Iced on Aran

by Brian Lumley

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  For Unsung Heroes and Wanderers Everywhere.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  ICED ON ARAN

  AUGEREN

  A DAY IN THE LIFE …

  A-MAZED IN ORIAB

  THIS WAY TO PAZZA’S PANTRY!

  “‘YATH—YATH-LHI—TYRHHIA—TREASURE’!”

  TALE’S TAIL

  Look for these Tor books by Brian Lumley

  The Vampire Wakes

  Copyright Page

  ICED ON ARAN

  King Kuranes’ questers, called Hero and Eldin for short—though neither of them was short, for being ex-waking worlders they were much taller than the average dreamlander, or Homo ephemerens, as Eldin was wont to call them—were laboring up the slopes of Mount Aran, above the trees and toward the snow line.

  Hero was rangy, springy of step, younger than his friend; Eldin was stocky, gangling, somehow apish in his length of arm and massive strength, and yet not unattractive. They loved each other like brothers but would deny it almost to the death, while defending each other to that same grave limit; they loved as well adventuring, girls, booze and especially their travels and travails as the Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Skies Around Serannian’s special emissaries, agents, and troubleshooters in general—though the latter was something they’d also deny, except when they were broke and needed the work. Like now.

  King Kuranes (or “Lord”; he made no special distinction, and only rarely stood on ceremony) was cooking something up for them right now, a job in far Inquanok; for which reason he kept the pair waiting in timeless Celephais on the Southern Sea while he made his various arrangements from his manor-house seat in that city. Alas, but sitting still on their backsides was something Hero and Eldin didn’t do too well; a day or two of total inactivity was normally sufficient to drive them to drink, and from that to other diversions. They’d been drinking last night; had started boasting, and a boozing companion (one Tatter Nees, a wandering balladeer from Nir) had found himself filling the role of adjudicator.

  Their bragging had ungallantly covered women, though never referred to individually by name; deeds of derring-do in various far-flung places; finally feats of physical prowess which, if true, would have made the pair the greatest athletes in all the dreamlands! (They weren’t, as it happens, though neither were they slouches.) And finally they’d started in on their climbing skills:

  “Who was it,” Hero noisily demanded, slopping muth-dew in his enthusiasm, “climbed a Great Keep of the First Ones alone and unaided?”

  “And who,” Eldin thumbed himself in the chest, “scaled the Great Bleak Range, even to topmost ridge?”

  “We were together on that!” Hero at once protested. “I did it too!”

  “Aye, and stubbed your toe on the top,” Eldin reminded, “and damned near crashed down the other side to your death. You would have, too, if a friendly little crevice-grown bush hadn’t taken pity on you!”

  “I was knocked over the rim fighting with Yib-Tstll’s vast stone idol avatar, as you well know!” Hero was affronted. “And that’s something else I do better than you—fight!” He jumped up, rotated his fists menacingly, leaped nimbly up and down and hither and thither like a frenetic boxer—until his head crashed against a low beam, which brought him to an abrupt, shuddering standstill. Then, staggering a little and grimacing a great deal, he collapsed back into his seat.

  The Wanderer (as Eldin was also named) and Tatter Nees laughed till they cried, and Hero too dizzy and dazed even to protest.

  “Well,” said Tatter eventually, “fight and climb all you like, just as long as you don’t go climbing Hatheg-Kla or Mount Aran. They’re forbidden to mortal men, those two peaks, and the strange old gods who decree such things are pretty unforgiving.”

  “Eh?” Eldin raised a shaggy eyebrow. “Aran, forbidden? I mean, I know Hatheg-Kla’s a bit hairy—old Atal of Ulthar’s an authority on that, if ever there was one—but snowy old Mount Aran? A mere hill by comparison with some mountains! What, Aran of the ginkgos and the eternal snows, whose frosty old crown’s forever white? Aran, where he rises from ocean’s rim to look down on Celephais and all the southern coast? Aran, that most benevolent of crests, forbidden? I didn’t know that!”

  “Aran?” Hero mumbled, still recovering from self-inflicted clout and gingerly fingering the lump he could almost feel rising on his head. “That molehill! Hah! I’d climb it in a trice!”

