"What did you say to him?" Hamnet heard Liv ask.
"Beats me." Ulric shrugged an elaborate shrug.
"Can you explain about the law of contagion in the Bizogot language?" Audun asked.
"I doubt it," Ulric said. "I can't even explain the law of contagion in Raumsdalian." He rode off, whistling. Audun muttered under his breath. Whatever he said, it didn't change Ulric Skakki into a lemming on the spot. Hamnet thought that was too bad.
He rode by himself. Ulric rode by himself. So did Trasamund. So did Eyvind Torfinn. And so did Gudrid. Audun Gilli and Liv rode together, but they couldn't talk to each other. The knot of Raumsdalian guardsmen followed Gudrid, but far enough away to keep her from screaming at them.
We're a happy bunch, Hamnet thought.
A teratorn circled high above them. With the air blowing down off the Glacier the way it did, what were the wind currents like for birds here? The huge scavenger had no trouble staying airborne, anyhow.
Audun Gilli watched the great bird soar for a while. Then he asked Liv, "Do you suppose it's an omen?"
Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble understanding him. The shaman, however, spoke no Raumsdalian. "What are you talking about?" she asked in her own tongue—which Audun couldn't follow.
The wizard threw up his hands in frustration. Then, after casting a glance of appeal that Count Hamnet stonily ignored, Audun pointed up into the sky at the teratorn. Liv pointed at it, too. They agreed on that much—and on no more. Audun tried to use gestures to explain what he meant. They didn't seem to mean anything to Liv.
To no one in particular, Ulric Skakki said, "We'd better find the Golden Shrine, and we'd better find it soon. We aren't fit to have anything to do with one another unless we find it." Unlike the wizard and the shaman, he spoke the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian, and put his plaintive comment into both languages.
"That is well said," Eyvind Torfinn said, first in one tongue and then in the other.
"Yes, true enough." Trasamund used his own language first, then unbent enough to say the same thing in Raumsdalian.
Several travelers eyed Hamnet Thyssen. He realized he was the other one who knew both the Empires language and the Bizogots'. Liv had only the nomads' tongue. Gudrid might understand some of that, but she showed no signs of speaking it, while Audun and the guardsmen knew only Raumsdalian. Count Hamnet didn't want to say anything; he would rather have ridden along stewing in his own juices. But those stares wore him down faster than he thought they would. "Yes, yes," he said grudgingly, first in one tongue, then in the other.
"Thank you," Audun Gilli said, maybe to him, maybe to Ulric Skakki, maybe to all the men who could use both languages. The wizard added, "Will someone please translate for me?"
At almost the same time, Liv said, "Will someone please tell me what the southern wizard is trying to say about the teratorn?"
“I’ll do it," Hamnet said, heaving a sigh. Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow in surprise, Hamnet caught his eye. With malice aforethought, he went on, "Better to translate than never."
Ulric flinched. So did Audun Gilli. "What did you tell them?" Liv asked. After a moment's thought, Hamnet was able to duplicate the pun in her language. The Bizogots' tongue and Raumsdalian weren't close enough to let wordplay go back and forth between them all the time, or even very often; he felt a certain somber pride at managing here. By the look on Liv's face, she would have been just as well pleased if he hadn't. Or he thought so, anyhow, till she winked at him. That startled him into a smile of his own. "And now, about the teratorn .. ." she prompted.
"Will you tell her what I meant?" Audun Gilli asked at the same time.
"I can translate, as long as you don't both talk at once," Count Hamnet told each of them in turn. He glanced up toward the teratorn, but it had flown away.
Even so, he explained what the wizard said. Liv considered that, then replied, "If it was an omen, if it was a shadow over us, it is gone now, and we go forward without it." Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding.
Out on the frozen plain, Hamnet Thyssen had felt as if he and his companions were so many ants walking across a plate. Here between the riven halves of the Glacier, he had a different feeling, and one even less pleasant. Those great cold cliffs might have been the sides of two crates . .. and as the travelers went farther and farther north, someone—God, maybe—was pushing the crates closer and closer together. If God shoved once too often .. .
Better not to think about that.
But the thought got harder to avoid as day followed day. At its southern outlet, the Gap was more than fifty miles wide. When the travelers rode into it, they had the Glacier on the horizon to either side of them, but they could look back over their shoulders and see open land behind. And, while the Glacier serrated the horizon to east and west, there was plenty of sky above it.
