Beyond the Gap Read online

  * * * *

  Despite the chimneys, the common room in the serai was smoky enough to make Hamnet Thyssen's eyes sting. Some of that smoke came from the hearthfires, some from the cookfires back in the kitchen, and some from the pipes and cigars on which more than a few of the travelers puffed.

  Gnawing on a turkey leg, Trasamund said, "This is not a bad place." A tall jack of beer sitting beside his trencher of hard barley bread probably went a good way toward improving his opinion. So did the smiles he'd won from the barmaid who'd brought him the jack. He had at least some reason to hope he'd win more than smiles from her.

  The food and drink suited Hamnet Thyssen well enough. The barmaid didn't interest him. He did idly wonder what Gudrid would think of Trasamund's pursuing another woman so soon after leaving her arms. He shrugged. Chasing a barmaid wouldn't worry him unless the Bizogot got killed in a brawl over her (which seemed unlikely) or came down with an unpleasant disease because of her (the odds of which Hamnet had no way of guessing).

  Eyvind Torfinn seemed content with supper, even if it was rougher than what he was used to. Audun Gilli ate more than he drank. To Count Ham-net, that made the meal a success as far as the wizard was concerned.

  Hamnet shared a room with Audun. The evening was not a success. The sorcerer, though a small man, proved to own a large snore. Hamnet wondered if there was some sorcerous cure for that. Then he wondered if he ought to throw a boot at Audun, the way he might have at a yowling cat.

  Ulric Skakki and Eyvind Torfinn had the room to one side of Hamnet s. The walls were no thicker than they had to be—Hamnet could hear the other two men talking for a long time. He wondered what they were talking about. Gudrid? As far as Hamnet Thyssen knew, she hadn't slept with Ulric. But he didn't know how far he knew.

  On the other side, Trasamund had a room to himself. Except he didn't have it to himself for long. The bedframe creaked. He grunted. His companion giggled and then moaned. Hamnet found himself glad of Audun Gilli s snores. They helped drown out the amatory racket. Not long after the creaking next door reached a crescendo, it began anew. The Bizogot had stamina. By the noises his partner made, he also had technique.

  How much of that technique had he had before he came south off the frozen steppe? How much had he learned inside the Empire—or, to come straight to the point, inside Gudrid? Count Hamnet ground his teeth. What he had right now was insomnia. He also had the firm conviction that God would have had trouble falling asleep in that room just then.

  Eventually, in spite of everything, Hamnet did go to sleep. What that said about God's chances of doing the same ... he was too unconscious to worry about.

  A sunbeam sneaking through the slats of the shutter on the south-facing window poked him in the eye. He yawned and sat up. Audun Gilli went on snoring away. Either Eyvind Torfinn or Ulric Skakki also owned a pretty formidable snore. As for Trasamund, he really did have stamina. That barmaid would probably walk bowlegged for days.

  Yawning again, Hamnet got out of bed. He'd slept in his clothes, as one did on the road. Instead of throwing his boots at Audun Gilli, he put them on. He did take the small pleasure of shaking the wizard awake. "You snore," he said when he saw reason in Audun's eyes.

  "I do?" the wizard said around a yawn of his own. Hamnet Thyssen nodded emphatically. Audun Gilli started pulling on his own boots. "Well, your Grace, if I do, I'm not the only one here who does."

  "What? Me?" Count Hamnet didn't believe it—or didn't want to believe it, anyhow. He stood on what dignity he could. "I've never once heard myself snore."

  Audun Gilli started to answer that, then seemed to think better of it. He contented himself with, "Shall we get the others up?"

  "Trasamund’s been up most of the night," Hamnet answered, which made Audun begin and then visibly reconsider another answer. Hamnet added, "But we may as well knock. That barmaid will have to go to work soon anyhow, though I daresay Trasamund’s worked her harder than the fellow who runs this serai ever did. Here's hoping she had fun."

  "They don't stay till morning if they haven't." The wizard spoke more practically than Hamnet Thyssen would have expected.

  Hamnet knocked on the door to the room that Eyvind Torfinn and Ulric Skakki shared. He knocked loud and long, hoping Trasamund and his lady friend would also hear. That actually worked; the barmaid scurried out of the Bizogot's chamber and down the hall toward the common room. But when Ulric opened the door, he looked more than a little put upon. "What?" he said irritably. "Is this place on fire?" Earl Eyvind appeared behind him, seeming similarly aggrieved.

