Above the Snowline

by Steph Swainston

  Dellin ran to its back, out of the way of its frantically kicking hooves, grabbed the waving shaft and pulled it free. Then she raised the spear above its eye and for a second saw the point reflect on the shining brown orb. She thrust the spear, jumped onto the shaft, and felt it sink home.

  She released her weight from the shaft and stepped back. She loved taking an animal’s movement and stilling it. She loved being able to see closely all the details of its body, and the rich smell of its sweat was making her giddy. She stroked its flank. The coarse hairs felt silky when smoothed along their grain. Underneath, its muscles flickered in their last spasms.

  Dellin’s hands were sticky with the tremendous amount of blood pouring freely from its neck. She retrieved her knife, slipped it into the suede sheath on her thigh, settled back on her haunches and meticulously licked her fingers clean. Then she leant over the horse’s bulk and poked her tongue into the wound, where the hair-bearing skin had pulled back from the slick red flesh, so wet and warm. She bit the flat expanse of its neck, feeling her teeth slide over the hard hairs. She pressed her lips against them, relishing the overpowering scent, and breathed it in through nose and open mouth - filling her lungs with it, filling her mind as if she had become part of it. She felt the horse relax and its smell changed from enticing prey to fresh meat - it was dead.

  Food at last! Dellin bowed her head and sucked, sucked at the wound. She drank her fill, then looked to Laochan. He had not made his kill as cleanly as hers, since he stubbornly still used a bone spear, and its uppermost back leg was twitching. Behind him, the other prey stampeded round and round, crazed with fear and streaming ragged scarves of breath.

  The handsome black stallion caught Dellin’s eye. It was indeed a prestigious beast. If she killed it, she could thread one of its teeth on her necklace. Her strength was flowing back now; the mare’s blood was so wholesome she lusted for more. She fancied she could smell the blood of the stallion coursing in its very veins. She wrenched her spear from the mare’s skull with a pull and a twist, then gave a double whistle.

  Laochan looked up, his mouth and chin shining red. Dellin pointed at the stallion. He wiped his sleeve across his face and grinned. He stood, digging his thumb under the bolas cord coiled around his waist, loosened the knot and unwound the three cords, releasing the stone balls that had been bound at his hip. He gracefully lifted the handle so they hung loose at the end of each cord, and whistled he was ready.

  Dellin whistled, ‘I’ll chase it to you,’ and leapt forward over the tussocks. Her soft boots were silent but her bangles jangled and inside the neck of her parka her strings of beads rattled. The stallion sensed it had been singled out. For a second she thought it might turn and attack her. But it continued racing its fastest, neck stretched and head thrust forward, as if it would burst through the barrier and go tumbling, mane, tail and hooves, down the cliff.

  She manoeuvred between it and the fence, matched speed with it and turned it towards Laochan. Few animals had ever outrun her, even when they were fleeing for their lives. She put on a spurt and made it charge quicker, ecstatic that her reflexes were so much faster, she could turn it whenever she wanted.

  The stallion saw Laochan and tried to cut in front of Dellin to escape, but a jab of her spear forced it closer. He slipped the three round weights off his shoulder, let them drop free and swung them to and fro. Then he raised the handle and twirled the bolas above his head.

  She halted and let the stallion race on. As Laochan’s hand swung towards the horse he released the bolas. The three balls on their ropes spun through the air, looped into the stallion’s legs and tangled them together.

  It went over hard onto its withers and head, thumped back onto its side - Dellin heard a leg break - and lay struggling, lifting its head, arcing its body, thrashing its hopelessly wrapped-up hooves. She pounced, her knife drawn like a single talon, and shredded its throat so thoroughly its eyes were already beginning to glaze by the time Laochan sprinted over.

  His shadow cast across her and striped the stallion’s broad body. She looked up, seeing the wind ruffle his long hair. His eyes reflected the sunlight and shone with joy. He smiled with blood in the corners of his mouth and Dellin beamed back. ‘We’ve enough meat for weeks!’

  ‘We can’t carry it all,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to make a cache … At least one.’

