Beyong the Gap g-1 Read online

  The jarl went on, "Guide us back to the tents of the clan. We have things to do before faring north again."

  "Just as you say, so shall it be," Gelimer replied.

  "Of course," Trasamund said complacently. Sigvat II, Emperor of Raumsdalia, could have sounded no more certain.

  The encampment of the Three Tusk clan was … a Bizogot encampment. Hamnet Thyssen was long familiar with them. Even if he weren't, the journey up across the frozen steppe would have taught him as much as he needed to know.

  Mammoth-hide tents sprouted here and there, scattered higgledy-piggledy across the ground. Horses were tied nearby. By Raumsdalian standards, Bizogot horses were short-legged and stocky and shaggy. They needed to be, to get through the long, hard winters in these parts. Some of them would wander with the clan's musk oxen during the winter, to forage on whatever they could dig up. Others would winter in and near the tents, feeding on hay the Bizogots harvested while the weather was good, and on the frozen grasses the nomads found beneath the snow. So it went in good winters, anyway. When times were not so good, the Bizogots ate horse and rebuilt their herds as they could.

  For the moment, the camp boiled with excitement. The nomads would not eat horse any time soon. They'd killed a cow mammoth not long before Trasamund and the Raumsdalians rode up, and were butchering the mountain of meat. They would roast and boil what they could, and eat it on the spot. The rest would be cut into thin strips and salted and dried in the sun and the wind.

  Hamnet Thyssen eyed Ulric Skakki. "Here's to gluttony," he said. "Are you up for it?"

  "I'll try my best," Ulric answered. "But any civilized man will explode if he tries to keep up with the Bizogots. They're better at stuffing themselves than we are."

  "They're better at doing without than we are, too," Hamnet said. "On average, I suppose it's about the same, but they swing further in both directions than we do."

  Even the arrival of their jarl, even the arrival of strangers from the south, distracted the nomads only a little. They greeted Trasamund with bloody handclasps. He took it in good part; he knew meat mattered more than he did.

  Women scraped fat from the back of the mammoth hide. Some of them used iron knives that had come north in trade, others flint tools that might have been as old as time or might have been made that morning. The Bizogots never had as much iron as they wanted, and eked it out with stone tools.

  Dogs danced and begged by the edge of the hide. Every so often, a woman would throw some scraps their way. The dogs yelped and snapped at the food and at one another. The women laughed at the sport.

  They carefully saved the rest of the fat. Some of it would get cooked in the feast. The rest would be pounded with lean mammoth meat and berries to make cakes that would keep for a long time and would feed a traveling man.

  Once the hide had not a scrap of fat or flesh clinging to it, the women rubbed it with a strong-smelling mix. Audun Gilli s nose wrinkled. "What's that stuff?" he asked.

  "Piss and salt, to cure the hide," Count Hamnet answered.

  "Oh." The wizard looked unhappy. "Why don't they use tanbark, the way we do?"

  Both Hamnet and Ulric laughed at him. "Think about it," Ulric said.

  Audun did. "Oh," he said again, this time in a small voice. Tanbark required oaks, and all the oaks grew well south of the tree line.

  "What is the news?" Trasamund asked. "Who has died? Who still lives? Who is born? Who is well? Who is sick or hurt?" He had a lot of catching up to do, and was trying to do it all at once. In the Empire, that would have been impossible. The Three Tusk clan was small enough to give him a fighting chance.

  "Who are these mouths up from the south?" a Bizogot asked him. That was how the Raumsdalians seemed to the locals-people who had to be fed as long as they were here. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how he liked being called a mouth. Not very well, he decided.

  Trasamund named names, which would mean little to a clansman. He called most of the Raumsdalians warriors, styling Audun Gilli and Eyvind Torfinn as shamans. The Three Tusk shaman, easily identifiable by the same kind of fringed and embroidered costume as Witigis had worn, eyed them with interested speculation.

  "What about the woman?" another Bizogot called. Actually, he said, What about the gap? That made Hamnet look north toward the gap between the two great sheets of ice that had once been one. This time, Gudrid didn't show any signs of understanding.

  "Is she just yours, or can we all have her?" still another mammoth-herder asked. A woman gave him an elbow in the ribs. Was she his wife, or just jealous of competition?

