Not far away, Vulfolaic was doing the same thing. After swallowing a bite, he said, “I sat up a while in the night and watched.”
“Did you, by God? Well, more power to you. You’re a stronger man than I am.” Count Hamnet made as if to tip the hat he wasn’t wearing. “You didn’t see the Rulers sneaking up on us – that’s plain enough.”
“No.” Vulfolaic shook his head. He sent Hamnet a quizzical look. No Bizogot would have admitted another man was stronger than he, yet the Raumsdalian had fought bravely in all the battles and skirmishes just past. He scratched his head, then crushed something between his thumbnails.
When he didn’t say anything more on his own, Hamnet prompted him: “Well, what did you see? You must have seen something, or you wouldn’t bother telling me you did sentry duty.”
“True enough.” Now Vulfolaic seemed impressed at how clever he was. Count Hamnet wanted to pound his head against the Glacier. After another pause, Vulfolaic went on, “I didn’t see the Rulers, no, but a big snowy owl flew around us. It must have known men well, for it stayed out of bowshot.”
He blinked when not only Hamnet but also Liv, Audun Gilli, and Ulric Skakki exclaimed. “That was the Rulers, looking us over,” Liv said.
“They won’t be back, either – that’s a sure thing,” Ulric said.
“Why not?” Audun didn’t follow.
The adventurer clicked his tongue between his teeth, as if surprised such naivete could exist. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “The owl will have taken one look, laughed till it almost fell out of the sky, and flown away. Why bother coming back? I’m surprised they bothered checking at all. A ragged bunch like us won’t give the Rulers any trouble even if we don’t end up frozen for our trouble.”
“Oh,” the wizard said in a small, unhappy voice. He didn’t try to argue.
Hamnet Thyssen wouldn’t have, either. He saw things the way Ulric did. He and his comrades were likely just putting off the inevitable – and, chances were, not for very long, either.
Trasamund sucked horse blood out of his mustache. “Let’s get going,” he said. “If we have to do this, we’ll do it.”
Hamnet admired his determination. Living up to it was something else again. Every muscle in his arms and legs and back groaned when he got moving. He’d done too much the day before, and he hadn’t slept on a feather bed after all. “I feel my age,” he said.
“If you weren’t old when you started this climb, you would be by the time you finished,” Ulric Skakki said, which also held a painful amount of truth.
Whether they could finish the climb grew less and less certain as the day wore along. The slope got steeper as they neared the top of the Glacier. They had to try several different ways to get around or over tilted blocks of ice. They’d taken harness trappings from the horses they killed. Those helped, but Hamnet wished the leather lines were longer.
“Careful!” he called when he saw a block shifting under Trasamund’s bulk. “You don’t want to start another avalanche.”
Trasamund held very still, then backed down instead of climbing on. The chunk of ice – bigger than he was – didn’t move any more. He nodded to Count Hamnet. “Thanks. I wouldn’t have had the chance to start more than one – that’s for sure.”
“Mm, no,” Hamnet said. “And what you started, the avalanche would finish.” Trasamund nodded again.
As they climbed higher, though, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians had to take more and more chances. It was either take them or have no way to go forward. They used what precautions they could. No one climbed right behind anyone else except when the going was uncommonly good or when there was no other choice. That way, if they did start an avalanche, it wouldn’t wipe out all of them. They hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.
The long northern day helped. Even down in Nidaros, the sun would have set before they got close to the top of the Glacier. A mist coming off the frozen surface veiled the plains far below. “You know what someone looking up towards us would see?” Ulric Skakki said, pausing to pant atop an ice boulder as clear and sparkling as a jewel.
“He wouldn’t see anything. If we can’t see him, he can’t see us.” Hamnet Thyssen was panting, too. The air felt as thin as a cheap tapman’s beer after he’d watered it. He couldn’t get enough into his lungs to let him move as freely as he wanted. He felt weary unto death, and had a pounding headache.
