She peered out of ice-powdered wool and fur to look out where day's first light poured into vacancy. "I think they wouldn't mind if we all fell. They've already lost one of their own, and we hinder them."
"Whatever their reason..." Baj stood in his parky (balancing carefully on springing netting), breathed-in air as thin and edged as a knife blade, and stretched, feeling muscles easing down his back. "Whatever, I'm grateful."
"And here's more to be grateful for." Marcus-Shrike, overhearing, sailed swinging by them, trailing frosting breath, a muk-boot resting in a loop of narrow line. He tossed short sticks of frozen blubber to them as he went.
"Only seal?" Patience sat up in the netting. "Nothing else at all?"
"Those people," Nancy said, as the Shrike climbed his rope like a southern spider, back onto the wall. "— People who don't mourn their dead." She tucked both pieces of blubber beneath her blanket, and sat on them to thaw.
"Better melt your drinking water as well, Lady... under that pretty bottom." The Shrike, calling from high above.
"Savages," Nancy said.
"And what's worse," Baj said, "full of very good advice." He found the water flasks among their covers — one chilled to granite, the other only rattling with ice when shaken — grimaced, and tucked them under him.
"Two chicken-birds," Nancy said, "sitting on eggs," and began to giggle.
Richard turned his massive head. "I find no reason, in such a place, for laughter."
"Thaw your water, Captain of the Guard," Baj said, "and become wise."
... Feeling oddly secure in their netting roost, that once had seemed so frail, so insubstantial, Baj and the others — except Errol, who climbed here and there, encouraged by the tribesmen — Baj and the others sat at ease, only standing to stretch, through the day's empty hours.
Patience, sang several very old songs for them, her singing voice as light as a girl's. She sang a song about dancing in the dark, and two or three others, while they drifted, dozing, munching half-thawed seal blubber, and drinking ice-melt water. They began conversations that often dissolved into the booming winds of the stupendous landscape they swung above... above even the trooping clouds that cruised under the early-winter sun over miles and miles of lake and tundra, sending their shadows across the distant mountains far to the south.
The four of them — and sometimes Errol — rested, only occasionally startled as monuments from the heights above, melted free by the sun, came ruffling, strumming past, slowly turning as they fell.... The Shrikes did not rest, but chattered among themselves in tribe-talk, clambering over the glacier's face from perch to perch, filing ice-hooks sharp, sewing torn furs and muk-boots, and testing, greasing, rebraiding their slender lines.
... That sweet ease darkened to a wind-whining night — that faded into a next day of sun-blaze off mirror ice, frost ice, ice sea-green, pine-green, gray-green. And ice — the best, the most reliable — a richer blue than any sky.
Climbing, hacking their way up, slowly approaching two miles of height with bone-aching effort in numbing cold became the truth of living — and all else, all memory and expectation, a foolish lie. Breathing, in air so sparse, was additional labor... required thought, deliberation, and care not to frost and ruin their lungs.
The fear of falling came and went at odd moments, so that Baj, certain he'd come to terms, would discover — at only the slightest slip — that he had not. And the same, he knew, for Nancy and the others, except for carefree Errol.
The Shrikes, as always, climbed their confident, accomplished way, even having lost a man.
... That after-noon, the tilting sun flashing furious reflections off the ice, Richard fell — though only to the stretched and strumming end of his belayed line. Fell, jolted to a savage stop, and spun there, breathless.
Looking down from a rough cornice, Baj saw the great Person's heavy-muzzled face all too perfectly human in terror. The tribesmen saw as well, and Christopher-Shrike, like a copybook angel, descended to Richard, swung him to the ice face — attached an additional slender, braided rope — then persuaded him up.
Toward evening, the wind rising — calling amid immense spires of crystal green and blue — Baj and Richard worked side by side, clinging to a steep and hacking hand-holds. "Now," Richard said, panting at the labor, "— now I know what it is to be absolutely fearless. I pissed all that away when I fell. Every drop."... And it was true that he'd seemed to climb, since, with greater ease and certainty, as if a pact had been made with gravity.
