Beyond the Gap

by Harry Turtledove

  "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.

  If a woman wasn't Gudrid, she wasn't worth bothering with.

  And if a woman was Gudrid . . . she wasn't worth bothering with, either.

  He wondered where that left him. Nowhere good was the only answer he'd ever found. While true, it didn't seem helpful.

  "Would you like to go again?" Marcatrude asked.

  "Thank you, dear, but no," Hamnet answered. To make her feel better, he added, "Once with you is like twice with anybody else."

  "You do say sweet things," she told him, so at least he was a successful hypocrite. She didn't seem particularly put out with him for not rising to the occasion again. He had gray in his beard, so how surprising was it that once sufficed for him? Marcatrude asked, "Will you spend the night with me?"

  Was that fondness, or did she aim to steal what she could while he slept? "I will," he said. "But in the morning, if anything of mine is missing, I will make you unhappy. I know how to do that, too. Do you believe me?"

  If she were a man, he would have insulted her by being so blunt. But a man, even one who wasn't a mammoth-herder himself, could speak as he pleased to a Bizogot woman. Marcatrude's nod said the thought of thievery did cross her mind. "If I don't steal, will you give me something to remember you by?" she asked.

  "Maybe I already did," he said, and she made a wry face at him. She might remember him very well indeed nine months from now. But that wasn't what she meant, and he knew it. He went on, "I will—if you don't."

  "I said that," she told him, and pulled more skins over both of them, enough to keep them warm even though they were naked. Then she blew out the lamp. The darkness that had been hovering at the top of the tent and near the edges spread its wings and swooped.

  He couldn't recall the last time he actually slept with a woman. Marcatrude's smooth warmth proved a bigger distraction than he expected. And in that darkness absolute, she could have been anyone, anyone at all, even.. . His arms tightened around her. She laughed, deep in her throat. Maybe she'd had that in mind, too.

  After the second round, they both fell asleep almost at once. Hamnet woke up sometime in the night. Marcatrudes arm lay on his shoulder. Her legs were twined with his. She murmured when he disentangled them, but didn't really rouse. He lay awake a long time himself.

  When morning came, he checked carefully, but found himself unplundered. He gave her a silverpiece with Sigvat IIs beaky profile on it. Bizogots didn't mint coins, but they used the ones they got in trade from lands farther south.

  "I thank you," she said. "May your travels farewell. I will remember you."

  "And I you." Hamnet Thyssen told the truth, as he usually did. He joined with women seldom enough these days to make each of them stand out in his mind.

  When the travelers rode north, Gudrid guided her horse next to Ham-net's. He didn't want her attentions. When he tried to steer away from her, though, she rode after him. "Well?" she said, a certain malicious relish in her voice.

  "Well, what?" he asked. If she got it out of her system, maybe she would go away and leave him alone.

  "How was it, touching her with one hand and holding your nose with the other?"

  He looked at her. He looked through her. "Better than attar of roses," he said.

  If she slapped him this time, he intended to deck her. If Jesper Fletti didn't like it, Hamnet intended to deck him, too, or do whatever else he needed to do. But Gudrid only laughed. "Who would have thought you'd turn into a liar?" she said, and rode off.

  Count Hamnet stared after her. She wasn't altogether wrong. And yet.. . Even if he wasn't immune to her, he knew she was poisonous. And the Bizogot girl wasn't. In that sense, he'd told Gudrid nothing but the truth.

  * * * *

  As they drew closer to the Glacier, they found they'd outrun spring. Sooner or later, the warm winds from the south would make it up to the very edge of the ice. A new meltwater lake was forming, there where the Glacier retreated. Grass and shrubs and flowers would burst forth from the ground for a few weeks. Streams would melt. Midges and mites and mosquitoes would buzz and breed with desperate urgency. And, when the season ended, the Glacier would have moved a few feet farther north than it had been the year before.

  But spring wasn't here yet. By the look of the ground and the feel of the air, it wouldn't get here any time soon, either. Thick gray clouds blowing down from the north hid the sun. Snow lay on every north-facing slope, and on some ground that didn't face north. The hares that dug through the snow for dead grass from the last brief summer stayed white, though their cousins farther south were going brown. The foxes that hunted them were also white.

