Above the Snowline

by Steph Swainston

  ‘I have enough food to reach Caigeann.’

  ‘And me. Enough to cache till the melt, then I’ll find more of the same.’

  ‘Why go near the keep?’ said Feocullan. ‘I don’t want to risk their arrows. We can go places the featherbacks can’t. We can stay out of their range.’

  ‘But Raven will hunt you!’ Dellin retorted.

  ‘Out here we hunt them. If we enter the keep he’ll have us penned and shoot us easily.’

  ‘Yes,’ said another. ‘I don’t want to die like Miagail.’

  ‘Or Laochan.’

  ‘I’ve never even seen a featherback before,’ purred the huntress from Sgriodan. ‘What do I care about Raven?’

  Dellin was trying furiously to come up with a reason for them to attack the keep. ‘Eventually he will reach your hunting grounds too,’ she said, but the Rhydanne only chuckled.

  ‘When?’ said Feocullan. ‘Next melt?’

  ‘Some time in the future.’

  ‘Ha ha ha.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I only need one or two of the stealthiest to help me find Raven inside the keep. It’s an exploit you can tell your children.’

  ‘Being shot means no children!’

  The lounging huntress said, ‘We’ve stopped them coming out of the keep. We frightened them into their refuge and they’re staying there. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

  Dellin said, ‘Cutting Raven’s throat is the quickest way to rid ourselves of all Awians. They’ll go home!’

  ‘Dellin, you’ve been in the flatlands so long you think like them.

  Who cares?’

  She looked down in frustration. If she hadn’t been so drunk she might have thought of another argument. ‘Tomorrow I’ll talk to you again,’ she said. ‘By then you’ll have realised the sense of my words. If you want to save yourselves, you’ll stay with me.’

  Tomorrow they’re all going to be very hungover, I thought. Then, if they still have meat and drink they’ll convey it to their caches. Dellin would find it difficult to rally them, although I thought she might be able to and I’d have to warn Raven. I grinned inwardly. Without the others, Dellin’s vendetta would collapse, I could get Raven to give ground and then I’d have her full attention.

  The fire was allowed to burn down to powdery sheaves of ash and calcined fragments of bone. The cauldron was scraped empty and Rubha was snoring. Everyone began stripping off their parkas and retiring inside their tents. Above us the moon hung like a coin. Tatters of cloud blowing across it gave the impression it was sailing with great rapidity towards the peak of Klannich. I was so tempted to track its flight across the sky that the fact it was stationary puzzled my eye. And, at this altitude, it was so pin-sharp that the man in the moon’s face lost its distinction. I realised what Dellin must have known all her life: that high cordilleras and tranquil plateaux just the same as Darkling ran over the surface of the moon.

  She plucked at my wing. ‘Come inside.’

  ‘With you?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course, with me. Do you prefer to sleep outside? Some men do.’

  ‘No, no. I’ll come in.’

  On the spear pole of her tent behind us hung a magnificent elk skull with a two-metre spread of antlers. They cast a shadow over the neighbouring tents like a pair of gigantic hands.

  Dellin undressed to nothing but black pants, bare breasts and supple skin. She stretched and crawled into her tent. Even the way she disappeared inside, little feet last, stirred love in me. I was tired from constantly being in the grip of emotion, but it was giving me a lot of energy to be tired with. I took my clothes off and carried them in before the intense cold gripped me. Inside was completely dark and wonderfully warm. Three or four layers of fur covered the groundsheet and Dellin wriggled underneath like a fox cub. Outside the temperature was plummeting and stark frost petrifying the forest, and we were snuggled together. I was so aware of her presence and my heart beating that I doubted I’d ever sleep. I might be awake all night watching over her.

  I spoke quietly, so my voice coming out of the blackness wouldn’t startle her: ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I will kill Raven. I will kill more Awians and eventually Raven himself. Somehow.’ She yawned and shut her mouth with a click. I was too disappointed to answer and she soon fell asleep.

