Beyong the Gap

XVI

Setting out across the broad plains of the Bizogot country with winter's frozen fingers gripping tighter every day should have chilled Hamnet's heart. It should have, but it didn't.

Snow and sleet and likely hunger and Bizogots who couldn't stand Raumsdalians or the Three Tusk clan or both at once? Hamnet Thyssen didn't worry. Not worrying felt strange, unnatural, almost perverse. All the same, he didn't. He was with someone who mattered to him more than all the possible worries put together.

"I hardly know you with that smile on your face," Ulric Skakki said.

"Ah, well," said Hamnet, who hardly knew himself. "With this smile on my face, I hardly know you, either."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ulric asked.

"Just what it said, and not a bit more," Count Hamnet answered. Ulric Skakki rode off shaking his head, which suited Hamnet fine.

Gudrid left him alone at the start of the journey south from the Three Tusk clan's encampment, which suited him fine. He waited for her to try to find some way to make him less happy, as she'd done whenever she caught him smiling after she left him.

He’d always stolidly pretended not to care about her, never with much success. Now, though, he truly didn't, an armor he'd never enjoyed before. He was tempted to flaunt his happiness with Liv to get Gudrid's goat.

He wouldn't have minded revenge; Gudrid had put him through too much to leave him immune to its charms. But what he wanted even more was freedom from the hooks she'd set in his soul. She'd been harder to break away from than poppy juice, mostly because he'd always wanted her back more than he'd wanted her to go away and leave him alone.

She couldn't go away now, not till they got back to Nidaros. She could keep on leaving him alone, though. He wanted no more from her-and no less.

But not long after he found what he wanted, Gudrid suddenly decided she couldn't stay away from him. It would have been funny … if he didn't have so much trouble keeping his hand off the hilt of his sword.

She guided her horse alongside his as they rode south. When he made as if to steer his mount away from her, she stayed with him. "So slumming makes you happy, does it?" she asked.

He looked at her-looked through her, really. "No, I didn't end up happy with you," he replied.

Gudrid laughed. "If you were half as funny as you think you are, you'd be twice as funny as you really are."

"If you don't care for my conversation, you're welcome to find someone else to annoy," Hamnet Thyssen said.

"Here I try to give you good advice, and this is the thanks I get." Gudrid sounded convincingly wounded-but not convincingly enough.

"The only good advice you'd give me is which poison to take and how to jump off a cliff," Count Hamnet said.

"Oh, I expect you can figure out that sort of thing for yourself." Gudrid pulled off a mitten for a moment so she could flutter her fingers at him. "You're clever about matters like that. It's people you have trouble with."

"No doubt," Hamnet Thyssen said. "Look how long I put up with you."

"Just so," Gudrid said placidly as she returned the mitten to her hand. "What makes you think you'll do any better this time around?"

"Well, I could scarcely do worse, could I?" Hamnet said.

"You never know, not till it happens."

"I'll take my chances," Hamnet said. "Why don't you go back to telling Eyvind Torfinn what to do? He's your sport these days, isn't he?"

"You're more amusing, though. It's harder to make him angry."

"I'm sure you could manage if you set your mind-or something-to it."

"Meow," she said. "Jealousy doesn't become you."

"I'm not jealous of Eyvind Torfinn." Hamnet listened to himself. It was true. He wasn't jealous. It so surprised him, he said it again: "I'm not jealous of Eyvind Torfinn, by God. If he wants you so much, he's welcome to you."

Gudrid stared. She must have heard the conviction in his voice, and it must have surprised her as much as it surprised him. She yanked hard at her horse's reins. The luckless beast snorted as she jerked its head away and rode off.

Hamnet Thyssen went on alone for some little while after that. For the time being, he was free from the longing for what once had been. He wasn't sure she entirely believed that, even now, but she would surely begin to suspect it might be so. And when she decided it was .. . What would she do then?

Whenever the travelers met other Bizogot clans, Trasamund would go on-and on, and on-about their wanderings beyond the Glacier. He'd come with them precisely so he could speak with each clan's jarl as an equal. He talked about the Rulers, and about the way they rode mammoths. That always made the Bizogots, chieftains and clansmen, sit up and take notice. Everyone who heard about it seemed wild to try it. "Why didn't we think of that?" was a refrain Count Hamnet heard over and over again.

