Beyond the Gap (17 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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When Count Hamnet said as much, Ulric Skakki smiled one of his sardonic smiles. “Of course, we're not invading their lands when we go north of the Gap—eh, your Grace?”
“We're not invading.” Hamnet waved an arm at the Bizogots and Raumsdalians riding north. “Does this look like an army to you?”
Ulric laughed. “Well, no,” he said. “But does one man who turns himself into an owl look like an army to you?”
“That's different,” Hamnet Thyssen insisted.
“How?” Ulric sounded genuinely curious.
Try as Hamnet would, he couldn't come up with a good answer. The only one that came to him was,
Because it's on this side of the Gap
. It was an answer plenty good enough for him. He was sure as sure could be, though, that Ulric Skakki would only laugh some more if he brought it out. And so he rode along in glum silence—and Ulric Skakki laughed at him anyway.
After a while, Ulric said, “They'll have a demon of a time trying to bring an army through here.”
That touched on Count Hamnet's professional expertise. “Oh, yes,” he said without a moment's hesitation. “It's not just the narrow gate they'll have to pass through. How will they keep a host of men and beasts fed?”
“Nobody can raise enough to keep a host fed till you get down into the Empire, where crops will grow,” Ulric agreed. “The Bizogots would be a lot more trouble than they are if they were hosts instead of bands—and they're trouble enough as is.”
“Really? I never would have noticed.” Count Hamnet's voice was dry. When Ulric laughed this time, it was with him, not at him. Hamnet thought so, anyhow.
Closer and closer together came the two cliffs that marked the edges of the Glacier. Once upon a time, within the memory of chroniclers and bards though certainly not within that of living men, the Glacier had had only a southern edge. Would it really keep melting till the Gap was a broad
highway—till, perhaps, there was no Glacier at all, only bare ground? Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine that, tried and felt himself failing. Even somewhat diminished as it was, the Glacier still seemed to him a natural and all but inevitable part of the world.
As those tall cliffs of ice drew closer, they also towered higher into the sky. Count Hamnet was not a nervous man, or not a man who showed his nerves, but his voice wobbled a little when he asked Trasamund, “Are there ever avalanches up here?” He couldn't imagine how many tons of ice might come thundering down on him.
“I'm sure there are—there must be,” the Bizogot jarl answered. “I've never been in one, though.” He chuckled. “If I ever was, I'd be too flat to talk to you now.”
“Er, yes,” Hamnet said. That marched too well with what he was thinking.
And then, the next morning, he couldn't see the edges of the ice at all. He couldn't see anything. Mist shrouded the campsite. It was cold and gray and thick, thicker than he'd ever known mist to be down in the Raumsdalian Empire. The air he inhaled felt soggy. When he exhaled, he added his own fog to that which swirled around him.
“Which way is north?” he asked. His voice sounded strangely muffled.
“North?” Ulric Skakki said from not far away—but Count Hamnet couldn't see him. “In this, I have trouble being sure of up and down.”
That would have been funny if it didn't hold so much truth. The air above, the air all around—the same shade of gray everywhere. It was like being in the middle of a wet sheep's wool. And when Hamnet Thyssen looked down, he could barely see his own boots.
“I ran into this myself the last time I came north,” Trasamund said from somewhere in the fog. “I was stuck for two or three days, because I couldn't tell which end was up. Of course, I didn't have a shaman with me, and now we've got two.”
“I know a spell for finding north,” Audun Gilli said. “An iron needle floating in a cup of water will show you the way.”
“What does he say?” Liv asked from farther away. Count Hamnet translated for her. When he finished, she said, “I know this spell. A Raumsdalian trader showed it to me. It may work down in your country, but not so well up here. He said it lied more and more the farther north he went.”
“That's so, by God—I've seen it, too,” Trasamund agreed, also in the Bizogot tongue.
Inevitably, Audun Gilli asked what they said. With a mental sigh, Hamnet
translated for him, too. The wizard let out an indignant sniff. “How can a spell that works well in one place not work in another? The idea is ridiculous.”
Trasamund, of course, understood Raumsdalian. “It may be ridiculous, but it's true. If you go the way you think north is, you'll smack your nose into the Glacier instead of heading on up into the Gap.”
“I don't believe it,” Audun said.
“Fine,” Trasamund told him. “Don't believe it. Work your magic. Go the way you think is north. But watch out for your nose.” He laughed. Audun Gilli sniffed more indignantly than ever. Laughing still, Trasamund went on, “Go ahead. Try your spell. We'll come along. Why not? We'll be going
somewhere
, even if it's in the wrong direction.”
Hamnet Thyssen hadn't known a needle would float on water. But Audun was right—the thin one he used did. And it pointed steadily in a direction he insisted was north. Off the travelers went, moving slowly through the impenetrable fog, calling to one another again and again to keep from getting separated.
