The Saga of the Renunciates

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Camilla put a cup of tea into her hand. How could Camilla, at her age, remain so strong and undamaged? Her eyes looked red and wind-burned, and the tip of her nose had a raw patch of frostbite, but the few hours of sleep they had managed in the snow had revived her. She sat down on another packload, and slurped her own tea, into which she had crumbled the dried meat and bread, but she didn’t say anything. At this altitude there was no breath for extraneous words.

  “Is Cholayna all right this morning?”

  “Seems to be. But if we don’t get down to a lower height, I wouldn’t like to guess what might happen. She was coughing all night long.” But not even Cholayna’s coughing could have kept Magda awake last night, after the nightmare of the descent from the pass after dark, by moonlight on the surface of the snow: kyorebni looming suddenly from the dizzy gaps of space almost at their feet, wheeling and screaming and then disappearing again: washed-out patches of trail where even the chervines balked and had to be coaxed to step across, and the horses had to be dragged or manhandled, fighting backward, their eyes rolling with terror at the smell of banshee in the crags.

  Jaelle had brought them all across, undamaged, without losing a horse or a pack animal or even a load; unhurt. Magda looked at the familiar slight form of her freemate, slumped across a packload, a handful of raisins halfway to her mouth. Her red curls were uncombed and matted under her fur-trimmed hood, her gray eyes sore and wind-burned like Camilla’s and her own. Magda wondered at the strength of will and courage in that small body. There had been moments in the pass when Magda herself, a strong young woman in superb physical condition, had wanted to lie down like one of the ponies, without breath or courage for another step; heart pounding, head splitting, face and body numbed with frost. She could only imagine what it had been like for Cholayna, but the older woman had struggled along bravely beside her, uttering not a single word of complaint. It was Jaelle, Magda realized, who had kept them all going.

  Magda followed Camilla’s example and crumbled the meat bar into her boiling tea. The taste was very peculiar, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was astonishing how, at this altitude, she could actually feel the hot food and fluid heating her all the way down, restoring a feeling of warmth to her exhausted and chilled limbs. When she finished the mess she dug into the ration sacks and got out another bar, this one of ground-up nuts and fruits stuck together with honey, and gnawed at it. Cholayna was resolutely spooning up a similar mixture dissolved in her tea.

  Vanessa said, “I ought to take my boots off and look at that wretched ankle. But it’s too damned cold. Where are we going now, Jaelle?”

  Jaelle glanced back at Nevarsin Peak, rising behind them. “The main road branches off toward Caer Donn. If there were any mysterious and unknown cities in that area, one of us would have run across it before this.” She fumbled with gloved fingers for the map, and pointed; removing gloves unnecessarily at this altitude was to court freezing. “This little settlement isn’t marked on any of the Darkovan maps. It showed up from the satellite picture, and this—” she traced with her outstretched finger—“looks something like a road.”

  “Something like a road,” Cholayna groaned. By now they all knew what unmarked roads in this area were like.

  “I know, but I can’t imagine any other road Rafaella could have taken,” Jaelle said. High in the pass, they had come across an abandoned packload, all but empty, with Rafaella’s mark on it. “They must be running low on food and grain for the ponies… they know we are following them. Why don’t they wait for us?”

  Magda couldn’t imagine, unless Lexie and Rafaella had been given some special guidance to that unknown city of the legend. From the summit of Nevarsin, in a brief moment of blazing sun between storms, she had looked across an endless view of mountain ranges, trackless peaks, toward the remote and inaccessible ice wall known as the Wall Around the World. She had glimpsed it only once before and then from a Mapping plane, and never in her remotest dreams had it occurred to her that she would ever travel toward it on foot.

  “More tea, anyone?” Camilla asked, and divided the remaining brew into the four mugs held out to her before stowing the kettle and scattering snow over the remaining fire; sheer habit of years on the trail, for there was certainly nothing here to burn.

