Beyong the Gap

Liv pointed to little sparrow-like birds hopping around on the snow-covered ground off to the side of the road. 'Larkspurs!' she said. 'So this is where they go during the winter.'

'I suppose so.' Hamnet thought for a few heartbeats. 'We did see them up in the Bizogot country in summertime, didn't we?' He hadn't paid much attention to the birds. They were too wary to be easily caught, and too small to be worth eating unless a large batch of them were baked in a pie or something of the sort.

'We saw them beyond the Glacier, too,' Liv said. 'Do those birds fly through the Gap to come here? Do they fly over the Glacier? Or do they winter in the lands we don't know, the lands to the far southwest?'

There was an interesting question. 'I don't know,' Hamnet admitted. 'How would you go about finding out?'

'You might be able to enchant a bird in the summer and then use the spell to see where it went in wintertime,' Liv answered. 'Of course, something might eat it between the time you cast the spell and the time you tried to check it. And you might not be able to tell anything if the larkspurs beyond the Glacier do go to that other land. God only knows how far away it is.'

That was liable to be literally true. No man on this side of the Glacier knew; that was certain. Maybe the Rulers did. And, come to that, maybe the larkspurs did. 'You might be able to enchant a bird in the summer,' Hamnet said.'I never could.' He paused, then added, 'You enchanted me.'

Liv blushed and shook her head. 'That was no magic, not the way you mean. It was ... the two of us.'

'Well, good.' Hamnet had always believed that was so. But he'd believed things about Gudrid that didn't turn out to be true. Could he stand it if he and Liv went sour?

Slowly, he nodded. He could stand their going sour. That was the chance you took, the risk you had to accept. Life wasn't perfect; neither were people. If Liv lied to him, though ... He would be a long time getting over that, if he ever did.

He didn't think she would. He hoped she wouldn't. And, right now, what else could he do? On he rode, after Trasamund, toward the Bizogot country, toward war with the Rulers, away from Nidaros, away from the Empire, away from everything he held dear. Sometimes you had to break the patterns that had run your life—and run it into the ground. Was he doing that here? Again, he thought so. He hoped so. Whether he was right or not.. . sooner or later, he'd find out.

Stopping at the first serai north of Nidaros made him nervous. He breathed a silent—or maybe a not so silent—sigh of relief when there was no sign of Gudrid in the common room. The only women in the place were barmaids and slatterns.

The men in there fell into two groups: merchants on their way down to Nidaros, and merchants on their way up from Nidaros. They ate and drank together, gossiping and doing their best to find out what lay ahead. They all eyed the party with two Bizogots in it with curiosity they hardly bothered to hide. Hamnet Thyssen supposed he accounted for some of that curiosity, too. He might have been a great many things, but few men would ever have accused him of buying and selling things for a living. Everything about him, from his face to the very way he walked, said he had no compromise in him.

He and his comrades squeezed their way onto the benches at a long table near the hearth. Merchants sat closer together to make room for them. Half a dozen men asked one of two questions—'Where are you from?' and 'Where are you bound?'—at more or less the same time.

Before answering, Trasamund shouted an order for a fat roast goose. A passing barmaid waved to show she heard. 'And mead!' Trasamund added. 'Plenty of mead, by God!' The woman waved again.

'We're out of Nidaros, heading for the lands of the Three Tusk clan and the Gap,' Ulric Skakki said.

That couldn't have been better calculated to make everyone else blink and gape. 'At this season of the year?' asked a grizzled merchant who found his tongue sooner than the rest. 'What will you do there? Besides freeze, I mean?'

Ulric looked not at Trasamund but at Hamnet Thyssen. Why not? Ham-net thought. The more who know, the better. If Sigvat doesn't like it, too bad for him. 'Some of you will have heard the Gap has melted through,' he said. 'It's true. There's land beyond the Glacier. There are folk beyond the Glacier, too—the Rulers, they call themselves. They're warlike and dangerous. Chances are they'll try to come down into the country we know. We aim to try to stop them.'

'You by yourselves?' The gray-bearded trader laughed raucously.

Audun Gilli murmured to himself. Count Hamnet thought his chant sounded familiar. He was right, too. A moment later, the merchant's plate grew a face that looked like a twisted version of his own. 'You wouldn't have the ballocks to come along, that's certain sure,' it jeered.

He stared at it. So did several of the men around him. Their laughs were even coarser than his had been. He picked up his pewter mug and slammed it down on the plate, which shattered like the cheap earthenware it was —or had been.

'You'll pay for that, by God!' a barmaid said. 'You can't go breaking crockery for the fun of it.'

'It called me a coward!' the trader exclaimed.

The barmaid rolled her eyes. 'I didn't figure you for one who saw snakes and demons when he put down too much ale,' she said. 'Only shows I'm not as smart as I thought I was, doesn't it?' She strutted away, swiveling her hips in magnificent scorn.

Another merchant turned to Hamnet and said, 'Next thing you'll tell me is that you went and found the Golden Shrine off beyond the Glacier.'

'No.' He shook his head. 'We looked, but we didn't see any sign of it. It may be there, or it may not. I can't tell you one way or the other.'

'I'd like to go back and look again,' Ulric Skakki added. 'I didn't believe there was any such thing till I went beyond the Glacier. I didn't believe you could go beyond the Glacier till I went and did it.'

'Neither did I,' Hamnet Thyssen said.

'Nor I,' Trasamund rumbled. 'I didn't know what would happen when I rode up into the narrowest part of the Gap the first time. But I kept going, and I found there was another side after all.'

'What about the—what did you call them?—the Rulers, that was it?' yet another trader asked.

'Yes, the Rulers,' Count Hamnet said. 'What about them? They're dangerous, that's what. For one thing, they ride mammoths to war. They carry lancers and archers aboard the beasts. For another, they're stronger wizards than any we have on this side of the Glacier.'

'That's so,' Audun Gilli said quietly.

'It is,' Liv agreed in her deliberate, newly acquired Raumsdalian.

'The other reason the Rulers are dangerous is that they're sure God or whatever they worship wants them to go out and rule all the other folk around them,' Ulric Skakki said. 'They don't want to talk to other folk. They just want to tell them what to do. And they may be tough enough to get away with it, too.'

'Huh!' the trader said. 'They haven't bumped into Raumsdalians before.'

'Or Bizogots.' Trasamund's tone and the warning gleam in his eye challenged the merchant to argue with him.

The man didn't rise to the challenge. 'Or Bizogots,' he said quickly. Trasamund subsided.

'Why isn't the Emperor doing anything about these Rulers?' somebody said.

'You would have to ask his Majesty about that.' But Hamnet couldn't leave it there. 'I wish he would have seemed more interested,' he added.

'You .. . talked to him?' the merchant said slowly.

'I talked to him.' Hamnet's voice was hard as stone, cold as the snowdrifts outside. He waited to see if the merchant called him a liar, and how. Whether the man went on breathing after that depended on such things.

Before the trader could speak, Ulric Skakki said, 'This is the famous Count Hamnet Thyssen. If he says a thing is so, you may rely on it. You'd better rely on it.'

Some of the men at the long table had plainly never heard of Hamnet Thyssen, famous or not. To others, he was famous for the wrong thing. 'He's the one whose wife . . .' one of them whispered to his neighbor, not quite quietly enough. The trader who'd asked if Hamnet had spoken to the Emperor didn't challenge him. Part of him was relieved, part disappointed. Sometimes fighting was simpler than talking.

'What can we do about the, uh, Rulers?' a merchant asked.