Beyond the Gap

by Harry Turtledove

  Liv started digging out the snow in front of the other hut's entrance. Somebody inside said something. Hamnet couldn't make out what it was, but Liv s tart answer told him. "No, I'm not a bear," she said. "It would serve you right if I were."

  Audun Gilli, Ulric Skakki, and Trasamund emerged a moment later. "Good thing the sun's in the sky," Ulric said. "Otherwise we wouldn't have any idea which way north was."

  "I could use the spell with the needle," Audun said. "It wouldn't be perfect, not up here"—he was ready to admit that now—"but it would give us the right idea."

  "If the water didn't freeze before you could finish chanting." Trasamund sounded altogether serious. Hamnet decided he had a right to be. With the air this cold, water would turn to ice in a hurry.

  "We've got the sun," the Raumsdalian noble said. "Let's use it." They mounted and rode north. The southern horses did know enough to paw forage up from under the snow. Hamnet hadn't been sure they would. One less thing to worry about, anyhow.

  * * * *

  Only last summer's frozen marsh plants sticking up from the snow here and there told the travelers they'd come to the edge of Sudertorp Lake. No screeching waterfowl now—nothing but the silent grip of winter. Count Hamnet looked west, then east. The frozen lake stretched as far as he could see in either direction.

  "Which is the shorter way around?" he asked.

  "They both look pretty long," Ulric said.

  "That both will cost us time," Hamnet said fretfully. The sense that it was slipping away gnawed at him.

  "See the southerners," Trasamund said to Liv in the Bizogot language. She grinned and nodded. Whatever amused the jarl, she found it funny, too.

  "What's the answer, then?" Hamnet Thyssen asked with as little sarcasm as he could.

  "We don't go around," Trasamund answered. "We go straight across, by God. This season of the year, musk oxen and mammoths cross lakes and rivers. If the ice holds them, it will hold us, too."

  Hamnet and Ulric and Audun exchanged glances. Hamnet had skated on frozen ponds in winter—what Raumsdalian hadn't? But sending horses across? That was a different story.

  "What happens if we fall in?" Audun Gilli asked the question on Ham-net's mind, and surely on Ulric's, too.

  "If we're close to shore, we drag you out, get on dry land, build a big fire fast as we can, and maybe you live," the Bizogot jarl answered. "If not so close, you freeze before we can do it." Like a lot of mammoth-herders, he was callous when it came to things nobody could do anything about. He went on, "It won't happen, though. The ice now is as thick as Jesper Fletti's head, and even harder."

  That made both Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen smile. Audun Gilli just nodded seriously and said, "I hope you're right."

  "I'm betting my neck, too," Trasamund said. The wizard nodded again.

  The horses went out onto the ice without much fuss. They placed their feet carefully. Even with horseshoes—one more thing the Bizogots, who didn't smelt iron, went without—the going was slippery. But Trasamund proved right about one thing—the frozen surface of the lake was more than solid enough to bear the heavy animals' weight. Except for the smoothness, Hamnet couldn't tell he wasn't riding across solid ground; there was no shaking under him to suggest water yet unfrozen lay beneath the ice.

  Sudertorp Lake was a long way across. Going around would have been three or four times as long—Hamnet understood as much. But he still felt peculiar with nothing but ice all around. He felt as if he were riding across the top of the Glacier.

  When he spoke that conceit aloud, Ulric Skakki clapped his mittened hands. "Now there's a sport no one's likely to try soon," he said. "Men might get to the top, I suppose, but not horses. Your Ferocity!"

  "What do you want?" Trasamund often suspected Ulric of laughing up his sleeve at him—and often was right.

  But the adventurer sounded serious as he asked, "Have any Bizogots ever tried climbing to the top of the Glacier?"

  "Not in my clan," the jarl answered. "Not so anyone remembers. I've heard that men have tried farther west. I don't think anyone ever made it, though. There are mountains that stick up through the Glacier. Some of them are topped with green in the summertime—but what grows on them no one knows. How would you get to them to find out?"

  Count Hamnet whistled softly. That wasn't a small thought. Those mountain peaks above the Glacier—what might grow up there? Anything at all. How long had they been there, each by itself? Eons. Could there be people up there, people who did roam the top of the Glacier and had no more hope of coming down than the Bizogots and Raumsdalians did of going up? What would they eat? The top of the Glacier made the Bizogot plains seem paradise by comparison.

