Above the Snowline

by Steph Swainston

‘That doesn’t matter if I know where I’m going!’

  ‘I didn’t bring a map. You don’t even know what that mountain’s called.’

  ‘Why should I need to? Why should it have a name? Are you Awian, or something?’ She walked faster, striding high above the tussocks.

  ‘That’s not the way!’ I practically howled with frustration.

  ‘It’s my way. Darkling is my home. I just want to get out of these horrible hills!’

  ‘Come back! OK, come here and we can talk about it.’

  ‘Talking! You are an Awian. You’re useless!’

  ‘We’re guaranteed a bed for the night at Scatterstones.’

  ‘I’m carrying a howff.’

  ‘Well, I’m not!’

  ‘I’ll make you one.’ Her voice had a sincere tone, but as she headed away it faded and I was forced to follow. ‘I’ve been in the flatlands for weeks, and everything was strange and new. I’ve had enough of staying in rooms where the walls press in at me from all sides. I’ve had enough of sleeping where I can’t see the sky. I have had enough of eating meat which someone else has cooked to their taste. I even built shelters from furniture to pretend I was camping. Oh, I know you were laughing, but I had to follow my habit and not let any of the strangeness in, or all the strangeness would rush in at once and overwhelm me. You flatlanders are very weak. Now I am going home and you can either come with me or flutter off back to your Castle.’

  I watched her climb some rubble from an old avalanche and disappear into the gorge, then emerge further up clambering over boulders, using her hands on the steeper parts. I was convinced she’d look back, but she didn’t even pause. I had forgotten how decisively Rhydanne behave. Stupid! I told myself. Are you going to tell San you lost her?

  I spread my wings and flapped up the incline, flying so low with my legs dangling that my toes bumped off tufts all the way. I entered the gorge and searched for flat ground. There was none so I landed on the slope and ran down to Dellin. She didn’t register me but kept trudging, reciting, ‘Blue … sky … king … prince … manor …’ as if it was the doctrine that would win her Carnich.

  I followed her up the uneven steps of natural rock beside the stream. ‘Would you really have walked all the way to Carnich without me?’ She didn’t reply and I realised it was a flatlander’s question - of course she would. Nevertheless I made one last try: ‘If we’re going to climb I should have brought more supplies. Scatterstones would give us mutton pie; otherwise we’ll have nothing to eat tonight.’

  She rounded on me incredulously. ‘What are you blathering about? We’re surrounded by food!’

  I glanced round but there were no sheep in the gorge. In fact, I hadn’t seen any since morning. ‘If you’re talking about those ewes, they belong to …’

  She started giggling. Her face lit up, her eyes danced. She saw my surprise and laughter overcame her. She shook her head, swishing her ponytail; doubled up and beat her fists on her thighs. ‘Oh, Jant … Oh, Jant, we’ve been surrounded by food ever since we left the Castle … and you insist on carrying it!’ Then she must have had another thought, because her expression grew serious. ‘The gorge is full of food. If you grew up in Darkling, how could you possibly not know? Every child knows it. I taught both my daughters. Picking food is children’s work, even for goatherds.’

  ‘I’m not a goatherd!’ I repeated for the nth time. ‘I’m used to feasts. I have been in your position. I’ve been there, done all that poverty-stricken berry-picking stuff, and it was shit. I’ve improved my life since then.’

  ‘But you can’t remember any of it? You must be as bad at being a messenger as you were at being a goatherd, if you have such a poor memory.’

  ‘Damn it! I remember! There are bilberries, sure, but—’

  ‘So you do know bilberries.’ She giggled with contempt. ‘Come on, I’ll show you!’ She ran lightly to the pouring waterfall, climbed the boulders beside it and disappeared onto the higher level. I sighed and followed.

  When I reached her side, she pointed to the verge. ‘Look, we have ramsons, garlic roots, not at their best this time of year but still good to accompany meat.’ She unearthed them with her knife and popped them in her pack. ‘Up here are rowan berries, cloudberries … blackberry brambles, see? Hawthorn and briar hips, sour but very nourishing. Come and collect them!’

  ‘Great. A light snack.’