  "No fire—except, I hope, in the hearth," Hamnet said. "Which of you snores?"

  "He does." Ulric and Eyvind both said the same thing. They pointed at each other. Eyvind Torfinn added, "As long as we're talking about snoring, was that you or Audun sawing stone last night?"

  "Yes." Hamnet let him make whatever he pleased of that. "I'm going to get Trasamund moving," he went on. "Then we ought to eat and we ought to ride."

  Earl Eyvind rubbed his hindquarters. Ulric Skakki sighed a martyred sigh. But neither man said no. Hamnet Thyssen knocked on Trasamund's door. "You hit ours a lot harder than that," Ulric said. Yes, and I had my reasons, too, Hamnet thought. Ulric went on scowling.

  Trasamund was also scowling as he opened up. But when Count Ham-net said, "We should be moving," the Bizogot's glower faded. Moving was something the mammoth-herders of the north understood.

  They all went off to the common room. Hamnet Thyssen was ready for oatmeal mush swimming with butter or rye crackers or barley rolls or boiled goose eggs or whatever else the seraikeeper served for breakfast.

  The barmaid was already busy, hurrying from the kitchen to other travelers waiting for their food. Count Hamnet noticed her only out of the corner of his eye. He stopped in his tracks at the entrance to the common room. None of his companions tried to push past him into the big hall, either.

  From her perch on a bench near a fireplace, Gudrid waved gaily to them.

  * * * *

  She hadn't come alone. Half a dozen stalwart imperial guardsmen sat across from her and to either side. Hamnet wondered how she’d talked Sigvat II out of them. Then he decided he didn't want to know, because talking might not have had anything to do with it. A heartbeat later, he shied away from hadn't come alone, too.

  "My sweet! What are you doing here?" Eyvind Torfinn asked—a reasonable question, and much more mildly phrased than it would have been coming from Hamnet. Still sounding reasonable, and reasonably concerned, Earl Eyvind went on, "Is anything wrong down in Nidaros?"

  "No, no, no." Gudrid laughed one of her silvery laughs. And then Count Hamnet discovered that he'd thanked God too soon, for she said, "I decided I'd come along with you, that's all."

  Hamnet stiffened, as if taking a sword thrust. Eyvind's jaw dropped. Even the unflappable Ulric Skakki blinked. Audun Gilli's eyes widened. And Trasamund roared laughter himself.

  "That's . .. impossible," Eyvind Torfinn said. Again, Hamnet would have told Gudrid the same thing. Again, he would have used stronger language. Earl Eyvind continued, "You couldn't possibly make it to the land beyond the Glacier."

  "Why not?" When Gudrid sounded innocent and sweet, you were well advised to set a hand on your belt pouch.

  "Because you're a woman, that's why not," Eyvind answered.

  "And so?" Gudrid said. "If I can't ride better than Audun there, I'm a musk ox. And I can shoot—dear Hamnet taught me how years ago. I don't pull a very heavy bow, but I hit what I aim at."

  She did, too. Hamnet Thyssen knew it. Trasamund looked from him to Gudrid and back again in surprise. No, the Bizogot jarl hadn't known of any connection between them. Hamnet hadn't thought he did.

  "And besides," Gudrid went on, still sounding sweet and innocent and, if you knew her, deadly dangerous, "I'll have all you big strong masterful men to protect me, won't I? And these guardsmen his Majesty was kind enough to give me, too."

  Some of the guardsmen looked mildly
embarrassed. Others smirked. How had Gudrid persuaded the Emperor? And why were those men smirking?

  "This is most unwise. It will not do," Eyvind Torfinn said.

  "I agree. This journey will be complicated enough without, uh, complications." Ulric Skakki didn't put that well, and knew it, but also didn't leave much doubt about what he meant.

  "Madness," Hamnet said.

  Gudrid fluttered her fingers, literally dismissing that out of hand. "As if you'd say anything else," she murmured. Then she fluttered those slim fingers again, this time toward Trasamund. "And what does our valiant Bizogot chieftain say?"

  The valiant Bizogot chieftain hadn't said much of anything. He'd listened to the backbiting with what seemed like immense enjoyment. Now he laughed once more. "Let the wench come," he said. "Why not? It will make the journey more entertaining."

  "But—" Eyvind Torfinn said.

