Beyond the Gap by Harry Turtledove Page B

draw blood. That wouldn’t help him; it would only make him more alluring to the parasites he was trying to kill. He said, “I wonder if Audun can do anything about our little friends.”
    â€œDon’t get your hopes up too high,” Hamnet said. “The Bizogot shamans know something about wizardry, too, and they crawl with vermin just like the rest of the barbarians.”
    Ulric grunted. “Well, you know how to murder a man’s hopes first thing in the morning, don’t you?” He crushed something between his thumbnails. “Ha! Got one of the little bastards, anyway … . I just had a thought.”
    â€œCongratulations, I suppose,” Hamnet Thyssen said, and then, “Oh. You expect me to ask you what it is.”
    â€œIf that’s not too much trouble.” Ulric had no trouble being sarcastic, either.
    â€œNot at all,” Count Hamnet said politely. “So what is this thought of yours?”
    â€œMaybe the Bizogots are so used to getting eaten alive that it’s never occurred to their shamans that they don’t have to. Maybe that’s why they don’t have any spells to hold the bugs at bay.”
    â€œMaybe,” Hamnet said. “We can find out, anyhow.” If he didn’t sound optimistic, he wasn’t.
    A Bizogot dog barked at him when he came out of the tent, but not with the same ferocity the beasts had shown before. Now he’d eaten Bizogot food and slept under Bizogot blankets in a tent lit by Bizogot lamps. He was bound to start smelling like a Bizogot himself. The dog would approve of that. Hamnet didn’t, but he couldn’t do anything about it. And when everybody smelled the same way, nobody smelled especially bad. That was consolation, of a sort.
    It was consolation for him, at least. He wondered how Gudrid would like it.
    When she came out of her tent, she smelled of attar of roses. At least Hamnet Thyssen assumed the sweet fragrance came from her; it seemed unlikely to belong to Jesper Fletti or the other imperial guardsmen, and even more unlikely to belong to the Bizogot women. Some of them were pretty enough, in a fair, strong-featured way, but they cared no more for Raumsdalian notions of cleanliness than their menfolk did.
    They did notice the scent that clung to Gudrid, though at first they didn’t
seem sure where it was coming from. “Like flowers, only more so,” one of them said.
    â€œCould we do that?” another asked. They liked the sweet smells, then, even if they didn’t know much about making them.
    Looking smug, Gudrid showed off the little glass bottle in which the perfume came. The Bizogot women made as much of the bottle as of the scent inside. That disconcerted Gudrid, which amused Count Hamnet. To the mammoth-hunters, glass was a trade good, rare and costly. It was one more thing they mostly did without. Life on the frozen plains was, and had to be, pared down to essentials. The Bizogots made do without pottery, too, except for what they got in trade from the south. They used baskets and hide vessels. Some of the baskets were so finely woven, they would hold water. Others, with clay smeared over them, could go into a fire without burning. That was as close as the Bizogots came to real pots.
    Gudrid dabbed perfume on some of the women. Yes, the Bizogots liked it. Two or three of the big blondes tried by sleight of hand to make the bottle disappear. Gudrid didn’t let that happen. She didn’t mind stealing herself—anything from a new joke to a new husband—but she drew the line at others stealing from her. And she drew it successfully, and she didn’t make the Bizogot women hate her when she did. In spite of himself, Hamnet Thyssen was impressed.
    Leovigild was not. “More southern foolishness,” he rumbled, that being the Bizogots’ usual name for anything the Raumsdalians could do that they couldn’t match. But his nostrils flared whenever he