  I woke with Dellin’s head resting against my chest and my arm under her. Immediately I was wide awake, intensely aware of her. Her company, her body; I scarcely dared breathe for fear of breaking the moment. She had snuggled against me in the night and now lay with her top half naked and the cosy fur around her waist. With every exhalation the deep pelt rolled over her belly button. Wild huntress, not yet tamed but, for the moment, not moving. She lay with her arm on the pelts, and wisps of hair covered her forearm like the faintest growth of lichen on a silver birch branch. The few ochre dreadlocks in her hair splayed over the pillow and smelt of rock. Her body was hard with no fat under the skin whatsoever; in fact I could see the grain of muscle fibres in her shoulder where her skin pulled tightly over them. It was a strange effect because she was still completely feminine. For all her hardness, I knew I was lying next to a woman; in fact her posture, her scent, her pointed little nose and her delicate face intoxicated me. She was so determined but so vulnerable … The slope of her shoulder descended to the pale plateau of her chest; on the subtle rises of her breasts, her nipples were like buds.

  I wanted to wrap my arms around her but that would wake her. I wanted to nuzzle my face over her midriff. I was terrified of disturbing her, because when she wakes, she’ll leave, and I would lose her again.

  I lay on my back, feeling the nap of the furs under me and her antler rattle pressing into my shoulder. Condensation droplets had formed all along the ridgepole and shadows speckling the outside of the tent showed there had been a fall of snow. Dawn light filtered through the hide walls, a lovely orange-pink blush. Dellin looked as if she was glowing the colour of embers. I looked longingly over her … so precious … her trophy necklace seemed crude and misplaced against her delicate shoulders. I followed it down to her breasts; the bear’s canine lay in the hollow between them. On her left breast lay a horse’s incisor, wolf fangs, then some freshly pierced teeth with bloodstained roots and gold fillings. Gold fillings? Oh, oh oh!

  I ran from the tent. I stumbled around the camp pulling on my trousers, tripping over the hearth stones, yanking on boots and parka.

  She had killed an Awian and taken his teeth! The tents were all silent, their flaps laced, sprinkled with snow. The cliff loomed over me, fringed with pines - and there were great spills of blood on its snow slope! Big red patches and little flesh-coloured figures dotted the ground below the rock! I dashed from the camp and climbed to the closest of them. He lay splayed, his head downhill. He was stripped naked and all his limbs had been flayed to the bone. By god! By god! Flanges of muscle remained, cut ragged close to his joints. His hands and feet looked hideously big, attached to arms and legs that were just bone sticks. Handfuls of feathers stuck to the snow around him: his wings had been sawn away. His ring finger was missing and - horror of horrors - the crown of his head had been axed open. I bent down to look. His brainpan was an empty, gory cup with flakes of snow blowing into it.

  What had I eaten last night? Who had I eaten?

  I scrambled up to the next body. A man lay bent unnaturally sharply in half, his spine snapped in his fall from the cliff top. His broken back had caused an erection which had frozen fast to the inside of his leg. His face was caved in where he’d hit the ground. The Rhydanne had filleted him too - limbs, back, shoulders and chest. He was little more than a bloodied skeleton and his guts adhered to the ice slope around him. And there was something that looked like cloth. Oh god! It was his skin, piled in folds! Through the snow dusting over it I saw hairs and an old blue tattoo. The name of his girlfriend.

  Dellin had driven these men over the cliff. They had all been butchered efficiently, spread-eagled next to th
eir horses’ broken carcasses. Their clothes, armour and saddles were missing. I stepped back and looked up to the cliff edge roughly two hundred metres above. Wind howled off its edge. Its snow was trampled away, its cornice broken - thick chunks of it scattered the ground around me. One man had fallen onto a pinnacle and lay draped over it.

  I had eaten so much meat! I had eaten my fill! And it was … was … And the burning bones! I gulped, gazed around, needing to understand but not wanting to look. Here one man lay like a limp doll, but thoroughly frozen, his hair and pubic hair black dots against the slope.

  All the shreds of flesh caught between my teeth! I found myself on my hands and knees, scrubbing my mouth out with snow. I spat, dug snow with my fingernails, packed my mouth with it, rubbed my finger against my gums and spat again. At length I looked up. The horror was still all around but the tingling in my gums grounded me. I counted the butchered men: twenty bodies in all and thirty horses. Tracks wound down the slope, drag marks spattered with blood - they led to a row of bodies placed neatly shoulder to shoulder at the base of the slope.

