“What are you saying?” Hawk said, their faces very close.
Snake could not withstand the blunt force of Hawk’s wrath, and turned away. “We lied,” he said. “We lied to all of you. No one has ever been to the top. Ten tens of men have died trying. It cannot be done.”
Scorpion stared at his father, mouth open in disbelief.
“Did Stillshadow know?” Raven asked, eyes wide with horror and betrayal.
“Cloud Stalker never told her,” he said, “But I think she suspected. Perhaps she would have warned you. I do not know.”
They stood gape-mouthed and disbelieving. “We have to turn back,” he said. “I’d hoped that we could make it. I’d thought that perhaps we would find the strength. I was a fool.”
Frog gazed at the cleft in the great wall, the place where, perhaps only a moon before, a titanic slab of rock and dead water had burst away like the flesh of a sun-rotted melon, and a cascade of boiling mud had cleansed the mountain.
Distantly, far down the slope, wolves howled.
Frog thought of the terrible suffering they had already endured, and the brothers and cousins glanced at one another.
“Who wants to go back?”
Snake’s legs seemed to melt as Fire Ant screamed, “We trusted you, and you lied.” Fire Ant slapped Snake, the man who had married their mother, who had fed them, who had raised them. Again and again Fire Ant struck, until Snake’s scars ran with blood. Snake took it, never struck back, did not even raise an arm to deflect the blows.
Hawk Shadow gripped at Fire Ant’s arm, trying to hold his brother back as Ant vented his frustration and fear.
“No!” Hawk said. “That is enough.”
Snake dropped his head.
“You are my father no longer,” Scorpion said. “To think you tried to shame me during my manhood ceremony. To think how I sought your approval. I would have done anything for you!” he screamed. “Go, liar. Go, coward.”
Snake stood, blood drooling from his lips to spatter on the ground. The spiderweb of scars covering the left side of his face had never seemed so brutal, his empty eye socket had never gaped so darkly.
Frog gripped Snake’s hand. His uncle, the man who had been the only father Frog had ever known, trembled with shame and cold. Who knew what he felt, the reasons that the hunt chiefs had lied to them all?
Then Snake pulled his hand from Frog’s and began his walk down the mountain.
“What does this mean?” Hawk asked, watching the old man retreat. “There is nothing up there?”
Frog was deadly calm. “That the top cannot be reached. That there is nothing there. That it was all a lie.”
The wind howled around them, driving the cold more deeply into their bones.
“What do we do?” Raven asked. At that moment she seemed to have lost her mother’s power. She was just a tired, frightened young woman.
“I don’t—” Hawk Shadow began.
“We climb,” T’Cori broke in, closing her eyes. “In my dreams, I have seen the top, and they are there. The spirits are there. Father Mountain is there. If we go back, our people die. We must go on.”
So close. It seemed that they could almost see the summit now.
Onward they would go.
The rock-and-ice wall facing them was impossible to climb. No handholds had been cut in years past. One slip could mean a lethal fall. Their fur-wrapped feet would never find safe purchase, and their numbed fingers would fail.
So they journeyed west around the wall, until Scorpion called: “Look!”
There in the ice, a river of boiling mud had burned a tunnel as tall as a crouching man. How far had it come? How far would it reach? Was it possible that it might take them around this impossible wall?
They backtracked far enough to gather wood to fashion into torches, then climbed back to the tunnel. Hawk’s hands trembled as he made the fire, but when at last it obeyed his summons they lit torches and climbed the river of mud. The walls of the tunnel were of blue ice, and sometimes jutting slabs of rock. Frog moved slowly, testing his footing, the glow of the torches reflecting back strangely, like the moon’s reflection on a calm night. The tunnel rose at a shallow angle, and there were points where the ice and dried mud beneath their feet was actually warm.
Without warning, gusts of warm moist air gushed up from the tunnel floor. “It feels like a woman’s breath,” Frog chuckled.
