The Ice Maze

by Isobelle Carmody

  As Bily began to serve up bowls of food, a speckled digger reached out shyly to touch his tail. ‘You are very softy,’ she said admiringly, patting Bily’s tail, which really had fluffed up rather splendidly.

  ‘Thank you,’ Bily muttered, his cheeks as red as the flames.

  Soon they were all eating their stew sitting in a row under the awning, gazing out at the thunderous curtain of rain that hid the world from them.

  ‘It would be very horrible to be out in that,’ Bily said.

  Zluty had to agree, and he did feel better for the rest and a hot meal. The rain had washed the mud out of his fur and so he used Bily’s brush to tidy himself while several of the diggers upturned their empty bowls and began to tap out a little rain beat. Zluty laid down the brush and listened in delight.

  ‘Join, Zchloo-tee!’ invited one of the diggers, offering him his reed pipe.

  Zluty took it but laid it aside and upturned his bowl. He listened carefully for a while, then he took a firenut in each hand and began to hammer out a rhythm of his own, feet slapping on the wet ground, every now and then rapping on the staff. The diggers squeaked in delight and Zluty grinned, hearing them clap the lighter patter of the digger paws into the rain and the sound of his feet.

  Bily was packing away the cooking things when suddenly he burst out laughing. Startled, Zluty and the diggers stopped tapping and turned to look at him. In the silence, Zluty understood. They had been so busy playing the sound of the rain that they had not noticed that it had ceased. Now, there was just the crackle of the fire and water dripping from the awning.

  ‘We must going on,’ Flugal said regretfully.

  It did not take them long to roll up the ground sheets they had been sitting on and lower the sodden awning. Semmel scraped the few glowing embers from the fire back into the firemoss ball and closed it, while Bily collected several blackened nubs of firenuts in a pot he hung from the side of the wagon.

  As they set off again, Zluty was pleased to see that it was not so dark now that the rain had stopped. The greyish light told him there was at least an hour of day left.

  The sound of wings made them all turn to see Redwing launch herself into the air. Zluty watched her fly up and angle North. He wondered if she sensed the nearness of the flyway and would go through it at once when she came to it, without saying goodbye. He could not blame her for obeying the call to fly West, but Bily would be terribly hurt.

  Flugal had told them that before the first stone storm, flocks of red-winged birds had always flown West on the eve of Winter. Cloud after fiery cloud of them had risen until there had been so many of them flying over the mountains that they had formed a great red bridge spanning the sky from East to West. Flugal had not seen the splendid sight he described, but the telling was sung often and he had a very clear picture of it in his mind, which he had been able to show Zluty and Bily. The red-winged birds had gone West seeking a warm place to lay their eggs and hatch their younglings. When Spring came, they had returned East.

  This story had made Bily sad, for the great flocks of red birds had perished and Redwing was the last of her kind. There would be no mate or younglings for her in the West.

  Zluty noticed Semmel gazing after the red bird, too, sorrow and regret in her bright eyes. He knew the diggers blamed themselves for the tragic destruction of Redwing’s kind, because they had built the Makers stone storm machine from parts sent through the sky crack. Yet all of that had happened long before Semmel was born, and those early diggers had not known what the machine they were making would do. When they did understand, they had broken the machine.

  Semmel looked at him questioningly.

  ‘I was wondering how close we are to the flyway,’ said Zluty.

  ‘We will reach it soonly,’ the she digger said calmly.

  Flugal suddenly pointed up with a Ra! of delight, and Zluty saw that Redwing had turned back and was overhead, coiling and soaring in the air high above them. Bily looked relieved, but Zluty wondered if Redwing was staying close because she knew that all too soon she would leave them.

  Then Bily caught his arm and pointed to the mountains.

  Zluty saw a great hole high up in the wet, stony slope of the nearest mountain. It was visible only because a dazzling beam of light flowed from it, turning the mist clinging to the side of the mountain a golden gauze. It was as if a stream of bright Summer daylight shone into the Winter twilight.

