Beyong the Gap

XXI

In the middle of winter, Hamnet Thyssen saw only a little difference ! between the Bizogot country and the Glacier farther north. Snow blanketed everything. On days when the sun shone, the reflections from all that white could dazzle and overwhelm the eye. Trasamund and Liv had no goggles, but rubbed streaks of ash from a campfire under their eyes to cut the glare. Before long, the Raumsdalians with them started doing the same thing. It was ugly, but it helped.

"I'm wearing musk-ox dung." Ulric Skakki sounded more cheerful than he had any business being.

"Well, we've been eating it whenever we cook up here," Hamnet said. "Why not wear it, too?"

"I wish you hadn't reminded me," Audun Gilli said.

"I wish for all kinds of things that won't come true-good sense from the Emperor, for instance," Ulric said. "What's one more wasted wish?"

Hamnet Thyssen looked around, as if to see who might have overheard Ulric. Down in Raumsdalia, someone could have betrayed him to the Emperor's servants, in which case he would not have a happy time of it. Up here, he was among friends, and had the sense to realize it before Hamnet did.

Trasamund saw the Raumsdalian's glance, and knew what it meant. "No spies up here, your Grace," he said. "No informers. You're in Bizogot country again. You're in the free lands. Breathe deep. Breathe free."

"What if someone back in the Three Tusk clan has been talking about you behind your back, your Ferocity?" Ulric Skakki asked in his most innocent tones.

Beneath the dirt and ashes on his face, Trasamund turned red. "If I hear about it, I'll knock the son of a mammoth turd's teeth out!" he growled.

"Welcome to the free lands. Welcome to Bizogot country," Ulric said.

"And what's that supposed to mean?" the jarl demanded.

"What do you think it means?" Ulric asked.

"I think it means you're making fun of me on the sly, you Raumsdalian hound," Trasamund said, and he wasn't wrong. "Didn't I ask you when you chose to come north if you would obey me?"

"How am I disobeying you? Did you ever tell me not to make fun of you? Did you ever tell me not to make fun of silly ideas?" Ulric sounded mild, which didn't mean he wasn't serious.

"If you obey, you have to respect. You are not respecting," Trasamund said.

Ulric Skakki went to his knees before the jarl. Then he went to his belly, knocking his forehead in the snow. "Your Ferocity! Your Wonderfulness!" he cried. "Your Highness! Your Majesty! Your exalted Magnificence! May I please be allowed to kiss some of the musk-ox dung from the sole of your boot?"

Liv giggled helplessly. That meant Trasamund's venomous glaze divided itself between Ulric and her, and lost some of its effect. He stirred Ulric with the toe of his-with luck-clean boot. "Get up, you fool. Give me the respect I deserve, not this stupid show of more."

"I was trying to do that." The adventurer brushed snow off his front. "You didn't seem to like it very well, either."

"No one likes to be made fun of," Trasamund said accurately.

"Well, your Ferocity, if you say something silly, can't I let you know I think it's silly?" Ulric Skakki asked. "If I can't, what's your famous Bizogot freedom worth? I might as well have stayed in the Empire after all."

Trasamund started to answer, then stopped. This time, Ulric got the full force of his glare. He seemed to have no trouble enduring it. "You twist things up," Trasamund complained. "I am the jarl. I know what I can do, and I know what I am not supposed to do. And I know what my clansfolk can do, too. You go past that."

"He is a foreigner, your Ferocity," Liv said. "He did not suck in our ways with his mother's milk."

"Do you follow all our Raumsdalian customs when you come down into the Empire?" Hamnet Thyssen added. "I don't think so."

"Maybe not," Trasamund said. "But I don't dance on them for the sport of it, either. Ulric was trying to pull my prong for the sport of it. I won't put up with that." A Raumsdalian would have talked about getting his leg pulled. As usual, the Bizogot idiom was gamier.

And the jarl was probably right. Ulric Skakki did make trouble for no better reason than that he liked making trouble. He'd certainly annoyed Count Hamnet more than once. Now he said, "I'll be mild as milk. You can rely on it."

"You'll be as mild as smetyn, and like smetyn you'll make everyone around you wild," Trasamund predicted. "The only reason I tell you to come along is the hope you will madden the Rulers more than the Three Tusk clan."