Then Trasamund would talk about how the Bizogot clans needed to band together against the invasion that was bound to come before long. Every other jarl who heard that would smile and nod politely, and then would go on with whatever he'd been doing before Trasamund raised the point. Riding mammoths interested the Bizogots. Taking steps against what hadn't happened yet… didn't.

"What's wrong with them?" Trasamund growled when yet another jarl refused to get excited about the threat.

"I can tell you, your Ferocity," Ulric Skakki said. "And I can tell you something else-you won't like it."

"Try me." Trasamund turned it into a challenge.

"Suppose a jarl from near the border with Raumsdalia came up to the Three Tusks country and told you the Empire was going to invade his grazing lands when spring came. What would you do about it?"

The jarl frowned. "Me? Probably not much, not by my lonesome. It's a long way off, and . .." His voice trailed away. He sent Ulric Skakki a perfectly poisonous glare. "You have a nasty way of making your point."

"Ah, God bless you, your Ferocity. You say the sweetest things," Ulric crooned. Trasamund muttered into his beard. Not for the first time, Ulric's gratitude for things that weren't meant as compliments succeeded in confusing the person who'd aimed the unpleasantry his way.

"He's right, I'm afraid," Hamnet Thyssen said gloomily. "When the Rulers bump up against these clans, they'll worry about them. Till then, folk from the far side of the Glacier don't seem real to them."

"But they ought to," Trasamund said. "You Raumsdalians can see the problem even though it isn't right on top of you."

"Well, we've gone beyond the Glacier, too," Hamnet said. "We hope the Emperor will see it. But you need to remember-" He broke off, not wanting to offend the jarl.

"Remember what?" Trasamund asked. "What, by God?"

Hamnet Thyssen knew he needed to pick his words with care. What he meant was that the Bizogots were nothing but barbarians, and so of course they didn't worry much about what would happen in a few months. No matter what he meant, he didn't want to say that. For one thing, it would anger Trasamund. For another, he had no guarantee that the future meant anything more to Sigvat II than it did to a fleabitten mammoth-herder.

He scratched. Plenty of fleas had bitten him, too. Flow he looked forward to a long soak and, best of all, to clean clothes!

He still had to answer Trasamund, who waited impatiently. "You need to remember, the Rulers will seem less real to the Emperor than even to your own folk. Nidaros is much farther away from the Gap than your camps are."

"And so the Raumsdalians will try to use the Bizogots as a shield, the way they bribe the southern clans now to help hold out the fiercer men from the north." Trasamund thumped his own chest with a big, hard fist, reminding Count Hamnet he was one of those fiercer men himself.

"How can you imagine we would do such a thing?" Hamnet said, as innocently as he could.

The Bizogot jarl laughed in his face. "By God, your Grace, I would if I lived in Sigvats palace. We are mammoth-herders-you think you can get away with being Bizogot-herders. But there is a difference. The mammoths don't know what we're doing to them. Bizogots aren't blind men, or deaf men, either. Sooner or later, you Raumsdalians will be sorry."

He was likely to be right. No, he was bound to be right. Once upon a time, back in the days when history and legend blurred together, the Raumsdalians had roamed the frozen steppe (in those days, it ran much farther south than it did now). Hamnet Thyssen's distant ancestors had torn the meat from the bones of the empire that preceded Raumsdalia. One of these days, maybe the Bizogots would storm Nidaros and set up their own kingdom on its ruins.

Or maybe the Rulers would swarm down through the Gap and beat the Bizogots to the punch. Hamnet Thyssen didn't know that the barbarians from the far side of the Glacier could do any such thing. He didn't know they could, no. But he didn't know they couldn't, either, and that worried him.

"I can see that the Rulers are a danger," Trasamund said. "If Sigvat II can't, maybe he doesn't deserve to be Emperor anymore. Maybe something will happen so he isn't. One thing God does-he makes sure fools pay for their folly."

"Well, you're right about that." Hamnet wasn't thinking about Sigvat and the Rulers.

"Liv . . . likes you." Now Trasamund spoke hesitantly. Even a jarl took care talking about a shaman.

