A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  ‘Six bloody days . . .’ he gasped. Six days of travelling across ice and frozen rock since they had parted from Kuthy and Elfswith. Those had been the longest six days of Bolldhe’s life. Even for one as well travelled as he, there was nowhere in the world he could think of as brutally inhospitable as this place, nowhere that even came close. Men were not supposed to exist here on this island, that he knew, and, as Bolldhe nursed his frozen digits and gasped in the thin air, he very much doubted they would make it to the other side.

  Crossing the frozen sea alone had almost killed them. How in the name of the wee man they had survived that trail, Bolldhe would never know. Perhaps Fate had taken a hand. This far north, that was always a possibility. It was the sort of thing Fate would do, really, now Bolldhe came to think about it: lend them a kindly hand across the causeway and keep encouraging them on, day after day, prolonging their lives and their misery and dragging them on to an even harsher enviroment until finally cutting them loose and abandoning them to a slow and miserable death. Yes, Fate was just like that.

  At first it had been plain sailing. The day had started fine, the ice stretched out as smooth as glass ahead of them, and they could clearly see the headland of Stromm Peninsula that marked the beginning of the island proper, no more than four hours’ march away.

  But none of them, not even Bolldhe, had any experience of fissures: great gaping crevasses that opened up suddenly before them, invisible from even a short distance but too wide to jump and long enough to force them off their route for miles. First one, then another, then another. As the sun began to sink in the sky, the travellers’ anxiety grew. They knew they could not risk spending the night out here on the ice, but there was nothing they could do about it. As their trepidation increased, their good sense lessened, and the risks they took became greater.

  At one point Nibulus had stood on the very edge of a fissure, the better to gauge the distance across. The ice had groaned in warning as the southern idiot had gawped down into the yawning chasm of blue ice plunging into darkness, and only Bolldhe’s shout of alarm had pulled him back, scant seconds before the entire shelf fell away into the watery depths below.

  More care had been taken after that incident, but this had meant a frustrating series of detours and backtracking that resulted in their reaching the headland several hours after nightfall. Those hours had proved the worst: every step could result in a fall to their death, despite being roped together, and they could only guess in what direction they were heading. It had only been the intense cold that had forced them on in such foolish desperation, a chill that none of them had ever experienced before.

  That cold and the voices.

  Those voices. Not even in the wasteland south of Myst-Hakel had they felt such unease, such unearthly dread, or heard such warped and soulless keening. As soon as the sun dipped below the horizon the sounds had started up: long, mournful moans that came from afar, washed over the ice field and reverberated subsonically inside their heads. Maybe they came from the sea, maybe from miles beneath the ice. Perhaps they had come from the air high above. They would never find out. Nor could they even guess what made them: some great creatures of the ocean depths or dwellers on the island, alive or dead? There had been undertones of human speech chattering on the edge of that wailing. On and on it went, plaguing the frightened travellers’ first night on the island.

  When finally they had risen again, it had been to a land that was as utterly alien as it was desolate. As the first light began to appear, Melhus slowly revealed itself to them – almost savouring the dismay it induced. Great towering cliffs of lead reached up before them and stretched away on either side as far as the eye could see. Ragged clusters of boulders, split by the cold and rimed with hoar frost, lay scattered about. And, flowing with unnatural slowness from the heights above, came a yellowish-grey vapour that caressed everything in its path with pestilential fingers and left an unpleasant dampness that smelt of rotten eggs.

  The day had been spent finding a way up those cliffs to the hinterland beyond, one whole day of frustration, danger and fear, and a deepening sense of despair that sapped the will of even the strongest among them. But a way had eventually been found: a series of ledges, slopes and scree banks rather than a path, up which Zhang could be coaxed, pushed and hauled. So, just before nightfall, they had gained the land beyond the cliffs, and stared in awe at Melhus, the last island at the top of the world.

