In another turn he met the first of the high bridges: the road was climbing by a rugged set of switchbacks and going further and further back into a fold of the mountain, and where the roadbuilders hadn’t found a way to blast away enough mountain to make a roadway past the slip-zone they had evidently just bridged the gap and hoped.
But with the fresh scars of slides going under the bridge, he got down off Burn’s back, climbed down at least far enough on the rocks so he could take a look at the underpinnings; and it did look to be sound.
He climbed up then and walked across the boards ahead of Burn—as Burn trod the weathered boards imaging
It wasn’t that far down. But, give or take the missing tie-downs that made no few of the warped boards rattle and rock—and thunder like hell under wheeled traffic, Guil could well imagine—it forecast nothing good ahead.
The next such bridge they reached was worse—two boards were actually missing in a span above a higher drop. Hope, Guil thought, that the villages had done better with the bridges up near the crest.
Another short span. Burn had to cross over more missing boards, easy stride for a horse—but Burn was, by now, not happy with bridges in general.
Then they caught sight of the big one Aby’s images had foretold they could expect, over a gorge by no means so large as Kroman, but impressive, the longest bridge yet—and as Guil looked up from below, it showed sky through its structure.
Guil gazed up at it in dismay, and Burn outright balked on the gravel road, catching the image from his mind and dizzily lifting and turning his head to have his one-sided horsewise view of it. Burn immediately ducked his head down and laid his ears back, shaking his neck.
Nothing to do but have a look, Guil thought, and nudged Burn with his heels, twice, to get him moving up that steep gravel incline.
The bridge looked no better when they came up on a level with it, a long span over a rift in the mountain flank, a cable and timber structure far more ambitious than any they’d met.
It wasn’t wholly suspension, thank God. The rails as well as the roadbed were missing pieces, and four and five of the crosslaid planks were gone at a stretch. He counted four, five such gaps in the bridge deck, so far as he could see from this side, gaps exposing the underpinnings. The boards had probably, Guil thought, sailed right off in the storms, considering the cold gusts that battered and buffeted them, sweeping unrestricted along the dry, slide-choked gorge on the one side and dizzily out into open sky and the whole of the plains and the distant haze-hidden Sea on the other.
He jammed his hat on tight and slipped the cord under his chin before he walked out on the span to look it over, and the look he got sent his heart plummeting. The gaps were big enough to drop a horse through, and the winds that swept across that span could rock a man on his feet.
Burn didn’t like that idea.
Days—days to go back down and across to the other route. With the weather about to turn. If he went back now he wouldn’t get up to Tarmin Ridge until spring—and that left him sitting in Anveney territory all winter, with nothing done, nothing but using up his supplies, his account—granting money was there, of which he was not entirely certain if he failed Cassivey’s commission now. If the villagers found that shipment up there in the rocks—Cassivey and a lot of Anveney folk weren’t going to be damned happy with him.
He didn’t like losing, or explaining to a shipper why he’d failed; and failing what he’d promised himself and Aby, hell—it wasn’t why he’d come this far already.
He walked back off the bridge.
The supports were sound enough, run through with iron rods and huge metal plates bolting the whole together.
He climbed back up to the road and walked out on the bridge as far as the gaps. He stood looking at the far side, then shut his eyes a moment, and made his mind as quiet and confident as he could.
“Come on, Burn, dammit. It’s too far to go back.” He looked up at gray-bottomed clouds scudding above the peak.
“Burn, dammit! Come on!”
“Burn. Get your ass out here.
Burn moved, came step after slow step, the wind whipping his mane upward, trying each plank, imaging as he came:
“It’s all right, Burn. Come on.”
Burn came up beside him, at the area of missing boards, stopped, and lowered his head to take a long, unhappy, dizzy look down into the depths below.
It wasn’t easy to free one. It was a plank sized to support a small truck. It weighed like hell and he could only lever it up from the end, looking out over a sheer drop down the face of the mountain, and the wind blasted his hat off, left it spinning and jerking at his back, held only by the cord. He got the plank up, turned it, dragged it back past Burn and, with slow maneuvering and a final, satisfying thump, installed it in the gap.
Burn leaned forward in curiosity and peered over that edge. Didn’t trust that board. But Burn was amazed, preoccupied with the gap, when Guil walked back by him, hand on Burn’s side.
He worked and worked, freed the next plank, and dragged it along past Burn.
