"Here..." Dolphus-Shrike distributed leather masks with dangling rawhide ties, each narrowly slit for vision. "Wear them when the sun is out, or the ice will blind the fool who doesn't."
A sad loser of many honor-promises to Patience, playing pickup sticks the evening before, the Shrike-chief seemed a little out of temper. "... Also, since our princeling here," he went to Baj's pack, plucked and tugged to test straps and lashings, "— since he was lightly touched in his so-honorable duel, we will make a morning's allowance for that, and haul him up where he must be hauled. But from this after-noon, Champion, you do your own work."
"Understood."
" 'Understood.. .'" Dolphus and another Shrike, Christopher, walked behind each, including fellow tribesmen, tightening, yanking at pack-straps and whatever load's rawhide ties.
Finished, they all stood thickly furred, slightly bent under bulky burdens — the Shrikes most encumbered with coils of braided line, and their jingling bandoleers of steel hooks, rings, and little grapnels.
Dolphus-Shrike looked the party over, nodded, then turned to Nancy. "Women have difficulty holding their water, then have to bare butt to lose it. Done your pissing?"
"Fuck you," Nancy said. And at a glance from Patience,"... Just joking."
Dolphus smiled, his first of the morning. "— And no one has packed what is not needed to live?"
"... Little chess set," Richard said. "The Common Prayers of Warm-time Oxford."
The Shrikes were amused.
"We're ready," Baj said.
"Then," Dolphus said, "— catch us if you can." The Shrikes all turned together and trotted away north, where the Wall — a flock of sailing geese only infinite specks across its gleaming front — grumbled awake to a rising sun.
... It took two glass-hours of fast marching across moraine — much of the time skirting streams and a shimmering lake of milk-white melt — to reach the base of the Wall.
The thunder and volley of toppling ice, the seething rapids they hiked beside — the Shrikes moving steadily — echoed to Baj something of the sounds of Warm-times, at least as he'd always imagined them... continuous racket, rushing, roaring, thumping, flushed with color and busy with millions of men and women racing here and there in bright, whining machines — having work adventures and love adventures and crime and war adventures.... Of course, there must have been boredom, discontent — those appeared in the copybooks, as well — but surely very little and only among fools, when the whole world was open to them, and warm... warm, so winter for them was only an interesting season's passage.
As now, below the Wall, it was not.
The cold there did not settle on them as Baj was used to from the river — as if a great soft coverlet of freezing-invisible had come down through the air. This was a cold that sought them out as if deliberately, with intention. Sought each of them out and gripped them, squeezing warmth away like some great festival wrestler, muscled with ice, and in Lord Winter's pay.... Cold the more frightening in air as still as deep water, except when some falling great structure disturbed it.
The cold took Baj's easy breaths away, and allowed only careful breathing between guarding lips to keep his lungs from freezing. He put his arm around Nancy — hooded, richly soft in her plush of furs — and she smiled up at him. "Careful," he said to her — meaning, he supposed, she was to be careful of the cold, and climbing. Careful of everything....
His word, "Careful," dissolved before him in a little cloud of crystals that sifted down like snow. Nancy stuck her tongue out at him, but only for a moment.
... The base of the Wall was an enormous confusion of massive fallen cliffs and towers, great gaps and crevasses snow-bridged or open to reveal depths blue-green to black. Through this immense and dangerous labyrinth, the Shrikes led fast — in morning sunshine, now, brilliant light that warmed not at all — crawling, climbing great broken tilted slabs of ice, to descend again. Scrambling over or around gaping pitfalls and many-storied structures of blue ice, white ice, and gray ice caverned by foaming water come rushing, spouting from the glacier's grand foundations.
Baj was surprised how difficult it was to keep up with the tribesmen — each of them so laden.... His right cheek still ached slightly, occasional little needles of pain flashing down the stitching there, and along the side of his head. But it was his bruised, shoulder that gave him trouble. What he would, it did — but stiffly.
