And Rolf called back, "I'll untangle the greetings from the farewells, Cotton. Good fortune. Take care. And beware of Waroo, the White Bear." And the young Man watched as the last of the train moved away in the cold
darkness, a long line of blue-green lanterns swinging and bobbing up the windy slopes.
The Legion marched swiftly, and after a while Cotton could tell by the sound of the waggon wheels and see by the glow of the lanterns that they were no longer in the woods. The strength of the wind increased, and it groaned and wailed through the crags and moaned down the side of the mountain, and the higher they went the more bodeful it sounded.
When daylight finally came it was dim, and fell through an overcast; and they could see an ominous blowing whiteness streaming from the crests, like enormous ragged clinging grey pennons slowly whipping and flowing in the wind that howled over the range from the far side. Cotton could see that the white streamings came from the old high snow as part of it was blown from the peaks and whipped about and carried up and far, far out to disappear— perhaps to sift down onto the foothills or plains far below, he could not tell which. The Host was about six miles from the Crestan Pass, and the cold was oppressive; and with the overcast the Sun would not warm the journey at all.
The nearer the Army came to the pass, the stronger grew the wind, for on the far slope whence the gale blew, the mountain flanks on either side of the route acted as a huge funnel, and the wide wind was channeled to blow through and over the constricted slot in the saddle. The shrieking gale frightened many of the teams on the narrow way, and they had to be led by those on foot, or even blindfolded and pulled against the screaming blast. Thus it was that as the column entered the pass, a howling gale-force tramontane pummeled and buffeted the Dwarves, and slammed at them, and tried to blow them and their horses and waggons away. The blast was so strong that Dwarves on foot had to lean and struggle to get through the gap, and most of the teams and waggons had to be pulled and pushed by warriors just to make it up the last slope. The wind took Cotton's breath away, and he had to struggle and gasp just to get air. Finally the column was through, past the neck of the funnel, though the wind tore and howled at them still, and voices could not be heard. With his elbow, Bomar jostled Cotton, getting the Warrow's attention and pointing ahead. With wind-watered eyes Cotton squinted out through his hood to see a roiling wall of white advancing up the reaches on the wind: the blizzard, Waroo, the White Bear, had come, and they were still ten miles from safety.
Driven by the yawling blast, the snow hurtled over the train, enveloping it in white obscurity. Signing Cotton to work the brake, Bomar climbed down and made his way to the horses; he took one of the bit reins in hand and began leading the team and waggon through the howling wind and slinging snow. The wind-whipped whiteness whistled up the precipice and along the wall, through crags and canyons, around bends and corners, and lashed into Cotton's face. He drew his hood tighter to fend the blast; still, he had to duck his head to keep the snow from driving through the fur tunnel and into
his eyes. Now and again the Warrow glanced up to get a quick look at where they were going, but all that Cotton could see clearly were the Dwarves on foot directly in front, and the next waggon ahead; he could make out the vague shape of the waggon beyond, but could see no farther. He noted that at every side canyon and false trail, Bomar would move across to scan for stragglers, but so far had found none—though if they were more than twenty or thirty yards distant, an entire army could have been lost.
Slowly, for what seemed like days, the buffeted Legion moved down the raging mountainside. And the snow grew thicker until Cotton could but barely make out Bomar leading the horses. At first the driving wind did not allow the snow to collect on the path, whipping it off as fast as it tried to accumulate. But then at corners and crevices it began to gather in drifts. The train came to a complete halt at times; Cotton believed that the head of the column had come to a drift that had to be cleared before they could go on. In these places the braking was slippery, and often the waggon lurched perilously close to the edge of the precipice, with Cotton's heart hammering wildly.
The white wind howled and screamed and pummeled horse, Dwarf, Man, and Warrow alike, and it seemed to suck the heat right out of the body and dash it against the looming stone walls to be consumed without effect on those cold surfaces. Sitting up high on the waggon seat, Cotton was chilled to the marrow, but as cold as he was, he worried more about Brownie and Downy: even though they were toiling, active with the labor of working the wain downward, moving against the storm, there was no doubt that if they did not reach shelter soon the horses would perish in the freezing shriek.
