Above the Snowline

by Steph Swainston

  She laughed. ‘It was good, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was all right.’

  ‘Do you want some more?’

  ‘Er … yes. Yes, I do. It’s very warming. Show me how to make it.’

  ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘But first fetch your flowery foam - your soap. You should wash and smell like an Awian again, because Raven will expect it. Come on.’ She used her mittens to ease four hot cobbles from the hearth and carried them to the tripod in the rear of the cave. She plunged them into the cone of pink flesh: there was a sudden hiss and a cloud of steam hid her.

  I peered into the wobbly sink. ‘What’s this made out of?’

  ‘It’s a section of the bear’s gut.’

  Surprisingly, the water was clean and wonderfully hot. Dellin lay on the furs and watched with regret as I shaved and brushed my teeth. Then I returned to the hearth and pulled the silky pelts around my legs, comfortable with exhaustion, hot water, massage and kutch. Now I was rid of a fortnight’s filth I felt extremely fresh, as if preened for a special occasion, and I basked in a tranquillity I’d hardly imagined could exist in Darkling at all. ‘Thank you, Dellin.’

  She snorted. ‘You don’t smell like a man; you smell like a bunch of violets. Tomorrow you must speak for the Carnich Rhydanne.’

  ‘Yes …’ I murmured.

  ‘Look at me! Look me in the eye. Don’t take the Awians’ side because you grow feathers and so do they.’

  ‘Dellin, I—’

  ‘Don’t take Raven’s side because you are accustomed to speaking with princes and he puts you at your ease. Don’t feel as if you’re a boy again, because Darkling brings back memories. I think Raven is the sort of man who has no time for boys.’

  ‘Hah! I grew up in the city backstreets, Dellin. I had a gang behind me then, and now I have the Castle.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘And most of all, don’t take his side because you think it’s what the silver man secretly wants. He wants to benefit his people, not the Castle.’

  ‘I know! I swear I’ll represent you fairly!’

  She stirred the embers, and when a single, elongated flame licked up around the pan, she glared at it. ‘The lies of Awians are as powerful as their bright colours. They carry you away.’

  ‘Dellin, I can handle Raven Rachiswater; I’ve known him since he was a boy. In fact, I remember him playing on a rocking horse with his brother … and they squabbled over it. I remember his father. Damn it, I remember his grandfather, who died on the battlefield. Yes, Carnich is your home, and you’re wonderfully in your element here, but wait until you see me in the milieu to which I’ve become accustomed.’

  Next morning, Dellin’s fur sleeping bag was already empty and the skillet of water was simmering noisily on the hearth. A clear blue light shone from the tunnel she had dug through the drift in the cave mouth, and rhythmic tapping told me she was out on the terrace.

  I slit Laochan’s jacket up the back twice for my wings, put it on and popped the toggles through their holes. I dressed myself in his other clothes, though they were a bit tight, and crawled out into the bright sunlight with my mittens slipping over the crystalline snow.

  What a sight it was! The mountainside dropped away nearly sheer into a steep, wide ravine filled by Carnich Glacier. We were on the bank high above it. I looked down onto its surface, which wasn’t flat but corrugated into regular waves taller than a man and banded equally white and dust-grey with ground rock. At its mouth the titan pressure of the weight of ice had thrust out clusters of blue-white shards, which stood sharp and monolithic, or splayed like quartz crystals. They cast long shadows each the length of a ship over the river of ice.

  On the far side, the immense bulk of Klannich rose more than halfway up the sky. Its M-shaped double summit was unmistakable. The nearer pinnacle was higher, but the further one was visible beyond it, since Klannich curved slightly to the east as if shrugging. Further on still, a wall of snow-clad ridges continued the immense cordillera with a breathless impression of space. Peaks behind peaks, and yet more crested into the distance, each ridge a paler shade of blue until only the points were visible in a blue-white haze.

  Clouds piled around Klannich mountain, not the thin wisps we had seen as we climbed, but great, cumbrous stacks of coppery nimbus, dark at the base where they hid the pointed summits here and there. A peach-pink, heavy dawn light shone from them, which, together with the lupin-blue sky, stippled the snowfield and the glacier’s ridged surface blue and orange. As the light shifted from a thundery brown to violet, the snowfields changed too, reflecting every nameable colour. Only Klannich’s two pinnacles remained pure white, like canines.

