Beyong the Gap

said.

'Here I try to give you good advice, and this is the thanks I get.' Gudrid sounded convincingly wounded—but not convincingly enough.

'The only good advice you'd give me is which poison to take and how to jump off a cliff,' Count Hamnet said.

'Oh, I expect you can figure out that sort of thing for yourself.' Gudrid pulled off a mitten for a moment so she could flutter her fingers at him. 'You're clever about matters like that. It's people you have trouble with.'

'No doubt,' Hamnet Thyssen said. 'Look how long I put up with you.'

'Just so,' Gudrid said placidly as she returned the mitten to her hand. 'What makes you think you'll do any better this time around?'

'Well, I could scarcely do worse, could I?' Hamnet said.

'You never know, not till it happens.'

'I'll take my chances,' Hamnet said. 'Why don't you go back to telling Eyvind Torfinn what to do? He's your sport these days, isn't he?'

'You're more amusing, though. It's harder to make him angry.'

'I'm sure you could manage if you set your mind—or something—to it.'

'Meow,' she said. 'Jealousy doesn't become you.'

'I'm not jealous of Eyvind Torfinn.' Hamnet listened to himself. It was true. He wasn't jealous. It so surprised him, he said it again: 'I'm not jealous of Eyvind Torfinn, by God. If he wants you so much, he's welcome to you.'

Gudrid stared. She must have heard the conviction in his voice, and it must have surprised her as much as it surprised him. She yanked hard at her horse's reins. The luckless beast snorted as she jerked its head away and rode off.

Hamnet Thyssen went on alone for some little while after that. For the time being, he was free from the longing for what once had been. He wasn't sure she entirely believed that, even now, but she would surely begin to suspect it might be so. And when she decided it was .. . What would she do then?

Whenever the travelers met other Bizogot clans, Trasamund would go on—and on, and on—about their wanderings beyond the Glacier. He'd come with them precisely so he could speak with each clan's jarl as an equal. He talked about the Rulers, and about the way they rode mammoths. That always made the Bizogots, chieftains and clansmen, sit up and take notice. Everyone who heard about it seemed wild to try it. 'Why didn't we think of that?' was a refrain Count Hamnet heard over and over again.

Then Trasamund would talk about how the Bizogot clans needed to band together against the invasion that was bound to come before long. Every other jarl who heard that would smile and nod politely, and then would go on with whatever he'd been doing before Trasamund raised the point. Riding mammoths interested the Bizogots. Taking steps against what hadn't happened yet... didn't.

'What's wrong with them?' Trasamund growled when yet another jarl refused to get excited about the threat.

'I can tell you, your Ferocity,' Ulric Skakki said. 'And I can tell you something else—you won't like it.'

'Try me.' Trasamund turned it into a challenge.

'Suppose a jarl from near the border with Raumsdalia came up to the Three Tusks country and told you the Empire was going to invade his grazing lands when spring came. What would you do about it?'

The jarl frowned. 'Me? Probably not much, not by my lonesome. It's a long way off, and . ..' His voice trailed away. He sent Ulric Skakki a perfectly poisonous glare. 'You have a nasty way of making your point.'

'Ah, God bless you, your Ferocity. You say the sweetest things,' Ulric crooned. Trasamund muttered into his beard. Not for the first time, Ulric's gratitude for things that weren't meant as compliments succeeded in confusing the person who'd aimed the unpleasantry his way.

'He's right, I'm afraid,' Hamnet Thyssen said gloomily. 'When the Rulers bump up against these clans, they'll worry about them. Till then, folk from the far side of the Glacier don't seem real to them.'

'But they ought to,' Trasamund said. 'You Raumsdalians can see the problem even though it isn't right on top of you.'

'Well, we've gone beyond the Glacier, too,' Hamnet said. 'We hope the Emperor will see it. But you need to remember—' He broke off, not wanting to offend the jarl.

'Remember what?' Trasamund asked. 'What, by God?'

Hamnet Thyssen knew he needed to pick his words with care. What he meant was that the Bizogots were nothing but barbarians, and so of course they didn't worry much about what would happen in a few months. No matter what he meant, he didn't want to say that. For one thing, it would anger Trasamund. For another, he had no guarantee that the future meant anything more to Sigvat II than it did to a fleabitten mammoth-herder.

He scratched. Plenty of fleas had bitten him, too. Flow he looked forward to a long soak and, best of all, to clean clothes!

He still had to answer Trasamund, who waited impatiently. 'You need to remember, the Rulers will seem less real to the Emperor than even to your own folk. Nidaros is much farther away from the Gap than your camps are.'

'And so the Raumsdalians will try to use the Bizogots as a shield, the way they bribe the southern clans now to help hold out the fiercer men from the north.' Trasamund thumped his own chest with a big, hard fist, reminding Count Hamnet he was one of those fiercer men himself.

'How can you imagine we would do such a thing?' Hamnet said, as innocently as he could.

The Bizogot jarl laughed in his face. 'By God, your Grace, I would if I lived in Sigvats palace. We are mammoth-herders—you think you can get away with being Bizogot-herders. But there is a difference. The mammoths don't know what we're doing to them. Bizogots aren't blind men, or deaf men, either. Sooner or later, you Raumsdalians will be sorry.'

He was likely to be right. No, he was bound to be right. Once upon a time, back in the days when history and legend blurred together, the Raumsdalians had roamed the frozen steppe (in those days, it ran much farther south than it did now). Hamnet Thyssen's distant ancestors had torn the meat from the bones of the empire that preceded Raumsdalia. One of these days, maybe the Bizogots would storm Nidaros and set up their own kingdom on its ruins.

Or maybe the Rulers would swarm down through the Gap and beat the Bizogots to the punch. Hamnet Thyssen didn't know that the barbarians from the far side of the Glacier could do any such thing. He didn't know they could, no. But he didn't know they couldn't, either, and that worried him.

'I can see that the Rulers are a danger,' Trasamund said. 'If Sigvat II can't, maybe he doesn't deserve to be Emperor anymore. Maybe something will happen so he isn't. One thing God does—he makes sure fools pay for their folly.'

'Well, you're right about that.' Hamnet wasn't thinking about Sigvat and the Rulers.

'Liv . . . likes you.' Now Trasamund spoke hesitantly. Even a jarl took care talking about a shaman.

'Yes,' Hamnet said. 'I like her, too.'

'Be careful with her. I don't want her hurt. She isn't just a good shaman. She's a good Bizogot, and a good woman, too.'

'If she weren't a good woman, I wouldn't like her the way I do.' Hamnet Thyssen hoped that was true.

'If you were a Bizogot.. .' Trasamund's voice trailed off. A moment later, he tried again, saying, 'If you were a Three Tusk Bizogot. . .'

'I'm not,' Hamnet said. 'I'm never going to be. You know that as well as I do, your Ferocity. I don't expect Liv to turn into a Raumsdalian. That won't happen either. I know it.'

'I should say not. But she would lose something if she turned into one of your folk. You would gain something if you turned into a Bizogot.'

'My folk would say it the other way around, you know,' Count Hamnet said. Trasamund laughed uproariously. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Hamnet Thyssen had known he would. If barbarians recognized that they were barbarians, they wouldn't be so barbarous any more.

He, of course, was right and full of reason when he declined to think about becoming a Bizogot. That was as