Beyong the Gap g-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "It's seen us," Trasamund said. Sure enough, the big cat trotted toward the travelers.

  The closer it got, the more they stared at it. "By God," Audun Gilli said, "that's no lion!"

  "It isn't," Jesper Fletti agreed. "What is it? It's no sabertooth, either-it doesn't have short hind legs the way they do."

  "It is something new," Eyvind Torfinn said. "It is a creature from beyond the Glacier." Awe suffused his voice.

  A creature from beyond the Glacier. That was plenty to awe Hamnet Thyssen, too. And itwasasingularlydeadly-lookingcreature.lt looked more like a lion than anything else, but it was bigger than any lion Hamnet had ever seen. It was so big, it surely had to be a male, but it did not bear a mane.

  Audun Gilli was right-it was no lion. Instead of a tawny coat, it had a pale golden one, broken by dark stripes that helped confuse its outline till it came quite near. When it yawned, it displayed formidable fangs, but more like a lion's than a sabertooth's.

  It trotted alongside the travelers for a while, but showed no inclination to attack. In fact, it showed no inclination to come within bowshot of the horses. Hamnet Thyssen had seen similarly wary lions down in the south. "It knows men," he said. "It knows what weapons can do."

  "Looks that way," Ulric Skakki said. "Well, no great surprise, not after some of the other things we've seen-and not after your magical owl."

  "Not mine," Hamnet said. "Liv woke me up, so I helped chase it away."

  "That'll do." Ulric pointed out toward the big striped cat. "Do you suppose they hunt in prides the way lions do?"

  "I hadn't thought about that," Hamnet said. "We'll find out. Where there's one of those things, there are bound to be more."

  "Well, you're right about that," Ulric Skakki said. "They might as well be tax collectors, except they don't take such big bites."

  "Heh," Count Hamnet said, for all the world as if Ulric were joking.

  The striped cat studied the travelers with as much curiosity as they showed it. Coming up from the other side of the Glacier, did they smell strange? Hamnet knew he smelled bad. All the travelers did, and got worse by the day. But he had no reason to believe anyone on this side of the ice was any more fragrant.

  After a few minutes, the striped cat seemed to decide the humans were too alert to make good prey. It trotted purposefully off toward the northwest, leaving the horses behind. The animals seemed glad it was gone. Whatever the travelers smelled like to the cat, it smelled like danger to the horses.

  "Was that a real cat?" Trasamund asked. "Or was it a man in cat shape, spying on us like the owl?"

  He spoke first in his own language, then in Raumsdalian. Both Liv and Audun Gilli looked surprised. "I felt nothing out of the ordinary," the Bizogot shaman said.

  Audun looked a question at Hamnet Thyssen, who translated for him. Audun nodded. "I thought it was an ordinary animal, too," he said. Hamnet translated that into the Bizogot tongue for Liv.

  "I'm glad to hear it," Trasamund said, again in both languages. "And by God, I hope you're right."

  They'd come so far north, full darkness never descended on the world. Not long before midnight, the sun sank below the horizon in the far northwest. Not long after midnight, it rose again in the far northeast. During its brief journey below the edge of the earth, the northern sky stayed light. Nothing deeper than twilight settled over the land, and only a few of the brightest stars came out-and then not for long.

  Ulric Skakki made a joke of it, saying, "They won't be afraid to see owls by daylight here."

  "No, they likely won't." Hamnet dropped his voice. "But you were up here in the wintertime before. What's it like then?"

  Ulric turned and pointed almost due south. With a melodramatic shiver, he said, "The sun comes up there." Then he swung his arm from slightly east of south to slightly west. "And it goes down there. And it never gets higher in the sky than this." He held thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart. "It's like two or three hours of late afternoon in the middle of the day. It's dark the rest of the time, dark and bloody cold. You see by the stars and the Northern Lights-when there are Northern Lights-and the moon. When the moon is full in wintertime, it does what the sun does in high summer, so it's in the sky a lot. Better than nothing, I suppose. The further from full it is, the shorter the time it stays up."

  Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine darkness spread across the landscape for almost the whole day. "You must have slept a lot," he said.

  "Well, what else is there to do?" Ulric asked in reasonable tones. "You ride, and you hunt, and you roast what you kill, and you sleep. You don't even have to hunt so much in the winter, because the meat doesn't spoil. You just have to make sure the wolves and the bears and the foxes and the big striped cats don't steal it."