  "Probably rabbits and lemmings and voles up there," Ulric said when Hamnet put that into words. "Bound to be birds, too, at least in summer. But I wouldn't want to try to live up there, and that's the truth." He shivered.

  So did Hamnet Thyssen. And then, unmistakably, so did the ice beneath them. Hamnet thought he heard a crackling noise far below. He pointed at Trasamund, not that pointing with a forefinger in a mitten did much good. "You said this couldn't happen!" he shouted at the Bizogot.

  "It can't!" Trasamund shouted back, even though it was.

  The crackling grew louder. "I don't know about you people, but I'm making for shore as fast as I can," Ulric Skakki said, and booted his horse up to a trot and then to a gallop.

  That seemed like such a good idea, Count Hamnet did the same thing. So did Trasamund and Liv and Audun Gilli. But the crackling followed them and got louder still, even through the drumming thunder of their horses' hooves. "This is sorcery!" Audun shouted. "Someone is making the ice breakup!"

  "Well, for God's sake make it stop!" Hamnet shouted back. He thought about what the jarl said about going into the icy water. Having thought about it, he wished he hadn't. To die like that... It would end fast, but not fast enough.

  And someone could only mean someone from the Rulers. How did the folk who lived beyond the Glacier track the travelers here? Hamnet had no idea. He wished Audun Gilli or Liv did.

  Liv began to chant in the Bizogot tongue. She took her left hand from the reins so she could use it for passes. "I know that spell," Trasamund said.

  "Do you?" Hamnet Thyssen looked back over his shoulder. What he saw made him wish he hadn't. Cracks in the frozen surface of the lake stretched toward him like skeletal arms wanting to hold him in an embrace that would last forever.

  "I do, by God," the jarl answered. "When snow is very dry, it won't hold together for things like huts. That spell clumps it, you might say."

  "Will it do the same for ice?" Hamnet asked.

  "I don't know," Trasamund said. "We're going to find out, don't you think?"

  Audun Gilli rode up alongside Liv. He reached out and set a hand on her leg. Most of the time, Hamnet would have killed him for that. Now, though, he understood the wizard wasn't feeling her up. Audun was lending her strength. He didn't know the spell; it wasn't one Raumsdalians were likely to use. But he was doing what he could to help.

  Would what he was doing, what Liv was doing be enough? Count Hamnet looked over his shoulder again. Those grasping cracks were still coming forward as fast as a horse could run—but no faster, or so he thought. So he hoped. He looked ahead. That rise had to be the beginning of solid ground, real ground. It also had to be most of a mile away. Could Liv hold back the sorcery from the north long enough, slow it down enough, to let them all win to safety?

  If the horse stumbles under me, I'm a dead man, Hamnet thought. Even so, he booted it on as fiercely as he could. If the cracks in the ice caught up with him, he was also dead. When he looked back one more time, he gasped in dismay. He could see black water there where the cracks had widened. No, he didn't want to go into that. "Come on, horse!" he called. "Run, curse you!"

  And the horse did run. And its hooves thudded up the slope of Sudertorp Lake's northern bank just as the cracks and black water reached the edge of the lake. Ulric and Tras
amund were ahead of him, Liv and Audun just behind.

  For a bad moment, he wondered if the spell could tear land asunder as it tore ice. But it did stop at the lake's edge. He reined in, breathing almost as hard as his horse was. Then he pulled back his hood in lieu of doffing a cap to salute the shaman and wizard. "I think you saved us," he said.

  Liv was panting, as if she'd run a long way. "I think I did, too," she said. "And I know—I know—I had help from Audun."

  "You knew the spell," Audun Gilli told her. "It worked .. . just well enough." He looked back toward the cracks in the frozen surface of the lake.

  So did Liv. Her shiver had nothing to do with winter on the Bizogot plains. "Just well enough is right," she said. "I couldn't stop the spell. I didn't have a chance in the world of stopping it. All I could do was slow it down a little."

  "How did the Rulers reach so far?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

  "I don't know!" she blazed, sounding angry at him and herself and the Rulers all at once. "I don't know, I tell you. If I knew, I'd be able to do something like that myself, and I can't. Nobody can."