  Dellin nodded. ‘The tall spruce is best. Remember the one above the ravine? If we tie our packs in its branches the wolves won’t get them. Oh, this is just like last summer!’ She went down on hands and knees and examined the horse’s incisors; great yellow plaques, with chewed grass and mashed blue flowers between them. Small bubbles of saliva clung around its pulled-back lips. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take a front tooth.’ She found a rock and began to bash its gums.

  Laochan bent a leg and examined its hoof. ‘Look! Look! It grows metal underneath. Wow. Metal hooves!’

  She wiggled an incisor free and drew out its very long root.

  Laochan poked his finger into an old spur-scar over its ribs. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Some kind of thorn scratch.’

  ‘Wait till they hear how I brought it down …’

  ‘They’ll think you’ve grown ten dicks. Hurry up! We have to butcher it before the wolves appear.’

  ‘After we’ve eaten, I’ll pounce on you and you’ll be my prey!’

  Dellin bit his shoulder lovingly and he grinned at her. He felt along the rounded edge of the horse’s back leg, and scored with his flint knife an arc along the line of the joint, again and again until the tough hide gradually split and he cut through to the muscle beneath. He dug his fingernails under the hide and slowly tore it back, using his knife to slice it away from the clinging meat.

  Tiny flakes broke off his knife edge and remained in the flesh as glittering dust, the sharp new stone shining cleanly where they had detached. Dellin yelped in disapproval and pushed his hand away. ‘Let me do that. I don’t want to eat steak full of flint spalls again. You know my favourite - get the stomach.’

  ‘All right.’ He pushed back his sleeves, then drew his knife down the middle of the stallion’s belly from breastbone to between its back legs. The skin began to part. He was careful not to pierce the intestines, the pungent reek would attract wolves, but he neatly cut the tubes at top and bottom, took the stomach out and presented it to her.

  She cut the hard ball of muscle in half and greedily bit out a mouthful of the mashed grass inside. It was so piquant! She chewed the acidic fibres slowly and passed the other half to Laochan, who looked like he needed some nourishment.

  He cut out the liver; purple, smooth and gleaming, and slopped it into his rucksack, then pulled the slippery mess of intestines forward and reached his arm over it into the body cavity to pluck out the kidneys. He stripped them of valuable white fat and tossed them in his pack.

  ‘Ay!’ he said. ‘Try some of this fat. There’s four times as much as on a deer!’

  His tempting musk tingled Dellin’s nose. But first things first: with fast, economical movements she peeled the skin down no further than the hock because the lower leg bore no meat, and began filling her bag with thick steaks from its haunch.

  A shout made them look up. Featherback men were running out of the opening in the wall, waving their arms and shouting madly. More men behind them turned to beckon to yet more dashing from their shacks. Dellin gasped. She had never seen so many! Their clothes were - colourful! - too bright - and they actually had wings folded at their backs. They really grew feathers. The stiff tips of one man’s wings protruded from his coat. Their hair was short and many shades of brown, even yellow, like dry grass. They were stocky and bulky and moved too slowly - comically slowly. Some held wood staffs and they yelled with fury. A hail of stones was bound to follow. She grabbed her spear.

  Laochan was elbow-deep in the horse’s ribcage, feeling about for its heart. The featherback men stopped at the barrier, aghast expressions contorting their f
aces. They raised their staffs in front of their eyes.

  ‘Run! Run!’

  Laochan sprang up - and cried out. A stick had appeared projecting from his hip. He clutched both hands around it, turned in wonder to the featherbacks - and another stick with feathers on the end appeared exactly in the middle of his chest.

  He dropped to his knees, staring at Dellin. His eyes were full of terror and confusion. Then they set and he fell.

  She tentatively touched him. He’s dead. Laochan’s dead. Feathered sticks were appearing all around her, embedding in the ground, in the horse’s carcass and in her husband’s body.

  She wrenched herself away from him and instinct told her to crawl. The forest edge seemed impossibly far. Something whooshed by - a stick hit the stones in front of her, jamming between them at an angle. It had a sharp metal tip. Then she was up and sprinting her fastest. The thin pines with a few bushes between them, the unnatural cut stumps much too white, the strip of dark boughs over trunks and undergrowth jumped and bounded, never getting any nearer.

