Beyong the Gap

to be a blurry slit at Parsh, who was in no better shape. 'Here,' the Bizogot mumbled through pulped and puffy lips. 'This time . . .' He cocked his left fist.

Parsh watched it with fearful concentration. Maybe he saw that Trasamund was putting everything he had left into this one blow, for as the Bizogot's left fist shot forward Parsh started to duck. He wasn't quick enough, not after the punishment he'd already taken. The blow caught him square on the point of the chin. He crumpled and lay motionless.

'Aii!' Trasamund groaned. 'I think I've gone and broken my other hand now.'

That would have mattered had the fight gone on. But Parsh could not get up. For a moment, Hamnet Thyssen wondered if he was dead. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest said life still smoldered in him.

Trasamund turned away. 'Wait!' the wizard from the Rulers—his name was Samoth—said in the Bizogot tongue.

'What for?' Trasamund could hardly stand on his own feet, let alone talk. His wits had to be scrambled. He'd taken a fearful beating. That he'd given a worse one seemed almost beside the point.

'You beat him,' Samoth said. 'Now kill him.'

'What the demon for?' Trasamund said. 'This wasn't to the death. It was last man standing. Here I am. God knows how, but here I am. He almost knocked my head off a couple of times there.' Now that he'd won, he could pay tribute to a formidable foe.

But Samoth shook his head. 'When we fight, we fight to the death. Anything less is a disgrace. He would have killed you. You would do him a favor by killing him. That he should lose to a lesser breed . . .' He translated his words into the gutturals his own folk used. Their fierce faces somber, the men of the Rulers nodded.

'No.' Trasamund shook his head—and almost fell over on account of it. 'That's his worry, not mine. I don't want his blood now. I just want to wash mine off my face and to tie up my hands. Where have you got some water, and maybe some cloth or some leather lashings?'

'I will take you,' Samoth said, reluctant respect in his voice. 'Come with me.'

Trasamund walked with the rolling, lurching gait of a drunk. That he walked at all amazed Hamnet Thyssen. After what the Bizogot jarl had taken, his being alive amazed Count Hamnet. 'Maybe I'd better go along,' Ulric Skakki remarked, 'just to make sure everything is on the up and up.'

'Not a bad idea,' Hamnet said. Silent as a snowy owl, Ulric slipped away.

Hamnet waited by Parsh, curious to see what would happen when the savage woke up and found he had lost. After a quarter of an hour, one of the Rulers poured a mammoth-hide bucket of water over Parsh's head. Parsh moaned and spluttered and jerked. His eyes came open. He looked around and realized he was lying on the ground.

Horror on his smashed face, he did his best to stand. He needed three tries before making it to his feet. Even then, he swayed like a tall tree in a storm. 'Where is the Bizogot?' he asked blurrily. 'Did he fall? If he didn't, I will hit him again.'

No one answered when he spoke the Bizogot tongue. Increasing alarm in his voice, he asked what was probably the same question in his own language. One of his countrymen gave back a few scornful words.

Parsh shook his head. He said something else. The other man of the Rulers turned his back on him. Parsh swung toward Hamnet Thyssen. 'Is it so? Can it be so?' he asked in the Bizogot language. 'Did he beat me? How could he beat me?'

'He beat you,' Hamnet answered. 'Your chin was strong, but his was stronger.'

'One of the lesser breeds cannot beat a man of the Rulers. It cannot be done,' Parsh said. His own battered state was proof positive that it could be done, but he seemed to be talking about laws of nature, not particular cases. He shook his head, then grimaced; after the beating he’d taken, he had to wish he were dead. Hamnet Thyssen had reason to remember that thought. 'It cannot be done,' Parsh repeated.

'It was,' Count Hamnet said.

Instead of answering, Parsh looked at his countryman, who kept on giving him his back. That seemed to make up his mind for him. 'It cannot be done,' he said for the third time. 'I must make amends.' He pulled his belt knife from its sheath and stared at the blade.