  "That must be fun," Count Hamnet observed.

  "Oh, sometimes." Ulric Skakki smiled crookedly. Then he nodded to Hamnet. "You ought to come up here in wintertime yourself, your Grace, just to see it. It might appeal-darkness suits you, eh?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Hamnet asked. Ulric Skakki's shrug was a small masterpiece of its kind. However much Hamnet fumed, he didn't ask the other man to explain himself again. He knew too well what Ulric had to mean. Darkness crouched at the center of his soul. It had for years. He feared it always would.

  He'd never been a cheery, outgoing man. He never would be; he didn't need sardonic Ulric to remind him of that. But what his former wife did to his spirit was like a wound that wouldn't heal. The spiritual pus that leaked from it infected his whole spirit.

  "I know what you need," Ulric said.

  Hamnet Thyssen scowled at him. "I need you to shut up and go away," he growled.

  "You need to fall in love." Ulric went on as if he hadn't spoken. The adventurer's grin was bright, charming, and altogether infuriating.

  "I really need you to shut up and go away." Hamnet Thyssen’s laugh came harsh as a raven's croak. "You damned fool, what are the odds?" He tried to imagine himself in love again. Imagining himself wringing Ulric Skakki's neck was much easier.

  Ulric laughed again, too, a light, airy sound that made Count Hamnet wonder how such different things could have the same name. "You won't do it if you don't go looking for somebody, that's for sure," he said.

  "And if I do go looking for somebody, what'll she do?" Hamnet demanded. "Betray me the same way Gudrid did, that's what."

  "Well, maybe you-" Ulric Skakki broke off, not from fear but from a certain self-protective caution. "You have murder in your eye, your Grace. Perhaps you should put it back in your pocket or wherever you usually keep it."

  "You were going to say, 'Maybe you had it coming,' weren't you?" Hamnet said thickly. "Why shouldn't I kill you for that, you son of a whore?"

  "Because it may be true even if you don't like it?" Ulric sounded as light and carefree as usual, but his hand hovered near his swordhilt.

  Hamnet Thyssen's hand dropped to his. "You lie," he said. "I didn't do anything to deserve having horns put on me."

  "No one ever does," Ulric Skakki said. "No one ever does, if you listen to him tell it. Or her-plenty of women sing the same sad song. 'No, I didn't do anything.' But people get horns put on them every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year. Meaning no offense, your Grace, but maybe doing nothing was your problem."

  "What nonsense are you spewing now?" Hamnet said.

  Ulric sighed. "I might have known you'd see it that way. By God, I did know you'd see it that way. Sometimes you have to try, whether you think it'll do any good or not." He turned away-but he kept an eye on Hamnet Thyssen even so.

  "Doing nothing," Hamnet muttered in disgust. As if that meant anything! Gudrid played Eyvind Torfinn for a fool, too. Did that mean he was doing nothing, too? Count Hamnet glanced over toward Eyvind. At the moment, he was trimming his nails with a clasp knife, and making heavy going of it-the years had lengthened his sight, so he had to work at arm's length.

  With what kind of man would Gudrid be
happy? Count Hamnet couldn't imagine. By all the signs, Gudrid couldn't, either. Hamnet glared at Ulric Skakki. He thought he had all the answers, did he? Well, he wasn't half as clever as he thought he was.

  Was he?

  North and west, north and west. Hamnet Thyssen hadn't realized there was so much land beyond the Glacier. He'd thought the ground on the far side of the ice would be an afterthought, an appendage to the real world, the world he was familiar with. After all, the Raumsdalian Empire, the Bizogot steppe, and the lands to the south of those that Sigvat II ruled added up to a vast sweep of terrain. Why would anyone-or even God-need more of the world than that?

  It all seemed perfectly logical. It probably was-but how much did logic have to do with truth? Not as much, plainly, as Hamnet would have wished.

  "Do you have any idea where the Golden Shrine is?" he asked Eyvind Torfinn when they camped one evening, waving a hand as if to say it might be anywhere.

  "I don't believe it's on the other side of the world," Earl Eyvind answered. "Past that, I'm afraid I can't begin to tell you."

  "How do you know it's not on the far side of the world?" Hamnet asked.

