But he didn't want to quarrel with Liv, either, and so he said, "Well, you may be right."
"I am." She had no doubts. She reached out and tapped his arm. "Tell me this-does your shaman, that Audun Gilli, does he think terrible thoughts about God, too? If he does, how can he make magic work?"
"I do not know what Audun Gilli thinks about God," Hamnet answered. "I never worried about it."
"You never worried about God. You never worried about what he thinks of God." Liv sounded disbelieving. "You southern folk are strange indeed."
"If you want to know someone from the south who thinks about God, talk to Eyvind Torfinn," Hamnet said.
Liv rolled her eyes, which told him she already had. "He tells me more than I want to hear," she said. "He says now one thing, now another, till I don't know whether my wits are coming or going."
"You see? We cannot make you happy," Hamnet Thyssen said.
"That is not so," Liv said. "I am happy-why shouldn't I be? But I am confused about what you think. Of the two of us, you are the unhappy one."
She wasn't wrong. Hamnet tried to avoid admitting that, saying, "What I think about God has nothing to do with whether I am happy or not."
"Did I say it did?" the Bizogot shaman returned. "All I said was that you were not happy, and I was right about that. I am sorry I was right about it. People should be happy, don't you think?"
"That depends," Count Hamnet said. "Some people have more to be happy about than others."
"Do you want to be happy?" she asked, and then, with Bizogot bluntness, "Do you think I could make you happy, at least for a while?"
He couldn't very well mistake the meaning of that. He could, and did, shake his head before he even thought about it. "Thank you, but no," he said. "Women are what made me the way I am now. I do not believe the illness is also the cure."
Liv looked at him for a moment. "I am sure you were a fool before a woman ever made one of you," she said coolly, and swung her horse away from his. Even if she'd stayed next to him, he had no idea how he would have answered her.
When Liv made a point of avoiding him after that, it came as something of a relief. She gave him the uneasy feeling she knew things he didn't know, and not things her occult lore had taught her, either.
He wondered just how big a fool she thought he was. He didn't feel like a fool, not to himself. All he'd done was tell her the truth. If that was enough to anger her. . . then it was, that was all.
After Liv stayed away from him for a couple of days, Gudrid rode up alongside him. He tried to pretend she wasn't there. It didn't work. "It's your own fault," she said, sounding as certain as she always did.
"You don't know what you're talking about," Hamnet Thyssen answered stonily, but under the firm words lay a nasty fear that she really did.
Her rich, throaty laugh only made that fear worse. "Oh, yes, I do," she said. "I don't know what you see in that Bizogot wench, but plainly you see something. God couldn't tell you why-she smells like a goat."
"So does everybody up here-including you," Hamnet said. Just then, as if to mock him, the breeze brought him a faint whiff of attar of roses. If Gudrid smelled like a goat, she smelled like a perfumed goat.
He couldn't even make her angry. She just laughed some more. "As if you care," she said. "You chased her too hard, and you went and put her back up, and it serves you right."
Hamnet Thyssen gaped. That was so wrong, on so many different levels, that for a moment he had no idea how to respond to it. "You really have lost your mind," he said at last.
"I don't think so." Gudrid, in fact, sounded maddeningly sure. "I know you better than you know yourself."
"Oh, you do, do you?" Hamnet scowled at her. "Then why didn't you know what you'd do to me when you started playing the whore?"
Gudrid yawned. "I knew. I just didn't care."
He wanted to kill her. But if he did, she would die laughing at him, and he couldn't stand that. "You came all this way to torment me, didn't you?"
Gudrid buffed her nails against the wool of her tunic-an artful display. Everything she did seemed carefully calculated to drive him mad. "Well, I wasn't doing anything else when Eyvind decided to come," she answered.
Cursing, Hamnet Thyssen rode away from her. He really might have tried to murder her had she followed. She didn't, but her laughter pursued him.
As they did south of the Glacier, woolly mammoths roamed the plains here. The travelers gave them a wide berth. Hamnet would not have wanted to go mammoth hunting with the men and weapons they had along, if they were starving, if no other food presented itself-then, maybe. As things were, he found the great beasts better admired at a distance.