If he’d tried to go after Trasamund, Count Hamnet would have stopped him. Hamnet didn't think that would be hard; Parsh could barely walk and speak, let alone fight. But the man of the Rulers did nothing of the sort. He spat between his own feet, a gesture of vast contempt. Then he looked up into the sky—and then, before Hamnet or anyone else could stop him, he slashed the knife across his throat.

Blood spurted, scarlet in the afternoon sun. Parsh crumpled. No one could hope to stanch that wound. The man of the Rulers thrashed on the ground for a little while, then lay still in death.

Only after he died did his comrade deign to turn around and acknowledge him again. The other man of the Rulers closed the dead and staring eyes. He said something in his own language.

'I don't understand you,' Hamnet Thyssen said, which was true on every level he could think of. Parsh's countryman spread his hands to show he knew nothing of the Bizogot language.

Trasamund and Samoth returned a few minutes later. Samoth eyed Parsh without surprise. 'Redeemed himself, did he?' the wizard said.

'By God!' Trasamund muttered. 'You are a hard-hearted folk.' He looked down at his bandaged hands. 'And a hardheaded folk, too.'

'Do you want his weapons?' Samoth asked. 'Such is the rule when one of us beats another. I do not know what the rule is when someone of a lesser breed beats a man of the Rulers. I do not think it happens enough for us to need a rule.'

That was a compliment of sorts. Maybe the Bizogot jarl would have been wiser to show he saw as much. Or maybe not; the Rulers, arrogant themselves, seemed to appreciate arrogance in others—when those others could back it up. Trasamund had. 'I didn't mean for him to die,' he said, peering through puffed and slitted eyes at Parsh's gory corpse. 'I only wanted to wipe out an insult.'

'What better way to wipe it out than in blood?' Samoth returned. Trasamund shrugged. Then he grimaced. Even the little motion had to hurt.

Had Trasamund not beaten Parsh, Hamnet Thyssen wondered if the Rulers would have fed the Bizogots and Raumsdalians. As things were, the men from beyond the Glacier treated the travelers, if not like themselves, then at least with a certain circumspection. We may be beasts, Count Hamnet thought, but we've shown we're beasts with claws and fangs.

The meat came from the deer that roamed these plains. Maybe the Rulers were fancy cooks in encampments that held women and children. Here by themselves, the warriors cooked about the same way Bizogots or Raumsdalian soldiers would have—they roasted their meat over flames. The flames came from a fire of dried dung, as they would have in the Bizogot country. Instead of holding the meat on sticks, the men used skewers made from mammoth bone. Again, the Bizogots would have done something similar, though they sometimes got wood in trade from the Empire. Hamnet Thyssen judged no trees grew anywhere close to lands the Rulers ruled.

They did have salt; perhaps the edge of a sea lay not too far off, or perhaps it came from an outcrop of rock salt. And they had spices the likes of which none of the travelers had ever tasted. The black flakes the curly- bearded men sprinkled on the meat reminded Hamnet Thyssen of chills because they bit the tongue, but their flavor was different.

Eyvind Torfinn thought so, too. 'What do you call this spice?' he asked the leader of the Rulers, a hawk-faced, middle-aged man named Roypar.

Roypar scratched his cheek and then tugged at the gold hoop he wore in his left ear. None of the other men of the Rulers wore such an ornament. Was it a badge of rank? A sign of wealth? Was there a difference? Count Hamnet wasn't sure about that, even among Raumsdalians. Among the Rulers? He could only guess.

'Is name of pepper,' Roypar answered. He spoke only a little of the Bizogot tongue. In any case, the important word came from his own speech.

'Pepper.' Earl Eyvind repeated, the unfamiliar name several times. Roypar nodded. Over meat, he seemed less ferocious than his fellows had before. 'Do you raise this yourself?' Eyvind inquired. 'Or do you trade for it?'

'Trade,' Roypar said, 'is come from far away.' He pointed south and west. 'Far, far away. Many days, many months.'