  "Nobody except them." Audun Gilli pointed north.

  "What does that say?" Count Hamnet had a pretty good notion what it said, but hoped he was wrong. "Does it say we'd better not quarrel with them, or else we'll lose? Does it say we should bend the knee to them, because that's the best we can hope to do? If it does, why are we fighting?"

  "We're fighting because we're free, and we're going to stay free," Trasamund answered before Liv could speak. "If that's not why you're fighting, go back to the Empire, because I want nothing to do with you."

  "I'm not going anywhere," Hamnet said. "Except north, that is."

  "Next frozen lake we come across, we ought to go around it and not over it," Ulric Skakki said.

  "I wonder if it matters," Hamnet said. "If the Rulers know where we are, if they can strike as they please, they'll find some other way, some other place, to try to kill us."

  "Foolish to give them the same chance twice," Ulric insisted.

  "Why? They've seen it didn't work, so wouldn't they think it's not worth trying again?" Count Hamnet said. "We haven't seen any more wizards pretending to be short-faced bears after we killed the first one."

  "That man was not pretending." Liv and Audun Gilli said the same thing at the same time in two different languages.

  "Whether he was or not, they only tried it once," Count Hamnet said stubbornly.

  "Are we as safe as we can be now?" Trasamund asked. The only answers the others could give were shrugs. How could they hope to know? But even shrugs satisfied the jarl. "Either we let them scare us, or we don't," he said. "And if we don't, we keep moving."

  "Spoken like a nomad," Ulric said.

  "I am a nomad," Trasamund answered proudly. "I am on the way back to my clan's grazing grounds. And you had better be, too." He urged his horse north. The others came with him. Having ridden so far, what else could they do?

  * * * *

  Hamnet Thyssen didn't like his dreams. They'd mostly been happy after he and Liv became lovers. The dreams he'd had since returning to the frozen steppe, though, were muddled and grim, and they got worse the farther north he traveled.

  When he finally complained about it, Liv looked surprised. "Yours, too?" she said. "Mine have been the same way. I don't care for the omen."

  They soon found they weren't the only ones with ugly dreams. Ulric Skakki made light of his, saying, "What do you expect after you eat musk-ox chitterlings two days running?"

  "What's wrong with musk-ox chitterlings? They're good," Trasamund declared. "And besides, they're a lot better than going empty."

  "I won't argue with the second part of that," Ulric said. "The first... is a matter of opinion, and it isn't mine."

  Even though Trasamund liked what he was eating, he also had bad dreams. He put it down to worry. "I keep wondering how things are with the clan," he said. "I imagine everything that could go wrong. Do that long enough and you'll start doing it whether you're awake or asleep."

  Audun Gilli said, "If my dreams are bad, it's because someone is trying to make them bad. And someone is doing it, too."

  "The Rulers?" Hamnet said.

  "I can't think of anyone else it's likely to be," Audun said. "Can you?"

  "I can't." Liv's voice was worried, too. "None of the other Bizogots hate the Three Tusk clan enough to bring a sending down on us."

  "What about his Imperial Majesty?" Ulric Skakki, as usual, was full of pleasant ideas.

  However much Count Hamnet wished he could, he couldn't dismiss that one out of hand. The most he would say was, "I don't like to think that of Sigvat."

  "Well, neither do I. But I don't like nightmares, either. I don't like waking tireder than I went to sleep," Ulric said. "How do we know for sure our own wizards weren't cracking the ice on Sudertorp Lake?"

  "How do we know? Because they cursed well weren't, that's how," Audun Gilli said. "I know what our sorcery feels like. I ought to, by God. This had nothing to do with that. It felt strange, strange and strong. Whoever worked that magic has been making spells in a tradition, in a style, separate from ours for... for forever, as best I can tell."

  "He's right," Liv said. "I know Bizogot shamanry. I know some of what Raumsdalian shamanry feels like. This was different, as different as blackberries and musk oxen."

  Ulric spread his hands. "All right, I was wrong about that. But are you sure I'm wrong about the sending?"

  Liv and Audun looked at each other. "I thought it was coming from the north," she said slowly. Audun Gilli nodded. But Liv went on, "I'm not sure of that, not the way I was with the spell on the lake. I still think it's likely, but I'm not sure."