When the ground under the horses' hooves grew muckier than ever, Hamnet began to suspect Trasamund knew what he was talking about. Wetter ground meant more meltwater, and more meltwater meant they were getting closer to the Glacier. The mist did thin a little as the day wore along, and a swirl of breeze showed the great cliff of ice dead ahead and seeming unimaginably tall.
“You see?” Trasamund sounded as if he would tear Audun Gilli's head off if the wizard denied seeing.
But Audun didn't. “I see,” he said sadly. He sounded chastened.
“We went more west than north, did we not?” Eyvind Torfinn said.
“Plainly.” Audun Gilli sounded more chastened yet. “But we should have gone north.” Was he staring at the needle as if wondering why it betrayed him? He was only a dim outline to Hamnet Thyssen, but the nobleman knew he would have stared at the needle that way.
Eyvind Torfinn, by contrast, sounded cheerful. “If we know the needle points somewhere close to west instead of north, then if we go in the direction the needle says is somewhere closer to east than north, we'll really be heading toward the true north after all, won't we?”
A considerable silence followed, from both Audun Gilli and Trasamund. When Audun said, “By God, your Splendor, I think we will,” he seemed amazed.
Trasamund's laugh might almost have blown the fog away by itself. “By God, your Splendor, you've worked a magic to make any shaman jealous!” he boomed. “You've made a liar tell the truth in spite of himself! Well done!”
“What do they say?” Liv asked plaintively. She was the only traveler who knew no Raumsdalian. Count Hamnet translated for her. “Ah,” she said when he finished. “The old man is clever.”
She forgot Earl Eyvindwas fluent in the Bizogot language. “I am not as old as all that, wise woman,” he said in her tongue, “or at least I hope I am not.”
Hamnet Thyssen couldn't see her turn red, either, but he would have bet she was blushing. “I crave your pardon,” she said in a small voice.
“Come on—let's get going,” Trasamund told Audun Gilli. “Your precious needle can lie as much as it pleases. You will tease the truth out of it even so.”
“Maybe I will. I really think I will.” Audun seemed astonished but happy. “A wizard ought to travel about with a charmed needle, and compare what it calls north to what the sky shows at a great many places. Once a chart was made, anyone would be able to use the needle anywhere and have it tell him the truth.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” the Bizogot jarl said. “It sounds like a good idea for somebody with all the time in the world. As much as I would like to have so much time, I don't—and neither do you.”
Audun took the hint. He murmured the charm over the needle once more, perhaps to encourage it. Then he began to ride. “This way,” he called. He was dimly visible through the thinning mist, but hearing him did help the others follow.
And Eyvind Torfinn's notion worked. Hamnet Thyssen saw no logical reason why it shouldn't, but plenty of things went wrong even when he saw no reason why they should.
“O
H,” LIV WHISPERED, looking first to one side, then to the other. She shook her head in awe and wonder. “Oh,” she said again.
Hamnet Thyssen couldn't have put it better himself. They were passing through the narrowest part of the Gap. The ground between the two titanic ice mountains was soggy, almost saturated, with meltwater. The horses had to pick their way through the mud as carefully as they could. That meant their riders had to pay close attention to what they were doing—except they couldn't, because the spectacle to either side was too magnificent.
The Gap had melted through, yes, but not by much. The gap in the ice was only a few hundred yards wide here. It towered up and up and up to either side. How far up was it to the top of the Glacier? A mile? Two miles? Three? Hamnet didn't know. He couldn't begin to guess. A clever geometer or surveyor might have been able to figure it out, but he was neither. Far enough to be daunting—far enough and then some.
Except near noon, the shadow of one half of the Glacier or the other shrouded the Gap. The ice smoked, as ice did in warm air. But this wasn't just ice—this was the Glacier. Fingers of mist swirled and curled about the travelers, now obscuring the frozen, towering cliffs, now leaving them fully visible.
Eyvind Torfinn doffed his fur hat to Trasamund. “I thank you,” Eyvind said in the Bizogot language. “By God, your Ferocity, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I might have died without ever seeing this marvel. I've lived many years, but nothing else comes close to it.”
“What does he say?” Audun Gilli asked. Ulric Skakki rode closer to him than Hamnet did, and translated Eyvind's words into Raumsdalian. The wizard nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I am younger than Eyvind Torfinn, but I do not expect to see anything to match this again.”
“It is a wonder—no doubt of that,” Ulric said. Though he'd seen it before, he had no trouble sounding impressed again. What would this passage be like in winter? One word immediately occurred to Count Hamnet. It would be
cold
. It would be narrower in the wintertime, too; as ice melted back when the sun swung north in the sky, so it grew again as days shortened. And days this far north would be short indeed come winter.
