Beyong the Gap

Hamnet Thyssen nodded. "Yes, I can see how it would be." In winter up here, everything closed down. A man who spent most of his time inside one of the mammoth-hide tents with his wife and his children and his dogs and all their fleas wouldn't worry about how wide the world was. "You say it happens here," Hamnet went on. "Does it not with men of the Three Tusk clan?"

"Oh, no." Trasamund laughed at the very idea. "Oh, no, Raumsdalian. These folk have the plain. And so do we; I will not say otherwise. We have the plain, too, yes. But we also have the Glacier."

"Ah." If Hamnet were walking instead of riding, he would have kicked at the ground in a

And then, a few hours later, the travelers were no longer alone on the plain. Jesper Fietti pointed north. "Are those . . . mammoths?" the imperial guard captain asked in an unwontedly small voice.

"Not at all," Ulric Skakki said blandly. "Those are steppe fleas. And if you're not careful, they'll step on you."

Jesper grimaced. So did Hamnet Thyssen. Audun Gilli winced. Trasamund didn't get it for a moment. He had to think in his own language, and didn't understand Raumsdalian as readily. When he did, he roared laughter. "Steppe fleas, is it? If those are fleas, then the world is their dog."

"Maybe it is," Ulric said. "Only God knows why He made it the way He did. Maybe one of these days the world will scratch, and that will be the end of the fleas—and of us, too."

"Do not tell this to a priest, unless you want to burn for blasphemy," Hamnet Thyssen said.

"Do not tell this to a shaman, either. He may decide to sacrifice you to let out the madness in your spirit," Trasamund said. He snorted. "Steppe fleas!"

There were about a dozen mammoths—a herd of females with their young. Males wandered by themselves except during the late-summer mating season, when they would use their weight and their tusks to battle one another to see which of them fathered the new generation. The rest of the year, those tusks pushed snow off the grasses the mammoths ate and broke ice atop frozen streams so they could drink.

"Do not go too close," Trasamund warned. "Otherwise we shall have to step lively to flee the steppe fleas."

He waved a challenge to Ulric Skakki. Gri

No matter how bad his puns, the jarl's advice was good. Hamnet Thyssen might have wanted a closer look at the mammoths, but he understood they didn't want a closer look at him. The travelers got near enough to let him remind himself what marvelous beasts they were.

The females stood perhaps eight feet high at the shoulder. Males were bigger—he remembered that. They looked like great shaggy boulders shambling over the plain. The females were big enough for all ordinary use. The knobs of bone they had on top of their heads gave them high foreheads and a look of greater cleverness than their cousins, the forest mastodons. As far as Hamnet knew, that look was an illusion. It was a powerful illusion, though.

Unlike mastodons, mammoths also had a hump on their backs. They sloped down from it, so that their hind legs were relatively short. They had small ears and short trunks, which made it harder for them to freeze.

And they had long, black-brown hair that often led them to be called woolly mammoths. It wasn't wool; it wasn't anything like wool. The hairs were thick and coarse—they had to be half a dozen times as thick as a man's hair. But they were long—some of them as long as a man's arm—and they grew close together. Mammoths, like musk oxen, could get through almost any weather.

One of the females lifted her trunk and blew a warning blast. It sounded something like a trumpet, something like a gargle. Another female also trumpeted. The young mammoths ran behind their mothers. They were browner than the adults.

"How do you herd them?" Audun Gilli asked Trasamund.

"Carefully," the jarl answered, laughing.

The wizard looked disappointed. "I hoped for something more than that."

Trasamund almost told him where to head in. Then the Bizogot visibly thought better of showing his a

"What do you do when they stampede?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

"Try to stay out of their way, by God. Try not to get trampled and squashed," the Bizogot answered. He was joking, but then again he wasn't. After a moment, he went on, "You wave those torches around for all they're worth, too. Mammoths are like most beasts—they don't like fire."

"I have a question, too," Jesper Fletti said. He waited for Trasamund to nod his way, then asked, "How do you get the females tame enough for milking?"

"You bribe them." The Bizogot jarl spoke Raumsdalian with some relish. "There is a kind of grass that grows on some parts of the plain—blueflower, we call it in my language. The mammoths are wild for it. One of the things we do while we travel is pull up blueflower wherever we find it. When we set a pile of the dried grass in front of a mammoth, she will stand and eat it, and the milkers can do what they need to do. Yes, we bribe the mammoths. They might as well be people."

"Are they as clever as people say?" Audun asked.

"I don't know. How clever do people down in the Empire say they are?" Trasamund asked. "They know how to do more things than musk oxen can, I'll say that. And they remember better than musk oxen do, too."

"They have trunks," Hamnet Thyssen said. "Those are almost like hands. They let mammoths do things other animals can't."

"Yes, that's so. That makes them almost like people, too," Trasamund said. "One of these days, maybe, they'll try bribing us instead of the other way around." He chortled at his own wit. Like most Bizogots Count Hamnet had known, he wasn't shy about finding himself wonderful in all kinds of ways.

"Do any beasts besides men trouble them?" Ulric Skakki asked.

"Every once in a while, lions or a short-faced bear will take a calf that wanders too far from its mother," Trasamund replied. "Doesn't happen often, but it happens. But what really troubles them in the warmer times are bugs. In spite of all that hair, the flies and mosquitoes drive them wild."

"I've been up here. I believe that," Hamnet said. When the frozen plain thawed out in springtime—or thawed out as much as it ever did, anyhow— endless little ponds dotted the landscape. Mosquitoes laid eggs in those ponds and then rose in buzzing, biting swarms. Sometimes the clouds of them were thick enough to dim the sun. It was as if the soul of a vampire were reincarnated in a million beings instead of just one.

A baby mammoth came out from behind its mother and took a few curious steps toward the travelers. She trumpeted at it. When it didn't heed her, she walked up and thumped its side with her trunk. The blow couldn't have hurt, but it sent a message. The baby stopped.

"You see?" Trasamund said. "When the little one gets out of line, it gets whacked. So too it is among the Bizogots. We have no spoiled, whining folk among us, not like some places a man could name."

That was nonsense, as Hamnet Thyssen knew. Bizogots pulled together better than Raumsdalians. That didn't mean there were no spoiled mammoth-herders, and it didn't mean they never whined. More often than not, Hamnet would have argued the point with Trasamund. Today, he held his peace, not because he felt uncommonly generous but because Trasamund was looking right at Gudrid when he grumbled about spoiled Raumsdalians. That would have made Hamnet forgive and overlook a lot.