Beyong the Gap

"Let's go," he said. "Maybe the others will come back to feed on their friend."

"I think not." Ulric Skakki pointed up into the sky. "Are those just ordinary vultures, or are they teratorns?"

"Teratorns." Eyvind answered before Trasamund could. "You can tell by the pattern of white and black under the wings."

"By the size, too, when they get lower," Trasamund added. "But they won't, not while we're hanging around the offal."

Sure enough, when the travelers rode north, the three or four teratorns spiraled down out of the sky to squabble over the bounty Trasamund left behind. They were enormous birds, with a wingspan as wide as two tall men. And down in the south, Hamnet Thyssen had heard, there were bigger teratorns still, their grotesque naked heads wattled and striped in shades of blue and yellow. All vultures were ugly. Those southern teratorns seemed to take ugliness to an almost surreal level, one where even grotesqueness took on a beauty all its own.

"Do Bizogots also eat teratorn meat?" Eyvind Torfi

"If we have to. If we are starving. Otherwise . . ." Trasamund shook his head. "It is a foul bird. It eats filth and carrion. Its flesh tastes of its food, the same as any vulture's." He made a nasty face. Did that mean he was once— or more than once— hungry enough to have to eat flesh like that? Hamnet Thyssen wondered, but he didn't ask.

Like the totem animal for which it was named, the Vole clan was small. But the jarl of the clan, a burly fellow named Wacho, had more than his share of pride. "Oh, yes, voles are little beasts," he said. "But the frozen plain would die if not for them. Who feeds the weasels? Who feeds the foxes? Who feeds the lynxes? Who feeds the snowy owls? The vole. Give the vole its due."

Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine someone down in Nidaros singing the praises of the house mouse. He couldn't do it. For one thing, folk in Nidaros had plenty of other things to worry about. For another, the Bizogots were more closely attuned to nature than his own people. To Raumsdalians, house mice were nuisances, to be trapped or poisoned or hunted with cats. To Bizogots, voles were part of the vast web of life that spread across their land.

Who was right? Who was wrong? Hamnet shrugged. Life for the mammoth-herders was harder than it was in the Empire. By the nature of things, it had to be. He’d grown up in the Raumsdalian way himself, and he preferred it. But sometimes the question was one of difference rather than right and wrong. He thought that was so here.

As usual when a clan guested the travelers, they feasted till they neared the bursting point. "I think the idea is to give us a layer of blubber like a mammoths," Ulric Skakki said, gnawing the meat from yet another musk-ox rib.

"That's all very well," Hamnet said, "but if we don't fit into our clothes, the blubber won't do us enough good to make up for it."

Audun Gilli started to say something. He wasn't a big man, but he had a respectable pile of bones in front of him. Before he could speak, someone new came into Wacho's tent—a fantastically dressed Bizogot whose jacket and trousers were elaborately embroidered and fringed, so that he seemed almost to be wearing a pelt. The resemblance was only strengthened by the bear claws at his wrists and ankles, and by the bearskin mask now pushed back from his face.

"This is Witigis," Wacho said. "He is the shaman of the Voles."

Witigis's gaze was quick and darting, more the look of a wild animal than a man. Shamans said they had closer ties to God than Raumsdalian priests dreamed of wi

But when his gaze fell on Audun Gilli, he stiffened. So did the Raumsdalian wizard. They stared at each other. Without looking as he took it, Witigis grabbed a rib and started chewing on the meat. Grease glistened around his mouth. His eyes never left Audun Gilli's.

"Like calls to like," Ulric whispered.

"Maybe," Count Hamnet answered. "But if that's so, which one of them did you just insult?" Ulric laughed, for all the world as if he were joking.

Witigis began to sing. It wasn't an ordinary song, even an ordinary Bizogot song. It had words, in the mammoth-herders' tongue, but they weren't words that made sense, at least not to Count Hamnet. It also had hums and growls and barks and sounds that perhaps should have been words but weren't, not in any tongue Hamnet knew.

And as Witigis sang, he ... changed. At first, Hamnet Thyssen rubbed his eyes, not sure what he was seeing. But there could be no doubt. Witigis's fringed regalia became real fur. The bear claws he wore were no longer ornaments. They grew from his fingers and toes as if they always had. After he pulled the mask down over his blue-eyed visage, his mouth opened wide to show fangs that never sprouted from any merely human jaw. Nor did his growl spring from any human throat. There he crouched on all fours—an undersized but otherwise perfect short-faced bear.

Wacho looked proud of his shaman. Trasamund nodded as if to say he had seen the like but admired the performance. The Raumsdalians all seemed a little uneasy, or more than a little.

All but Audun Gilli. He too began to sing, a calm song that might almost have been a lullaby. Count Hamnet had nearly as much trouble understanding him as he had with Witigis. Audun's words were Raumsdalian, but in a dialect so old that it came close to being another language. Hamnet needed so long to grasp one bit that several others would slip past him, uncomprehended, till he seized on another small clump of familiar sounds.

Eyvind Torfi

Audun sang on. And, little by little, the shaman lost his bearishness. His fur coat became embroidery and fringes once more. The claws he wore were only ornaments, not parts of himself. An ordinary hand—dirty, but ordinary—pushed back the bearskin mask that was only a mask. And under it lay his face. When he opened his mouth to speak, he showed a man's ordinary face.

But Hamnet Thyssen knew what he had seen. He knew it was true transformation, too, not illusion. He didn't know how he knew, but he did.

"Yes, you too have the power," Witigis told Audun.

Audun Gilli did not speak the Bizogot language. No one would ever have known it from the way he inclined his head. In Raumsdalian, he answered, ''Your strength is not small." Maybe he understood with the heart if not with the head.

Witigis had given no sign of knowing Raumsdalian. "Nor is yours," he said now, in his own tongue. The two of them, the barbarian with the bear in his soul and the drunken product of a formidable civilization, bowed respectfully to each other.

"Well, well," Wacho said. "I have never seen Witigis brought out of bearness save when he himself wished it."

"How do you know he did not, your Ferocity?" Ulric Skakki asked.

The jarl sent him a sharp glance, as if to chide him for joking about a serious business. But Ulric was not joking, and Wacho saw as much. "A point, southern man," the Bizogot said. "Yes, a point. How do I know? I do not know." He glanced at Witigis. "I wonder if he knows himself."

"When I am a bear, I know little of what I do," Witigis said. "No—say not that I do not know. Say that I do not care, as a bear would not care. When I am a man again, I see what my bear-self has done. I see, and as often as not I marvel. A bear will do what a man would not. The lesson is, this does not always make the bear wrong."

"Does it always make the man wrong?" Hamnet Thyssen didn't know if Audun Gilli would have asked that question. Whether the wizard did or not, Count Hamnet wanted it answered.