"Yes," Hamnet said. "I like her, too."

"Be careful with her. I don't want her hurt. She isn't just a good shaman. She's a good Bizogot, and a good woman, too."

"If she weren't a good woman, I wouldn't like her the way I do." Hamnet Thyssen hoped that was true.

"If you were a Bizogot.. ." Trasamund's voice trailed off. A moment later, he tried again, saying, "If you were a Three Tusk Bizogot. . ."

"I'm not," Hamnet said. "I'm never going to be. You know that as well as I do, your Ferocity. I don't expect Liv to turn into a Raumsdalian. That won't happen either. I know it."

"I should say not. But she would lose something if she turned into one of your folk. You would gain something if you turned into a Bizogot."

"My folk would say it the other way around, you know," Count Hamnet said. Trasamund laughed uproariously. He thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Hamnet Thyssen had known he would. If barbarians recognized that they were barbarians, they wouldn't be so barbarous any more.

He, of course, was right and full of reason when he declined to think about becoming a Bizogot. That was as plain as the nose on his face. At the moment, the nose on his face had a muffler over it, to keep the blizzards from freezing it off him. He rode on toward the south, but winter rode ahead of him.

In spring, Sudertorp Lake had been a marvelous place, full of ducks and geese and swans and waders and shore scuttlers-every manner of bird that lived in or near the water seemed to want to breed in the bushes and marshes and reeds that lined the immense meltwater lake. In winter, though .. . Hamnet Thyssen had never seen Sudertorp Lake in the wintertime before. He was sorry to see it now.

Under a gray sky, the water and ice of Sudertorp Lake in winter were the color of phlegm. The north wind-the Breath of God-whipped the water to waves and whitecaps that tossed sullenly. . . where they could. Toward the shore, the surface of the lake was frozen. Count Hamnet supposed the ice would advance across the water till the turning of the sun made it retreat once more.

Right now, that turning looked a long way off, a long, long way indeed.

The bushes and reeds and rushes were yellow and brown and dead. The turning of the sun would also bring them back to life, but that seemed likelier to be legend than truth. Hamnet would have been sure of it if he hadn't come through here in the springtime.

In spring, the Leaping Lynx clan camped by the eastern shore of Sudertorp Lake. The Bizogots of that clan lived off the fat of the land then. So many birds bred and foraged here, a clan's worth of hunting mattered no more to them than a mosquito bite to a man.

In winter, though, the Leaping Lynxes' lakeside houses stood empty. The Bizogots had to go forth and follow their herds and flocks like any other clan. Trasamund surveyed the empty stone buildings with a certain somber satisfaction. "Serves them right-you know what I mean?" he said. "In the springtime, Riccimir gets above himself. He might as well be a Raumsdalian."

"A Raumsdalian?" Ulric Skakki said.

"That's right." Trasamund nodded. "He doesn't have to move around so much, so he thinks he's better than the people who do."

"If I thought not moving around made me better, would I have gone beyond the Glacier?" Ulric asked. "Twice?" he asked to himself.

"But you are a man of sense," the Bizogot jarl said. "Riccimir is an overstuffed mammoth turd."

"What does he call you?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

"Who cares?" Trasamund answered, which might have meant he truly didn't care or might have meant he couldn't see the boot might fit on the other foot as well. Hamnet would have bet on the latter; Trasamund was better at seeing other peoples weaknesses than at noting his own.

The travelers came upon the Leaping Lynxes' winter encampment, their wandering encampment, a day after the pause by Sudertorp Lake. It seemed like any other Bizogot camp-but, then again, it didn't. The mammoth-herders were doing the same sort of things as all their fellows did, and doing them about as well as the other Bizogots did. But every other clan

Hamnet Thyssen had seen took those labors altogether for granted. The Leaping Lynxes seemed faintly embarrassed at living in tents and following the herds. They knew another way of life. They not only knew it, they preferred it.

When Riccimir gave his guests roasted musk-ox meat, he said, "It's not fat goose, my friends, but it's what we have."

"Nothing wrong with musk ox," Trasamund said, his lips shiny with grease.