  Vanessa slung packloads on chervines, pulling the straps tight and double-checking them, and Cholayna began helping Jaelle with the saddles. Abruptly she bent over in a renewed fit of coughing, clinging to the saddle-straps and bracing herself against the horse’s side. Vanessa’s eyes on her were calculating; Magda knew she was wondering if the older woman could make it. But there was nothing to be done. After a moment Cholayna, eyes streaming and the tears already freezing on her cheeks, straightened up and rummaged in her pack for the compass with which she checked the map and the road.

  “This way,” Jaelle decided. “Let’s go.”

  For a time, then, the road led downhill, then swerved away into an ill-marked trail leading upward between two long slopes. The sun rose higher and higher, and Magda felt sweat streaming down her body under her jacket, and freezing there.

  They had ridden about three hours, and Jaelle passed the word back to look for a good place for a rest. The road was steep and narrow; the horses were struggling upward alongside an old glacier, pale with rotten ice. The trail curved, and led across a long snow-laden slope. As they set foot on it, there was a scream as a dozen birds flapped and flew upward in a streaming flight; then a roar like sudden thunder. Jaelle, in the lead, pulled her horse up sharp.

  Then, from somewhere above them, tons of rock and ice cascaded down a deep-carved gully in the mountainside. The horses reared upward, neighing. The very mountain seemed to shake beneath them. The pack animals jostled together and their horses crowded close; Camilla leaned over and clutched at Magda, and they clung together as the avalanche roared down and down and down and went on forever.

  At last it was silent, though the air was full of crushed ice and dust, and the sound of screaming went on and on. Jaelle’s pony had collapsed, struck by a falling boulder. Camilla slid from her horse and hurried, picking her way across the rock-strewn trail. Jaelle, shakily upright, was kneeling beside the stricken pony. Magda looked swiftly around to her companions. Vanessa was hugging herself, arms tight wrapped to her chest, her face very white. Magda could hear Cholayna’s breath wheeze in and out as she hung over her pony without even the strength to cough. Silence, except for the screaming of the hurt animal and the shrill cries of the disturbed birds still wheeling in the air.

  At last Vanessa said shakily, “They say you can never hear the one that has your name on it. If you can hear it, you’re still alive.” She picked her way fastidiously over the debris of rock and ice which was all that was left of the trail, to kneel at Camilla’s side by the pitiably screaming pony.

  “Leg crushed,” she said, “nothing to be done.”

  Jaelle’s eyes were streaming tears, which froze on her cheeks, as she struggled to get out her knife. Camilla said, “Let me,” and for an instant laid her free hand over Jaelle’s. It was almost a caress. “Hold her head, Shaya.”

  Jaelle held the pony’s head in her lap; the struggling animal quieted for an instant, and Camilla’s dagger swept down and swiftly severed the great artery in the neck. A few spurts of blood, a final struggle, and quiet. Camilla’s lips were set as she tried to brush away the blood from her riding-cape.

  “Get the saddle off her. You have ridden stag-ponies before this. Put it on the chervine with the white face; he’s the gentlest and most trustworthy,” she said briskly, but Magda knew her sharpness concealed real concern. As Vanessa got the saddle off the swiftly freezing corpse (the pony’s leg had been crushed under a great rock, it was a miracle Jaelle had not been thrown and killed) Magda went to Jaelle, who looked almost stunned. She took a tube of cream and smeared it over the frozen tears on her freemate’s face. Mingled with the splashed blood of the pony, it looked grotesque, but it would keep her
cheeks from frostbite.

  “Are you hurt, breda?”

  “No.” But Jaelle was limping, and leaned heavily on Magda. “Something hit me in the shins when the pony fell. I don’t think the skin’s broken, just a bruise.” But she threatened to cry again. “Oh, Dancer!” That was the horse’s name. “Damon gave her to me, the year Dori was born. When she was a colt she followed me around like a puppy. I broke her to the saddle myself. Oh, Magda, Damon will be so angry that I didn’t take better care of her.”

  The words were meaningless; she was hysterical and Magda knew it. Jaelle was in shock; they were all in shock.

  “Get the other saddles off, Camilla, and we’ll brew tea; Jaelle needs it after that. We all need it.”

