Beyong the Gap

X

Defeated and depressed, Hamnet Thyssen strode away from the campfire. The sun had set at last, but he was in no danger of getting lost. The northern horizon remained white and bright; the light was still good enough to read by. But he didn't feel like reading, even if he'd had a book. He wished he could keep walking, and leave behind the fools who didn't want to listen to him.

"Hamnet Thyssen!" As Liv often did, she spoke his given and family names as if they were part of the same long word. "Please wait!" she added.

After a moment, he did. She hadn't ignored him; she hadn't understood a word he was saying. Well, save for Ulric Skakki, neither had the rest, even though they and he used the same language. "Not your fault," he admitted.

"What was the argument about?" she asked, adding, "No one would slowdown and translate for me. I really have to learn Raumsdalian, don't I?"

"It might help," Hamnet said. "If I can learn your language, I don't think there's any reason you can't learn mine. As for the argument, I thought we should turn around and go home while the going is good. Ulric Skakki thought I was right. Everyone else thought I had a mammoth turd where my brains ought to be."

The Bizogot shaman laughed. "You have an accent when you speak our tongue, Hamnet Thyssen, but that is something a man of my clan might say."

"What? That we should go home?" He misunderstood her on purpose.

"No, about the mammoth turd and-" Liv broke off. Her eyes flashed. "You are teasing me. Do you know what happens when you tease a shaman?"

"Nothing good, or you wouldn't want to tell me about it," Hamnet answered. "Tell me something else instead-do you think we ought to head back?"

"Probably," Liv answered. "What else can we do here, unless we happen to stumble over the Golden Shrine?"

He stared at her. He thought she was the most wonderful woman in the world. Of course he did-she agreed with him. "By God," he exclaimed, "I could kiss you!"

Liv waited. When nothing happened, she said, "Well? Go ahead."

He stared at her again, in a different way. She wasn't a bad-looking woman, not at all, but he hadn't thought she would take him literally. No-he hadn't thought she would want to take him literally. Since his troubles with Gudrid, he'd had trouble believing any woman would be interested in him.

Carefully, so as not to offend, he kissed her on the cheek. She raised an eyebrow. She was grimy and none too fresh, but he hardly noticed. All the travelers, himself included, were grimy and none too fresh. "Well?" he said, when she stood there looking at him with that eyebrow halfway up her forehead.

"Not very well, as a matter of fact," Liv told him. "You can do better."

You'd better do better, lurked behind the words. He managed a crooked smile of his own. "Who knows what you'd do to me if I told you no? You were just talking about how it's dangerous to anger a shaman."

In saying he didn't want to anger her, he managed to do just that. Her frown put him in mind of a building storm. "I do not force you to this, Hamnet Thyssen," she said. "If you care to, you will. If you don't. . ." She didn't go on, but he had no trouble filling in something like, Be damned to you.

Angry at himself and her both, he did kiss her, not much caring if he was gentle or not. "Well?" he said again, tasting a little blood in his mouth.

"That is better." Liv paused. "Different, anyway."

Count Hamnet bowed. "Thank you so much."

"My pleasure-a little of it, anyhow." The Bizogot woman could be formidably sarcastic.

The one person except Ulric who thought the same way he did-and here he was quarreling with her. How much sense did that make? Not much, and. he knew it too well. He fought his temper under something close to control. "Will you tell Trasamund you think we ought to go south?" he asked.

"Is this what you ask after you kiss a woman?" Liv snapped. "Would you ask Gudrid the same question after you kiss her?"

"I would never kiss Gudrid." Hamnet s fury kindled for real. "And if, God forbid, I did, I would ask her who shed just kissed before me and who she planned on kissing next." He spat at Liv's feet.

He thought that would infuriate her in turn. Instead, it sobered her like a bucket of cold water in the face. "Oh," she said in a small voice. "I did not mean to tease you, either. I am sorry."

"Let it go," Hamnet said roughly. "Just-let it go. But do talk to the jarl, because that really is important."

