With each day's travel, though-sometimes with each hour's-the Glacier grew higher and higher. Those sheer, towering cliffs ate more and more of the sky. Days were shorter than they would have been otherwise, for the sun needed extra time to climb above the Glacier to the east and sank below the Glacier to the west all too soon.
And, with each day's travel, the ground got squashier and the bugs got worse. Meltwater poured from the ice on both sides of the Glacier, more and more as days lengthened. Pools and ponds and puddles, creeks and rills and rivulets, were everywhere. Midges and flies and mosquitoes mated madly. Their offspring rose in ravenous, bloodthirsty hordes.
Gudrid veiled herself in fine, almost transparent cloth. That meant she got bitten less often than the others. It didn't mean she kept all the buzzing biters at bay.
"By God, now I know another reason why the Bizogots breed such shaggy horses," Hamnet Thyssen said, smashing a fly on the back of his hand.
"What do you mean?" Ulric Skakki asked. The bites blotching his face made him look as if he'd come down with some horrid disease.
"Well, the longer their hair, the better they do in the winters up here. That's plain," Count Hamnet said, and Ulric nodded. The nobleman went on, "But the longer their hair, the more trouble the bugs have getting at 'em, too."
"Maybe that's another reason woolly mammoths are woolly, too," Ulric said after a moment's thought. "But who bred them? They had to be here long before the Bizogots started herding them. They're still closer to wild than tamed."
"Maybe God bred them," Hamnet said.
"Maybe he did," Ulric agreed. "It would give him something to do with his time, anyway." In another tone of voice, he would have sounded blasphemous. As things were, he seemed to find the idea reasonable. When he slapped a moment later, he did sound blasphemous. And so did Hamnet Thyssen, when something that probably specialized in piercing mammoth hide bit him in the back of the neck. He didn't get the bug, which made his language fouler still.
Finding dry ground to sleep on got harder and harder. Trasamund and Liv had oiled mammoth hides to unroll beneath them as groundsheets. The Raumsdalians weren't so lucky. "If you've been this way before, you should have warned us it was a bog," Hamnet said to Ulric in a low voice.
"I couldn't-I didn't know," Ulric answered. "Everything was nice and hard then." He looked around to make sure Trasamund and Liv couldn't overhear.
"You came through here in the winter?" Hamnet Thyssen asked. "What was it like?"
"Cold," Ulric Skakki said, with feeling. "Colder than . . . Well, cold." What didn't he say? Colder than Gudrid's heart? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised.
"Does the Glacier grow in the wintertime?" Hamnet asked.
Ulric nodded. "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You can almost watch it happen. The way the Glacier goes forward when it's cold, you wonder how it ever goes back."
"Bad winters, it does come forward and stay there for a while. I know that," Hamnet said. "On balance, though, it's been moving back more than forward. Otherwise, the Bizogots would be herding mammoths where Nidaros stands."
"You mean they don't?" Ulric Skakki's eyebrows arched in artfully simulated surprise. "And all this time I thought. . ."
"All this time, I thought you were a chowderhead," Count Hamnet said. "And here I see I was right."
"Your servant, your Grace." Ulric bowed in the saddle. "And few clammier places have I ever been than this."
"Ow!" Hamnet Thyssen mimed squashing him like a mosquito. Ulric Skakki bowed again. Count Hamnet muttered to himself for the next quarter of an hour. In a way, that was a measure of how bad Ulric's pun was. In another way, it was a measure of how good. Hamnet forgot about the journey, even forgot about Gudrid, for a little while. He supposed that was good, too.
When someone shook Count Hamnet awake in the middle of the night, his first confused thought was that the northern sky had caught fire. Curtains and sheets of coruscating red and yellow and ghostly green danced there. Oh, he realized muzzily. The Northern Lights. They showed themselves only rarely down in Nidaros. He saw them more often as he traveled through the Bizogot country. Here in the Gap, he'd come a long way north indeed, and they burned more brightly than he’d ever seen them before.
All the same, he didn't think whoever was shaking him awake wanted him to enjoy their beauty. The shifting, multicolored light they shed let him see Audun Gilli crouched to one side of him and Liv to the other.
That made him reach for his sword. He didn't think they'd roused him to tell him they were running off with each other. They'd better not be, he thought. That would infuriate him for any number of reasons.