With a crack like that of a breaking branch but immensely larger, a house-sized chunk of ice broke off from the eastern Glacier and thudded to the ground. Hamnet Thyssen's horse snorted and sidestepped nervously. If he were on his feet, he thought he would have felt an earthquake. The broken piece hadn't rolled and fallen more than a bowshot's distance, either. What would have happened if it had started halfway up the Glacier? He shivered, though they weren't shrouded in mist just then. An avalanche would have happened, that was what.
Jesper Fletti's head kept whipping back and forth, back and forth, too. The guards officer didn't seemed awed by the spectacle of the Glacier to either side of him; he acted more like a trapped animal. “It's like being in a box,” he said hoarsely. “In a box.”
And it was, with the opening ahead so narrow. Some people didn't like being closed in. Who did, really? But it had to bother Jesper more than most people. Hamnet wondered how he liked sleeping in the tight, enfolding blackness of a mammoth-hide tent. Maybe it worried him less if he couldn't see it.
Count Hamnet might have asked another man. He might have consoled another man. He might even have consoled Jesper Fletti under different circumstances. He had nothing against Jesper as a guards officer; Sigvat II needed able men, and Jesper plainly was one. But he'd come north to protect Gudrid, and that meant Hamnet had as little to do with him as he could.
Ulric Skakki also looked to left and right. There in the narrows of the Gap, what else could a man do … unless he chose to look up and up and up at one half of the Glacier or the other? Hamnet Thyssen had tried that once. He didn't do it any more. It gave him the uneasy feeling he would fall
up
the Glacier. He knew he wouldn't. But what he knew and what his eyes told him
were two different things, and any man had trouble disbelieving his eyes.
“I think the Gap is a little wider here than it was an hour ago,” Ulric said. “Are we really past the narrowest part?”
As soon as he asked the question, the travelers all started making the same calculation. “I do believe we are,” Trasamund said.
Jesper Fletti drew in a loud, deep breath, as if being past the narrows meant his chest wasn't squeezed as tightly as it had been before. He probably thought it wasn't. That was as much in his mind as Hamnet's fear of falling up the Glacier. But, in many ways, what felt real
was
real.
“By God!” Audun Gilli exclaimed. “If we keep going—when we keep going, I mean—we'll put the Glacier behind us. We'll have to look south to see it. That seems … unnatural.”
“It may seem unnatural, but it's so—I've done it,” Trasamund said. “And believe me, Raumsdalian, it's much stranger for me than it ever could be for you. I've always had the Glacier to the north of me whenever I turned my head. The Glacier was—is—the northern horizon for me. When I rode down to the Empire and it disappeared behind me, the sky looked wrong. The world looked wrong. Seeing it in the south—that's worse than wrong. It's …” He paused, groping for the word in Raumsdalian.
“Perverted?” Gudrid suggested.
The Bizogot jarl nodded. “Yes, that's what I wanted to say. I thank you. Seeing the Glacier behind me is perverted.”
“Translate for me,” Liv said to Hamnet Thyssen. “What do they say?” Count Hamnet did. The shaman's eyes widened. “The Glacier behind us?” she whispered. “I hadn't thought of that. It's wrong, it's impossible—and it's going to happen, isn't it?”
“If we keep going, how can it help but happen?” Hamnet replied. He found the word Gudrid had used the most fitting to describe what that would be like. He also found it much too fitting that she should have been the one to come up with that particular word.
“It seems mad,” Liv said. “When you have a fever, when the world whirls round and round so you don't know what's real and what's a dream—then you might think you'd gone north of the Glacier. Otherwise?” She shook her head. “Not a chance.”
“Except you're going to do it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “We're all going to do it. Maybe this is the part of the world where everything goes mad. Look at Audun Gilli's enchanted needle.”
“Yes, that was strange—is strange,” Liv agreed. “If we go far enough north of the Glacier, will the needle point south when it's trying to tell us north?”
Hamnet blinked. He hadn't thought of that. “Maybe it will,” he aid. Then he turned the thought into Raumsdalian and passed it on to Audun.
It made the wizard blink, too—blink and then start to laugh. “Who knows?” he said. “What I want is the chance to find out.”
 
LITTLE BY LITTLE, the space between the two halves of the Glacier widened, as it had narrowed before. Jesper Fletti became his old self again. “I don't feel as if everything is pressing in on me any more,” he said. “I don't feel as if I have to do this”—he made pushing motions with both hands—“to hold the ice mountains apart.”
“That wouldn't do you any good,” Count Hamnet pointed out.
“Oh, I know, your Grace. I know it here.” Jesper tapped his head. “But I don't know it here, or here.” His hand went to his heart, and then to his belly.
“When will we see something different?” Gudrid said. “Everything looks the same as it did on the right side of the Glacier.”