  I slithered down to them: nine more men lay stiff and mottled blue-white. Their necks and limbs were twisted at odd angles, some pushed into their bodies, and enormous bruises where they’d hit the ground. They were whole apart from where Rhydanne had severed fingers to remove rings, and each man’s detached fingers had been placed on his chest. Ice rimed their hair, every strand frozen like white netting. Some strands stuck to their faces, others to the ground. A film of ice sealed their eyeballs like opaque marbles. The nearest one was only a boy. I touched my boot toe to his hip; he was as hard as rock. Dellin was caching them for her followers.

  I pressed my hands into the pit of my stomach. Although I felt hollow and empty, a heavy dread filled my chest. Rhydanne didn’t consider Awians people at all, but simply animals permissible to eat. Dellin could feed her starving followers, and now they had the taste for Awian flesh they would hunt down more men, and yet more. No one could stop them.

  Her camp had turned into an ominous lair. Its low windbreak pulsated in the breeze a stone’s throw away. The spear points jutted from their tents like spines on the backs of beasts. I could see Dellin’s elk antlers. She would fix some poor Awian’s head there next.

  She was dangerous. Not my lover, dangerous. Not vulnerable, dangerous. I looked down at the frozen men. You poor buggers, was my first coherent thought. You poor buggers, coming up here to meet your deaths. You had no idea. But, light-headed with shock, I was surprised I didn’t feel sick. No one must ever know I ate … And if nobody knows, nobody ever knows, it will be all right. I didn’t kill them, wouldn’t have killed them. And anyway they didn’t taste at all bad.

  Even now, I was loath to leave Dellin. Perhaps I could talk this through with her? Her eager stance and rascally smile flashed across my mind’s eye. I had the potential to forgive even this. But no … she wasn’t the woman I thought she was. She was a brute, a killer, and she can never change. I turned my back on her cannibal camp and took off for the keep.

  The wind tore down the slope of Klannich. It howled through the glacier’s gorge, scattered the clouds before it, seized me, and I rode it like a wave.

  I raced to the keep and curtain wall standing proud on their promontory. Cloud poured off the edge of Raven’s cliff, streaked out by the wind. Around and far below, a clear view to the snow-covered plains. I shed height with my wings half-closed and dropped into the bailey.

  I landed in front of the settlers’ cabins. All their shutters and doors were closed. The keep itself had shutters fastened over every window as if its eyes were squeezed tight in revulsion. Every embrasure in the encircling wall was bolted. Bowmen stood alert on its summit and some soldiers in the furthest corner of the parapet, busy with rope, block and tackle, seemed to be fixing sharp staves along the top, facing outwards.

  I ran to the staircase portal, but the guards standing outside it crossed their spears. ‘Let me through. I want to see Raven.’

  They glanced at each other. So they were under orders not to admit me? I had no time for that. I barged between them and they snatched their spears out of the way. Then I was in gloom, running up the steps to Raven’s chamber.

  His door at the top opened and Snipe popped out. He peered down in trepidation, slammed the door behind him and its bolt snicked closed. I came to a halt a few steps below him and looked up. His face was a mess. The black eye I had given him was swollen and puffy, but now for some reason he also sported chapped lips and a waxy, yellowish sheen of frostbite on ears and nose. He must have had exposure, because extreme cold had dappled his big forehead red raw. The multicoloured effect reminded me of the corpses I’d just seen. He carried a loaded crossbow.

  ‘Let me through. I want to see Raven.’

  He rubbed a hand across his mouth and I saw his fingers were blackened at the tips. ‘Comet, Raven isn’t here. He’s gone hunting.’

  ‘I know he’s in there, hiding in the solar. I want to talk to him.’

  His sunken eyes glared. ‘My lord rode out a few hours ago. To kill some fucking ’danne.’

  ‘In reprisal for last night?’

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  I shook my head. ‘Raven’s in there. Is he afraid? Let me through, in the Emperor’s name, for the will of god and the protection of the Circle.’

  He shook his head.

  I leant on the clammy wall. Nobody had simply refused me before. Refused me! Raven’s door looked extremely solid and Snipe, in its archway, rested his necrosed fingers on the crossbow’s hair trigger.