He knew his logic was good, and started to get angry when the adventurer shook his head. But Ulric had an answer of his own: “He’d see clouds. We’re above those clouds, looking down on them. Isn’t that something you thought only birds and God could ever do?” No matter how cynical he was, awe filled his voice.
“Well, you’re right,” Hamnet said. “I hope they’re not the last thing we see.”
“So do I. I’d sooner look down on the Rulers than on clouds,” Ulric said. Maybe because of the thin air scrambling his brains, Count Hamnet needed longer than he should have for the pun to sink in. When it did, it made his headache worse – or he thought so, anyhow.
“Come on!” Trasamund pushed himself to his feet again. “We’re almost there. Let’s finish the job. Up on top of the Glacier, by God! No one from down below has ever done that, or we’d have tales to tell of it. They’ll remember us forever!”
In a low voice, Ulric said, “No one from down below s ever done it and then made it back to start tales. Will we?”
“Well, the Bizogot’s right about one thing: we won’t if we don’t get moving.” Hamnet Thyssen heaved himself upright, too. “And we are almost there.”
They had one last bad stretch: nearly vertical, with the ice alarmingly shaky under them. Then they clawed their way up out of the scarp the avalanche had bitten from the edge of the ice sheet. Hamnet s breath smoked as he stared across the top of the Glacier.
It might have been spring down below, but winter still reigned here. Or maybe not. In the midst of all that white and blue, enough dirt had blown into crevices in the ice to let plants sprout here and there. And not too far away in the distance was what seemed an oasis in this frozen desert: a mountaintop that climbed out of the Glacier and showed green streaked with snow.
“Well, we know where we’re going,” Hamnet said. No one disagreed with him.
“Never mind where we’re going for now,” Liv said. “We’re here. We did it! Isn’t that enough of a marvel?”
“Before I started up, I thought it would be. Now I’m not so sure,” he answered. She made a questioning noise. He explained: “Looking at what it’s like up here, seems to me getting down again will be the real marvel.”
She thought about that, then nodded. “You’re bound to be right.”
He wished she had told him he was wrong. He wished she had convinced him he was wrong. The more likely he was to be wrong, the better their chances were.
He wanted to ask her to sleep with him, to make love with him, that evening. But he held back, not so much for fear she would say no as for fear she would say yes and find him unable to perform. After all the fighting and climbing he’d done the past few days, he was far from sure he could. And the thin air up here atop the Glacier only made things worse. He felt as if he were moving under water, with every step costing far more effort than it should have.
He and Liv did sleep in each other’s arms once the sun went down. But sleep was all they did. Hamnet woke once in the middle of the night. When he looked up at the sky, he wondered if he was seeing things. It was blacker than he’d ever known it to be, and a whole host of stars blazed down – far more than he’d seen on a clear night down on the ground.
People who came from the mountains talked about how many stars they could see. He’d always nodded when he heard talk like that, nodded without taking it very seriously. Now he saw he’d been wrong. So many shone here, he had trouble picking out the brighter ones that marked the outlines of the constellations. The Milky Way was a glisten of mother-of-pearl.
And then, despite the beauty, despite the wo
nder, he fell asleep again. He could admire the night sky for as long as he stayed atop the Glacier. Sleep, though, sleep he needed now.
He didn’t want to wake up come morning, even with the sun smacking him in the face. He yawned and stretched and groaned. Then he saw Ulric Skakki gutting a snowshoe hare. For a heartbeat, that meant nothing special to him, which only proved how tired he was. Then he blinked. “Where did you get that?” he asked through another yawn.
“Oh, I looked in my pocket, and there it was,” Ulric answered airily. Hamnet Thyssen growled, down deep in his throat. Ulric laughed. Then, before Hamnet attempted mayhem on his exasperating person, he went on, “It just came hopping along, happy as you please. It stopped to nibble on one of those little patches of plants they have up here, and I put an arrow through it.”
“I wouldn’t eat raw rabbit down below,” Trasamund said. “I’ve known too many who got sick after they did. Up here .. . Up here I’ll eat anything I can kill, and worry about getting sick later on.”