  "Because once upon a time-God only knows how long ago-we went there, and we remembered," Eyvind said. "I don't think we could have got to the Temple if it were so far away from the lands we know."

  Count Hamnet grunted. "Well, I suppose that makes sense," he said, and then, surprising himself, "What does Gudrid say about the journey?"

  "I think she wishes she never came." Eyvind Torfinn took the question in stride. "I told her back in Nidaros she would feel this way." He shrugged. "No one ever listens to advice, so the best advice I can give is not to give any."

  "If I take it, I prove I listened," Hamnet said. "But if I advise anyone else to take it.. ."

  Eyvind Torfinn looked at him, blinked, and started to laugh. He tried to stop, but seemed to have some trouble. "Oh, dear," he said, and laughed some more. "Oh, dear." Finally, with a fit of coughing, he made the laughter break off. "Well, well. I never expected to come up with such a neat paradox. I should be proud of myself."

  Liv walked up to the two of them. "Why did the old man have a fit?" she asked Hamnet Thyssen.

  That made Earl Eyvind cough some more, if not so comfortably. "I'm not as old as all that," he told the Bizogot shaman in her language.

  She was somewhere in her late twenties-so Hamnet guessed, anyway. To her, Earl Eyvind probably was as old as all that. To her, I'm getting on toward being an antique myself, Hamnet thought uncomfortably, though he wasn't far past forty. The idea annoyed him more than it had any business doing. Then Liv bowed to Eyvind Torfinn. "I cry your pardon," she said. "I meant no insult, and I forgot you knew the Bizogot tongue so very well."

  "You thought you could talk behind my back in front of me," the Raumsdalian noble said, an indulgent note in his voice. "Well, I forgive you-and I think I just made another paradox." The key word came out in Raumsdalian; the nomads didn't have the idea.

  "Another what?" Liv asked, frowning.

  "A paradox is something that says two things at the same time when they both can't be true at once," Eyvind Torfinn answered. Count Hamnet eyed him in admiration, knowing he couldn't have defined the word so well in the Bizogot tongue.

  But the shaman's frown deepened. "Show me what you mean," she said.

  "All right, by God, I will," Eyvind Torfinn said. "I have heard Bizogots say Raumsdalians lie all the time. You will have heard this, too, I'm sure."

  "I do not believe it," Liv said politely.

  "You are kind. You are gracious. But suppose it is true. Can you do that?" Eyvind waited till Liv nodded. Then he smiled. "All Raumsdalians tell lies all the time. Always. Right?" Liv nodded again. Eyvind jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "I am a Raumsdalian. I say I am a liar. But when I say I am a liar, am I telling the truth?"

  "Yes," Liv said, and then, at once, "I mean, no." She paused a little longer. "I mean, yes." Her blue eyes started to cross. "It's maddening! It's mad!" she exclaimed. "It goes round and round, like a musk ox with the staggers. Where does it stop?"

  "Good question," Hamnet said. His eyes were starting to cross, too.

  "It stops wherever you want it to stop," Eyvind Torfinn said. "Or else it doesn't stop at all. That's what a paradox is."

  "What do you use it for?" Liv asked.

  Earl Eyvind's smile got wider. "Why, for whatever you want."

  "For confusing people," Hamnet Thyssen said.

  "It can do that." Liv eyed Eyvind Torfinn with more respect than she usually showed him. "You say you made up one of these horrible things?"

  "Two of them, as a matter of fact," he answered, not without pride. "You bear watching," Liv said, and walked away.

  "Would you rather bear watching or watch bears?" Count Hamnet asked.

  "Yes," Eyvind Torfinn said. Hamnet walked away, too.

  "Deer!" Trasamund pointed west. "A herd of deer!"

  Hamnet Thyssen’s eyes followed that outthrust finger. The deer he knew didn't travel in herds. They were mostly solitary creatures that lived in the forests east of the Raumsdalian Empire. Every so often, they came out and fed in orchards and fields. He'd hunted them often enough to savor the taste of venison slowly simmered in ale and herbs.

  These, he saw at a glance, were beasts different from the ones he'd known down in the south. The warm south, he thought, although he hadn't conceived of the Empire as such a warm place before his travels in the north. It was warm enough up here now, with the sun in the sky almost all day long. But what it would be like come winter. ..

