Beyond the Gap Read online

  "What did you do to the dogs?" asked the mammoth-herder who'd put the question before.

  "We kept them from troubling us," Eyvind Torfinn answered.

  "You have a shaman with you." By the way Sarus said it, it was not a question.

  "And why should we not?" Eyvind Torfinn spoke in even terms. After Trasamund's bombast, Count Hamnet wondered if Sarus would pay any attention to him. Eyvind went on, "The world is full of spirits. The world is full of other shamans, too. Are we not allowed to ward ourselves as we would?"

  Sarus mulled that. The son of the Musk Ox jarl was big and fair, like most of the Bizogots who rode with him and like Trasamund. Though he couldn't have been older than twenty-five, he had a warrior's scars and a nose that leaned to the left. "You will come to our camp," he said at last. "My father will decide."

  It was not a request but a command. The only way to say no was not to speak but to fight. Sarus had more men with him than the Raumsdalians and Trasamund. Even if the northbound travelers somehow vanquished Sarus and his followers, the Musk Ox men could easily summon reinforcements. Hamnet Thyssen could not prove there were any other Raumsdalians north of the ill-defined border.

  "Are we to be guests at your father's camp?" he asked before either Trasamund or Eyvind Torfinn could speak. People formally admitted to be guests had a special status among the Bizogots. They couldn't be killed for the sport of it, for instance. If any of them were female, they couldn't be thrown down on the cold ground and gang-raped for the sport of it, either.

  If Sarus said no, then fighting to the death now might make a better bet than whatever the Musk Ox jarl's son had in mind. But, after no more than a heartbeat's hesitation, Sarus nodded. "Yes, you will be guests at my father's camp. You will eat of our meat and salt. You will drink of our smetyn." That was the name they gave to fermented mammoth's milk—indeed, to any fermented milk. A Raumsdalian would have spoken of bread and salt and beer or, if he was rich, of wine. But the same principle held.

  "We thank you for your kindness," Hamnet Thyssen said. "We are glad to accept. Should you come to the lands we roam, we will gladly guest you there."

  Sarus smiled to see a foreigner fulfill ritual so well. Trasamund bared his teeth at Count Hamnet in what looked also like a smile, but wasn't. He did not want ties of guesting to bind him to the Musk Ox clan. Want it or not, though, he was stuck with it unless he wanted to charge Sarus's clansmates singlehanded.

  Maybe he wanted to. But he didn't do it.

  Hamnet Thyssen chuckled, down deep in his chest. So did Ulric Skakki. Audun Gilli looked from one of them to the other. Neither offered to explain. In some clans—Hamnet didn't know if the Musk Ox was one of them—hospitality went further than meat and salt and smetyn. Some of the mammoth-herders shared their wives with guests.

  And the Bizogots expected visitors to their tents to do the same if they ever appeared as guests themselves. Every so often, a Raumsdalian marriage burned like a dry, dead fir after a man who'd gone up to the frozen plains unexpectedly had to try to meet his obligations to a traveler from the north.

  What would Gudrid make of such a demand? Count Hamnet suspected it would depend on what she thought of the individual Bizogot. She certainly hadn't turned her back on Trasamund—at least, not with her clothes on.

  To Hamnet's relief, Sarus son of Leovigild said, "We ride, then," and wheeled his horse to the northwest, the direction from which he and his comrades had come. The Raumsdalians and Trasamund rode after him.

  The dogs that had loped along with Sarus's followers clung close to their horses. They didn't trouble the travelers. Hamnet didn't hear any more barks from the outsized magical dog, but he wondered whether Audun Gilli was keeping some of the nonexistent animal's definitely existent smell in the air. No denying it—Audun was a wizard.

  When the barbarians passed a herd of grazing musk oxen, most of the dogs peeled off to help tend it. The musk oxen didn't seem to need much help. Whenever men or wild beasts approached, they formed a circle with the formidably horned bulls facing out on the perimeter. Cows and calves sheltered within. The defense wasn't perfect, but what in this world was? It was usually more than good enough.

  Sarus rode back to the Raumsdalians and fell in beside him. "May I ask you something?" the Bizogot said in Raumsdalian not quite as good as Trasamund's.

  "You may ask. I do not promise to answer." Count Hamnet went on speaking the Bizogot tongue. He wanted the practice.

