Beyong the Gap

'We don't go around,' Trasamund answered. 'We go straight across, by God. This season of the year, musk oxen and mammoths cross lakes and rivers. If the ice holds them, it will hold us, too.'

Hamnet and Ulric and Audun exchanged glances. Hamnet had skated on frozen ponds in winter—what Raumsdalian hadn't? But sending horses across? That was a different story.

'What happens if we fall in?' Audun Gilli asked the question on Ham-net's mind, and surely on Ulric's, too.

'If we're close to shore, we drag you out, get on dry land, build a big fire fast as we can, and maybe you live,' the Bizogot jarl answered. 'If not so close, you freeze before we can do it.' Like a lot of mammoth-herders, he was callous when it came to things nobody could do anything about. He went on, 'It won't happen, though. The ice now is as thick as Jesper Fletti's head, and even harder.'

That made both Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen smile. Audun Gilli just nodded seriously and said, 'I hope you're right.'

'I'm betting my neck, too,' Trasamund said. The wizard nodded again.

The horses went out onto the ice without much fuss. They placed their feet carefully. Even with horseshoes— one more thing the Bizogots, who didn't smelt iron, went without—the going was slippery. But Trasamund proved right about one thing—the frozen surface of the lake was more than solid enough to bear the heavy animals' weight. Except for the smoothness, Hamnet couldn't tell he wasn't riding across solid ground; there was no shaking under him to suggest water yet unfrozen lay beneath the ice.

Sudertorp Lake was a long way across. Going around would have been three or four times as long—Hamnet understood as much. But he still felt peculiar with nothing but ice all around. He felt as if he were riding across the top of the Glacier.

When he spoke that conceit aloud, Ulric Skakki clapped his mittened hands. 'Now there's a sport no one's likely to try soon,' he said. 'Men might get to the top, I suppose, but not horses. Your Ferocity!'

'What do you want?' Trasamund often suspected Ulric of laughing up his sleeve at him—and often was right.

But the adventurer sounded serious as he asked, 'Have any Bizogots ever tried climbing to the top of the Glacier?'

'Not in my clan,' the jarl answered. 'Not so anyone remembers. I've heard that men have tried farther west. I don't think anyone ever made it, though. There are mountains that stick up through the Glacier. Some of them are topped with green in the summertime—but what grows on them no one knows. How would you get to them to find out?'

Count Hamnet whistled softly. That wasn't a small thought. Those mountain peaks above the Glacier— what might grow up there? Anything at all. How long had they been there, each by itself? Eons. Could there be people up there, people who did roam the top of the Glacier and had no more hope of coming down than the Bizogots and Raumsdalians did of going up? What would they eat? The top of the Glacier made the Bizogot plains seem paradise by comparison.

'Probably rabbits and lemmings and voles up there,' Ulric said when Hamnet put that into words. 'Bound to be birds, too, at least in summer. But I wouldn't want to try to live up there, and that's the truth.' He shivered.

So did Hamnet Thyssen. And then, unmistakably, so did the ice beneath them. Hamnet thought he heard a crackling noise far below. He pointed at Trasamund, not that pointing with a forefinger in a mitten did much good. 'You said this couldn't happen!' he shouted at the Bizogot.

'It can't!' Trasamund shouted back, even though it was.

The crackling grew louder. 'I don't know about you people, but I'm making for shore as fast as I can,' Ulric Skakki said, and booted his horse up to a trot and then to a gallop.

That seemed like such a good idea, Count Hamnet did the same thing. So did Trasamund and Liv and Audun Gilli. But the crackling followed them and got louder still, even through the drumming thunder of their horses' hooves. 'This is sorcery!' Audun shouted. 'Someone is making the ice breakup!'

'Well, for God's sake make it stop!' Hamnet shouted back. He thought about what the jarl said about going into the icy water. Having thought about it, he wished he hadn't. To die like that... It would end fast, but not fast enough.

And someone could only mean someone from the Rulers. How did the folk who lived beyond the Glacier track the travelers here? Hamnet had no idea. He wished Audun Gilli or Liv did.

Liv began to chant in the Bizogot tongue. She took her left hand from the reins so she could use it for passes. 'I know that spell,' Trasamund said.

'Do you?' Hamnet Thyssen looked back over his shoulder. What he saw made him wish he hadn't. Cracks in the frozen surface of the lake stretched toward him like skeletal arms wanting to hold him in an embrace that would last forever.

'I do, by God,' the jarl answered. 'When snow is very dry, it won't hold together for things like huts. That spell clumps it, you might say.'

'Will it do the same for ice?' Hamnet asked.

'I don't know,' Trasamund said. 'We're going to find out, don't you think?'

Audun Gilli rode up alongside Liv. He reached out and set a hand on her leg. Most of the time, Hamnet would have killed him for that. Now, though, he understood the wizard wasn't feeling her up. Audun was lending her strength. He didn't know the spell; it wasn't one Raumsdalians were likely to use. But he was doing what he could to help.

Would what he was doing, what Liv was doing be enough? Count Hamnet looked over his shoulder again. Those grasping cracks were still coming forward as fast as a horse could run—but no faster, or so he thought. So he hoped. He looked ahead. That rise had to be the beginning of solid ground, real ground. It also had to be most of a mile away. Could Liv hold back the sorcery from the north long enough, slow it down enough, to let them all win to safety?

If the horse stumbles under me, I'm a dead man, Hamnet thought. Even so, he booted it on as fiercely as he could. If the cracks in the ice caught up with him, he was also dead. When he looked back one more time, he gasped in dismay. He could see black water there where the cracks had widened. No, he didn't want to go into that. 'Come on, horse!' he called. 'Run, curse you!'

And the horse did run. And its hooves thudded up the slope of Sudertorp Lake's northern bank just as the cracks and black water reached the edge of the lake. Ulric and Trasamund were ahead of him, Liv and Audun just behind.

For a bad moment, he wondered if the spell could tear land asunder as it tore ice. But it did stop at the lake's edge. He reined in, breathing almost as hard as his horse was. Then he pulled back his hood in lieu of doffing a cap to salute the shaman and wizard. 'I think you saved us,' he said.

Liv was panting, as if she'd run a long way. 'I think I did, too,' she said. 'And I know—I know—I had help from Audun.'

'You knew the spell,' Audun Gilli told her. 'It worked .. . just well enough.' He looked back toward the cracks in the frozen surface of the lake.

So did Liv. Her shiver had nothing to do with winter on the Bizogot plains. 'Just well enough is right,' she said. 'I couldn't stop the spell. I didn't have a chance in the world of stopping it. All I could do was slow it down a little.'

'How did the Rulers reach so far?' Hamnet Thyssen asked.

'I don't know!' she blazed, sounding angry at him and herself and the Rulers all at once. 'I don't know, I tell you. If I knew, I'd be able to do something like that myself, and I can't. Nobody can.'

'Nobody except them.' Audun Gilli pointed north.

'What does that say?' Count Hamnet had a pretty good notion what it said, but hoped he was wrong. 'Does it say we'd better not quarrel with them, or else we'll lose? Does it say we should bend the knee to them, because that's the best we can hope to do? If it does, why are we fighting?'

'We're fighting because we're free, and we're going to stay free,' Trasamund answered before Liv could speak. 'If that's not why you're fighting, go back to the Empire, because I want nothing to do with you.'

'I'm not going anywhere,' Hamnet said. 'Except north, that is.'

'Next frozen lake we come across, we ought to go around it and not over it,' Ulric Skakki said.

'I wonder if it matters,' Hamnet said. 'If the Rulers know where we are, if they can strike as they please,