However much Hamnet wanted to quarrel with his former wife, he couldn't, not because of that. Everything on this side of the Glacier looked the same to him as it had on the other side, too.
But Trasamund shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said, and then, “Oh, no,” again, as if to stress how much he disagreed. “Some of the flowers and plants here—I've never seen anything like them down in the lands we know.”
“Marsh plants?” Gudrid sniffed. “I don't care anything about marsh plants. I want to see something
interesting
. Where are your white bears? Where is the Golden Shrine?” She rounded on Eyvind Torfinn. “Where
is
the Golden Shrine? You're supposed to know about these things.”
She talked to her husband the way she might have talked to a majordomo back in Nidaros—as someone who did know about things, yes, but who had better not presume to be her equal. And Eyvind Torfinn put up with it. Gudrid had ways of making men put up with things. Earl Eyvind coughed and said, “You must understand, my dear, this is the first time a real exploring party has come north of the Glacier—this is the first time an exploring party
could
have come north of the Glacier. We don't know just where the Golden
Shrine is. Truth to tell, we don't
know
it's here at all. We hope to find out.”
That made good sense to Hamnet Thyssen. He thought it would quiet Gudrid down, but she only sniffed again. “What nonsense!” she said. “All we need to do is grab somebody up here and squeeze him. On this side of the Glacier, they'll know just where the silly old Shrine is.”
Count Hamnet stared. So did Ulric Skakki. Eyvind Torfinn looked as amazed as if a teratorn were writing in the sky with characters of fire. Even Trasamund, who had his full measure of straightforward Bizogot brutality, seemed taken aback. But then he guffawed. “You've got all the answers, don't you, my sweet?”
“Well, this isn't a very hard question,” Gudrid said.
Trasamund laughed some more. Earl Eyvind held his head in both hands. He'd spent most of his life looking for lore about the Golden Shrine. He knew how much he didn't know. Gudrid had no idea about any of that. Instead of untying a knot, she wanted to slash it through with a sword. Maybe that would work. On the other hand …
“If we grab a local and squeeze him, that won't make his clan love us,” Ulric Skakki observed.
But nothing fazed Gudrid. She waved the worry aside. “Who says he has to get back to his clan? We leave him out for the dire wolves, or whatever they have here.”
“I would not care to approach the Golden Shrine with blood on my hands,” Eyvind Torfinn said.
“If we can't find it without doing whatever we have to do, then we'll do it, that's all.” Gudrid sounded very sure of herself. She commonly did.
“Remember the owl,” Audun Gilli said. “Whoever lives here has powers of his own. We are only visitors. We would do well to remember that.”
She looked down her straight nose at the wizard. “Who here is the man, and who the woman?” Audun blushed like a child.
But even Jesper Fletti shook his head. “The sorcerer is right,” he said. “We're a long way from the Bizogot country, even, and a demon of a lot farther from the Empire. We couldn't fight a war up here. Keeping any kind of army supplied as it goes up through the Gap …” He shook his head. “I wouldn't care to try it.”
Gudrid only sniffed again. She didn't worry when someone disagreed with her, because she was always sure she was right. “What are we going to do?” she said. “Turn around and go home without finding the Golden Shrine? I don't think so.”
Hamnet Thyssen feared they would have to do exactly that. Summer didn't last long up here. The Bizogots knew how to winter next to the Glacier, but he and his countrymen didn't. They'd never had to. Before they froze and starved, they would need to head back to a more tolerable clime.
The Golden Shrine … He looked around, as if expecting to spy it on the northern horizon. That made him laugh at himself. They weren't even out of the Gap yet. This ground had lain under the Glacier for years uncounted. Wherever the Golden Shrine might be, it wasn't here.
And he had no idea what it would look like if and when they did find it. It would, presumably, be white. Past that … Past that, who could say? He pictured it as standing all alone on something that looked like the frozen plains where the Bizogots roamed. He pictured it that way, yes, but he knew his picture might be wrong. Maybe it would be the center of a town, maybe even the center of a city like Nidaros. Then, like Jesper, he shook his head. That seemed unlikely. How would you feed a town—how would you feed anything more than a band of nomads—in country like this?
Despite all his logic, he scanned the northern horizon again. He stiffened in the saddle. His finger stabbed out. “What's that?”
“Lion,” said Ulric Skakki, who rode not far away.
“I suppose so,” Hamnet said. That small shape in the distance did move with a sinuous, feline grace.
“It's seen us,” Trasamund said. Sure enough, the big cat trotted toward the travelers.
The closer it got, the more they stared at it. “By God,” Audun Gilli said, “that's no lion!”
“It isn't,” Jesper Fletti agreed. “What is it? It's no sabertooth, either—it doesn't have short hind legs the way they do.”

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