  Maybe Sarus did, too, for he continued in Raumsdalian, "This woman you have with you—who is she? What is she doing here?"

  Hamnet understood his curiosity. If anything, saying women from the Empire seldom came to the frozen steppe was an understatement. "Gudrid is Earl Eyvind Torfinn's wife," Hamnet answered. That was true now. What was once true didn't concern the Bizogot.

  "I thought he said that, the old man. I was not sure it could be so." Sarus shrugged. "But then again, why not? Our strong old men take younger women when they can, too. So he brought her with him to keep him warm when the Breath of God blows strong, did he?"

  "It is not as simple as that," Hamnet said, another good-sized understatement.

  "I should say it is not!" Sarus exclaimed. "A good-looking woman who is not so old when the man who has her is ... How much trouble has she caused you?"

  "Some," Hamnet answered. "Less than she might have, I suppose. But that is not quite what I meant. Eyvind Torfinn did not bring this woman here, not the way you think. She came north because it was her will that she come north. She follows her own will, no one else's." One more understatement.

  "I have heard that you imperials are soft with your women. I see it is so," Sarus said. "Beat her a few times and she will follow her husband's will, no one else's." He folded one large hand into a hard fist. "It works for us."

  Hamnet had hit Gudrid when he first found out she was unfaithful to him. She tried to give him hemlock in his beer. She tried to slip a knife between his ribs while he slept. He hit her again, and told her he wouldn't do it any more if she stopped trying to do away with him. She did. Did that mean beating her worked? He didn't think so.

  It didn't stop her from being unfaithful, not to him. And nothing stopped her from being unfaithful to Eyvind Torfinn, either.

  What was he supposed to tell Sarus? He didn't want to admit Gudrid was once his—and his worry—so he said, "You have your ways, we have ours. Some ways work for some folk, others for others."

  "It could be so," the Bizogot said politely. "But what if ways do not work for a folk? What then?"

  "Nothing in this world is perfect," Hamnet Thyssen said, and smiled a little. Who would have dreamt that what held true for the defensive herds of musk oxen also held for women? He wondered what Gudrid would have thought of that. Not much, most likely.

  "God is perfect," Sarus said. "How could God not be perfect? He would not be God."

  "God is perfect," Hamnet agreed. "But is God in this world or above it?"

  Sarus grunted. That was a different sort of argument. Instead of taking it up, the jarl's son said, "The Golden Shrine is perfect."

  "Is it?" Hamnet said. "I have never known a man who has seen it. I have never heard a man who says he knows a man who has seen it." He had no idea what, if anything, Trasamund had told the Bizogots on his way down to Nidaros. Did they even know the Gap had melted through and Trasamund had fared beyond the Glacier? If they didn't, Hamnet was not about to tell them.

  "The Golden Shrine must be perfect," Sarus said. "If God is in the world at all, he is in the world there."

  "Well, maybe." Count Hamnet didn't care to quarrel. "Down in the Raumsdalian Empire, we hear all sorts of stories of lands still farther south, lands where it's like summer the whole year around, lands where there are strange animals and stranger birds. Tales about places you have not seen . . . Who knows what to believe?"

  "Travelers' tales are mostly lies," Sarus said.

  "Mostly, but not always," Hamnet said. "Sometimes the travelers will
bring hides with them, hides of beasts that do not live in the Empire or any neighboring country. And do you know of opossums? Have they come this far north?"

  "I have seen one or two." Sarus made a face. "Horrible things, like big rats with pointed faces. What about them?"

  "In the olden days, when the Glacier still covered this country, they would not even come up as far as Nidaros," Hamnet Thyssen said. "As the Glacier has moved north, as the weather has grown warmer, opossums have moved north, too. The people who live south of us say the beasts once came up through their lands, and there were times when they did not know them. Opossums would have been travelers' tales in long-gone days. But now they have their own tails, and hang by them."

  He hoped the pun worked in the Bizogot language. Sarus made another face, so evidently it did. "You will believe travelers' tales about these ugly animals," the Musk Ox clansman said. "But you will not believe them about the Golden Shrine or about God. What does this say of you?"

  "That I believe what I see with my own eyes, what I touch with my own hands," Hamnet answered. "I already knew this about myself. Anyone else who deals with me for even a little while comes to see it is true."