  At her urging, they moved upslope from the corpse of the pony, around which the kyorebni were already wheeling and fighting. Vanessa began to build a fire. Magda sat Jaelle down on a saddle load and surveyed what had once been a road. It had been all but obliterated above them. Nevertheless they were lucky to be alive, to have lost only one mount.

  Magda pushed Jaelle down on a load. With the trail gone, there would have to be reconnaissance ahead. But neither Jaelle nor Cholayna was in much shape to forge on for their route. Tea was brewed and drunk; Camilla got the saddle off the dead horse, and tried to fit it on the smallest and most tractable chervine, but the difference in size and contour, even when the bony back of the chervine was padded with a small blanket, made it an almost impossible proposition.

  “I have ridden chervines bareback in my day, but I don’t intend to try if there’s any alternative; that backbone-ridge always splits me in two,” Jaelle complained. With hot tea and some sweets from the packloads, some color had come back into her face, but her shin was skinned raw and bruised bone-deep.

  “When we come to another village, we will try to trade for a riding-chervine, or at least a proper saddle for this one,” Camilla said. Magda finished her food, and stood up wearily.

  “It’s up to us, Vanessa, to scout ahead and see whether there is a trail anywhere up there.” She scanned the map. It was past noon and the day was still fine, but long, narrow, hook-ended clouds were beginning to blow across the sky from the north, and Magda knew, they all knew, what that presaged: high wind at least, perhaps storm and deep snow.

  The map showed something like a settlement or a village. She prayed it would not be a village like the last one they had discovered in emergency.

  “Put your leg up and rest it while you can, Jaelle. Vanessa and I will scout ahead.” Cholayna, she thought, looked worse than Jaelle, her breath coming in heavy rasping wheezes. Yet there was no way to return, and no shelter near. They must simply go ahead and hope they found shelter. Magda was not superstitious, but it seemed that the pony’s death was an ill omen. They had had too much good luck on this long trek, and if that good luck had deserted them, who might be next?

  Camilla said, “Let me go with you—”

  “You’ve got to stay here and look after Cholayna and Jaelle. Vanessa is mountain-wise and I’m the most able-bodied one now.” Magda smiled faintly. She said, “You have the hard part; it’s going to be cold here, not moving. Get out sleeping bags and wrap up in them. At least Vanessa and I will keep warm moving.”

  Jaelle said, “In all of Kindra’s old stories, it was made clear that the way to the secret city of the Sisterhood was guarded. I wonder if we are being tested.”

  Cholayna said, wrapping a sleeping bag around herself and Jaelle, “I find it hard to believe that they have that much power. Weather, perhaps—I can just manage to believe that. Avalanche? No, I think perhaps that must be marked up to—” she interrupted herself with a prolonged paroxysm of coughing, finishing, half strangled, “to the general cussedness of things. Camilla, is there any more of your witches’ brew?”

  Magda was oddly reluctant to turn her back even on the makeshift camp. It was her first experience with being roped up, but one look at the debris-strewn, rocky, icy surface above and below them convinced her to let Vanessa make her fast to the rope. They hugged the glacier, picking their way carefully along the heaps of loose rocks, at the imminent risk of breaking an ankle or worse. From the glacier above, walls of ice seemed to tilt forward and hang over them.

  Magda was breathless with the altitude—they must, she thought, be somewhere above five thousand meters. The whole of the slope seemed to be strewn with newly fallen snow and old ice. There were several buttresses of rock widely separated by gullies filled to the brim with loose stone and unstable boulders. There seemed no hint of a trail, no suggestion that anyone had ever traveled this way before.

  As they climbed, the whole of the great plateau was revealing itself. They were nearing the vast wall of ice which guarded the summit marked on the map; they crossed the gullies in rushes, wary of fresh rockfalls from above, seeking the safety of the natural stone buttresses which stood out from the slopes, clear of the danger.

  “Too damned much loose rock and ice this way,” said Vanessa, pausing to wipe her face in the shelter of one of the huge boulders. “If we bring everybody up this way, we’re going to have to stay awfully close together, which probably means roping the horses and chervines and bringing them up in clusters. Not good. And I don’t like the look of that.”

