Above the Snowline

by Steph Swainston

  When you face death your senses are alive. The world is bright! We were elated, switched on to the utmost. No future, no past, just the current moment! Now the danger had passed we were relaxing and feeling the adrenaline ebb away.

  She leant on her spear. ‘What is that thing you’re holding?’

  ‘A sword.’

  ‘A sword. Is that to skin it with? Ouzel would pay five bangles for this pelt.’ She brushed her hand against the grain of the fur, revealing the depth of its fluffy undercoat.

  I was so impressed I could scarcely string a sentence together. ‘It’s for killing Insects, but …’

  ‘But not bears. And has your bow become damp? Well, well, you need a bolas, like Laochan.’

  ‘Dellin, I can’t believe you just killed a buck bear. I mean, I helped, but … you were amazing. Tornado said he’d love to see you fight an Insect, and he’s right. When Awians bait bears they don’t even go near them. They use longbows and packs of dogs.’

  ‘I bet they don’t eat them, either.’ She took hold of its hump and heaved it onto its side. ‘This is a stroke of luck. The damn Awians might have killed all the game in Carnich, and I doubt we’ll find anything tomorrow, but at least we’ll eat well tonight. And I can cache some,’ she continued, and gestured at the entrance. ‘It’s safe now. Take in the packs.’

  I did as she said, wondering. Here on the verge of Carniss she was on her home ground, the top predator, at the height of her career. She was making me look ridiculous.

  The snow faded to a wet margin at the cave mouth and then onto a hard-packed earth floor. Dellin had built a hearth just inside, with a more prodigal use of fuel than usual, and its flames throve high. I crouched down and began rubbing some life back into my hands. My fingertips hurt excruciatingly as they defrosted, as if they were being crushed.

  The firelight enhanced the glow of ivory-yellow lamps along the base of the walls, three on each side. Their flames illuminated the entire chamber. They were a peculiar shape, with dents and protuberances. I picked up the nearest and felt its smooth, warm surface. It was a bear’s skull turned upside down. Dellin had secured each one on its lower jaw as a stand, then filled each brain pan with lamp oil and fitted a wick in the holes where their spinal columns had once attached. White fangs spiked from their palates and cast shifting, jumping shadows.

  Near the entrance the chamber was nearly oval and as wide as a normal room, then it narrowed towards the rear where the slanting walls met smoothly in a crevice. A sheaf of spear shafts neatly bound with sinew were propped there and, just in front, a round hollow worn in the clayey earth, spotted with blood, showed where the bear had been asleep.

  I knelt close to the fire. Its smoke rose straight up into the point of the ceiling and was blowing out the top of the entrance past a crusty overhang of snow and icicles. As I tracked its course I noticed a natural ledge three quarters of the way up the wall - the shadows of some objects on it reared and shrank. I stood, and a fan of seven of my shadows joined them, their heads curving over the ceiling.

  A large, rough wooden chest filled the depth of the shelf, together with six or seven rolled rugs in drawstring bags, bundles of twigs and an earthenware oil jar carefully wedged between them. Dellin’s ladder leaned against the shelf, a slender pine trunk with the branches lopped off leaving stumps. I smiled as I examined it. Her little cave was unexpectedly snug.

  She poked her face in at the entrance. ‘Hurry up! I have to butcher this bear quickly!’

  I slipped out of the rift fringed with ice and was surprised how much darker the terrace had become in the last few minutes. The peaks around us were darkening stage by stage, as if candles were being blown out one by one in a boundless hall. The bear’s back was a black silhouette. The rocks all around it jutted against a sky bloated purple with unfallen snow. Behind the further of Klannich’s two peaks, as jagged as a child’s drawing of Darkling, the heavy, dull-red sun sagged like a yew berry.

  Dellin nodded and echoed my thoughts: ‘There’s a lot of snow still to fall tonight. At least it will cover our scent.’

  ‘And deter wolves?’