“She’d have to have the biggest mouth ever,” Scorpion laughed uneasily. “I feel it all over my body—”
Something in his voice, a sudden stressed rise in pitch, made Frog turn around. His brother’s eyes were like twin flaming moons, impossibly wide, his mouth pursed in a surprised circle.
The ground beneath him sagged, a jagged crack running from one side of the tunnel to the other.
He tried to take a step away from the unstable area, when suddenly he dropped a handsbreadth and a scalding gout of steam swallowed him.
Oh, how Scorpion screamed! The pain and fear in that cry would echo in Frog’s ears for many moons, haunting his sleep.
Frog fell backward, shocked, his brothers screaming around him. When his eyes cleared he saw Scorpion, body wedged halfway into the earth. He howled and thrashed. They clutched at his arms trying to pull him out, but then the ground cracked more and he slipped from their grasp. Another steam flower blossomed in the tunnel, and they ran, Scorpion’s screams ringing in their ears.
“Demons!” Raven cried. “Fire demons!”
They fled upward, the steam billowing in pursuit. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” Fire Ant screamed, and clawed his way ahead of all of them. The steam caught them, and was almost but not quite hot enough to sear their skin.
They reached a point where they could see light above them in the tunnel, and climbed up the curved sides to the surface, helping one another.
T’Cori was the first, but not strong enough to help them. Hawk Shadow was next, and he and Fire Ant helped Raven up.
Frog was the last.
They stood there at the top, waiting, and then called down into the darkness. “Scorpion!” they called. “Scorpion!” but they heard nothing. Frog sagged to his knees.
His cousin. His stepbrother. Cruel, and cowardly, and loyal. For all things, good and bad, that Scorpion might have or have not been, the most important was that he was Frog’s stepbrother. They had run together, eaten together, slept side by side in the hut for so long, he knew if Scorpion was there by the smell of his breath alone.
Fair and foul, Scorpion had been his brother. And now he was gone.
Raven clutched at his arm. “One who dies here, on the mountain,” she said, “is already in heaven. You will see him again.”
Frog was too tired to argue with her, too heartsick not to hope that she was right. He would see Scorpion again.
If an afterlife still existed.
They found themselves in a crystal valley, amid countless ice mounds sculpted by the flow of hot mud, and amid cairns taller than a hand of men. The ground beneath their feet was of frozen mud, and the ice fell from the sky upon them. Strangely, the traction was actually better here, where the mud had thickened.
Raven paused on their march. Until now, the girl had stopped frequently, seeming to grow weaker by the breath, but now she seemed inspired.
“She is here,” Raven said. “I can feel Great Mother.” She appeared to have regained herself. They could see Stillshadow’s strength in her eyes, hear it in her voice. When she looked at T’Cori, her smile deepened. “Do you feel her?” she asked. T’Cori nodded rapidly, the ice caking her hair.
And so they went on. Raven was spitting blood, had been since awakening that morning. Her face was ice-flecked, her cheeks cracked and bleeding, but now she and T’Cori shared the same heart, filled with a single unquenchable thirst.
“We go on,” Raven said. “Even if we die, we go on.”
So close. So close. Their inner fire drove them on, even as their bodies began to fail.
All around them were sights no Ibandi, no two-legged had ever seen. Cracked ice towers and mountains of dead water glistened. There seemed nothing alive, save their own footsteps and voices.
Food leapt from their stomachs. Strength and enthusiasm were distant memories. In all the world the only reality was this: one foot after another, slowly, slowly, just trying to survive. The freezing thin air ate at them like a worm that devoured from within.
Frog’s fingers and face were swollen and cracked, but although he could see red in the wounds, blood did not flow. He felt little save despair. He had to rest every few steps just to catch his breath.
“This is death, brother,” Hawk gasped.
But Frog looked at the holy girl T’Cori and realized that there was no way that he could let her climb—that inner fire continuing to animate the ragged remnants of her body, pulling it forward into an unknown and unknowable glory—and not try to follow. Even unto death.