"That's good enough," Ulric Skakki said cheerfully, and on they went.

The Breath of God reached down to Raumsdalia in the winter. Ham-net Thyssen thought he knew what blizzards could do. After the first couple he went through on the plains, he owned himself an amateur.

He was as warmly dressed as any man could be, in furs with mittens on his hands and baggy felt boots with more loose felt in them on his feet. Only his eyes showed. His hood came down low on his forehead. A thick musk-ox wool scarf covered his nose and mouth. When snow came roaring down from the north riding a wind almost strong enough to knock a man off his feet, it hardly seemed to matter.

Trasamund and Liv took being out and about in such weather for granted. "We're still a long way from the Glacier," Liv screamed in Hamnet's ear, that being the only way to make herself heard through the wind's howls. "This is nothing."

"It seems like something to me," he shouted back. Her eyes showed amusement, or he thought they did. When they were the only part of her he could see, he had trouble being sure.

It was blowing too hard for them to hope to set up their tents when they stopped for the evening. Trasamund and Liv started making snow huts, lumping snow into blocks and building inward to form a dome. They left a tiny opening in the roof to let smoke out. The entrance faced south and had a dogleg to break the force of the wind.

"What about the horses?" Audun Gilli asked.

But the Bizogots were already piling up more snow blocks into a windbreak. Liv used a little magic to melt some snow on the ground and let it re-freeze as ice around the poles she used to tether the horses. "They won't be able to go anywhere," she said confidently.

"Suppose bears come? Or wolves? What do we do then?" Audun asked.

"We walk," Trasamund answered with withering scorn. The idea didn't seem to worry him. It worried Hamnet Thyssen, but he didn't say anything about it. What could he say? The wizard also kept quiet.

No one said anything about how the travelers would occupy the snow huts, either. But Hamnet and Liv ended up in one, with the other two Raumsdalians and Trasamund in the other. Just getting out of the ravening wind made Hamnet feel warmer. He fumbled for flint and steel in the darkness inside. He had a little leather pouch with tinder in it on his belt. The sooner he got a fire going, the happier he would be.

Liv did it before him. A few murmured words were enough to set a lamp alight. He gave her a seated bow. "Handy traveling with a shaman," he said.

"Up here, any Bizogot will know that spell," she said. "We need it too often, and not knowing it can kill."

"Can Bizogots who aren't shamans work it?" Hamnet asked. "Is the power in the spell or in the spellcaster?"

"This spell works most of the time for most people," Liv answered. "Whether that means most people have some power or the spell itself is strong … I don't know. I never thought about it."

Most of the time, Hamnet wouldn't have thought about it, either. It was the kind of question more likely to interest Eyvind Torfinn. But here, in the snow hut, fire was naturally on his mind. He and Liv didn't need much of a blaze. The heat from their bodies warmed the cramped space surprisingly well. The lamp gave more light than heat.

Liv even had a chunk of musk-ox meat with her. As she sliced off frozen strips, she sent Hamnet a sly look. "Can you eat raw meat?"

"If I'm hungry enough, I can-" He broke off. He almost said he could eat anything if he got hungry enough. But, since the Bizogots ate stomachs and guts with their contents still in them when they got hungry enough, that might prove more bragging than he cared to back up.

To his relief, Liv took what he did say for a complete sentence. She started passing him strips of meat. He had no trouble eating them. They might even have been a delicacy down in Nidaros. And the company here was better than any he would have known in the imperial capital.

"What's it like making love when the wind is screaming outside?" he asked.

Liv smiled. "You want to find out, I suppose. Well, why not? It's warm enough, and the work will make us warmer."

As long as they lay on their clothes and blankets, it was fine. When Ham-net stuck his foot in the snow for a couple of heartbeats, it put him off his stroke, but he quickly recovered. Afterwards, he dressed in a hurry, and so did Liv. They wrapped themselves in their blankets and fell asleep.

It was dark inside the hut when Count Hamnet woke-the lamp had gone out. The wind still howled and screeched outside. Within the hut, though, it was snug and more than warm enough. The Bizogots knew what they were doing, all right. He yawned, twisted, and went back to sleep.

The next time he woke up, a little light was coming in through the smoke hole. He needed a moment to realize the storm had died. It was almost eerily quiet. Beside him, Liv said, "It's blown itself out. I hoped it would."

