Beyong the Gap g-1 Read online

  "Who do you think you are, to tell me what I am?" Jesper demanded, glowering at Hamnet. "And who do you think you are, to tell me what to do?"

  "I'm a man who recognizes fools. I'd better-I've been one often enough." Hamnet looked toward Gudrid as he answered. She deliberately looked away from him. He hadn't expected anything else. "As for telling you what to do," he went on, "well, let's see. For one thing, I outrank you. You should say, 'Who do you think you are, your Grace?' For another, I've been up here in the north before. Have you? And, for a third, I hope I know better than to get any wizard angry at me."

  Jesper Fletti glowered and spluttered. Whatever he was feeling, he didn't try to put it into words. Hamnet Thyssen had landed too heavy a load of truth on him. He looked away from Hamnet, too. Gudrid did it with more panache.

  "I thank you, your Grace," Audun Gilli said in a low voice.

  "You're welcome. I've seen you aren't lazy or weak," Count Hamnet answered. "If he asked if you were drunk or hungover, I would have had less to say to him."

  Audun's mouth tightened. "Don't you think saying something like that might make a wizard angry at you?"

  "I hope not," Hamnet replied. "A man who gets angry at the truth will have a hard time in life, don't you think?"

  "It could be so," Audun Gilli answered after considering the question longer and more seriously than Hamnet had looked for. "Yes, it could be so. Of course, you might say the same about a man who gets drunk whenever he finds the chance."

  "Yes, you might," Hamnet agreed. "Far be it from me to deny that. But there's a simple answer, don't you think? An obvious answer, too."

  "For almost every problem, there is an answer that is simple, obvious- and wrong," Audun said. Hamnet Thyssen pondered that, then inclined his head. The wizard left him with no good comeback.

  Trasamund got down from his horse, tossing the reins to Ulric Skakki. He walked over to the dire wolf and butchered it. "Anyone but me want a chunk of raw liver?" he asked, holding up the dripping purplish organ. Plainly, he was ready to laugh at effete Raumsdalians when they told him no.

  Gudrid gulped. When she looked away this time, she wasn't acting or posing; she was truly revolted. But Audun Gilli said, "Give me some. What better way to take in the spirit of this land?"

  "I'll eat some, too," Hamnet said. "The dire wolf would have gnawed my liver. The least I can do is pay him back."

  "Now that-that is spoken like a Bizogot, by God!" Trasamund said. Count Hamnet knew the jarl meant it for praise. If it felt like an insult, he could keep that to himself.

  "I'll eat wolf liver. Why not? It's meat," Ulric Skakki said. He might well have eaten it before, but he didn't want Trasamund to know this wasn't his first visit to the frozen plains.

  Trasamund turned to Eyvind Torfinn. "What about you, your Splendor?"

  "With respect, your Ferocity, I will decline," Eyvind answered. "I have my own land, and do not wish to become mystically attuned to this one. Besides, unless starving and without choice I prefer my meat cooked."

  The jarl took it in good part, saying, "Well, you know your own mind, anyway." He ate his gobbet with every sign of relish, then passed another one to Audun Gilli-the wizard was the first Raumsdalian volunteer.

  Audun screwed up his face and stuffed the bloody meat into his mouth. He chewed. "Could be worse," he said once he got it down.

  'At least that wasn't, 'Tastes like chicken,'" Ulric Skakki murmured.

  Dire-wolf liver didn't taste like chicken. Hamnet Thyssen had no time to point that out to Ulric, for Trasamund handed him his own chunk of still-warm meat. He ate it without thinking about what he was doing, and swallowed it without too much trouble. When he saw Gudrid’s mocking expression, he smiled back at her with his mouth still full. That made her turn away in a hurry.

  Ulric Skakki ate his ragged slice of liver without any fuss. Jesper Fletti and the rest of Gudrid's guardsmen declined to partake. They were less smooth about it than Earl Eyvind, but Trasamund didn't harry them on account of that. He'd got three Raumsdalians to try his delicacy, which was probably three more than he expected.

  Trasamund went back to his butchery. He wrapped the meat in the dire wolf's hide and tied it on a pack horse. The animal snorted and rolled its eyes at the scent of blood and the smell of dire wolf, but did not try to bolt. Trasamund left the wolf's entrails steaming on the ground.