"Nothing wrong with it, no," the jarl of the Leaping Lynxes agreed. "But it's not as fine a flesh as waterfowl. I'm not just speaking of geese, mind you, though they're common and they're easy to take. But when you eat snipe and woodcock through the fat season of the year, you aren't so happy with the leaner days." He shrugged broad shoulders. "It can't be helped. I know it can't be helped-it's the way God made things work for us. But I wish it were different, and I don't know a Leaping Lynx who doesn't."

"You like living soft," Trasamund said, without rancor. Hamnet Thyssen wouldn't have put it that way. He would have said the Leaping Lynxes took advantage of their springtime abundance. Maybe those amounted to the same thing. He wasn't sure, and he would have bet Trasamund wasn't, either.

As for Riccimir, he replied, "What if we do? You'd live the way we do, too, if only you could. Will you call me a liar?"

"No," Trasamund said. If he'd said yes, it would have meant a fight to the death. But he went on, "Be careful how soft you get, or some other clan will drive you away from Sudertorp Lake. Then you'll go back to wandering all through the year, if you're lucky enough to hold together as a clan."

"We've been attacked before," Riccimir said. "We still hold our lands. Anyone who ever tried to take them came to grief. What does that tell you?"

"That you've done what you needed to do-so far," Trasamund said. "But you have to win every single time. If you lose even once, you're ruined."

"And for which Bizogot clan isn't that so?" Riccimir said. Trasamund had no answer for him.

Neither did Hamnet Thyssen. What Riccimir said spoke of the differences between the Bizogots and the Raumsdalian Empire. The riches of Sudertorp Lake in springtime let the Leaping Lynx clan approach civilization, but it was still as vulnerable as any other clan. One defeat meant disaster. The Empire could draw upon more resources. Losing one fight wouldn't-or wouldn't have to-mean collapse for it.

What about the Rulers? Hamnet wondered. How much in the way of failure can they stand? Before too long, he worried that he would find out.

Down toward the tree line, where the frozen plains ended and forests began, the Bizogots yielded to the Raumsdalian Empire. Hamnet Thyssen knew how tenuous Raumsdalian rule over the northern part of the Empire was. In the north, everything was tenuous; there wasn't enough food and weren't enough people to make life as relatively safe and secure and rich as it was down by Nidaros.

Trasamund kept looking back over his shoulder and shaking his head. Even when the weather was clear, the Glacier had fallen below the horizon. "Doesn't seem natural," he said. "The north looks naked."

The cold wind that blew down from the Glacier left Hamnet Thyssen in no doubt that it hadn't gone away. He said as much, adding, "It won't, either, not for many, many generations."

"Even to think that it might one day is as strange as thinking God might get old and die," Trasamund said.

Eyvind Torfinn rode close enough to hear him. "Some men in the Empire have been known to wonder about that, your Ferocity," he said. "They argue that everything else grows old and dies, that even the Glacier is falling back and may leave us one day, so why shouid the same not hold true for God?"

"Really?" Trasamund said. "What do you do with men who ask things like that?"

"Yes, what?" Hamnet Thyssen echoed. "I don't remember hearing about men with those ideas, and I'd think it would kick up a scandal.'

"It did," Earl Eyvind answered. "This was about a hundred and twenty-years ago, you understand, in the reign of Palnir I. If I remember rightly, one of the philosophers got fifty lashes, the other two got twenty-five apiece, and they were all exiled to a town in the far southwest, where they could watch ground sloths and glyptodonts and hope the Manches didn't nip in and cut their throats."

"I'm surprised they got away with their lives," Hamnet said.

"Palnir had a name for being merciful," Eyvind Torfinn said. "He told them he wouldn't kill them himself-he would leave that to God."

"You Raumsdalians are softer than the Leaping Lynxes," Trasamund said. "But what's a glyptodont?"

"Do you know what an armadillo is?" Hamnet Thyssen said. The Bizo-got shook his head. Hamnet wasn't surprised; armadillos and their bigger cousins liked warm weather and didn't come up anywhere near Nidaros. He went on, "Imagine a pot with a long handle. Turn it upside down. Make the handle its tail-sort of a bony club. Give it a head and four short legs, also armored in bone. Make it ten feet long from nose to tailtip, and three or four feet high. It's not very bright, and it only eats plants, but a sabertooth will break his fangs before he can puncture it."