Dolphus-Shrike, though never turning back to look, seemed to have the talent of Who-is-where, so almost always when Baj slowed, climbing some steep, there would be Marcus or Henry or one of the three nameless men suddenly beside him in support. Muttering, the Shrike would boost him up, taking one of his booted feet in hand to place it properly. — And twice, Baj was simply seized and tossed up to better holds. Impressive demonstrations of strength, though still a strength gathered, however swiftly. Sunriser strength, rather than George Brock's instant and terrific impetus.
... Baj couldn't have said when not-quite-the-Wall became the thing itself. There was a rise that continued to a steeper rise, with no longer even a slight descent, but only going up.
Here, a Shrike was single-roped to each of their charges, except for Patience, who — sitting cross-legged on a snowy ledge, scimitar strapped to her small pack — slowly drifted sideways with the Wall's wind, seeming not to rise very much at all... until she did, with her colored greatcoat ruffling in the wind like the bright plumage of some bird of myth.
The Shrikes — who until then had been clambering as Baj and the others did, though much more easily — unlimbered more of their thick coils of slender braided-leather line, knotted the ends to the steel hooks they carried... then buckled and strapped odd little sharp steel points to their heavy-soled muk-boots... and lifting the similar boots Baj and the others had been given by the Guard, fastened the spikes for them as if shoeing horses.
These points were not comfortable, made simple walking difficult. But using them, and the spikes backing their hatchets' heads, the Shrikes began to demonstrate true climbing — staying, Baj saw, on good green or blue ice where they could, avoiding rotten gray.... Working in steady cooperation, they often wove running guard-lines of braided leather — threaded through small steel circles, and anchored with hooks and grapnels — to support them and their charges as they climbed.
It was a remarkable skill to see, to try to imitate, and kept Baj's mind, mostly, from their height above the ground. He'd climbed trees, of course, and various granite walls at Island, sometimes perilously high above the river's currents. But the Wall's ramparts — so very much higher — were different in kind, their ice (so various, patches of it rotten) much more treacherous than solid stone.
He wished Nancy had been left behind, left with the Guard, so he didn't have to watch her climbing just above him, hesitant, hacking at ice with her hatchets or, mittens tugged off, clutching with freezing hands to crucial holds made only of frozen water.... Concern for her — and concern for himself, since his rolled blanket and pack (rapier, dagger, bow and quiver strapped to it), seemed to conspire to tug him out and away from the ice cliff to fall.
He used the Shrike hatchets at first awkwardly, so their heads' sharp reverses bounced off ice, or skidded to the side.... But after a time (and occasionally in terror), he slowly found the short swinging stroke that drove the narrow points picking into the ice as a war hammer pecked skulls. His wrists looped to the hatchet handles, he picked left-handed into sound ice... hauled himself up to pick higher with the right... then kicked-in standing places with his muk-boots' spikes to swing the hatchets again.
It was brutal work, extraordinarily wearying... but the left shoulder loosened under the discipline, its stiffness fading as the Shrikes' attention to him faded. Soon — the sun past straight-up — no Marcus, Henry, or Christopher came to hoist Baj along.
Above him, Nancy (and Richard, higher) climbed laboriously as he did, with careful hand and foot — while Errol, staying with the leading Shrikes and apparently unco
nscious of height, seemed to scamper up easily as a southern squirrel, leaving windblown banners of fine ice-particles behind him.
As Baj, already very tired, worked his slow way, a huge cornice, large as a river lord's hold and detached a mile or more above by the sun's mild melting — fell ponderously moaning past, turning... turning as it went. One of many such, large and small, sailing, cascading down throughout the day. Only fortune, only luck unreliable, kept any one of them from wiping all the climbers from the height.
The sun threw a passing shadow across fractured ice beside him, and Baj — minding a slippery stance, a tenuous hold — looked carefully out to see Patience in mid-air, a pebble's toss from the ice-face... drifting cross-legged, eddying like a leaf in wind. Her eyes were open, but she didn't seem to see him. She slowly swung away, away from the Wall's sheer... and it appeared to Baj that she flew — Walked-in-air — with some awkwardness, as if spurning both a cliff of ice and the icy earth below, made for difficulty.
