by M J Engh
“Yes, if we could catch it,” Lethgro answered grumpily (though in truth he was mightily relieved, first by their return and second by their news), and he put aside the stove, with which he had been tinkering to pass the time.
“Not just the beasts,” said Repnomar, “but whatever the beasts feed on, for I don't suppose they live on snow any more than we do. We don't need to starve, Lethgro, even if our rations run out.”
Now the Warden's heart, which had risen warmly at sight of her, sank with a thump, and he began to object strongly; for he saw where her thought was tending, and he had no wish to die in the icy darkness, so far from the Sollet, chasing after an outlander who wanted no more of them. And with some argument he got a promise from the Captain to abide by their plan, and turn back toward the light before they had eaten half their rations. “Only,” she said, “if we find other food, we'll eat that first, and so the rations will go further. But we haven't set our course yet.” And she sent the crows up again to search for the Exile's torchlight.
This, too, brought good news of a sort, for presently they heard one of the crows returning with loud cries, who swooped above them and arrowed off again into the darkness, calling for them to follow. This they did, the other crow soon joining its fellow, and both of them impatient at the slowness of foot travelers. But in a little, Repnomar called down the crows and made them ride on her shoulders. “For,” she said, “we know our course now, and there's no need to shout our whereabouts to all the world.” And indeed, though the Captain had taught her crows well, she had never been able to teach them silence.
The course the crows had set for them led downhill, into a deeper darkness than any they had known yet and, for a while, into deeper snow. The Captain went first, shining the torchbeam on the snow just ahead of her, and now and then swinging it side to side to look for better footing—in hopes, too, of seeing tracks, whether of the Exile or of some beast. Broz floundered behind her, sniffing the cold air and snorting hopefully, for he knew by the Captain's bearing that they were on a trail, though of whom or of what he did not know; and the Warden, loaded with such supplies as remained to them, brought up the rear.
One thing most clear in all this darkness was that this was not the path the Exile had followed; and if he was now somewhere straight in front of them, it seemed to the Captain that one of two things must be true: either he had gone roundabout, by some longer but easier road, “or,” she said aloud, “he flew.” And when the Warden from behind asked her what she was muttering, she repeated all her thought to him; and he said soberly, “Yes. He flew.”
Indeed all other theories foundered on the matter of the pods. Those must have risen straight up from where they lay, and doubtless the Exile had risen with them. “Only this time,” the Warden added moodily, “there's nothing for it but admit, Rep, that some god must have had a hand in it—or else some giant bird. For with all the sails in the world, a man couldn't have done it.” And he tramped for a while in silence, considering which would be worse to meet in this unhallowed country, that giant bird or that outlandish god. But presently the Captain's casting-about of the torchbeam caught a long ridge of ice where the snow lay thin, and here they paused while she sent up the crows again and made sure of their course; and for some two hours, at the Warden's guess, they followed first the ridge and then the rocky flank of a peak above the ice.
It was here that Broz, who had been snuffling at the snow from time to time, suddenly began to dig in a frenzy, raising a cloud of flying snow around him. So they stopped and watched in hope; and Broz, when he had plowed a trench longer than himself, made a last plunge and yank, and dragged out a little beast the size of a young mole but more like a fish in color, and flapping like a fish in his jaws. The Captain raised a discordant cheer, and the Warden dropped on his knees and patted Broz warmly on the back. “And where there's one beast,” the Captain observed, “there are more, and what they feed on besides.” And while Broz killed and ate his snowfish, growling proprietorially at the crows that came to peck at the scraps of it, she began to dig the snow in her turn, working backward from where Broz had begun his trenching. Lethgro watched for a minute and then bent to help her, saying, “Not so rough, Rep; go gentle,” for he saw that she meant to trace out the snowfish's burrow. So they worked for a time, and presently Broz joined them at it, leaving the last morsels of his prey to the crows, for in truth he had not found it savory eating.
“It's more a land beast than a fish, Lethgro,” said the Captain. “What do you say it feeds on?”
