Beyond the Gap Page 8

  Leovigild shrugged, as if to say it wasn't his worry. "You Raumsdalians are our guests," he said. "Even Trasamund is our guest. Eat, then, and drink, and know that the Musk Ox clan does not stint."

  When the mammoth-herders ate, they ate well. By Raumsdalian standards, they ate monumentally well. Musk-ox ribs and liver and chitterlings and brains did not taste much different from the beef Raumsdalians ate at home. The Bizogots made cheese from musk-ox milk. They also made but­ter, and ate it as a food on its own instead of spreading it on bread—they had no bread. They used it in their lamps, too.

  Mammoth had a stronger flavor than musk ox. Not all of that sprang from the fuel over which the meat cooked; the musk ox was roasted over burning dung, too. Count Hamnet had never quite got used to mammoth meat, and would not have eaten it by choice. Coming up onto the frozen plains, he had no choice. Mammoth-milk cheese also had a tang all its own.

  For treats, the Bizogots ate strawberries and raspberries and blueberries and gooseberries candied in honey. The berries that grew in this clime were small but very sweet. Bees had to scurry like madmen in the short spring and summer to lay in enough supplies to last through the rest of the year. Only a little farther north, and they could not live.

  Smetyn, whether made from mammoth or musk-ox milk . . . Even ale was better, as far as Hamnet was concerned. But the sour brews warmed him inside and told him how sleepy he was. He rolled himself in a mammoth-hide blanket and went to bed in a tent that reeked of burning butter.

  V

  When count Hamnet woke, he needed a moment to remember where he was. He'd been on the road for a while now, and he'd got used to Ulric Skakki's resonant snores. He supposed Ulric was used to his, too, for the other man didn't complain about them any more.

  The lingering smell of the butter lamp told him what he needed to know. That's right—the Bizogot encampment, he thought. In case he needed a further reminder, the shaggy hair on the mammoth hide draped over him would have done the job.

  He yawned and stretched. A few early-morning sunbeams managed to sneak into the tent and turn what would have been darkness into gloom. One of those sunbeams hit Ulric Skakki in the eye. Ulric tried to twist away, but the damage was done. His eyes opened. He sat up and looked toward Hamnet Thyssen.

  "You awake?" he asked.

  "Of course not. I always talk in my sleep," Hamnet answered.

  "It's too early in the morning to be funny," Ulric complained. Then he started to scratch and started to swear. "By God, it's a Bizogot camp, all right. Fleas, bedbugs—a copper gets you gold we're lousy, too." He scratched some more, harder now.

  Hamnet Thyssen also started scratching. All at once, he itched everywhere. "It's not a surprise," he said, trying to sound resigned instead of fu­rious. "They don't bathe. They wander with animals all the time. There are all these hides around, and scraps of meat. . . No wonder they've got bugs."

  "No, no wonder at all. I've been through this before. I just forgot how much I love it, that's all." By now, Ulric Skakki was probably scratching hard enough to draw blood. That wouldn't help him; it would only make him more alluring to the parasites he was trying to kill. He said, "I wonder if Audun can do anything about our little friends."

  "Don't get your hopes up too high," Hamnet said. "The Bizogot shamans know something about wizardry, too, and they crawl with vermin just like the rest of the barbarians."

  Ulric grunted. "Well, you know how to murder a man's hopes first thing in the morning, don't you?" He crushed something between his thumbnails. "Ha! Got one of the little bastards, anyway. ... I just had a thought."

  "Congratulations, I suppose," Hamnet Thyssen said, and then, "Oh. You expect me to ask you what it is."

  "If that's not too much trouble." Ulric had no trouble being sarcastic, either.

  "Not at all," Count Hamnet said politely. "So what is this thought of yours?"

  "Maybe the Bizogots are so used to getting eaten alive that it's never occurred to their shamans that they don't have to. Maybe that's why they don't have any spells to hold the bugs at bay."

  "Maybe," Hamnet said. "We can find out, anyhow." If he didn't sound optimistic, he wasn't.

  A Bizogot dog barked at him when he came out of the tent, but not with the same ferocity the beasts had shown before. Now he'd eaten Bizogot food and slept under Bizogot blankets in a tent lit by Bizogot lamps. He was bound to start smelling like a Bizogot himself. The dog would approve of that. Hamnet didn't, but he couldn't do anything about it. And when everybody smelled the same way, nobody smelled especially bad. That was consolation, of a sort.