... By the sixth day's morning, Baj and the others, climbing now with the Shrikes as well as beside them, found the world beneath and to the south — twenty miles of moraine, then eighty... ninety miles of tundra beyond that to the mountains — was now only a feature to them, and meant no more or less than a painting of such things.
Since Henry-Shrike had fallen, no one else had died.
One tribesman had had a little toe turn black after stitching had torn in his left muk-boot and let the cold in. Dolphus-Shrike had cut that toe off with his ice-hatchet's blade — an occasion for laughter among the Shrikes — and the nine-toed tribesman had smiled in good humor, folded cloth to the stump, used sewing-sinew to repair his muk-boot... then climbed away.
Baj, by this sixth day, had grown used to exhaustion's visions — found them interesting — but was careful not to be distracted when King Sam Monroe appeared climbing beside him just before sun-straight-up, though dressed in buckskins for hunting. The Achieving King seemed to need no ice hatchets for his holds.... Strong fingers, strong wrists. "I like your girl, Baj," he said. "Fox blood does well by her."
"And she'd like you, sir."
The King, climbing quite steadily, had glanced at Baj, smiling. "If I were alive, you mean."
"I... suppose I mean that. Yes."
"Look away, son," the King said then. "Look away from me."
Baj did — and there seemed a change of light beside him, a shadow fled, and the King was gone.
That was the best imagining, the richest vision that came to Baj weary on the Wall, since it seemed to him that the King had loved him truly as a son — and not only as ward, as responsibility, as an amusing boy. The King's face had been a father's.
And there was something else — an odd thing, but he was certain of it — that if the Khan Toghrul, his First-father, appeared at the Wall, it would be as Baj was falling.
CHAPTER 24
Below, in the landscape world, Dolphus-Shrike had said at least six or seven days, and a day of rest, to climb the Wall. And it was late after-noon on the seventh day that they came to the overhang.
Here at its crest, the glacier had thrust out a massive curling wave, like a great sea-roller — but frozen still and hard as granite, though brilliant blue under the sun, and so perfect that many depths were seen in it.
Baj and the others — exhausted veterans now, worn, wind-and-weather burned, bellies aching from days of melt-water and seal-blubber — clung to their pick-perches and examined the thing. The notions of falling, that had to some degree receded as they'd climbed and grown to understand the ice, now came back to them — to Baj at least — with sickening force.
It seemed to him that time for payment might now have arrived under this gleaming great ceiling of gorgeous ice reaching out... far out into the air.
And the more disturbing, since the Shrikes were disturbed. Dolphus and the others seemed surprised by this jutting shelf. They hammered ice-hooks in to swing out to left and right... surveying to find a way past it.
And found none. Baj, wrists aching, hands stiff claws on the handles of his ice hatchets, saw it in their faces. The overhang ran too far to skirt.
"What are we going to do...?" As she'd grown more tired, Nancy had taken to asking Baj these questions, as if he, who loved her, must know an answer.
"We're going to watch the Shrikes rig lines out beneath it, sweetheart — and probably send one man out, then another, until they're able to climb up and over."
&n
bsp; Nancy turned her head, staring up at that immense and shining shelf.
Richard clung close to the ice just past them. "I don't know," he said, and coughed. The freezing air had dried their throats, cracked their lips to bleeding. "— I'm big, maybe too big to hang out there." Though he was big, his massive weight of muscle a handicap on vertical places, Richard had shrunk a little in the climb. It had diminished him, brought out the vulnerable human in him very clearly, so he no longer seemed a bear-man — a Moonriser Person — to Baj, but only a big man, and very tired.
"They'll manage, my dear." Patience, annoyed as Errol — above her and restless on a narrow shelf — scattered ice-chips down, had done very well. Slight and strong, though older, and tough with whatever blood her mother had accepted, she stood up against the ice on muk-boot spikes as if part of the Wall. The hem of her colored coat flagged as wind came sweeping past. "Shrikes are good managers...."
As if to prove it, the tribesmen bit off chunks of frozen blubber to chew, clapped mittened hands to warm them, and began to manage... muttering among themselves in slurred near book-English.