“I'd tell you better if I'd had a chance to look at its jaws,” answered Lethgro. “Maybe worms and the like. Maybe roots and bulbs, I'd say, if this were soil we were digging through and not snow. Go easy, Rep; there may be a nest of them.” It was not that Lethgro was jealous of Broz for his kill; but the Exile's rations had not set well with his stomach, and his mouth watered now, swallow as he might, at the thought of fresh meat.
Here Repnomar whistled sharply through her teeth, and tightened her hand around something in the snow. “What is it?” Lethgro asked quickly, and she shook her head. The truth was that her fingers were too numb to tell her much about what she had hold of, only that it was long and thin, and she yanked hard to bring it out into the light of the Exile's torch. But in the same moment she gave a yelp of pain that brought Broz's head up anxiously, and said between her teeth, “Get a bit of rope around this thing, Lethgro, and help me pull it out. But be careful how you touch it.”
Lethgro brought the beam of the torch to bear on the Captain's hands in the snow. “It looks like a root,” he said, and there was surprise in his voice, he having expected something worse.
“Root it may be, but it bit me,” the Captain said doggedly. “Look, here's a leg. Tie your rope under that, and it ought to hold.”
“It's a branch, not a leg,” said the Warden; but he eyed the thing warily as he knotted the rope around it, all the more so as he thought he saw certain buds or nodes or tubers scattered down its length stir restively. Yet when they hauled on the rope the thing came up lifelessly enough, with a slow ripping like a root being pulled out of soil. The Captain sat back on her heels.
“It's as long as an anchor cable,” she said. “But it looks more like a strand of kelp with the leaves stripped off.” She blew out her lips in a long whistle, but the sound was strangely faint, and Broz and the Warden looked at her questioningly, so that they were watching when she passed a hand over her brow and muttered, like one in puzzlement, “The blasted landkelp bit me,” and sagged sideways into the snow.
Lethgro caught her before she was quite down, and so held her propped against his knee while he got the Exile's sheet off Broz's back and half spread behind her, and then eased her down upon it. Now for a time the world looked very bleak to him, squatted on that dark mountainside with rock above and ice below, no help to call on but one old dog and a pair of ill-tempered crows and whatever unwholesome gods might have cognizance of this far country, while the Captain's breath came slow and shallow beside him, and that thing lay stretched on the snow within reach of his hand, like a great warty snake, opening and closing its knobs. Nevertheless he wasted no time, setting both stove and torch to shine on the Captain, and soon found the little wound on her hand, for it was already dark and swollen. He did what he could, opening it with his knifepoint and sucking at it to draw out whatever poison the thing had put into her, though indeed he had little hope of this, since the poison was at work already. Broz would have tried his teeth on the landkelp, but Lethgro called him sternly back from it, and he came and lay beside the Captain with his head on her stomach, turning up his eyes to the Warden from time to time, for he was troubled by the strangeness of her sleep; and the crows sat hunched at the sheet's edge, muttering to each other as crows will do; and the Warden watched.
His thoughts were so bleak, and he so deeply sunk in them, that he fairly jerked with startlement when Repnomar's eyes opened and she said grumblingly but very clearly, “Why didn
't you wake me for my turn on guard?” And for the next little while he had much to do to explain to her where she was and what had happened, for she was groggy in her mind, and all the matter of the landkelp, and indeed of the Exile's disappearance and their searching for him, seemed to have gone from her memory.
Otherwise she was well enough, though a little dizzy when she first tried to stand. As soon as this had passed, or somewhat sooner, she was hot to examine the landkelp, and this they did very carefully, turning and prodding it with the Warden's arrows, till the Captain snorted impatiently and grasped it with both hands, saying, “There's no harm in it if you keep away from its mouths. Here, Lethgro, you wanted to see the jaws on that snowfish—” (for memory was coming back to her in flaws and gusts); “take a look at these instead, and tell me what you make of it.” She was teasing open one of the knots or bulbs with her knifepoint.
The Warden peered close, and clicked his tongue in surprise. “Well, it's the first time,” he said, “I've ever seen a root that eats worms.”