They still had horseflesh and musk-ox meat, too. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t hungry any more when he started trudging towards the peak that stuck up through the Glacier. Tired, stiff, sore, trying to suck in more air than he readily could … all of that, but not hungry.
He saw more rabbits hopping across the Glacier, and other little creatures he couldn’t name so readily. “Do they go from one mountaintop to another, like boatmen in the Southeastern Sea sailing from one island to the next?” he wondered.
“Seems so,” Audun Gilli said. “Those mountains are islands here, is-lands of life.”
“Islands of life,” Count Hamnet echoed. It was a pretty phrase, and one also likely to be true. The two didn’t go together all that often. “What would we do if one of them weren’t close by?”
Ulric Skakki had a one-word answer for that: “Starve.”
That wasn’t very pretty, but it too was likely to be true. Hamnet trudged along the top of the Glacier. They might starve anyway, once their food ran out. How many hares and voles and whatever other little creatures that lived up here could they catch? Enough to live on? He would have been surprised.
A fox trotted past, unfortunately well out of bowshot. Spit flooded Hamnet’s mouth as he watched it go. Fox meat was bound to be rank, but it was meat. He got the feeling that if he stayed up here long he wouldn’t sneer at anything even remotely edible. In this thin air, in this cold, a man needed to eat like a sabertooth to keep going.
But for its eyes and nose, the fox was white. Down on the Bizogot steppe, the animals had turned brown. There wasn’t enough dirt up here to make that worthwhile.
“We can drink ourselves through every tavern in Nidaros with this tale, and never once touch our own money,” Ulric said.
“If we get back,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Well, yes, there is that,” the adventurer allowed, “though you didn’t hear me being rude enough to talk about it.”
“I’d like to drink my way through a tavern or two,” Audun Gilli said wistfully.
He’d spent a lot of time in Nidaros drinking – mourning his family, lost in a fire. He’d had his head stuck in the ale vat for three years, but he’d done well enough and stayed sober enough since Ulric Skakki hauled him from the gutter and made him dry out. One thing seemed plain: he wouldn’t have a chance to do much drinking up here.
No matter how far Count Hamnet and the other refugees walked, the mountaintop seemed no closer. Hamnet had heard the air in the southwestern deserts was clear enough to make things seem closer than they really were. God knew what air there was up here was achingly transparent.
“We should have brought some horses up the avalanche,” Trasamund said.
For a moment, Hamnet thought he meant it. That only proved he wasn’t getting enough air to keep his own wits working. Vulfolaic needed longer to realize it was a joke than he did, which made him feel a little better. The other Bizogot did a splendid double take, then sent Trasamund a dirty look. “You could have strapped three or four of them on your back and carried them up that way,” Vulfolaic said.
“Don’t be foolish.” Trasamund shook his head. “The wizards could have shrunk them, and we’d each have one in our belt pouches.”
“Why not?” Hamnet asked Liv. “If the Rulers’ wizards can turn themselves into owls, why couldn’t you do something like that?”
“Easier to work magic on yourself than on something else,” she answered. Audun Gilli nodded. She went on, “We were a little rushed before we started climbing, too, or more than a little.”
“If you’re going to complain about every little thing . . .” Trasamund said.
“I ought to clout you with something,” Liv said, “but I haven’t got anything handy and I’m too tired to do a proper job of it.”
On they went. Suddenly, the mountaintop seemed to loom just ahead of them. Hamnet wasn’t sure how it had got so close without his noticing – probably because he’d been trudging along with his head down. It looked less inviting now that he could examine it better… but then, what didn’t? The green that had drawn them from afar wasn’t the green of rich upland meadows, as he’d hoped it would be. It was thin and patchy, with gray rock showing through here and there, or perhaps more often than that.
But it was undoubtedly a more hopeful place than the vast solitude of the Glacier all around it. Some of the plants had flowers. Some even had berries already. And if mosquitoes buzzed .. . well, they were life, too.
Something that looked like a rabbit with short hind legs and short, round ears stared at the newcomers from little black eyes. “Funny-looking creature,” Trasamund remarked.