  “Then I’d climb it twice in a trice!” growled Eldin; and more cautiously, “Except it’s forbidden. According to Tatter here, anyway.”

  “Tittle-Tatter!” cried Hero. “I’d run up Aran before breakfast, just to keep myself in trim!”

  “And I’d be on top waiting for you,” returned Eldin, “having gone up ahead for a breath of fresh air!”

  “Now that’s climbing talk!” Hero declared, sticking out his jaw. “In the morning, then?”

  “Tonight, if you like!”

  “No, morning’s soon enough—and anyway, I’ve a headache.”

  “What? What?” cried Tatter. “Madness, and I’m party to it! Only climb Mount Aran—or race to the top, if you will—and tomorrow here’s me composing a lyric farewell to two of my dearest friends, which I shall call ‘Quest No More, My Fair Brave Lads.’”

  “One fair brave lad,” said Hero, “and one old ratbag!”

  “More muth!” cried Eldin to the somewhat troubled taverner, who knew their reputation. “I want to drink a last toast to a gallant loser, before he burns himself out on the slopes of Mount Aran.”

  And so it went …

  Neither one of the questers remembered Tatter tottering them up rickety stairs to their respective rickety beds in a cheap, tiny, rickety garret room. But both of them remembered their oath. Perhaps they regretted it, too, but things didn’t work out that way.

  Across the distance of the single pace separating them where they lay, as the sun’s first rays crept in through a small-paned window, they blinked crusted eyes and tasted mouths like old shoes with dead-rat tongues, and Eldin said: “Hero—ugh!—about Aran …”

  “Forget it—yechhh!” Hero had answered, wondering why muth wasn’t called moth. “I won’t hold you to it. What would it prove?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I mean, you’re all those years older than me …”

  And after a moment, in a somewhat harsher tone: “Exactly—and that much more experienced! So get up, pup! The sun’s up and Aran’s snows are sweet and cool and waiting.”

  Which was how they came to be here now.

  During the climb they’d been pretty quiet, heads clearing, thoughts their own, probably wondering what madness had prompted this contest. The only good thing about it was that it was burning the muth out of their systems. Hangovers which might normally last two whole days should be gone by the time they hit the snow line …

  Mount Aran was a mountain, one of the ocean-fringing range of mountains whose roots lay in the Tanarian Hills beyond Ooth-Nargai, but it was not one of those sheer-sided monster mountains like Ngranek or (worse far) Hatheg-Kla. Its lower slopes were green, gentling up through palms and shrubs and ginkgos, then gradually shi
fting to scree and bare rock, finally crossing the permanent snow line to rise more steeply, but not frighteningly so, to a white rounded peak. In the waking world it would not have had the height to support permanent snow and ice—relatively few mountains do—but these were the dreamlands, and things were different here.

  Perhaps the questers thought of these differences as they struggled higher across slopes of loose, sliding shale, using the roots and springy branches of the few remaining mountain shrubs for leverage. Differences like the “timelessness” of Aran and Celaphais, where the seasons never seemed to change and people led inordinately long, almost interminable lives. Hero, considering this, thought: I’d be bored to death if I thought I was going to live, or dream, forever! And he grinned at the apparent contradiction in his thoughts.

  Eldin saw that infectious grin; it signified the younger quester’s emergence from muth-fume, also the resurgence of his natural good-humor. What’s more, it might indicate that he was actually enjoying this barmy scramble, which Eldin frankly was not. The Wanderer scowled. “Funny, is it?” he asked, “this foolish contest you’ve goaded me into?”

  “Funny?” Hero parked himself on a boulder, drank deep of the crisp air. “Daft, more like! Actually, I wasn’t smiling at your discomfort; I’ve more than enough of my own. No, it was something else I was thinking of, far removed from the scaling of Aran. As for goading: we goaded each other, I reckon.”

  Eldin sat down beside him, said: “You see no point in this, then?”

  Hero shook his head. “None at all! Let’s face it, we’ve climbed, you and I, in previously undreamed places. And what’s Aran but a big hill, eh? Hardly a climb to tax our talents.”

