Beyong the Gap

V

When count Hamnet woke, he needed a moment to remember where he was. He'd been on the road for a while now, and he'd got used to Ulric Skakki's resonant snores. He supposed Ulric was used to his, too, for the other man didn't complain about them any more.

The lingering smell of the butter lamp told him what he needed to know. That's right-the Bizogot encampment, he thought. In case he needed a further reminder, the shaggy hair on the mammoth hide draped over him would have done the job.

He yawned and stretched. A few early-morning sunbeams managed to sneak into the tent and turn what would have been darkness into gloom. One of those sunbeams hit Ulric Skakki in the eye. Ulric tried to twist away, but the damage was done. His eyes opened. He sat up and looked toward Hamnet Thyssen.

"You awake?" he asked.

"Of course not. I always talk in my sleep," Hamnet answered.

"It's too early in the morning to be funny," Ulric complained. Then he started to scratch and started to swear. "By God, it's a Bizogot camp, all right. Fleas, bedbugs-a copper gets you gold we're lousy, too." He scratched some more, harder now.

Hamnet Thyssen also started scratching. All at once, he itched everywhere. "It's not a surprise," he said, trying to sound resigned instead of fu shy;rious. "They don't bathe. They wander with animals all the time. There are all these hides around, and scraps of meat. . . No wonder they've got bugs."

"No, no wonder at all. I've been through this before. I just forgot how much I love it, that's all." By now, Ulric Skakki was probably scratching hard enough to draw blood. That wouldn't help him; it would only make him more alluring to the parasites he was trying to kill. He said, "I wonder if Audun can do anything about our little friends."

"Don't get your hopes up too high," Hamnet said. "The Bizogot shamans know something about wizardry, too, and they crawl with vermin just like the rest of the barbarians."

Ulric grunted. "Well, you know how to murder a man's hopes first thing in the morning, don't you?" He crushed something between his thumbnails. "Ha! Got one of the little bastards, anyway. … I just had a thought."

"Congratulations, I suppose," Hamnet Thyssen said, and then, "Oh. You expect me to ask you what it is."

"If that's not too much trouble." Ulric had no trouble being sarcastic, either.

"Not at all," Count Hamnet said politely. "So what is this thought of yours?"

"Maybe the Bizogots are so used to getting eaten alive that it's never occurred to their shamans that they don't have to. Maybe that's why they don't have any spells to hold the bugs at bay."

"Maybe," Hamnet said. "We can find out, anyhow." If he didn't sound optimistic, he wasn't.

A Bizogot dog barked at him when he came out of the tent, but not with the same ferocity the beasts had shown before. Now he'd eaten Bizogot food and slept under Bizogot blankets in a tent lit by Bizogot lamps. He was bound to start smelling like a Bizogot himself. The dog would approve of that. Hamnet didn't, but he couldn't do anything about it. And when everybody smelled the same way, nobody smelled especially bad. That was consolation, of a sort.

It was consolation for him, at least. He wondered how Gudrid would like it.

When she came out of her tent, she smelled of attar of roses. At least Hamnet Thyssen assumed the sweet fragrance came from her; it seemed unlikely to belong to Jesper Fletti or the other imperial guardsmen, and even more unlikely to belong to the Bizogot women. Some of them were pretty enough, in a fair, strong-featured way, but they cared no more for Raumsdalian notions of cleanliness than their menfolk did.

They did notice the scent that clung to Gudrid, though at first they didn't seem sure where it was coming from. "Like flowers, only more so," one of them said.

"Could we do that?" another asked. They liked the sweet smells, then, even if they didn't know much about making them.

Looking smug, Gudrid showed off the little glass bottle in which the perfume came. The Bizogot women made as much of the bottle as of the scent inside. That disconcerted Gudrid, which amused Count Hamnet. To the mammoth-hunters, glass was a trade good, rare and costly. It was one more thing they mostly did without. Life on the frozen plains was, and had to be, pared down to essentials. The Bizogots made do without pottery, too, except for what they got in trade from the south. They used baskets and hide vessels. Some of the baskets were so finely woven, they would hold water. Others, with clay smeared over them, could go into a fire without burning. That was as close as the Bizogots came to real pots.