Liv bit her lip and nodded. "It shall be as you say." Then, without a backward glance, she went off toward the camp. Slowly, Hamnet Thyssen followed.

The bear the travelers saw scooping salmon from a stream was not white. It was brown. It was also the biggest bear Hamnet Thyssen had ever seen. Oh, some short-faced bears might have been as tall at the shoulder as this monster, but they were long-legged and quick. This beast was built like an ordinary woods bruin, but on an enormous scale.

It showed formidable teeth when the riders drew near. With a little coughing roar, it stood between them and the fish it had caught. "It doesn't trust us," Ulric Skakki said.

"Maybe it's met men before," Audun Gilli said.

"Maybe it just knows what we're likely to be like," Count Hamnet said.

Trasamund eyed him sourly. "And now you'll go, 'It's a great big bear! We should all turn around and run home!'"

Hamnet Thyssen looked back, his eyes as cold as the Glacier. "Demons take you, your Ferocity," he replied in a voice chillier yet.

"No one talks to me that way!" Trasamund had no more control over his temper than a six-year-old. "I'll kill the man who talks to me so."

After sliding down from his horse, Count Hamnet bowed with ironic precision. "You are welcome to try, of course. And after you have tried, the demons will take you in truth." He was not afraid of the Bizogot. Trasamund was big and strong and brave but not, from everything Hamnet had seen, particularly skillful. And even if he were . . . Hamnet Thyssen would not have been afraid, because whether he lived or died was a matter of complete indifference to him.

Trasamund also dismounted. He drew his sword, a two-handed blade that could have severed the great bear's head from its shoulders. A blade like that could cut a man in half-if it bit. Hamnet s own sword was smaller and lighter, but he was much quicker with it.

Ulric Skakki rode between them. "Gentlemen, this is absurd," he said. "You are quarreling over the shadow of an ass."

"By no means," Hamnet Thyssen said. He intended to add that he saw the ass before him. The more furious Trasamund got, the more careless he would act. He was proud of being a Bizogot like any other. That a Raumsdalian might goad him into foolishness because he was so typical never once crossed his mind.

It crossed Ulric Skakki's, though. "That will be enough from you," he snapped before Hamnet could speak. Then he rounded on Trasamund. "And as for you, your Ferocity, you owe his Grace an apology."

"I will apologize with steel." The jarl swung his sword in a whirring, whirling, glittering circle of death.

"You are a bloody fool," Ulric said.

"Shall I kill you, too?" Trasamund asked. "I do not mind. Take your place behind that other wretch, and I will dispose of you one at a time."

"If I have to, I will," Ulric Skakki said. "Personally, I don't think you'll get past Count Hamnet. If by some accident you should, I know you won't get past me. Count Hamnet, I believe, fights fair. I promise you, your Ferocity, I don't waste time on such foolishness."

"Do you want to die?" Trasamund sounded genuinely curious. "If you do, I promise I can arrange it."

"Get out of the way, Ulric," Hamnet Thyssen said. "Believe me, I can take care of myself." He had no intention of backing down-or of dying. Surprises happened, accidents happened, but he didn't think any would this time.

Trasamund seemed to realize for the first time that he was not only serious but murderous, that he wasn't just fighting to save his honor or to keep from seeming a coward but because he expected to win. "You are making a mistake, Raumsdalian," the Bizogot jarl warned.

"I don't think so," Hamnet answered. "And there's been too much talk already." He trotted toward Trasamund, ready to dodge around Ulric Skakki's horse.

"Hold!" That cry didn't come from Ulric-it came from Liv. The shaman pointed one forefinger at Hamnet, the other at Trasamund. They might have been drawn bows. "You are both behaving like men who have lost their wits. Either you are mad, or some sorcery in this country has struck you daft. Whichever it is, you shall not fight."

"No one tells me what to do. No one, by God!" Trasamund growled. He set himself to meet Hamnet Thyssen's onslaught, or perhaps to charge himself.