  She pointed, and Magda, already breathless, felt her heart stop in her throat. They were far to one side, and safe, but the great glacier, an overwhelming mass of tortured formations of ice frozen in the very act of toppling over, loomed high above the other slope, the very end of a great bed of ice sitting almost atop the summit they must cross.

  Magda knew little of glaciers; the rock slope was a gentle gradient, but she knew that the ice was in slow, inexorable motion, moving, though imperceptibly, down the slopes they must somehow cross or climb. As the great masses of ice, under immeasurable pressure, reached the edge of the summit, they must break asunder and roar their way down into the valley. Such was the avalanche which had killed Jaelle’s pony and nearly taken Jaelle with it. How could they know how soon the next point of inequilibrium would be reached? Were their comrades even safe where they were now?

  They hurried across another gully of broken stone and razor-sharp flakes of loose shale which cut at their boots. The sun had gone behind the thickening layer of cloud, and Magda, looking down, could only see a small reddish dot, the sleeping bag Cholayna had wrapped round herself and Jaelle. Looking upward and across the valley, they could see, on the next slope, a few rectangular grayish shapes.

  “Now is that the village marked on the map, or is it just a cluster of stone blocks like these?” Magda wondered aloud.

  “God knows; and I’m not in Her confidence,” Vanessa said. “But at the moment I’d take out a nice mortgage on my soul for a helicopter. I wonder if this might have been what Lexie saw from the plane?”

  “No way of telling. And I don’t like the look of the sky,” Magda said. “If it is a village we’ll have to make directly for it. There’s nothing else that even looks like shelter, and I don’t like the idea of letting Cholayna spend another night in the open. Vanessa, I’m worried, really worried about her.”

  “You think I’m not? We’d better pray that place is a village or settlement of some sort. I don’t think it’s what Lexie saw; it’s marked on the maps. But it looks a little too regular to be a rock formation. Anyway we’ve got to try for it. The way that sky looks, we have no choice. I don’t want to bivouac in that.”

  “Who would?” Magda turned to descend the way they had come, but turned to look at Vanessa, who was standing at the very edge of the cliff in a way that made Magda’s arms and legs prickle with cramping apprehension.

  Vanessa said in an undertone, “God, Lorne, just look at it. It makes the mountains of Alpha look like foothills. I was proud of collecting Montenegro Summit. I’ve never seen anything like this. No matter how this comes out, just the chance to see this—” She broke off, and looked at Magda.

  She said softly, “You don’t un
derstand at all, do you, Lorne? To you it’s just difficulties and dangers and hard travel and rough going, and you can’t even see it, can you?”

  “Not the way you do, Vanessa,” Magda confessed. “I never wanted to climb mountains for their own sake. Not for the love of it.”

  Unexpectedly, Vanessa reached out and put an awkward arm around her. “That’s really something. That you keep going, like this, when it doesn’t even mean anything to you. Lorne, I’m—I’m glad we’ve got to know each other. You’re—you’re what they always said you were.” Her cold lips brushed Magda’s cheek in a shy kiss. Abruptly, she turned away.

  “We’d better get back down, and tell them what we found. If anything. I’d feel damned funny to climb all the way up to that cluster of gray stuff and find it was just a bunch of rotten old square rocks!”

  “Funny isn’t exactly the word for what I’d feel,” Magda agreed, “but it’s the only halfway repeatable word for it.”

  Going down was easier, though they picked their way carefully to avoid a fall. As it was, Vanessa stumbled and was saved by the rope from a long fall down a debris-strewn slide; putting out her hand to save herself she wrenched her wrist painfully.

  The sky was wholly clouded over now, and a cutting wind had begun to blow; Magda was shivering, and halfway down the slope they stopped, sheltering behind one of the rock buttresses to dig out the emergency rations from their pockets and suck on honey-soaked dried fruit. Magda’s face felt raw in spite of the cream she had smeared on it. As the sky darkened it was harder to place their feet. How, in heaven’s name, were they going to bring horses and chervines, not to mention the ailing Cholayna, up this way? She had no chronometer, but it could not be so late in the day as that sky presaged. Did that mean one of the blizzards, roaring down out of the impassable north?