Gudrid dabbed perfume on some of the women. Yes, the Bizogots liked it. Two or three of the big blondes tried by sleight of hand to make the bottle disappear. Gudrid didn't let that happen. She didn't mind stealing herself-anything from a new joke to a new husband-but she drew the line at others stealing from her. And she drew it successfully, and she didn't make the Bizogot women hate her when she did. In spite of himself, Ham-net Thyssen was impressed.

Leovigild was not. "More southern foolishness," he rumbled, that being the Bizogots' usual name for anything the Raumsdalians could do that they couldn't match. But his nostrils flared whenever he got a whiff of the perfume.

Trasamund also did his best not to show the perfume was anything out of the ordinary. "We've got to be moving," he said at shorter and shorter intervals. Of course, he'd gone down into the Empire. He'd met perfume before, on Gudrid and, no doubt, on others as well. He'd even learned to bathe . . . sometimes.

Leovigild and Sarus both bowed to him. "God watch over you, our guest," they said. "Stay safe, stay full, stay warm. May the Breath of God blow you here again."

"May it be so." Trasamund replied to one ritual phrase with another. "Safety and meat and warmth to you as well, and may the Breath of God bring you to my encampment, that I might guest you in answer for your kindness."

Count Hamnet would have been angry if a detachment of Raumsdalian soldiers took so long to get moving in the morning. With so many people who weren't Raumsdalian soldiers in the party, he supposed it could have been worse. He suspected days would come when it was worse, too.

The dogs chased them when they rode out of camp. Count Hamnet hadn't expected anything different. To a dog, going away meant running away, and running away meant you were prey. Audun Gilli made the Voice of Dog snarl at the Bizogot beasts. Maybe he made them smell that fearsome scent, too. They dashed back toward the mammoth-hide tents, whimpers in their throats and their tails clamped between their legs.

No sooner were they gone than they were forgotten. The plain stretched out ahead of the travelers-the plain, and then, farther north still, the Glacier.

One of the things Hamnet Thyssen forgot-one of the things any Raumsdalian forgot-was how wide, how deep, the frozen plains were. A man or woman who lived in the Empire knew variety wherever the eye fell. Here you saw forests; there, fields. Here you saw a castle; there a village; there, maybe, a town. In the east there were hills; in the west, mountains. Birds and animals accommodated themselves to the different terrain in which they dwelt. People did the same thing; a tinsmith's life in a town differed in almost every way from that of a farmer who grew grain to feed his family, while a rafter who floated great armies of logs down the Broad River toward the rich foreign cities by the Warm Sea knew yet another way to earn his bread and meat and beer.

But the frozen plains were … the frozen plains. Once the Musk Ox clan's encampment fell behind Count Hamnet, the wide land stretched out around him and his companions in one vast sweep, seemingly identical in every direction. When the sun shone bright, the travelers might have been insects crawling across an endless plate under an enormous dome of blue enamel.

And when the wind shifted and blew out of the north, when clouds swept down and covered the sky, Hamnet Thyssen's sense of being nothing, of going nowhere, if anything, intensified. When shadows disappeared, the very idea of direction seemed to go with them. He might have been moving in any direction at all. It didn't seem to matter.

He rode up alongside Trasamund and asked, "How do you remember you are men when you measure yourselves against. . . this?" He intended his wave to be as vast as the landscape it tried to take in. Instead, the motion only reminded him of his own puniness.

Would Trasamund understand him at all? Or did the Bizogot take his own land as much for granted as a Raumsdalian peasant took his farm? To Hamnet s relief, the jarl neither gaped nor sneered at him. "Out here in the middle of nowhere, it happens that men forget," Trasamund said.

"How do you mean?" Hamnet asked.

Trasamund said a word in his own language that Hamnet hadn't heard before. "I am not sure how to turn that into Raumsdalian," the Bizogot went on. "It means something like to enchant yourself. Sometimes you will find a fellow staring up at the sky, or sometimes out to where the sky and the land meet. He has forgotten everything around him. Sometimes hearing his friends will bring him back to himself. Sometimes it takes a shaman. Every once in awhile"-he spread his hands-"his soul flies away for good, and who knows where it goes? This is a summer complaint, you understand."

Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "Yes, I can see how it would be." In winter up here, everything closed down. A man who spent most of his time inside one of the mammoth-hide tents with his wife and his children and his dogs and all their fleas wouldn't worry about how wide the world was. "You say it happens here," Hamnet went on. "Does it not with men of the Three Tusk clan?"