Bomar not only realized the plight of the horses, but he knew Cotton's condition, too, and the Dwarf arranged for one of the walking warriors to spell the buccan, who then helped lead the team. And even though the white wind raged and blasted him with snow, Cotton warmed a bit in the effort of walking, though he was still miserably cold.
They continued down the treacherous slopes, trapped on a howling trail, caught between a sheer wall and a steep precipice, passing by yawning canyons in the wall, trudging beyond forks in the path. At one false trail Bomar found a squad of lost Dwarves who had somehow become separated from the column in the obscuring whiteness. They had struggled down a wrong split but had realized that they were alone and had just fought their way back to the main route when the waggon rolled by. A long rope was tied to the tailgate, and the Dwarves gripped it and trailed along behind as the party pushed on for the unseen pines somewhere below.
Cotton had lost all sense of time and place and direction, stumbling along through the white blindness and into the teeth of the screaming blizzard. He was wretchedly cold—freezing—and wanted nothing more than to be in front of a blazing fire at The Root, or no, not even that, just to be warm anywhere would be enough. Numbly Cotton looked at the whistling white-
ness flinging past and was thankful he was with Bomar, for without the sturdy Dwarf, Cotton knew that he and the others would not know the way and would die among the frozen crags.
They had collected another squad of stragglers, this time with a green waggon, and were pressing on into the icy blast. Cotton and several of the Dwarves took turns driving the two waggons, working the brakes while others led. And Cotton was on the seat of the yellow waggon when he discovered that they had just come among a few sparse trees. "Hurrah!" he hoarsely shouted. "We've made it!" But the wind whipped away his words and shredded them asunder, the fragments to be lost in the vast whiteness, and no one heard him.
Grimly, Bomar pressed on, for they had two miles to go to reach the thick pines, and in the blasting white gale it took another hour. But at last they came to the sheltering forest: Bomar leading and Cotton up on the yellow wain with nineteen lost Dwarves holding onto a rope trailing behind followed by a green waggon.
As Bomar and Cotton and the tagtails emerged from the swirling snow, Durek, who had been standing in the eaves of the wood, stepped forward and directed them into one of the shielded glens where lean-tos were being constructed and many fires blazed. And as the stragglers passed, Durek smiled, for they were the last.
There among the trees the wind was not as fierce, for the thick pine boughs held it aloft and warded the Host. Still the snow swirled and flew within the glens and collected heavily on the branches; and so the fires were kindled out from under the limbs—otherwise, the heat would melt the snow to come crashing down.
Cotton drove the waggon to the place indicated and numbly crawled down to accept a hot cup of tea from Rand, who was waiting; and the shivering Warrow diddered, "W . . . well, we m . . . m . . . made it. The w . . . worst is over."
"Not yet, Cotton," replied Rand grimly, gauging the snowfall. "We must move on again as soon as possible, for to stay here will trap us in deep drifts."
Night was falling, but the need to press on was urgent. Durek called his Chief Captains together, and their tallies showed that thanks to Bomar and t
he other guides, miraculously no one had been lost, though three waggons had slid over the edge, pulling the doomed horses with them—yet the drivers had each managed to leap to safety. Thus, all were accounted for except Brytta's four advance scouts, of which there was no sign. It was hoped that the quartet of Valonian riders had forged ahead to the low country ere the blizzard struck; yet Brytta fretted, though nothing could be done to aid his missing Men.
The Host was exhausted, chilled to the bone, and so Durek decided that the Army would rest in the pines until the snowfall became deep enoug be worrisome—judged by Rand to be about four or five hours hence The
Chief Captains made plans for a risky lantern-lit trek through the blizzard, should the need to move onward become imperative.