  "She is the old shaman's woman," Trasamund answered. Count Hamnet glanced over to see how Eyvind Torfinn liked hearing that again and again. By the fixed smile on his face, he didn't like it much. Trasamund went on, "They are all our guests. They are not to be stolen from."

  "Ha!" Ulric Skakki said. Hamnet Thyssen nodded. Guest-friendship would keep the Raumsdalians' persons safe while they stayed with the Three Tusk clan. Their personal property? No. Having so little themselves, Bizogots were born thieves.

  "My guests, will you feast with my folk?" Trasamund said.

  "We will," answered Hamnet, Ulric, and Eyvind, the only three Raumsdalians who spoke any useful amount of the Bizogot language. "We thank you."

  After the Raumsdalians dismounted, Bizogot youths led their horses off to the line where those belonging to the mammoth-herders were tied. The shaman made a beeline for Audun Gilli and spoke to him in the Bizogot tongue. His eyebrows leaped. "A woman!" he exclaimed in Raumsdalian.

  "I thought you could tell the difference before they talked," Hamnet Thyssen said dryly. "She's got no beard, and that's a pretty good hint."

  The shaman turned to him. "You speak your language, and you speak ours. Will you interpret for me?"

  "If I can," Hamnet answered. "If you speak of secret things, I will not know your words for them, and I may not know ours, either. I am no spellcaster."

  She looked at him. "You think not, do you?" While he was wondering what to make of that, she went on, "Ask his name for me, please, and tell him I am Liv."

  "He is Audun Gilli," Hamnet said. He translated for the wizard.

  "Tell her I am glad to meet her," Audun said. "Tell her I hope we can learn things from each other."

  "I hope the same." Liv eyed Hamnet again. "And who are you!" He gave her his name. She shook her head with poorly hidden impatience. "I did not ask you for that. I ask who you were. It is not the same thing."

  Hamnet Thyssen scratched his head. He wondered if the shaman for Trasamund's clan was slightly daft, or more than slightly. "I am a soldier, a hunter, a loyal follower of my Emperor." Did she know what an emperor was? "Think of him as a jarl ruling many clans."

  "Yes, yes." Liv brushed the explanation aside. She looked at him again. She didn't just look at him-she looked into him, with the same disconcerting directness a Raumsdalian wizard might have shown. Lie tried to look away; he had the feeling she was seeing more than he wanted her to. But those cornflower-blue eyes would not release his … until, all at once, they did. He took a deep breath, and then another one. Facing up to her felt like running a long way with a heavy pack on his back. But all she said was, "You are not a happy man."

  "No," Hamnet agreed. "I am not." She didn't need to be sorcerer or shaman to know that. Anyone who spoke with him for a little while realized as much.

  He waited for her to ask him why not. But she found a different question instead, inquiring, "Why did you come to the Bizogot country?"

  "You will know of the Golden Shrine." He didn't quite make it a question. He didn't quite not make it a question, either. Almost everyone on both sides of the border agreed that Raumsdalians and Bizogots worshiped the same God. Everyone on both sides of the border agreed they did not always worship him the same way.

  But Liv nodded. "Oh, yes. What of it?"

  "I came to seek it, along with your jarl."

  "Oh." If he thought that would impress her, he was disappointed. La
ter, he found that very little impressed her, and that she admitted to even less. For now, she looked into him again. He scowled. He didn't like it, even if it was somehow not the violation it could have been. After a bit, she asked, "What do you look to find there?"

  "I don't know." Hamnet Thyssen frowned. He hadn't worried about that. Finding the ages-lost Golden Shrine seemed worry enough. "Truth. Knowledge. Happiness. God."

  "Yes," Audun Gilli said softly when Hamnet remembered to translate that for him.

  "Maybe," Liv said. "Yes, maybe. But why do you think these things are there?"

  "Where else would they be?" Hamnet burst out.

  Liv didn't answer, not in words. Instead, she smiled. Hamnet Thyssen gave back a pace, and he was not a man in the habit of retreating from anything or anyone. Sober, Liv was another Bizogot-stranger than most, but apart from that nothing out of the ordinary. When she smiled . .. her whole face changed. It was as if the sun came out from behind the clouds, and hardly less dazzling. For a heartbeat, altogether in spite of himself, he fell in love.

  Angrily, he turned away from her. Wizards and shamans had their tricks, yes. Try as he would, he couldn't imagine one more monstrously unfair than that.

