Beyong the Gap

When it went down at last, bawling in pain and incomprehension, Trasamund finished it with a headsman's stroke from his great two-handed blade.

Gore crimsoned the snow. Some of the hungry Bizogots snatched up that bloody snow and stuffed it into their mouths. They couldn't wait for butchery, let alone a fire. Bodies needed food of any sort in this weather. The nomads grinned with blood on their lips and running down their chins.

Hamnet Thyssen, having eaten better lately, left the blood alone. After the dung fire began to burn, he roasted his meat and gulped it down— burnt on the outside, raw in the middle. He didn't care. You couldn't be very fussy in the Bizogot country, not if you wanted to go on living. He supposed he would eat bloody snow if he got hungry enough. He didn't think he would grin afterwards, though.

Trasamund seemed to gain strength with food, too. 'Where are the Rulers?' he roared. 'Let them come now. Yes, let them come, by God! We will kill them by the hundreds, by the thousands!' The remnant of his clan had no more than twenty warriors, counting the newcomers up from the south.

'Let them come, yes—but not too many of them.' Wherever you put him, Ulric Skakki had good sense.

'Let them leave their wizards behind, too.' That wasn't Trasamund scorning Liv and Audun Gilli. That was Audun himself. 'They are stronger than we are, however much I hate to admit it.'

'Maybe we can take them by surprise,' Liv said. 'They'll think we're weak.' And they'll be right, too, Hamnet Thyssen thought. The shaman went on, 'And they'll think we're afraid. And we will show them they're wrong.'

'We're not afraid of them. We were never afraid of them.' Gelimer's voice was blurry, because he talked with his mouth full. He was too busy eating to pause very much. 'But they beat us. They were too many and too strong.'

'They won't come against us with everything they have. That's bound to be true. They won't think they'll need to. And they'll be gathering strength for a raid farther south. That's what I would do if I were one of them, anyhow. They'll push through the Bizogot country so they can attack the Empire.'

'What makes you so special?' demanded one of the Bizogots who'd lived through the Rulers' onslaught. 'What are you doing here, if you think you're better than we are?'

'I didn't say anything about better. I don't say anything about that,' Ul-ric answered. 'But we're richer than you are. Our lands are richer than yours. Our weather is warmer than yours. The Rulers will strike south.' He defied the Bizogot to disagree with him.

The man wanted to. Hamnet Thyssen could see as much. But the fellow only muttered into his gingery beard and went back to stuffing himself with meat.

Down in Raumsdalia, the musk ox's stones would have been called prairie oysters. Trasamund toasted them over the fire and ate them. 'As the bull battered down his rivals and won his mates, so will I beat down the Rulers,' he vowed.

'So may it be,' Liv said softly.

Ulric Skakki had to remind Trasamund to put scouts out to the east. The jarl still wasn't at his best, or anything close to it. 'If we had another leader here to follow, I would,' Ulric told Hamnet Thyssen.

The way the adventurer looked at Count Hamnet alarmed him. 'I don't want to lead anybody,' Hamnet said. 'I didn't want to do it down in Raumsdalia with my own folk. I really don't want to do it here. The Bizogots wouldn't follow me anyhow.'

'You might be surprised,' Ulric said. 'You're large and you're tough and you don't spend all your time going on about how wonderful you are.'

'I'm a foreigner,' Hamnet said with a patience not far from desperation. ' 'All Raumsdalians are liars,' remember?'

'And Bizogots aren't?' Ulric Skakki threw back his head and laughed. 'That's the funniest thing I've heard since I don't know when.'

'It's their country. They can do whatever they want in it,' Count Hamnet said. 'And one of the things they'd want to do is knock any Raumsdalian who tries to tell them what to do over the head with a lump of frozen mammoth dung.'

Liv came up to the two of them, the snow crunching under her felt boots. 'What are you arguing about?' she asked. They spelled it out for her. She didn't need long to make up her mind. 'Count Hamnet is right,' she said. 'We Bizogots must have our own to lead us. Do you plot against the jarl?'

'No, but I want someone who isn't sunk in grief in charge,' Ulric answered. 'If Trasamund can't do it, who can?'

'Who says Trasamund can't?' Liv returned. 'When the Rulers come, his spirit will rouse. You wait and see.'

'What if the Rulers came and we didn't even know they were on the way?' Ulric asked. But Liv didn't want to listen to him, and neither did Hamnet Thyssen. Ulric sighed out a small cloud of fog, threw his hands in the air, and gave up.

Whoever persuaded Trasamund to set scouts out, it was as well that he did, because two days later one of them rode back to the musk-ox herd so hard that his horse steamed in the frigid air. 'They're coming!' he shouted. 'Those murderous thieves are coming!'

Liv proved to know her jarl. He might have been sunk in gloom before he got the news, but he revived with a roar. 'Oh, they are, are they?' he boomed. 'By God, we'll teach them this isn't their country!'

When he gave orders, he seemed to know which ones to give. He sent a few Bizogots out as herd watchers, to give the Rulers something to focus on. The rest, along with the Raumsdalians, he stationed at the edge of the herd, ready to ride out and strike as the chance offered. He put Liv and Audun Gilli with that group.

'If you find a spell to confound the Rulers, use it,' he said. 'If you find they're using spells against us, block them. Is that plain?'

'If we fail. .. ?' Audun asked.

'You won't. You can't,' Trasamund said. 'Too much riding on it. No place to run away any more. No place to hide. We beat them here or we die here. Is that plain?' Biting his lip, the Raumsdalian wizard nodded.

'They're coming!' The shout came from several throats at once.

Count Hamnet looked east. Those moving dots... At first, he took them for horses, or for the large deer the Rulers rode instead. Then he realized they were bigger and farther away than that. Mammoths, he thought. The chill that ran through him had nothing to do with the icy weather. He was honest enough to call it by its right name—fear.

'Can we really fight them?' The same noxious beast filled Gelimer's voice.

'By God, we can. We will.' Trasamund sounded confident, or at least unafraid. 'If we die, what do we lose? Nothing, for the clan is shattered and we are nothing without it. But if we win, we have the start of our vengeance. And so we shall win. We have nothing else left to do.'

'I don't think Eyvind Torfinn would like the logic,' Ulric Skakki murmured to Hamnet.

'Bugger Eyvind Torfinn. He's down where it's warmer,' Hamnet answered. 'We're doing his work for him up here, so let's do it.'

Behind him, Audun Gilli began a soft chant. 'A masking spell—just a small one,' he said into a pause. 'So they don't look at the musk oxen too closely and don't notice whatever they happen to see along with them.'

'Good. Good,' Trasamund rumbled. 'Let us surprise them if we can.'

The Rulers had stronger magic than folk on this side of the Glacier. But Audun's spell didn't have to be strong. It didn't aim to draw attention to itself. The opposite, in fact. Hamnet Thyssen hoped that meant the invaders wouldn't notice it—and wouldn't notice him and the rest of the warriors.

He strung his bow and nocked an arrow. Here came the mammoths. Now he could see the deer-riders flanking them. 'So you want some more, do you?' a lancer atop one tusker shouted in the Bizogot tongue. 'We'll give you more, all right—see if we don't!'

The Bizogots who seemed to be ordinary herders did what Hamnet Thyssen would have done in their place— they wheeled their horses and fled. Laughing and jeering, the Rulers came after them. Hamnet discovered something he didn't know—mammoths could move at least as fast as horses with snow on the ground.

Some of the Bizogots turned and shot over their shoulders at their pursuers. Most of those arrows went wild.