Beyond the Gap (22 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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They came.
 
THE CAMP WAS not like anything Hamnet Thyssen expected. He'd looked for the same sort of dirt and disorder that always marked a Bizogot encampment. He didn't find them. Tents stood in neat rows. Mammoths and deer were tethered in neat lines. Some of the deer had saddles and reins. The Rulers didn't seem to ride horses. Come to think of it, Hamnet hadn't seen any horses except for the ones with his party since traveling beyond the Glacier. Parsh hadn't shown any curiosity about them, but Parsh didn't seem to show curiosity. The only thing he showed was arrogance.
That irked Count Hamnet. It infuriated Trasamund. As soon as he got down from his horse, he roared, “Parsh! Where are you, Parsh, you bastard child of a rabid fox and a palsied rabbit? Come get what you deserve!”
He didn't have long to wait. Parsh marched up to him and bowed. “Here I am, creature. How do you care to die? Name your pleasure, and I will oblige you.”
“Bizogot stand-down,” Trasamund said at once.
“I do not know what foolish games barbarians play,” Parsh said scornfully. “Tell me what this is, so I know whether it is fitting.”
“We stand here,” Trasamund said. “One of us hits the other in the face. Then it's the second man's turn. Last one who can still get up and swing wins.”
For the first time since Hamnet set eyes on him, Parsh actually looked pleased. “This is good sport—very good sport for a savage. How generous of you to give me the chance to amuse myself so.” He shouted in his own guttural language. His countrymen sounded interested and approving, even if Hamnet couldn't understand a word they said. Parsh returned to the Bizogot tongue to ask, “How do we decide who goes first?”
“Go ahead,” Trasamund said as men of the Rulers gathered to watch the stand-down. Hamnet Thyssen saw no women in the encampment. “Do your worst, hound, and then you will see what a nothing it is.”
Hamnet wouldn't have said that, not against a foe as plainly powerful as Parsh. He would have tried to claim the first blow, or at least an even chance at it. Parsh actually smiled. “Your funeral,” he said, and likely meant that in the most literal way.
“Talk is cheap,” Trasamund said. “What do you do to back it up?”
Parsh hit him. Hamnet thought that blow might have felled a mammoth, let alone a man. Blood poured from Trasamund's nose. He swayed, but quickly straightened. “Well, when will you begin?” he asked.
“You fool! I did,” Parsh said.
“Oh, that? I thought you sneezed,” the Bizogot jarl said. Samoth the wizard or shaman or whatever he was turned Trasamund's words into the language of the Rulers. The strangers buzzed among themselves. They clearly weren't used to outsiders as proud as themselves. Trasamund went on, “Well, then, I'll just have to hit you back.”
Parsh didn't flinch from the blow. He did stagger. He bled from the nose, too; his seemed to have changed shape. But he managed a laugh. “A mosquito bit me,” he said.
“Any that did would sick you up afterwards,” Trasamund jeered. Parsh hit him again. His head snapped back. He spat blood, and a tooth. “Keep at it,” he told Parsh. “You may wake me yet.”
He slugged the man from beyond the Glacier. Parsh lurched and blinked a couple of times. “A love pat,” he said thickly, and then he too spat red.
“You dream,” Trasamund said, “for I love you not.”
“Then love—this.” Parsh threw another right. Trasamund went to one knee. Slowly, he got to his feet. He shook his head, as if to clear it. Parsh looked quite humanly surprised—he hadn't thought the Bizogot would be able to stand up.
Trasamund shook his head. “I love it so well, I'll give you one like it.” He shook his head again. “No, I'll give you one better.” He smashed his fist into Parsh's face. The man from the Rulers swayed but stayed upright. Even so, the nasty light in his eyes went out. He wasn't enjoying the game any more, only hoping to get through it—as Trasamund was.
It went on for a long, painful, miserable time. Both Trasamund and Parsh went down repeatedly; each man struggled to his feet each time. Parsh kept punching with his right hand. After a while, Trasamund switched to his left.