"I wondered if it would bury the hut before it did," Hamnet said.

"No-too windy for that. The snow wouldn't stick enough," she said. "We may have to dig out of the entrance, though."

They did. As they shoveled snow with mittened hands, Hamnet Thyssen said, "I hope the horses came through all right."

"So do I. They're your southern beasts, not the ones we breed ourselves." Liv went on digging as she spoke. She broke out into fresh air. "We'll know soon."

Standing up came as a relief to Hamnet. He'd felt as crowded in the snow as he felt small and insignificant traveling across the frozen plains. Everything was frozen now, the ground as far as the eye could see robed in white. Even his furs and Liv's had snow all over them.

He trudged through snow that crunched under his boots to the windbreak Trasamund and Liv had built. The horses were still there, still alive, and eager for food. He had a little sugar made from maple sap down in the Empire. The animals snuffled up the treat and snorted for more.

Liv started digging out the snow in front of the other hut's entrance. Somebody inside said something. Hamnet couldn't make out what it was, but Liv s tart answer told him. "No, I'm not a bear," she said. "It would serve you right if I were."

Audun Gilli, Ulric Skakki, and Trasamund emerged a moment later. "Good thing the sun's in the sky," Ulric said. "Otherwise we wouldn't have any idea which way north was."

"I could use the spell with the needle," Audun said. "It wouldn't be perfect, not up here"-he was ready to admit that now-"but it would give us the right idea."

"If the water didn't freeze before you could finish chanting." Trasamund sounded altogether serious. Hamnet decided he had a right to be. With the air this cold, water would turn to ice in a hurry.

"We've got the sun," the Raumsdalian noble said. "Let's use it." They mounted and rode north. The southern horses did know enough to paw forage up from under the snow. Hamnet hadn't been sure they would. One less thing to worry about, anyhow.

Only last summer's frozen marsh plants sticking up from the snow here and there told the travelers they'd come to the edge of Sudertorp Lake. No screeching waterfowl now-nothing but the silent grip of winter. Count Hamnet looked west, then east. The frozen lake stretched as far as he could see in either direction.

"Which is the shorter way around?" he asked.

"They both look pretty long," Ulric said.

"That both will cost us time," Hamnet said fretfully. The sense that it was slipping away gnawed at him.

"See the southerners," Trasamund said to Liv in the Bizogot language. She grinned and nodded. Whatever amused the jarl, she found it funny, too.

"What's the answer, then?" Hamnet Thyssen asked with as little sarcasm as he could.

"We don't go around," Trasamund answered. "We go straight across, by God. This season of the year, musk oxen and mammoths cross lakes and rivers. If the ice holds them, it will hold us, too."

Hamnet and Ulric and Audun exchanged glances. Hamnet had skated on frozen ponds in winter-what Raumsdalian hadn't? But sending horses across? That was a different story.

"What happens if we fall in?" Audun Gilli asked the question on Ham-net's mind, and surely on Ulric's, too.

"If we're close to shore, we drag you out, get on dry land, build a big fire fast as we can, and maybe you live," the Bizogot jarl answered. "If not so close, you freeze before we can do it." Like a lot of mammoth-herders, he was callous when it came to things nobody could do anything about. He went on, "It won't happen, though. The ice now is as thick as Jesper Fletti's head, and even harder."

That made both Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen smile. Audun Gilli just nodded seriously and said, "I hope you're right."

"I'm betting my neck, too," Trasamund said. The wizard nodded again.

The horses went out onto the ice without much fuss. They placed their feet carefully. Even with horseshoes-one more thing the Bizogots, who didn't smelt iron, went without-the going was slippery. But Trasamund proved right about one thing-the frozen surface of the lake was more than solid enough to bear the heavy animals' weight. Except for the smoothness, Hamnet couldn't tell he wasn't riding across solid ground; there was no shaking under him to suggest water yet unfrozen lay beneath the ice.

Sudertorp Lake was a long way across. Going around would have been three or four times as long-Hamnet understood as much. But he still felt peculiar with nothing but ice all around. He felt as if he were riding across the top of the Glacier.

When he spoke that conceit aloud, Ulric Skakki clapped his mittened hands. "Now there's a sport no one's likely to try soon," he said. "Men might get to the top, I suppose, but not horses. Your Ferocity!"

