by Andy Lane
We were closer to the sky now, and I could see features upon it: patches of shadow, deep gouges and little black specks that seemed to move.
'Animals,' said Ace when I pointed them out to her. 'Good to eat, too. I shoot them down with a bow and arrow when I get the chance. They taste of chocolate.'
'But how can . . .?'
'They're like big balloons full of some gas that's lighter than air. They float up against the ice.'
'I see. So how do they move around?'
She looked at me as if I was slow-witted.
'Skates,' she said succinctly.
We moved on. The going was getting rougher now: we were having to use our hands, more often than not, to pull ourselves along. Sometimes, when I looked up, the sky was a milky white wall towards which we were crawling.
At one point I grasped at a rock which came away in my hand and rolled down the slope with an increasing clatter of smaller stones following it until it was out of sight. The echoes of its passage lived on for some time.
It was getting colder. Much colder. I turned the collar of my coat up and bound strips of handkerchief round my hands, but it was of little use. Ace did not seem to be bothered by the cold.
'You should try doing route marches on Ragnarok,' she snapped when I offered her my jacket. 'The only inhabitants are a tribe of brass monkeys who all look like they've lost something.'
I did not understand her meaning, so I smiled and climbed on.
By this time I was forced to seek out crevices with my hands and feet to anchor myself before taking a step. The sharply edged rocks tore at my fingertips, and the blood seeping from the wounds made my handholds difficult. I wished that I had brought gloves. The weight of my body constantly threatened to tear me from the rock and send me hurtling down the slope. I dared not look down. My world was a few square feet of rock, my one aim to find enough purchase to enable me to pull myself onwards to another world: another few feet of rock. Every so often, but not often enough, Ace called a halt. In those periods I gazed ahead, toward the oppressive ice barrier. Wavelike formations of thin clouds seemed to chase each other across its surface and crash against the mountainside where it penetrated the ice. The inflated bladder-like animals skated across the sky in flocks of ten or twenty, looking rather like fat pheasants, or perhaps puffed-up goldfish. The thought of chocolate began to obsess me.
We passed a stream of some viscous turquoise substance that wound its way through the rocks. My throat was dry, and so I made as if to drink some. Ace warned me off.
'It's not water,' she said. 'More like a liquid atmosphere. Oxygen and nitrogen, mainly, although it should be gaseous at this temperature.
Probably some kind of allotropic form that we don't get on Earth. A-level chemistry's all right for a few bangs, but not much use on alien planets.'
Over the course of a few minutes, I found it increasingly difficult to breath.
My lungs seemed to be on fire, and I felt as if spikes were being driven into my temples. Finding handholds was almost impossible: I seemed to be able to concentrate on a smaller area of ground than before and my hands were having to scrabble in the grey areas on the edges of my vision until they found something which would take my weight. Twice I found nothing, and had to retrace my path and find a new one. I cursed myself for eating that alien creature. Its flesh was obviously poisonous, and I had obviously ingested an incapacitating, if not fatal, dose. It was only when I noticed that Ace was also having problems that I remembered the symptoms of oxygen deprivation, and suggested that we go back and dip handkerchiefs in the stream. If we tied them around our necks, I reasoned, the heat of our bodies should cause the liquid to evaporate back into a breathable vapour.
Although sceptical, Ace complied with my suggestion. I am glad to say that it worked, and we were able to climb onwards refreshed. We made sure that we climbed alongside the stream, and when the effort of drawing a breath became a chore again, we would re-moisten our handkerchiefs. Ace took me more seriously after that.
We were constantly attempting to find the easiest path up the side of the mountain, choosing those sections which appeared to have more cracks which we could use as hand-and footholds, detouring around large outcrops of stone and sections of friable rock, always trying to look ahead and predict which channels, chimneys or ledges would lead to fresh paths and which would lead to dead ends. Sometimes we got it right, and could gain ten or fifteen feet in a few minutes: sometimes we got it wrong and would have to retrace our steps and find another path. Frequently we would have to spend as much time travelling sideways, edging along precarious ledges, as we did climbing upwards.
A cramp hit me as we traversed one such section: a fairly broad lip of rock beneath a jutting boulder made of some striated element more impervious to the weathering effect of the wind. I fell to my knees, clutching at my calf.
The pain was agonizing, as if a ligament had snapped or a muscle had torn. I was familiar with the sensation - I used to play rugby for Blackheath -
but it as no more welcome for that. Fortunately Ace was also familiar with cramp, and forced me to lie flat whilst she massaged my calf until the muscle relaxed.
'Are you sure that we're headed in the right direction?' I asked as her fingers probed my leg.
'No. I haven't seen anywhere for them to have diverted, though, so it looks like we're headed for the top.'