"You're having me on," Trasamund said. "That's the craziest beast I ever heard of."

"No, he's telling the truth," Eyvind Torfinn said.

"I don't believe it," Trasamund said stubbornly. "You figure you've got a fool of a Bizogot here, and you think you can tell him funny stories and have a laugh afterward."

"Go ask Ulric if you don't believe me," Hamnet said.

The Bizogot jarl shook his head again. "Not me. You probably all cooked it up amongst yourselves beforehand." He rode away, his head still going back and forth. Not much later, though, Hamnet watched him riding along next to Jesper Fletti. Trasamund might have thought Hamnet wouldn't conspire with Gudrid s chief bodyguard-and if he did, he was right. By Jesper's gestures, he knew what a glyptodont was. Trasamund threw his hands in the air.

Hamnet Thyssen began looking for border stations. They were thinly scattered, and wouldn't have been easy to spot if not for the smoke that rose from them all through the winter. A lot of Bizogots skirted the stations when they came down into the Empire. Some succeeded in smuggling their goods or themselves into Raumsdalia. Others ran into customs inspectors in the small northern towns and paid duty there.

A smoke plume led the travelers to a border post. The guards wore furs that made them look like Bizogots. One of them stared at the newcomers and said, "If you're not the raggediest-looking bunch of buggers I've ever seen, bugger me with a pine cone if I can think of who is."

"If you're not a disgrace to the uniform you aren't wearing, God's more merciful than I thought," Hamnet Thyssen retorted.

Hearing unaccented, educated, angry Raumsdalian burst from the mouth of the shaggy ragamuffin in front of him gave the border guard pause. "Uh, who are you, anyway?" he asked, his own voice suddenly much less scornful.

"You might have wondered sooner. I am Count Hamnet Thyssen. With my companions here, I've traveled beyond the Glacier, and I have come back to tell the tale-but to the Emperor, not to the likes of you."

The guards jaw dropped. "You're the people who went beyond the Glacier? You really did?" He turned to his comrades. "God let them come back, Vigfus!"

"Somebody did, anyhow," Vigfus allowed. "Or so they say. Do you suppose we ought to believe ‘em?"

"If you do not believe Trasamund, jarl of the Three Tusk clan of Bizogots, God may not punish you," Trasamund said. "God may not, but I will." He made as if to draw his great two-handed sword. "Do you call me a liar? Who will mourn for you when you die? Anyone? Or will your flesh feed foxes and teratorns?"

"Keep your hair on, pal," said Vigfus, who’d surely heard Bizogot bluster before. "If you really made it through the Gap, more power to you."

"We were supposed to keep an eye out for you people, but I never figured you’d come through here," the other guard said. "What are the odds?"

"Whatever the odds may be, here we are," Eyvind Torfinn said. "We have done much, we have traveled far, and we have seen strange things. His Majesty Sigvat II needs to hear of them as soon as we get to Nidaros."

Vigfus and his friend looked at each other. At the same time, they asked, "Did you find the Golden Shrine?"

"Well, no," Eyvind Torfinn answered. "But that doesn't mean it isn't there. We'll go back one day, and maybe we'll find it then."

"We did find white bears, and deer that men ride like horses, and beasts like lions, only without manes and with stripes," Hamnet said.

"And we found men who ride mammoths," Trasamund said. "By God, I will ride a mammoth before too much time goes by. I will." He folded his right hand into a fist and brought it down hard on his thigh.

"Men who ride mammoths?" said the guard whose name they didn't know. "Are they very brave or very stupid?"

"Yes," answered Ulric Skakki, who'd kept quiet till then.

"What's that supposed to mean?" the guard asked.

"What it says," Ulric told him. "I'm like Count Hamnet here-I usually say what I mean. People have a better chance of understanding me when I do. The Rulers are very brave. And, by God, they're very stupid, too."

"The Rulers? What kind of name is that?" Vigfus said.

Hamnet Thyssen, Ulric Skakki, Eyvind Torfinn, and Trasamund all shrugged together. "It's what they call themselves, or how they say it when they use the Bizogot language," Hamnet said. "I don't know what you want us to do about it."