  He saw he was not the only one turning away. Audun Gilli couldn't face her, either. "She has more strength than she knows," the wizard whispered. "She has more strength than she even dreams of. What such a one would be in Raumsdalia . . ."

  "What would she be but Gudrid?" Hamnet Thyssen snarled. Audun flinched as if Hamnet had hit him. Hamnet didn't care. He would rather have hit Liv. No, nothing could be crueler than reminding him of love.

  Little by little, Hamnet Thyssen's temper eased. Filling his belly helped, even if he wouldn't have filled it on mammoth meat, mushrooms fried in musk-ox butter, and berries back in the Empire. Getting somewhere close to drunk helped, too, although he would have used beer or ale or mead or even wine to do the job farther south. If smetyn was what the Bizogots had, Count Hamnet would drink it.

  He kept a wary eye on Liv despite his full belly and muzzy head. She didn't do anything especially noteworthy. She ate. She drank. She talked with her fellow clansmen and women, and with some of the Raumsdalians who could use her language. She left Hamnet alone. That suited him fine, or better than fine.

  He wanted to ask Trasamund how long it would be before they fared north. He wanted to, yes, but the newly returned jarl was otherwise occupied. Trasamund ate enough for three hungry Raumsdalians, and drank enough for five. When he went off to the tent the Bizogots had run up for him, he went with three big blond women from the clan. Mammoth hide might be thick enough to keep out cold, but it couldn't keep in the moans and sighs that came from that tent.

  "He's been away from his own people a long time," Ulric Skakki remarked.

  "Well, so he has," Hamnet said. "By the sound of things, he's making some more people in there right now-or trying his hardest, anyhow."

  "His hardest, indeed," Ulric murmured, and Hamnet swallowed wrong with a swig of fermented mammoth milk. Ulric had to pound him on the back to get him to stop choking.

  "You're a demon, you are," Hamnet wheezed.

  Ulric Skakki batted his not very long, not very alluring eyelashes. "You say the sweetest things, my dear." Count Hamnet almost-almost-sent another swallow down the wrong pipe.

  Gudrid was left all alone. Worse-she was left with Eyvind Torfinn. Trasamund, at least for the time being, had forgot all about her. Now that he was back in the Three Tusk clan, he preferred his own women. That had to be a bitter pill for Gudrid to swallow. You're not indispensable after all, my not so dear, Hamnet thought. Yes, the only one who cares right now is your husband. Such a comedown. Catching his eye on her, Gudrid snapped out something he was too far away and too drunk to make out. He smiled at her, which didn't make her look any happier.

  Eyvind said something to her, probably doing his best to calm her down. She snapped at him, too. He drew back, a wounded look on his usually placid features. If God had given her a sabertooth's fangs, chances were she would have bitten his head off in truth, not just as a figure of speech.

  "What is the trouble?" Liv asked Eyvind. Somehow, Hamnet heard her clearly even though Gudrid s words were just noise to him. Maybe that had to do with her being a shaman. Maybe it had to do with how much he'd poured down. Drunks had selective hearing, and drunk he was.

  The Raumsdalian noble only shrugged. "My wife is out of sorts," he answered. Well, so she was, but did he know why? Did he know how regularly Gudrid cuckolded him?

  What would he do when he found out? Anything? That was an interesting question. Count Hamnet was glad it wasn't his worry … or wouldn't have been, if he didn't worry about Gudrid all the time.

  "All things considered, I'd rather share a tent with you," he told Ulric Skakki when the two of them snuggled under skins for the night.

  "What? Me instead of three pretty girls who aim to please? I didn't know your tastes ran in that direction, my dear." Ulric batted his eyelashes again. It made him look ridiculous, which was bound to be what he had in mind.

  "No!" Count Hamnet's ears heated. His tastes didn't run in that direction, and Ulric did know it. "I was thinking of. . ." He didn't even want to say her name.

  "Of Liv?" Ulric Skakki seemed bound and determined to be as difficult as he could. "I'd like her better if she bathed, but the Bizogots mostly don't. Up here, I mostly don't, either. I'd like me better if I did, too." He held his nose.

  Hamnet Thyssen wouldn't have minded a bath himself, but he missed bathing less than he thought he would when he set out from Nidaros. He didn't smell any worse than the people around him, which was all that really mattered. As for Liv . . . "She's strange."