  It was a land of fire and ice, rock and wind, a churning battleground in which these four powerful elements waged ceaseless war against each other, and whose merging energies shattered the entire seething, bubbling crust, sullied the air and pulverized the chthonic depths beneath. Mountains of blue rock, nunataks poking their peaks through mile-thick ice, were whittled and carved into the grotesquely contorted shapes of horn, claw and tooth by the screeching arctic winds, clamped around by the vice-like grip of ice that pushed its searching fingers deep into cracks to split and shatter, while from within their innards were melted and boiled by fire from hell’s own cauldron. In quaking convulsions this would spew out of fissures, melt the ice in seething gouts of steam that would burn the very air, and send rivers of boiling water down into lakes below that would in turn freeze over. Then the ice would be chiselled into bizarrely shaped points, forming oceans of jagged waves, or forests of cold white spears that forbade any passage. Geysers belched foul-smelling water from magma-heated sinkholes. Gale-force winds whipped ice, sparks and ash about in a frenzy, and curled steam into living vortices. Lakes of sulphur and ice-melt sprawled like a yellow scum-layered regurgitation across the landscape.

  Amid all this chaotic boiling activity, not a sign of life could be seen. During the previous day’s journey the travellers had watched from the ice bridge sundry birds and beasts: darting sea swallows that wheeled over the wind-whipped tops of waves, silver-grey fish that leapt in unison from the water and the occasional wet-eyed seal cub abandoned on a floe by a mother scared away by these strange new creatures that walked on two legs. But here on the island not even the meanest patch of lichen could endure the hostile environment.

  On the afternoon of the first day the blizzards had blown so fiercely it was almost impossible to see. Had they not encountered Elfswith and accepted his arctic clothing, they would not have lasted one day. Those bearskin coats were massive, all-encompassing and so thick it felt as if their wearers were swimming through a sea of pure bear-dom. But the wind somehow managed to find a way through this hairy armour. Pelts would suddenly fly up alarmingly, and continual stops had to be made to resecure them. The blinding snow stung their faces and eyes until they bellowed in frustration and anger, but the wind only laughed all the harder. At one point they had been forced to don their crampons and lash themselves together in a line behind the sturdy Zhang. On another occasion they had shared the exhilarating, once-in-a-lifetime experience of being dragged behind the galloping beast over a smooth frozen lake, thanks to Elfswith’s whalebone skates.

  During the night, they had almost shared another once-in-a-lifetime experience – they almost died. Just as Elfswith had promised, fierce winds came ‘screaming from the very heart of Eisholm across the flat land where there be no shelter’. Only Bolldhe’s know-how had saved them that night almost upon the very doorstep of Vaagenfjord Maw. Recalling tales he had heard of the reindeer hunters of Hoc-Valdrea, he had directed all of them to use their saws to cut blocks of ice as swiftly as their numbed and breathless bodies could manage. Fighting against time, exhaustion and the rapidly failing light, they succeeded in constructing a crude igloo that would take the worst force out of the wind. They piled inside, horse and all, and managed to survive the night by dint of sleeping embarrassingly close to each other.

  The following day had seen even worse blizzards. Each step they took was accomplished by dogged perseverance alone, as the desperate and by this stage very frightened men had forced themselves onward. Even Zhang, further encumbered by the now unconscious form of Appa, had w
hinnied from time to time in anguish. Leaning forward at a forty-five-degree angle into the gale, all the walkers had followed Wodeman, the only one among them capable of keeping his bearings in this blizzard.

  Bolldhe was having a particularly bad time of it. At one point he looked up through the blinding snow to just about make out the stumbling shapes of all his fellow travellers ahead of him. Ahead? He had been swearing, almost crying like a child, in fury and frustration at the beating he was receiving from the weather, and to see the others all ahead of him made him curse his weakness in every language he knew. That should have been him in the lead! His coarse words, however, were snatched away by the even coarser wind.

  But the company had learnt something from the previous night’s experience, and that evening made sure to establish camp in a spot amid hot springs and clouds of steam. From that night on they set their course by similarly welcoming areas, though always keeping the distinctive cat’s-tooth peak of Ravenscairn in their sight as a guide. By the sixth evening of their trek across Melhus they had arrived at the last stretch of the journey.