  It was consolation for him, at least. He wondered how Gudrid would like it.

  When she came out of her tent, she smelled of attar of roses. At least Hamnet Thyssen assumed the sweet fragrance came from her; it seemed unlikely to belong to Jesper Fletti or the other imperial guardsmen, and even more unlikely to belong to the Bizogot women. Some of them were pretty enough, in a fair, strong-featured way, but they cared no more for Raumsdalian notions of cleanliness than their menfolk did.

  They did notice the scent that clung to Gudrid, though at first they didn't seem sure where it was coming from. "Like flowers, only more so," one of them said.

  "Could we do that?" another asked. They liked the sweet smells, then, even if they didn't know much about making them.

  Looking smug, Gudrid showed off the little glass bottle in which the perfume came. The Bizogot women made as much of the bottle as of the scent inside. That disconcerted Gudrid, which amused Count Hamnet. To the mammoth-hunters, glass was a trade good, rare and costly. It was one more thing they mostly did without. Life on the frozen plains was, and had to be, pared down to essentials. The Bizogots made do without pottery, too, except for what they got in trade from the south. They used baskets and hide vessels. Some of the baskets were so finely woven, they would hold water. Others, with clay smeared over them, could go into a fire without burning. That was as close as the Bizogots came to real pots.

  Gudrid dabbed perfume on some of the women. Yes, the Bizogots liked it. Two or three of the big blondes tried by sleight of hand to make the bottle disappear. Gudrid didn't let that happen. She didn't mind stealing herself—anything from a new joke to a new husband—but she drew the line at others stealing from her. And she drew it successfully, and she didn't make the Bizogot women hate her when she did. In spite of himself, Ham-net Thyssen was impressed.

  Leovigild was not. "More southern foolishness," he rumbled, that being the Bizogots' usual name for anything the Raumsdalians could do that they couldn't match. But his nostrils flared whenever he got a whiff of the perfume.

  Trasamund also did his best not to show the perfume was anything out of the ordinary. "We've got to be moving," he said at shorter and shorter intervals. Of course, he'd gone down into the Empire. He'd met perfume before, on Gudrid and, no doubt, on others as well. He'd even learned to bathe . . . sometimes.

  Leovigild and Sarus both bowed to him. "God watch over you, our guest," they said. "Stay safe, stay full, stay warm. May the Breath of God blow you here again."

  "May it be so." Trasamund replied to one ritual phrase with another. "Safety and meat and warmth to you as well, and may the Breath of God bring you to my encampment, that I might guest you in answer for your kindness."

  Count Hamnet would have been angry if a detachment of Raumsdalian soldiers took so long to get moving in the morning. With so many people who weren't Raumsdalian soldiers in the party, he supposed it could have been worse. He suspected days would come when it was worse, too.

  The dogs chased them when they rode out of camp. Count Hamnet hadn't expected anything different. To a dog, going away meant running away, and running away meant you were prey. Audun Gilli made the Voice of Dog snarl at the Bizogot beasts. Maybe he made them smell that fearsome scent, too. They dashed back toward the mammoth-hide tents, whimpers in their throats and their tails clamped between their legs.

  No sooner were they gone than they were f
orgotten. The plain stretched out ahead of the travelers—the plain, and then, farther north still, the Glacier.

  * * * *

  One of the things Hamnet Thyssen forgot—one of the things any Raumsdalian forgot—was how wide, how deep, the frozen plains were. A man or woman who lived in the Empire knew variety wherever the eye fell. Here you saw forests; there, fields. Here you saw a castle; there a village; there, maybe, a town. In the east there were hills; in the west, mountains. Birds and animals accommodated themselves to the different terrain in which they dwelt. People did the same thing; a tinsmith's life in a town differed in almost every way from that of a farmer who grew grain to feed his family, while a rafter who floated great armies of logs down the Broad River toward the rich foreign cities by the Warm Sea knew yet another way to earn his bread and meat and beer.