But they had reckoned not upon the course of the storm, for it doubled its fury within the next half hour; and the driven snow thickened, and the blizzard could not be endured out of the shelter of the pines; and so the planned night march was abandoned.
Later that night a drained Cotton wearily leaned his head against a pine tree trunk as he sat on a carpet of fallen needles and stared through the low, sheltering boughs at the fluttering fire under the nearby lean-to. The wind moaned aloft, and the snow thickly eddied and swirled down. Tired though he was, anxiety gnawed at Cotton's vitals, for all he could think of was, What if we're trapped here? What if we don't get to Dusk-Door on time? The twenty-fifth will come and go, and Mister Perry and the others will be trapped down in the Ruck pits.
Overhead, Waroo, the White Bear, raged and groaned and moaned and growled, and stalked about and clawed at the mountains and doubled his fury again.
CHAPTER 16 RIVER RIDE
Perry walked back into the campsite where the other members of the Squad were gathered. "Well, they've gone," he announced. "I stood and watched and could see them for three hours before the last waggon passed beyond my view on the flat prairie. Oh—I shall miss Cotton dearly, but we will meet again at the far door."
"Three hours?" questioned young Tobin Forgefire. "You watched them go away for all that time? Hmph! That was a long goodbye. In the caverns of Mineholt North—or in any Chakka cavern for that matter—goodbyes can last but a moment, for that is all it takes before the one who is leaving turns a corner or passes through a door and is lost to sight. On the other hand, hellos can last a goodly while, since those who are meeting can stand together and talk for as long as they wish. Hah! That is the way it should be: short goodbyes and long hellos."
Lord Kian looked up from the smooth bare ground in front of him. "Dwarves have the right idea when it comes to partings and meetings," he agreed. "You and I, Perry, can learn much from these Folk." Then Kian began scratching marks in the smooth earth with a short stick.
Perry watched for a while, puzzled, but just as he started to ask about it, Lord Kian called the Squad together. "When I was a lad in Dael," he began, smoothing over the loam, "often Rand and I would construct a raft out of tall, straight trees and float down the River Iron water to the Inner Sea and visit the city of Rhondor." A faraway look came into Kian's eyes. "There we would sell the raft for a silver penny or two, for Rhondor is a city of fire-clay tile built on the coastal plain along the shores of the great bay, and wood is always in short supply and welcomed by the townspeople. And Rand and I would take our coins and tour that city of merchants, where the market-stalls had items of wonder from Pellar and Hum and even faraway Hyree. Ah, but it was glorious, running from place to place, agonizing over what things of marvel to buy: pastries and strange fruit, trinkets and bangles and turtle-shell combs for Mother; curved knives and exotically feathered falcon hoods for Father; horns made of seashells; mysterious boxes—it was a place of endless fascination. After spending our money on the singled-out items, winnowed from the bedazzle, we would trek home to bestow the largess upon Mother and Father, and to think upon another raft."
Kian smiled in fond remembrance, but then sobered and drew with his stick in the smoothed earth. "This is the way of their construction," he said, and began outlining the procedure for building a raft, indicating that they would use white oak from the thick stand below the ford, where the trees grew tall and straight and had no limbs for more than half their length. The Dwarves listened intently, for though they were crafters all, they never before had constructed a raft.
The next morning, just after breakfast, using woodcutters' axes they had taken from one of the black waggons, Anval and Borin began felling the trees marked by Kian the day previous. The rest of the Squad trimmed and topped the fallen trees, then dragged the logs to a work site at the edge of the river. It took a full day of hard labor by each of the Seven to accomplish the task, and as dusk approached, Lord Kian called a halt to the work.
Wearily they returned to camp and ate a supper meal, then all bedded down except the guard. When Perry's turn at watch came, he made slow rounds and wondered if Cotton, too, was standing ward.