  Wolves remained gray. The travelers saw a small pack of dire wolves trotting along in search of anything they could eat, from rabbits to musk oxen. The wolves saw them, too, or scented them, and came over for a closer look. Unlike the pack the travelers had met earlier, these wolves seemed to decide right away that they were more trouble than they were worth—or maybe these wolves weren't so hungry, and didn't need to press an attack. After shadowing the travelers for a while, the dire wolves loped off across the frozen plain.

  "I am not sorry to see them go, the miserable, skulking things," Jesper Fletti said.

  "Neither am I," Ulric Skakki said. "If they had lawyers instead of teeth, they'd be as bad as people."

  Jesper gave him a puzzled look. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "What it says. I commonly say what I mean. Don't you?" Ulric was the picture of innocence. Jesper Fletti scratched his head but decided to let it drop.

  "Do you enjoy baiting him?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

  "Some," Ulric answered. "He's not as much fun as you are, because he hasn't got the brains to shoot back."

  "I'd think that would make him more fun, not less," Count Hamnet said.

  "No, no, no." Ulric Skakki shook his head. "No sport to it."

  "I see." Hamnet bowed in the saddle. "So glad to provide you with amusement. If you ever get bored with me, you can always pull the wings and legs off flies." He slapped at himself. "Enough of them at this season of the year. Too many, in fact."

  Ulric slapped, too. "Way too bloody many, if anyone wants to knowwhat I think. They don't just take pain, either, the way Jesper does—they give it out, too. That makes it a fair fight."

  "If you want to be on the receiving end, you can always quarrel with dear Gudrid," Hamnet said.

  "No, thanks," Ulric answered. "I'd be the unarmed one there." His shiver had nothing to do with the chilly weather. "Meaning no disrespect, your Grace, but I don't know what you saw in her. Well, I know what you saw— she's a fine-looking woman, even now. But I don't know how you put up with her as long as you did."

  "Everything was fine—everything was wonderful—till all of a sudden it wasn't." That was as much as Hamnet Thyssen had said about the downfall of his marriage since Gudrid left him. He scowled at Ulric Skakki, wondering how the other man tricked the words out of him. Ulric stared back blandly, as if to say he had nothing to do with it.

  And, listening to himself, Hamnet Thyssen realized he'd been a fool to believe that then, and was a bigger fool if he still believed it now. Things couldn't have been all right between him and Gudrid, even if he failed to notice anything wrong. A happy spouse didn't start running around for no reason at all—which could only mean Gudrid hadn't been happy long before he realized she wasn't. How many lovers did she have that he never suspected?

  Maybe things would have
been different if she'd had a child or two in the first few years they were married. Well, things certainly would have been different if she had. Maybe they would have been better. He'd never know now.

  Off in the distance, a bull mammoth wandered by itself. The bad bulls were probably the most dangerous animals on the frozen steppe. They were fierce and clever and swift and strong and very hard to kill.

  Ulric Skakki kept looking from the woolly mammoth to Hamnet and back again. That almost made Hamnet laugh. He was strong and swift, and could be fierce. He dared hope he was hard to kill. Clever? Hadn't he just proved himself a fool in his own eyes? Didn't a teratorn, a bird that needed no more in the way of brains than what was required to sneak up on a corpse, have wits sharper than his? So it seemed to him, anyhow.

  "May I ask you something else, your Grace?" Ulric said.

  Harshly, Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "Go ahead."

  "Do you know why your, ah, formerly beloved took it into her head to come up here?"

  "By God, I don't," Hamnet exploded. "Because she does what she pleases when she pleases, and worries about it later if she ever worries about it at all. Any other questions?"

  "Why didn't you kill her? You must have had your chances."

  The answer to that seemed much too clear. "Because I'm a fool."

  * * * *

  "Soon, now," Trasamund said. "Soon we enter the grazing grounds of the Three Tusk Bizogots, the grandest land God ever made." He sat up straight on his horse and puffed out his chest. He felt grand himself, and he wanted the world to know he felt grand.