  ‘Yes. The wolves …’ She crouched abruptly and began cutting through the bear’s nearest wrist. I drew my sword to assist but she rocked back on her heels and growled, ‘This is my kill.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘I don’t need your help!’ She detached one paw and started to saw through another wrist, evidently taking them as prizes. No bears lived at the extreme altitude where I spent my boyhood, but Eilean sometimes met hunters with wind-dried paws sewn on their rucksacks or whole strings dangling from their tent poles. Eilean had told me that they were adept hunters who must be treated with respect - but what do such codes mean to me now? It was just embarrassing. The other Eszai, sporting immortality as a sign of status, would laugh themselves silly to see Dellin recovering scabby, blood-matted bear feet.

  ‘Leave them,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  ‘No! Why?’

  ‘I can go baiting any time and send you any number of paws. A whole cartload, if you like.’

  She ignored me. She lay them aside carefully and made a cut all the way around the bear’s neck and down its front over chest and belly. She gradually peeled the fur back, leaving muscle and guts enclosed in a silvery-grey membrane. Then she pressed the muscle of the bear’s shoulders, to find the hollows around its scapulae where the thick layer of muscle kept the forelimbs in place. She cut round them and lifted off the right forelimb, then the left. They looked remarkably like human arms. She laid them in the snow and said, ‘Go fetch a pickaxe from the back of the cave.’

  ‘We don’t need a cache, Dellin. There’ll be plenty of food at Carniss.’

  ‘If you think I’m eating with Raven, you’re mad. This is my food, Jant. I bet you’ve dug caches before.’

  ‘A long time ago. In another life, that wasn’t really me …’

  ‘It’ll last all winter, till the melt.’

  The melt, I thought. In Mhor Darkling we didn’t even have a melt season. The ground was solid with permafrost and our caches kept fresh for years. In fact, they’re probably still there now, and still edible.

  I found the pickaxe, of cheap Awian manufacture, returned to the terrace, scraped away the snow where Dellin indicated, and began hacking at the frozen soil. She continued to peel the bear’s skin down, over its bottom and pulled the tail through, leaving its tuft of fur on the naked buttocks. She skinned the back legs and cut the thighs, calves and hamstrings from them. The thin, pink-white bones still attached to the hips seemed quite pathetic with trimmings and flanges of dark red muscle remaining. She filleted the two long muscles of its back. She was bloodied up to the elbows and the iron smell of clots was overpowering.

  The soil was hard as stone and, despite the intense cold, I was sweating. I threw the pick down. ‘This will do!’

  ‘But it’s just a shallow scrape.’

  ‘Dellin, do the wolves have shovels?’

  She shrugged and bundled the bear meat up in its pelt, the fur on the outside, and toggled a bone through to fasten it. She put the package in the pit and I scooped earth, then snow, over it, packed it down and marked it with a broken spear shaft.

  Dellin had decanted the bear’s guts into its ribcage and she pointed at it, brushing snow from her eyelashes with her other arm. ‘Drag that upwind a few hundred strides. Be careful.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Dump it in the direction we’ll travel tomorrow. It will draw wolves away and when we pass it we’ll see their footprints and assess how many are about. Though I think it will soon be buried.’

  I thought so, too, judging by the snow-burdened sky. I grabbed the bear’s ear and dragged its remains away, though I wanted more than anything to defrost by the fire. I wasn’t used to being cold! In the Plainslands winter I can wander around in a T-shirt; everybody envies my immunity from the cold. I didn’t remember feeling dangerously cold when I was a child either, so I ha
d assumed my normal clothes would be adequate. Now I had to admit Dellin was right: the Darkling winter sheared straight through them.

  I returned, flurries driving hard into my face, but the welcoming glow emanated from the cave mouth to guide me. The terrace had frozen into a dark slick. I slid inside, to where Dellin knelt, forelit as she leant over the fire. She had spread furs around it and stripped down to her underclothes. Her jacket and trousers hung on an A-frame - a rack for wind-drying fillets of meat out on the terrace in autumn - to which some mummified strands still clung.

  I’d drawn my fists back into my sleeves and clamped my jaw to stop my teeth chattering. I stomped straight to the hearth and huddled over it.

  Dellin glanced up. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  ‘You’re freezing!’

  ‘Well, I do ache a bit.’

  ‘Take your ridiculous coat off!’