  ‘That’s not all!’ She bounded around so quickly that I didn’t follow her but watched her crossing and re-crossing my path. ‘Onions. Hazelnuts. Pignuts. Look here! These delicate blue mushrooms are wood blewits. The spear-shaped leaves are sorrel. Take the seeds as well. Those tall stalks are orache - better than spinach! You can bake meat wrapped in their leaves. These flaky plates are bracket fungus … and such a lot! Help me pick the small ones. They tenderise better. And below, boletus and parasol mushroom. That red one’s russula. The wrinkled one’s sparassis! Put them all together in your pack! Over here, turnips. Yarrow and thyme! Take as much as you can; they’re good to flavour meat. Bulk them out with sage and mint; they taste fine together. Oh, by the Huntress, don’t you know? This is sage, this is mint. Come further up - I’ve spotted puffballs on the opposite slope!’

  She ran beside the stream, crossed it on tiny stepping stones, and dashed up and down the nearly sheer banks, finding footholds on eroded steps of soil. She paused to pick berries from a bush, harvested handfuls of leaves and uprooted whole plants, one here, one there, into her rucksack. But I thought this horrible muck, not fit to eat at all. Why, when I could have a plate of beef and dumplings, had I let myself in for this? My heart sank even further when she began plucking snails off a rock and throwing them into her rucksack too.

  We reached the highest cliff of the gorge, worn smooth by the glistening waterfall. Dellin climbed it straight. I zigzagged up the bank beside it, which was so steep it was hell on the thighs, and all I could hear was my heart booming and my breathing in-in-out-out, in-in-out-out. Whenever I felt I wasn’t going to slip I looked up to the edge of the slope and Dellin’s face was there peering down at me.

  I emerged and there before me a pine forest rose up to the massive rock faces of Darkling. Their sheer size took my breath away, and as I looked around for a place to sit down I saw a fallen tree lying in the stream. Its roots had torn up a crown of black earth and its topmost twigs were trailing in the water, latticing it into silver ripples. ‘There’s plenty more food by that tree. Come and look!’ Dellin pointed with a dirty hand to some yellow, wrinkled fungi in the damp grass around its trunk.

  ‘I’m not touching those! They look revolting!’

  ‘But they’re chanterelles. They’re almost as good as field mushrooms. ’

  ‘I don’t care! This is all inedible, Dellin. Are you trying to kill us both?’

  ‘What else are you going to eat?’ she said, crouching to wash the nuts and mushrooms in the stream.

  ‘Roast beef, hopefully!’

  ‘Jant Shira, there will be good prey higher up: ibex, chamois, big game. Winter food in fact. I like it better too. It’s less effort for more meat and I have all the gear to hunt it. So let’s climb higher and in the meantime take what we can. Pick those, they’re oyster fungus and honey fungus.’

  ‘The slimy goo and the squidgy orange stuff.’ I sighed and complied, while Dellin gathered some weeds she called marjoram and, from the cliffs wet with spray, pocketed bunches of fleshy hart’s tongue fern. We continued through the forest, where she showed me we could eat the soft, pale green shoots at the tips of conifer branches. Yew trees are poisonous, but she peeled off the red flesh of the berries, which was sweet and sticky and tasted of pine. She declared that juniper berries could be made edible by cooking and, as we ascended, we snacked on waxy, yellow pine nuts, levering them out of cones with our knives.

  And then we left the forest, through a zone where the pines grew stunted, and emerged onto the bare Darkling mountainside. Here she found more fruit on the shrubs among the rocks
- barberries, cranberries, cowberries - but they hardly stopped my stomach from rumbling. When she dug up gentian root ‘to go in our kutch’, I turned and looked back over the vast landscape through which we had travelled. No way was I drinking kutch.

  The forest’s uneven pelt covered the hill. The stream sucked the hillside smoothly down into the gorge, and from its foot clear water bled out and bisected the grassy expanse of Marram Moor. Marram town itself was too far to see, tucked into a fold of Bromedale in the grey distance. The moor stretched to the north as well, and at some point, just before the horizon, it must become Micawater. To the south it continued towards Rilldale. I turned; before me the bare granite clutched and combed into vertiginous peaks.

