Beyong the Gap

'It can do that.' Liv eyed Eyvind Torfinn with more respect than she usually showed him. 'You say you made up one of these horrible things?'

'Two of them, as a matter of fact,' he answered, not without pride. 'You bear watching,' Liv said, and walked away.

'Would you rather bear watching or watch bears?' Count Hamnet asked.

'Yes,' Eyvind Torfinn said. Hamnet walked away, too.

'Deer!' Trasamund pointed west. 'A herd of deer!'

Hamnet Thyssen’s eyes followed that outthrust finger. The deer he knew didn't travel in herds. They were mostly solitary creatures that lived in the forests east of the Raumsdalian Empire. Every so often, they came out and fed in orchards and fields. He'd hunted them often enough to savor the taste of venison slowly simmered in ale and herbs.

These, he saw at a glance, were beasts different from the ones he'd known down in the south. The warm south, he thought, although he hadn't conceived of the Empire as such a warm place before his travels in the north. It was warm enough up here now, with the sun in the sky almost all day long. But what it would be like come winter. ..

Better to think about the deer. They were thicker-bodied and shorter-legged than the ones he knew, and of a pale dun color that blended in well with the ground over which they wandered. Their antlers were large and sweeping, but didn't have such sharp tines as those of the forest beasts he'd hunted. And . . . 'Are they all stags?' he asked. 'The deer I know, the does have no horns.'

'More likely, the does here do grow antlers,' Eyvind Torfinn said. Count Hamnet found himself nodding. He couldn't imagine such a large herd of male animals ambling along so peacefully.

'We'll eat well tonight, by God,' Trasamund said with a nomad's practicality. Hamnet Thyssen nodded again. With so many of these strange deer going by, they would surely be able to knock over one or two.

And they did. The animals seemed untroubled, unafraid, as the men approached them. Getting into archery range was the easiest thing in the world. Jesper Fletti looked up from butchering one of the slain deer, his arms crimson to the elbows. 'It's as if they never saw people before, and didn't know we were hunting them,' he said.

'Either that or they're already tame, and don't worry about people because they're used to having them around,' Ulric Skakki said.

'I don't think so.' Naturally, the guards officer liked his own ideas better than someone else's.

Count Hamnet looked sharply at Ulric Skakki. Whether Jesper did or not, Hamnet knew Ulric had come beyond the Glacier before. 'Did you meet these tame deer in the wintertime?' he asked in a low voice.

Ulric nodded. 'I did. They act like musk oxen on the Bizogot plain— they scrape up the snow and eat what's underneath.'

'And do people herd them, the way the Bizogots herd musk oxen and mammoths?' Hamnet asked.

'I can't prove that. I didn't see people with them,' Ulric answered. 'But there are people here, unless that owl you and the sorcerers flushed turned back into a white bear instead. And I don't think white bears herd deer, however much they might want to.'

'No doubt you're right.' Hamnet Thyssen looked around. 'I don't see any signs of herders, though.'

'Neither do I,' Ulric said. 'We must be on the edge of the country they usually wander. But that owl says we aren't the only ones who know the Glacier really has broken in two at last.'

There was a disturbing thought. Hamnet looked around again. The only people he saw were the travelers with whom he'd come so far. But what did that prove?

'All we can do is go on,' Hamnet said.

'No—we could go back,' Ulric said. 'We might be smart if we did. We've seen there's open land beyond the Glacier. What more do we need?'

'What about the Golden Shrine?' Hamnet asked.

'Well, what about it?' Ulric Skakki returned. 'If you know where the bloody thing is, your Grace, lead the way.'

'You know I don't,' Hamnet Thyssen said irritably.

'Yes, I know that,' Ulric said. 'And I know I don't know where it is. Neither does Eyvind Torfinn, however much he wishes he did. Neither does Trasamund. Neither does Audun Gilli. And neither does the Bizogot shaman.'

'Liv,' Hamnet said.

'That's right.' Ulric Skakki nodded. 'And if I don't know, and if they don't know, then nobody up here from the other side of the Glacier knows—and nobody down there on the other side of the Glacier knows, either. And what are the odds of finding something if you don't know where in blazes to look for it? Rotten, if you ask me. So why waste time up here and maybe get caught by the weather—or by the folk who herd these deer? Better to take what we know and head back, isn't it?'

Hamnet Thyssen frowned. He might be the nominal leader of the Raumsdalians here, but he knew too well what a painful word nominal was. Eyvind Torfinn had a higher degree of nobility than he did, and a mulish scholarly autonomy. Audun Gilli might obey or might go off and pick wild-flowers or look for something to drink. Ulric Skakki listened to himself and no one else. Jesper Fletti and his guardsmen listened to Gudrid first. As for Gudrid, if she listened to anyone under the sun—by no means obvious— she didn't heed her former husband.

Then there were the Bizogots, whom Hamnet couldn't even claim to command. No one commanded Trasamund, who was as much a sovereign as Sigvat II. Hamnet thought that if he told Liv to do something, she might. . . if she decided it was a good idea.

Wonderful. That may make one. Hamnet sighed. 'Do you really suppose I could persuade the others to turn back?' he asked.

'How do you know if you don't try?' Ulric Skakki replied. Count Hamnet sighed again. That sounded sensible, reasonable. Both men knew it wasn't, which only made it more irritating.

'I'll try,' Hamnet said. 'That'll teach you.'

The smell of roasting meat brought another striped hunting cat—or maybe the first one the travelers saw— back to investigate. They yelled and threw things at the animal and frightened it away. But it didn't go far. It skulked around out of bowshot, as if to say it claimed the scraps.

After Hamnet bit into a rib, he was willing to let the beast have them. The meat was tough and not very tasty. What flavor it had, he didn't much care for. The deer had been feeding on something that left it unappetizing. Hamnet had found the like in gamebirds, but never before in deer.

He used the poor meat to help make his point. 'Now that we've found out what this country is like, shouldn't we head back to our own side of the Glacier and let the people there know?' he said, waving the rib bone for emphasis.

'Makes sense to me.' Ulric Skakki did what he could to support the argument he'd proposed himself.

Everyone else metaphorically tore it limb from limb. 'We have not found the Golden Shrine yet,' Eyvind Torfinn declared, as if it were right around the corner—as if this vast, flat plain had corners.

'You have not seen a white bear yet, either,' Trasamund added. 'They're fine hunting, better even than the short-faced bears back on our own side of the Glacier.' Considering how dangerous short-faced bears were, Hamnet Thyssen was anything but convinced that he wanted to meet anything worse. If he did, it was liable to end up hunting him, not the other way around.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Gudrid said, 'Besides, we haven't met the people who live beyond the Glacier.'

'All the more reason to leave now, wouldn't you say?' Count Hamnet replied. Ulric Skakki nodded.

No one else could see it. Liv couldn't understand it, because the discussion was in Raumsdalian. Hamnet wondered what excuse his countrymen and Trasamund had. Were they merely foolish, or were they willfully blind? He glanced over at Gudrid. People would have asked the same thing of him when she first started being unfaithful. No doubt they had asked it— behind his back.

In those days, no one could have persuaded him she was anything but true. Here in the long-shadowed