"Oh, no." Trasamund laughed at the very idea. "Oh, no, Raumsdalian. These folk have the plain. And so do we; I will not say otherwise. We have the plain, too, yes. But we also have the Glacier."

"Ah." If Hamnet were walking instead of riding, he would have kicked at the ground in annoyance. He didn't like seeming foolish or missing things, but he knew he had.

And then, a few hours later, the travelers were no longer alone on the plain. Jesper Fietti pointed north. "Are those . . . mammoths?" the imperial guard captain asked in an unwontedly small voice.

"Not at all," Ulric Skakki said blandly. "Those are steppe fleas. And if you're not careful, they'll step on you."

Jesper grimaced. So did Hamnet Thyssen. Audun Gilli winced. Trasamund didn't get it for a moment. He had to think in his own language, and didn't understand Raumsdalian as readily. When he did, he roared laughter. "Steppe fleas, is it? If those are fleas, then the world is their dog."

"Maybe it is," Ulric said. "Only God knows why He made it the way He did. Maybe one of these days the world will scratch, and that will be the end of the fleas-and of us, too."

"Do not tell this to a priest, unless you want to burn for blasphemy," Hamnet Thyssen said.

"Do not tell this to a shaman, either. He may decide to sacrifice you to let out the madness in your spirit," Trasamund said. He snorted. "Steppe fleas!"

There were about a dozen mammoths-a herd of females with their young. Males wandered by themselves except during the late-summer mating season, when they would use their weight and their tusks to battle one another to see which of them fathered the new generation. The rest of the year, those tusks pushed snow off the grasses the mammoths ate and broke ice atop frozen streams so they could drink.

"Do not go too close," Trasamund warned. "Otherwise we shall have to step lively to flee the steppe fleas."

He waved a challenge to Ulric Skakki. Grinning, Ulric waved back, yielding him the prize. Trasamund bowed in the saddle.

No matter how bad his puns, the jarl's advice was good. Hamnet Thyssen might have wanted a closer look at the mammoths, but he understood they didn't want a closer look at him. The travelers got near enough to let him remind himself what marvelous beasts they were.

The females stood perhaps eight feet high at the shoulder. Males were bigger-he remembered that. They looked like great shaggy boulders shambling over the plain. The females were big enough for all ordinary use. The knobs of bone they had on top of their heads gave them high foreheads and a look of greater cleverness than their cousins, the forest mastodons. As far as Hamnet knew, that look was an illusion. It was a powerful illusion, though.

Unlike mastodons, mammoths also had a hump on their backs. They sloped down from it, so that their hind legs were relatively short. They had small ears and short trunks, which made it harder for them to freeze.

And they had long, black-brown hair that often led them to be called woolly mammoths. It wasn't wool; it wasn't anything like wool. The hairs were thick and coarse-they had to be half a dozen times as thick as a man's hair. But they were long-some of them as long as a man's arm-and they grew close together. Mammoths, like musk oxen, could get through almost any weather.

One of the females lifted her trunk and blew a warning blast. It sounded something like a trumpet, something like a gargle. Another female also trumpeted. The young mammoths ran behind their mothers. They were browner than the adults.

"How do you herd them?" Audun Gilli asked Trasamund.

"Carefully," the jarl answered, laughing.

The wizard looked disappointed. "I hoped for something more than that."

Trasamund almost told him where to head in. Then the Bizogot visibly thought better of showing his annoyance. A man who offended a sorcerer could have ail sorts of unpleasant things happen to him. "Well," Trasamund said, "a man on horseback is big enough even for a mammoth to notice. And a troop of men shouting and waving torches can usually get the beasts to do what they want. Usually."

"What do you do when they stampede?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

"Try to stay out of their way, by God. Try not to get trampled and squashed," the Bizogot answered. He was joking, but then again he wasn't. After a moment, he went on, "You wave those torches around for all they're worth, too. Mammoths are like most beasts-they don't like fire."

"I have a question, too," Jesper Fletti said. He waited for Trasamund to nod his way, then asked, "How do you get the females tame enough for milking?"

"You bribe them." The Bizogot jarl spoke Raumsdalian with some relish. "There is a kind of grass that grows on some parts of the plain-blueflower, we call it in my language. The mammoths are wild for it. One of the things we do while we travel is pull up blueflower wherever we find it. When we set a pile of the dried grass in front of a mammoth, she will stand and eat it, and the milkers can do what they need to do. Yes, we bribe the mammoths. They might as well be people."

