Beyong the Gap

you can tell him funny stories and have a laugh afterward.'

'Go ask Ulric if you don't believe me,' Hamnet said.

The Bizogot jarl shook his head again. 'Not me. You probably all cooked it up amongst yourselves beforehand.' He rode away, his head still going back and forth. Not much later, though, Hamnet watched him riding along next to Jesper Fletti. Trasamund might have thought Hamnet wouldn't conspire with Gudrid s chief bodyguard—and if he did, he was right. By Jesper's gestures, he knew what a glyptodont was. Trasamund threw his hands in the air.

Hamnet Thyssen began looking for border stations. They were thinly scattered, and wouldn't have been easy to spot if not for the smoke that rose from them all through the winter. A lot of Bizogots skirted the stations when they came down into the Empire. Some succeeded in smuggling their goods or themselves into Raumsdalia. Others ran into customs inspectors in the small northern towns and paid duty there.

A smoke plume led the travelers to a border post. The guards wore furs that made them look like Bizogots. One of them stared at the newcomers and said, 'If you're not the raggediest-looking bunch of buggers I've ever seen, bugger me with a pine cone if I can think of who is.'

'If you're not a disgrace to the uniform you aren't wearing, God's more merciful than I thought,' Hamnet Thyssen retorted.

Hearing unaccented, educated, angry Raumsdalian burst from the mouth of the shaggy ragamuffin in front of him gave the border guard pause. 'Uh, who are you, anyway?' he asked, his own voice suddenly much less scornful.

'You might have wondered sooner. I am Count Hamnet Thyssen. With my companions here, I've traveled beyond the Glacier, and I have come back to tell the tale—but to the Emperor, not to the likes of you.'

The guards jaw dropped. 'You're the people who went beyond the Glacier? You really did?' He turned to his comrades. 'God let them come back, Vigfus!'

'Somebody did, anyhow,' Vigfus allowed. 'Or so they say. Do you suppose we ought to believe ‘em?'

'If you do not believe Trasamund, jarl of the Three Tusk clan of Bizogots, God may not punish you,' Trasamund said. 'God may not, but I will.' He made as if to draw his great two-handed sword. 'Do you call me a liar? Who will mourn for you when you die? Anyone? Or will your flesh feed foxes and teratorns?'

'Keep your hair on, pal,' said Vigfus, who’d surely heard Bizogot bluster before. 'If you really made it through the Gap, more power to you.'

'We were supposed to keep an eye out for you people, but I never figured you’d come through here,' the other guard said. 'What are the odds?'

'Whatever the odds may be, here we are,' Eyvind Torfinn said. 'We have done much, we have traveled far, and we have seen strange things. His Majesty Sigvat II needs to hear of them as soon as we get to Nidaros.'

Vigfus and his friend looked at each other. At the same time, they asked, 'Did you find the Golden Shrine?'

'Well, no,' Eyvind Torfinn answered. 'But that doesn't mean it isn't there. We'll go back one day, and maybe we'll find it then.'

'We did find white bears, and deer that men ride like horses, and beasts like lions, only without manes and with stripes,' Hamnet said.

'And we found men who ride mammoths,' Trasamund said. 'By God, I will ride a mammoth before too much time goes by. I will.' He folded his right hand into a fist and brought it down hard on his thigh.

'Men who ride mammoths?' said the guard whose name they didn't know. 'Are they very brave or very stupid?'

'Yes,' answered Ulric Skakki, who'd kept quiet till then.

'What's that supposed to mean?' the guard asked.

'What it says,' Ulric told him. 'I'm like Count Hamnet here—I usually say what I mean. People have a better chance of understanding me when I do. The Rulers are very brave. And, by God, they're very stupid, too.'

'The Rulers? What kind of name is that?' Vigfus said.

Hamnet Thyssen, Ulric Skakki, Eyvind Torfinn, and Trasamund all shrugged together. 'It's what they call themselves, or how they say it when they use the Bizogot language,' Hamnet said. 'I don't know what you want us to do about it.'

Gudrid rode up to the guards. 'Why are you wasting our time here?' she demanded. 'Why don't you let us go back to civilization?'

Vigfus looked at her. It wasn't the way a man looked at a pretty woman. With half a year's grime on them, none of the travelers was pretty any more. 'Who the demon does she think she is?' the border guard asked no one in particular.

'She thinks she's my wife,' Eyvind Torfinn said. 'She's right, too.' Did Gudrid think that? Hamnet had his doubts. When she felt like it, maybe she did.

'Huh!' Vigfus said. 'She's a mouthy one, she is. You should belt her more often, teach her to behave.'

Gudrid's squeal was pure rage. 'You are speaking to, and of, an earl's wife!' she said shrilly. 'Show the proper respect!'

'Oh, shut up,' Vigfus said. Gudrid's jaw dropped; that wasn't what she'd had in mind. She was used to getting her way with men with a wave of the hand and a wink of the eye. Not here, not now. Vigfus went on, 'I'm a guard at the most godforsaken post in the Empire. What can you do to me that's worse? Send me to prison somewhere farther south? I'll get down on my knees and kiss your hand, or whatever else you want kissed, if you do. But the way things are, I'll talk however I cursed well please.'

She stared at him. Some men in the Empire were strong enough to take no notice when she said something. She'd never imagined a man who could be weak enough to do the same thing, and neither had Hamnet Thyssen.

'May we pass on?' he asked.

Simple respect was the only thing the guards were looking for. 'Yes, your Grace,' replied the one who wasn't named Vigfus. 'Pass on to the south. Tell the folk there what you've told us. See if they believe you anymore than we do.'

With that less than ringing endorsement, Hamnet did ride south with the rest of the travelers. Once they got out of earshot of the border post, Ulric Skakki said, 'By now, I hardly care whether I tell the Emperor what we've seen or not. All I care about is finding a town with a bathhouse. Did you see those guards? Some time not too long ago, they had baths. Both of them! Isn't that something?' He scratched.

As usual, that made Hamnet scratch, too. How many different kinds of bugs was he carrying around on his person and in his clothes? Too many— he was sure of that.

Liv stared at the firs and spruces through which they rode. 'So big,' she murmured in an awestruck voice. 'Are they really alive?'

'They really are,' Hamnet assured her, his voice grave. 'We make things from the wood, and we use it for fires instead of dung.'

'Yes, I can see how you might. So much of it in each tree, there for the taking,' the Bizogot shaman said. 'Truly this is a rich land.'

Hamnet Thyssen's jaw dropped. These northern provinces were heart-breakingly poor—back-breakingly poor, too, if you had to try to claw a living from them. Woodsmen and trappers were almost the only people who could. He eyed Liv with something that went deeper than astonishment, because what she said spoke volumes about how different they were. In her eyes, this miserable country seemed rich beyond compare.

And why wouldn't it? Summer here probably lasted six weeks longer than it did up where she lived, hard by the Glacier. The ground wasn't permanently frozen. Liv had never seen a tree before in all her life. A land warm enough to let them grow . . . was a land richer than any the Bizogots inhabited.

Realizing that almost left Hamnet embarrassed to be a Raumsdalian. How much his own folk took for granted! They sneered at the Bizogots for all the things the mammoth-herders lacked. But that wasn't the Bizogots' fault; it was the fault of the country in which they lived.

The Rulers lived even farther north than the Bizogots. Hamnet had seen that they used iron. Did they forge it themselves, or did they get it in trade from some unknown land far to the west and south, as the Bizogots got it from the Empire? Hamnet didn't know—by the nature of things, how could he? But he was sure of one thing. If the