"What is it?" he asked, first in Raumsdalian, then in the Bizogots' language. Needing to ask twice was one more inconvenience.
"Someone," Audun Gilli whispered.
"Out there," Liv agreed, pointing north and east.
Hamnet peered in that direction. He saw nothing. "Who?" he said in a low voice. "How far away?" Again, he repeated himself so both Audun and Liv could understand.
"We don't know who," Audun answered, at the same time as Liv said, "I'm not sure how far away. But out there."
Swearing under his breath, Count Hamnet said, "Well, what do you know? Can you tell me if it's a Bizogot out there? Or is it a Raumsdalian?"
"We don't know." The wizard and the shaman said the same thing at the same time in two different languages. Then they did it again, adding, "Whoever it is, it's a magician."
That made Hamnet Thyssen wonder if the sword would do him any good. He held on to it. It was the only weapon he had handy, and the familiar feel of the leather-wrapped hilt in his hand was reassuring. "How do you know?" he asked.
"The touch of magic woke us." Audun and Liv said the same thing once more.
"Well, is it Bizogot magic or Raumsdalian magic?" Count Hamnet asked testily.
"I don't know," Audun Gilli said, while Liv answered, "I'm not sure." They were different there, if not very.
Then Liv said, "It might not be either one."
That made Hamnet's annoyance at being roused in the middle of the night fall away. Ulric Skakki had said he thought people dwelt beyond the Glacier. Hamnet didn't think Ulric had told that either to Audun or to Liv. And if Trasamund believed the same thing, he was keeping quiet about it. Hamnet had trouble imagining the Bizogot jarl keeping quiet about anything for very long.
Which meant. . . Well, who could tell what it meant?
"What does she say?" Audun asked.
Muttering in annoyance at having to go back and forth, Hamnet translated.
Audun Gilli looked thoughtful. He nodded. "Why are you bothering me if this stranger is a wizard?" Hamnet asked as the new thought occurred to him. "Why didn't you deal with him yourselves?"
"We tried," Liv said in her language.
"We couldn't," Audun said in his.
So it comes clown to the sword after all, Hamnet thought-sweat-stained, wear-smoothed leather against callused palm. "Well, I'll go, if you can guide me toward him," he said-the last thing he wanted was to try to stalk an unfriendly wizard by the flickering, fluttering glow of the Northern Lights.
"I'll come with you," Liv said at once.
Hamnet Thyssen wondered if he wanted a woman beside him. But if the other choice was Audun Gilli, he decided he did. This was the Bizogot shaman's country. If anyone could move through it smoothly and quietly, she could. Audun had shown himself to be a pretty fair wizard, but he couldn't move anywhere without stumbling over his own feet. And that was when he was sober. When he'd had a bit to drink, or more than a bit…
"You stay behind," Hamnet told him. "If you hear anything wrong or sense anything wrong, wake Ulric Skakki and Trasamund." To Hamnet s way of thinking, they were the two men likeliest to do him some good in a pinch. Audun Gilli nodded. Count Hamnet put on his boots and got to his feet. "Let's go," he said to Liv.
They hadn't gone far before she stepped in some mud and pulled her feet out with horrid squelching sounds. So much for
smoothly and quietly, Hamnet thought. It would have been funny if it didn't endanger them both. Liv wasn't laughing. She swore as foully in the Bizogot language as Trasamund could have.
"How far away is this wizard or shaman or whatever he is?" Hamnet asked again. With no plants taller than the middle of his calf, he would have a demon of a time sneaking up on the stranger. If the fellow had a bow, he wouldn't need to be a wizard. But at that thought Count Hamnet shook his head. He wouldn't have wanted to try to gauge distances with only God's curtains to help him, and he couldn't believe any other archer would, either.
"Out beyond bowshot-that's as much as I can tell," Liv replied. "Shall I throw our shadows, to confuse him about how we're coming after him?"
"Throw our shadows? What do you mean?" Count Hamnet asked.
Instead of answering, Liv began to chant softly. Hamnet Thyssen started, for it seemed as if two manlike shapes sprang into being about fifty feet off to the left. "He will notice them. He will not notice us," Liv said. But then she added, "Unless he is a better shaman than I think he is." Count Hamnet wouldn't have minded not hearing that.