  I couldn’t open my hands to unfasten the buttons, so she had to help, standing close, no taller than my shoulder, and clicking her tongue disparagingly. I slowly uncurled my fingers - the army gloves were less than useless - stripped off all my clothes, which went on the drying rack. My hands were so numb I couldn’t feel the flames, reached too close and nearly burnt them. I couldn’t warm my wings at all without scorching the feathers so I spread them like a cloak and rubbed them vigorously.

  ‘Warm up more slowly,’ Dellin said. ‘You’ll hurt yourself. Sit on the pelts.’

  I did so and she folded them around me. ‘Now you need a hot drink. I’ve made some kutch.’

  ‘I said no kutch.’

  ‘You’re hypothermic! You have to drink something. Here.’ She handed me a mug that smelt of whisky. I held it for a while, letting it defrost my fingers, but without sipping any.

  The smell of hot stone and brass from the hearth mingled with bug-repelling pine resin on the reverse of the furs and the shiny smell of melting ice. At the far end of the cave Dellin had erected a tripod and stretched something like a bladder over it, opened out at the top to form a bowl and knotted like a stocking at the end that trailed down between the three stakes.

  She looked me over professionally, taking my lithe legs and hairless chest for granted but studying the broad joints of my wings. I made no impact on her whatsoever; she had the detachment of a doctor. ‘Wings take a long time to dry,’ she stated. ‘I’ll get you some better clothes.’ She squirreled up the pine-bole ladder and balanced on the top two branches. She opened the lid of the trunk and rummaged inside it, her bottom bobbing about. She lifted out a crucible used to melt hare skin mastic, a bag of the glue chips and a pack of skins.

  ‘That’s your store?’ I asked.

  ‘My laaba. Animals can’t reach it.’

  ‘What about Rhydanne? Don’t they steal your stuff?’

  Her head still buried in the box, she chuckled. ‘Not with a bear to guard it! No, hunters know they can borrow in desperate straits. If a hunter is far from her usual ground and dying from starvation she can use my stores … if she finds them. That’s why I build the hearth in view of the door: if any hunter sees the fire tonight she can come in.’

  ‘I thought it was to keep wolves away.’

  ‘That too, but don’t you know a hungry wolf would brave a fire? Hunters appreciate that if they use stores, they must replace them. Think if I came in, starving, and found my food gone? I’d die! It’s true … Another hunter’s hoard saved my life once, when I was chasing ibex way over on Bhachnadich.’

  ‘A stash in a cave?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know whose. I’ve never met anyone on Bhachnadich. Never heard any signals. I was caught in a blizzard and I had exposure. I was desperate, at the end of my strength, so I sheltered there by chance. I found some dried salmon, kindling and spirits, so I brewed some kutch and revived myself. Two days I spent there … I replaced the stocks, of course, and I know where to find that refuge, if I need it again.’

  What a life, I thought. What a bloody life. There but for the grace of the avalanche go I.

  She took out a suede parka, lined and trimmed with fur, and another pair of hazel-withy and twisted-gut snowshoes. Trousers and boots followed; they were white, like hers, so it must have been a winter suit. Every Rhydanne hunter has two, a brown buckskin outfit for summer camouflage and a thicker one of chamois and snow leopard fur for winter.

  ‘This is Laochan’s,’ she said. ‘He was wearing his other clothes when he died. I left him there … I didn’t return.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean? You can have them.’

  ‘No,’ I said more tenderly. ‘Raven won’t think I’m a neutral negotiator if I arrive looking like a Rhydanne.’ I had recovered enough from the cold to begin taking off my bangles and bracelets.

  Dellin simply pointed at my soaked jacket. ‘It’s freezing outside. If you wear that you will die. I will trade you Laochan’s clothes for those bangles.’

  How like a Rhydanne. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Take them.’

  She nodded and gave me her dead husband’s clothes. Selling them had no effect on her; in fact she began cooking again. She scooped more snow into her pot on the cracked and reddened hearthstones. It quickly turned translucent, its crest fell in and the water boiled much sooner than it would on the plains. Tiny bubbles coated the sides and bottom of the pan, and rushed to the surface till they turned it grey.