"Mammoths make me believe in God," Trasamund said one bright midnight. The Bizogot jarl was roasting a chunk of meat from one of the swarms of deer that shared the plain with the mammoths. "They truly do. How could mammoths make themselves? God had to do it."
"You could say the same thing about mosquitoes." Eyvind Torfinn punctuated the observation by slapping. "You could even say God liked mosquitoes better than mammoths, because he made so many more of them."
"No." Trasamund smiled, but he wasn't in a joking mood. "Any old demon could come up with your mosquito. A mammoth, now, a mammoth takes imagination and power. Isn't that so, Thyssen?"
Hamnet started. He sprawled by the fire for no better reason than that he didn't feel like sleeping. "I don't know what God does, or why," he answered. "If he tells me, I promise you'll be the first to hear."
Ulric Skakki thought that was funny, whether Trasamund did or not. "If God talks to anybody, he'll probably talk to you, your Grace," he said. "Me, I don't wonder so much where these mammoths came from. I wonder who herds them, and when the herders are going to show themselves."
"Haven't seen anyone yet," Trasamund said. "And the mammoths seem wild."
"How can you know that?" Eyvind Torfinn sounded curious, not doubtful. He usually sounded curious.
"One of the ways we tame them-as much as we do tame them-is to give them berries and other things they like," the jarl answered. "They're clever animals-they soon learn we have treats for them. They sometimes come up and try to get treats from us whether we have any or not."
"Back in Nidaros, my cat will do the same thing," Eyvind Torfinn said. "I don't think I would want a woolly mammoth hopping into my lap, though."
That did make Trasamund laugh, but he said, "These mammoths don't seem to think we have berries for them, so I would guess no one tames them."
Ulric Skakki made a dubious noise. Liv didn't look convinced, either; they were speaking the Bizogot language, so she had no trouble following along. Hamnet Thyssen also had his doubts.
"Could people tame mammoths some different way?" Ulric asked.
Trasamund looked down his nose at him. "People could do all kinds of things," the Bizogot replied. "They could waste their time with foolish questions, for instance."
"Thank you so much, your Ferocity," Ulric Skakki murmured.
"Any time." Trasamund was too blunt to recognize sarcasm, or maybe too sly to admit to recognizing it.
"We know there are people here," Liv said. "Either that or the owls in the land beyond the Glacier are sorcerers in their own right." She understood what sarcasm was about, even if not all Bizogots did.
Trasamund refused to let it bother him. "Maybe there are. We haven't seen any people here. That's all I can tell you."
"We have not seen the Golden Shrine, either," Eyvind Torfinn said. "Nevertheless, we are confident it's here somewhere."
"Well, people are probably here somewhere, too," Trasamund allowed with a show of generosity. "I don't think they're anywhere close by, though. You worriers are just trying to use this to get me to turn around and go back." He glowered at Hamnet Thyssen.
"Don't look at me that way," Count Hamnet said. "I didn't even take sides in this argument. You know more about mammoths than I do." You ought to. Your hide and your skull are thick enough.
&n
bsp; Even though he didn't say that out loud, Trasamund sent him another suspicious stare. The Bizogot was clever enough to know when someone was thinking unkind thoughts about him. Why wasn't he clever enough to know they were thinking those thoughts because he was acting like a fool?
Instead of going back, they went on, though at the slow, halfhearted pace they'd been using for quite a while. One day seemed much like another-broad plains ahead, behind, and to all sides. People said the sea looked that way, too. Count Hamnet couldn't speak about that; he'd never seen the sea. He did know the low, flat landscape bored him almost to the point of dozing on horseback.
One herd of deer, one herd of mammoths, one flock of ptarmigan or snow buntings came to look much like another, too. The travelers didn't see many of the great striped cats or enormous bears. He wasn't sorry about that, not even a little.
Another reason days all seemed the same was that they blended into one another so smoothly. A stretch of bright twilight for a couple of hours bracketing midnight, and then the sun came up again. You could travel whenever you pleased, rest whenever you pleased, sleep whenever you pleased.