Trasamund's traveling companions stayed quiet through the contest. The men of the Rulers cheered Parsh at first. As it became clear the victory wouldn't be easy if it came at all, they subsided into uneasy silence, too.
One of Trasamund's eyes was swollen shut. He could open the other one a little. He peered through what had to be a blurry slit at Parsh, who was in no better shape. “Here,” the Bizogot mumbled through pulped and puffy lips. “This time …” He cocked his left fist.
Parsh watched it with fearful concentration. Maybe he saw that Trasamund was putting everything he had left into this one blow, for as the Bizogot's left fist shot forward Parsh started to duck. He wasn't quick enough, not after the punishment he'd already taken. The blow caught him square on the point of the chin. He crumpled and lay motionless.
“Aii!” Trasamund groaned. “I think I've gone and broken my other hand now.”
That would have mattered had the fight gone on. But Parsh could not get up. For a moment, Hamnet Thyssen wondered if he was dead. Only the slow rise and fall of his chest said life still smoldered in him.
Trasamund turned away. “Wait!” the wizard from the Ruters—his name was Samofh—said in the Bizogot tongue.
“What for?” Trasamund could hardly stand on his own feet, let alone talk. His wits had to be scrambled. He'd taken a fearful beating. That he'd given a worse one seemed almost beside the point.
“You beat him,” Samoth said. “Now kill him.”
“What the demon for?” Trasamund said. “This wasn't to the death. It was last man standing. Here I am. God knows how, but here I am. He almost knocked my head off a couple of times there.” Now that he'd won, he could pay tribute to a formidable foe.
But Samoth shook his head. “When we fight, we fight to the death. Anything less is a disgrace. He would have killed you. You would do him a favor by killing him. That he should lose to a lesser breed …” He translated his words into the gutturals his own folk used. Their fierce faces somber, the men of the Rulers nodded.
“No.” Trasamund shook his head—and almost fell over on account of it. “That's his worry, not mine. I don't want his blood now. I just want to wash mine off my face and to tie up my hands. Where have you got some water, and maybe some cloth or some leather lashings?”
“I will take you,” Samoth said, reluctant respect in his voice. “Come with me.”
Trasamund walked with the rolling, lurching gait of a drunk. That he walked at all amazed Hamnet Thyssen. After what the Bizogot jarl had taken, his being alive amazed Count Hamnet. “Maybe I'd better go along,” Ulric Skakki remarked, “just to make sure everything is on the up and up.”
“Not a bad idea,” Hamnet said. Silent as a snowy owl, Ulric slipped away.
Hamnet waited by Parsh, curious to see what would happen when the savage woke up and found he had lost. After a quarter of an hour, one of the Rulers poured a mammoth-hide bucket of water over Parsh's head. Parsh moaned and spluttered and jerked. His eyes came open. He looked around and realized he was lying on the ground.
Horror on his smashed face, he did his best to stand. He needed three tries before making it to his feet. Even then, he swayed like a tall tree in a storm. “Where is the Bizogot?” he asked blurrily. “Did he fall? If he didn't, I will hit him again.”
No one answered when he spoke the Bizogot tongue. Increasing alarm in his voice, he asked what was probably the same question in his own language. One of his countrymen gave back a few scornful words.
Parsh shook his head. He said something else. The other man of the Rulers turned his back on him. Parsh swung toward Hamnet Thyssen. “Is it so? Can it be so?” he asked in the Bizogot language. “Did he beat me? How could he beat me?”
“He beat you,” Hamnet answered. “Your chin was strong, but his was stronger.”
“One of the lesser breeds cannot beat a man of the Rulers. It cannot be done,” Parsh said. His own battered state was proof positive that it
could
be done, but he seemed to be talking about laws of nature, not particular cases. He shook his head, then grimaced; after the beating he'd taken, he had to wish he were dead. Hamnet Thyssen had reason to remember that thought. “It cannot be done,” Parsh repeated.
“It was,” Count Hamnet said.
Instead of answering, Parsh looked at his countryman, who kept on giving him his back. That seemed to make up his mind for him. “It cannot be done,” he said for the third time. “I must make amends.” He pulled his belt knife from its sheath and stared at the blade.