“It probably thinks the same of you,” Ulric Skakki answered. Trasamund rewarded him with a glare. Ignoring it, the adventurer went on, “I do believe that’s what they call a pika. They live up in the mountains south of the Glacier, too.”
“I wonder if it tastes like rabbit,” Vulfolaic said.
Before he could do more than wonder, the pika, if that was what it was, disappeared into a hole in the ground. “That’s interesting,” Liv said.
“Why?” Count Hamnet asked. “The hole can’t be very deep. Chances are we can get the beast out.”
She shook her head. “Not what I meant. Why would it be afraid of us if it never saw people before?”
“Because we’re large and noisy and we smell bad?” he suggested.
Liv’s grin was crooked enough to suit even Ulric Skakki. “Well, God knows that’s all true,” she said.
A few buntings and longspurs fluttered about, as they might have on the Bizogot plains. Hamnet Thyssen wouldn’t have thought they could find enough seeds to eat up here, but they didn’t seem to care what he thought.
They were meat, too, if the Bizogots and Raumsdalians could figure out some way to catch them.
A spring bubbled up out of the rock. Hamnet had been chipping off bits of ice and putting them in his mouth when he got thirsty. The spring water wasn’t much warmer, but it tasted far better. He sprawled down not far away. “God, I’m tired!” he groaned.
The others rested, too. The rock, again, wasn’t much warmer than the Glacier surrounding it, but it seemed so. The sun shone down brightly. “We have a refuge – for a while,” Arnora said.
“How’s your face?” Ulric asked her.
Her hand went to the moss covering her wound. “Sore,” she answered. “The scar will make me lose my looks.” She shrugged. “I’m still alive. I may stay alive a while longer, anyhow.”
“You still look fine to me, sweetheart,” Ulric Skakki said.
“You say that because you want to screw me and you have no other women handy,” Arnora said with a wry, one-sided smile. “Tell me I’m wrong. I know men. I know how they work.”
“No man in his right mind would say he knew how women worked,” Ulric said.
“Of course not. But men are simple,” Arnora replied.
“I feel pretty simple right now,” Ulric said. “I won’t argue w
ith you there. I need food, and I need sleep. The more of each, the better. After that… well, my dear, after that I’ll still think you look good.”
“You tell me so now,” Arnora said. “When we get down again … If we get down again .. . Well, if we get down again, that will be a miracle. Maybe I can look for another miracle afterwards.”
Liv was methodically gathering dead plants. She eyed them none too happily. “They’ll burn fast – they won’t give a good, long-lasting fire the way musk-ox dung would. But maybe we’ll be able to cook a little, anyhow.”
Even getting a fire going proved harder than it would have down on the Bizogot plain. The air was so thin, sparks didn’t want to form and the fuel didn’t want to catch. Finally, though, they could cook, or at least sear, chunks of meat.
Chewing – and chewing, and chewing – Ulric Skakki said, “No matter what you do to this stuff, I don’t think we’ll see it at fancy eateries in Nidaros any time soon.”
“Odds are against it,” Count Hamnet agreed. The odds were against their ever seeing anything in Nidaros again, but he didn’t dwell on that. Dwelling on it wouldn’t have done him any good, anyhow.
While the sun shone, the mountaintop stayed warm enough. But they’d come to the eastern side of the mountain, and its bulk made the sun set for them earlier than it would have otherwise. They could watch the mountain’s shadow stretch west across the Glacier. They could – but they didn’t spend much time doing it. They spread across the rocks and screen, all of them looking for anything that would burn.
“We might as well be sleeping on ice,” Hamnet grumbled as a frigid wind began to blow.
“As long as we’re sleeping someplace where our enemies can’t get at us, I’ll worry about everything else later,” Liv said. “Cold is only cold. It gets much worse than this in winter down on the plain.”
Since she was right, Hamnet left it there. He spread out his bedroll behind a boulder that shielded him from the worst of the breeze. Liv lay down beside him. He looked around for Audun Gilli, but didn’t see the wizard anywhere close by. That suited him fine.
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