Certainly it was like a root, no thicker anywhere than two of the Warden's fingers pressed together, and tapering to a wispy tip like a root's end; branches, too, along its side as a root may have, but none of these longer than Broz's foreleg, and every branch tipped with one of those same unwholesome knobs that studded the main length, looking like harmless buds but opening to show each a sac like the craw of some small toothless beast, with a sting in the middle. And indeed some of these, like the one Repnomar had first opened, held the half-digested remnants of little colorless worms. Stretched out on the snow, the thing was twice the Warden's height in length, and might well have been longer, for the thicker end was broken, or more rightly torn, showing a raw edge and a fringe of snapped hairs.
“Not a root, but a trunk,” the Warden decided. “This is where its roots went down into whatever's below. What do you say, Repnomar?”
“Kelp,” Repnomar answered with assurance. “But call it a tree if you like, Lethgro.” For she felt that (landlubberly terminology aside) he had come round to her judgement. “Whatever it is, it might make pretty good rope, once you got those jaws off.” And it was only by reminding her of the time they had lost already, and of how far ahead the Exile might be, that Lethgro persuaded her to put away the knife with which she was picking at it and send up the crows.
These, however, returned quickly and with eager cries, setting them a course well to starboard of their former one and almost straight across the ice river. Here the snow was no deeper than a few fingers’ breadth, so that they could see crevices and hummocks before their feet found them, and they pushed ahead briskly. Only Broz was restless, sniffing the air and trotting off now this way, now that. But they still saw no tracks, and the Captain had good hope that they were traveling a shorter course than the Exile and so would cut him off. “Except that we can't cut him off while he's flying,” the Warden added. And he looked up into (he blackness of the sky that hung like solid hopelessness above their torchlight.
And it was just here, looking up into nothing and leaned a little forward as he finished a stride, that he felt himself grasped and jerked by both ankles at once, so that he toppled helplessly; and flinging out his arms to catch himself, he was worse caught instead, for something grabbed and tightened on his right forearm, and suddenly he was face down in a tangle of snow and ropes, half stunned by the fall and with his gear poking into him in various uncomfortable places. He had seen Repnomar go down in the same instant, and just in front of his head Broz was lunging and heaving, caught too by all four legs. Repnomar had kept her grip on the torch, and now she flared the beam wide, so that they lay in a pool of light, and at its edges flashes of silver-gray that sprang and flitted. But before they could make out anything clearly they were all tumbled together, like fish in a net, and dragged with much bumping across the ice.
This did not last long, for which they were grateful. Lethgro, finding that he still had some control over his left arm, shoved aside Broz's rump and said into the Captain's shoulder blade, “Can you see them?” To which the Captain answered, “Shh!”
Indeed, being on the top side of the bundle, she saw well enough; and she thought that except for Broz's desperate panting in her ear and Lethgro's muttering at her back, she would be able to hear, too. And she wanted to hear, for they were talking now.
Clustered near the edge of the light, some of them still gripping the cords that tightened the net, they cheeped and whistled and flashed their gestures like spurts of molten silver, swerving and dancing. The Captain's breath came hard from her lungs, for she had not thought to see that glint and swiftness except in the Soll and its creatures. She knew, too, and it was strange to think of, that these sounds were like the sounds that she and Broz had heard when they went hunting in the dark. “Well,” she told herself, “we would have eaten one of them if we'd had the chance; it's fair enough if they want to eat us.”
Certainly the three of them (not to count the crows, who had fluttered up from the Captain's shoulders when the meshes tightened around her feet, and so escaped) should feed a good many of these creatures, if they were meat-eaters. None of them was bigger than Broz, and all more slimly built, something like coneys in their shape and movements, but furred all over in that glistening silver-gray, and with great saucer ears that swiveled suddenly this way and that, and long dog-whiskers, and the bigger part of their faces filled by their huge deep-blue eyes. Now, it seemed to the Captain that eyes meant light to see by, and she thought it was poor luck indeed if they were to be butchered and eaten by the very folk that might have shown them the way out of darkness.