If he'd tried to go after Trasamund, Count Hamnet would have stopped him. Hamnet didn't think that would be hard; Parsh could barely walk and speak, let alone fight. But the man of the Rulers did nothing of the sort. He spat between his own feet, a gesture of vast contempt. Then he looked up into the sky—and then, before Hamnet or anyone else could stop him, he slashed the knife across his throat.
Blood spurted, scarlet in the afternoon sun. Parsh crumpled. No one could hope to stanch that wound. The man of the Rulers thrashed on the ground for a little while, then lay still in death.
Only after he died did his comrade deign to turn around and acknowledge him again. The other man of the Rulers closed the dead and staring eyes. He said something in his own language.
“I don't understand you,” Hamnet Thyssen said, which was true on every level he could think of. Parsh's countryman spread his hands to show he knew nothing of the Bizogot language.
Trasamund and Samoth returned a few minutes later. Samoth eyed Parsh without surprise. “Redeemed himself, did he?” the wizard said.
“By God!” Trasamund muttered. “You are a hard-hearted folk.” He looked down at his bandaged hands. “And a hardheaded folk, too.”
“Do you want his weapons?” Samoth asked. “Such is the rule when one of us beats another. I do not know what the rule is when someone of a lesser breed beats a man of the Rulers. I do not think it happens enough for us to need a rule.”
That was a compliment of sorts. Maybe the Bizogot jarl would have been wiser to show he saw as much. Or maybe not; the Rulers, arrogant themselves,
seemed to appreciate arrogance in others—when those others could back it up. Trasamund had. “I didn't mean for him to die,” he said, peering through puffed and slitted eyes at Parsh's gory corpse. “I only wanted to wipe out an insult.”
“What better way to wipe it out than in blood?” Samoth returned. Trasamund shrugged. Then he grimaced. Even the little motion had to hurt.
 
HAD TRASAMUND NOT beaten Parsh, Hamnet Thyssen wondered if the Rulers would have fed the Bizogots and Raumsdalians. As things were, the men from beyond the Glacier treated the travelers, if not like themselves, then at least with a certain circumspection.
We may be beasts,
Count Hamnet thought,
but we've shown we're beasts with claws and fangs.
The meat came from the deer that roamed these plains. Maybe the Rulers were fancy cooks in encampments that held women and children. Here by themselves, the warriors cooked about the same way Bizogots or Raumsdalian soldiers would have—they roasted their meat over flames. The flames came from a fire of dried dung, as they would have in the Bizogot country. Instead of holding the meat on sticks, the men used skewers made from mammoth bone. Again, the Bizogots would have done something similar, though they sometimes got wood in trade from the Empire. Hamnet Thyssen judged no trees grew anywhere close to lands the Rulers ruled.
They did have salt; perhaps the edge of a sea lay not too far off, or perhaps it came from an outcrop of rock salt. And they had spices the likes of which none of the travelers had ever tasted. The black flakes the curly-bearded men sprinkled on the meat reminded Hamnet Thyssen of chills because they bit the tongue, but their flavor was different.
Eyvind Torfinn thought so, too. “What do you call this spice?” he asked the leader of the Rulers, a hawk-faced, middle-aged man named Roypar.
Roypar scratched his cheek and then tugged at the gold hoop he wore in his left ear. None of the other men of the Rulers wore such an ornament. Was it a badge of rank? A sign of wealth? Was there a difference? Count Hamnet wasn't sure about that, even among Raumsdalians. Among the Rulers? He could only guess.
“Is name of
pepper
,” Roypar answered. He spoke only a little of the Bizogot tongue. In any case, the important word came from his own speech.
“Pepper.” Earl Eyvind repeated the unfamiliar name several times. Roypar nodded. Over meat, he seemed less ferocious than his fellows had before. “Do you raise this yourself?” Eyvind inquired. “Or do you trade for it?”
“Trade,” Roypar said. “Is come from far away.” He pointed south and west. “Far, far away. Many days, many months.”

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