To hold oneself in the air by only thinking it was now so frightening a notion it made Baj look away from her, not wanting to see anyone hanging on nothing — where truly was nothing but empty air... and a great distance to fall.
He stared instead at the ice close before him — and saw, in its crazed surface, mirror enough to make out a hollow-cheeked, scant-bearded man, sewn with scars and no longer truly young. Baj closed his eyes and held on, stayed clutching where he was... only for a few moment's rest.... Then, with a scrape and rattle of ice-chips, someone came clambering swiftly down to him, and Dolphus-Shrike, close as a lover though on ice vertical, whispered in his ear. "Who won't climb up, will be thrown down." And was gone, scrambling the cliff, leaving ice powder sifting on the wind.
Baj opened his eyes and climbed.
CHAPTER 23
The evening seemed to come after forever.... During the climbing day, Baj had imagined falling — worse, imagined Nancy falling — so many dreadful times that terror itself seemed to weary. After that, he'd climbed only for grim effort's sake — trying clumsily to imitate the Shrikes, for whom these towering battlements of untrustworthy ice seemed nearly a home.
Still, ceasing was a pleasure as the sun set — so that west, down the Wall's horizon, its glittering immensity gradually diminished to a distant gleaming thread.... Evening shadows grew swiftly in and about spires of ice where the climbers held fast, tiny as twelve specks of dust in a world of vaulted white. The Shrikes — like furred swift far-southern spiders — began to weave a web of braided line and steel ice-hooks between sheer walls, shelves, and notches of blue ice and white ice as the wind hummed through.
Baj and the others — excepting Errol, who seemed at ease playing along their wind-swept ledge — roosted together like exhausted swallow-birds, clinging to their best holds while watching the Shrikes work.
"I was so frightened." Nancy, fur-hooded, gripped Baj's arm as if to prevent a fall. "I was frightened all day...." Her breath smoked out on freezing air.
"I, also." Richard hummed for a moment, deep as a bass banjar. "I'm too big for this. Too heavy." He was clutching an anchored leather line, his crest and fur-tufts spangled with ice. "— We came south last year from the barren grounds, Map-Ohio. Ran from Matthew-Robin's company. Never been on this... thing, since I was basketed down as a boy to train to join the Guard."
"I wasn't frightened," Baj said, keeping his breathing shallow to save his lungs from frostbite. "I was fucking terrified." A perfect use of Warm-time's fucking, so often misplaced in modern ignorance.
A weary giggle from Nancy. "We're all terrified, except Errol."
"And what," Richard said, "— at least four more days to go?" He had to raise even his voice against the evening wind, which had begun to sing several songs at once, blowing through cathedrals of ice.
"Look at that fool!" Nancy called, "Errol — stop... stop doing that!" The boy was traversing a slender braided line hand-overhand above nothing but icy air.
The Shrikes, busy working — hammering in hooks with their hatchets, swinging from here to there — seemed pleased with Errol. Called encouragement.
"Stupid Sunriser assholes...." Nancy gave the Shrikes hard looks. "Savages."
Baj saw one of the tribesmen seem to hear her over the wind. "Shhh .. . Sweetheart, this is absolutely not the time or place for insults."
"Absolutely not," Richard clutched his leather line to him, "— though it's likely we'll freeze in the night, anyway."
With a rattling flap of colored coat-tails in the wind, a pinch-faced Patience swung out of the sunset and into the ice just above them .. . scrabbled for a grip, found one — precarious, where the surface had cracked like a fallen pitcher — and hung there.
"I need..." She could barely be heard. "I need help."
Baj, shamefully reluctant, took a cold-stiffened hand from its good hold (remember to mitten, remember to mitten) began to climb to her — and was greatly relieved when a Shrike, apparently sensitive to climbing trouble, seemed to stroll across a monstrous vertical, took Patience in a hug, and with only casual managing, brought her down to the others.
"Stay," the Shrike said, and was gone back to web-making.
"My fault," Patience said, her teeth chattering. "... My fault for getting too swiftly old., I came off the Wall years ago as if it were a snowbank, and no more. Now, the earth seems a long way down... difficult to push against."
