Ozzie blinked and pulled his focus back. ‘I thought they were vegetarians,’ he said.
‘You thought wrong,’ Sara told him.
Ozzie turned to face her. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’
‘I came to tell you to get ready,’ she said. A gesture took in the other five humans who intended to follow the Silfen, they were all busy strapping their skis on. ‘They’ll be moving on right away.’
‘No more hunting?’ Ozzie asked.
‘No.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I know you hated being here, but I’m glad I had the chance to meet you. It’s not often people live up to their reputation. Some of it, anyway.’
‘Thanks, I think.’
‘Next time we meet, it’ll be different.’
There were a lot of ways he could have answered that, but just about everyone would hear. ‘Let’s hope so.’
‘And you,’ she said to Orion. ‘Make him behave.’
‘I’ll try,’ the boy said from behind his mask.
Ozzie put his own skis on, then checked Orion had fixed his properly. With the boy holding on to the tow rope at the back of Tochee’s sledge, Ozzie gave the alien their prearranged signal, and pushed off. The escarpment was steep enough to give him a good initial speed. All he had to do was watch for snags and stones which could throw the sledge. Tochee followed him easily, using the four poles with a light touch to steer the sledge along Ozzie’s ski tracks.
By the time they reached the bottom of the escarpment, the Silfen were already leaving. The riders had returned, and those on foot had picked up their lanterns. Their voices were raised in cheerful song again. They set off almost directly back the way they came. Ozzie turned to look back up the escarpment. A lone figure was silhouetted against the sky, watching them, but at this distance he couldn’t tell who it was.
He knew it would be easy at the start. They’d done nothing energetic the day before; they’d eaten well, and had nearly seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. For the first couple of hours, he had to take care not to slide up into the midst of the Silfen. Instead he was content to stay maybe forty yards or so behind them as they jogged along. Their feet compacted the light sprinkling of snow that drifted above the hard ground, providing a relatively smooth surface for the skis. Tochee, also, had no trouble keeping pace, staying five yards or so behind him. Every time he turned, Orion would be there, a hand raised to wave, to reassure him that everything was okay. The other followers kept a constant speed, two of them staying level with Ozzie and the sledge, while the three most proficient skiers kept up with the Silfen, determined not to let go of their ticket out.
As the afternoon progressed, Ozzie was aware of their line starting to curve away from the route they’d taken out from the Ice Citadel. The sun gave him a rough guide to their direction, and the massif was slipping further and further over to the left. The landscape here began to change. Craters and crags remained the primary features, but they were spaced wider apart, allowing the crystal trees to spread thickly between them, the forests insinuating their way around slopes like the leading edge of some prickly dark tide. It was both encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging, because he believed that the forests would ultimately provide the path off this bitter world. Frustrating, for the difficulty they added to the journey. The Silfen barely slowed as they moved under the trees, skipping fluidly around the trunks and saplings without disturbing a branch. For Ozzie it was harder work, even following the widest set of tracks he was having to swerve constantly. Doing that at the pace they set took both concentration and a great deal of physical effort.
He forced himself to slow down every twenty minutes to take a drink of the hot juice; fully aware how dangerous dehydration could be in these circumstances. It was surprising how much distance they lost even halting for the fifteen seconds it took to open a thermos and take a couple of gulps. Distance which he would then try and regain by travelling faster.
After four hours he was sweating heavily into his clothes, which were chafing badly. His arms ached. He could hear his heart thudding away loudly. His legs were threatening to cramp. One of the skiers who’d kept level with them was now hundreds of yards behind, and still falling back further, while of those three originally up with the Silfen, two had slipped back level with Ozzie. The path the Silfen were taking was leading them over a whole succession of hummocks, whose steepish slopes were tough going. On either side, the trees were growing taller. They were shapes which Ozzie hadn’t seen on this world before. The really tall ones had branches which spiralled upwards, as if they’d been neatly pruned and trained around the main bole. While the broader variety were simple poles with spheres that resembled glass cages clustered along their length, the ones at the base measuring up to a yard across, with those at the tip barely the size of acorns. Particles of ice had accumulated into irregular cloaks on every trunk, though there were no icicles. It was too cold for the frozen particles to shape themselves like that.