  Her camp craft impressed me as much as her hunting prowess. She turned some strips of fat spitting in the fire. It looked like bacon.

  ‘Is that from the bear?’

  ‘Yes. Brown fat. It’s the most nutritious sort of meat there is. And it tastes the best too. Hibernating bears have it - that’s the only source apart from cubs - so you’re lucky.’

  Outside, the night blizzard howled and drove snow horizontally past the cave mouth. A drift was building up there, already half-filling the entrance with a soft wall, coloured orange by our firelight. ‘We’ll have to dig ourselves out.’

  ‘Perhaps. Doesn’t matter.’

  Sure enough, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered here. It was strange to think of other Eszai sitting down to feast in the Castle’s hall, when five hundred kilometres away I was sequestered in a cave with a huntress, the only inhabitants of our secret world. Snow sealed the cave mouth completely and shadows flickered in the eye sockets of each skull lantern, bringing life to the long-dead beasts.

  When we had eaten Dellin stirred some of her whisky into the melted bear’s grease. ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an ointment. I’m going to massage your feet.’

  ‘Really? Um …’ I wondered where this was leading. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  ‘Jant, you have blisters. The slush has softened your skin. It’s dangerous. You might fall prey to frostbite or blood poisoning. Here …’ She held out her hand and I wriggled round to present her with my right foot, while keeping the rest of my body wrapped in the soft furs. I was naked, after all.

  She washed my feet with warm water and then began to give me the most soothing and reinvigorating massage I have ever had. Her head bowed thoughtfully as she worked in silence. Her profile was sharp, with a shadow under the angle of her jaw. Her hair was tied back, her pale body fantastically athletic, with bone pointing from the muscle at elbows and shoulders. The notch at her throat was as deeply hollowed as an ice sculpture. Her breasts were just two nipples pushing out the vest, which, lower down, hung loose over her hard, concave stomach. The black vest and pants revealed more of her long limbs, making them lengthier still. I watched the play of indentations in her muscles as she moved. There was so much power locked up in her small frame.

  In our snug sanctuary I moved closer to her, although Dellin never looked up to meet my eye. She worked practically, kneading my sole and separating my toes, which so many other women had massaged before. She forced her strong fingers between every muscle, loosened every joint, and it felt magnificent. I had to ruck
the furs around my waist to disguise a secret erection. If she had noticed, I think it would have shocked her.

  ‘Now your feet are safe,’ she said at last. ‘It’s your turn to do mine.’

  ‘This ankle is still stiff. There …’

  ‘Feels all right to me.’

  ‘Can you do it again? Ahh …’

  Then I took her tiny feet, washed and massaged them. They were surprisingly charming; every nail perfect and no calluses at all. Cleanliness was a matter of life and death to her, not a quest for beauty, but the result was the same. I felt her skin warm and soften under my hands and I couldn’t prevent my massage strokes becoming erotic touches. I was long-practised at massage and proud of my prowess. She relaxed and lay down close to me, and the deep furs folded between us. Was she attracted to me, or was this just another way of ‘making tomorrow safe’? I felt a new interest in her lifestyle. After all, I was returning to normal tomorrow, one night’s holiday as a Rhydanne wouldn’t do me any harm.

  ‘Laochan’s clothes remind me of those I wore as a child,’ I said serenely. ‘They’re much the same, magnified to adult size. That smell of worn suede takes me back to Mhor Darkling. Eilean made my clothes; I didn’t know how. I still don’t, even though I’m ninety-five. Laochan’s stitching is so fine, he must have had a lot of spare time.’

  ‘Oh yes. He was a wonderful hunter. He had time to beat lots of bangles, carve lots of beads. You can see some on the laces.’ She sighed and I squeezed her instep to let her know she wasn’t alone.

  ‘I may not have learnt how to make clothes, but I taught myself to fly.’

  ‘You are fast,’ she murmured - a compliment! I felt a mounting desire to caress the rest of her body, lean forward and run my hands over her legs, very slowly under the furs. I wanted to tell her more.

  Instead, she sat up. ‘You’ve drunk all your kutch.’

  I blinked. ‘Um … yes. Yes, I have.’