"I will curse the man who strikes the first blow. I will doubly curse the man who draws the first blood. And I will triply curse the man who slays." Liv sounded as determined as the jarl. Bizogots didn't commonly do things by halves.

Eyvind Torfinn was murmuring a translation for Audun Gilli. The Raumsdalian wizard said, "My curse also on anyone who fights here. We need to stick together."

"I fear no curses," Trasamund said, but the wobble in his voice belied his words.

Hamnet Thyssen really did fear no curses. He was already living under a curse, and shed chosen to travel with him to the land beyond the Glacier. But Ulric Skakki guided his mount between Hamnet and the Bizogot again. "I think Liv is right. I think this land must be ensorceled," he said. "Otherwise his Ferocity would see he needlessly insulted a man who was only trying to do what he thought right-would see that and make amends for it."

He looked toward Trasamund. So did Hamnet Thyssen, who didn't care whether the Bizogot apologized or not. One way or another, Hamnet would go forward. All paths felt the same to him, and all had only darkness at the end.

The Bizogots had a word for that, where Raumsdalian didn't. The mammoth-herders called it fey. Maybe that word was in Trasamund s mind when he said, "This Hamnet dares to offer himself to my sword, to let it drink his blood. That being so, he cannot be such a spineless wretch after all. If I said something hasty, my tongue was running faster than it should have, and I am sorry for that."

"Your Grace?" Ulric said.

Part of Count Hamnet wanted to fight in spite of everything. But hearing Trasamund back down was startling, almost shocking. It shocked him enough to make him ground his sword. "That will do," he said with poor grace, and turned away.

"Good!" Eyvind Torfinn beamed. "Very good!"

Was it? Hamnet wasn't convinced. He wondered whether he'd stopped a fight with Trasamund or just put it off for another day. Trasamund muttered to himself as he slid his sword back into its sheath. Was he wondering the same thing?

They went on, but not so far, not so fast. It was as if the quarrel about whether to go on or turn back had wounded the urge to advance without quite killing it. The plodding pace left Hamnet Thyssen less happy than either a forthright advance or a retreat would have.

"We'll never find the Golden Shrine at this rate," he said to Eyvind Torfinn.

"I don't know if it will matter whether we go fast or slow, if we go north or south or east or west," Earl Eyvind said.

"What's that supposed to mean, your Splendor?" Hamnet asked. "It sounds . . . mystical." He didn't feel like trying to penetrate another man's mysticism. To him, mysticism was even more opaque than magic, which after all had practical uses.

Eyvind Torfinn didn't help when he went on, "The Golden Shrine will be found when it is ready to be found. Till then, we can search as hard as we please, but we will pass it by. When we are ready, when it is ready, we will know, and it will be found."

"Wait," Count Hamnet said, scratching his head. "Wait. The Glacier has blocked the way north for how many thousand years?"

"I don't know. For a good many," Eyvind said calmly. "What of it?"

"Well, how could the Golden Shrine know anything about us?" Hamnet Thyssen asked. "We hardly know anything about it. Till I heard the Gap had melted through, I wasn't sure I even believed in the Golden Shrine. I'm still not sure I do."

"Don't worry about whether you believe in the Golden Shrine," Eyvind Torfinn said. "The Golden Shrine believes in you, which is all that really matters."

Instead of answering him, Hamnet Thyssen jerked his horse's head to one side and rode away. If Earl Eyvind wanted to talk nonsense, he was welcome to, as far as Hamnet was concerned. If he wanted anyone else to take him seriously when he did .. . that was another story altogether. Or was it?

Count Hamnet found himself looking in every direction at once. If the Golden Shrine was somehow sneaking around out there keeping an eye on him, he wanted to catch it in the act. Rationally, that made no sense at all.

He needed a little while to realize as much, but eventually he did. Yet out here beyond the Glacier, things weren't necessarily rational. . . were they?