  Eldin shrugged. “That’s true enough—why, we’re halfway up already, and not even noon! So why do we do these things, tell me that?”

  Hero grinned again. “With nothing to test our mettle, we test each other. Or maybe it’s the forbidden fruit syndrome, eh?”

  “Because Tatter said we mustn’t? You mean like naughty children? Is that all there is to us, Hero?” He nodded, considered it quite possible, gazed down on Celephais with its glittering minarets and caught flashes of Naraxa water where that river cascaded down to join the sea.

  Before they’d sat down the Wanderer, too, had been dwelling a little on the timelessness of things: chiefly on Aran’s snowy crest, which was the same now as the first time he’d seen it—oh, how long ago? What kept the ice going? he wondered. Why didn’t it melt away? Or, on the other hand, why didn’t it get so thick it formed a glacier down to the sea? Had it been this way immemorially? And if so, would it be the same a thousand years from now?

  “Sometimes,” said Hero, breaking in on his thoughts, “I feel weary.”

  “That’s my line, surely?” Eldin snorted. But it pleased him anyway. What? Hero tired? Ridiculous! He was like a workhorse! But if he really was tired … well didn’t that say something for Eldin’s stamina, who must always keep apace of him?

  Hero turned up the collar of his jacket. Fine when you were on the move, but at this altitude it quickly got cold when you sat still. “Brrr!” said the younger quester, and: “Tell you what, let’s go up to the snow, find a block of ice, and ride it down to Celephais. That should satisfy Tatter. And we’ll tell him we climbed opposite sides and clashed heads at the very top!”

  “Suits me, if you say so,” Eldin agreed. “But who cares what Tatter thinks?”

  Hero sighed. “That’s what makes me tired. Not Tatter especially, but people in general. These reputations of ours, they’re what really keep us going. And that’s the answer to your question: why do we do it. What are rogues if they quit their roguish ways, answer me that? Brawlers, boozers, adventurers: if we stop doing those things, what’s left? ‘Hey, look! There go Hero and Eldin. They were a couple of bad old boys—in their time …’ See what I mean?”

  Eldin thought about that for a moment, said: “Now I really do feel weary! Let’s go and collect that ice and get down out of here; we break the mood of the place, change what shouldn’t be changed.”

  They stood up; started climbing, crossed from scree and riven rock to snow and ice. And there, more than two-thirds of the way to the top—

  “Ho, there, you lads! Lost your way, have you?”

  Startled, the questers scanned about. The thin snow was dazzling in morning sunshine, where it coated Aran’s ice, so that they must shield their eyes from its glare. But up there, fifty yards on to the ice, was a thin small figure, pick in hand, staring at them apparently in some surprise. They moved toward him, saw that he was old, gave each other sour glances.

  “A right pair of adventurers, we are!” Eldin muttered under his breath, which plumed now in the frozen air. “What? Come to climb a ‘forbidden’ mountain—and grandads leaping about all over its peak?”

  As they drew closer, so the old man studied them minutely. They could feel his eyes on them, going from faces to forms, taking in every aspect, comparing Hero’s bark-brown garb to Eldin’s night-black, the former’s curved blade of Kled to the latter’s great straight sword. And finally: “David Hero,” he said. “Or Hero of Dreams, as they call you. And Eldin the Wanderer. Well, now—and it seems you really have lost your way!”

  While the oldster had examined and spoken to them, they in turn had given him the once-over. There seemed no requirement for a detailed scrutiny: what was he but an old man? In no way threatening. Still …

  He was dressed in baggy gray breeks tied at the ankles, his large feet tucked into fur-lined boots that went up under the cuffs of the breeks. His gray jacket was fur-lined, too, and buttoned to his neck. Tufts of fur protruded from button- and lace-holes. Upon his head he wore a woolen cap with a pompom, beneath which his hair and beard and droopy moustache were white as snow. All in all, his attire looked so grotesquely large and loose on him, it seemed to the questers he must be the merest bundle of sticks inside. Certainly his hands were pale and thin, as the petals of some winter-blooming flowers; blue-veined, they were, and very nearly translucent. Likewise his face, framed in curling locks of wintry hair: all pale and shiny as if waxed, or covered perhaps in a thin skim of clear ice. Icy, too, his eyes; indeed, gray and cold as snow-laden clouds, but not unfriendly for all that. And not without curiosity.