  Sticks were cracking against the rocks all around. She sped past them and kept going straight, aiming for the darkness between the trunks. She vaulted the barrier, landed atop a boulder, sprang off and across the track.

  At last, the forest! She caught her breath in a bound over the brambles at its edge and landed, both feet, both hands, on the pine litter.

  She heard no pursuit. She dashed deeper in, skidded to her knees behind the rowan bush, pulled herself into the smallest possible area and peered out between its leaves. Four featherback men were climbing into the enclosure. The horses were mad with panic, stampeding round and round inside the fence as far as they could get from the kills. The strangers seemed cautious of them and walked instead to Laochan, who lay on his side with his legs crooked. One bent down, obscured by the tussocks, straightened up with Laochan’s knife in his hand and inspected it.

  Tears were pouring down Dellin’s face but she kept watching. She started sobbing, catching each breath short and sharp.

  The tallest Awian crouched beside the stallion and pressed his hand to its neck. The second turned Laochan’s body over with his foot. Dellin saw in a flash his white skin and trailing black hair. She cried out and all four men looked in her direction.

  She shrank back and clamped her hand over her mouth. The man stroking the dead stallion said something and the others began to walk towards her. They left her husband lying face down and drew new feather-ended sticks, fitted them to the strings on their wooden staves.

  Dellin glanced uphill, towards the familiar screes. She fled.

  LIGHTNING

  November, 1890

  I ran up the spiral staircase as fast as I could, beside myself with excitement. I couldn’t wait to tell him. Three hundred and thirty steps later I came to a little bare landing and the arched door of his apartment. I reached out a hand and rapped on it. There was no answer. Of course there was no answer; the Messenger was rarely seen before ten o’clock in the morning, when he leaves his tower with his girl of the previous night and goes in search of breakfast.

  On the other hand, he is keen to be accessible and usually leaves his door unlocked. That was well known. I pushed down the catch and swung it wide. ‘Jant?’

  He wasn’t in this half of the circular room, but bedclothes were rustling on the other side of the velvet curtain drawn across it. I stepped through the doorway and waited for a reply. ‘Jant? Jant?’

  ‘Just a minute!’ came from behind the curtain.

  This is the fastest person in the world and it is always ‘just a minute’ with him. The room was half in impenetrable gloom but a little light leaked in from the shutters, and with the odour of stale coffee, the air was quite a fug. I picked my way across the semicircular study to the window, between a trio of smeared wine glasses on the floor, plates sticky with the remains of what seemed to be cherry gateau, big curled feathers from the tops of someone’s wings, and a pair of women’s shoes with pointed toes, kicked off in a hurry. I opened the shutters. One of them was broken, and as I propped it wide I thought, it’s extraordinary. Jant does look very much like her. Broader, of course; but she could be his sister. Watch me shock him out of bed.

  ‘Jant!’ I called. ‘There’s a Rhydanne in the Castle!’

  The bedclothes crinkled with increased asperity, then with a jingle of brass rings on the rail the curtain twitched apart in the middle and Jant’s face appeared, looking somewhat hungover. ‘What?’

  ‘A Rhydanne!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Down by Carillon.’

  He blinked in surprise. I continued, satisfied, ‘Called Shira. Standing by Serein’s fishpond. So I thought I should—’

  Jant interrupted me, ‘He’s called Shira?’

  I smiled and something in my smile informed him he should alter the question.

  ‘She’s called Shira?’

  ‘Yes. That much I understood.’

  He poked his upper body through and drew the drapes about his waist, so I was no longer speaking to a disembodied head but also to a hairless torso. ‘Is she speaking Scree?’

  ‘I assume so. You can speak it, surely?’

  ‘Well, it’s been a long time but … yes, yes, of course …’

  ‘Well, come on then! If she harpoons any of Serein’s prize koi, he’ll run her through.’

  ‘Ha! Serein and his bloody fish.’

  ‘You and your bloody women.’

  Jant shrugged, withdrew behind the curtains and tweaked them into place. A few seconds later he slipped through and descended the three steps to the lower half of the room, buttoning his shirt cuffs.