Gudrid rode up to the guards. "Why are you wasting our time here?" she demanded. "Why don't you let us go back to civilization?"

Vigfus looked at her. It wasn't the way a man looked at a pretty woman. With half a year's grime on them, none of the travelers was pretty any more. "Who the demon does she think she is?" the border guard asked no one in particular.

"She thinks she's my wife," Eyvind Torfinn said. "She's right, too." Did Gudrid think that? Hamnet had his doubts. When she felt like it, maybe she did.

"Huh!" Vigfus said. "She's a mouthy one, she is. You should belt her more often, teach her to behave."

Gudrid's squeal was pure rage. "You are speaking to, and of, an earl's wife!" she said shrilly. "Show the proper respect!"

"Oh, shut up," Vigfus said. Gudrid's jaw dropped; that wasn't what she'd had in mind. She was used to getting her way with men with a wave of the hand and a wink of the eye. Not here, not now. Vigfus went on, "I'm a guard at the most godforsaken post in the Empire. What can you do to me that's worse? Send me to prison somewhere farther south? I'll get down on my knees and kiss your hand, or whatever else you want kissed, if you do. But the way things are, I'll talk however I cursed well please."

She stared at him. Some men in the Empire were strong enough to take no notice when she said something. She'd never imagined a man who could be weak enough to do the same thing, and neither had Hamnet Thyssen.

"May we pass on?" he asked.

Simple respect was the only thing the guards were looking for. "Yes, your Grace," replied the one who wasn't named Vigfus. "Pass on to the south. Tell the folk there what you've told us. See if they believe you anymore than we do."

With that less than ringing endorsement, Hamnet did ride south with the rest of the travelers. Once they got out of earshot of the border post, Ulric Skakki said, "By now, I hardly care whether I tell the Emperor what we've seen or not. All I care about is finding a town with a bathhouse. Did you see those guards? Some time not too long ago, they had baths. Both of them! Isn't that something?" He scratched.

As usual, that made Hamnet scratch, too. How many different kinds of bugs was he carrying around on his person and in his clothes? Too many- he was sure of that.

Liv stared at the firs and spruces through which they rode. "So big," she murmured in an awestruck voice. "Are they really alive?"

"They really are," Hamnet assured her, his voice grave. "We make things from the wood, and we use it for fires instead of dung."

"Yes, I can see how you might. So much of it in each tree, there for the taking," the Bizogot shaman said. "Truly this is a rich land."

Hamnet Thyssen's jaw dropped. These northern provinces were heart-breakingly poor-back-breakingly poor, too, if you had to try to claw a living from them. Woodsmen and trappers were almost the only people who could. He eyed Liv with something that went deeper than astonishment, because what she said spoke volumes about how different they were. In her eyes, this miserable country seemed rich beyond compare.

And why wouldn't it? Summer here probably lasted six weeks longer than it did up where she lived, hard by the Glacier. The ground wasn't permanently frozen. Liv had never seen a tree before in all her life. A land warm enough to let them grow . . . was a land richer than any the Bizogots inhabited.

Realizing that almost left Hamnet embarrassed to be a Raumsdalian. How much his own folk took for granted! They sneered at the Bizogots for all the things the mammoth-herders lacked. But that wasn't the Bizogots' fault; it was the fault of the country in which they lived.

The Rulers lived even farther north than the Bizogots. Hamnet had seen that they used iron. Did they forge it themselves, or did they get it in trade from some unknown land far to the west and south, as the Bizogots got it from the Empire? Hamnet didn't know-by the nature of things, how could he? But he was sure of one thing. If the Rulers reached Raumsdalian territory, even these hardscrabble provinces along the northern border, they would think the land was as rich as Liv did.

That wasn't good news, not as far as Raumsdalia was concerned.

Up in a tree, a blue jay screeched at the travelers. "What makes that noise?" Liv asked.

"A jay." Hamnet Thyssen pointed up to it. The bird didn't like that- maybe it thought his outstretched arm and hand were an arrow aimed its way. Screeching still, it flapped off to another fir farther away.