  ‘Sunlight from the West,’ Semmel murmured. ‘That is the flyway.’

  Redwing flew low and began to sing them a farewell, but Bily interrupted to beg her to land and let him prepare her some food before she left. Zluty felt the strength of Redwing’s urgency to be gone, yet her love for Bily was very strong, too. She gave one piercing cry before settling, and then she stood patiently, allowing the diggers to reverently groom and smooth her ruffled feathers, while Bily mixed her favourite seeds and some honey water.

  Zluty took out his pipe and played a tune. He did not want to play a mournful tune for the occasion was sad enough. Instead, he tried to think how exciting it would be for Redwing to enter the mysterious flyway and soar into sunlight and the warmth. If the weather truly was hot on the other side of the mountains, it would be like flying from Winter to Summer, as well as from night into day. His tune drew on all of these thoughts, but it also caught up Redwing’s longing to fly into the West. It was a song of yearning that told of Bily singing out to him to come for supper, or to see a new dye he had discovered, or a new rug he had begun. He piped the diggers in their burrows, calling one another to eat. He played the baby birds in their nests, cheeping to their mothers to come and feed them.

  Redwing cocked her head and watched him intently, occasionally making a soft cooing noise. The diggers joined in, clapping their paws softly together at the chorus to make a sound like the beat of a bird’s wings.

  Bily brought a bowl and set it before Redwing. She began at once to peck at the seeds. Zluty was startled to see that some of them had come from the precious store of seeds Bily had scavenged from the drowned cellar of their cottage. They were all that remained of his garden. He had dried them out for when he might have a garden again, yet he had sacrificed some of them to Redwing.

  When the bird had finished, she looked at Bily and spread one wing to enfold him and gather him close. He laid his head against her breast sadly and Zluty knew he was listening to the soft thud of Redwing’s heart. He had told Zluty that this was one of his favourite sounds in all the world.

  He heard Bily whisper to Redwing that he loved her and already longed for the day when they were together again. Finally, unable to resist the calling any longer, Redwing freed herself, shook her plumage out and sang a farewell.

  For once, the words in her mind were so strong that even Zluty heard them clearly. She was telling Bily that she loved him, and would carry him to the West in her heart. Then, to his surprise, she reached across to tap Zluty’s cheek tenderly with her beak and bid him farewell, too.

  ‘Guard Bily,’ she sent the thought softly, gravely, just for him, then she flapped up to the side of the wagon where the Monster was watching them with its yellow eyes. It looked at the bird and, though he could hear nothing, Zluty had the feeling they were talking to one another.

  At length, Redwing turned to the diggers who had gathered reverently into a little group by the side of the wagon, their heads raised so they could look at her. She sang a sweet, high note of farewell wound up with forgiveness to them, then she leapt into the air. Opening her lovely wings to their fullest extent she beat them powerfully, once, twice, thrice, rising higher and higher above them, and the diggers clapped their soft wingbeat song as she glided over them and away towards the mountains.

  Zluty watched her soar across the stony face of the mountain to the hole where the golden light flowed through. Without hesitation, she angled her wings and soared into the flyway. For a moment her red plumage blazed like fire, and then she was gone.

  ‘Oh,’ Bily cried
, as if he had cut himself.

  ‘She flies as her heart desires,’ said the Monster in its dark soft tone, its eyes fixed on the flyway.

  Zluty heard the clear note of envy in its voice. He took his brother’s hand and patted it. ‘I am sure it is not forever,’ he told Bily gently. ‘Now, we must set up camp and get some sleep. I won’t make another fire for we don’t need to eat again tonight, but perhaps we ought to have a farewell breakfast tomorrow. The diggers who are to return to their settlement will want to leave early.’

  As Zluty had guessed, his words distracted his brother from his immediate grief and Bily announced that he would prepare everything for the feast before he slept.