  We were in a bizarre landscape of naked, angular rock with only the smallest rowan trees at the foot of the cliffs. Enormous, dark grey boulders surrounded us, almost entirely covered with green lichen. Everything was either grey or pale green, as if seen through coloured glass, and I was trying to get used to the weird effect. We had done eighty kilometres so far and, since we were losing the light, Dellin began looking for a place to camp. Eighty kilometres on foot over bad terrain. I grinned, despite myself, at the incredible rate of Rhydanne travel.

  Dellin called out ahead. I ran up and found her fastening a dead mountain hare to her pack. Her spear lay bloodied on the ground. Now I was impressed - if she could hit such a small target at distance with a thrown spear she was better than most trained spearmen. She gutted the hare without skinning it and slung it over the top of her rucksack. ‘Its fur has turned white, see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Soon it will snow. I knew I would be coming back through the snows.’

  A few minutes later she speared another, which I hadn’t even noticed, and I readied my crossbow, determined not to let a Rhydanne get the better of me. She caught yet another by hand, then, thankfully, I managed to shoot one. We now had enough to eat, so she called a halt to hunting.

  ‘You hit it with a tiny arrow,’ she said, tying the carcass to her pack.

  ‘A bolt. Give it back; I can reuse it.’

  She held out her hand for the bow and examined it as we walked. I had given her food for thought, but not, it seemed, for long. ‘My spear is much better,’ she concluded and passed the bow back abruptly.

  ‘This is the best the Castle ever designed!’

  ‘Ha! When snow starts falling, it will be less than useless. We’ll have to rely on my spear. Do the Awians use crossbows like this?’

  ‘Some do, but they mostly have longbows.’

  ‘The damp will affect them too.’

  ‘They keep them in cases.’

  ‘Much good that’ll do in the driving sleet!’ She laughed. ‘Snow must have started sticking in Carnich by now and Awians won’t murder us any longer! Oh, Jant, the shape of the mountains tells me I’m nearing home!’

  The sun dipped into the lilac-grey haze above the toothed peaks, and Dellin beckoned me on, uphill to the base of the cliff. It had weathered to a concavity along its base and had an overhang at head height. She ran along it; she seemed to be looking for something. After a while she halted. ‘This is perfect, Jant. Some Rhydanne have been here. It’s good to see their signs after so long.’ She stretched, shrugged off her rucksack and untied the animals from it.

  A sudden dusk breeze sprang up, blowing the chill of the high peaks against my body. I lay down in the shelter of the cliff, and immediately felt the sun’s rays again, strong enough to burn. It was strange, as if we had reached the point where autumn and winter joined. The late-summer sun was making one last effort before winter overwhelmed it.

  Dellin began skinning the animals. She looked up, annoyed. ‘You’re doing nothing while we have to secure camp. We have to work together; didn’t your grandmother tell you this is the most vulnerable time?’

  ‘Yes, but there aren’t any wolves here.’

  ‘That’s what you think! You have no idea! Take out the wood we gathered and make a hearth.’

  I did as I was told, with very bad grace. I am used to giving orders to mortals, not obeying them. But I know how to build a campfire. I’m not as hopeless in her world as she is in mine. I made a big cooking fire such as the fyrd use and was just about to light it when she glanced over and yelled, ‘No! Too many sticks!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The wood has to last us!’ She ran to my hearth and dismantled it in a matter of seconds. ‘We’re above the tree line, Jant. Do you want to end up using bone as fuel? Because it burns dismally, let me tell you.’ She placed three flat stones in a triangle with small gaps between them, so that air could enter at the points of the triangle, and set the hearth in the space between them. She lit it with a flint and dry grass, and stood a small brass pot of water on top.

  ‘I’m making kutch!’ she said happily. ‘It’s been days since I last had any. Do you want some?’

  ‘Oh, no. Not kutch. Certainly not.’

  ‘Kutch is good for you.’

  ‘I have water.’

  ‘Only the dying drink water.’

  The brass pot was well scrubbed, but still blackened and patched with iridescence from hundreds of campfires. Dellin laid out one of the hares, shredded its meat and dropped it into the boiling water. Then she poured in a generous amount of Marram beer.

  ‘I’m not drinking that concoction,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t afford to be choosy.’

  ‘Oh, god …’

  ‘And don’t use that water to wash! It has to last till tomorrow.’

  ‘How am I supposed to get clean, then?’