He saw nothing that looked like the Golden Shrine-not that he knew what the Golden Shrine looked like. The country was the same as it had been since the travelers came through the Gap-a steppe for the moment green and spattered with flowers, but with all the signs of winter to come. Here and there, snow lingered on slopes that didn't see much of the sun. Here and there, frost heaves made miniature hillocks-the only real relief in the landscape.

"You call those pingoes, don't you?" Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, pointing to one that reared a good hundred yards above the surface of the plain. A thin coating of dirt and clinging plants protected the ice core from melting in the sun.

"That is a pingo, yes," she answered. "Pingo is the name for such things in our language. That pingo is taller than most of the ones in Bizogot country."

"I wonder what makes them," Hamnet said.

"They are," the shaman responded. "How can they be made, except by God?"

"Sudertorp Lake is a lake because of meltwater from the Glacier," Hamnet said.

"Yes, of course." Liv nodded. "God made it so."

"Many, many years ago, Nidaros, the capital of the Empire, sat by the edge of Hevring Lake," Hamnet said. "Hevring Lake was a meltwater lake, too. Then it broke through the dam of earth and ice that held it, and it drained, and it made a great flood. You can still see the badlands it scoured out. One of these days, Sudertorp Lake will do the same thing."

"It maybe so, but what of it?" the Bizogot shaman said.

Stubbornly, Hamnet Thyssen answered, "The land does what it does for reasons men can see. I can understand why Hevring Lake emptied out. I can see that Sudertorp Lake will do the same thing when the Glacier moves farther north. I don't have to talk about God to do it. So what shaped a pingo?"

Liv looked at him. "Speak to me of the Glacier without speaking of God. Speak of why it moves forward and back without speaking of God. Speak of how the Gap opened without speaking of God. Speak of the Golden Shrine without speaking of God."

Count Hamnet opened his mouth, but he did not know what to say.

"You see?" Liv told him, not in triumph, but in the manner of someone who has pointed out the obvious.

"Well, maybe I do," he admitted. "Or maybe I simply don't know enough about the Glacier to speak of it without speaking or God."

"I know what your trouble is," she said. Hamnet didn't think he had trouble, or at least not trouble along those lines. No matter what he thought, the Bizogot woman went on, "You live too far south, too far from the Glacier. You do not really feel the Breath of God in the winter, when it howls down off the ice. If you did, you would not doubt."

Bizogots always spoke of the Breath of God. Count Hamnet had gone up among the mammoth-herders in winter, but never in a clan like Trasamund's that lived hard by the Glacier. He wasn't sorry. The cold he'd known was bad enough that he didn't want to find out about worse.

It was as cold outside as it was in my heart, he thought. Could anything be colder than that? He didn't believe it. He wouldn't believe it.

But he didn't want to quarrel with Liv, either, and so he said, "Well, you may be right."

"I am." She had no doubts. She reached out and tapped his arm. "Tell me this-does your shaman, that Audun Gilli, does he think terrible thoughts about God, too? If he does, how can he make magic work?"

"I do not know what Audun Gilli thinks about God," Hamnet answered. "I never worried about it."

"You never worried about God. You never worried about what he thinks of God." Liv sounded disbelieving. "You southern folk are strange indeed."

"If you want to know someone from the south who thinks about God, talk to Eyvind Torfinn," Hamnet said.

Liv rolled her eyes, which told him she already had. "He tells me more than I want to hear," she said. "He says now one thing, now another, till I don't know whether my wits are coming or going."

"You see? We cannot make you happy," Hamnet Thyssen said.

"That is not so," Liv said. "I am happy-why shouldn't I be? But I am confused about what you think. Of the two of us, you are the unhappy one."

She wasn't wrong. Hamnet tried to avoid admitting that, saying, "What I think about God has nothing to do with whether I am happy or not."

"Did I say it did?" the Bizogot shaman returned. "All I said was that you were not happy, and I was right about that. I am sorry I was right about it. People should be happy, don't you think?"