"What do you want?" Trasamund often suspected Ulric of laughing up his sleeve at him-and often was right.

But the adventurer sounded serious as he asked, "Have any Bizogots ever tried climbing to the top of the Glacier?"

"Not in my clan," the jarl answered. "Not so anyone remembers. I've heard that men have tried farther west. I don't think anyone ever made it, though. There are mountains that stick up through the Glacier. Some of them are topped with green in the summertime-but what grows on them no one knows. How would you get to them to find out?"

Count Hamnet whistled softly. That wasn't a small thought. Those mountain peaks above the Glacier-what might grow up there? Anything at all. How long had they been there, each by itself? Eons. Could there be people up there, people who did roam the top of the Glacier and had no more hope of coming down than the Bizogots and Raumsdalians did of going up? What would they eat? The top of the Glacier made the Bizogot plains seem paradise by comparison.

"Probably rabbits and lemmings and voles up there," Ulric said when Hamnet put that into words. "Bound to be birds, too, at least in summer. But I wouldn't want to try to live up there, and that's the truth." He shivered.

So did Hamnet Thyssen. And then, unmistakably, so did the ice beneath them. Hamnet thought he heard a crackling noise far below. He pointed at Trasamund, not that pointing with a forefinger in a mitten did much good. "You said this couldn't happen!" he shouted at the Bizogot.

"It can't!" Trasamund shouted back, even though it was.

The crackling grew louder. "I don't know about you people, but I'm making for shore as fast as I can," Ulric Skakki said, and booted his horse up to a trot and then to a gallop.

That seemed like such a good idea, Count Hamnet did the same thing. So did Trasamund and Liv and Audun Gilli. But the crackling followed them and got louder still, even through the drumming thunder of their horses' hooves. "This is sorcery!" Audun shouted. "Someone is making the ice breakup!"

"Well, for God's sake make it stop!" Hamnet shouted back. He thought about what the jarl said about going into the icy water. Having thought about it, he wished he hadn't. To die like that… It would end fast, but not fast enough.

And someone could only mean someone from the Rulers. How did the folk who lived beyond the Glacier track the travelers here? Hamnet had no idea. He wished Audun Gilli or Liv did.

Liv began to chant in the Bizogot tongue. She took her left hand from the reins so she could use it for passes. "I know that spell," Trasamund said.

"Do you?" Hamnet Thyssen looked back over his shoulder. What he saw made him wish he hadn't. Cracks in the frozen surface of the lake stretched toward him like skeletal arms wanting to hold him in an embrace that would last forever.

"I do, by God," the jarl answered. "When snow is very dry, it won't hold together for things like huts. That spell clumps it, you might say."

"Will it do the same for ice?" Hamnet asked.

"I don't know," Trasamund said. "We're going to find out, don't you think?"

Audun Gilli rode up alongside Liv. He reached out and set a hand on her leg. Most of the time, Hamnet would have killed him for that. Now, though, he understood the wizard wasn't feeling her up. Audun was lending her strength. He didn't know the spell; it wasn't one Raumsdalians were likely to use. But he was doing what he could to help.

Would what he was doing, what Liv was doing be enough? Count Hamnet looked over his shoulder again. Those grasping cracks were still coming forward as fast as a horse could run-but no faster, or so he thought. So he hoped. He looked ahead. That rise had to be the beginning of solid ground, real ground. It also had to be most of a mile away. Could Liv hold back the sorcery from the north long enough, slow it down enough, to let them all win to safety?

If the horse stumbles under me, I'm a dead man, Hamnet thought. Even so, he booted it on as fiercely as he could. If the cracks in the ice caught up with him, he was also dead. When he looked back one more time, he gasped in dismay. He could see black water there where the cracks had widened. No, he didn't want to go into that. "Come on, horse!" he called. "Run, curse you!"

And the horse did run. And its hooves thudded up the slope of Sudertorp Lake's northern bank just as the cracks and black water reached the edge of the lake. Ulric and Trasamund were ahead of him, Liv and Audun just behind.

For a bad moment, he wondered if the spell could tear land asunder as it tore ice. But it did stop at the lake's edge. He reined in, breathing almost as hard as his horse was. Then he pulled back his hood in lieu of doffing a cap to salute the shaman and wizard. "I think you saved us," he said.