  "Let's go," he said. "Maybe the others will come back to feed on their friend."

  "I think not." Ulric Skakki pointed up into the sky. "Are those just ordinary vultures, or are they teratorns?"

  "Teratorns." Eyvind answered before Trasamund could. "You can tell by the pattern of white and black under the wings."

  "By the size, too, when they get lower," Trasamund added. "But they won't, not while we're hanging around the offal."

  Sure enough, when the travelers rode north, the three or four teratorns spiraled down out of the sky to squabble over the bounty Trasamund left behind. They were enormous birds, with a wingspan as wide as two tall men. And down in the south, Hamnet Thyssen had heard, there were bigger teratorns still, their grotesque naked heads wattled and striped in shades of blue and yellow. All vultures were ugly. Those southern teratorns seemed to take ugliness to an almost surreal level, one where even grotesqueness took on a beauty all its own.

  "Do Bizogots also eat teratorn meat?" Eyvind Torfinn asked.

  "If we have to. If we are starving. Otherwise . . ." Trasamund shook his head. "It is a foul bird. It eats filth and carrion. Its flesh tastes of its food, the same as any vulture's." He made a nasty face. Did that mean he was once- or more than once- hungry enough to have to eat flesh like that? Hamnet Thyssen wondered, but he didn't ask.

  Like the totem animal for which it was named, the Vole clan was small. But the jarl of the clan, a burly fellow named Wacho, had more than his share of pride. "Oh, yes, voles are little beasts," he said. "But the frozen plain would die if not for them. Who feeds the weasels? Who feeds the foxes? Who feeds the lynxes? Who feeds the snowy owls? The vole. Give the vole its due."

  Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine someone down in Nidaros singing the praises of the house mouse. He couldn't do it. For one thing, folk in Nidaros had plenty of other things to worry about. For another, the Bizogots were more closely attuned to nature than his own people. To Raumsdalians, house mice were nuisances, to be trapped or poisoned or hunted with cats. To Bizogots, voles were part of the vast web of life that spread across their land.

  Who was right? Who was wrong? Hamnet shrugged. Life for the mammoth-herders was harder than it was in the Empire. By the nature of things, it had to be. He’d grown up in the Raumsdalian way himself, and he preferred it. But sometimes the question was one of difference rather than right and wrong. He thought that was so here.

  As usual when a clan guested the travelers, they feasted till they neared the bursting point. "I think the idea is to give us a layer of blubber like a mammoths," Ulric Skakki said, gnawing the meat from yet another musk-ox rib.

  "That's all very well," Hamnet said, "but if we don't fit into our clothes, the blubber won't do us enough good to make up for it."

  Audun Gilli started to say something. He wasn't a big man, but he had a respectable pile of bones in front of him. Before he could speak, someone new came into Wacho's tent-a fantastically dressed Bizogot whose jacket and trousers were elaborately embroidered and fringed, so that he seemed almost to be wearing a pelt. The resemblance was only strengthened by the bear claws at his wrists and ankles, and by the bearskin mask now pushed back from his face.

  "This is Witigis," Wacho said. "He is the shaman of the Voles."

  Witigis's gaze was quick and darting, more the look of a wild animal than a man. Shamans said they had closer ties to God than Raumsdalian priests dreamed of winning. Hamnet Thyssen wondered if Witigis was a holy man or simply a madman. His vacant features didn't promise much in the way of brains.

  But when his gaze fell on Audun Gilli, he stiffened. So did the R
aumsdalian wizard. They stared at each other. Without looking as he took it, Witigis grabbed a rib and started chewing on the meat. Grease glistened around his mouth. His eyes never left Audun Gilli's.

  "Like calls to like," Ulric whispered.

  "Maybe," Count Hamnet answered. "But if that's so, which one of them did you just insult?" Ulric laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.

  Witigis began to sing. It wasn't an ordinary song, even an ordinary Bizogot song. It had words, in the mammoth-herders' tongue, but they weren't words that made sense, at least not to Count Hamnet. It also had hums and growls and barks and sounds that perhaps should have been words but weren't, not in any tongue Hamnet knew.