  Abruptly I turned and descended the spiral stairs, out to the bailey and passed the guards. As I did so, I remarked over my shoulder, ‘If those spikes on the parapet are to stop Rhydanne climbing in, you’ll simply be giving them new handholds.’

  The guards said nothing but crossed their spears again. Their closed faces and hooded eyes revealed prejudice like granite. They think I’m a Rhydanne. They think I’m in with Dellin and they’re terrified.

  I followed the track between the nearest cabins and the few shutters still ajar slammed as I passed through. Eyes watched me from behind fretwork holes and metal glinted. Fear hung over the settlement like greasy smoke. Their distrust was so palpable I could hardly breathe. News of the cliff-fall deaths must have reached them and they knew the Rhydanne were winning. They probably hadn’t yet discovered that Dellin’s hunters had devoured their fathers, brothers and sons, but the atmosphere of dread had taken on a life of its own. I doubted any Awian wanted to set foot outside the keep; their fear trapped them inside. They had always whispered rumours but now they believed every one. They jumped to conclusions. They had always alleged Rhydanne were man-eaters, now some scout would report the grisly remains and justify all their fears, all their belligerence. They were bent double under the weight of terror and they stayed in their houses. They knew what people like me did to Awians.

  I considered as I walked to the end of the promontory. I am the most junior Eszai and I have very little clout with Raven. My very heritage, and the reason I’m Eszai, now made him mistrust me. I wished Tornado were here. No one would have dared lock a door against him - a pointless gesture to the Strongman in any case - and now I regretted not letting him join me.

  As soon as Raven’s troops arrive he will invade Rachiswater and seize the throne. He knows that the Emperor does not intervene in any country’s affairs. How the Awians choose their king, or whom they choose, is up to them.

  Even though I’m sure the Emperor wouldn’t like Raven as much as Tarmigan, the Emperor would let Raven’s uprising go ahead - and use me as spy to inform him of every detail. San would want to save lives and prevent Awia from losing strength against the Insects. So if Raven presents the Emperor with a fait accompli, once he is crowned the Castle would probably support him.

  I wondered whether to inform Tarmigan. The Emperor wouldn’t approve, but I was confident I could fix things so I wouldn’t be the obvio
us source of the warning. But then what? Tarmigan would collect his Royal Select and set out to meet his brother. One way or the other I would push Awian troops into battle against each other, which as far as I know has never happened before. Of course, if Tarmigan won he would be grateful, and a king’s gratitude is not to be sneered at, but how could I hide it from San? And what would happen to the Rhydanne if a royal army besieged Carniss?

  I thought about Lightning and Mist. They were Eszai too and they own manors of Awia. Maybe I could ask them … Of the two, Lightning was better; he was more steadfast. He’s one hundred per cent noble as well as being the Castle’s Archer, so everyone would be keen to know his opinion. He usually maintained a judicious neutrality in internal Awian affairs, but he’d have to get involved if soldiers crashed through his vineyards. Lightning has fifteen hundred years’ experience of being a governor and the best archer in the world. Raven certainly couldn’t ignore him as rudely as he’d just ignored me.

  I stopped at the foot of the avalanche warning tower and heaved a sigh. I didn’t want to ask Lightning’s help because … because it’s admitting defeat. The world will know that my talks with Raven broke down so I called for the aid of an older Eszai. Well … I’m doing it for Dellin, really. And Lightning might offer me some advice there too … Oh god, now I sound as wet as he does.

  He certainly mustn’t find out about Dellin’s taste for Awian flesh or he’d support Raven against her. A mere battalion of Micawater archers could wipe out every Rhydanne in Carnich. She isn’t stupid, though. She’ll hide the evidence of her feast and - I shuddered - she’ll store the frozen bodies where even the wolves won’t find them.

  I spread my wings. Where would Lightning be at this end of the year? Feasting in Micawater? No, he said he wanted to spend a quiet New Year’s in Foin Hall. In that case he’s probably brooding again, and I should wake him up: a little excitement will do him good.

  I took off, beating hard, flew up and over the curtain wall. The cliff dropped away below me and I was airborne, already three hundred metres above the fir-clad slopes. The view was so clear I could see Eyrie village tiny as a model in the distance. I turned south towards Micawater.