"Are they as clever as people say?" Audun asked.

"I don't know. How clever do people down in the Empire say they are?" Trasamund asked. "They know how to do more things than musk oxen can, I'll say that. And they remember better than musk oxen do, too."

"They have trunks," Hamnet Thyssen said. "Those are almost like hands. They let mammoths do things other animals can't."

"Yes, that's so. That makes them almost like people, too," Trasamund said. "One of these days, maybe, they'll try bribing us instead of the other way around." He chortled at his own wit. Like most Bizogots Count Hamnet had known, he wasn't shy about finding himself wonderful in all kinds of ways.

"Do any beasts besides men trouble them?" Ulric Skakki asked.

"Every once in a while, lions or a short-faced bear will take a calf that wanders too far from its mother," Trasamund replied. "Doesn't happen often, but it happens. But what really troubles them in the warmer times are bugs. In spite of all that hair, the flies and mosquitoes drive them wild."

"I've been up here. I believe that," Hamnet said. When the frozen plain thawed out in springtime-or thawed out as much as it ever did, anyhow- endless little ponds dotted the landscape. Mosquitoes laid eggs in those ponds and then rose in buzzing, biting swarms. Sometimes the clouds of them were thick enough to dim the sun. It was as if the soul of a vampire were reincarnated in a million beings instead of just one.

A baby mammoth came out from behind its mother and took a few curious steps toward the travelers. She trumpeted at it. When it didn't heed her, she walked up and thumped its side with her trunk. The blow couldn't have hurt, but it sent a message. The baby stopped.

"You see?" Trasamund said. "When the little one gets out of line, it gets whacked. So too it is among the Bizogots. We have no spoiled, whining folk among us, not like some places a man could name."

That was nonsense, as Hamnet Thyssen knew. Bizogots pulled together better than Raumsdalians. That didn't mean there were no spoiled mammoth-herders, and it didn't mean they never whined. More often than not, Hamnet would have argued the point with Trasamund. Today, he held his peace, not because he felt uncommonly generous but because Trasamund was looking right at Gudrid when he grumbled about spoiled Raumsdalians. That would have made Hamnet forgive and overlook a lot.

The expression on Gudrid's face would have made him forgive and overlook even more. Yes, Trasamund went unchallenged.

Hevring Lake was dead and gone. The scars the draining of its basin left behind would lie heavy on the land west of Nidaros for centuries to come. Farther north, new meltwater lakes formed as the Glacier retreated. Sudertorp Lake wasn't very deep, but spread across a great stretch of the frozen plain. Waterfowl by the hundreds of thousands bred at the lake's marshy edges. Foxes and dire wolves and lynxes preyed on that abundance. Even lions and short-faced bears didn't disdain geese and great white swans.

Neither did the Bizogots. The Leaping Lynx clan was camped near the eastern edge of Sudertorp Lake. At this season of the year, they won enough food with their bows and with their snares that they didn't need to wander. They had stone huts that they came back to every spring. Their clothes differed from those of the Musk Ox and Three Tusk clans. To keep themselves warm, they wore jackets stuffed with down. In really cold weather, they wore trousers stuffed with down, too, with ingenious arrangements at the knee to make walking easier and others farther up to do the same for relieving themselves.

In spring, they were glad enough to guest travelers coming up by Sudertorp Lake. They had more than they could eat themselves. So did the other clans that dwelt along the lakeshore. It made them unique among the Bizogots.

The jarl of the Leaping Lynx clan was a fat man named Riccimir. Hamnet Thyssen didn't think he'd ever seen a fat nomad before. "Ear! Eat!" Riccimir said. "You are welcome. Oh, yes-you are welcome. Your goose is cooked!"

Eyvind Torfinn, Ulric Skakki, and Count Hamnet all looked up in alarm when they heard that. "Your Ferocity?" Eyvind said.

Riccimir laughed till the tears ran down his greasy face. "Ho, ho, ho! Yes, I know what that means in Raumsdalian. A trader taught me. It is a good joke, yes?"

"As long as it is a joke, your Ferocity, it is a good one," Ulric Skakki said.

"It is. By God, it is. But it is the best kind of a joke-it is a true joke. We have today a great plenty of cooked goose," Riccimir said.