  ‘She’s standing on the wall of the pond,’ I said, ‘with a spear - some kind of harpoon - watching the carp.’ I raised my arm and struck the pose. ‘I was going to the hall when I saw her. A grounds-man tried to talk to her as well, but he couldn’t. I mean, she talks but we couldn’t fathom a word she said. It’s all V’s and K’s.’

  ‘Bh’s and Ich’s.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  He picked a corset from the back of the chair, gathered its dangling laces, scooped up the shoes and disappeared behind the curtain.

  Typical, I thought. Apart from the clutter on the floor, his room was cluttered on every wall, the top of his desk and dresser, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if the clutter had extended across the ceiling as well. The desk was covered in coach route maps, folded in zigzag fashion, and other necessities of his job: pens, paper, a walnut box of seals and stubs of sealing wax - crimson for the Castle’s correspondence, black for his own.

  On his travels he had collected such a vast miscellany of articles that his room resembled the den of an undiscerning buccaneer. There was a little cup and saucer with gold rims compulsively lifted from the Rachiswater Royal Café. There were books of matches pinched from various hotels; a scallop shell (‘A Souvenir From Cobalt’); horse racing spurs from Eske; a glazed green roof ornament of a sea serpent from Ghallain; a bunch of silk sky-blue roses of Awia given him in secret by a Lady Governor, stuffed into a Litanee knotwork vase; a series of small gouache paintings of local scenes popular in my own manor; a pack of cards I know to be false, with extra aces; and several half-dried bottles of eyeliner, which I believe was all the rage in Hacilith and the sort of thing that Jant latched onto rapidly.

  Clay animal figurines from past Shatterings crowded the mantelpiece and in the grate were a very blackened kettle and toasting fork. Rather than descend the three hundred steps to the hall, he sat up here of a night and made his own toast and black coffee, from a great coffee tin embossed with baroque scrollwork and a dense little cylinder of dark chocolate, which he grated into it.

  On a stand, pride of place, stood a black and scarlet chessboard, with ebony and red maple pieces inlaid with jet and carnelian. It had cost Jant so much he never stopped flaunting it, but it was no more than a pose because he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to play. The bric-a-brac and interesting jun
k picked up in flea markets around the world gave off a mothy smell of dust, but the more subtle smell of wood polish underlay everything, with old newspaper and the peppery scent of ink.

  Beside the door, the wall was taken up by pigeonholes, each compartment labelled with the name of one of the Eszai or the Castle’s staff. Bundles of letters and slips of paper projected from most of them.

  The curtain was pushed aside and a half-dressed woman emerged, apologetically bowed over a bundle of her clothes. She backed to the door and disappeared down the spiral stairs as fast as she could go. Jant came out on the other side and began preening in the mirror.

  I said, ‘A Rhydanne, right here in the Castle! What do you think she wants?’

  ‘I have a landslide of a hangover …’

  More rustling, and another pale and interesting girl crept out of the bedroom - all dishevelled hair and white shift - and departed as quickly as her flip-flops would let her. Jant didn’t spare her a glance.

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘I’m not really sure …’ He pulled on his boots and searched around. ‘Where’s my sword? I can’t go down there looking like a Zascai. Oh, here we are.’ He unhooked his jacket from the back of the door and a Wrought sword was hanging underneath, on a belt with the Castle’s sun as its buckle. He put it on then sailed out of the room, leaving the door open. He took the stairs two at a time, leaning around the tight curve. ‘What a time to come knocking. There I was, lying in the sunlight with a sleeping beauty on either side. The blonde’s leg there, hidden in the duvet; the brunette’s plump tits there. I was enjoying wondering how to wake them and you rush in, shouting.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll manage to find some more.’

  ‘It’s the eyes.’ He smirked. ‘They can’t resist the eyes.’

  We reached the bottom of the staircase, emerged onto the grass and turned onto the path that runs between the kitchens and the end of Carillon which houses the Treasury. All the windows of the Treasury were caged and the flagstones of the path were dipped in the centre by the progress and egress of so many thousands of feet over the centuries. We passed the Treasurer’s apartments, then the Cook’s, and on either side the verdant lawns exhaled the moisture of last night’s rain. Although it was late November, the warmth of autumn still lingered and the baroque, red-tiled roof of Carillon looked more beautiful than ever against the cloudless sky.