  But the frozen plains were ... the frozen plains. Once the Musk Ox clan's encampment fell behind Count Hamnet, the wide land stretched out around him and his companions in one vast sweep, seemingly identical in every direction. When the sun shone bright, the travelers might have been insects crawling across an endless plate under an enormous dome of blue enamel.

  And when the wind shifted and blew out of the north, when clouds swept down and covered the sky, Hamnet Thyssen's sense of being nothing, of going nowhere, if anything, intensified. When shadows disappeared, the very idea of direction seemed to go with them. He might have been moving in any direction at all. It didn't seem to matter.

  He rode up alongside Trasamund and asked, "How do you remember you are men when you measure yourselves against. . . this?" He intended his wave to be as vast as the landscape it tried to take in. Instead, the motion only reminded him of his own puniness.

  Would Trasamund understand him at all? Or did the Bizogot take his own land as much for granted as a Raumsdalian peasant took his farm? To Hamnet s relief, the jarl neither gaped nor sneered at him. "Out here in the middle of nowhere, it happens that men forget," Trasamund said.

  "How do you mean?" Hamnet asked.

  Trasamund said a word in his own language that Hamnet hadn't heard before. "I am not sure how to turn that into Raumsdalian," the Bizogot went on. "It means something like to enchant yourself. Sometimes you will find a fellow staring up at the sky, or sometimes out to where the sky and the land meet. He has forgotten everything around him. Sometimes hearing his friends will bring him back to himself. Sometimes it takes a shaman. Every once in awhile"—he spread his hands—"his soul flies away for good, and who knows where it goes? This is a summer complaint, you understand."

  Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "Yes, I can see how it would be." In winter up here, everything closed down. A man who spent most of his time inside one of the mammoth-hide tents with his wife and his children and his dogs and all their fleas wouldn't worry about how wide the world was. "You say it happens here," Hamnet went on. "Does it not with men of the Three Tusk clan?"

  "Oh, no." Trasamund laughed at the very idea. "Oh, no, Raumsdalian. These folk have the plain. And so do we; I will not say otherwise. We have the plain, too, yes. But we also have the Glacier."

  "Ah." If Hamnet were walking instead of riding, he would have kicked at the ground in annoyance. He didn't like seeming foolish or missing things, but he knew he had.

  And then, a few hours later, the travelers were no longer alone on the plain. Jesper Fietti pointed north. "Are those . . . mammoths?" the imperial guard captain asked in an unwontedly small voice.

  "Not at all," Ulric Skakki said blandly. "Those are steppe fleas. And if you're not careful, they'll step on you."

  Jesper grimaced. So did Hamnet Thyssen. Audun Gilli winced. Trasamund didn't get it for a moment. He had to think in his own language, and didn't understand Raumsdalian as readily. When he did, he roared laughter. "Steppe fleas, is it? If those are fleas, then the world is their dog."

  "Maybe it is," Ulric said. "Only God knows why He made it the way He did. Maybe one of these days the world will scratch, and that will be the end of the fleas—and of us, too."

  "Do not tell this to a priest, unless you want to burn for blasphemy," Hamnet Thyssen said.

  "Do not tell this to a shaman, either. He may decide to sacrifice you to let out the madness in your spirit," Trasamund said. He snorted. "Steppe fleas!"

  There were about a dozen mammoths—a herd of females with their young. Males wandered by themselves except during the late-summer mating season, when they would use their weight and their tusks to battle one another to see which of them fathered the new generation. The rest of the year, those tusks pushed snow off the grasses the mammoths ate and broke ice atop frozen streams so they could drink.

  "Do not go too close," Trasamund warned. "Otherwise we shall have to step lively to flee the steppe fleas."

  He waved a challenge to Ulric Skakki. Grinning, Ulric waved back, yielding him the prize. Trasamund bowed in the saddle.

  No matter how bad his puns, the jarl's advice was good. Hamnet Thyssen might have wanted a closer look at the mammoths, but he understood they didn't want a closer look at him. The travelers got near enough to let him remind himself what marvelous beasts they were.

  The females stood perhaps eight feet high at the shoulder. Males were bigger—he remembered that. They looked like great shaggy boulders shambling over the plain. The females were big enough for all ordinary use. The knobs of bone they had on top of their heads gave them high foreheads and a look of greater cleverness than their cousins, the forest mastodons. As far as Hamnet knew, that look was an illusion. It was a powerful illusion, though.