Here Broz gave an outraged yelp; for the Warden was struggling to draw his knife, in hopes to cut some of the meshes, and with his twisting, the tip of his bow had poked Broz in a tender spot. At this, some few of their captors came forward, dropping onto all fours to run across the snow, while others pulled the meshes still tighter. The Captain held grimly to her torch, thinking to flash it in their eyes and dazzle them, or perhaps to smash a head with it, though in fact she could barely move either hand. But they did not so much as blink at the light; and stopping a few feet off, they whipped each one a slender rod from behind their shoulders, and blew them like so many whistles, and the Captain felt something sting her cheek.
When she woke this time, as before, it was to see the Warden gazing glumly down at her. “Well, Rep,” he said, “how do you like your Quicksilver People? Or have you forgotten everything again?”
Indeed she had forgotten much, but this time it came back more swiftly, just as the poison had acted more swiftly, and she sat up in a rush, saying, “Where are we? Where's Broz?”
“In an ice cave,” he answered. “Right beside you, still asleep.”
On this she would have sprung up, but found her ankles tied together, and she began to swear at the Warden for not having unbound her, and to work at the knots with her fingers (for their hands were free). The Warden chuckled gloomily.
“You're a better sailor than I am, Repnomar, and maybe you can manage it,” he said; “but I've been working at those knots for the better part of an hour. And they've taken our knives.”
The Captain held to it that any knot ever tied could be untied, but she put the problem aside for the moment and turned to Broz, stirring now and whining in his sleep. The Warden had spread the sheet and laid them on it, folding a corner over Broz against the cold; for though the Quicksilver People had left them the torch, they had taken the stove. Broz's hind legs too were bound together, and this proved to be a lucky thing, for no sooner was he well awake than he lunged at the Captain, catching the arm that she flung up in startlement and almost crushing the bones of her wrist in his jaws before the Warden could get him loose. Whereupon he turned on the Warden, snapping and ravening, so that both Warden and Captain dragged themselves hastily away, and with a shaking hand the Captain took up the torch to use as a weapon if need should be. “He'll remember us,” she said hoarsely. “Let's hope it'
s soon.”
15
Knots and Nooses
It was a weary time later—none of them knew how long—when Broz, with a puzzled whine, dropped his chin onto the Captain's knee and fell asleep. The Captain and the Warden met each other's eyes and drew a long breath, for all in all it had been a wearisome watch. Lethgro, with some caution, undid the belt he had fastened with considerable effort not long before, looped through the cords that bound Broz's hind legs. The moss he had stuffed his clothes with against the cold had proved useful for another purpose during that operation, and though he was ragged enough now, with tufts of moss everywhere raveling out through the gashes, he had not bled, or not to mention. The Captain had fared somewhat worse. Her own belt had gone to loop the old dog's nose in a makeshift muzzle, and for that success she had paid with a torn right hand, and come near to paying with an eye, for Broz at close quarters was no light antagonist. Lethgro had been for noosing it around his neck, as being easier to do and a surer means of quieting him; but the Captain would have no harm done to her dog, even by her own hand ("so long as I can help it,” as she had added), and thought a noose around the neck all too easy to tighten too hard or too long. So it had been touch and go, the Warden yanking at Broz from behind and the Captain teasing him with the looped belt in front, till they got him passably well muzzled and pinned.
“And all this would have been easier,” the Captain said, searching for a clean spot on her shirt to wrap her hand in, “if we'd had a proper rope to work with.” She looked at the Warden and her face relaxed into a grin. “I've seen scarecrows in the beanfields below Rotl that looked better than you, Lethgro.”
“And why shouldn't they?” answered Lethgro, with another sigh. “They're in a better place, and with better prospects. Answer me this, Repnomar: Why did they take our rope, and our stove, and nothing else but our knives? And why have they left us here alone all this time, sealed up like fish in a frozen pond?” It was on his tongue to ask, Are they ever coming back? but he did not.