They’d just reached the crest of one small hill when Orion finally faltered, skidding erratically to a halt as he let go of the tow rope. Tochee immediately jammed his four poles into the ground, braking. The other skiers flashed past as Ozzie turned.
‘You okay?’ he shouted at Orion.
The boy was bent nearly double. Even through the thick layers of clothing, Ozzie could see him quaking.
‘I’m sorry,’ the boy was sobbing. ‘I’m sorry. It hurts everywhere. I’ve got to have a rest.’
‘Take as long as you want.’ The timer in Ozzie’s virtual vision told him they’d been going for just over five hours. The sun would set in another fifty-one minutes.
He pulled a parchment from his coat pocket, struggling to unroll the cold-stiffened sheet. With a charcoal stump held crudely in a mitten, he wrote: Boy very tired. Soon night. Make camp bottom of hill.
Tochee moved about behind the windscreen, lowering its head so that Ozzie could look into its forward eye segment. The patterns flexed and twisted. Roughly translated they told him: Also tired. Camp good.
When Ozzie looked along the path, he could just see a few twinkles of topaz and jade light through the trees below as the Silfen moved ever onwards. Their singing had long since faded from the air. That was when he realized that the skier who’d fallen far behind hadn’t caught up yet. If the man had any sense, he’d try and make it back to the covered sledges tomorrow. Ozzie didn’t even know which one of the five it was. Some of them had modern camping gear with them – that might see them through the night. His own confidence was bolstered by knowing their own air-insulated tent was good enough, especially with a heat brick.
Orion was taking a big drink from his thermos.
‘Yo man, can you make it down to the bottom?’ Ozzie asked.
‘Yes. I’m really sorry, Ozzie. You two should go on. I can probably make it back to the Ice Citadel.’
‘Don’t be so stupid. It’s almost time to stop anyway. I want to be in the tent before the sun goes down.’ He picked up the tow rope, and handed it to the boy.
The track down to the bottom of the hill was undemanding. They kept going for a few minutes more until they found what passed for a small glade. The heavy ice-smothered trees soaked up the red sunlight, turning the forest floor a gloomy crimson. Ozzie pulled their tent from the back of Tochee’s sledge, and gave it to Orion to sort out, while he set up the rudimentary bone frame and fur covering. Once more he lit a couple of candles in front of the sledge windscreen. He saw the alien pull the tab on a heat brick just as he wormed his way back out of the covering.
Orion had pitched their tent a few yards away, and was already inside. Drowsy yellow light from the kerosene lamp shone out of the open flap. As he hurried over, the impact of how isolated they truly were struck him. Alone in an arctic alien forest, without any natural light or heat, where unknown creatures possibly lurked close by. This was the eternal child-nightmare that never quite left once adulthood had been reached, not even after three hundred and fifty years.
>
It wasn’t just the cold which was making him shiver as he crawled inside and sealed the flap. Orion made a big show of pulling the tab on a heat brick. The two of them slowly took off their bulky fur coats and overtrousers, then their outer layers of sweaters and trousers. Ozzie plucked at his cold, sweat-sodden check shirt, wrinkling his nose in disgust. As soon as they’d stopped their exertions, he’d begun to get cold very fast, despite the fur coat.
‘I’d forgotten how bad it is out there at night,’ he grumbled.
‘I thought we’d be away from here by now,’ Orion said sheepishly. ‘We travelled so far.’
Ozzie squeezed the boy’s shoulder. ‘Remember the kind of progress we made when we arrived here? You did really well out there today. I was ready to call it a day anyway.’
‘Thanks, Ozzie. Do you think the others made it?’
‘I don’t know. Most of them were keeping up with the Silfen.’
‘I hope they did.’
Ozzie opened the bag containing some of their food pack-ages. ‘What do you fancy for supper?’
