"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.