Nancy shifted to put an arm around her. "Then don't Walk-in-air, dear. Stay and climb with us."
"Soon, I'll have to — and give the Shrikes another clumsy creature to care for."
Dolphus-Shrike, looking cheerful with a round ice-frosted face, clambered down to them. "Shake a leg!" And to Baj, "— Know that one?"
"No, I don't." Baj imagined the clever chieftain with a dagger-blade in his belly.... A refreshing vision.
"Oh, very ancient WT," the Shrike perched smiling, his filed teeth a polished white. "A naval term — means to start a dance, a celebration."
Baj couldn't help himself. "Sounds absolutely wrong — fragment mis-read, and wrong. If truly naval, probably had nothing to do with dancing."
Dolphus stopped smiling.
"If we freeze to death here," Patience said, "— while two fools argue what neither knows, we will make very angry ghosts."
Dolphus smiled again, said, "Princes should be ignorant; it's the only advantage of the ruled." He gestured up with his thumb. "Climb. It's bed-time."
... The "bed" had been woven for them, a long narrow hammock — sling seating — its casual wide-spaced netting, braided-rope. It hung from six lines fastened down its length, and anchored with steel hooks hard into blue ice.
"Sit," said Dolphus-Shrike when they'd climbed very cautiously to it. "Tuck your muk-books up, and wrap your blankets over your furs, or you'll freeze in the night.... And if pissing or shitting must be done, then push down fur trousers and hide trousers, and do those things through a netting gap — but with care. No dirty ropes in the morning!"
He and Henry-Shrike saw them settled in a row, crowded side by side — Baj, then Nancy, then Patience, then Errol, then Richard. "Birds," Dolphus said, "— on a branch," and Paul-Shrike swung down with a rolled caribou hide, and tucked it around Patience.
"Won't need it," Patience said, but Paul-Shrike only said, "Bring feet up," and swaddled her over her coat of colors.
Baj found their perch, hanging from a rough overhang within a great shallow bay of evening-colored ice — a vaulted space perhaps three bow-shots across — found it at first, very comfortable, though two great ice-chunks had fallen whistling past, just in front of them.... Henry-Shrike had run a length of the greased, braided line tight across their chests, to keep them sitting back firm in the sling. It seemed .. . pleasant enough, all swaying together slightly in the wind, Baj feeling Nancy close and warm beside him. Comfortable, secure enough to look out and wonder at the landscape hundreds of Warm-time feet beneath them.
From their roost, the glacier's moraine and
outwash country made a rough brown-and-white wrinkled map stretching out of sight to east and west... and south, far, far to the hint of mountains. Nearer, the Wall's lap lay plated with broad lakes — red-gold as the sunset struck them — and threaded with braiding streams, the swift rivers of melt.... A view from the air, and though not from greater height than many mountain peaks, still was different from even the grandest of those vistas. A view, it seemed to Baj, that transformed the earth into something to be observed, something less solid than for those who walked it. — He found he understood Patience better, her... removal, remoteness. For her, all others and their landscapes lay essentially below. To be visited only.
The sight of such immense vacancy, the limitless country beneath, seemed almost worth the long day's effort to climb the ice wall to it — as if the effort, the fear, had been coins of payment.
... They sat in their row, and passed leather water-bottles and Baj's canteen — the water still liquid from their bodies' heat. Then shared out strips of frozen seal to chew, while, higher and to the side, the Shrikes rigged individual and skimpier woven rests — a few casual loops only — hammering guyline hooks into healthy ice with ringing strokes, using the flat sides of their hatchets' heads.
Night came quite suddenly. There was light, and airy vision, and all the warm colors sunset reflected from glaze ice, frost ice, fractured ice, and the country below — then, in the time a few breaths might be taken, the heights and air and the world beneath were only grays.... As the dark came down, the wind came up, and began to whine and warble past pinnacles, pillars, and massive fluted columns of ice — humming there with a vibration so great that Baj felt his teeth and bones sing to it.
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