*
Ozzie really didn’t want to wake up when his insert alarm went off. Lying snug in the soft warm folds of the sleeping bag, every limb ached abominably, and as for his abdominal muscles . . . It was pitch black inside the tent, so he switched his retinal inserts to infrared, and searched round for the kerosene lamp. It lit with a flare which made him blink, casting its dreary yellow glow around the interior. The flame from the icewhale oil they used as fuel was soon puffing out a little twist of reeking black smoke.
‘What’s wrong?’ Orion coughed.
‘Nothing. It’s morning, time to get up.’
‘You’re wrong. It’s night, still. I’ve only just got to sleep.’
‘Fraid not, man.’ Ozzie unzipped the top half of his sleeping bag. His thermal undergarments had dried out, as had the check shirt and sweaters that were squashed into the bag with him. But the heat brick was all but exhausted, so the gradually cooling air had allowed condensation to form all over the inside of the tent fabric. He tried to put his check shirt on carefully, but every time a hand caught the side of the tent, little droplets rained down. Orion complained some more as he struggled into action, dressing himself.
They pulled the rings on packets of scrambled egg and bacon. For a few glorious moments the smell of hot food overpowered the dreadful oil.
When they were almost ready to venture back outside, Orion asked, ‘Do you think we’ll get there today?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know, man. I hope so. But, if not, we just keep going, it can’t be far now. Not even the Silfen can survive here for long.’ In his head, their own limit was a constant worry. Between them, they had another eight heat bricks, that gave them three more guaranteed safe nights. They might be able to survive in the tent without one, but it would be an evil night, and Tochee would be finished. How they’d carry the tent and food and other stuff after that was a moot point.
They emerged from the odour of the icewhale oil into the numbing cold of the dark forest. It had snowed again over-night, depositing a thin layer over the fur sheet protecting Tochee’s sledge. Once again, anxiety plucked at Ozzie as they pulled it back to see if the big alien had survived. It had. Manipulator flesh gestured happily to them from behind the windscreen.
The tent and coverings and bags were packed away within half an hour. Fortunately, the snowfall hadn’t been heavy enough to completely cover the tracks left by the Silfen. Just before they started, Ozzie held up the little friendship pendant. Its sparkle wasn’t as strong as yesterday, but tiny slivers of blue light still crawled around inside it. He took that as an encouraging sign, and pushed off.
A wind picked up, drifting through the forest all morning. It carried little flecks of snow with it, forcing Ozzie to wipe his goggles free every few minutes. Whenever he paused for his drink, he had to go and brush solid flakes off the sledge windscreen. He wasn’t sure if it was actually snowing up there above the treetops, or if this was simply residual swirls that the wind was rearranging. It had always puzzled him why the ground here wasn’t covered by several feet of snow and ice. Then Sara had told him that once or twice a year a gale would blow for days, scouring away the loose snow and tiny ice pellets. Somehow that didn’t surprise or even bother him, this whole planet was weird; privately he considered that it might be as artificial as Silvergalde.
He deliberately set a slower pace that morning. Yesterday had been a determined effort to keep up with the Silfen, grasping the faint chance that they might lead him away off the planet before nightfall. There was still an urgency to their trek, but a constant and realistic pace was more important now than pure speed. His new concern was how the little zephyrs were steadily eradicating the compacted footprints. Although, as if in compensation, it did seem like the trees had parted slightly to form a rudimentary path through the forest.
Lunch was soup again, snatched in the paltry lee of one of the clustered sphere trees; with its snow coat disguise it could have passed for a swollen Christmas pine. As before, even a short stop hauled their body temperature down, which the hot soup seemed unable to compensate for. Ozzie hated the sensation of cold sinking into his toes, he couldn’t stop worrying about frostbite. When they re-emerged from behind the tree, the falling snow was thicker, eliminating almost all trace of the tracks they’d been following. To make matters worse, it was starting to adhere against the fur of their coats. The sledge was like a small lumpy mound of snow on runners.