Then Burn caught on what he was doing,
Burn backed up in a panicked rush. Guil let the plank fall crashing to the deck and grabbed a double fistful of nighthorse mane to stop him.
Burn stood there shivering, with a clear imagination of the bridge unraveling behind him.
“You don’t move!”
He went back and got another one. Burn was still standing, shivering. Burn could cross a single missing board. Guil dragged the third board up to Burn’s position.
But Burn was far from certain that any board he’d just seen moved was going to stay put. Burn grew confused about directions, and started to back up in great haste.
“You fool,” Guil swore, threw himself under Burn’s rump and shoved with all the strength he had.
Burn didn’t trust
There were two of them shaking now. Guil retrieved the plank he’d dropped, a quarter over the edge of the decking where it had bounced. He jammed his hat back on and swore and wrestled it up to the two-plank gap.
He dropped it in. He was exhausted and his headache had come back, but he wouldn’t ask Burn to accept a hand-span gap in the planks that were there—Burn’s estimation of gaps wasn’t so reliable at the moment. He dragged and wrestled with it and got it butted.
Then he got up and stamped loudly over the repaired section, while Burn watched in horror. Stepped across the single missing plank. Did a kickstep across it, back and forth and twice more, like a lunatic.
Then he went back to
Burn, and with his hands constantly on Burn’s neck, patted and cajoled and argued, with the wind blasting up out of the gorge at both of them, rocking even Burn on his feet. He imaged
When that didn’t work, he tried
The last was only half a lie. It spooked Burn. Burn jumped forward,
Right for the next gap.
<“Burn!”>
Burn cleared it. Thump-bang!.—and stopped, scared and confused.
Guil grabbed up his gear and ran, heart pounding, as far as the gap Burn had jumped, before his knees wobbled and gave out.
He squatted down. Burn was standing sideways on the bridge, looking back in distress.
It took a considerable while of catching his breath before Guil slung his rifle to his back, threw the two-pack across the gap, and crossed it, astride the support boards, with the wind out of the gorge blasting up under his coat and whipping his hat this way and that.
Something white flew across his vision. Several more followed.
Snowflakes, scattered, few, and from a partially cloudy sky. But it was a warning. It was a clear warning.
“I’m trying,” Guil muttered, and tried to will the headache into some inner dark. Let his temper and the headache go off together and trade insults. They’d this bridge to cross. He didn’t know how many more. He didn’t know this road except by Aby’s image, and that was the way an experienced rider killed himself and his horse, just too damn good, too damn cocky with the weather and an unknown road a junior wouldn’t think of trying.
Burn deserved better. Wasn’t going to leave Burn to freeze on a gap-toothed bridge.
Two more gaps. More laborious board-movings, a twice-mashed finger, a bashed knee, a splinter through his right glove, that he couldn’t get all of with his teeth and he didn’t want to take the glove off for fear of losing it, the wind was blowing so and his fin-gers were so numb. Cold helped the headache, only thing he could say for it.
Don’t do anything, a doctor would say—and the wind blasted at him at the worst moments of his balance, so he lost one plank that caught the wind, spun him around, and off his balance. He let go and fell, it went sailing off into the gorge: he didn’t follow it. The pistol damn near did, spun past his face to the gap: flat on his belly he grabbed that and recovered it as something else, small and shiny, slipped his pocket, skittered across the wind-scoured boards and over the edge. He’d saved the pistol, but the lighter was spook-bait.
He got up and got another board.
He didn’t want Burn to try another jump, even if he could talk him into it. A nighthorse walking the old timbers was one thing. A nighthorse landing on them was another. He didn’t trust the wood. But the far side hove closer and closer, plank after laboriously gained plank, and Burn crossed the next to last gap when he told Burn it was safe.
“Burn!” Guil yelled, at the same time Burn gathered himself for the charge, hoof-toed feet thundering down the board.
Burn sailed across the gap, landed. A board broke—Burn went in halfway up to his hock, and Guil stared, heart stopped as Burn clambered across the last few boards to the solid bridgehead.
Guil took a wobbly few steps forward, remembered his gear, gathered it up and followed, far more scared than Burn was. Burn stood on solid ground again. Burn was pleased with himself— raised a hind foot to lick a scrape, but that was all.
Burn’s rider crossed the last gap above sharp rocks and mountainside and tottered to a rock-sheltered spot to sit down, dizzy, dry-mouthed with exertion, and feeling his skull trying to explode.