Liv laughed and clapped her mittened hands. "It's a piece of the sky with wings!" she exclaimed. "I've never seen anything so pretty. How many other birds do you have that we never see up by the Glacier?"

"How many? I don't know. Earl Eyvind might be able to tell you, or one of the savants down in Nidaros," Hamnet answered. "But there are lots of them. Jays, warblers, orioles, woodpeckers . . ."

They were only names to Liv. "Woodpeckers?" she echoed uncertainly. Count Hamnet translated the word into the Bizogot tongue. Then he told how they pounded their bills into trees, going after insects and grubs. Liv laughed when he finished. "You're making that up," she said, as Trasamund had when he heard about glyptodonts. "You're telling me a story because I don't know any better, the way we might talk about a musk ox with a trunk if we were making sport of a Raumsdalian who thought he knew it all."

"It's not a story-it's the truth," Hamnet said. "By God, it is. Ask any other Raumsdalian you please. Ask your jarl-chances are he's seen them, or maybe heard them drumming."

"Drumming." Liv repeated that, too. "Why don't their heads fall off from all that banging, if they do what you say they do?"

"I don't know." Count Hamnet had never worried about it. "And we have bats, too, though not this far north. Think of a vole or a lemming. Give it big ears and sharp teeth and wings that are all bare skin-no feathers or anything. That's what bats are. They hunt at night, and they eat bugs."

"Next you'll probably tell me you have things that live in the rivers but aren't fish," Liv said with a scornful sniff.

"We do." Hamnet talked about frogs. He talked about turtles. He talked about alligators and crocodiles, finishing, "Those live only in the far south. There are probably a few alligators in the southern part of the Empire, but not many."

Liv eyed him. "You aren't making these things up."

"No, I'm not. By God, I'm not," Hamnet Thyssen said. "We have lots of creatures you don't, because your winters would kill them." He talked about toads and salamanders. He talked about lizards. He talked about snakes. This time, he finished, "Some of them have poisonous fangs. If they bite you, it can kill. If it doesn't, it will make you very sick."

He wondered if she would think he was lying about those. Her face thoughtful, she said, "A trader from the Empire came up to the Three Tusk country a few years ago and talked about creatures like those. We all thought he was the biggest liar in the world, even if we didn't say so."

"Why didn't you?" Hamnet asked. "You Bizogots are quick enough to call Raumsdalians liars most of the time."

Liv wrinkled her nose at him. "Well, a lot of the time you are liars. But no, we didn't call him on his stories. They were new to us, and they helped make the time go by. We didn't believe them? So what? We still enjoyed them."

"Fair enough, I suppose," Hamnet said with a smile of his own.

"Your Ferocity!" Liv called-Trasamund was half a bowshot ahead of her on the trail through the forest. He looked back over his shoulder and waved to show he'd heard. She booted her horse up into a trot to catch up to him. Hamnet Thyssen sped up, too. When Liv got close enough to the jarl to talk without shouting, she said, "Remember that Raumsdalian trader who told us tales about the legless things with the poison teeth?"

Trasamund threw back his head and laughed. "I'm not likely to forget him. He could spin them, couldn't he?"

"He was telling the truth," Liv said. "He must have been. Hamnet here just told me about the same creatures."

"Oh, he did, did he?" The Bizogot jarl eyed Count Hamnet. "Who's to say he's not lying through his beard, too?"

"I could tell you the chances of two men making up the same strange animal are slim," Hamnet said. "Or I could just tell you I'm not lying, and if you want to make something out of it and say I am, go ahead."

Trasamund eyed him. "You wouldn't fight over a no-account thing like a story. A Bizogot might, but a Raumsdalian wouldn't. So I suppose you are telling the truth. Who would have believed it? These beasts are real?"

"They are," Count Hamnet said. "Have you ever heard the phrase 'a snake in the grass'?" He shifted to his own tongue for the last few words.

"Yes. It means something sneaky and dangerous."

"That's right. Snakes crawl around in the grass, and it's easy to miss them. With the poison in their fangs, though, they can make you sorry if you do."

"Well, well." Trasamund plucked at his beard. "How many 'snakes in the grass' do you suppose we have with us?" Hamnet Thyssen found no good answer for that, in Raumsdalian or the Bizogot tongue.