Hamnet Thyssen ate roasted goose till his belly groaned. Bizogots used only knives for eating tools. By the time he finished, his face was as greasy as Riccimir's. So were those of the other Raumsdalians. However much Hamnet ate, the Bizogots around him outdid him without effort. They were better at going without than civilized men, too. Moderation was not in their nature. The way they lived didn't let them be moderate.

They didn't drink to enjoy themselves, either. They drank to get drunk. Downing smetyn, that took a lot of drinking. They met the challenge with ease.

Hamnet Thyssen's head was spinning when Riccimir pointed to Gudrid and said, "I will sleep with that one tonight. I like the way she smells. Trasamund, Eyvind Torfinn, pick women for yourselves. You are the leaders. It is your right. If your friends find willing women, that is all right, too."

He spoke in the Bizogot language. "What does he say?" Gudrid asked suspiciously-that finger aimed at her and the fat jarl's leer no doubt gave her reasons for suspicion.

When Eyvind Torfinn translated for her, she let out an irate squawk. "No!" she said. "And I don't like the way he smells, not even a little bit."

Eyvind turned to Riccimir. "Gudrid is my wife," he said, "and trading women back and forth is not our custom."

"And so?" Riccimir said. "You are in the halls of the Bizogots now." Any other jarl would have said the tents. "Here you follow our customs."

"Why bed an unwilling woman?" Ulric Skakki said smoothly. "Isn't it a waste of time, with so many willing? They aren't much fun after you pin them down, either."

"Says who?" the jarl returned. "Sometimes the way they squawk and thrash fans the fire. And this one looks like fun. Pick any woman for yourself in payment, Eyvind Torfinn. We have some lively ones. You are old, but they will know how to make you think you are young."

Once that was translated, Gudrid squawked louder than ever. Count Hamnet wondered why. She spread her favors over the landscape with fine impartiality. What was one more unbathed Bizogot? She was unbathed herself, even if she did have that bottle of attar of roses.

In Raumsdalian, Jesper Fletti said, "Tell the . . . jarl we have a strong custom against forcing a woman to give herself." He probably almost said something like Tell the barbarian. Hamnet Thyssen found it ironically amusing that Gudrids bodyguard was indeed guarding her body, although no doubt not in the way he’d had in mind when he set out from Nidaros.

Jesper proved wise to speak politely. Riccimir answered in fairly fluent Raumsdalian, saying, "If you talk about your customs in your land, I will listen. You have the right to do that. But you are not in your land."

"Imagine the custom of our land made you do something against your own customs," Ulric said. "Would you do it, just for the sake of fitting in?"

What kind of man was Riccimir? Ulric asked a good, sensible question. But did the Bizogot care about good, sensible questions, or did he simply want to open Gudrid's legs? If he didn't feel like listening, what could the travelers do? Not much-if it came to a fight, they were bound to lose.

The jarl scowled at Ulric Skakki. When he did, Hamnet Thyssen's hopes rose. Riccimir understood what Ulric was saying, anyway. "You are not good guests," he grumbled. "Guests should follow the ways of the hosts. Our women would not raise such a fuss over a small thing."

"A small thing?" Trasamund said. "Don't you have a big thing, Riccimir?"

"I do. By God, I do!" Riccimir answered, laughing. "We are the Leaping Lynxes, but I am a mammoth. Maybe I am too much for a woman of the south."

"Maybe you are," Ulric Skakki said, and the tension eased.

"Much help you were," Gudrid hissed at Hamnet Thyssen a little later.

"By God, why should I help you?" he asked in honest perplexity. "I don't want you here. I wish you'd go back to Nidaros. I don't feel anything for you any more."

He wished that were true. The hopeless mix of curdled love and fury that coursed through him whenever he thought of Gudrid chewed his stomach to sour rags and made him want either to hit something-preferably her- or stab himself. Gudrid knew it. She enjoyed it-she reveled in it. He did his best not to admit it.

Usually, his best was nowhere near good enough. Tonight, it served. "You would have let that-that savage do what he wanted to me!" Gudrid said shrilly.

"This was one of the chances you took when you left the Empire," Ham-net pointed out. "Anyone with an ounce of sense would know it. No doubt that lets you out."

She swung on him. She was very quick, but again he caught her wrist before she connected. He was much stronger than she was. It hardly ever did him any good. She said something that would have horrified a drill sergeant. It didn't faze Hamnet Thyssen.

When she tried to bite him, he shoved her away, hard. She sat down even harder, and called him a name that made the first one seem like love poetry by comparison. Again, he scarcely noticed. He rubbed his hand against his trouser leg, trying to wipe away even the memory of touching her.