The sorcerous shadows or doubles paced along to the left of the real Raumsdalian and shaman. "Will they have any better notion of where this strange wizard is than we do?" Hamnet whispered.
Liv grinned wryly. "I wish they would."
Lightning sizzled along the ground-not a great bolt such as God might hurl down from the edge of the Glacier, but enough to fill the air with the smell of thunderstorms and enough to make the magical shadows jerk and twitch like real people caught by that brilliant lash. Hamnet Thyssen admired Liv's artistry. He blinked again and again, trying to will sight back to his dazzled eyes.
Liv pointed in the direction from which the lightning bolt had come. "There!" she said. "We will find him there! Quick!" She ran forward.
She was lightfooted, and fast as most men. Hamnet Thyssen lumbered after her, doing his best to keep up. She let out what sounded like a lynx's cry-what sounded so much like one, Hamnet wondered whether one of the beasts really spoke from her throat. He wouldn't have been surprised; Bizogot shamans and wild beasts had mystical connections he understood only dimly.
Peer as he would, Hamnet Thyssen saw no man standing or even crouching there on the frozen plain. But suddenly he heard a great thunder of wings. Some large bird-in the glow from the Northern Lights, he saw it was an owl as white as an arctic fox or hare in winter-streaked off to the north.
Liv dug in her heels and skidded to a stop. Count Hamnet charged past her, then stopped himself. The plain was empty now. He could feel it. "Our man has flown," Liv said sadly.
"Flown?" Hamnet's echo sounded foolish even in his own ears.
"Flown," the shaman repeated. "Did you not see the snowy owl just then?"
"I saw the owl," Hamnet Thyssen said. "I saw no man."
"Oh, yes, you did," Liv told him. "The owl was the man-is the man. Well, he is flown now. Wherever he lands, so long as it is far from us, he will take back his own shape. He will tell his friends, whoever they are, whatever he learned of us."
"His friends." Again, Hamnet used her words for his own. "Who are his friends? Is he another Bizogot shaman? Why would he fly north if he is?"
"He is not a Bizogot. I was not sure before. Now I am." Liv sounded very sure. She went on, "I do not know what he is. I do not think he comes from your folk, either-at least, his magic feels nothing like Audun Gilli's. Are there people beyond the Glacier? Maybe there are."
"Yes, maybe." Hamnet couldn't say more without telling her that Ulric Skakki had come this way before. For that matter, how could he be sure himself that Ulric was telling the truth? He couldn't, and he knew it. For him, if not for the adventurer, maybe was nothing but the truth.
The shaman looked north, in the direction the snowy owl had flown, toward the narrow part of the Gap, toward whatever-and whoever-lay beyond. "If there are people beyond the Glacier, they are not God's people." She sounded disappointed. "God's people wouldn't need to spy."
Count Hamnet hadn't thought of it like that. When he did, he nodded. "And if they are not God's people, if they are people like the rest of us, what does that say?"
"That they will steal whatever they can and take whatever they can," Liv replied at once. Startled, Hamnet nodded again. He wouldn't have put it that way, which didn't mean he thought the Bizogot shaman was wrong. Liv had a habit of saying exactly what was on her mind. Hamnet Thyssen tried to do that, too, which was one reason so many Raumsdalians were perfectly content to see him stay in his castle off on the edge of nowhere.
He laughed softly as he and Liv walked back to the encampment. He was much closer to the edge of nowhere here in the Gap than he could be anywhere inside the Empire. And, with the Gap melted through, he and his companions could go beyond the edge of nowhere, go into lands no one from the south could have reached for thousands of years.
The people on the other side couldn't have come down into the south for thousands of years, either. Sigvat II didn't seem worried about that. Neither did Trasamund. Hamnet Thyssen wondered why not. He knew he was.
"When the spy flew away, what did you sense?" he asked Audun Gilli when he got back.
"Is that what happened?" the wizard said, as if much was now explained.
"That's what happened," Hamnet said. He translated for Liv, who nodded.
"Liv made the very pretty shadow spell-I know that," Audun said. "It fooled him, too, or he wouldn't have thrown the lightning at the doubles. He would have sent it against you. But then when he realized you were still coming forward .. . Yes, it must have been a shapeshifting spell, but not one I ever met before. Nothing like any I ever met before, in fact."