"That depends," Count Hamnet said. "Some people have more to be happy about than others."

"Do you want to be happy?" she asked, and then, with Bizogot bluntness, "Do you think I could make you happy, at least for a while?"

He couldn't very well mistake the meaning of that. He could, and did, shake his head before he even thought about it. "Thank you, but no," he said. "Women are what made me the way I am now. I do not believe the illness is also the cure."

Liv looked at him for a moment. "I am sure you were a fool before a woman ever made one of you," she said coolly, and swung her horse away from his. Even if she'd stayed next to him, he had no idea how he would have answered her.

When Liv made a point of avoiding him after that, it came as something of a relief. She gave him the uneasy feeling she knew things he didn't know, and not things her occult lore had taught her, either.

He wondered just how big a fool she thought he was. He didn't feel like a fool, not to himself. All he'd done was tell her the truth. If that was enough to anger her. . . then it was, that was all.

After Liv stayed away from him for a couple of days, Gudrid rode up alongside him. He tried to pretend she wasn't there. It didn't work. "It's your own fault," she said, sounding as certain as she always did.

"You don't know what you're talking about," Hamnet Thyssen answered stonily, but under the firm words lay a nasty fear that she really did.

Her rich, throaty laugh only made that fear worse. "Oh, yes, I do," she said. "I don't know what you see in that Bizogot wench, but plainly you see something. God couldn't tell you why-she smells like a goat."

"So does everybody up here-including you," Hamnet said. Just then, as if to mock him, the breeze brought him a faint whiff of attar of roses. If Gudrid smelled like a goat, she smelled like a perfumed goat.

He couldn't even make her angry. She just laughed some more. "As if you care," she said. "You chased her too hard, and you went and put her back up, and it serves you right."

Hamnet Thyssen gaped. That was so wrong, on so many different levels, that for a moment he had no idea how to respond to it. "You really have lost your mind," he said at last.

"I don't think so." Gudrid, in fact, sounded maddeningly sure. "I know you better than you know yourself."

"Oh, you do, do you?" Hamnet scowled at her. "Then why didn't you know what you'd do to me when you started playing the whore?"

Gudrid yawned. "I knew. I just didn't care."

He wanted to kill her. But if he did, she would die laughing at him, and he couldn't stand that. "You came all this way to torment me, didn't you?"

Gudrid buffed her nails against the wool of her tunic-an artful display. Everything she did seemed carefully calculated to drive him mad. "Well, I wasn't doing anything else when Eyvind decided to come," she answered.

Cursing, Hamnet Thyssen rode away from her. He really might have tried to murder her had she followed. She didn't, but her laughter pursued him.

As they did south of the Glacier, woolly mammoths roamed the plains here. The travelers gave them a wide berth. Hamnet would not have wanted to go mammoth hunting with the men and weapons they had along, if they were starving, if no other food presented itself-then, maybe. As things were, he found the great beasts better admired at a distance.

"Mammoths make me believe in God," Trasamund said one bright midnight. The Bizogot jarl was roasting a chunk of meat from one of the swarms of deer that shared the plain with the mammoths. "They truly do. How could mammoths make themselves? God had to do it."

"You could say the same thing about mosquitoes." Eyvind Torfinn punctuated the observation by slapping. "You could even say God liked mosquitoes better than mammoths, because he made so many more of them."

"No." Trasamund smiled, but he wasn't in a joking mood. "Any old demon could come up with your mosquito. A mammoth, now, a mammoth takes imagination and power. Isn't that so, Thyssen?"

Hamnet started. He sprawled by the fire for no better reason than that he didn't feel like sleeping. "I don't know what God does, or why," he answered. "If he tells me, I promise you'll be the first to hear."

Ulric Skakki thought that was funny, whether Trasamund did or not. "If God talks to anybody, he'll probably talk to you, your Grace," he said. "Me, I don't wonder so much where these mammoths came from. I wonder who herds them, and when the herders are going to show themselves."