"Never a dull moment, is there?" Ulric Skakki said, his voice dry.

"Why, what ever could you mean?" Hamnet Thyssen trying to sound arch and coy was as unnatural as a musk ox trying to play the trumpet. Ulric did his best not to laugh, but it was a losing battle.

Sulking, Riccimir went off with a Bizogot woman. She was younger and better built than Gudrid, and at least as pretty, even if she didn't wear perfume. The jarl stayed grumpy all the same- No doubt he would have been glad enough to lie down with her if he hadn't set eyes on Gudrid. Since he had, the woman from his own clan wasn't what he wanted any more. That made her seem like secondhand goods to him.

"Foolishness," Ulric Skakki said. "Everything that goes on between men and women is full of foolishness."

"True enough," Hamnet said. "But so what? For better or worse, we're stuck with each other." He knew too much about worse and not enough of better.

"Well, not necessarily." Ulric sent him a sly, sidelong glance. "Although I must say you're not my type." He made himself mince far better than Count Hamnet made himself sound naive.

"Those things happen down in the Empire. Not up here, not very often," Hamnet said. "When the Bizogots catch men bedding men, they make them into eunuchs and then they burn them. Not a lot of give to the mammoth-herders. Their ways are their ways. You step outside them at your peril."

"Charming people." Ulric was also a dab hand at irony.

"Aren't they?" There, at least, Hamnet Thyssen could match him.

The Leaping Lynx Bizogots stuffed the travelers with more roast fowl and with boiled duck and goose eggs the next morning. Riccimir seemed in a better mood than he had the night before. Maybe the buxom blonde from his own clan pleased him more than he'd thought she would. Whatever the reason, he didn't try to hinder the travelers when they mounted their horses to ride away from what was as close to a settled village as the northern nomads came.

He couldn't resist going after the last word, though. He walked up to Gudrid and said, "My pretty, you will remember last night forever."

"Why?" she said. "Nothing happened between us." By the look in her eye, she was glad nothing happened, too.

Riccimir ignored that look. It wasn't easy; Hamnet Thyssen envied his singlemindedness. "That is why you will remember it," he said. "You will regret that you did not come to know the mighty love of Riccimir." He struck a pose.

What Gudrid's horse did a moment later probably matched her opinion of Riccimir's mighty love. His clansmates could dry the results and use them for warmth and cooking. If she had spoken, her words probably would have given them plenty of warmth, too. As things were, her expression was eloquent enough. The jarl, convinced to the marrow that he was wonderful, never noticed.

"Are we ready?" Eyvind Torfinn said. "Perhaps we should depart, then."

"God keep you safe on your journey," Riccimir said. "May he bring you back to your homes with wealth or wisdom or whatever you seek. And may he bring you to my clan on your way south. Good will be the guesting on your return-and may the sweet one's heart be softened by then."

Count Hamnet didn't see how Eyvind Torfinn could answer that without landing in trouble with Riccimir or with Gudrid or with both of them at once. Earl Eyvind showed uncommon wisdom-he didn't try. He flicked his horse's reins and used the pressure of his knees to urge the beast forward. The rest of the Raumsdalians and Trasamund followed.

"An interesting time," Audun Gilli said, riding up alongside Hamnet and Ulric Skakki.

"That's one way to put it," Hamnet said. "Some interesting times I could live without."

"It wasn't so bad," Audun said.

"Demons take me if it wasn't!" Hamnet exclaimed.

Ulric laughed. "He didn't mind it, Thyssen. Didn't you see him go off with that Bizogot wench?" His hands shaped an hourglass in the air.

"No, I didn't." Hamnet couldn't remember when he'd lost track of the wizard. Audun wasn't what anyone would call memorable, so he had trouble. "When was this?"

"You were exchanging compliments with your lady love." Ulric Skakki stopped. Hamnet Thyssen had a hand on his swordhilt. He probably also had murder in his eye. He didn't mind being chaffed about many things. The list was short, yes, but Gudrid headed it. Ulric hastened to backtrack. "My apologies, your Grace. When you were quarreling with your former wife, I should have said."

"Yes. You should have." Hamnet made his hand come off the sword. He made himself look away from Ulric Skakki and toward Audun Gilli. "So. You lay down with a Bizogot woman, did you? How was it? Did you have to hold your nose?"