  Hamnet Thyssen, on the other hand, had to work to hold his face straight. He didn't know exactly where the grandest land God ever made lay, but he thought it had to be somewhere south of the Raumsdalian Empire. The Empire was far enough south for farming to be possible through most of it, though its northern reaches lay beyond the limits of agriculture. Its strength lay less in its soil than in its people. They were tested by adversity—and by raids from the Bizogots, from farther north still.

  Were the rest of the Raumsdalians here thinking the same thing? Count Hamnet didn't see how they could think anything else. Yet not a one of them, not even Jesper Fletti, not even Gudrid, said a word. For one thing, whether this was God's country or not, it wasn't theirs. They needed help from the Bizogots if they were to keep on pushing north, up through the Gap. For another. . .

  For another, whether this was God's country or not, spring did eventually reach it. Warm—well, warmer—breezes blew up from the south, driving back the clouds and mist and spatters of snow and sleet that had dogged the travelers for so long. The sun shone from a blue sky. If the blue was watery, if the sun didn't climb as high above the southern horizon as it did even down in Nidaros, those were details. When the clouds receded, when the mist retreated, when the sun shone, the travelers got their first clear look at something they never would have seen if they stayed down in the Empire.

  The Glacier.

  That wall of ice to the north might have been a mountain range. It stood as tall as many mountains. Did it reach a mile up into the sky? Two miles? Three? Hamnet Thyssen couldn't say. Here and there, storms blew dust and dirt over it, so that from a distance it looked as if it might be made of rock and soil.

  But then the sun glanced off a bare patch, and that coruscating flash proved the Glacier could only be ... the Glacier. A chill and awful majesty clung to it. "What must it be like," Ulric Skakki murmured, "to always look over your shoulder and see—that? How do you get used to it? Don't you think it's going to fall on you?"

  "I would." Count Flamnet's shiver had nothing to do with the weather, which was, well, better than it had been. One enormous difference between the Glacier and ordinary mountains was that the latter ascended gradually through uplands and foothills to the peaks at the heart of the range. The Glacier, by contrast, rose sheer, which made those frozen cliffs seem even taller than they were.

  A herd of woolly mammoths, no doubt belonging to the Three Tusk clan, ambled along over the snowy ground in the middle distance. By any ordinary standard, mammoths were enormous, gigantic, titanic—mammoth. Against the Glacier, ordinary standards failed. Against the Glacier, those mammoths seemed like nothing more than what Ulric Skakki had called them farther south—fleas on the hide of a white-coated world.

  Hamnet Thyssen eyed Trasamund with sudden new respect. The Bizogot jarl hadn't said the land over which his clan wandered was the best or the most fertile God ever made. He said it was the grandest. Looking north from the abruptly dwarfed mammoths to the Glacier, Hamnet Thyssen decided he might be right after all.

  VII

  Trasamund did not know where in the large territory they roamed the rest of the Three Tusk clan would be. "It depends on the beasts," he said. "It depends on the hunting. It depends on the weather. Later in the year, they may go some way up the Gap—but not, I think, so soon."

  Hamnet Thyssen looked ahead, toward the Glacier. He imagined it not just in front of him, but to either side. The thought was not comfortable-was anything but comfortable, in fact. Wouldn't he feel like a bug between two hands waiting for them to slap shut and smash it between them? The rational part of his mind insisted that couldn't happen. In spite of the rational part, he sent apprehensive glances northward.

  Then he had a new thought. What would it be like with the Glacier not just to either side of him but behind him? Trasamund had seen that. So had Ulric Skakki. The mere idea made Hamnet dizzy. Wouldn't he think the whole world had turned upside down?

  While he was looking at the Glacier, Eyvind Torfinn was peering east. Eyvind pointed. "Isn't that a horseman?" he asked.

  Everyone's head swung that way. Count Hamnet was angry at himself for letting the scholar spot something before he did himself. Earl Eyvind would be worth his weight in gold when and if they found the Golden Shrine. Till then, the learned noble was so much excess baggage. So Hamnet had thought, anyway.