And then, almost before Hamnet consciously realized it, real night returned to the world. The sun didn't come up quite so far in the northeast, didn't set quite so far in the northwest. It stayed below the horizon longer, and dipped farther below. Hamnet got reacquainted with stars he hadn't seen for weeks.
Birds sensed the change before he did. The sky was a murmur, sometimes a thunder, of wings. Flocks from even farther north began coming down upon and past the travelers. They knew winter was on the way, though the sun still shone brightly and days were, if anything, warmer than they had been when summer first began.
When the deer began to grow restless, even Trasamund acknowledged that the time to think things through had come. "We should turn around and head for the Gap again," he said, as if no one had ever suggested that before. "We are not going to find the Golden Shrine. Time to put away things of legend and remember the real world."
Ulric Skakki shook his head. "What a foolish idea! I think we should keep on wandering west through this godforsaken country till we come to the edge of the world and fall off it."
Trasamund glared at him. "Is that a joke? I don't hear anyone laughing."
"Then maybe it's not a joke," Ulric answered. "Maybe turning around is a good idea. Maybe it should have seemed like a good idea to you before this afternoon."
"I know when to turn back," the Bizogot jarl rumbled. "I always said I would know when to turn back."
"People say all sorts of things," Ulric Skakki observed. "Sometimes they mean them. Sometimes they don't. You never can tell ahead of time."
Glaring still, Trasamund said, "When we set out again come morning, I will ride south and east. Others may do as they please. Anyone who wants to fall off the edge of the world is welcome to, as far as I am concerned. Nobody will miss a slick-talking Raumsdalian, not one bit. Some folk are too clever for their own good."
Some folk are too stupid for their own good. But Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. Trasamund, whatever else you could say about him, was nobody's fool. Some folk are too stubborn for their own good. Yes, that fit the Bizogot better.
Hamnet wondered whether Trasamund would have decided to turn around sooner if he himself and Ulric and Liv hadn't kept trying to talk him into it. He wouldn't have been surprised. Trasamund was just the man to dig in his heels and try to go in the direction opposite the one other people urged on him. Count Hamnet was that kind of man himself, so he recognized the symptoms-here, perhaps, more slowly than he might have.
That night was the darkest one Hamnet remembered since passing beyond the Glacier. Maybe his own gloom painted the sky blacker than it was. Maybe the moon's being down added to the way the heavens seemed uncommonly unreachable, the stars small and dim and lost.
And maybe he was feeling something that was really in the air. Audun Gilli and Liv both woke screaming around midnight. That set Gudrid screaming, too. She only wanted to know what was going on, which seemed reasonable enough, but she made an ungodly lot of noise trying to find out.
"Too late!" Audun said.
"Much too late!" Liv agreed. They stared at each other, their eyes enormous and seeming filled with blood in the dim light the embers shed.
Hamnet Thyssen needed a moment to remember that neither of them understood the other's speech. The knowledge sent ice stabbing through him that had nothing to do with the enormous walls of ice he'd passed between.
"Do you hear them, your Ferocity?" Ulric Skakki asked.
"I'd have to be deaf not to," Trasamund answered, which was true enough. "They both had nightmares. So what?" He was not going to be impressed. No matter what happened, he wouldn't be-he was too determined.
"No, by God," Count Hamnet said. "They didn't have nightmares. They had the same nightmare. Do you think that's good news?"
"I don't think I can do much about it any which way," Trasamund said, and that was also true. He yawned-not quite theatrically, but not quite naturally either. "About the only thing I can do that will help at all is go back to sleep, so I will . . . if the rest of you let me." He rolled himself in his blanket and turned his back on the fire-and on the rest of the travelers.
"What was it?" Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv, who lay closer to him than Audun Gilli did.
Whatever it was, it shook her enough to make her forget their quarrel. "It was . . . bad," she answered. "It was coming for us. I don't know what it would have done. I didn't want to find out. Maybe I was lucky I screamed myself awake."
"Maybe you were," Hamnet said. "If it comes onus in the waking world, can we get away so easily?"
