Beyong the Gap

Hamnet asked. 'You speak both languages, and you'll probably have more luck with the technical terms than I am.'

'If it's all the same to you, I'd rather pass,' Ulric said. It wasn't all the same to Hamnet, but he couldn't do anything about it. Ulric Skakki gave an extravagant wave of the hand. 'You never get tired of this scenery, do you?'

'You do if you're a Bizogot,' Hamnet answered. It's only the Glacier, Liv had said.

'Well, I'm bloody well not, thank God,' Ulric Skakki said. 'I've got plenty of things wrong with me, but that isn't one of them.' Only then did he eye Liv. 'She doesn't speak Raumsdalian, does she? No, of course not. You wouldn't be translating if she did.'

'No, but don't forget she's a shaman,' Hamnet said. 'She may not need to understand what you say to understand what you mean.'

'Now there's a cheery thought.' Ulric glanced at Liv again. She wasn't paying any attention to him, but keeping flies off her horse with a mammoth-hair whisk. He looked relieved. In a lower voice, he said, 'She wouldn't be bad if she cleaned herself up.'

That was true of a lot of Bizogot women. Hamnet Thyssen shrugged. It worked out the other way around. The Bizogots never got clean. People who came among them got dirty. Then his own thoughts went in a different direction. 'What's it like, passing through the Gap where it's narrowest?'

'It's like being born again,' Ulric answered seriously. That startled Count Hamnet, who hadn't thought the much-traveled adventurer had room in him for figures of speech. 'It really is,' Ulric insisted. 'You come out on the other side, and everything is different. Well, lots of things are different, anyhow. And besides, going through . . .'

'Yes, tell me about that,' Hamnet said.

Ulric Skakki shook his head. 'I can't. There are no words. You'll see for yourself before too long. And you won't be able to tell anybody else about it, either. It's like being in love . . . What the—?'

Hamnet Thyssen pulled savagely at his horse's reins, jerking the animal away from Ulric Skakki—and, incidentally, away from Audun Gilli and Liv. Ulric started to go after him, then saw the black scowl on his face and forbore.

'What did you say to him?' Hamnet heard Liv ask.

'Beats me.' Ulric shrugged an elaborate shrug.

'Can you explain about the law of contagion in the Bizogot language?' Audun asked.

'I doubt it,' Ulric said. 'I can't even explain the law of contagion in Raumsdalian.' He rode off, whistling. Audun muttered under his breath. Whatever he said, it didn't change Ulric Skakki into a lemming on the spot. Hamnet thought that was too bad.

He rode by himself. Ulric rode by himself. So did Trasamund. So did Eyvind Torfinn. And so did Gudrid. Audun Gilli and Liv rode together, but they couldn't talk to each other. The knot of Raumsdalian guardsmen followed Gudrid, but far enough away to keep her from screaming at them.

We're a happy bunch, Hamnet thought.

A teratorn circled high above them. With the air blowing down off the Glacier the way it did, what were the wind currents like for birds here? The huge scavenger had no trouble staying airborne, anyhow.

Audun Gilli watched the great bird soar for a while. Then he asked Liv, 'Do you suppose it's an omen?'

Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble understanding him. The shaman, however, spoke no Raumsdalian. 'What are you talking about?' she asked in her own tongue—which Audun couldn't follow.

The wizard threw up his hands in frustration. Then, after casting a glance of appeal that Count Hamnet stonily ignored, Audun pointed up into the sky at the teratorn. Liv pointed at it, too. They agreed on that much—and on no more. Audun tried to use gestures to explain what he meant. They didn't seem to mean anything to Liv.

To no one in particular, Ulric Skakki said, 'We'd better find the Golden Shrine, and we'd better find it soon. We aren't fit to have anything to do with one another unless we find it.' Unlike the wizard and the shaman, he spoke the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian, and put his plaintive comment into both languages.

'That is well said,' Eyvind Torfinn said, first in one tongue and then in the other.

'Yes, true enough.' Trasamund used his own language first, then unbent enough to say the same thing in Raumsdalian.

Several travelers eyed Hamnet Thyssen. He realized he was the other one who knew both the Empires language and the Bizogots'. Liv had only the nomads' tongue. Gudrid might understand some of that, but she showed no signs of speaking it, while Audun and the guardsmen knew only Raumsdalian. Count Hamnet didn't want to say anything; he would rather have ridden along stewing in his own juices. But those stares wore him down faster than he thought they would. 'Yes, yes,' he said grudgingly, first in one tongue, then in the other.

'Thank you,' Audun Gilli said, maybe to him, maybe to Ulric Skakki, maybe to all the men who could use both languages. The wizard added, 'Will someone please translate for me?'

At almost the same time, Liv said, 'Will someone please tell me what the southern wizard is trying to say about the teratorn?'

“I’ll do it,' Hamnet said, heaving a sigh. Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow in surprise, Hamnet caught his eye. With malice aforethought, he went on, 'Better to translate than never.'

Ulric flinched. So did Audun Gilli. 'What did you tell them?' Liv asked. After a moment's thought, Hamnet was able to duplicate the pun in her language. The Bizogots' tongue and Raumsdalian weren't close enough to let wordplay go back and forth between them all the time, or even very often; he felt a certain somber pride at managing here. By the look on Liv's face, she would have been just as well pleased if he hadn't. Or he thought so, anyhow, till she winked at him. That startled him into a smile of his own. 'And now, about the teratorn .. .' she prompted.

'Will you tell her what I meant?' Audun Gilli asked at the same time.

'I can translate, as long as you don't both talk at once,' Count Hamnet told each of them in turn. He glanced up toward the teratorn, but it had flown away.

Even so, he explained what the wizard said. Liv considered that, then replied, 'If it was an omen, if it was a shadow over us, it is gone now, and we go forward without it.' Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding.

Out on the frozen plain, Hamnet Thyssen had felt as if he and his companions were so many ants walking across a plate. Here between the riven halves of the Glacier, he had a different feeling, and one even less pleasant. Those great cold cliffs might have been the sides of two crates . .. and as the travelers went farther and farther north, someone—God, maybe—was pushing the crates closer and closer together. If God shoved once too often .. .

Better not to think about that.

But the thought got harder to avoid as day followed day. At its southern outlet, the Gap was more than fifty miles wide. When the travelers rode into it, they had the Glacier on the horizon to either side of them, but they could look back over their shoulders and see open land behind. And, while the Glacier serrated the horizon to east and west, there was plenty of sky above it.

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.