  Trasamund cut him off with a slash of the hand. "I have said she will come, and she will come." He spoke with a jarl's hauteur—he didn't think Hamnet was the leader any more, then. "Raumsdalia does not have to go beyond the Glacier. Raumsdalia does not have to look for the Golden Shrine. We Bizogots can do it alone. The way north for you goes through our land."

  Earl Eyvind made a horrible face, not because Trasamund was wrong but because he was right. When the Empire's needs clashed with his ... He scowled at the Bizogot and scowled at his wife, but in the end he nodded.

  Hamnet Thyssen, by contrast, started out of the common room. "Where are you going?" Eyvind Torfinn called after him. His tone suggested a drowning man watching a spar drift away.

  "Home," Hamnet answered. "The Golden Shrine can rot, for all of me, and the Gap, too."

  Gudrid's laugh somehow struck him as ominous. "I knew you'd get stuffy about this, Hamnet. I knew it. Read this." She held out a rolled parchment.

  He made sure he didn't touch her when he took the parchment. She noticed him making sure, and laughed again, this time at him. He ignored her. She thought that was funny, too. The parchment was sealed in wax of imperial gold, and had stamped on it a sabertooth's head—Sigvat's seal. Hamnet Thyssen ground his teeth as he broke it.

  Most of the message was in a secretary's supremely legible script.

  To Count Hamnet Thyssen from his Imperial Majesty, Sigvat ll, by God's grace Emperor of Raumsdalia. Your Grace—You are hereby requested and required to continue on your journey north to the lands beyond the Glacier and, if possible, to the Golden Shrine, notwithstanding the presence on the said journey of Gudrid, wife to Earl Eyvind Torfinn, whose intimate knowledge of conditions pertaining to the said Golden Shrine conduces to the success of the expedition of which you form a component.

  A scrawled signature, unquestionably Sigvat's, lay under the body of the letter.

  "You see?" Gudrid said, languid triumph in her voice.

  "I see." Hamnet folded the parchment and put it in his belt pouch—he offered no offense to the imperial letter, though his first impulse was to fling it in the fire. "And I tell you this, Gudrid: no matter what this letter says, I am not a cursed component. I am a man—my own man, by God. I'm for my own keep, too, and the journey can go hang. And so, my former dear, can you."

  He trudged out of the serai and off toward the stable, not a man in a hurry but not a man about to change his mind, either. He'd almost got to the stable door when someone behind him called, "Hamnet—wait."

  If that had been Gudrid, he wouldn't have waited—though he might have drawn sword on her if she tried to insist. But it wasn't. It was Ulric Skakki. "Well?" Hamnet growled. "Are you fool enough to think you can make me change my mind? If Sigvat can't do it, you aren't likely to."

  "I wouldn't dream of trying, your Grace," Ulric said. Hamnet laughed harshly—he knew a lie when he heard one. Unperturbed, Ulric Skakki went on, "I just wanted to tell you one thing before you go."

  "Well?" Hamnet said. "What is it? Say your say, then, and be quick about it."

  "I will," Ulric said. Whom he served—beyond himself—was a mystery to Hamnet. He hadn't been in the habit of talking about himself when he and Hamnet served together a few years earlier. Evidently he still wasn't.

  With a small shrug, he went on, "If you leave, if you walk away, that woman wins."

  Had Ulric called Gudrid by her name, Hamnet Thyssen would have turned his back and gone into the stable, and afterwards much would have been different. As things were, he looked Ulric up and down, a glower that would have annihilated a lesser man, or a less self-assured one. Ulric Skakki withstood it with no external signs of injury.

  "As if I care what that woman does," Hamnet said, and then, not at all at random, "Have you swived her, too, the way everyone else has?"

  "Good God, no," Ulric Skakki answered. "No scorpion ever hatched anywhere has a sting in its tail to match hers."

  That held the unmistakable ring of sincerity. But then, Ulric might well be able to sound sincere when he wasn't. It was a common gift. Even Gudrid had it. For the moment, Hamnet Thyssen chose to assume Ulric meant what he said, and growled, "Well, then, you see what my trouble is. I don't want to be within miles of that woman, let alone riding beside her. And I used to love her, which makes it worse."

  "But we need you on the journey. You're the best Raumsdalian we have," Ulric Skakki said. "Eyvind Torfinn is nice enough, but he's an old fool. Audun Gilli is ... what he is. They won't do, Thyssen."

  "There's you," Count Hamnet said. "Why are you acting so modest? It doesn't seem your natural state."

