Beyong the Gap

'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 forgotten. 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