  When Zluty offered to help, Bily refused in a muffled voice. Seeing that he needed to be alone to grieve for a bit, Zluty went to check on the bee urn carefully stowed in the wagon. He wanted to make sure no water had leaked into the urn or into anything else that might be damaged by it. He was relieved to find that nothing had been spoiled or made more than slightly damp. Bily had told him the awning had been treated with some potion that resisted water, and Zluty reminded himself to find out how it was made before they parted from the diggers, so that he could make more when it wore off.

  He went to help the diggers untie all the metal pieces of the devices they were taking back to the settlement. He was dismayed to see how many there were. Two pieces were so big that it would take three diggers to carry one.

  ‘They can’t manage all of this,’ he said to Flugal. ‘We had better make a pile of them here and they can come back to collect them.’

  But Flugal said the diggers were determined to take all of their treasures back to the settlement.

  ‘Well,’ said Zluty, studying the pile, ‘we could tie everything onto the two big pieces and fix it so the diggers can pull them like the wagon. We can’t make wheels, so when there are no coldwhites like now, they must carry them.’

  This was such a clever idea that the diggers agreed at once, and Flugal set about hammering the bigger bits into shapes that would enable them to be pulled along in the snow.

  ‘They are very odd looking,’ Bily said doubtfully, coming to see how they were doing.

  ‘They don’t have to look nice,’ Zluty told him firmly. ‘They only have to work.’

  Zluty helped Flugal with the sleds as the dull afternoon light faded. There was no wind and Zluty hoped it would stay that way, for it had got a good deal colder now. His eyes sought out the flyway where a soft haze of brightness still shone, and he thought of Redwing, flying on and on into the dying light.

  Bily listened to the diggers chattering as some of them helped Semmel bundle up the supplies they would tie to the sleds. He was making the batter for the pancakes he would cook in the morning, but most of his mind was taken up with grieving for Redwing.

  He was ashamed of it because the Monster was right. Redwing was going where she had been longing to go, and he had no right to be sad. But he wept a good many quiet tears into the big pot of pancake batter he was mixing, carefully avoiding looking at the Monster, whose golden gaze rested on him from time to time.

  Bily’s eyes were drawn again and again to the flyway, where gradually the haze of light streaming from the opening had darkened from gold to orange to dusky red.

  Finally, the opening was lost in the hulking darkness of the mountains and he heaved a sigh. He had secretly hoped that Redwing might discover the pull of her love for him was stronger than her desire to fly into the mysterious West. But she had not returned. She would not return. How long would it take her to fly through a mountain? he wondered.

  Unable to bear thinking of her all alone in the stony heart of the mountains with no fire to warm her, no one to cuddle to her, Bily reminded himself that Redwing did not have to trudge through the snow but flew on swift, wide wings with a strong wind from the East behind her.

  He tried to imagine her landing somewhere in the Velvet City, but it was too hard to imagine a place he had never seen. The diggers had never seen it either, and the Monster had said only that it was hot and that there were many Listeners living there in complex many-levelled cottages made from stone. Bily found it difficult to imagine many cottages all pressed close to one another, let alone cottages on top of one another. He had only ever known the cottage where he and Zluty had lived.

  The Monster said softly, ‘You smell of memories.’

  Bily fancied there was disapproval in its voice. He said, ‘I was thinking of the things you told me about the Velvet City when we first met.’

  The Monster’s eyes glimmered with brief rare humour. ‘You smelled of fear then, but still you tended my wounds. Is that how you came to know Redwing? You healed her?’

  It hurt Bily so much to hear Redwing’s name, that for a moment he could not breathe.

  ‘I heard her singing,’ he managed to say, the memory of that first song so sweet and dear. ‘Zluty was away in the Northern Forest and there was a grass fire. I had not seen it coming but I smelled it. I was trying to wet the garden so that the sparks would not catch, when I heard Redwing. I could not see her for the smoke. I thought I was imagining it, but she kept singing. I found her in a little thicket in the grass just before the fire burned it.’

  ‘Where did she come from before that?’ the Monster asked.