The following dawn, Perry groaned awake with sore arms, neck, back, and legs; hewing and hauling is hard labor, and once again the Warrow had called into play little-used muscles. The others smiled sympathetically at him and
shook their heads in commiseration as he groaningly stumped toward the fire. Aching, he hunkered down next to the warmth and moved as little as possible to avoid additional twinges while he took his breakfast.
Over the course of the day, however, Perry worked out the soreness as under Kian's directions the Seven toiled to construct the bed of the raft from the felled trees: Perry was sent to fetch rope while the other six comrades hoisted up the long straight timbers and laid them side by side upon two, shorter, crossways logs. And as the wee buccan struggled to drag each of the large coils of thick line to the work site, Anval and Borin notched the logs so that a long, sturdy, young tree—trimmed of branches and cut to length by the other three—could be laid completely across the raft in a groove that went from log to log; three times they did this: at each end of the raft and across the center. At each end, Barak and Delk bound the logs to one another with the heavy rope; and as the two went they lashed each of the three cross-members to each long raft log in turn. In the meantime, Kian, Anval, and Borin used augers to drill holes through the cross-members and through the raft logs below, while Perry helped fashion wooden pegs that he and Tobin then drove with mallets into the auger-holes to pin the structure together. This work took all of the second day to complete, and again the Squad wearily retired to the campsite.
The next morning dawned dull and overcast, and there was a chill wind blowing from the mountains. A rain of leaves whirled down, covering the woodland floor with a brown, crackling carpet. Glumly the Seven huddled around the campfire and breakfasted, each keeping an eye to the bleak sky for sign of cold rain.
That day began with the Squad constructing a platform in the center of the raft as a place to stow the supplies away from the water plashing upward, and they fashioned a simple lean-to as part of the platform in case of rain. To pole the raft, they cut and trimmed long saplings. Then they made two sculling sweeps, and crafted oarlocks, placing them at each end of the raft, fore and aft; the sweeps would be used to position the craft in the river current. Kian took time to instruct the others in the plying of these oars, as well as the poles.
Lord Kian and Perry went searching for boughs for the roof of the lean-to. Spying the color of evergreen through partially barren branches of the fall woodland, they climbed up a slope and emerged at last from the shelter of the trees to find themselves upon a clear knoll near a small stand of red pine. On the exposed hillock the chill wind from the mountains blew stronger, cutting sharply through their clothes. Lord Kian drew his cloak closely around himself and stared long over the forest and beyond the open grassland at the faraway peaks, the crests of which were shrouded by roiling white
clouds under the higher overcast. 'The White Bear stalks the mountains," he observed.
"Bear?" asked Perry, who had been half listening. "Did you just say something about a
bear?"
"It is just an old tale told to children in Riamon," answered Kian, "about a white bear that brings cold wind and snow to the mountains."
"We have a legend like that in the Bosky," responded Perry, "except it isn't a bear, but a great white Wolf instead. The Wolf only comes with dire storms though, for that is the only time you can hear him howling outside the homes. The story may have come from the time of the Winter War, two hundred thirty-odd years ago—though as for me, I believe the tale is older than that. During the War, however, white Wolves came down from the north and pushed through the Spindlethorn Barrier and into the Boskydells. It was touch and go for many families, but the Gammer and others organized Wolf patrols—they went with bows and arrows and hunted the creatures, and finally the Wolves came to fear the sight of Warrows.
"But what about the bear? Does he, too, signal fierce weather? In the mountains? Oh, I hope the Army is down out of the high country." And thereafter Perry took to glancing often toward the mountains far to the west; he looked in that direction even after he and Kian returned to the raft site and the forest trees blocked the view.
The Squad laid log rollers down the bank from the raft to the river to launch the float, and they tied ropes to the craft to pull it over the rollers. By the time they had completed this work, night was drawing upon the land, but at last the raft was finished. "Tomorrow will be soon enough to load the supplies and launch our 'ship,' " announced Kian. "We've done enough for today. Let's bed down." And so the Seven returned to camp.
Trek to Kraggen-Cor Page 19