  "My dreams have been cold. All of them have been cold," Audun said. Thinking back on it, Hamnet realized his had, too. Audun continued, "That doesn't prove it's the Rulers and not the Emperor, but I'd bet on them."

  "When we get back among the good folk of the Three Tusk clan, we will be troubled no more," Trasamund said. "By being what they are, they will shield us from this nuisance."

  "What? We're not good folk ourselves?" Ulric asked. "If that's all it takes . . . We don't have some of the people who came along with us last time here now, you know." He named no names, which was just as well. Hamnet Thyssen's mind immediately turned to Gudrid.

  But he hadn't had nightmares about her up here, not even once. That struck him as odd. He'd had plenty of them before.

  Trasamund's thoughts ran in a different direction. "Nothing wrong with Eyvind Torfinn," he said. "Jesper Fletti and the other soldiers—I don't miss them so much."

  He thought Earl Eyvind was a good fellow because the aging noble either didn't see his sport with Gudrid or pretended not to notice it. Hamnet didn't think Eyvind Torfinn a bad fellow, either, but he esteemed the other Raumsdalian despite his ties to Gudrid, not because of them.

  Trasamund sent Ulric Skakki a sly glance. He didn't say anything about Ulric. He didn't say the adventurer wasn't a good man. Whatever he thought, he thought. And if Ulric growled and muttered, he didn't—he couldn't—do any more than that. Trasamund . . . smiled.

  Who would have thought a Bizogot could show such subtlety?

  * * * *

  The Red Dire Wolves—not to be confused with the Black Dire Wolves, who dwelt far to the west—fed the travelers to the bursting point. They’d just killed a bull mammoth, and for the time being had more meat than they knew what to do with. Baked mammoth, stewed mammoth, mammoth fritters, roasted mammoth marrow—a delicacy, that, even without toasted bread on which to spread it—mammoth blood sausage, mammoth head cheese . . . Anything you could do to and with a mammoth's carcass, the Red Dire Wolves did.

  "I'm surprised we didn't see mammoth eyeballs and mammoth bal-locks," Audun Gilli said during a pause in the orgy of eating.

  "Oh, the jarl gets the eyeballs," Trasamund said seriously. "They help make him farseeing, or so the hope is. As for the ballocks, the clansmen slice
them up and roast them first thing. Same with the pizzle. You can figure out why."

  "Er—yes." Audun raised a leather jack of smetyn to his lips. He was on his way to getting drunk, but so were the rest of them. He didn't get drunk when he needed to stay sober, which was all that really mattered.

  Hamnet Thyssen gnawed more meat off a chunk of mammoth rib. Some enterprising Raumsdalian trader had sold the Red Dire Wolf clan several bone saws, of the sort surgeons used down in the Empire. For the Bizogots, they made first-rate butcher's tools. Hamnet wondered who his clever countryman was. The fellow had found an odd way, but a good one, to meet his customers' desires.

  A big, burly graybeard named Totila ruled the Red Dire Wolves. He eyed Hamnet and Ulric and said, "Some of you foreigners can fill yourselves almost like real people." He didn't include Audun in that. The wizard was small to begin with, and didn't seem to have an infinitely extensible paunch.

  "Practice, your Ferocity," Ulric Skakki answered. "The mammoth brain is very tasty, but now I keep wanting to wave my trunk and wiggle my ears." He did wiggle them, something Hamnet hadn't known he could do.

  Totila stared, then laughed and laughed. "As long as thinking like a mammoth doesn't make you want to shit in the middle of my tent, eat all the brains you please."

  Ulric did eat some more, then mimed pulling down his trousers. Totila laughed harder than ever. In Raumsdalian, Hamnet Thyssen said, "I see you've found your true level."

  "I'll cut your heart out and eat it for that," Ulric answered. "And what kind of fool will I act like then?"

  "A jealous fool, I'd say," Hamnet answered. "And I ought to know about those." He remembered the feel of his point grating off the ribs of Gudrid's first lover—the first one he found out about, anyhow—and then sliding deep to pierce the man's heart. He remembered the anguished surprise on Ingjald Oddleif's face. This can't be happening to me, he must have thought, there at the end. But it was.