IX
Oh," Liv whispered, looking first to one side, then to the other. She shook her head in awe and wonder. "Oh," she said again.
Hamnet Thyssen couldn't have put it better himself. They were passing through the narrowest part of the Gap. The ground between the two titanic ice mountains was soggy, almost saturated, with meltwater. The horses had to pick their way through the mud as carefully as they could. That meant their riders had to pay close attention to what they were doing—except they couldn't, because the spectacle to either side was too magnificent.
The Gap had melted through, yes, but not by much. The gap in the ice was only a few hundred yards wide here. It towered up and up and up to either side. How far up was it to the top of the Glacier? A mile? Two miles? Three? Hamnet didn't know. He couldn't begin to guess. A clever geometer or surveyor might have been able to figure it out, but he was neither. Far enough to be daunting—far enough and then some.
Except near noon, the shadow of one half of the Glacier or the other shrouded the Gap. The ice smoked, as ice did in warm air. But this wasn't just ice—this was the Glacier. Fingers of mist swirled and curled about the travelers, now obscuring the frozen, towering cliffs, now leaving them fully visible.
Eyvind Torfinn doffed his fur hat to Trasamund. "I thank you," Eyvind said in the Bizogot language. "By God, your Ferocity, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I might have died without ever seeing this marvel. I've lived many years, but nothing else comes close to it."
"What does he say?" Audun Gilli asked. Ulric Skakki rode closer to him than Hamnet did, and translated Eyvind's words into Raumsdalian. The wizard nodded. "Oh, yes," he said. "I am younger than Eyvind Torfinn, but I do not expect to see anything to match this again."
"It is a wonder—no doubt of that," Ulric said. Though he'd seen it before, he had no trouble sounding impressed again. What would this passage be like in winter? One word immediately occurred to Count Hamnet. It would be cold. It would be narrower in the wintertime, too; as ice melted back when the sun swung north in the sky, so it grew again as days shortened. And days this far north would be short indeed come winter.
With a crack like that of a breaking branch but immensely larger, a house-sized chunk of ice broke off from the eastern Glacier and thudded to the ground. Hamnet Thyssen's horse snorted and sidestepped nervously. If he were on his feet, he thought he would have felt an earthquake. The broken piece hadn't rolled and fallen more than a bowshot's distance, either. What would have happened if it had started halfway up the Glacier? He shivered, though they weren't shrouded in mist just then. An avalanche would have happened, that was what.
Jesper Fletti s head kept whipping back and forth, back and forth, too. The guards officer didn't seemed awed by the spectacle of the Glacier to either side of him; he acted more like a trapped animal. "It's like being in a box," he said hoarsely. "In a box."
And it was, with the opening ahead so narrow. Some people didn't like being closed in. Who did, really? But it had to bother Jesper more than most people. Hamnet wondered how he liked sleeping in the tight, enfolding blackness of a mammoth-hide tent. Maybe it worried him less if he couldn't see it.
Count Hamnet might have asked another man. He might have consoled another man. He might even have consoled Jesper Fletti under different circumstances. He had nothing against Jesper as a guards officer; Sigvat II needed able men, and Jesper plainly was one. But he'd come north to protect Gudrid, and that meant Hamnet had as little to do with him as he could.
Ulric Skakki also looked to left and right. There in the narrows of the Gap, what else could a man do ... unless he chose to look up and up and up at one half of the Glacier or the other? Hamnet Thyssen had tried that once. He didn't do it any more. It gave him the uneasy feeling he would fall up the Glacier. He knew he wouldn't. But what he knew and what his eyes told him were two different things, and any man had trouble disbelieving his eyes.
"I think the Gap is a little wider here than it was an hour ago," Ulric said. "Are we really past the narrowest part?"
As soon as he asked the question, the travelers all started making the same calculation. "I do believe we are," Trasamund said.
Jesper Fletti drew in a loud, deep breath, as if being past the narrows meant his chest wasn't squeezed as tightly as it had been before. He probably thought it wasn't. That was as much in his mind as Hamnet's fear of falling up the Glacier. But, in many ways, what felt real was real.
"By God!" Audun Gilli exclaimed. "If we keep going—when we keep going, I mean—we'll put the Glacier behind us. We'll have to look south to see it. That seems .. . unnatural."
"It may seem unnatural, but it's so—I've done it," Trasamund said. "And believe me, Raumsdalian, it's much stranger for me than it ever could be for you. I've always had the Glacier to the north of me whenever I turned my head. The Glacier was—is—the northern horizon for me. When I rode down to the Empire and it disappeared behind me, the sky looked wrong. The world looked wrong. Seeing it in the south—that's worse than wrong. It's . . ." He paused, groping for the word in Raumsdalian.
"Perverted?" Gudrid suggested.
The Bizogot jarl nodded. "Yes, that's what I wanted to say. I thank you. Seeing the Glacier behind me is perverted."
"Translate for me," Liv said to Hamnet Thyssen. "What do they say?" Count Hamnet did. The shaman's eyes widened. "The Glacier behind us?" she whispered. "I hadn't thought of that. It's wrong, it's impossible—and it's going to happen, isn't it?"