Ozzie could feel the tiny particles working their way round the rim of his hood. Slender lines of ice were burning against the skin of his cheeks. After a few minutes, the trees began to thin out. While it made skiing slightly easier, it reduced their protection from the wind and ice flakes. It wasn’t long after that when the Silfen tracks vanished completely. He slowed to a halt, then had to push off again quickly as Tochee’s sledge nearly slid into him.
This was what he’d feared happening right from the start, this world’s weather closing in on them, and losing the path. He fumbled with his mittens, pulling out the friendship pendant. A small bluish glimmer still lurked below the surface. Ozzie turned a complete circle. He thought – possibly – it was a fraction brighter at one point. It was a pretty tenuous assumption to gamble three lives on, but he had nothing else.
He went round to the rear of the sledge, and found a length of slim rope. With one end tied to his waist, and the other to the front of the sledge, he set off again. The wind at least seemed to have died down somewhat. But if anything the snowfall was thicker. He was stopping constantly to check the pendant, while the whole time a treacherous thought in his mind kept asking why bother? At least when they arrived on this world he had the comforting ignorance of believing that nothing bad could happen to any traveller on the Silfen paths. Now he knew his life was on the line, and he was trusting it to a piece of alien jewellery. How tenuous was that?
His timer told him they’d been out in the open for forty minutes, though it felt like most of the afternoon, when he came to the edge of another forest. As soon as they were inside and under the protective boughs, the swirling ice flakes abated considerably. Ozzie kept the rope tied to the sledge, though.
‘We’ll make camp in a couple of hours,’ he told his companions. He’d really hoped they could have kept going for longer, but once again this world had thwarted them. He was exhausted by two days of battling his way across hostile terrain, and he knew Orion was never going to be able to take much more of this. As for Tochee . . . well, who knew? But tonight, they would have a long rest, which would at least enable them to keep going for another full day. Beyond that, there was nothing to think about.
He kept going, moving heavy arms and aching legs in slow rhythm. His feet were numb now, the cold cutting off all feeling below his ankles, which allowed his imagination to summon up the worst-case images of what he’d see when he took his boots off that evening. At least the forest was on a gentle downward slope; the
re were mounds and ridges, of course, but the overall progress was helpful. He wasn’t sure if he could manage another big uphill slog. The snow was deeper, too, covering all the usual stones and snags. Several times he shook it off his fur coat where it was clinging.
‘Ozzie!’
He turned at the shout, seeing Orion waving frantically. Now what? Despite nerves that were getting badly stretched, he signalled Tochee to stop, and skied round to the boy.
Orion pulled his goggles off. ‘It’s wet,’ he exclaimed.
Instead of shouting at the boy to put the goggles back on, he leant in closer to see what had happened.
‘The snow,’ Orion said. ‘It’s melting. It’s warm enough to melt.’
Sure enough, the ice on the goggles seemed to be mushy, sleet rather than ice. Ozzie snatched his own goggles off, and looked straight up. A million dark specks were falling out of the uniform coral-pink sky. When they landed on his exposed skin, they didn’t sting and burn as they had before, they were wintry, yes, but they quickly turned to slush and dribbled over his skin.
Ozzie propelled himself over to the closest tree. He raised a pole, and whacked it hard against the trunk. The snow loosened, falling away. He hit it again and again until the bark was exposed. Real, biological bark. It was a proper wooden tree. He laughed with more than a touch of hysteria. It was a stupid irony that he’d gotten so cold he couldn’t actually tell when the environment warmed up to a mere ten degrees below freezing.
Orion had churned his way over. He looked at the exposed patch of crinkled bark with trepidation.
‘We did it!’ Ozzie shouted, and flung his arms round the boy. ‘We fucking did it! We are gone from that bastard world. Out, out, out. I’m free again.’
‘Are we? Have we really escaped?’
‘Oh goddamn yes! You bet your sweet ass we have. You and me, kid, we did it. Oh hey, and Tochee, of course. Come on, let’s go tell it the good news.’
‘But Ozzie . . .’ Orion glanced up. ‘The sky’s still red.’
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