  ‘She could not say. She was only a youngling. She could not even have flown there because she had no feathers, only a bit of fluff on her head. The rest of her was pink and bare. But there was a terrible storm before the fire came. It must have blown Redwing before it. She has no memory of what was before that, so maybe she was inside an egg.’

  ‘Storms do have a habit of bringing the world to your door, Bily,’ the Monster said. ‘Perhaps Redwing came from the same place as the fire.’

  Bily opened his mouth to say that was impossible because the fire had been lit by burning talons of sky fire, but Semmel suddenly gave a muffled cry of triumph. She had found the sack of dried berries she had decided would go well with pancakes. Bringing them to Bily, she explained that the glossy black berries grew on the stony plain in small pockets of good earth, and were difficult to find. She gave him one to taste. The berry had an unusual tart sweetness, and after a moment of thought he bid her put some of them in a big bowl of water to soak.

  The she digger looked surprised and interested as she went to unstopper one of the water urns. She had to lean so far into it with the dipper that she almost overbalanced, reminding Bily the water in it was getting low and he should ask Zluty to fill them from the stream running along the feet of the mountains before they moved on.

  ‘Tonight will be very mistful,’ Semmel murmured as she plucked the hard little stems from the dried berries and put them into a bowl half filled with water. When she had finished, Bily set it atop a shelf. He looked out through the awning to see that the sky was devoid of stars. The mountains had been swallowed up by the dark night, and when his eyes dropped to the ground, a thick white mist was seeping from the earth just as Semmel had predicted. Zluty and the diggers, sitting a little way off, looked as if they were on a little island surrounded by a vaporous sea of white.

  Zluty shouted out to Semmel to fetch him the ball of firemoss, and Bily wondered what had made him change his mind about not having a fire. He shrugged and went back to mixing his batter. When it was as fluffy as he liked, he set it beside the bowl of soaking berries and carefully covered both with a cloth. It was warm inside the wagon with the door closed, and the heat given off by the Monster would make the batter rise slowly during the night.

  He set about chopping nuts and beating digger milk into butter. By the time Bily finished preparations and stepped outside, it had got darker and the tide of mist had risen high enough that the wagon was submerged. It was very much colder than it had been, and he guessed this must be why Zluty had changed his mind about the fire. He could just see it through the mist, a brave little node of brightness. As he went closer he saw that Zluty and the diggers were poring ove
r a pile of the diggers’ small staffs and a heap of shining skystones that gave off their queer greenish light.

  He remembered, then, that Zluty had decided to give one skystone to each of the diggers as a farewell present. Obviously he had decided to attach them to their staffs. He had needed the fire to melt the glue that would hold the skystones in place.

  Bily decided to give each digger a feather to attach to their staff as well. He went back into the wagon to get his collection and set it down by the fire. The diggers stroked the feathers in delight, and made their choices solemnly. The diggers had their own tokens and treasures which they also added to their staffs, and when each was complete, Zluty bound its grip, and the digger bore it away to bed, chittering in delight.

  Despite his thickening fur, Bily shivered as the fire grew low. There were three diggers yet to have their grips bound. All were wrapped up in their cloaks and yawning. Bily went to fetch his own cloak. He saw that Semmel was already curled into her bedding in the wagon, alongside the Monster. Bily carried Zluty’s bedding outside and prepared it. He would sleep in the wagon, but Zluty always slept out if he could.

  By the time he returned to the fire, only Flugal remained. But he, too, stood and gestured to them to sleep well before trotting off to join Semmel with his staff.

  ‘All is ready for tomorrow?’ Zluty asked Bily, stifling a yawn.

  ‘Of course,’ Bily said, trying to sound cheerful.

  Zluty gave him a searching look. To avoid talking about Redwing, Bily began to tell him about the Monster’s warning to avoid the Velvet City.

  Zluty frowned. ‘Flugal said we have not yet come halfway in our journey to the end of the mountain range, so it will be a good long while before we need to think about the Velvet City. He said we would know we were halfway to the end of the mountains when we come to the Raincage. He doesn’t know what that is, but he says the memory scents will tell us.’ He smothered another yawn.