If he had seen no miracles, seen no spirits, demons, gods or goddesses in his life, the sight of that girl never faltering, never giving up, would have convinced him of the possibility of gods. Surely such strength was a sign that Father Mountain and Great Mother were real and lived still. Surely such strength was not entirely human.
Even when resting, his heart raced as if he had just finished a sprint. The five survivors slept no more. Hawk is right, Frog thought. This is death. They were not in mortal danger. Rather, they were already dead.
“This is afterworld,” Hawk Shadow said in eerie reflection of Frog’s own thoughts. “We died in the tunnel with Scorpion and now are merely climbing to heaven.”
Yet if that was true, why wasn’t Scorpion here with them? Then Frog remembered that it takes time for flesh to melt from the bones. Even cooked flesh. He gagged at the thought.
Perhaps they and not Scorpion had died. Perhaps he had turned around, descending safely with Snake, while those who went on had been frozen or burned alive.
There it was again. Father Mountain. How often he heard his mind crying out that name. And why not? Surely this, if no other time of his life, was the moment when he would meet Father Mountain, if such a being was there to be met. Surely, shortly, once and for all Frog’s questions were about to be answered.
Surely.
Vents jetted enough foul steam to choke and cloud vision. Bubbling water boiled up through the ice. Stinking gases oozed forth from the ground, and if Frog had been able to eat that morning, he would have lost it then.
A crawl through another ice tube brought them through another wall, and onto a plain devoid of life, only tumbled rocks and fissured ice greeting them.
The sky whirled with dry, harsh, powdery dead water again, and despite their furs, their fingers and toes were stiffening, losing not just sensation but control. The nighttime fire didn’t warm them, and they could not sleep, could only wait for morning’s light.
“I think Hawk is right,” Fire Ant said. “We are already dead.”
“Then we might as well go forward,” Frog said. “We have nothing left to lose.”
Frog found his way to T’Cori’s side. She was with Raven, who was coughing blood now, so close to the fire that her furs were singed, still shivering. He took her aside. “Are you afraid?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Are you?”
“No,” he said.
“Do you always lie?”
“Always,” Frog gasped, and despite his fatigue found the strength to join with her in laughter.
She was weaker than he, Frog was certain of that. And yet it seemed almost as if the more her flesh faded, the brighter her inner fire burned.
Before the sun had lent its puny warmth to the morning air or even gifted them with full light, they continued their climb. The grade now was not much less severe than the ice cliffs, but the hill was of gravelly pumice. For every three lengths they climbed, they slid back two.
“I did not think it would be so terrible to be dead,” Hawk Shadow gasped, climbing past Frog. Frog just tried to concentrate on putting one hand up and then another, pushing, pulling in endless, mindless sequence. They had to keep moving. If they stopped to rest, it seemed impossible to begin moving once again.
He dared not look back. The slope was so steep that looking down triggered Frog’s every primal fear. Still, there was exhilaration as well. All his life he had looked up at the clouds, and now he walked among them. Did that not make him one of the greatest Ibandi of all?
Clouds blotted out the ground, but from moment to moment, it was possible to see the savannah, impossibly far beneath them. They were above the clouds. Yes, this was heaven, or a white hell.
One step at a time, every breath an ordeal. Frog coughed, covering his mouth, and then examined his hands. Blood dappled his numbed fingers.
They settled in for sleep before the sun had gone down, so exhausted that they barely had strength to scrape the fluffy dead water from the ground before laying down their furs. A tumble of rocks to either side would protect them from wind, but only shared body heat would help them through the night. T’Cori was pressed against Frog, who groaned in her ear, “I know we still live.”
“How do you know that?” T’Cori asked.
“Because I wish I was dead. And you can’t wish you were dead if you’re already dead, can you?”
She stared at him. “Your mind is strange,” she said, and he rolled over.
Raven chattered with terror, her eyes rolling, her long lashes tinged with frost. “So cold. So cold. I cannot be warm. I will never be warm again.”
“Hold on,” T’Cori said. “We will make it, and we will see the new sun.”