"If we keep going, how can it help but happen?" Hamnet replied. He found the word Gudrid had used the most fitting to describe what that would be like. He also found it much too fitting that she should have been the one to come up with that particular word.
"It seems mad," Liv said. "When you have a fever, when the world whirls round and round so you don't know what's real and what's a dream—then you might think you'd gone north of the Glacier. Otherwise?" She shook her head. "Not a chance."
"Except you're going to do it," Hamnet Thyssen said. "We're all going to do it. Maybe this is the part of the world where everything goes mad. Look at Audun Gilli s enchanted needle."
"Yes, that was strange—is strange," Liv agreed. "If we go far enough north of the Glacier, will the needle point south when it's trying to tell us north?"
Hamnet blinked. He hadn't thought of that. "Maybe it will," he said. Then he turned the thought into Raumsdalian and passed it on to Audun.
It made the wizard blink, too—blink and then start to laugh. "Who knows?" he said. "What I want is the chance to find out."
Little by little, the space between the two halves of the Glacier widened, as it had narrowed before. Jesper Fletti became his old self again. "I don't feel as if everything is pressing in on me any more," he said. "I don't feel as if I have to do this"—he made pushing motions with both hands— "to hold the ice mountains apart."
"That wouldn't do you any good," Count Hamnet pointed out.
"Oh, I know, your Grace. I know it here." Jesper tapped his head. "But I don't know it here, or here." His hand went to his heart, and then to his belly.
"When will we see something different?" Gudrid said. "Everything looks the same as it did on the right side of the Glacier."
However much Hamnet wanted to quarrel with his former wife, he couldn't, not because of that. Everything on this side of the Glacier looked the same to him as it had on the other side, too.
But Trasamund shook his head. "Oh, no," he said, and then, "Oh, no," again, as if to stress how much he disagreed. "Some of the flowers and plants here—I've never seen anything like them down in the lands we know."
"Marsh plants?" Gudrid sniffed. "I don't care anything about marsh plants. I want to see something interesting. Where are your white bears? Where is the Golden Shrine?" She rounded on Eyvind Torfinn. "Where is the Golden Shrine? You're supposed to know about these things."
She talked to her husband the way she might have talked to a majordomo back in Nidaros—as someone who did know about things, yes, but who had better not presume to be her equal. And Eyvind Torfinn put up with it. Gudrid had ways of making men put up with things. Earl Eyvind coughed and said, "You must understand, my dear, this is the first time a real exploring party has come north of the Glacier—this is the first time an exploring party could have come north of the Glacier. We don't know just where the Golden Shrine is. Truth to tell, we don't know it's here at all. We hope to find out."
That made good sense to Hamnet Thyssen. He thought it would quiet Gudrid down, but she only sniffed again. "What nonsense!" she said. "All we need to do is grab somebody up here and squeeze him. On this side of the Glacier, they'll know just where the silly old Shrine is."
Count Hamnet stared. So did Ulric Skakki. Eyvind Torfinn looked as amazed as if a teratorn were writing in the sky with characters of fire. Even Trasamund, who had his full measure of straightforward Bizogot brutality, seemed taken aback. But then he guffawed. "You've got all the answers, don't you, my sweet?"
"Well, this isn't a very hard question," Gudrid said.
Trasamund laughed some more. Earl Eyvind held his head in both hands. He'd spent most of his life looking for lore about the Golden Shrine. He knew how much he didn't know. Gudrid had no idea about any of that. Instead of untying a knot, she wanted to slash it through with a sword. Maybe that would work. On the other hand . . .
"If we grab a local and squeeze him, that won't make his clan love us," Ulric Skakki observed.
But nothing fazed Gudrid. She waved the worry aside. "Who says he has to get back to his clan? We leave him out for the dire wolves, or whatever they have here."
"I would not care to approach the Golden Shrine with blood on my hands," Eyvind Torfinn said.
"If we can't find it without doing whatever we have to do, then we'll do it, that's all." Gudrid sounded very sure of herself. She commonly did.
"Remember the owl," Audun Gilli said. "Whoever lives here has powers of his own. We are only visitors. We would do well to remember that."
She looked down her straight nose at the wizard. "Who here is the man, and who the woman?" Audun blushed like a child.
But even Jesper Fletti shook his head. "The sorcerer is right," he said. "We're a long way from the Bizogot country, even, and a demon of a lot farther from the Empire. We couldn't fight a war up here. Keeping any kind of army supplied as it goes up through the Gap . . ." He shook his head. "I wouldn't care to try it."
Gudrid only sniffed again. She didn't worry when someone disagreed with her, because she was always sure she was right. "What are we going to do?" she said. "Turn around and go home without finding the Golden Shrine? I don't think so."
Hamnet Thyssen feared they would have to do exactly that. Summer didn't last long up here. The Bizogots knew how to winter next to the Glacier, but he and his countrymen didn't. They'd never had to. Before they froze and starved, they would need to head back to a more tolerable clime.
The Golden Shrine ... He looked around, as if expecting to spy it on the northern horizon. That made him laugh at himself. They weren't even out of the Gap yet. This ground had lain under the Glacier for years uncounted. Wherever the Golden Shrine might be, it wasn't here.