”
“You knew the spell,” Audun Gilli told her. “It worked … just well enough.” He looked back toward the cracks in the frozen surface of the lake.
So did Liv. Her shiver had nothing to do with winter on the Bizogot plains. “Just well enough is right,” she said. “I couldn't stop the spell. I didn't have a chance in the world of stopping it. All I could do was slow it down a little.”
“How did the Rulers reach so far?” Hamnet Thyssen asked.
“I don't know!” she blazed, sounding angry at him and herself and the Rulers all at once. “I don't know, I tell you. If I knew, I'd be able to do something like that myself, and I can't. Nobody can.”
“Nobody except them.” Audun Gilli pointed north.
“What does that say?” Count Hamnet had a pretty good notion what it said, but hoped he was wrong. “Does it say we'd better not quarrel with them, or else we'll lose? Does it say we should bend the knee to them, because that's the best we can hope to do? If it does, why are we fighting?”
“We're fighting because we're free, and we're going to stay free,” Trasamund answered before Liv could speak. “If that's not why you're fighting, go back to the Empire, because I want nothing to do with you.”
“I'm not going anywhere,” Hamnet said. “Except north, that is.”
“Next frozen lake we come across, we ought to go around it and not over it,” Ulric Skakki said.
“I wonder if it matters,” Hamnet said. “If the Rulers know where we are, if they can strike as they please, they'll find some other way, some other place, to try to kill us.”
“Foolish to give them the same chance twice,” Ulric insisted.
“Why? They've seen it didn't work, so wouldn't they think it's not worth trying again?” Count Hamnet said. “We haven't seen any more wizards pretending to be short-faced bears after we killed the first one.”
“That man was not pretending.” Liv and Audun Gilli said the same thing at the same time in two different languages.
“Whether he was or not, they only tried it once,” Count Hamnet said stubbornly.
“Are we as safe as we can be now?” Trasamund asked. The only answers the others could give were shrugs. How could they hope to know? But even shrugs satisfied the jarl. “Either we let them scare us, or we don't,” he said. “And if we don't, we keep moving.”
“Spoken like a nomad,” Ulric said.
“I
am
a nomad,” Trasamund answered proudly. “I am on the way back to my clan's grazing grounds. And you had better be, too.” He urged his horse north. The others came with him. Having ridden so far, what else could they do?
 
HAMNET THYSSEN DIDN'T like his dreams. They'd mostly been happy after he and Liv became lovers. The dreams he'd had since returning to the frozen steppe, though, were muddled and grim, and they got worse the farther north he traveled.
When he finally complained about it, Liv looked surprised. “Yours, too?” she said. “Mine have been the same way. I don't care for the omen.”
They soon found they weren't the only ones with ugly dreams. Ulric Skakki made light of his, saying, “What do you expect after you eat musk-ox chitterlings two days running?”
“What's wrong with musk-ox chitterlings? They're good,” Trasamund declared. “And besides, they're a lot better than going empty.”
“I won't argue with the second part of that,” Ulric said. “The first … is a matter of opinion, and it isn't mine.”
Even though Trasamund liked what he was eating, he also had bad dreams. He put it down to worry. “I keep wondering how things are with the clan,” he said. “I imagine everything that could go wrong. Do that long enough and you'll start doing it whether you're awake or asleep.”
Audun Gilli said, “If my dreams are bad, it's because someone is trying to make them bad. And someone is doing it, too.”
“The Rulers?” Hamnet said.
“I can't think of anyone else it's likely to be,” Audun said. “Can you?”
“
I
can't.” Liv's voice was worried, too. “None of the other Bizogots hate the Three Tusk clan enough to bring a sending down on us.”
“What about his Imperial Majesty?” Ulric Skakki, as usual, was full of pleasant ideas.
However much Count Hamnet wished he could, he couldn't dismiss that one out of hand. The most he would say was, “I don't like to think that of Sigvat.”
“Well, neither do I. But I don't like nightmares, either. I don't like waking tireder than I went to sleep,” Ulric said. “How do we know for sure our own wizards weren't cracking the ice on Sudertorp Lake?”
“How do we know? Because they cursed well weren't, that's how,” Audun Gilli said. “I know what our sorcery feels like. I ought to, by God. This had nothing to do with that. It felt strange, strange and strong. Whoever worked that magic has been making spells in a tradition, in a style, separate from ours for … for forever, as best I can tell.”
“He's right,” Liv said. “I know Bizogot shamanry. I know some of what Raumsdalian shamanry feels like. This was different, as different as blackberries and musk oxen.”
Ulric spread his hands. “All right, I was wrong about that. But are you sure I'm wrong about the sending?”
Liv and Audun looked at each other. “I thought it was coming from the north,” she said slowly. Audun Gilli nodded. But Liv went on, “I'm not sure of that, not the way I was with the spell on the lake. I still think it's likely, but I'm not sure.”
“My dreams have been cold. All of them have been cold,” Audun said. Thinking back on it, Hamnet realized his had, too. Audun continued, “That doesn't prove it's the Rulers and not the Emperor, but I'd bet on them.”
“When we get back among the good folk of the Three Tusk clan, we will be troubled no more,” Trasamund said. “By being what they are, they will shield us from this nuisance.”
“What? We're not good folk ourselves?” Ulric asked. “If that's all it takes … We don't have some of the people who came along with us last time here now, you know.” He named no names, which was just as well. Hamnet Thyssen's mind immediately turned to Gudrid.

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