  "Of course she's strange. She's a shaman, and she wouldn't be if she weren't." Ulric paused to work out whether that really said what he wanted it to. Deciding it did, he went on, "Doesn't mean she's not pretty. She has a nice smile, don't you think?"

  "I didn't notice." Hamnet didn't like to lie, but telling Ulric Skakki how much he noticed Liv's smile would only leave him open for more ribbing. Instead, he said, "I wasn't really thinking of her, anyway." That was true enough.

  "Who, then?" Ulric didn't need long to answer his own question. "Gudrid? By God, you don't want to think about her, do you? I wouldn't, if I were you."

  "No, I don't want to," Hamnet answered. "But what you want to do and what you end up doing aren't always the same beast."

  "I always do what I want," Ulric Skakki said, which had to be a bigger lie than the one Hamnet told him. He added, "What I want to do now is go to sleep. Good night." He blew out the lamp. The smell of hot butter filled the tent. In moments, Ulric was snoring. He did what he wanted then, anyhow. Hamnet Thyssen lay awake brooding-but not very long.

  People outside the tent were shouting at each other. The racket pried Hamnet's eyes open. One of the people shouting was Jesper Fletti, the other Gelimer. Hamnet understood both sides of the quarrel. Yawning, he needed a moment to realize neither of them was likely to.

  "Keep your hands off me, you barbarous hound!" Jesper yelled.

  "What do you think you're doing, fool of an outlander?" Gelimer shouted back.

  Hamnet's breath smoked when he sat up. He pulled on his boots. Not far away, Ulric was doing the same thing. Quirking up an eyebrow, Ulric said, "Maybe we ought to let them kill each other. Jesper's no great loss."

  "If he hurts Gelimer, the Bizogots will want to murder all of us," Hamnet answered.

  "I suppose you're right. What a pity." Ulric Skakki stood up.

  So did Hamnet. The shouting outside did nothing to improve the headache he discovered on waking. "Neither one of them understands the other's language," he pointed out.

  "Just as well," Ulric said. "If they knew what they were calling each other, they would have gone for their knives long since."

  Count Hamnet hadn't thought of that. "We really ought to calm them down if we can," he said.

  "You're no fun," Ul
ric told him, but they left the mammoth-hide tent together.

  "What's going on here?" Hamnet said, first in Raumsdalian, then in the Bizogot tongue.

  Jesper Fletti and Gelimer gave up shouting at each other. Instead, they both shouted at him. That didn't do his head any good. "This lemming-brained idiot keeps wanting to bother the jarl," Gelimer said. "Doesn't he know Trasamund's in his tent screwing like there's no tomorrow?"

  At the same time, Jesper Fletti said, "This fleabitten savage won't let the lady Gudrid talk to Trasamund."

  "Oh." Hamnet Thyssen's head pounded anew, for an altogether different reason.

  "Oh, for God's sake," Ulric Skakki said in about the same tone of voice.

  Hamnet stepped between Gelimer and Jesper. He set both hands on Jes-per's shoulders. The imperial guardsman bristled at the liberty, but grudgingly allowed it from a Raumsdalian noble. "Go back to Gudrid," Hamnet said. "Tell her she can't see Trasamund now. Tell her she can't see him now even if she's seen every single inch of him before. Tell her it doesn't matter if she's a noblewoman. Tell her she's a guest among the Bizogots, and what they say goes. Tell her that if she causes any more trouble she's liable to get you killed and she's liable to get herself killed."

  "Tell her that if she causes any more trouble that involves waking people up, the Bizogots may not be the ones who kill her-or you," Ulric Skakki added.

  "And who will try to do this?" Jesper asked softly, setting a hand on the hilt of his sword. "You and who else?"

  "I'm the who else," Hamnet said. Jesper Fletti looked horrified. Hamnet went on, "Tell Gudrid she can't get away with playing the spoiled brat up here. She won't hear that from me, no matter how true it is. Maybe she'll listen to you." Or maybe she won't listen to anybody. Half the time, she doesn't.

  Jesper Fletti looked from him to Ulric to Gelimer. Abruptly, the guardsman spun on his heel and stalked away. He ducked into a tent. Count Hamnet heard his voice from inside, but couldn't make out what he said. Then Gudrid let out a screech like a lion impaled on a woolly rhino's horn.