  Bolldhe managed to slip his liquor flask back under his pelt and into its pouch without letting in too much cold air. He chafed himself vigorously and tried to stamp some life back into the numb blocks of ice that his feet had become, then gazed around at his surroundings.

  As far as the eye could see in every direction it was the same: a flat expanse of white punctuated by jagged points of ice around which a freezing fog billowed. The light had almost failed, and they could no longer see the pinnacle of Ravenscairn itself, nor any other higher land save the rocky knoll upon which he and Wodeman now stood. Down below, on a patch of steaming black rock just warm enough to hold back the encroaching circle of ice that hemmed it in, he could see the others busily setting up for the night. The blaze of the campfire looked bleary through the fog but infinitely more reassuring than the disembodied flares of red that could occasionally be seen in the sky from unseen, far-off volcanoes.

  During his travels he had heard many songs and tales of lands so cold even the sea would freeze over, but he had always dismissed these as poetic exaggeration, if not pure fantasy. But he realized now that the skalds had been right all along, for Melhus was a terrible land, yes, terrible beyond belief. Yet there was a fierce pride in Bolldhe’s heart also. It was only right that he, Bolldhe the Wanderer, he who had travelled through lands of every extremity in climate and terrain, should finally have made it to the coldest, most inhospitable, most northerly place in the known world.

  He turned back to Wodeman and grinned defiantly.

  ‘So?’ he asked. ‘What do we do now?’

  The sorcerer had dragged him up to this higher place as soon as their day’s journey was over. A quiet, private place, away from the others. He had not explained why to Bolldhe, but certain words had passed between them on previous days, and Bolldhe had a fair idea of what was about to occur.

  ‘We’ll start by taking some of this,’ Wodeman began, as he extricated a pouch of something herbal from beneath his pelts. ‘Henbane leaf.’

  ‘What’s it do?’ Bolldhe wrinkled his nose dubiously.

  ‘It’s good stuff,’ the shaman reassured him, his exhaled breath falling to the ground in a shower of whispering crystals. ‘Smoking it helps to free your mind, block out the distractions of the present. Helps set you on the path to your inner consciousness . . . put you in touch with the spirits!’

  ‘Sounds a bit fishy to me,’ Bolldhe replied. ‘Not really my thing.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ Wodeman shrugged and settled himself down in the shelter of a rock. ‘Mind if I have some?’

  ‘Why? Are you going to get in touch with your inner consciousness too?’

  ‘No,’ Wodeman replied simply and lit up.

  Bolldhe waited patiently while the other man puffed his special stuff and giggled a bit, then turned to him to explain. ‘We’re nearly there, Bolldhe; two days from Ravenscairn at the most. This may be our last opportunity to really talk before . . .’

  ‘Before entering the Rawgr’s lair,’ Bolldhe finished for him, rather histrionically.

  ‘There’s something buried deep within you, something so important it will change the fate of our world,’ Wodeman continued, slurring his words slightly. ‘I don’t have the slightest clue what it is, and neither does Appa—’

  ‘Or me.’

  ‘Right. But we have to know. Or, at the very least, begin to guess . . . I don’t know if you’re hiding something from us, or whether you really have no idea why it is that you’re so special, but we’ve now run out of time. Important words must come before important deeds, and now is the last chance for us to have them.’

  He peered closely at Bolldhe, but Bolldhe merely looked at a loss. ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said, ‘but I can’t promise you anything.’

  Wodeman mumbled something under his breath and shifted himself into a more comfortable position. ‘You see, what it is . . . If we mortals are lacking in sufficient knowledge, then perhaps we can turn to others who do know. Have you ever heard of the H’urvisg?’

  ‘H’urvisg,’ Bolldhe repeated thoughtfully. ‘Is that anything like Urisk? Half mortal and half fey?’

  ‘It could be, in your language. H’urvisg are the earth spirits; they dwell among us but are not of our kind.’