The wind picked up as we climbed higher. It attacked us first from one direction and then from another, circling around to find our weakest spots, sometimes insinuating its cold, hard fingers into our clothes and sapping the strength from our limbs, sometimes buffeting us hard and making us lose our precious fingerholds. There was no mercy here: the elements were pitting their strength against two pygmies who had dared profane this sacred place. Perversely these natural attacks gave me some small measure of comfort, for compared to them the evil of men such as Maupertuis and his mysterious master were as nothing. If we could defeat the mountain, I felt that we could defeat anything.
That epiphany proved to be the turning point of the climb. Perhaps the cold had finally got to me and numbed my marrow but I felt warmer and more confident after that. Even when the rock vanished, to be replaced with a sheer wall of black ice, I did not quail. Ace and I took turns with her miraculous weapon, which she had set to produce a thin knife of sunlight, cutting steps into the ice. I took my cue from her: each step that she cut was precisely the right size, no deeper than it should be, and spaced apart from its neighbours by a comfortable distance. My own initial attempts were farcical but I soon learned how to wield the device, and I found that I could match her delicacy of touch.
At one stage, when Ace was above me, cutting away, and I was clinging to the steps that I had recently cut but which had refrozen within seconds, I looked past her. The mountain could only have been a few hundred yards in diameter at that point, and I was shocked to discover that the sky was only a few body-lengths away. At that range the ice was pitted, rough and grey. Gaps existed between the ice and the mountain: black voids, like wounds in reality. The river of liquid atmosphere, just a trickle at this elevation, emerged from one of them. The view was half-hidden by tendrils of mist which curled around us. Looking down, first a few inches, then a few feet, and then further, I found that I could no longer make out the ground.
We were suspended between heaven and hell, cocooned in the mist.
'Jesus, I didn't realize we were so close.'
Ace's voice surprised me out of my reverie. I climbed past her and took the lightgun.
'A few more minutes should see us to the top,' I grunted, and set to work cutting a set of steps and then a rough platform for us to stand on, side by side.
Reverently, I reached up and touched the sky. It was as hard as the mountain had been, and as cold. I craned my neck and looked out, upside down, along its surface. My mind played funny tricks with perspective, for a moment I couldn't tell which direction was up and which was down, what was surface and what
was sky. Some primitive part of my brain kept screaming that I was going to fall, but only for a moment.
And then a distorted face thrust itself out of a patch of mist at me, and I did scream.
Ace laughed.
'It's only one of the skaters,' she said.
Catching my breath, I looked closer. The face, which looked so much like a gross caricature of a well-fed, gout-ridden Dickensian gentleman, or a rector straight out of Trollope, gazed with an expression of bovine stupidity straight from a spherical, semi-transparent body some ten feet in diameter.
Three stubby limbs rose from the top of the body, each terminating in what looked for all the world like a skate, made of some bony substance. A pouch of skin drooped below the creature. I wondered for a moment what its function was, but I was enlightened when the creature grew bored with me and unfurled the pouch to form a sail with which it caught the breeze and skated away across the surface of the ice.
'Your face,' Ace said, and laughed again.
'They taste of chocolate, you say?'
'Yeah. They have these big macho dominance fights, sometimes, and they use those skate-things as weapons. The loser gets his balloon punctured and falls all the way down to the surface. I got hungry one night, and one just dropped out of the sky, virtually into my lap. "That's 'andy, 'Arty," I said, and bunged it on the fire. After that I made myself a bow and arrow. No time to eat now, though. We've got a job to do.'
'Where do we go now?'
She looked around.
'Where else is there? Onward and upward.'
'Upward where?'
She indicated the gap where the ice did not quite meet the rock.
'Up there. To the real surface. To the outside.'
'Are you mad? There's no reason to think that they've been taken up there!
The chances are that we missed the signs of a camp or a cave further down the mountain, and we've been climbing blindly ever since!'
Ace nodded to a larger fissure some thirty or so feet away.
'Look at that. The edges aren't natural. They've been clawed away. That's where they were taken.'
'But..' I was searching round for excuses now. I did not want to climb any further. Every muscle in my body ached with the accumulated toxins of fatigue. '. . . But the air is too thin. How will we manage to breathe? How did they manage? You must be mistaken.'
'That's a bit of a poser,' Ace admitted, frowning. 'You're right of course. If the atmosphere's this thin here, it'll be non-existent if we climb much further. They probably had suits of some kind. We'll have to improvize.'
I didn't like the sound of that.
'Improvize?'
'What's the matter, never seen Blue Peter?'
'No.'
'Lucky man. Now think: how do we ensure a supply of air for ourselves?'
'We've managed with the handkerchiefs so far,' I offered.
'True, but the path might move away from the mountain side, like in a tunnel through the ice or something. We can't rely on still being able to use the stream to refresh them.'
'So we need a larger supply,' I mused.
'Good thinking, Sherlock.'
I frowned at her and she blushed, embarrassed.
'What about the animals?' I asked, as an idea suddenly struck me.
'The animals? You mean, cut a couple of them open, get rid of the gas inside and replace it with air?' She grinned. 'Ace!'
