Beyond the Gap (26 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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Eyvind forgot her gibe and did his best to soothe her. His best wasn't nearly good enough. Hamnet smiled at Liv. She smiled back, a certain knowing look in her eye. She might guess he was thinking she wouldn't throw a tantrum like that. And if she did, she was right.
Audun Gilli, meanwhile, fiddled with his ensorceled needle floating in a bowl of water. Chanting his spell and watching the way the lodestone swung, he nodded to himself. “The magic confirms it,” he said. “The Gap is that way.” He pointed the way they were riding, the way Gudrid questioned.
She rewarded him with a sneer a mustachioed stage villain in a melodrama would have been proud to claim for his own. “Oh, yes—a lot you know about it,” she said. “The last time you tried that spell, you almost ran us straight into the Glacier, if I remember right.”
“You do,” Audun said steadily. “I've learned where I made my mistake. Can you say the same?”
Now she gaped at him in astonishment mixed with fury. She couldn't have thought he had enough spirit to talk back to her. Since Hamnet Thyssen hadn't thought so, either, he couldn't blame her … for that.
“Enough of this blather,” Trasamund declared. “I am riding on toward the Gap. Anyone else is welcome to come along. Anyone who thinks I'm heading in the wrong direction is welcome to go where she pleases, as friend Ulric said.” That
she
made Gudrid scowl all over again. The Bizogot jarl plainly thought no one else thought him misguided.
And he was right. Everyone rode along with him—even Gudrid, though she bit her lip in anger and humiliation. Hamnet wondered what she would do next to show how important she was—and how much trouble it would cause.
 
THE SNOWSTORM DIDN'T seem to want to end. Even this early in the season, it claimed the land beyond the Glacier for its own. Hamnet Thyssen didn't mind. He was used to snow himself, though neither Liv nor Trasamund would have been much impressed with his claims.
That wasn't the only reason he didn't mind so much. He was sleeping warmer of nights than he'd ever imagined he would be. There was little room for privacy in the encampments the travelers set up. Liv didn't mind; there was little room for privacy in a Bizogot camp, either.
He woke up mornings with a smile on his face. He wasn't used to that. It made muscles that hadn't been used much for a long time ache from the unaccustomed exercise.
Ulric Skakki teased him about it, saying, “What have you got that I don't?”
“A lady friend?” Count Hamnet suggested; the idea bemused him, too.
“Well, yes. I know
that
.” Mock indignation filled Ulric's voice—Hamnet hoped it was mock indignation, anyhow. “But why have you got her?”
“For the beauty of my plumage and the sweetness of my song?” Hamnet suggested.
Ulric looked at him, then slowly shook his head. “You haven't just gone around the bend,” he said. “You've gone right past it, you have.” He steered his horse away from Hamnet as if afraid whatever the noble had was catching.
Hamnet doubted that. In his experience, happiness wasn't contagious.
He certainly hadn't caught much of it himself. Now that he had a little, he kept taking it out and picking it up and looking at it from all angles, as if it were some strange animal that lived on this side of the Glacier but not on the one with which he was more familiar.
Doing that, he discovered something he would perhaps rather not have known—the thing he was examining proved not to be quite perfect after all. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy making love with Liv. A man would have to be dead not to enjoy that. But what they did had something missing compared to what he'd done with Gudrid.
Something … He worked at that as a man might work at a piece of meat stuck tight between two teeth. Trying to find it almost drove him mad, as the meat would have when it didn't move. Whatever it was, it wasn't the pleasure of the act itself. Liv was at least as good a lover in those terms as Gudrid.
Something … Listening to Gudrid bicker with Eyvind Torfinn over roasted deer ribs one evening all at once made Hamnet stare and stare. Gudrid noticed; she usually did. “What's your problem?” she snapped. She could go from scolding her new husband to scolding the one she'd discarded without missing a beat.
“It's nothing, really. I'm sorry,” Hamnet Thyssen answered, and looked away. That made Gudrid blink; he shot back more often than not. But, with a shrug that was almost a wriggle, she returned to making life difficult for Earl Eyvind. They weren't really squabbling
about
anything. They were just going back and forth, the way Gudrid did with any man with whom she was involved.
Hamnet Thyssen, meanwhile, still stared, but not at Gudrid anymore. He looked into the fire, marveling at his own blindness.
So that's it
, he thought.
When he'd made love with Gudrid, especially toward the end when the two of them were falling apart, he'd always had to win a fight before she gave in. It wasn't physical; sometimes it wasn't even verbal. But it was always there between them—the idea that he had to overcome her before she yielded herself to him. He'd got used to it, to the point where it became part of what he thought of as lovemaking.
With Liv, it wasn't there. It didn't need to be there. As far as he could tell, she really wanted him. She didn't have to be persuaded or coerced or whatever the right word was. She just … wanted him. And if the missing frisson of winning the fight stayed missing …
“Well, goodbye to it,” Hamnet muttered. If that was what his trouble was, he didn't need it, not one bit.
 
