Beyong the Gap

'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.