They gathered almost all line — leaving Baj and the others sharing only two anchored belays and what purchase they'd made for themselves — and handed through the slender braided ropes, checking the greased lines for fray and ice cuts.... Jingling bandoleers of steel ice-hooks were examined, and the curved points of ice hatchets, and the spikes strapped to their muk-boots. Careful preparation.
The day was cruelly cold, but clear as the best silvered mirror. Clinging to ice, Baj turned his face from the Wall to see, two miles below, the rest of the earth lying inconsequential.... What had been boulders and ice blocks, immense, immeasurable, had now become grains of sand — which, with those infinite lakes reduced to puddles, now made a map of miniatures. What appeared only a patch of tundra, green and brown, seemed to stretch a few feet to little hillocks, whose ranges might be stepped over by a child.... And past those, the definite, gentle horizon-curve of the round world itself.
"Worth it," Baj said, his breath frosting.
"What?" Nancy carefully turned from watching the Shrikes' preparations.
"All worth it, to see that."
She followed his gaze... dung looking out as Lady Weather might, above and over the earth. "Almost," she said, "— except for losing Henry-Shrike."
There was stirring among the tribesmen... a releasing of holds, and changing stances on ice vertical. Then one, Christopher — heavy pack and possibles left hanging from a hammered hook on the Wall's face, his hood thrown back, his mittens off and dangling from sleeve strings — reached out and up to the great ceiling overhead, while two men belayed a line knotted around his waist.
He leaned far out... took a small ice-hook from his bandoleer, placed it up against the overhang, and using the flat of his hatchet, hammered it in, listening for the sharp notes of firmly-set. Then he reached back, caught the tossed end of a second line, and fed it through the hook's deep curve, where the steel nearly closed upon itself.
... Christopher drew that slender rope through and along, then pulled himself up it to hammer in a second hook, and slipped a loop of his belay line through that. — Then he swung free... dangling now farther out with the second line draped over his shoulder. Baj saw the Shrike take a breath, then begin to swing with purpose, back and forth, as the other tribesmen clung to their holds, gripping both lines fixed to anchoring ice-hooks and steel circlets.
Christopher swung out, struck up into the ice ceiling with his hatchet to pick a hold — and failed, the hatchet rebounding as if it struck stone. He swung back, swung forward... swung back... forward, and struck up for a hold again. The hatchet's pick snagged a place, held, then broke free, and Christopher swung back and away... used that momentum to swing forward again, struck up at the ice ceiling a third time, and the pick held.
Dangling in vacancy, he reached up with his free hand to twist a hook shallow into the ice — and hanging from one hatchet, took his second from his belt, hit the ice-hook three hard blows. Then he set and hammered in another.
Tugging for slack, he looped each his lines side by side through this second pair of hooks.
As Christopher swung away, a hook broke — its steel snapping clean with a crack — and he fell, seeming slowly... almost drifting down, until yanked to a hard halt at his line's end, the belaying Shrikes grunting at the shock.
Christopher spun slowly one way, then the other, his ice hatchets swinging on their cords. Only a worn leather line, slender as a finger, held him above two miles of air.
Nancy said, "No... no... no."
"The cold," Richard said from his place. "The fucking cold brittles the steel___"
Christopher — Baj saw the Shrike's eyes were closed — swayed back and forth with the wind, the rope knotted tight around his waist so the brown fur of his parky was gathered in.
Then the tribesman opened his eyes, gestured "up" with a thumb, and as the other Shrikes heaved and hauled together from precarious perches, rose in surges up... up... and up, took another hook from his bandoleer, hammered it in, then gripped and hung from it to gain slack to pass his line through.
Swinging back, then forward from that second set of ice-hooks, he reached out and up, caught a hold with his hatchet's pick... then hammered in a third pair, ran the lines through them.
"Brave man," Nancy said. "Brave man..."
Laboring, Christopher-Shrike swung to place his fourth pair of hooks. And having traveled that distance along his slender two strands — the free line running through its hooks in parallel with his belay — he swung on above emptiness, to extend his highway.