LIKE MOUNTAIN RANGES farther south, the Glacier didn't waste much time shouldering its way up over the horizon. As soon as the snowstorm blew through and clear weather returned, there it was. The sweep to the south that marked the Gap lay almost exactly in the direction where Trasamund and Audun Gilli had said it would. Gudrid maintained a discreet silence.
A short-eared fox trotted along just out of bowshot of Hamnet Thyssen, then streaked off after a hare. Both beasts were losing their summer coats and going to winter white. Before long, only their noses and eyes would mark them against the drifted snow.
Every night seemed longer and darker than the one before. The Northern Lights began to dance, higher in the sky than Hamnet Thyssen had ever seen them. “I wonder what makes them,” he murmured to Liv as they lay side by side under a mammoth skin.
“We say God warms His hands with them,” Liv told him. He liked the poetry of the answer. He also liked the way Liv found to warm her hands a little later. If they were cold, they would have heated; that part of him, lately, had felt as if it were on fire. He hadn't realized a man his age could do so much. Of course, for several years he hadn't wanted to do much at all.
Birds went white for the winter, too. A snowy owl swooped down on a ptarmigan the next morning and carried it away. Count Hamnet hadn't noticed the ptarmigan, but the owl did.
Higher and higher rose the Glacier—and then it vanished as another snowstorm blew down on the travelers from behind. This one would have been a formidable blizzard in Nidaros, but the Bizogots took it in stride. That made the Raumsdalians try to do the same, lest Trasamund and Liv think them soft.
“Was it like this when you came up here before?” Hamnet asked Ulric Skakki. With the wind roaring and moaning, the only way to talk was to ride close together and bawl in each other's ears.
“No,” Ulric answered. “It was worse.”
“By God!” Hamnet said. “How?”
Ulric Skakki's hat came down over his forehead. A wool muffler covered his mouth and nose. Only his eyes were exposed to the weather. People said eyes by themselves didn't show much. They'd never seen his. “Believe me,
your Grace, it had no trouble at all,” he said. “The wind doesn't always blow toward the Glacier. Sometimes it comes down off it. Sometimes the wind blowing toward it runs smack into the wind coming down off it. If you think this is bad, imagine a tornado full of snow.”
“I'd rather not,” Hamnet Thyssen said. Down in the southern part of the Raumsdalian Empire, tornadoes could level a town or scatter a castle's stones across the countryside. Some of those stones had to weigh as much as a mammoth. The savage winds picked them up and flung them anyway.
No wonder weatherworkers have so much trouble
, Hamnet thought. How could a mere man hope to control anything so strong?
Ulric Skakki's thoughts ran in a different direction. “When we get down to the right side of the Glacier,” he said, “do you think anyone will believe us when we tell people what we've found?”
“The Bizogots will,” Hamnet said. “They don't complicate things that don't need to be complicated.”
“Or sometimes even things that do,” Ulric said. “And the Bizogots move by clan, not as one folk. Even if they do believe, how much good will it do us? They'll spend more time quarreling among themselves than doing anything about the Rulers.”
As far as Hamnet Thyssen was concerned, the Bizogots' disunity was a boon for the empire. If they ever found a jarl who could unite them all, they might prove deadly dangerous to Raumsdalia. They might also prove deadly dangerous if they decided to join the Rulers instead of fighting them.
“Will his Majesty pay attention to the word we bring?” Ulric Skakki persisted.
“He sent out this expedition. He let some of his guardsmen come along with it,” Hamnet Thyssen said. And how
had
Gudrid managed that? Did she sleep with Sigvat to persuade him? Hamnet forced his mind back to the question at hand. “If the Emperor isn't convinced—”
“We're all in trouble,” Ulric finished for him.
“Maybe. Maybe not, too,” Hamnet said. “All we know about the Rulers is from their bragging and the little we saw.”
“They don't just herd mammoths. They really tame them, the way we tame horses,” Ulric said. “Samoth is a stronger wizard than Audun Gilli dreams of being.”
“Well, yes.” Hamnet Thyssen looked around to make sure Audun was out of earshot. “But how much does that say about the one, and how much does it say about the other?”
Ulric Skakki gave him a dirty look—and well he might have, when he'd dragged Audun Gilli from the gutter for the journey beyond the Glacier. “Audun will be fine when we really need him.”
“I hope so. We all hope so,” Count Hamnet said. “But the Rulers are a problem, and you're right—no one who hasn't seen them can understand how big a problem they could be.”
“Well, that may take care of itself,” Ulric said.
Hamnet frowned. “How do you mean?”
“By next year, chances are that everyone will have seen them, don't you think?” Ulric said. Hamnet only grunted, like a man who takes a fist in the pit of the stomach. Ulric Skakki seemed to think that a full answer. And so perhaps it was.
 
BEFORE LONG, HAMNET Thyssen wondered whether he and the other travelers would make it back to the Gap, let alone through the narrow opening that was the only way home. The two sides of the divided Glacier shaped a funnel with that opening as the sole outlet. All the bad weather beyond the Glacier seemed to pour into the funnel—and had no way out.
Snow piled up thick on the ground. This, sages said, was how the Glacier formed in the first place—snow that fell faster than it melted, that never melted from year to year, that hardened into the solid Glacier as the weight of more snow above it squeezed out the air. Finding or forcing a way through got harder by the day.
“Are we going to have to wait till the blizzards stop?” Hamnet asked Trasamund.
“I hope not,” the Bizogot answered. Hamnet Thyssen had wanted more. Maybe his face said as much, for Trasamund went on, “This is new for me, too, you know. I'm used to weather that has more, ah, room to move around.”
“Think on the bright side,” Jesper Fletti said. “If we freeze to death or starve to death up here, chances are the Rulers will, too.”
“Oh, joy.” Hamnet Thyssen did not like Jesper, and so he took a certain sour pleasure in showing up the other man. “That isn't so, anyhow. The Rulers aren't likely to come through the Gap during winter. Chances are they'll travel when the weather is good—or as good as it gets up here.”
Like the rest of the travelers, Jesper was bundled up so only his eyes and a bit of his forehead and the bridge of his nose were exposed to the air. By
the way his rime-whitened eyebrows came down and pulled together at the center, Count Hamnet's dart hit home.
“One way or another, we'll manage.” Trasamund didn't sound worried—but how a leader sounded and what he really thought could be two different things, as Hamnet knew full well. The Bizogot continued, “If we have to, we'll build shelters from snow blocks and wait it out. We've got plenty of deer flesh on the horses' backs.”

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