Beyond the Gap (44 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: Beyond the Gap
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“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,” Ulric 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—frear.
“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. The Manches and other tribes in the far southwest practiced that shot and made it deadly. They would have laughed themselves sick at how little use the Bizogots got from it.
When a mammoth caught up with a horse, by contrast, the Rulers knew just what to do. They speared one Bizogot out of the saddle, then another. And they went on laughing while they did it.
“Now!” Trasamund bellowed. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians concealed by the musk-ox herd and by Audun Gilli's magic thundered forward.
Bowstrings thrummed. These archers weren't making an unaccustomed shot, but one they used all the time. They aimed for the mammoths' eyes and ears and trunks—the sensitive spots where wounds would pain even those gigantic beasts. And they aimed for the warriors atop them.
One thing mammoths couldn't do was turn as quickly as horses. The Rulers cried out in surprise and dismay at the unexpected flank assault. Their enormous mounts went wild when wounded, just as horses would have. One plucked a rider off its back with its trunk, dashed him to the ground, and stepped on him. His scream cut off abruptly. Red stained the snow.
With shouts of rage, men of the Rulers on deer tried to close with the horsemen. The deer lowered their heads and charged, ready to use their antlers as secondary weapons. But ferocious archery kept most of them at a distance, and the horses overbore those that did manage to close. Hamnet and Ulric and the Bizogots chopped down at the enemy riders with their swords.
“Revenge!” Trasamund shouted over and over again. “The Three Tusk clan! Revenge!”
Ulric Skakki made a lucky shot: he hit a mammoth not just near the eye but in it. No, Hamnet decided—it was a great shot, not lucky; Ulric had done that before. The arrow must have pierced the thin, fragile bone behind the eyeball and reached the brain, for the mammoth crashed to the ground, stone dead. One of the men atop it survived the tumble, but not for long. A Bizogot ran up and dashed out his brains with a hatchet.
“Revenge!” Trasamund yelled once more, and all the Bizogots took up the cry.
“Revenge!”
Seeing the mammoth topple seemed to suck the spirit from the Rulers. They still outnumbered their foes, but they lost stomach for a fight that wasn't a walkover. The ones who could rode back toward the east as fast as they could go.
“They don't look like such heroes when you see their arses, do they?” Ulric Skakki remarked.
“Not a bit of it,” Hamnet Thyssen answered, thrusting his blade into the snow to get blood off it. “We ought to round up the ones who are still breathing but couldn't get away.”
“Yes, the Bizogots will have fun with them, won't they?” Ulric said.
Count Hamnet's mouth twisted. The adventurer was bound to be right
about that, and what happened then wouldn't be pretty.
Revenge
,
yes
, Hamnet thought. “They shouldn't just be sport,” he said. “We ought to squeeze answers out of them, too. Some of them speak the Bizogot tongue.”
“Who knows what kind of noises they'll make by the time the Bizogots get through with them?” Ulric said. “Do you want to be the one to tell Trasamund he can't have all the revenge he craves?”
“I'll do it.” After a moment, Count Hamnet amended that: “I'll see if he wants to listen, anyhow.”
Trasamund wasn't paying much attention to captives when Hamnet came up to him. He was directing the butchery of the mammoth Ulric had slain, and of the deer and horses that had fallen in the fight. “When we go off to join up with another clan, by God, we won't come empty-handed,” he shouted. “We'll have meat for their larders, so much meat that they'll want us worse than we want them.”
That was bravado. He had to know as much, too. But it was a bravado the surviving Three Tusk clansfolk needed. Along with the fallen men of the Rulers, Bizogots lay in the snow, cold and dead and rapidly getting stiff. The ones who yet lived had to be convinced the others didn't die for nothing.
The Bizogots were already starting to abuse the prisoners they'd taken. “We should question them, not torment them,” Hamnet said.
Trasamund looked as if he hated him. “Easy for you to talk like that,” the jarl growled. “They didn't wreck your clan.”
“Not yet,” Hamnet Thyssen answered, which brought the Bizogot up short. He went on, “If we learn all we can, we'll save other Bizogot clans, too. Or we can hope we will. Would you rather waste them? Think of them as food—for the sword.”
That got home to Trasamund. Considering how the Bizogots ate every bit of every animal they killed, from snout to tail, Count Hamnet had hoped it would. The jarl went on scowling at him, but then turned aside and started bellowing orders.
And he needed to bellow. Having started in on some of their captives, the Bizogots had the rest trussed and waiting and watching. They didn't want to be deprived of the pleasures of vengeance.
Trasamund said, “If they tell us the truth, maybe we let them live, or at least give them a quick end. That will give them a reason to talk to us. If we catch them lying, then we do as we please.”
“Some of them don't know any of our tongue,” Gelimer said. “We might as well slay them—we can't talk to them.”
“Keep them breathing for now,” Trasamund said. “Maybe we can ransom them or make the Rulers do something to keep us from hurting them.”
“You've spent too much time in the south,” Gelimer said. “You're getting soft.”
Trasamund hit him in the face. The jarl's mitten cushioned the blow, but it knocked Gelimer down even so. He got up smiting—Trasamund had proved himself still ferocious. Hamnet Thyssen would have thought that a perfect Bizogot attitude if he hadn't known Raumsdalians who worked the same way.

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