  Ice had sealed the snow in a glassy crust over the whole slope and there was no sign of the bear’s blood. Half a metre of snow must have fallen last night - the heaviest fall I’d seen in eighty years. Dellin was busy with breakfast. She was sitting on one of the boulders, tenderising a chunk of bear thigh by holding it on the flat top and bashing it with a stone. ‘What do you think?’ she said.

  ‘I’m missing my coffee and biscuits.’

  ‘What? No. I mean, weren’t you looking at Raven’s house?’

  ‘Can I see Carniss from here?’ I said excitedly. ‘Where? Show me.’

  She stood up and pointed across the ravine. The far bank was a vertical cliff, but Klannich projected beyond the end of the glacier into a promontory. In silhouette, topping this headland, was a wall and a big square tower.

  ‘Oh god,’ I breathed. ‘Oh god - oh no!’

  ‘Raven’s pueblo,’ said Dellin.

  ‘You didn’t tell me he was building a fucking castle! It’s … it’s huge!’

  ‘I told you it was big.’

  ‘Oh, shit, Raven, what the fuck are you trying to do?’

  Dellin couldn’t understand a rhetorical address to Raven. She looked at me as if I was mad.

  I said, ‘It’s a keep. He’s built a bloody fortress up there! Easily as big as the ones at the Front! Why didn’t you tell us?’

  ‘I told the silver man it was as big as the Skein Gate,’ she said, taken aback.

  ‘A house, you said. Not a fucking tower!’

  Dellin seemed so frightened that I tried to calm down. ‘How long did it take him to build?’

  ‘Last year and this year, from the melt to the melt.’

  ‘Impressive.’ I indicated the sloppy meat. ‘Were you going to make kutch with that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, bring me the whisky. I need a stiff drink.’

  She dashed into the cave and emerged with a bottle. I swigged from it, grimaced, and said, ‘Raven doesn’t have a licence to fortify. If he did, I’d know about it, because he needs permission from the Emperor. Nobody can fortify without a licence and nobody ever has, not since the Eske Rebellion …’ I tailed off because the fortress drew my gaze. Its blocky profile was so much at odds with the mountains I wondered why I hadn’t seen it at once. A curtain wall ran along the top of the sheer cliff, and at the end nearest Klannich a square tower surmounted it, with a tiny movement fluttering - a flag flying from its roof. Raven might have disturbed a few Rhydanne, fine, but I couldn’t let him cross the Emperor.

  ‘I’m the first immortal to know this. I have to deal with it properly. Have your moonshine back, Dellin. It’s got a kick like a mule.’

  She slopped some into a steaming mug and offered it to me with some oatcakes. I broke one in half and stirred the kutch with it, breaking up the layer of translucent fat on its surface into amber globules. The chill air was nipping my skin and the sun’s rays were tangible too, a sick radiation making me feel light-headed. The air in my clothes was a warm cocoon and I dreaded the moment when excessive movement would expel it.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘Raven wants to rid Carnich of Rhydanne, every one.’

  ‘But he has the might of Awia behind him. Surely Rhydanne can’t be such a threat that he needs to build a keep? He can’t be protecting himself against I
nsects, either; there aren’t any up here. There are wolves …’

  ‘A timber barricade is proof against wolves,’ said Dellin.

  ‘Exactly. There’s no need for a keep.’

  ‘Will you still speak to him?’

  ‘Yes, certainly! I want to know what the fuck he’s playing at. San will want to know too.’

  She looked relieved and began to prowl about, tidying and packing. Then she swung herself onto the boulder’s slanting top and dropped onto one knee. On all fours, she grasped its edge and stretched the other leg out behind. She took a deep breath, threw her head back and howled: ‘Ah-ooo!’

  What was she doing?

  She took another breath and yowled into the air: ‘Ah-ooo! Ah-ooo! ’ More high-pitched than a wolf.

  I backed off until a boulder pressed cold against my calves, then sat down heavily on it, crunching the snow. The respect I’d had for her vanished. How could I have felt close to her last night? I couldn’t possibly know her! Her actions were so alien, her thoughts must be worse!

