Beyong the Gap

invaders. The Three Tusk clan has lost a fight. But the Bizogots are still your folk. They need you. They need what you can do. They need what you know. Ulric's right. If we charge now, we lose. We have to regroup and figure out what to do next, how to fight the Rulers.'

'Talk, talk, talk. This is what Raumsdalians do,' Trasamund said. 'Not Bizogots. Bizogots go out and fight.'

'And then wish later that they'd done some talking instead,' Ulric Skakki said. Trasamund scowled at him—and at the world.

'The Raumsdalians are right, your Ferocity,' Liv said.

'Not you, too!' the jarl howled.

She nodded. 'I'm sorry, but yes. Going forward, charging ahead, is useless now. We need to save ourselves for a fight we can hope to win.'

'Our grazing grounds! The mammoths! The musk oxen!' Trasamund beat his fists against his legs in misery.

'They're lost now, your Ferocity,' Ulric said. 'If we win, you can reclaim them. If you lose now, will you ever see them again? How likely is it? Tell me the truth, not what your heart wants to hear.'

Trasamund growled like a wild beast, down deep in his throat. 'Better to die than to live the exile's life!' he cried.

'If you really want to die, it won't be hard,' Ulric said. 'If you're just making noise because things hurt so much right now, that's a different story. But be careful what you say, because you may decide to do something your mouth means but your heart doesn't.'

'He is right,' Liv said again. 'What we really need is vengeance. Don't throw yourself away before we can take it.'

Trasamund turned his ravaged gaze on Hamnet Thyssen. 'Well, Raumsdalian? Are you going to preach me a sermon, too?' He spoke in the Empire's language; his own had no word for sermon.

'No,' Count Hamnet answered. 'The only thing I'll tell you is, I know what watching your world crash down on you feels like. It's happened to me, too. You have a hole where your heart used to be, and you go on anyway. What else can you do?'

'Kill!' Trasamund roared.

'If you kill a little now, your Ferocity, you will die right afterwards.' Audun Gilli was almost maddeningly precise. 'If you wait for your moment, you can work a great killing on the foe, and still live to hear him mourn. Which would you rather?'

'I want to kill now, and I want to kill later,' the jarl answered. 'I want to kill and kill and kill. If I drowned the world in blood, it wouldn't glut me. Do you understand, you and your talk of killing? What do you know of death?'

Audun Gilli bit his lip. 'I came home one night to watch my family burn.

Is that enough, your Ferocity, or do you want something more? Did you ever smell your wife's charred flesh when you lay down to try to sleep?' He almost quivered with fury. Little weedy man that he was, he was on the point of hurling himself at the burly Bizogot, magic forgot, simply man against man. And Hamnet Thyssen might not have been astonished if he prevailed.

Trasamund stared. In his own moment of agony, he seemed to have forgot that others could know, had known, torment, too. Where Ulric's sarcasm and Hamnet s stolidity failed to remind him of it, the wizard's rage did. Trasamund seemed to slump in on himself like a pingo melting in an uncommonly hot summer. 'I will live,' he mumbled. 'I will avenge. And I will hate myself every heartbeat till I do.'

Hamnet Thyssen and Audun Gilli both nodded. 'Oh, yes, your Ferocity,' Hamnet said. 'Oh, yes. That comes with the territory. For now, though, we see about living.'

Dully, Trasamund nodded as well.

Audun Gilli knew a weatherworking spell that seemed stronger than any Liv had. He used it to call snow down on the travelers' tracks. Maybe that would let them and the survivors from the Three Tusk clan give the Rulers the slip. Or, then again, maybe it wouldn't.

'If you like, I'll ride off by myself,' Hamnet said. 'The wizards from the Rulers seem to want to kill me in particular, fools that they are. I don't want to bring my troubles down on anyone else.'

'You'll do no such thing!' Liv's voice went high and shrill. She does care for me, Hamnet thought. That seemed a stranger, stronger magic than the one Audun used to fill their trail with snowflakes.

'Stay with us, Thyssen,' Trasamund said. 'Stay with us. If the Rulers want you so much, it follows that you can hurt them if you live. And so we'd better keep you alive if we can.' He cared for Hamnet, too, cared for him the same way he cared for his own weapons. Anything he could aim at the Rulers, he would.

Count Hamnet didn't want to leave Liv. And he didn't want to leave Trasamund, either. The Bizogot jarl wanted to hit back at the invaders. That was more than Sigvat II did. Hamnet Thyssen was in the right place, and in the right company. 'If you don't think my coming along will endanger you, I'll gladly stay.'

'Good. That's good. We need all the enemies of those lion turds to ride together.' Trasamund could see that, even if Sigvat couldn't. 'And we need to hit back at them as soon as we can without throwing ourselves away.'

'How?' Once more, Ulric Skakki asked a bluntly practical question.

He asked it, and the Bizogot waved it aside. 'I don't know yet. But we need to do it when we see the chance. We need to show the rest of my folk that we can hit back. If we don't, what's to stop them from rolling on their backs like a dire wolf that's lost a fight and giving the cursed Rulers whatever they want?'

'A point.' Ulric didn't sound happy about admitting it, but he did. He was no more honest than he had to be, but was in his own way scrupulous.

'Gelimer!' Trasamund boomed. The other Bizogot nodded miserably. Trasamund went on, 'You will know where the herds are, not so?'

'I know where they were, your Ferocity. Where they were before the thunderbolt from the north hit us, I should say,' Gelimer answered.

'We warned you. By God, you should have listened.' But Trasamund let that go—for a Bizogot, a rare show of magnanimity. 'The Rulers will be feeding off the beasts closest to your camp. Guide us to a herd farther away. It will feed us for a while. And, sooner or later, the invaders will come to steal. When they do'—he smacked his hands together—'we strike!' He made it sound simple. Whether it would be ...

Gelimer seemed to gain a little life at the thought of hitting back. 'Off to the west is where most of the musk oxen were. The mammoths roamed closer to our camp. I don't know if those .. . Rulers are breaking them to ride. Even after you said they could do that, who would have thought it was true?'

'You should have,' Hamnet Thyssen answered before Trasamund could speak. 'Did you think we were making up stories to pass the time?'

'With Raumsdalians, who knows?' Gelimer said. 'All you people lie all the time, so how can we tell what to believe?'

Hamnet looked at Liv. She was looking back at him. They both remembered Eyvind Torfinn's paradox. Hamnet wished the Bizogots here hadn't taken it so literally; it might have cost them dear. Or, then again, it might not have mattered. Who could say whether the Rulers would have beaten them anyhow?

'Am I a Raumsdalian? Is the jarl a Raumsdalian?' Liv asked Gelimer. 'When we say something is true, you can rely on it. You can, but you didn't. And now you see what happened.'

'You don't need to make me feel any worse, Lady,' Gelimer said. 'I'm already lower than a maggot's belly.'

'Killing the enemy will make a man of you again,' Trasamund declared. 'West, you said the musk-ox herds were? Then west we shall ride, west and north, back into our own lands again.'

Enough fatty roast meat made the cold all around much easier to bear. The furnace inside Hamnet Thyssen, stoked with such fuel, burned harder and hotter. He seemed warmer, and supposed he really was.

The Bizogots had no trouble cutting an old bull musk ox, half lame and slow, out of the herd and leading it downwind so the smell of blood wouldn't panic the other animals. Killing it took a lot of arrows, but they had them.