Liv was panting, as if she'd run a long way. "I think I did, too," she said. "And I know-I know-I had help from Audun."

"You knew the spell," Audun Gilli told her. "It worked .. . just well enough." He looked back toward the cracks in the frozen surface of the lake.

So did Liv. Her shiver had nothing to do with winter on the Bizogot plains. "Just well enough is right," she said. "I couldn't stop the spell. I didn't have a chance in the world of stopping it. All I could do was slow it down a little."

"How did the Rulers reach so far?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

"I don't know!" she blazed, sounding angry at him and herself and the Rulers all at once. "I don't know, I tell you. If I knew, I'd be able to do something like that myself, and I can't. Nobody can."

"Nobody except them." Audun Gilli pointed north.

"What does that say?" Count Hamnet had a pretty good notion what it said, but hoped he was wrong. "Does it say we'd better not quarrel with them, or else we'll lose? Does it say we should bend the knee to them, because that's the best we can hope to do? If it does, why are we fighting?"

"We're fighting because we're free, and we're going to stay free," Trasamund answered before Liv could speak. "If that's not why you're fighting, go back to the Empire, because I want nothing to do with you."

"I'm not going anywhere," Hamnet said. "Except north, that is."

"Next frozen lake we come across, we ought to go around it and not over it," Ulric Skakki said.

"I wonder if it matters," Hamnet said. "If the Rulers know where we are, if they can strike as they please, they'll find some other way, some other place, to try to kill us."

"Foolish to give them the same chance twice," Ulric insisted.

"Why? They've seen it didn't work, so wouldn't they think it's not worth trying again?" Count Hamnet said. "We haven't seen any more wizards pretending to be short-faced bears after we killed the first one."

"That man was not pretending." Liv and Audun Gilli said the same thing at the same time in two different languages.

"Whether he was or not, they only tried it once," Count Hamnet said stubbornly.

"Are we as safe as we can be now?" Trasamund asked. The only answers the others could give were shrugs. How could they hope to know? But even shrugs satisfied the jarl. "Either we let them scare us, or we don't," he said. "And if we don't, we keep moving."

"Spoken like a nomad," Ulric said.

"I am a nomad," Trasamund answered proudly. "I am on the way back to my clan's grazing grounds. And you had better be, too." He urged his horse north. The others came with him. Having ridden so far, what else could they do?

Hamnet Thyssen didn't like his dreams. They'd mostly been happy after he and Liv became lovers. The dreams he'd had since returning to the frozen steppe, though, were muddled and grim, and they got worse the farther north he traveled.

When he finally complained about it, Liv looked surprised. "Yours, too?" she said. "Mine have been the same way. I don't care for the omen."

They soon found they weren't the only ones with ugly dreams. Ulric Skakki made light of his, saying, "What do you expect after you eat musk-ox chitterlings two days running?"

"What's wrong with musk-ox chitterlings? They're good," Trasamund declared. "And besides, they're a lot better than going empty."

"I won't argue with the second part of that," Ulric said. "The first… is a matter of opinion, and it isn't mine."

Even though Trasamund liked what he was eating, he also had bad dreams. He put it down to worry. "I keep wondering how things are with the clan," he said. "I imagine everything that could go wrong. Do that long enough and you'll start doing it whether you're awake or asleep."

Audun Gilli said, "If my dreams are bad, it's because someone is trying to make them bad. And someone is doing it, too."

"The Rulers?" Hamnet said.

"I can't think of anyone else it's likely to be," Audun said. "Can you?"

"I can't." Liv's voice was worried, too. "None of the other Bizogots hate the Three Tusk clan enough to bring a sending down on us."

"What about his Imperial Majesty?" Ulric Skakki, as usual, was full of pleasant ideas.

However much Count Hamnet wished he could, he couldn't dismiss that one out of hand. The most he would say was, "I don't like to think that of Sigvat."

"Well, neither do I. But I don't like nightmares, either. I don't like waking tireder than I went to sleep," Ulric said. "How do we know for sure our own wizards weren't cracking the ice on Sudertorp Lake?"