  She paused, head bowed gracefully, but I felt repulsed. I had no idea what to say. What does one say to a wild animal?

  ‘Ah-ooo! Ah-ooo!’ And now the first howl echoed back from the surrounding cliffs. Dellin tilted her head and listened: those weren’t echoes, they were replies.

  Another ululation resounded from further up the far bank. A third, definitely an older female, amplified on the breeze gusting down the glacier.

  Dellin breathed deeply then bayed again, leaning forward on hands and toes, putting her whole strength into the call. Echoes redoubled the cries and they reverberated together, nearly-human voices straining lupine howls into the wails of mourners. Abruptly, they stopped. The ravine resounded with echoes, which gradually died away until, at length, I could hear the whistling breeze. The hair on my arms prickled. My mother had been one of these!

  Dellin closed her eyes and turned to the source of the glacier, as if listening with her whole face, but the wind brought not the faintest sound. She shrugged and wiped her mouth. ‘There’s a pair nearly opposite, another pair some way up the Carniss side of the glacier and a lone huntress down in the forest. That’s all - I heard nothing from the trading post.’ She crossed a foot onto her thigh and began lacing a crampon to her boot. ‘I’m sure I heard Karbhainn, though. I’m glad the stinking Awians haven’t killed him.’

  ‘Can you really recognise their howls?’

  ‘Their signals, Jant. Only wolves howl. Yes, of course I can; these are people I’ve come to know.’

  The wind was whipping round the cliff edge beside her cave and, judging by the curling clouds, the air currents were treacherous. Hopefully I could gain enough altitude on the more constant flow along the ridge to soar high above the glacier.

  Dellin tied her crampon laces and stamped around to test them. She looked innocuous enough now, but I was still shuddering at the sight of her stretched out like a pointing hound. I hadn’t known Rhydanne howled … But then another scene from my shieling resolved in my mind: the wind clamouring down our valley carried a fluid, diaphanous voice. A yearning sound, it rode the gale effortlessly but with no trace of sentience, as bestial as a fox. I had heard nothing like it before; it matched no animal I knew. It had to be Barguest, the great wolf, outside in the sightless abyss. How many times had Eilean told me, ‘Barguest will come and get you’? I pulled the rugs over my head and lay as still as if frozen, but the howling drifted into my bunk, calling me to come outside, feel the strong teeth plunge into my flesh and be shaken into thousands of pieces. Eilean heard it too, and gasped. She grabbed her parka and dashed out, leaving the door swinging on its leather hinge.

  Dellin poked me with the butt of her spear. ‘Wake up, Jant. Will you fly over the glacier?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then meet me at the other side. If I approach alone they’ll shoot me.’

  ‘Oh, then I’ll catch the arrow in mid-air.’

  She grinned and set off with a swinging gait, using her spear as a staff, towards the ravine sliced by Carnich Glacier through the white skirts of Klannich.

  RAVEN

  I retired to the window seat to peruse my book while the servants cleared the remains of breakfast from the table in my solar. But I wasn’t paying much attention to Myths and Legends of Ancient Awia - I have re-read it so many times before, with the few others I managed to bring here. I kept glancing up from its worn pages, through the diamond-shaped panes of leaded glass to the heights of Capercaillie and the thronging peaks. They repelled me. They fascinated me too. Their silence belied their terrible potential: they could take a man’s life at any time, in any number of ways.

  Clouds were lifting off the summits and out of the hanging valleys between them. Each valley extruded its own glacier, meeting in the bulk of Carniss Glacier. Clouds hung below the double crown of Capercaillie, which, I am told, is about five thousand metres high. Nobody has charted the others; there are far too many. According to the theory of Phalarope, the range, the backbone of the continent from the top of Ghallain Peninsula all the way into the Paperlands, is slowly but constantly increasing in height as the pressure from the seabed under the western ocean pushes it up. Difficult to imagine, but I am told the theory is supported by the sharpness of the peaks too young to be worn down, the straight west coast and the frequent earthquakes.

  I looked up to the triangular, vertical rock face of Capercaillie. Blown powder snow had stuck to it, revealing its diagonal strata. Far below my window, the settlers’ cabins were dotted about between my tower and the edge of the forest, where the tree boughs hung low with ice. The snow around the long latrine shack was stained brown, and in front of it tracks converged on a manger, from which several russet-cream llamas were imperiously pulling straw.

