Beyond the Gap by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online

would have if he’d taken an arrow in the leg. Gudrid knew better. She knew him altogether too well. When they were happy together, the way she knew him pleased him and made him proud. These days, it meant he was vulnerable.
    Eyvind Torfinn seemed oblivious to the byplay. Count Hamnet wasn’t sure he was, but he seemed that way. Ulric Skakki watched it with wry fascination. He didn’t seem to interest Gudrid. Maybe that was because he was only a commoner, maybe because she recognized that he might be as devious and dangerous as she was herself, if less alluring. As for Audun Gilli, he took in everything with a childlike, wide-eyed fascination. But a child who drank the way he did would have been in no shape to take in anything.
    Trasamund, for his part, took Gudrid’s attentions as no less than his due. “That is quite a woman,” he told Hamnet, plainly not knowing they’d once been man and wife. “Not as young as she used to be, maybe, but still quite a woman. Still plenty tight.” The jarl leered and rocked his hips forward and back, in case Hamnet could have any doubt about what he meant.
    â€œIs she?” Count Hamnet’s voice held no expression whatever. That might have been just as well. If he had let it hold expression, what would have come out? Rage? Bitterness? Jealousy? Longing? Since he revealed even less to Trasamund than he did to Gudrid, the question didn’t arise. So he told himself, anyhow.
    He drank Eyvind Torfinn’s wine and beer. He ate horseflesh and fat-rich camel’s meat, and musk ox and strong-tasting mammoth flesh brought down from the north on ice. There was ice in the north, all right, ice and to spare. He nibbled on honey cakes and frozen, sweetened milk. And his stomach gnawed at him, and he wished he were anywhere else in all the world. Sinking into soft asphalt with dire wolves and sabertooths prowling all around? Next to this lavish hospitality, that looked pretty good.
    â€œYou hate me, don’t you?” Gudrid asked one evening after everyone had drunk a little too much. By the way her eyes sparkled, she wanted him to tell her yes.
    â€œI loved you,” Hamnet Thyssen said, which was not an answer—unless it was.
    The gleam grew brighter. “And now?”
    Count Hamnet shrugged. “We all make mistakes. Some of us make bigger mistakes than others.”

    â€œYes, that’s true,” Gudrid agreed. “I never should have wed you in the first place.”
    â€œYou didn’t think so then,” Hamnet said, and let it go at that. If he told her she’d loved him, she would have laughed in his face. He thought she had. He was convinced she had, in fact. But he was just as convinced that Sigvat II’s torturers couldn’t tear the confession out of her now.
    â€œWe all make mistakes. You said it; I didn’t.” Gudrid was like a cat, playing and swiping and tormenting before the kill.
    â€œAnd what mistake did you make with Eyvind Torfinn?” Hamnet inquired.
    She breathed sweet wine fumes into his face when she laughed. “Dear Eyvind? I made no mistakes with him. He lets me do whatever I please.”
    â€œAnd you despise him for it,” Count Hamnet said. Gudrid did not deny it; she only laughed again. Stubbornly, Hamnet went on, “Wouldn’t you call wedding a man you despise a mistake?”
    â€œOf course not. I call it an amusement.” She reached out and stroked his cheek with a soft hand. “But don’t worry, my sweet. If it makes you feel any better, I despise you, too.”
    â€œAnd Trasamund?” Hamnet asked, trying to ignore the way her touch seared his flesh.
    â€œAh, Trasamund.” She laughed throatily and batted her eyelashes at him. “No one could despise Trasamund. He’s much too … virile.”
    â€œHe thinks you’re quite something, too,” Hamnet said. Gudrid laughed again, this time in complacent amusement.