Beyong the Gap

seen by somebody with a wicked sense of humor. 'We fly through the air all by ourselves. Birds do, so we must. Only stands to reason.' It crossed its eyes and stuck out an iron tongue.

Both guards goggled. So did their sergeant. Hamnet Thyssen and Ulric Skakki looked at each other. Told you so, Ulric mouthed. Hamnet nodded, remembering when Audun Gilli worked that same spell on their winecups.

'I think you had better pass on in,' the sergeant said. 'They can deal with you at the palace, by God.' His spearhead blew him a wet, slobbery kiss. He looked as if he wanted to wring its wooden neck. The other guards' spearheads made more sarcastic gibes.

'Maybe you'd better let them quiet down,' Hamnet Thyssen murmured as the travelers rode into the city.

'They will as soon as I get far enough away,' Audun Gilli answered. 'That spell takes work to keep up, and I'm not going to bother.'

'It is a good magic, a funny magic,' Liv said in her new and halting Raumsdalian. 'You teach me? Make people laugh when I go north again.'

Not if I go north again, Hamnet noted. When. She sounded very sure of what she wanted to do. And he couldn't suppress a stab of jealousy when Audun walked her through the spell step by step. Her face was bright and shiny, full of excitement. She and Audun shared something she never could with him.

He scowled and muttered and clasped the reins tightly. He hadn't left himself open to a woman's wounding since Gudrid left him. Liv wasn't hurting him on purpose, which didn't mean she wasn't hurting him.

'I thank you,' she told Audun Gilli when he finished. 'It is clever. I can do it. I am sure I can do it.'

'Not hard,' Audun said. 'Not good for much, but fun.'

'Fun is good.' Liv looked around, seemed to come back to herself, and nodded to Count Hamnet. 'I begin to see what you mean. This city is... very large. Look at all the big buildings, and at all the people in the streets. And not just people. All the beasts, too.'

A string of loaded mules was coming up toward the north gate. The plump merchant leading it had some pungent things to say about the travelers who blocked his path. Then the lead mule screwed up his face and said, 'Oh, sure, you think they're as bad as you are, don't you? Fat chance!'

It spoke clearly, distinctly, loudly. The merchant's jaw hit his chest with what should have been an audible clank. The travelers squeezed past the column of loaded mules. The animal in the lead went right on telling the merchant what it thought of him. He didn't stand there gaping long. When anyone—anything—insulted him, he shot back hard. Telling off a mule? He didn't mind. He'd likely done it countless times when the beast couldn't say anything.

'You've got more demon in you than I thought,' Hamnet told Audun Gilli.

'Who, me?' the wizard said modestly. 'What makes you think that had anything to do with me?'

'I'll tell you what—if Liv tried it, the mule would have had a Bizogot accent.'

'I was going to do it,' Liv said. 'Audun did it first.'

'Well, you've got more demon in you than I thought, too,' Hamnet said. Liv stuck out her tongue at him. They both laughed, his jealousy dissolving.

Behind them, the merchant called the mule something really unlikely. The mule called the merchant something even worse. Chances were they were both right. Before long, the mule would lose the power of speech as Audun Gilli moved too far away to sustain the spell. The merchant was guaranteed the last word, and all the words after that. But Count Hamnet would have bet the man would never trust the mule not to tell him off again one day.

They moved deeper into Nidaros, streets zigzagging to blunt the Breath of God. The farther they went, the wider Liv's eyes got. 'There really is ... quite a lot of it, isn't there?' she said. 'How do you feed so many people?'

'Me? I don't,' Hamnet answered. 'You've seen the way I cook. These folk would sooner starve than eat that.'

She sent him a severe look. 'And you said I had a demon in me.'

'All right, then. A lot of food comes up from the south. We have markets. We have storehouses. Meat mostly keeps fresh through the winter, though that's shorter than it is up in the Bizogot country. Grain will last a long time if you store it where mice and rats can't get at it and it can't go moldy.'

'How long is a long time?'

'I don't know exactly. Years, anyhow.'

'Years,' she echoed. 'You are luckier than we are. These are the riches that let you build the things we can't, aren't they?'

'I suppose so,' Hamnet said. 'We have more left over at the end of a year than you do—unless the year is very bad, I mean.'

'There's something else about having extra food,' Ulric Skakki put in. 'We don't all have to hunt or gather all the time. Some of us can make the things Bizogots don't have, yes. And some of us can try to think up new things, things even we don't have, things it would be nice if we did have.'

'New things.' Liv frowned. 'Like what? When you have all this, what more could you want?'

'If I knew, I'd think up new things myself,' Ulric said.

'Old men say that when their grandfathers were boys no one made lamps with mirrors behind them to shed more light. I've heard that more than once,' Hamnet Thyssen said. 'It's a small thing, but it's the kind of thing I mean. Every craft probably has secrets someone thought of not so long ago. Wizards make new spells all the time. Audun Gilli would know more about that than I do.' There—he'd said it.

'Thank you, your Grace. That's what I was talking about, sure enough,' Ulric Skakki said.

'We do come up with new spells now and then,' Liv said. 'The rest of the way we live . . . That hasn't changed much, not so far as anyone can remember.'

'Ah, but the Three Tusk clan lives hard by the Glacier,' Ulric said. 'The Bizogot clans farther south trade with the Empire.' He turned to Hamnet Thyssen. 'Remember those ugly wool caps the Musk Ox Bizogots wore?'

'I'm not likely to forget them,' Hamnet said with a shudder. To Liv, he went on, 'You're lucky we came back farther west, so you didn't have to see those. But some of the Bizogots take things we make and use them in ways we'd never think of. And the Leaping Lynxes, up by Sudertorp Lake—the shorebirds they take there let them live in a town half the time. They're having to figure out how to do that when most of them have never seen a real town.'

'I see.' Liv nodded. 'Every folk has clever people and fools in it. But in the Empire your clever people have more room to be clever than they do up on the plains.'

'Yes, I think that's likely so,' Count Hamnet said.

'Maybe. Or rather, sometimes,' Ulric Skakki said. 'Just remember, most people in the Empire live on farms, not in towns. They're born on a farm, they grow up on a farm, they get old—if they get old —on a farm, and they die on a farm. The clever ones might make better farmers than their stupid neighbors, but that's about it. Farmers don't change the way they do things any faster than Bizogots do. Sometimes they don't change any faster than their beasts.'

'You sound like you know what you're talking about,' Hamnet remarked. Ulric was always chary of talking about his own past. Was he doing it now without naming names?

His foxy features were perfectly opaque as he smiled at Hamnet. 'Well, I try to do that. Harder to be taken for a fool when you do, eh?'

'Er—yes.' Hamnet had to drop it. Ulric left nothing on which to get a conversational grip.

The street zigzagged again. Jesper Fletti, who was riding ahead of Hamnet and Liv and Ulric, let out a war whoop no Bizogot in the world would have been ashamed to claim. 'The palace!' he shouted. 'The palace!' He might have spotted water in the southwestern desert. In an instant, all the guardsmen who'd gone north with Gudrid were shouting the same thing. 'The palace! The palace!''They'd come home at last, and probably all of them had wondered if they ever would.

Come to that, Hamnet Thyssen had wondered if he would come back to Nidaros, too, even if he was still a long way from his castle in the southeast at the forest's edge. A moment later, very much to his surprise, he found himself shouting, too.

Sigvat II didn't stint. He let the travelers use the imperial bathhouse. That was luxury by anyone's standards.