  Better to think about the deer. They were thicker-bodied and shorter-legged than the ones he knew, and of a pale dun color that blended in well with the ground over which they wandered. Their antlers were large and sweeping, but didn't have such sharp tines as those of the forest beasts he'd hunted. And . . . "Are they all stags?" he asked. "The deer I know, the does have no horns."

  "More likely, the does here do grow antlers," Eyvind Torfinn said. Count Hamnet found himself nodding. He couldn't imagine such a large herd of male animals ambling along so peacefully.

  "We'll eat well tonight, by God," Trasamund said with a nomad's practicality. Hamnet Thyssen nodded again. With so many of these strange deer going by, they would surely be able to knock over one or two.

  And they did. The animals seemed untroubled, unafraid, as the men approached them. Getting into archery range was the easiest thing in the world. Jesper Fletti looked up from butchering one of the slain deer, his arms crimson to the elbows. "It's as if they never saw people before, and didn't know we were hunting them," he said.

  "Either that or they're already tame, and don't worry about people because they're used to having them around," Ulric Skakki said.

  "I don't think so." Naturally, the guards officer liked his own ideas better than someone else's.

  Count Hamnet looked sharply at Ulric Skakki. Whether Jesper did or not, Hamnet knew Ulric had come beyond the Glacier before. "Did you meet these tame deer in the wintertime?" he asked in a low voice.

  Ulric nodded. "I did. They act like musk oxen on the Bizogot plain- they scrape up the snow and eat what's underneath."

  "And do people herd them, the way the Bizogots herd musk oxen and mammoths?" Hamnet asked.

  "I can't prove that. I didn't see people with them," Ulric answered. "But there are people here, unless that owl you and the sorcerers flushed turned back into a white bear instead. And I don't think white bears herd deer, however much they might want to."

  "No doubt you're right." Hamnet Thyssen looked around. "I don't see any signs of herders, though."

  "Neither do I," Ulric said. "We must be on the edge of the country they usually wander. But that owl says we aren't the only ones who know the Glacier really has broken in two at last."

  There was a disturbing thought. Hamnet looked around again. The only people he saw were the travelers with whom he'd come so far. But what did that prove?

 
"All we can do is go on," Hamnet said.

  "No-we could go back," Ulric said. "We might be smart if we did. We've seen there's open land beyond the Glacier. What more do we need?"

  "What about the Golden Shrine?" Hamnet asked.

  "Well, what about it?" Ulric Skakki returned. "If you know where the bloody thing is, your Grace, lead the way."

  "You know I don't," Hamnet Thyssen said irritably.

  "Yes, I know that," Ulric said. "And I know I don't know where it is. Neither does Eyvind Torfinn, however much he wishes he did. Neither does Trasamund. Neither does Audun Gilli. And neither does the Bizogot shaman."

  "Liv," Hamnet said.

  "That's right." Ulric Skakki nodded. "And if I don't know, and if they don't know, then nobody up here from the other side of the Glacier knows-and nobody down there on the other side of the Glacier knows, either. And what are the odds of finding something if you don't know where in blazes to look for it? Rotten, if you ask me. So why waste time up here and maybe get caught by the weather-or by the folk who herd these deer? Better to take what we know and head back, isn't it?"

  Hamnet Thyssen frowned. He might be the nominal leader of the Raumsdalians here, but he knew too well what a painful word nominal was. Eyvind Torfinn had a higher degree of nobility than he did, and a mulish scholarly autonomy. Audun Gilli might obey or might go off and pick wild-flowers or look for something to drink. Ulric Skakki listened to himself and no one else. Jesper Fletti and his guardsmen listened to Gudrid first. As for Gudrid, if she listened to anyone under the sun-by no means obvious- she didn't heed her former husband.

  Then there were the Bizogots, whom Hamnet couldn't even claim to command. No one commanded Trasamund, who was as much a sovereign as Sigvat II. Hamnet thought that if he told Liv to do something, she might. . . if she decided it was a good idea.

  Wonderful. That may make one. Hamnet sighed. "Do you really suppose I could persuade the others to turn back?" he asked.

  "How do you know if you don't try?" Ulric Skakki replied. Count Hamnet sighed again. That sounded sensible, reasonable. Both men knew it wasn't, which only made it more irritating.