  “What brings you here?” he finally asked the pair, his voice almost a chime. “Why do you climb Aran?”

  “Because it’s here!” growled Eldin at once. And: “Do we need a reason?”

  The old man held up placating hands. “I wasn’t prying,” he said. “I’ve no authority one way or the other. Just making conversation, that’s all.”

  Hero spoke up. “No motive to our being here,” he said, “except we thought we’d climb Aran, that’s all. But what’s in it for you? You’ll pardon my saying so, but it seems to me you’re a bit long in the tooth for shinning up mountains.”

  The old man gave them a gummy grin. “A man’s as old as he feels,” he said. “And who’s to say who feels the younger, you or I? Looks to me like you two are feeling as old as the hills themselves right now—if you’ll forgive me saying so. As to why I’m here: why, I cut the ice for the fishmongers and butchers and vintners in Celephais! The ice of Aran provides my living, you see, as it did for my grandfather and father before me. Cutting it, and carving it, too—though the latter’s more properly a hobby, a small self-indulgence, with nothing of profit in it. Obviously I can’t take my carvings into town, for they’d quickly melt. Up here, however—why, they last forever!”

  “Carvings?” Eldin looked all about. “I see no carvings …” Perhaps the old lad was an idiot.

  The icemonger grinned again. “Only brush the snow away where you stand,” he said.

  The ice-slope had been simplicity itself in the climbing,. for here and there it went up in uniform ripples, almost like steps, with only a thin, crisp covering of snow to round off their sharp angular shapes. Eldin scuffed at some of these flat, regular surfaces with his boots; saw that in fac
t they were steps, cut with infinite care into the ice of Aran. And, narrowing his eyes toward the peak, the Wanderer saw that indeed the steps would seem to go all the way to the top.

  “Steps!” said Hero, following Eldin’s gaze, and at once felt foolish. Of course they were steps.

  The old man nodded. “To make the climbing of Aran easier, aye.”

  “But who’d want to make the climbing of a forbidden mountain easy?” Eldin was puzzled.

  The old man laughed. “An icemonger, of course! My grandfather first cut steps on Aran’s frozen slopes, and after him my father, and now I cut them. You see, the mountain is not forbidden to me. But ice-steps are not the carvings I was talking about, Wanderer. You brushed snow from the wrong place.”

  The questers looked again.

  Flanking the rippling stairway they had ascended, large expanses of the slope showed columnar, lumpy, or nodal structures beneath a thin snow sheath. Eldin got down on his knees to one edge of the steps and brushed away snow with his hands. Hero likewise on the opposite side of the steps. And now an amazing thing, for beneath the snow—

  “Wonderful!” said Hero, his voice full of admiration.

  A figure reclined there, laid bare by the quester’s hands: the figure of a man carved in ice. He sat (or seemed to) on the slope, his back against an ice boulder, hands in his lap, and gazed out through ice eyes far across all the lands of dream. He was middling old, yet looked ages-weary, and his downward sloping shoulders seemed to bear all the weight of entire worlds. His ice-robes were those of a king, which the ice-crown upon his head confirmed beyond a doubt. But even without the royal robes and ice-jewelled headgear, still the figure was unmistakable.

  “Kuranes!” Hero whispered, seeing in the ice an image almost of life itself, yet at the same time a Kuranes utterly unknown to him.

  “The Lord of Ooth-Nargai, aye,” the old ice carver whispered. “My father sculpted this in a time when Kuranes dwelled in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights, before he dreamed himself his manor-house and built his Cornish village on the coast. As you can see, the king was weary in those days, and jaded on the dreamlands; see how clearly it shows in his mien? But once he’d builded a little bit of Cornwall here”—he shrugged—“his weariness fell off him. My father had thought he might visit this place, come up and see himself shaped in ice, but he never came. Still, time yet …”