"I'm not so clean myself these days. After a bit, you stop noticing that." Audun grinned. It made him look surprisingly young. "As for the rest, well, the parts work the same way here as they do down in the Empire."

"There's a surprise." Ulric Skakki grinned, too.

Count Hamnet only grunted. Losing Gudrid had soured him on women. He still bedded them now and again-sometimes his body drove him to do what he wanted to despise. But he couldn't take them lightly, the way most men did.

Trasamund led them away from Sudertorp Lake. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan was not in a good humor. Since Hamnet Thyssen wasn't, either, he soon found himself riding next to Trasamund. The big blond jarl scowled at him. When he scowled back, Trasamund seemed satisfied.

After a while, Trasamund said, "That Leaping Lynx clan .. ." He didn't seem to know how to go on.

"What about them?" Hamnet asked.

"They hardly seem like Bizogots at all!" It burst from Trasamund.

They seemed very much like Bizogots to Hamnet. But he was looking at them from the outside, not from the inside the way the jarl was. Slowly, he said, "The waterfowl give them so much to eat at this season, they don't have to wander. Things are different when you can stay in one place for a long time."

"I suppose so." Trasamund went right on scowling. "It's wrong, though. It's unnatural. They . .. might as well be Raumsdalians." By the way he said it, he couldn't imagine a stronger condemnation.

"I will tell you, your Ferocity, that to a Raumsdalian they don't seem much like Raumsdalians at all," Count Hamnet said.

"They live in stone houses. They have fat people. They are like Raumsdalians." No, Trasamund had no more idea of what being a Raumsdalian meant-probably less-than Hamnet did about being a Bizogot. He also didn't know that he really didn't know what being a Raumsdalian meant.

Arguing with him would only make him angry. Hamnet Thyssen didn't try. Instead, looking out across the frozen plain, he pointed and asked, "What's that?"

All at once, Trasamund was back in his element. He forgot about the Bizogots of the Leaping Lynx clan. "That's a God-cursed dire wolf, is what that is." His voice rose to a shout. "Close up! Close up! We've got wolves! Archers, string your bows! We've got wolves!"

To Hamnet Thyssen, it was only a moving squiggle at the edge of visibility. But he wasn't at home here, any more than Trasamund knew all the ins and outs of life in Nidaros, or even in the distant keep where Hamnet would rather have spent his time. Accepting that Trasamund knew and he didn't, Hamnet braced himself for an onslaught.

He didn't have to wait long. Just as the Bizogot recognized a distant moving squiggle as danger, so the dire wolf saw distant moving squiggles as meat. It couldn't take their scent; the wind was with them. But before long, a formidable pack of dire wolves trotted purposefully toward the travelers.

Dire wolves were half again as big as their cousins that skulked through the eastern forests. Their fur was thicker, and of a paler gray so as not to stand out against the snow. Some people said timber wolves were smarter than their larger cousins. Hamnet Thyssen didn't know about that one way or the other. People also said dire wolves ate more carrion than timber wolves did. Count Hamnet thought that was true. But it didn't mean dire wolves turned up their noses at fresh meat. If Count Hamnet hadn't known that, he would have found out now.

The pack leader stood there right at the edge of bowshot, eyeing the travelers. The dire wolf grinned a doggy grin at them, long pink tongue lolling out of his mouth. Even at that distance, though, Hamnet could make out the animal's teeth, long and sharp and yellow. Dire wolves needed to be wary around men. Any animal bigger than a bedbug needed to be wary around men. But men needed to be wary around dire wolves, too.

After a moment's appraisal, the dire wolf lifted its head and let out a howl. If it were speaking a human tongue, Hamnet would have thought that howl meant, All right. Let's try it and see what happens.

And it seemed to mean just that. The dire wolves trotted forward again. They might have been trying to cut a weak musk ox or a baby mammoth out of the herd. Almost of their own accord, Hamnet's eyes went to Gudrid. That was a tempting thought, but he didn't suppose she would appreciate it.

"Shout at them," Trasamund called. "Sometimes you can scare them off."

Hamnet yelled at the top of his lungs. So did the rest of the travelers. Some of the dire wolves skidded to a stop. A few even went back onto their haunches. But the rest kept coming. Seeing their comrades advance, the frightened wolves got up and went on, too. It was as if they didn't want their friends to think them cowards.

In some ways, dire wolves were much too much like men.