  And as Witigis sang, he … changed. At first, Hamnet Thyssen rubbed his eyes, not sure what he was seeing. But there could be no doubt. Witigis's fringed regalia became real fur. The bear claws he wore were no longer ornaments. They grew from his fingers and toes as if they always had. After he pulled the mask down over his blue-eyed visage, his mouth opened wide to show fangs that never sprouted from any merely human jaw. Nor did his growl spring from any human throat. There he crouched on all fours-an undersized but otherwise perfect short-faced bear.

  Wacho looked proud of his shaman. Trasamund nodded as if to say he had seen the like but admired the performance. The Raumsdalians all seemed a little uneasy, or more than a little.

  All but Audun Gilli. He too began to sing, a calm song that might almost have been a lullaby. Count Hamnet had nearly as much trouble understanding him as he had with Witigis. Audun's words were Raumsdalian, but in a dialect so old that it came close to being another language. Hamnet needed so long to grasp one bit that several others would slip past him, uncomprehended, till he seized on another small clump of familiar sounds.

  Eyvind Torfinn nodded. Whatever the wizard was singing, it was no mystery to the old earl. Hamnet Thyssen didn't suppose that should have surprised him. Any man who went searching for the secrets of the Golden Shrine would naturally come to know the old, the all but forgotten.

  Audun sang on. And, little by little, the shaman lost his bearishness. His fur coat became embroidery and fringes once more. The claws he wore were only ornaments, not parts of himself. An ordinary hand-dirty, but ordinary-pushed back the bearskin mask that was only a mask. And under it lay his face. When he opened his mouth to speak, he showed a man's ordinary face.

  But Hamnet Thyssen knew what he had seen. He knew it was true transformation, too, not illusion. He didn't know how he knew, but he did.

  "Yes, you too have the power," Witigis told Audun.

  Audun Gilli did not speak the Bizogot language. No one would ever have known it from the way he inclined his head. In Raumsdalian, he answered, ''Your strength is not small." Maybe he understood with the heart if not with the head.

  Witigis had given no sign of knowing Raumsdalian. "Nor is yours," he said now, in his own tongue. The two of them, the barbarian with the bear in his soul and the drunken product of a formidable civilization, bowed respectfully to each other.

  "Well, well," Wacho said. "I have never seen Witigis brought out of bearness save when he himself wished it."

  "How do you know he did not, your Ferocity?" Ulric Skakki asked.

  The jarl sent him a sharp glance, as if to chide him for joking about a serious business. But Ulric was not joking, and Wacho saw as much. "A point, southern man," the Bizogot said. "Yes, a point. How do I know? I do not know." He glanced at Witigis. "I wonder if he knows himself."

  "When I am a bear, I know little of what I do," Witigis said. "No-say not that I do not know. Say that I do not care, as a bear would not care. When I am a man again, I see what my bear-self has done. I see, and as often as not I marvel. A bear will do what a man would not. The lesson is, this does not always make the bear wrong."

  "Does it always make the man wrong?" Hamnet Thyssen didn't know if Audun Gilli would have asked that question. Whether the wizard did or not, Count Hamnet wanted it answered.

  Witigis blinked and looked quite humanly-though not bearishly- amazed. "Do you know, outlander, I never thought of that. I never thought about it," he said. Think about it he did, with a concentrated intensity that startled Hamnet. More than a minute went by before he continued. "No, the man is not always wrong. Sometimes a man is a fool. Sometimes a bear is a brute."

  That struck Hamnet as basically honest. "I thank you," he said.

  "When you change from a man to a bear, do you think God enters into you?" Eyvind Torfinn found a different kind of question to ask.

  In answering, the Bizogot shaman didn't hesitate. "Not unless God comes in the shape of a bear," he answered. "When I am a bear, I am a bear not only in body but also in spirit."

  "Do you still feel your human spirit when you are a bear?" Ulric Skakki inquired. "And when you are a man, do you feel a bear's spirit pawing around at the bottom of your soul?"

  Witigis smiled. "You have a way with words." Ulric modestly shook his head. Again, the Bizogot thought hard before answering. "Both could be so. When I am a bear, I suppose I am a smarter bear than one who never walks on two legs. And when I am a man . . ." He shaped his hands into paws, and looked at them as if surprised the bear claws dangling from his sleeve were not part of him all the time. "When I am a man, sometimes I would rather bite and tear than talk."

  Hamnet Thyssen's laugh was not particularly pleasant. "From what I have seen of men, my friend, you need not have a bear in your soul to make this so."