"Haven't seen anyone yet," Trasamund said. "And the mammoths seem wild."

"How can you know that?" Eyvind Torfinn sounded curious, not doubtful. He usually sounded curious.

"One of the ways we tame them-as much as we do tame them-is to give them berries and other things they like," the jarl answered. "They're clever animals-they soon learn we have treats for them. They sometimes come up and try to get treats from us whether we have any or not."

"Back in Nidaros, my cat will do the same thing," Eyvind Torfinn said. "I don't think I would want a woolly mammoth hopping into my lap, though."

That did make Trasamund laugh, but he said, "These mammoths don't seem to think we have berries for them, so I would guess no one tames them."

Ulric Skakki made a dubious noise. Liv didn't look convinced, either; they were speaking the Bizogot language, so she had no trouble following along. Hamnet Thyssen also had his doubts.

"Could people tame mammoths some different way?" Ulric asked.

Trasamund looked down his nose at him. "People could do all kinds of things," the Bizogot replied. "They could waste their time with foolish questions, for instance."

"Thank you so much, your Ferocity," Ulric Skakki murmured.

"Any time." Trasamund was too blunt to recognize sarcasm, or maybe too sly to admit to recognizing it.

"We know there are people here," Liv said. "Either that or the owls in the land beyond the Glacier are sorcerers in their own right." She understood what sarcasm was about, even if not all Bizogots did.

Trasamund refused to let it bother him. "Maybe there are. We haven't seen any people here. That's all I can tell you."

"We have not seen the Golden Shrine, either," Eyvind Torfinn said. "Nevertheless, we are confident it's here somewhere."

"Well, people are probably here somewhere, too," Trasamund allowed with a show of generosity. "I don't think they're anywhere close by, though. You worriers are just trying to use this to get me to turn around and go back." He glowered at Hamnet Thyssen.

"Don't look at me that way," Count Hamnet said. "I didn't even take sides in this argument. You know more about mammoths than I do." You ought to. Your hide and your skull are thick enough.

Even though he didn't say that out loud, Trasamund sent him another suspicious stare. The Bizogot was clever enough to know when someone was thinking unkind thoughts about him. Why wasn't he clever enough to know they were thinking those thoughts because he was acting like a fool?

Instead of going back, they went on, though at the slow, halfhearted pace they'd been using for quite a while. One day seemed much like another-broad plains ahead, behind, and to all sides. People said the sea looked that way, too. Count Hamnet couldn't speak about that; he'd never seen the sea. He did know the low, flat landscape bored him almost to the point of dozing on horseback.

One herd of deer, one herd of mammoths, one flock of ptarmigan or snow buntings came to look much like another, too. The travelers didn't see many of the great striped cats or enormous bears. He wasn't sorry about that, not even a little.

Another reason days all seemed the same was that they blended into one another so smoothly. A stretch of bright twilight for a couple of hours bracketing midnight, and then the sun came up again. You could travel whenever you pleased, rest whenever you pleased, sleep whenever you pleased.

And then, almost before Hamnet consciously realized it, real night returned to the world. The sun didn't come up quite so far in the northeast, didn't set quite so far in the northwest. It stayed below the horizon longer, and dipped farther below. Hamnet got reacquainted with stars he hadn't seen for weeks.

Birds sensed the change before he did. The sky was a murmur, sometimes a thunder, of wings. Flocks from even farther north began coming down upon and past the travelers. They knew winter was on the way, though the sun still shone brightly and days were, if anything, warmer than they had been when summer first began.

When the deer began to grow restless, even Trasamund acknowledged that the time to think things through had come. "We should turn around and head for the Gap again," he said, as if no one had ever suggested that before. "We are not going to find the Golden Shrine. Time to put away things of legend and remember the real world."

Ulric Skakki shook his head. "What a foolish idea! I think we should keep on wandering west through this godforsaken country till we come to the edge of the world and fall off it."