  ‘Where I come from, Urisks are no spirits: they’re just the bastard spawn of succubus and man,’ Bolldhe replied, a little annoyed that he had been hauled away from the camp just to be lectured on ‘caravan people’, as his mother rather euphemistically termed them. ‘They help out villeins, fetch and carry, perform all sorts of tasks, all for no pay, then think they have the right to stick their pointy noses into our affairs and give us the benefit of their “higher wisdom”.’

  ‘Mmn, I think we’re talking about different beings here, after all. In any case, I can see you’re sceptical, but I have to tell you that I have often asked H’urvisg for advice and, whatever you may think of them, they have proved themselves reliable.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Bolldhe cut in. ‘Before you start, Wodeman, let me tell you something I’ve learnt from my own life: I’ve been all over Lindormyn and encountered many sorcerers of one description or another, and if there’s one thing I’m fairly sure of, it’s that spirits do not know the minds of men. They don’t know our world, our feelings, our motivations, or any of that, even a fraction as well as we do ourselves, so they can have no wisdom or knowledge that could be of any use to us. Whatsoever.’

  ‘H’urvisgs are elementals; they are of the very stuff this world is made of,’ Wodeman insisted. ‘They may be limited in their depth of knowledge but potentially unlimited in their release of energy. Their help is in the form of physical emotion, not wordy explanations. If they get a chance to feel what is within you, maybe they can unleash that inner energy of yours, like a volcano about to erupt.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll just choose not to answer,’ Bolldhe countered. ‘Maybe they can’t be bothered. Divination, or whatever you call it, has no compelling force. Have you ever considered that? In fact, when you think about it, can they even be trusted? No one ever claimed they were honest.’

  ‘Look, Bolldhe. It’s getting bloody cold out here, and I really don’t care all that much. These spells of mine are my way – and the way of the Torca, my own people. I don’t care to question matters that are so . . .’

  ‘Traditional?’ Bolldhe suggested. ‘Set in stone?’

  ‘Fundamental,’ Wodeman concluded. ‘Now shall we get on with this, or would you rather postpone having these words until we are in the Rawgr’s own lair?’

  Though he did not say so, Bolldhe would indeed rather have had such discussions within the relative warmth and shelter of the Maw. He still did not believe there was anything there at all, but deep down gave a sigh. Wodeman’s words were all too typical of humanity. The Torca here had previously asserted how openness is preferable to belief, but just listen to the old gasbag now. ‘
Fundamental’? That was as good as admitting that belief itself is stronger than the object of belief. And Bolldhe on his travels had seen and heard of many cults, sciences and even entire civilizations founded on beliefs that were now recognized to be false, yet were still going strong right up to the present.

  People and their bloody anchors of faith. Entire lives built up or chained down by pipe-smoke visions. And those most miserable people of all, who have no doctrine to start with so have to invent one and then disallow anyone – themselves included – to question it.

  Thus civilization is kept together, he surmised, and I am kept out . . .

  ‘Right, well . . . how do we get started?’ he asked with a hint of weary resignation.

  There was also a trace of resentment in his tone. Why did people fear the truth so much? Why did they always have to defer the responsibility of decision-making and self-determination to ‘higher beings’? Even in Quiravia, a country famous for its republican ideals, the only decision its ‘self-governing’ people ever took was during the election of leaders who would make all the decisions for them. The stupid idiots preferred that responsibility should rest on the shoulders of ‘higher beings’ whom they could subsequently blame for messing things up.

  Hu-bloody-manity! Pitiful!

  Wodeman closed his eyes, took another long drag from the noxious weed, held it in for a while, then slowly exhaled, some of the smoke wafting straight up Bolldhe’s nostrils. A slight dizziness passed over him, and for a brief moment he fancied he could see the smoke curling through Wodeman’s beard. The sorcerer’s eyes opened and, through the veil of henbane smoke, they regarded Bolldhe like red lanterns.

  Then Bolldhe blinked, the moment passed, and the smoke was instantly taken by the wind.

  Henbane, he reflected. Yes, it was a henbane derivative that he himself had used on those mad old abbesses way out in Dzhygyn-Erdtse. Now that had been a ‘trip’ worth taking! Way out indeed . . . even though the only effect it had had on himself was to make him walk around very fast and urinate a lot.