  Sarus thought about it for a little while. Then he nodded, as if to say he had already seen it. And then he rode away, as if to say that, having seen it, he did not find it pleasing. Hamnet Thyssen was unsurprised. He'd met that reaction before.

  * * * *

  More dogs barked and howled when the Raumsdalians and Trasamund rode into the Musk Ox clan's encampment. But, though the big, ferocious-looking beasts made halfhearted rushes toward the newcomers, they did no more. Count Hamnet glanced toward Audun Gilli. The wizard gave back a smile of sorts.

  Maybe his magic held dogs at bay. Bizogots were another story. Men, women, and children swarmed out of their tents of musk-ox skins and mammoth hides, drawn to the strangers like iron to a lodestone. They would steal if they saw a chance. Hamnet Thyssen knew that from experience. He hoped the Bizogots wouldn't have too many chances to steal from his comrades—hoped without particularly expecting his hopes would come true.

  Instead of poles, mammoth ribs and leg bones supported the Bizogots' tents. Here beyond the line where trees could grow to a useful size, wood was scarce and precious. The fires burning in braziers weren't from seasoned timber, either. They were of dried mammoth or musk-ox dung, which gave food cooked over them a certain unique piquancy.

  The Bizogots claimed meat roasted over dung fires was especially smoky and juicy and flavorful. They claimed mere wood couldn't come close to matching dung in any of those ways. Travelers up from the south were dubious about their claims. Hamnet Thyssen didn't think joints cooked over dung had any marked superiority over those he was more used to. While up on the frozen plains, he generally tried not to think at all about how his meat was cooked.

  Ulric Skakki had also come up here before. When he smelled the dung fires, one of his eyebrows quirked up in wry amusement. He caught Ham-net's eye and shrugged a shrug half resigned, half melodramatic. "How long will the rest of them need?" he asked, and didn't finish the question. Sooner or later, all the Raumsdalians would realize how the Bizogots had to cook.

  No one needed long to realize how little the Bizogots bathed. There Hamnet Thyssen had a hard time blaming the mammoth-herders. Even in summer, warm water was a rare luxury here. In winter, water for drinking and cooking, let alone for bathing, had to be melted from snow or ice—and shedding one's clothes invited frostbite if not worse. But even if he understood why the Bizogots behaved as they did, the strong, sour reek that rose from them made his nostrils flare.

  Their jarl, Sarus's father, looked like a larger, older version of the man who’d brought the Raumsdalians to the camp. Gray streaked Leovigild's greasy hair and shaggy beard. Thick, heavy gold hoops hung from his ears. A thicker golden necklace flashed against the gray and dun of his wolfskin jacket. And, when he smiled, glittering gold covered or replaced most of his front teeth. Many a Raumsdalian banker or pawnbroker would have envied his smile.

  He spoke with Sarus first, to find out what arrangements his son had made with the strangers. When he knew, he turned to the Raumsdalians and Trasamund and boomed, "Welcome, my guests! Welcome! Three times welcome! Use our encampment as your own while you bide with us."

  "We thank you for your kindness. We thank you for your hospitality. We thank you for your generosity," Eyvind Torfinn said politely.

  "Come north and use my camp as I use yours now," Trasamund boomed back.

  He and Leovigild stared at each other in what seemed part appraisal, part challenge. They had come out of the same mold, though Leovigild was out longer and had seen more hard use. "You think you're so special, traveling along by the edge of the Glacier," the Musk Ox jarl said. "All it means is, your clan couldn't get better grazing ground."

  "Shows what you know, you old raven," Trasamund answered. "Every year, the Glacier falls back. All the new land that shows when it does is mine." He made a fist and thumped it against his broad chest. "Mine!" He thumped his chest again. Hamnet Thyssen had never met a subtle, restrained Bizogot, never once.

  Trasamund and Leovigild exchanged more brags and barbs. They seemed more good-natured than otherwise. Maybe that meant they both remembered the obligations guesting gave them, or maybe that they didn't dislike each other as men even if their clans did not get on well. Hamnet accepted the good humor without worrying overmuch about the wherefores behind it.

  His time to worry came a little later, when Leovigild rounded on the Raumsdalians and demanded, "And you people, what are you doing north of the tree line?"