"How do we know? Because they cursed well weren't, that's how," Audun Gilli said. "I know what our sorcery feels like. I ought to, by God. This had nothing to do with that. It felt strange, strange and strong. Whoever worked that magic has been making spells in a tradition, in a style, separate from ours for… for forever, as best I can tell."

"He's right," Liv said. "I know Bizogot shamanry. I know some of what Raumsdalian shamanry feels like. This was different, as different as blackberries and musk oxen."

Ulric spread his hands. "All right, I was wrong about that. But are you sure I'm wrong about the sending?"

Liv and Audun looked at each other. "I thought it was coming from the north," she said slowly. Audun Gilli nodded. But Liv went on, "I'm not sure of that, not the way I was with the spell on the lake. I still think it's likely, but I'm not sure."

"My dreams have been cold. All of them have been cold," Audun said. Thinking back on it, Hamnet realized his had, too. Audun continued, "That doesn't prove it's the Rulers and not the Emperor, but I'd bet on them."

"When we get back among the good folk of the Three Tusk clan, we will be troubled no more," Trasamund said. "By being what they are, they will shield us from this nuisance."

"What? We're not good folk ourselves?" Ulric asked. "If that's all it takes . . . We don't have some of the people who came along with us last time here now, you know." He named no names, which was just as well. Hamnet Thyssen's mind immediately turned to Gudrid.

But he hadn't had nightmares about her up here, not even once. That struck him as odd. He'd had plenty of them before.

Trasamund's thoughts ran in a different direction. "Nothing wrong with Eyvind Torfinn," he said. "Jesper Fletti and the other soldiers-I don't miss them so much."

He thought Earl Eyvind was a good fellow because the aging noble either didn't see his sport with Gudrid or pretended not to notice it. Hamnet didn't think Eyvind Torfinn a bad fellow, either, but he esteemed the other Raumsdalian despite his ties to Gudrid, not because of them.

Trasamund sent Ulric Skakki a sly glance. He didn't say anything about Ulric. He didn't say the adventurer wasn't a good man. Whatever he thought, he thought. And if Ulric growled and muttered, he didn't-he couldn't-do any more than that. Trasamund . .. smiled.

Who would have thought a Bizogot could show such subtlety?

The Red Dire Wolves-not to be confused with the Black Dire Wolves, who dwelt far to the west-fed the travelers to the bursting point. They’d just killed a bull mammoth, and for the time being had more meat than they knew what to do with. Baked mammoth, stewed mammoth, mammoth fritters, roasted mammoth marrow-a delicacy, that, even without toasted bread on which to spread it-mammoth blood sausage, mammoth head cheese . . . Anything you could do to and with a mammoth's carcass, the Red Dire Wolves did.

"I'm surprised we didn't see mammoth eyeballs and mammoth bal-locks," Audun Gilli said during a pause in the orgy of eating.

"Oh, the jarl gets the eyeballs," Trasamund said seriously. "They help make him farseeing, or so the hope is. As for the ballocks, the clansmen slice them up and roast them first thing. Same with the pizzle. You can figure out why."

"Er-yes." Audun raised a leather jack of smetyn to his lips. He was on his way to getting drunk, but so were the rest of them. He didn't get drunk when he needed to stay sober, which was all that really mattered.

Hamnet Thyssen gnawed more meat off a chunk of mammoth rib. Some enterprising Raumsdalian trader had sold the Red Dire Wolf clan several bone saws, of the sort surgeons used down in the Empire. For the Bizogots, they made first-rate butcher's tools. Hamnet wondered who his clever countryman was. The fellow had found an odd way, but a good one, to meet his customers' desires.

A big, burly graybeard named Totila ruled the Red Dire Wolves. He eyed Hamnet and Ulric and said, "Some of you foreigners can fill yourselves almost like real people." He didn't include Audun in that. The wizard was small to begin with, and didn't seem to have an infinitely extensible paunch.

"Practice, your Ferocity," Ulric Skakki answered. "The mammoth brain is very tasty, but now I keep wanting to wave my trunk and wiggle my ears." He did wiggle them, something Hamnet hadn't known he could do.

Totila stared, then laughed and laughed. "As long as thinking like a mammoth doesn't make you want to shit in the middle of my tent, eat all the brains you please."

Ulric did eat some more, then mimed pulling down his trousers. Totila laughed harder than ever. In Raumsdalian, Hamnet Thyssen said, "I see you've found your true level."