"He is right," Liv said after Hamnet Thyssen translated again. "Shamans can take the seeming of a bear or a dire wolf or a lion or a musk ox or a mammoth. Sometimes it is more than a seeming-even you folk from the hot lands will know this." Count Hamnet didn't think of the Raumsdalian Empire as a hot country, but it was when measured against the Bizogot plains. Liv went on, "This magic was new to me, too. It was quicker and more complete than any I have known before. The spy did not take on the seeming of an owl. He was an owl."
After Hamnet turned that into Raumsdalian for Audun Gilli, he asked, "How will he stop being an owl, then?" He used both languages.
"Someone will have to make him into a man again," Liv said. "Even in owl shape, he will know enough to go back where he came from."
"What does she say?" Audun asked. When Hamnet told him, he said, "Yes, it would have to work like that. And the spy will have to hope he knows enough to go back where he came from. Otherwise, he'll catch rabbits and voles and lemmings for the rest of his days."
Now Liv had to wait for the translation. When she had it, she sketched a salute to Audun Gilli. "That can happen to Bizogot shamans, too," she said. "Some people say short-faced bears are as sly as they are because they have men's blood in them, blood from shamans who never went back to men's shape."
Count Hamnet's shiver had nothing to do with the chilly night. He tried to imagine living the rest of his life as a beast, slowly forgetting he was ever a man. Only one thought occurred to him. How Gudrid would laugh!
Trasamund grunted when he heard the folk from beyond the Glacier had spies on this side of the Gap. After a bit, he unbent enough to say, "If we catch them, we'll kill them." His large, hard hands opened and closed several times; he seemed to look forward to it.
"We're going up to spy on them," Ulric Skakki murmured when he and Hamnet rode a little apart from the rest of the travelers. "Why shouldn't they come down to spy on us?"
Put that way, it seemed logical enough, fair enough. But it didn't feel fair to Hamnet Thyssen. What the Empire was doing-with some help from the Bizogots-was only fitting and proper. So it looked to him, anyhow. For other folk to come down into those familiar lands, though … If that wasn't an invasion, what was it?
When Count Hamnet said as much, Ulric Skakki smiled one
of his sardonic smiles. "Of course, we're not invading their lands when we go north of the Gap-eh, your Grace?"
"We're not invading." Hamnet waved an arm at the Bizogots and Raumsdalians riding north. "Does this look like an army to you?"
Ulric laughed. "Well, no," he said. "But does one man who turns himself into an owl look like an army to you?"
"That's different," Hamnet Thyssen insisted.
"How?" Ulric sounded genuinely curious.
Try as Hamnet would, he couldn't come up with a good answer. The only one that came to him was, Because it's on this side of the Gap. It was an answer plenty good enough for him. He was sure as sure could be, though, that Ulric Skakki would only laugh some more if he brought it out. And so he rode along in glum silence-and Ulric Skakki laughed at him anyway.
After a while, Ulric said, "They'll have a demon of a time trying to bring an army through here."
That touched on Count Hamnet s professional expertise. "Oh, yes," he said without a moment's hesitation. "It's not just the narrow gate they'll have to pass through. How will they keep a host of men and beasts fed?"
"Nobody can raise enough to keep a host fed till you get down into the Empire, where crops will grow," Ulric agreed. "The Bizogots would be a lot more trouble than they are if they were hosts instead of bands-and they're trouble enough as is."
"Really? I never would have noticed." Count Hamnet's voice was dry. When Ulric laughed this time, it was with him, not at him. Hamnet thought so, anyhow.
Closer and closer together came the two cliffs that marked the edges of the Glacier. Once upon a time, within the memory of chroniclers and bards though certainly not within that of living men, the Glacier had had only a southern edge. Would it really keep melting till the Gap was a broad highway-till, perhaps, there was no Glacier at all, only bare ground? Ham-net Thyssen tried to imagine that, tried and felt himself failing. Even somewhat diminished as it was, the Glacier still seemed to him a natural and all but inevitable part of the world.
As those tall cliffs of ice drew closer, they also towered higher into the sky. Count Hamnet was not a nervous man, or not a man who showed his nerves, but his voice wobbled a little when he asked Trasamund, "Are there ever avalanches up here?" He couldn't imagine how many tons of ice might come thundering down on him.
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