  The jarl eyed him and Eyvind Torfinn in particular. He found that interesting. Audun Gilli was easy to ignore—the other travelers did it all the time. But Ulric Skakki was not a man who casually sank into obscurity. Neither was the leader of Gudrid's guards, a tough-looking captain named Jesper Fletti. And yet Leovigild took no notice of either Ulric or Jesper. He took no notice of Gudrid, either, but Bizogots were less likely to take women seriously (or, at least, less likely to show they took women seriously) than Raumsdalians were.

  "Your Ferocity, we are explorers, come to learn what we may of your excellent country," Eyvind Torfinn said, as smoothly as he could in the Bizogots' language. "I am a scholar of days gone by. We have a wizard with us as well. . . ." He nodded to Audun Gilli, who looked surprised— even alarmed—at being singled out.

  Leovigild also nodded. "Our shamans will have somewhat to say to this fellow. One or two of them speak Raumsdalian." He plainly did not expect Audun to know his language. By the look he gave the wizard, he might not have expected Audun to know anything. His attention swung back to Earl Eyvind. "What of the others, then?"

  "Soldiers help guard and help hunt," Eyvind said. Leovigild accepted that with a wave. Eyvind Torfinn continued, "Count Hamnet here is an excellent man of his hands, and has traveled the cold plains before, while Ulric Skakki. .." He ran down. How was he supposed to explain why Ulric Skakki had come north?

  "I know all sorts of strange things, your Ferocity." Ulric had no trouble speaking for himself. "You never can tell when one of them will come in handy, and you never can tell which one it will be."

  "Huh." Leovigild eyed him. "Strange things about slitting throats and knocking heads together and setting traps and stealing pouches, or I miss my guess." Leovigild waited. When Ulric Skakki didn't deny it, the jarl grunted. "Thought so." He swung back toward Earl Eyvind. "And what about the woman?"

  "Gudrid is my wife, your Ferocity," Eyvind Torfinn said, a touch of sternness in his voice.

  "Can't fault your taste—she looks tastable enough, in fact." Leovigild roared laughter at the look on Eyvind's face. He went on, "But what is she doing here!"

  "I suggest you ask her yourself," Earl Eyvind replied.

  "Never mind." Leovigild threw back his head and laughed again. "You just told me everything I need to know." Eyvind Torfinn looked bewildered, which only made the Bizogot laugh hard
er. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble following Leovigild. He meant that Eyvind couldn't tell Gudrid what to do. The mammoth-herder wasn't wrong, either. Count Hamnet wondered whether anyone had ever been able to tell Gudrid what to do. He doubted it. He knew too well he hadn't.

  "She is well able to take care of herself," Eyvind Torfinn said. That was true enough; it might well have been truer than he knew.

  True or not, it made Leovigild laugh even more. But then the Bizogot jarl sobered. "Something you should know," he said, aiming a scarred forefinger at Eyvind's chest. "Something you need to know, by God. Need to know, yes. The Empire is rich. The Empire has a great plenty of everything. Is it not so?"

  "Well . . ." Eyvind Torfinn hesitated. Anyone who'd lived his whole life in the Raumsdalian Empire knew things weren't as simple as Leovigild made them out to be. But anyone who'd spent even a little while on the frozen plains of the north knew that, from the Bizogot point of view, the jarl was right and more than right. The Empire was rich. It did have a great plenty of everything.

  "It is so," Leovigild said solemnly. "And because it is so, in the Empire you can say, 'This one can take care of himself,' or even, 'This one can take care of herself.' There is so much down in the south, one person can have enough. It is not like that here. One person alone here is one person dead here. Only the clans can go on. Do you understand this, Eyvind Torfinn? Does your tastable Gudrid understand it?"

  "I understand your words very well, your Ferocity," Earl Eyvind said. Leovigild scowled and turned away. Hamnet Thyssen knew why. Eyvind Torfinn understood what the Bizogot's words meant, yes, but they didn't sink in for him, not at the gut level where they should have. And how much trouble would that cause him in his travels through the north?

  How much trouble would it cause Gudrid? A woman could be independent down where trees grew and the ground wasn't frozen all the time. Up here, where even a man was more a part of his clan than an individual? She might find out the hard way just how different things were.