With each day's travel, though—sometimes with each hour's—the Glacier grew higher and higher. Those sheer, towering cliffs ate more and more of the sky. Days were shorter than they would have been otherwise, for the sun needed extra time to climb above the Glacier to the east and sank below the Glacier to the west all too soon.
And, with each day's travel, the ground got squashier and the bugs got worse. Meltwater poured from the ice on both sides of the Glacier, more and more as days lengthened. Pools and ponds and puddles, creeks and rills and rivulets, were everywhere. Midges and flies and mosquitoes mated madly. Their offspring rose in ravenous, bloodthirsty hordes.
Gudrid veiled herself in fine, almost transparent cloth. That meant she got bitten less often than the others. It didn't mean she kept all the buzzing biters at bay.
"By God, now I know another reason why the Bizogots breed such shaggy horses," Hamnet Thyssen said, smashing a fly on the back of his hand.
"What do you mean?" Ulric Skakki asked. The bites blotching his face made him look as if he'd come down with some horrid disease.
"Well, the longer their hair, the better they do in the winters up here. That's plain," Count Hamnet said, and Ulric nodded. The nobleman went on, "But the longer their hair, the more trouble the bugs have getting at 'em, too."
"Maybe that's another reason woolly mammoths are woolly, too," Ulric said after a moment's thought. "But who bred them? They had to be here long before the Bizogots started herding them. They're still closer to wild than tamed."
"Maybe God bred them," Hamnet said.
"Maybe he did," Ulric agreed. "It would give him something to do with his time, anyway." In another tone of voice, he would have sounded blasphemous. As things were, he seemed to find the idea reasonable. When he slapped a moment later, he did sound blasphemous. And so did Hamnet Thyssen, when something that probably specialized in piercing mammoth hide bit him in the back of the neck. He didn't get the bug, which made his language fouler still.
Finding dry ground to sleep on got harder and harder. Trasamund and Liv had oiled mammoth hides to unroll beneath them as groundsheets. The Raumsdalians weren't so lucky. "If you've been this way before, you should have warned us it was a bog," Hamnet said to Ulric in a low voice.
"I couldn't—I didn't know," Ulric answered. "Everything was nice and hard then." He looked around to make sure Trasamund and Liv couldn't overhear.
"You came through here in the winter?" Hamnet Thyssen asked. "What was it like?"
"Cold," Ulric Skakki said, with feeling. "Colder than . . . Well, cold." What didn't he say? Colder than Gudrid's heart? Hamnet wouldn't have been surprised.
"Does the Glacier grow in the wintertime?" Hamnet asked.
Ulric nodded. "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. You can almost watch it happen. The way the Glacier goes forward when it's cold, you wonder how it ever goes back."
"Bad winters, it does come forward and stay there for a while. I know that," Hamnet said. "On balance, though, it's been moving back more than forward. Otherwise, the Bizogots would be herding mammoths where Nidaros stands."
"You mean they don't?" Ulric Skakki's eyebrows arched in artfully simulated surprise. "And all this time I thought. . ."
"All this time, I thought you were a chowderhead," Count Hamnet said. "And here I see I was right."
"Your servant, your Grace." Ulric bowed in the saddle. "And few clammier places have I ever been than this."
"Ow!" Hamnet Thyssen mimed squashing him like a mosquito. Ulric Skakki bowed again. Count Hamnet muttered to himself for the next quarter of an hour. In a way, that was a measure of how bad Ulric's pun was. In another way, it was a measure of how good. Hamnet forgot about the journey, even forgot about Gudrid, for a little while. He supposed that was good, too.
When someone shook Count Hamnet awake in the middle of the night, his first confused thought was that the northern sky had caught fire. Curtains and sheets of coruscating red and yellow and ghostly green danced there. Oh, he realized muzzily. The Northern Lights. They showed themselves only rarely down in Nidaros. He saw them more often as he traveled through the Bizogot country. Here in the Gap, he'd come a long way north indeed, and they burned more brightly than he’d ever seen them before.
All the same, he didn't think whoever was shaking him awake wanted him to enjoy their beauty. The shifting, multicolored light they shed let him see Audun Gilli crouched to one side of him and Liv to the other.
That made him reach for his sword. He didn't think they'd roused him to tell him they were running off with each other. They'd better not be, he thought. That would infuriate him for any number of reasons.
"What is it?" he asked, first in Raumsdalian, then in the Bizogots' language. Needing to ask twice was one more inconvenience.
"Someone," Audun Gilli whispered.