  "It's not," Ulric agreed. "But I'm only a commoner, and I have a strange background—to say nothing of my foreground." Was his chuckle self-conscious? Hamnet had trouble believing it. Ulric went on, "Earl Eyvind won't take me seriously. Neither will Trasamund. You've got the blood they respect."

  "Gudrid might want to see it spilled. Otherwise it doesn't much impress her," Hamnet said. "And there are her bodyguards. One of them would likely serve your purpose."

  Ulric Skakki shook his head. "Louts. Fools. Chowderheads. The Emperor won't send away men he can't afford to lose. He'll send the ones he doesn't care about—so that's what he's done. I know about these fellows. And I know something else."

  "What?" Hamnet asked uneasily; what Ulric said made altogether too much sense.

  "I know Trasamund hasn't told everything he knows about what lies beyond the Glacier."

  "And how do you know that?" Hamnet inquired in sardonic tones. "I suppose you've gone beyond the Glacier yourself ?"

  Ulric grimaced. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I have, though it's worth my life if you say so where a Bizogot might hear. It's likely worth your life, too, so you ought to bear that in mind."

  Hamnet Thyssen stared at the younger man. He did not think Ulric was lying; he wished he did. "By God, how did you manage that?" he asked.

  "Carefully," Ulric Skakki answered, which had to be the understatement of the year. "Trasamund says he doesn't know if there are men on the far side of the Glacier. Either he's lying or he's not as much of a far-ranger as he'd have us believe. There are." Again, he spoke with great conviction.

  "And?" Hamnet asked, as he was plainly meant to do.

  "And they're dangerous. To the Bizogots, to us, maybe even to themselves. I am not making this up, Thyssen. I have seen them. We need you there."

  "Then send Gudrid back to Nidaros."

  Ulric Skakki shrugged sadly. "I'm sorry. I can't do that. I wish I could, but I can't."

  "Mmrr." Hamnet made a noise deep down in his chest. "If you lure me on with this, Skakki, if you dangle a wiggling worm in front of me to make me swim after it, I'll kill you. Gudrid's first lover didn't believe me when I said something like that. I'd tell you to ask him if I lied, but he's too dead to give you a straight answer."

  "Well, you can try," Ulric Skakki murmured. Count Hamnet sent him a sharp stare. Ulric looked back imperturbably. If Hamnet's words worried him, he showed it not at all. He didn't seem to believe Hamnet could harm him. Maybe that made him a fool.
Maybe it meant he knew some things Hamnet didn't, things Hamnet might discover if he tried to make good on his threat. As if it were never made, Ulric went on, "Does that mean you're coming, then?"

  The last word Hamnet Thyssen thought he would use came out of his mouth. Hating himself, hating Gudrid, and saving a little hate for Ulric Skakki, too, he said, "Yes."

  * * * *

  Weather along the Great North Road seemed to get worse with each passing mile. That had to be Hamnet's imagination. Spring was advancing, the sun staying in the sky longer with each passing day. Things should have got warmer and finer, not darker and gloomier. Odds were that the cloud over the expedition was fixed above his head and no one else's.

  Had he wanted other opinions, he would have asked for them. He rode apart from the other travelers, with them but not of them. Audun Gilli rode apart, too, but Audun Gilli was about as sociable as an old root. Sometimes the noble and the wizard rode side by side, but even then they were apart.

  As usual, Gudrid contrived to make the world revolve around herself. The royal bodyguards, Eyvind Torfinn, and Trasamund all danced attendance on her. Ulric Skakki seemed more loosely attached to that group, but attached he was—or so it seemed to Count Hamnet's jaundiced eye, at any rate.

  For most of the way north toward the frontier, things went smoothly enough. The travelers stopped at a serai each night. If they didn't have all the comforts Gudrid was used to down in Nidaros, they had most of them. Gudrid played the part of the cheerful voyager as if she'd rehearsed for years. Whatever went on in the nighttime went on without Hamnet Thyssen. He and Ulric Skakki usually shared a chamber. As far as he could tell, Ulric didn't go out of nights, so maybe the other man had given his true opinion of Gudrid.

  And if he hadn't, it was his lookout.

  The country got flatter and flatter as they went north, till it looked as if it were pressed. And so it was. The Glacier had crushed it till very recently. Countless shallow ponds and lakes marked the slightly—the ever slightly—lower ground. The winds mostly blew warm out of the south, but snow lingered long in the shade of the spruce and fir woods.