  Unlike mastodons, mammoths also had a hump on their backs. They sloped down from it, so that their hind legs were relatively short. They had small ears and short trunks, which made it harder for them to freeze.

  And they had long, black-brown hair that often led them to be called woolly mammoths. It wasn't wool; it wasn't anything like wool. The hairs were thick and coarse—they had to be half a dozen times as thick as a man's hair. But they were long—some of them as long as a man's arm—and they grew close together. Mammoths, like musk oxen, could get through almost any weather.

  One of the females lifted her trunk and blew a warning blast. It sounded something like a trumpet, something like a gargle. Another female also trumpeted. The young mammoths ran behind their mothers. They were browner than the adults.

  "How do you herd them?" Audun Gilli asked Trasamund.

  "Carefully," the jarl answered, laughing.

  The wizard looked disappointed. "I hoped for something more than that."

  Trasamund almost told him where to head in. Then the Bizogot visibly thought better of showing his annoyance. A man who offended a sorcerer could have ail sorts of unpleasant things happen to him. "Well," Trasamund said, "a man on horseback is big enough even for a mammoth to notice. And a troop of men shouting and waving torches can usually get the beasts to do what they want. Usually."

  "What do you do when they stampede?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

  "Try to stay out of their way, by God. Try not to get trampled and squashed," the Bizogot answered. He was joking, but then again he wasn't. After a moment, he went on, "You wave those torches around for all they're worth, too. Mammoths are like most beasts—they don't like fire."

  "I have a question, too," Jesper Fletti said. He waited for Trasamund to nod his way, then asked, "How do you get the females tame enough for milking?"

  "You bribe them." The Bizogot jarl spoke Raumsdalian with some relish. "There is a kind of grass that grows on some parts of the plain—blueflower, we call it in my language. The mammoths are wild for it. One of the things we do while we travel is pull up blueflower wherever we find it. When we set a pile of the dried grass in front of a mammoth, she will stand and eat it, and the milkers can do what they need to do. Yes, we bribe the mammoths. They might as well be people."

  "Are they as clever as people say?" Audun asked.

  "I don't know. How clever do people down in the Empire say they are?" Trasamund asked. "T
hey know how to do more things than musk oxen can, I'll say that. And they remember better than musk oxen do, too."

  "They have trunks," Hamnet Thyssen said. "Those are almost like hands. They let mammoths do things other animals can't."

  "Yes, that's so. That makes them almost like people, too," Trasamund said. "One of these days, maybe, they'll try bribing us instead of the other way around." He chortled at his own wit. Like most Bizogots Count Hamnet had known, he wasn't shy about finding himself wonderful in all kinds of ways.

  "Do any beasts besides men trouble them?" Ulric Skakki asked.

  "Every once in a while, lions or a short-faced bear will take a calf that wanders too far from its mother," Trasamund replied. "Doesn't happen often, but it happens. But what really troubles them in the warmer times are bugs. In spite of all that hair, the flies and mosquitoes drive them wild."

  "I've been up here. I believe that," Hamnet said. When the frozen plain thawed out in springtime—or thawed out as much as it ever did, anyhow— endless little ponds dotted the landscape. Mosquitoes laid eggs in those ponds and then rose in buzzing, biting swarms. Sometimes the clouds of them were thick enough to dim the sun. It was as if the soul of a vampire were reincarnated in a million beings instead of just one.

  A baby mammoth came out from behind its mother and took a few curious steps toward the travelers. She trumpeted at it. When it didn't heed her, she walked up and thumped its side with her trunk. The blow couldn't have hurt, but it sent a message. The baby stopped.

  "You see?" Trasamund said. "When the little one gets out of line, it gets whacked. So too it is among the Bizogots. We have no spoiled, whining folk among us, not like some places a man could name."

  That was nonsense, as Hamnet Thyssen knew. Bizogots pulled together better than Raumsdalians. That didn't mean there were no spoiled mammoth-herders, and it didn't mean they never whined. More often than not, Hamnet would have argued the point with Trasamund. Today, he held his peace, not because he felt uncommonly generous but because Trasamund was looking right at Gudrid when he grumbled about spoiled Raumsdalians. That would have made Hamnet forgive and overlook a lot.