... It seemed to Baj to take a great while for Christopher to reach the edge of the overhang. Once there, out so far, the Shrike hung suspended in air, mirrored beneath its blue ceiling, with both running ropes now knotted to him. He lay there a time to rest.
"Frozen Jesus..." Nancy lisping the Jesus. "Not worth it."
"I don't think," Richard said, "that it will hold me."
"It will hold you," Patience said. "We won't lose you now."
As they watched — even Errol, above them, attentive — Christopher-Shrike, having rested enough, and with both ice hatchets in his hands, crouched precarious at the overhang's edge, a booted foot supported in a rope-loop taut with strain.... Then, very quickly, he reached up, drove a hatchet-point into the ice — and hanging from it, lines now sagging — hauled himself up, kicked in boot-spikes, and climbed, swinging his hatchets left and right, onto the overhang's face and out of sight, the ropes feeding after him.
Patience said, "Marvelous .. ." The perfect old word — and the more powerful since Patience Walked-in-air (though no longer high as she had) and was familiar with heights.
.. . Then there was only waiting, and the slow periodic paying out of braided lines through six pairs of hooks as Christopher climbed the Wall's crest, unseen.
The sun had slid lower to the west, when both lines drew taut... and there was the faintest shrill whistle, that might have been an eagle's but for its ascending note.
Dolphus-Shrike leaned far out to reach the lines, hauled hard to test them — then swung aside against the Wall, and gestured Paul-Shrike and one of the Nameless to climb out and on them.
Those two unmittened, and swung out hand over hand, swaying from one rope to the other as monkey-animals were said to do in the forests of South Map-America. Hand over hand — and those hands nearly frozen, chapped and cut from cold and climbing.
"I will not be able to do that." Richard shook his head.
Dolphus heard him, and laughed. "We'll haul you over and up like a killed walrus, Captain. You'll wallow, but you'll go."
Another Shrike clambered up to Errol, tapped the boy's nose for attention, then handed him down to the others. Dolphus-Shrike lifted Errol up to the lines — saw him take his grip on each — then let him loose.
Nancy called "Don't," but no attention was paid. And none needed, since Errol — app
arently enjoying himself — swung along the lines as if the ground lay only just beneath his feet. .. swung out and along the slender ropes to the overhang's edge, then climbed up them as they ran out of sight.
"The rest of you," Dolphus said, "— will be bundles, with short rope-ties hooked to each line. It will be a pleasure trip."
... And so it was. Baj and the others became packages, relieved of responsibility. Short lengths of rope were knotted around them, then hooked right and left to the twin lines running out under the ice ceiling, so they had only to draw themselves across, hand over hand, lying on their backs — the blue ice, two feet above their faces, reflecting weariness as they hauled themselves along, supporting the hanging weight of their packs and weapons.
They each trundled across, with a Shrike waiting to transfer their short-rope hooks around the ceiling hooks as they reached them. — Richard first, while a tribesman watched the rig for strain, then Patience, then Nancy... and Baj last. It was their easiest time on the Wall.
And remained easy at the overhang's lip. There — still a bundle — each was met by a Shrike on one of two thicker lines lowered from above, ropes hanging down the cresting shelf's great face, a hundred-foot vertical... the ice, wind-polished, blazing white in the sun.
Knotted to the free rope, given no chance to climb, they were drawn up to signaling whistles — up in swift surges, scraping... spinning off the ice, warding it as best they could.
... Baj, having seen Nancy disappear above him, was circled with a heavy line knotted tight enough about his waist to hurt him, then patted on the shoulder by a smiling Paul-Shrike. Paul whistled painfully shrilly, and let Baj go to swing up into the air as hard hauling took his breath away, pained his back as if the line were sawing him in half.
Rising, he struck the ice face several times... tried to get his feet up to guard, but spun away.
There was a rounded foam of soft snow above him as he rose... the sky above its edge an extraordinary deep blue. The borderline between the snow and that blue seemed another color entirely than either of them, abrupt and perfect.
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