  ‘Rub snow on yourself.’

  ‘But there isn’t any snow.’

  ‘Yet. There will be tomorrow! And besides,’ she continued, ‘you smell better if you don’t wash. Less fake, more like a man. Maybe one day you’ll explain to me why flatland men go around smelling of flowers.’

  I knew this had been a mistake. I got up and wandered around while she made the alcoholic gravy called kutch. The Rhydanne are as obsessed with kutch as Awians are with coffee and habitually brew the disgusting broth from whatever meat and spirit is available. Dellin poured some into a mug and drank it with every sign of enjoyment, but it really reeked. I was determined not to touch any but I was ravenous and craved almost any food. Roast potatoes, golden and translucent-crisp; chocolate cake; I could almost smell it; shortbread fingers and fresh coffee … why hadn’t I brought any? Coffee would be perfect, but Dellin would have to stick to kutch. One cup of espresso and she would probably explode.

  ‘Sure you don’t want some?’ she said.

  ‘No! It pongs! My reputation will be marred badly enough when I arrive at Carnich as filthy as a wolf, without eating like one too.’

  Revitalised, she laid down her empty pack and began rolling out her tent, a wide tube of supple leather which had been packed in the base. She unpegged the rucksack frame and took the three longest struts, each just less than a metre long, threaded them into hems at the tent opening and slotted them together. To keep this triangular opening upright she pushed her spear into the ground as a tent pole and hooked the apex of the triangle to it. Then she propped up the other end of the tent with the last of the rucksack frame’s struts - in no more than five minutes she had built a camp out of no more than what she was carrying.

  She supported the spear with stones, then sat down beside the fire.

  ‘What about me?’ I asked.

  ‘Here.’ She tossed a folded tarpaulin and a length of cord at my feet.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’

  She laughed, annoying me even further. ‘The anchor points are above you.’

  I looked up, to the smooth underside of the overhang above my head. She spoke slowly, clearly thinking I was stupid. ‘This is a rock shelter, Jant. When you were a goatherd, did you live in a house?’

  ‘In a shieling, actually.’

  ‘You can’t have travelled much.’

  ‘I spent my first te
n years in Mhor Darkling valley.’

  ‘I’m not surprised you know nothing. There are holes in the rock, look …’ She came over and, standing on tiptoe, passed her fingers through a loop that had been carved out of the cliff face. ‘Here’s one. And another. All the way along, see?’

  Sure enough half a dozen rugged holes were chiselled from solid rock along the edge of the overhang - I would never have noticed if she hadn’t pointed them out. I set about unfolding the canvas sheet, threaded the cord through its eyeholes and tied it to the loops in the overhang. It hung down like a curtain and made a chamber of the dry recess at the base of the cliff. I stretched the curtain out into an awning and selected some rocks to weigh down its bottom edge. Then I crawled into the serviceable shelter between it and the cliff, stowed my rucksack and joined Dellin at the hearth.

  By this time I was so famished I felt faint, and Dellin’s cooking smelt scrumptious. She had threaded slivers of hare meat on bone skewers and laid them across the fire, so the meat was browning already and dripping juices. She had fried the nuts and mushrooms together and left the pan on a warm hearth stone. She had placed all the fruits on the back of her jacket spread on the ground and we snacked from them while she pounded the herbs into paste in a tin bowl.

  She was bare-armed in her black vest, her hunched shoulders pointed as she basted the meat with the paste and at length gave me one of the kebabs. It tasted wonderful. The meat, herb-crusted and succulent inside, was every bit as good as one of the Castle’s feasts. Even the spring water, pure and cool, was better than the water on the Plains.

  She set the pot to brew more kutch, then used her nails to pull the steaming meat from the skewer. She didn’t blow it cool but chomped it noisily with her back teeth. Then she pointed along the mountainside with the empty skewer. ‘That’s the way we’re going. Good visibility. You can see for about forty kilometres, the full distance we will cover tomorrow.’

  ‘We should be able to cover fifty.’

  ‘No. Because tomorrow it will snow.’

  Nothing seemed less likely. The sky above the cliff was a rose-pink haze and a cloudless blue out to the east. We were already in shade, as the sun set behind the highest peaks, which cast their long shadows over us and down to stripe the mountainside.