  "If you have a bit of bear in you even when you are a man, do the women like you better for it?" Ulric Skakki grinned a sly grin.

  Gudrid made a disgusted noise. Hamnet wondered why. Some of the men she was drawn to were brutes even if not shapeshifters-Trasamund sprang to mind. Did she think that was all right for her but not for someone else? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised. Gudrid always thought rules were for other people.

  As for the shaman, he grinned back. "Now and again, I have seen this to be so. Not always, but now and again. Some women like one thing, some another. You never can tell."

  "No, you can't. It's almost as if they were people, isn't it?" Ulric said. Witigis scratched his head. At first, that was simple puzzlement. Then it turned businesslike. He squashed something between his thumbnails, Gudrid made another disgusted noise. Count Hamnet silently sighed. He was lousy now himself, and fleabitten, and also bitten by bedbugs. The Bizogots took all that for granted. With their attitude toward bathing, they could hardly do anything else.

  "When you go from man to bear, do you leave human fleas and lice behind?" he asked Witigis. "If you stay a bear, do you get a bear's bugs?"

  "You people find interesting questions, by God!" the shaman said. "I always wondered why I'm bitten less than most people. Now maybe I know."

  "Maybe you do," Hamnet said.

  Later, as leather drinking jacks of smetyn passed from hand to hand, he saw Witigis talking with Wacho and pointing his way. He couldn't make out what either the shaman or the jarl was saying, which annoyed him. Coming right out and asking would have been rude. Instead, he drank more than he might have otherwise.

  Wacho talked with a Bizogot woman. She nodded. Then she came over and sat down beside Count Hamnet. "I'm Marcatrude," she said.

  Hamnet gave his own name.

  She nodded again. She couldn't have been much past twenty. She was pretty enough, and nicely shaped. If she was no cleaner than Bizogots usually were . . . Well, Hamnet Thyssen wasn't much cleaner than Bizogots usually were, either. She said, "Wacho has given me to you for the night, if you want me."

  If Count Hamnet had drunk less, he might have said no. If he hadn't gone without a woman for such a long time, he might have said no, too. But he had. And, he told himself-drunkenly-refusing the jarl's kindness would be impolite.

  "Where shall we go?" he asked. Bizogots worried less about privacy than Raumsdalians did. If this was going to turn into an orgy, he didn't think he could keep up his end of the bargain.

 
; But Marcatrude didn't seem to expect it to. She set her hand on his. Even if he was drunk, he noticed she didn't have the smooth, supple skin of a pampered Raumsdalian woman-of, say, someone like Gudrid. Hamnet shook his head. He didn't want to think about Gudrid now. If he did, he might also fail to keep up his end of the bargain. If Marcatrude's palm was callused and rough from work even when she was so young, then it was, that was all. She would be soft other places, soft where it mattered.

  When he got up and left the jarl's tent with her, he felt Gudrid's eyes boring into his back. Absurdly, he felt guilty, as if he were being unfaithful to her. Considering everything she'd done, that was ridiculous, which didn't make the feeling go away.

  He and Marcatrude had another mammoth-hide tent to themselves. They lay down together on the cured hide of a short-faced bear. "I can blow out the lamp, if you like," Marcatrude said as he began to undress her. Drink and lust made his fingers clumsy.

  "No, let it burn," he said, and then, feeling that wasn't enough, "You're so pretty, you're worth seeing."

  She smiled. She had very white, very even teeth. "You say kind things," she told him. "What kind of men are outlanders?" Before long, he was naked, too. She eyed him and nodded. "You are man enough, without a doubt."

  She seemed surprised when he teased her and stroked her instead of just opening her legs and taking his pleasure-surprised, but not unhappy. Far from unhappy, in fact. She purred with pleasure. That pleased Hamnet- and heated him, too.

  "Oh," the Bizogot girl said softly when he went into her-a sound he thought was likely the same in any language.

  He brought her to the peak an instant before he spent himself. He stroked her cheek and told her how wonderful she was. The afterglow didn't last long-it never did. What had been delight quickly turned to disgust. It wasn't that Marcatrude had a strong smell or that her hair was greasy and matted. Hamnet Thyssen took no long-lasting pleasure in Raumsdalian women, either. He'd scratched an itch, and now it wouldn't trouble him for a while. That was how he looked at it.