Trasamund glared at him. "Is that a joke? I don't hear anyone laughing."

"Then maybe it's not a joke," Ulric answered. "Maybe turning around is a good idea. Maybe it should have seemed like a good idea to you before this afternoon."

"I know when to turn back," the Bizogot jarl rumbled. "I always said I would know when to turn back."

"People say all sorts of things," Ulric Skakki observed. "Sometimes they mean them. Sometimes they don't. You never can tell ahead of time."

Glaring still, Trasamund said, "When we set out again come morning, I will ride south and east. Others may do as they please. Anyone who wants to fall off the edge of the world is welcome to, as far as I am concerned. Nobody will miss a slick-talking Raumsdalian, not one bit. Some folk are too clever for their own good."

Some folk are too stupid for their own good. But Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. Trasamund, whatever else you could say about him, was nobody's fool. Some folk are too stubborn for their own good. Yes, that fit the Bizogot better.

Hamnet wondered whether Trasamund would have decided to turn around sooner if he himself and Ulric and Liv hadn't kept trying to talk him into it. He wouldn't have been surprised. Trasamund was just the man to dig in his heels and try to go in the direction opposite the one other people urged on him. Count Hamnet was that kind of man himself, so he recognized the symptoms-here, perhaps, more slowly than he might have.

That night was the darkest one Hamnet remembered since passing beyond the Glacier. Maybe his own gloom painted the sky blacker than it was. Maybe the moon's being down added to the way the heavens seemed uncommonly unreachable, the stars small and dim and lost.

And maybe he was feeling something that was really in the air. Audun Gilli and Liv both woke screaming around midnight. That set Gudrid screaming, too. She only wanted to know what was going on, which seemed reasonable enough, but she made an ungodly lot of noise trying to find out.

"Too late!" Audun said.

"Much too late!" Liv agreed. They stared at each other, their eyes enormous and seeming filled with blood in the dim light the embers shed.

Hamnet Thyssen needed a moment to remember that neither of them understood the other's speech. The knowledge sent ice stabbing through him that had nothing to do with the enormous walls of ice he'd passed between.

"Do you hear them, your Ferocity?" Ulric Skakki asked.

"I'd have to be deaf not to," Trasamund answered, which was true enough. "They both had nightmares. So what?" He was not going to be impressed. No matter what happened, he wouldn't be-he was too determined.

"No, by God," Count Hamnet said. "They didn't have nightmares. They had the same nightmare. Do you think that's good news?"

"I don't think I can do much about it any which way," Trasamund said, and that was also true. He yawned-not quite theatrically, but not quite naturally either. "About the only thing I can do that will help at all is go back to sleep, so I will . . . if the rest of you let me." He rolled himself in his blanket and turned his back on the fire-and on the rest of the travelers.

"What was it?" Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, who lay closer to him than Audun Gilli did.

Whatever it was, it shook her enough to make her forget their quarrel. "It was . . . bad," she answered. "It was coming for us. I don't know what it would have done. I didn't want to find out. Maybe I was lucky I screamed myself awake."

"Maybe you were," Hamnet said. "If it comes onus in the waking world, can we get away so easily?"

"The waking world and the other one are less separate than you seem to think," the shaman said. "They touch, they blend, they mingle. You can't always say for sure that something is part of the one but not of the other."

Being a man who liked things neat and orderly, with each one in its proper slot, Hamnet Thyssen would like to have argued with her. Here in this land beyond the Glacier, here with the chill of winter in his heart, he found he couldn't. He couldn't sleep again, either, despite the snores rising from Trasamund.

The Bizogot jarl headed back toward the Gap faster than he'd gone before. No matter what he said there in the darkness, he worried about what Audun Gilli and Liv sensed, too.

Everything seemed normal for the next couple of days. Trasamund swore when a herd of mammoths crossed the travelers' path. A moment later, he swore again, in awe and amazement. The great beasts carried men atop them.