  I appreciated the beauty of the peaks surrounding us, but they were innately deadly too, like a coiled viper which may at any moment rear and strike. They engender an apprehension in me, just the same as when I used to wait in the amphitheatre, sword in hand, alone on the sand-strewn ground, the crowd fell silent, and the gate at the opposite end began slowly, slowly to ratchet open …

  I do not understand the mountains. No human terms can fancifully be applied to them; they are as cold as my brother’s heart. I will never be able to tame them but they add to the challenge I have set myself, and I admit I find it exhilarating.

  A low howl, very mournful and faint, emanated from the direction of the glacier. More howls joined it, making my people below look around anxiously and glance at each other. The goats and llamas started up and their bells began tonkling all over the settlement and echoing back from the quarry face. The Rhydanne are howling again. It sent a shiver down my spine. I slipped a bookmark between the pages and placed the book down on the seat, stood up and looked out over the treetops, but there was nothing to see bar the plumes of spindrift curling off the nearest ridge. I supported myself with my hands on the columns either side of the window and listened to the howls. The snow out there looked soft as carded wool, but its terrible cold constantly stole into my solar and wrapped around my ankles. The mountains want to suck the life from us. You feel the heat of your body dissipating into the chill air.

  Eventually the howls ceased and the silence returned, as deep as the drifts. The servants by the table were looking up at me apprehensively. ‘Not wolves; only savages,’ I said. ‘You can go now.’

  I descended from the recess and sat down at the table. A scatter of coins lay next to my ledger - I have just given an advance on next month’s pay to my steward, who is inordinately fond of drinking in the Frozen Hound. The gold coins glittered and caught my eye, my brother’s profile on each one. I picked one up. It might as well be my face, since no one can tell us apart. I pressed my thumbnail on the cheek as if to scar it. It could be my face, and why shouldn’t it be? It’s simply a matter of chance. He drew breath a minute before me, so he inherits the kingdom. He always had to be first. He was always the bully.

 
I permitted myself a sour smile. He becomes king and I end up trapped on this damn rock. Scarcely aware of doing it, I tossed up and caught the coin. I clicked my thumbnail into the ridges on its sides, and it gradually warmed to the heat of my palm. I tossed it again. My brother’s head, ‘Tarm. Rach. 73RD Rex Awia’ inscribed around it. Again. The Rachiswater eagle close on the obverse. My twin brother’s head. The florid eagle with his eye keen and his wings folded. My twin’s head. The eagle. My twin’s head. My twin’s head. The eagle. My twin’s head. Why does his head turn up more often? I clenched my fist. It is just like him - rearing his head into every affair where he’s not wanted! He’s ubiquitous! I unfolded my hand, index to little finger, and looked down at his profile, identical to mine. Except that while I wear my hair short, he is jolly and cavalier, or at least feigns it, and grows his dark locks to shoulder length.

  I do hate him (tossing up the coin again). He doesn’t manage the kingdom as well as I could. He has no interest in the affairs of the people, no appetite for the details of justice and trade, only for feasting, hunting and sycophancy. He does not have a practical attitude … But, damn him, his laughing mind has so political a bent that whatever I do anywhere in the kingdom he seems to know of it. He gainsays me. He forestalls my every step. And he does it in so humorous a manner that the courtiers laugh themselves sick. Laugh themselves sick and on to another feast at my expense.

  So I am here.

  I was surprised to find I was clenching my fist again and the hot pound coin was digging into my palm. I calmed myself as a good swordsman should and glanced out at Capercaillie Mountain - its ominous bulk was a fine stimulant.

  No, I can’t conquer the mountains but I can still conquer my brother. Carniss Keep is impregnable. No one can assail this cliff top. With the storehouses and cisterns for both water and snow we can withstand a siege. Work on the fortifications is proceeding according to plan - the ones I can’t afford to build yet I’ve left space for, to throw up if necessary. The colonists are coping admirably - proof I know how to govern, but he only knows how to reign. My forces are nearly ready. I have enlisted the fortune hunters who flocked here, and Francolin’s soldiers will arrive soon. Then my sweet brother had better look to his own.