Luring the creatures over was, paradoxically, the easiest part. They were not wary of humans in the way that animals on Earth might have been. We had a few teething troubles in the butchery department: Ace used her lightgun on the first one, and it exploded with a surprised expression upon its face, singeing my eyebrows. The gas inside appeared to be inflammable, as well as lighter than air. The next one was almost as bad. I held it whilst Ace made a slight incision in its tough but flexible skin with my pocket knife. It burst in my arms, splattering me with a gelid blue substance. If I hadn't been so cold and so tired, the farcical elements of our actions would have set me laughing. As it was, both of us were getting increasingly angry. By the time we had captured a third creature, we had evolved a strategy. I pinched a section of its skin, and Ace cut off the protruding section. I could then gradually let the gas out using my fingers as a crude valve. It died struggling, and in confusion. The gas made me slightly light-headed, but I welcomed the feeling as it cushioned my tiredness somewhat. It also made me feel slightly better about what we were doing. I did not enjoy killing them, especially in such an undignified manner, but we were desperate.
Once we had two deflated skins, we set about cutting away the limbs and protruding members and refilling the remaining bladders. We carefully held the rents beneath the surface of the stream until some liquid got in. Whilst I held them closed again, Ace filled two oddly shaped canteens with liquid as well, and hooked one onto my belt.
'Additional supplies,' she said, then climbed inside one of the skins. I did likewise with the other. We knotted the rents from the inside. As we had hoped, the warmth from our bodies vaporized the liquid and inflated the skin.
Urgency had lent skill to our endeavours: the scheme had worked, and we were left standing within two tough, translucent, taut spheres that used to be living creatures but now functioned as crude reservoirs of breathable air.
Ace waved at me. I waved back, and followed her as she carefully climbed up towards the dark opening. The skin of the life-preserving integument deformed beneath our fingers and feet, enabling us to climb, but was tough enough to resist tearing against the rock.
We entered the dark channel. A tunnel led upwards through the ice at a shallow enough angle that we could walk along it in comfort. Ace turned and bestowed a triumphant smile upon me. I pretended not to see it.
We walked for what seemed like hours. There were no side tunnels, no choices of path. Although the walls were rough ice, I gained the impression that they had been carved, rather than formed naturally. They glowed with what I first took to be an inner effulgence, but later realized was the light from the planet's sun, refracted through the ice. It got brighter as we walked, and more directional. Upon Ry'leh's interior surface I had not been able to tell where the sun was, merely that it was up. Now I could have pointed to it with some accuracy. I stumbled numerous times, but each time I managed to pick myself up and carry on. My friends were depending on me. All I wanted to do was sleep, but I kept on putting one foot before the other, slogging away like a trooper. The air within the balloon became stuffier and stuffier, and the skin grew tauter and tauter as the pressure outside reduced, but the trapped warmth of my body combated the cold which stung my fingers whenever I inadvertently touched the skin. I was on the verge of passing out when I remembered the canteen that Ace had provided me with. With clumsy fingers I untied the knot and tried to bleed some of the stale air away. The reduced pressure outside snatched at the rent, but I managed to hang on. I retied the skin when the balloon was half empty and carefully poured some liquid from Ace's canteen. Within seconds the balloon had reflated, and I felt refreshed.
I glanced over to where Ace had stopped. She was engaged in the same activity. From the haggard look upon her face, she had almost left it too late.
We started walking again along the monotonous tunnel. I had completely lost track of time, and was dreaming about roast turkey and plum pudding, when Ace stopped. I bumped into her, and rebounded. She pointed ahead.
There was an irregular black opening some ten feet away. Cautiously, we crept closer and peered out.
We had emerged at the base of a sheer cliff. The landscape that surrounded us was like illustrations I have seen of the surface of the moon.
Tremendous spires of rock -the tops of the mountains - soared into the jet-black, starspeckled sky. Broken escarpments and jumbled, irregular cliffs vied with large expanses of fiat ice. A bloated red sphere, spotted with black, hung above our heads, casting a maleficent light across the terrain.
I have reconstructed the view at my
leisure, to set the scene for the adventures that were to come. At the time, it was not the alienness of the landscape that captured and held our attention but rather the group of wooden caravans that sat not twenty feet away from us. Their seams were sealed with some black, sticky substance and they sat upon huge metal runners that cut deeply into the ice. The central caravan was cathedral-sized and ornate, with symbols carved deeply into its sides and ten or eleven doors spaced around its circumference. The others were smaller, clustered like ducklings around their mother. Great grooves in the ice led away towards the horizon. They had been brought here.
Surrounding them: hundreds of rakshassi. They too were encased in inflated skins, forcing them to fold their wings up against their backs. Some of them were busying themselves with ropes, a handful of others were connecting the larger caravan to one of the smaller ones with a tube which seemed to have been sewn together out of the same flexible skins that Ace and I wore, and inflating it.