"I'll cut your heart out and eat it for that," Ulric answered. "And what kind of fool will I act like then?"

"A jealous fool, I'd say," Hamnet answered. "And I ought to know about those." He remembered the feel of his point grating off the ribs of Gudrid's first lover-the first one he found out about, anyhow-and then sliding deep to pierce the man's heart. He remembered the anguished surprise on Ingjald Oddleif's face. This can't be happening to me, he must have thought, there at the end. But it was.

Totila found girls for Trasamund and Ulric Skakki. He would have found one for Audun Gilli, too, but the wizard was using the bits of the Bizogot tongue he'd painfully acquired to try to talk shop with the deaf old man who was the Red Dire Wolves' shaman. Audun would have liked to find someone to translate for him, but the rest of the travelers were otherwise occupied-Hamnet and Liv had crawled under a mammoth hide together, too. Audun had to do the best he could on his own.

When the travelers rode out of the Red Dire Wolves' encampment the next morning, the wizard said, "I think Odovacar told me there were changes in the north."

"Their shaman? Has he had bad dreams, too?" Ulric Skakki asked. By his self-satisfied smirk, whatever dreams he'd had after enjoying the Bizogot woman weren't bad at all.

But he sobered when Audun Gilli nodded. "He has. I'm almost sure of it," Audun said. "That makes it more likely the Rulers are sending the dreams, not the Emperor. Why would imperial wizards trouble a shaman's dreams?"

"Why would the Rulers?" Hamnet Thyssen asked in turn. "If they're plotting something, wouldn't they want to keep shamans in the dark as long as they could?"

In the dark was the right phrase. The sun rose late and set early, scuttling across the sky from southeast to southwest and never rising high above the southern horizon. Beyond the Glacier, it wouldn't come up even this far. Hamnet remembered Ulric's account of winter up there.

"Sometimes spells wash out farther than you wish they would," Liv said in Raumsdalian, and Audun Gilli nodded. She went on, "Odovacar may have felt bits and pieces of what was aimed somewhere else."

"Aimed at us?" Hamnet asked.

"It could be," Liv said. "Or maybe-" She broke off.

"Maybe what?" Audun Gilli asked.

She didn't answer. She stopped speaking Raumsdalian. In her own language, she called out to Trasamund, saying, "I fear the Rulers may have struck at our clan. God grant it not be so, but I fear it."

"Would they dare?" the jarl said.

"Never doubt what the Rulers would dare," Ulric Skakki said in the Bizogot tongue. "They may not always get everything they want, but they want a lot."

"God be praised we come in time to stop them here, then," Trasamund said.

"If we do," Hamnet Thyssen said. Trasamund sent him a horrible stare. He looked back steadily. The Bizogot was assuming that what he wanted was true. But was it really? We'll find out soon, the Raumsdalian thought.

On they rode. The weather was clear but very cold. Totila had given them some mammoth meat to take with them on their journey. They also killed hares. Even so far north, though, those had next to no fat on them, relying on their thick white fur for warmth. They would feed a man, but wouldn't keep him going indefinitely by themselves. In such weather, people needed fat for fuel to keep from freezing.

"Now we ride into the lands of the Three Tusk clan," Trasamund said a couple of days after they left the Red Dire Wolves' encampment. "Now we join the grandest clan among the Bizogots." He looked around. "I see no herds, not yet. They will be wandering elsewhere, no doubt. Our grazing range is vast."

And needs to be, Hamnet Thyssen thought. If the land up here by the Glacier were better, the musk oxen and mammoths could have lived on less of it. By the ironic glint in Ulric Skakki's eye, he saw the same thing. Neither of them pointed it out to Trasamund. That would have enraged him without being able to change anything.

Late in the afternoon, Liv pointed north across the snow-covered plain. "Those are people, I think, heading our way."

They were no more than wiggling dots at the edge of visibility to Count Hamnet. "If you say so," he told her.

"My own folk, coming to greet me." Smug pride rang in Trasamund’s voice.

Before long, he got a closer look at his clansfolk, and pride changed to horror. They weren't welcoming him-they were fleeing disaster. Some were wounded, others terribly burned. "Invaders!" Gelimer gasped when he saw his chieftain. "Invaders from the north!"