Which wasn’t something he’d regret at the moment.
But they were safe.
And the smells on this side of the gorge he suddenly realized were evergreen and not chemical smoke—clean, pure evergreen, rocks, nighthorse, and the tang of snow on the wind…
And Burn lipped his ear. His hands met a soft nose, velvet nudge at his cheek—Burn’s tongue licked the side of his eye with utmost delicacy and tasted salt.
The taste came into Guil’s mouth, too, and identity melted. He scratched Burn’s chin where Burn liked to be scratched, he shut his eyes and saw through Burn’s,
Not a full-out storm, only a spat of snow. Not thick enough yet. Burn stood there, a barricade against the wind. His head still reeled, and he thought it hurt: it was one of those ghosty kind of headaches. Half-blind, feeling the altitude after his stint in Malvey and Shamesey lowlands, he uncapped his canteen and took a sip of water to ease his throat.
It took maybe a half an hour for him to get to his feet, and to climb, belly-down, onto Burn’s back. But on this side of the gorge the wind was less, and the next switchback came up among sizeable, snow-blanketed evergreens that cut off the sight of the valley.
They’d made the Height. They were on the lower loop of the Tarmin road.
And, no, lichen wasn’t edible—or it was, but it wasn’t something a human palate or a human stomach wanted to try again. He’d chewed evergreen trying to get the taste from his mouth. And it had mostly worked.
Cloud imaged a better taste for the stuff. Cloud didn’t believe his.
And his gut hurt, since he’d eaten the stuff, and his heart had raced and his vision had tunneled for at least an hour afterward, which wasn’t at all a good sign. That had scared him off further trials of anything fungus-like.
The effect had finally passed. The stomachache had eased, and become the stomach-empty feeling that had gone past mere light-headedness. He wasn’t near starving to death. He knew that. A human could go a whole moon-chase with nothing at all to eat, he’d heard of people doing it who broke a leg or something where they couldn’t get help, and who had to crawl for days.
He thought about warm beds and his mother’s cooking.
And maybe Cloud interpreted that as a wish Cloud should do something about, because he felt a fairly purposeful change in direction.
Within a few minutes Cloud came down a steep, snowy slope onto a clear-cut that extended in either direction, a track across the Wild.
More—he saw phone lines.
* * *
Chapter xviii
« ^ »
THE EVENING SHADOW ROLLED DOWN EARLY, THICK WITH CLOUD, and the black, bristling evergreens were white with snow. Snow made a fine dust in Burn’s mane and in the folds of Guil’s coat— still a spat, not a storm, but advising a traveler it might be well to think about camp: it was all
too easy if a real blow came up—as well could happen with the weather like this—to stray off the road in the dark and the snow, and right off the edge of a cliff.
But there was due to be a shelter ahead, down what was, so far, a well-defined road—a clear-cut marked by the solitary phone line.
And all the while that thin thread of human talk and commerce, he supposed, could have let him call the villages ahead. He’d thought once of buying a handset and learning how to tap in; those who rode the lines said it was stupid-simple, and all you needed was tape and wire-cutters besides, but, hell, he’d never needed a phone—until now. There was a stop-start way you could send a message without a handset; but the authorities put out warrants if you ever cut a line purely on rider business, and besides, he didn’t know the code: he couldn’t spell any more than he could read. And a handset? It was weight and cost, and Burn had enough to carry, Burn would tell him so.
Burn had been damned forgiving this trip. Burn was a
Burn was immensely pleased. Doubly so that Burn’s rider opted to slide down and walk; Burn was concerned about his rider’s limp and sore leg, and wanted to lick at it—attention he had as soon not—but Burn was very glad not to have
You certainly didn’t push yourself at this altitude if you weren’t acclimated, and neither of them were acclimated. You didn’t press beyond sensible limits—his own chest ached with the thin air, and persistent headache rode just at the back of his eyes, not, he thought, entirely due to the concussion.
But the thought of a solid shelter and a wood fire was a powerful incentive: there was supposed to be one fairly close to the ascent and one more before Tarmin. It was encouraging that there was no sight nor warning of trouble so far—but he didn’t take the High Wild for granted—he walked with a loaded rifle and a sidearm ready, at the pace he felt like maintaining, which was a leisurely limp that didn’t hurt beyond what his nerves could bear; and he’d much rather have solid walls around them tonight.
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