“I was wrong about you,” Raven whispered through cracked lips. “Always I hated you. Because you were the one who was not afraid of me. Why were you never afraid of me?”
“I was, and then one day I was not. I saw who you were,” T’Cori said to her, holding her rival’s hand. “I saw that you were afraid you would never be as great as Stillshadow. And that you wanted so much to be.”
“And weren’t you afraid?” she asked.
“I know I cannot be Stillshadow. I can only be myself.”
“I was wrong about you,” Raven said again. She paused, her breath rasping in her chest. Each liquid rasp seemed weaker than the one before. “I want a favor from you,” she said.
“Yes?”
“If you make it back and I do not, I want you to be a daughter to my mother.”
“What are you saying?” T’Cori whispered, and the tears started from her eyes.
“You are my sister. You should always have been my sister.”
T’Cori was so stunned that she could not speak.
Raven closed her eyes. “We should never have come,” she whispered.
“Let her sleep,” Frog said.
“She will die,” T’Cori said. And wept for the sister she had always wanted, and had at last, and now would lose.
In the morning, Raven was dead.
With crooked fingers, the freezing air howling around them, they straightened her limbs and scraped some frost together to bury her, and went on. T’Cori felt the tears rising in her eyes, their heat and the chill of the wind suddenly in curious contrast.
“Was she your friend?” Frog asked.
“No,” T’Cori said. “But she was my sister. Sisters fight.” T’Cori wavered as if she might fall, but looked up the mountain. “Here, so close to heaven,” she prayed, “I know your num will find the way. Lead us all, my sister,” she said. “Make us proud.”
“I cannot go on,” Hawk Shadow said, his voice shaking. “I am not strong enough to go higher.” He pulled away his furs, which had been wet and were now stiff. His feet had an odd look to them, as if burned in a cold fire. The flesh was cracked and split, and pinking beneath.
Fire Ant seemed stricken. “We cannot leave you here. There is no shelter. No wood to build fire. You’ll freeze.”
“Going down,” Hawk Shadow panted, “is easier than going up.
I can make it back to the last shelter. Can you find it?”
Fire Ant thought. “I think so, yes. Are you sure?”
“I am sure,” Hawk said. “I must go back.”
“I could send Frog back with you—”
“No!” Hawk said, his voice momentarily regaining its force. “Brother, remember why we are here. This is more important than my life. Than any of our lives. Go. There is food, and dead water I can melt with fire.”
“It is hard to make fire in this cold,” Frog said.
“Who made it last night?” Hawk asked. “Who summoned fire in the ice tunnel? I should be worrying about you!”
Fire Ant paused, weighing his choices, and finally nodded. “All right,” he said.
So Hawk embraced him, and then Frog, and then the girl. “I should not touch a dream dancer so,” he said, but managed to smile. “I don’t know if it is right, but I think of you as a little sister.”
“Thank you,” she whispered, tight against his chest. “I never had a brother.”
After a time he headed back down, and Frog found that there was a large part of himself that wished he could go with Hawk. That was not the surprising thing. The surprising thing was that there was a larger part of him that did not.
On and upward they pushed, picking among the rocks, climbing around ledges and up embankments, over stone and ice, leaning on their spears when their staggering legs failed them.
Late that day they finally broke through the clouds to a place of peace. The air was so shallow that Frog’s chest seemed empty no matter how he heaved. Strange lights danced at the edges of his vision. He was beyond exhaustion now, pushing on by sheer will.
He clawed his way up the ash and frozen gravel of yet another slope, fearing to look down, as if the very sight of the clouds from such a height might pull him back.
The view awaiting Frog was that of a level, ice-covered plateau. The flatness was broken by a few spires, and distantly something that looked like a minor rise, but there was nowhere left to climb.
They had reached the top.
Frog gripped his spear shaft for dear life, trying not to fall. Blackness wavered around the edges of his vision. “Where…is…Father?” he asked. “Where is Scorpion?” There was no strength left. He could feel nothing anywhere on his skin, but deep within his body, Frog ached. Never had he even imagined fatigue such as this.
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