"The waking world and the other one are less separate than you seem to think," the shaman said. "They touch, they blend, they mingle. You can't always say for sure that something is part of the one but not of the other."
Being a man who liked things neat and orderly, with each one in its proper slot, Hamnet Thyssen would like to have argued with her. Here in this land beyond the Glacier, here with the chill of winter in his heart, he found he couldn't. He couldn't sleep again, either, despite the snores rising from Trasamund.
The Bizogot jarl headed back toward the Gap faster than he'd gone before. No matter what he said there in the darkness, he worried about what Audun Gilli and Liv sensed, too.
Everything seemed normal for the next couple of days. Trasamund swore when a herd of mammoths crossed the travelers' path. A moment later, he swore again, in awe and amazement. The great beasts carried men atop them.
XI
When Trasamund's curses ran dry, he said, "But they can't do that." Hamnet Thyssen was inclined to agree with him. The idea of herding woolly mammoths was astonishing enough from a Raumsdalian point of view. The idea of taming them to the point where they could be ridden . .. Count Hamnet didn't know whether to be impressed or appalled. He ended up both at once, a stew of emotions that left him queasy.
Some of the mammoth-riders carried lances long enough to skewer someone in front of their enormous mounts. Count Hamnet wouldn't have wanted to try that-how much did one of those things weigh? Others had quivers on their backs. Still others seemed unarmed. After a bit, Hamnet saw that they were the men actually in charge of controlling the mammoths. They had iron-tipped bone goads with which they whacked the enormous animals to get them to do what they wanted.
What they wanted, right then, was to get a closer look at the travelers from the far side of the Glacier. The column of woolly mammoths swung into a line and bore down upon the Raumsdalians and Bizogots as smoothly as one of the Emperor's cavalry squadrons.
"Will you look at that?" Trasamund murmured. "Will you look at that?" He sounded as overwhelmed, and as full of yearning, as a boy on the edge of manhood staring at a beautiful woman and contemplating wonderful things he'd never imagined before. His eyes were as big and wide as the youth's might have been, too.
Hamnet Thyssen did not expect he would ever maste
r the art of riding mammoths. He didn't feel he was suffering any great loss, either. His attention focused not on the shaggy beasts but on the men who rode them.
He did not like their looks. The closer they came, the less he liked it. They were not unhandsome-just the opposite, in a fierce half-eagle, half-lion sort of way. They had swarthy skins, big scimitar noses, proud cheekbones, and gleaming dark eyes. They wore their black beards in elaborate curled waves that rippled halfway down their chests, and their hair in neat buns at the napes of their necks.
Those gleaming eyes, though .. . Hamnet hoped his imagination was running away with him, but he did not like what he thought he saw in them. The Bizogots were hard. They had to be, living where they did, where so many things were so scarce. They mostly weren't cruel for the sake of cruelty. Hamnet Thyssen wasn't so sure about these strangers.
One of the men cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted something. To Hamnet's ear, it was just guttural nonsense. "I am sorry, my friends, but I don't understand you," Eyvind Torfinn answered in Raumsdalian.
"Do you speak my tongue?" Trasamund called in the Bizogot language.
More harsh-sounding gibberish came from the strangers. Eyvind and the Bizogot jarl both spread their hands to show they could make no sense of it. Ulric Skakki rode up alongside Count Hamnet and said, "I wonder if they would understand if Audun or Liv hooted like an owl."
"I wouldn't be surprised," Hamnet answered.
One of the strangers got down from his mammoth and approached the travelers from beyond the Glacier. He used the beast's long hair for handholds. The mammoth let him, which impressed Hamnet of itself. The man wasn't very tall, but he had some of the widest shoulders Hamnet had ever seen. He was built like a brick, all muscle everywhere.
He wore furs and leather, as the Bizogots did, but there the resemblance ended. The Bizogots wore clothes that fit tightly, while his jacket and trousers were loose and baggy, perhaps to let him stuff in extra padding if he wanted to. He had on enormous felt boots, into which he tucked the bottoms of his trousers. With footgear so large, his gait was more waddle than walk, but it was an impressive waddle.
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