  By the chagrin on Trasamund's face, he was having similar thoughts. Or would they be so similar? Hamnet hadn't slept with Gudrid since she married Eyvind Torfinn. Trasamund had, and hardly bothered hiding it. If Eyvind noticed, he didn't let on. But maybe it was more a case of not letting on than of not noticing. If it was, did he contemplate vengeance on Trasamund?

  What kind of vengeance could an overeducated Raumsdalian earl take against a Bizogot jarl here on the frozen plain? Hamnet Thyssen couldn't think of any. That didn't have to mean Eyvind Torfinn couldn't, though. Whatever Earl Eyvind might be, he was no fool.

  Before the rider—for a rider he certainly was—came much closer, Trasamund said, "I know him. That's Gelimer. He is of my clan."

  "How can you tell?" Audun Gilli asked. "By some sorcery?"

  "No, no. By his size. By the way he sits his horse," Trasamund answered, shaking his head. "Do you not know your brother at some distance? Gelimer is my brother. Every man of the Three Tusk clan is my brother."

  Did that make every woman in the clan his sister? Hamnet shook his head. Not in that sense—Bizogots could marry within their own clan, even if they often didn't. And, as he'd seen, they weren't shy about sporting with women from their own clan, either.

  "Who comes to the land of the Three Tusk clan?" Gelimer shouted when he came within hailing distance. He was alone, and facing many strangers, but seemed fearless. After a moment, Count Hamnet shook his head. Gelimer wasn't so much fearless as righteous; he seemed certain he had every moral right to demand answers from anyone he found on the land his clan roamed.

  "Hail, Gelimer. Your jarl has returned from the lands of the south," Trasamund shouted back. He urged his horse out a few paces. "Do you not know me?" You had better know me, his tone warned.

  "By God, I do, your Ferocity," the other Bizogot warned. "These folk with you are friends and guests, then?"

  "They are," Trasamund said. "They will go north into the Gap with me. They will go north beyond the Gap, beyond the Glacier, with me. They will see where God draws in his Breath to bl
ow it out."

  For a moment, Hamnet took that as no more than a figure of speech. Then he thought of the Golden Shrine, somewhere out there beyond the Glacier. If God dwelt anywhere on earth, wouldn't he dwell in or somewhere near the Golden Shrine? No, Hamnet was never a particularly pious man. But every day's travel to the north took him farther from the mundane world of the Raumsdalian Empire and deeper into the land of legend and myth. How could he afford to disbelieve, considering where he was bound?

  Other thoughts ruled Gelimer s mind. Looking over the southerners, he said, "Only one woman for so many men?"

  Trasamund laughed. Ulric Skakki smiled a small, tight, ironic smile. Eyvind Torfinn stiffened slightly. And Gudrid stiffened more than slightly. Seeing that, Hamnet Thyssen thoughtfully pursed his lips. He hadn't thought Gudrid understood the Bizogot language. Maybe—pretty plainly, in fact—he was wrong.

  "She's not a common woman," Trasamund said. "She belongs to the old shaman here." He pointed toward Earl Eyvind. He was polite enough not to throw Gudrid's infidelities with him into Eyvind's face. His language had no real word for scholar. Shaman came closer than any other.

  Gelimer shrugged. "Be it so, then," he said—it wasn't his worry. "But what is she doing here?"

  The jarl laughed again. "What? Why, whatever she wants to, of course." He might not have known Gudrid for long, but he grasped her essence. He went on, "Where is the encampment? Is all well with the clan?"

  "We are that way, about two days' ride." Gelimer pointed back over his shoulder, toward the east. "And yes, all is... well enough. We skirmished with the White Foxes two months past, when we found them hunting west of the third frost-heave. . . ." He told that story in some detail. Hamnet listened with half an ear. A border squabble between two bands of mammoth-herders interested him about as much as a quarrel between two coachmakers down in Nidaros would have interested Trasamund.

  To the jarl, though, this was meat and drink—literally. He plied Gelimer with questions, and finally grunted in satisfaction. "You did well. You all did well," he rumbled. "The White Foxes will respect that which is right, that which is true, from here on out."