Above the Snowline (26 page)
But I admit, I was furious mainly because he’d successfully pulled the wool over my eyes. Francolin said his men would be arriving around New Year’s Eve - a week on Thursday. I should warn the king. No. I should inform the Emperor and he can decide how to tell Tarmigan.
‘Raven Rachiswater!’ I said aloud. ‘How bloody stupid can you be?’ I folded the note, slipped it into my jacket and ran to catch up with Dellin, thinking the while.
If Raven increased the archers on his towers and reinforced his gate, his ‘compound’ would be as strong as Lowespass, where Francolin already was. They both had fortresses. Francolin would have swarms of troops, so why had he only sent five hundred men? Five hundred couldn’t possibly stand against the king, so Raven must be planning some ruse. A lightning attack? If he was fast he could storm the palace and seize the throne before Tarmigan knew what was happening. One division could overpower the palace guard if they had no time to call for reinforcements. Of course Raven knows every approach to Rachiswater, all the streets of the town, all the vulnerabilities of the palace, the habits of the sentries, every corridor and secret passage!
What’s this about sleds? Dog sleds would be the swiftest way to transport five hundred men to the lowlands. Maybe they’d change to horseback once they reached Rachiswater, but up here dogs have every advantage - and Raven had so many. God . . . Raven would want to catch the king unprepared . . . On New Year’s Day! Yes, I felt certain, either on New Year’s Day itself or the following day. Awians celebrate so passionately that they have hangovers all the first week of January. When better to swipe the throne from under your brother’s arse than on the biggest festival of the year?
I take it back: Raven isn’t stupid at all. God knows what he wants to do to Tarmigan! But, for sure, if I let him attack Rachiswater he’ll split the heart of Awia in two. We are looking at nothing less than civil war.
‘You’re being completely useless!’ Dellin’s exclamation rang on the air. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Listen! Raven is receiving soldiers to depose his brother!’
‘Good.’
‘But there’ll be bloodshed in Awia!’
‘Good!’
‘I have to do something about it,’ I explained, as if to a child.
‘Stare at a scrap of paper, perhaps? Jant, we are walking through a
crevasse field
and you are taking
no notice
of your surroundings!’
crevasse field
and you are taking
no notice
of your surroundings!’
‘We’re walking through a what?’
‘A crevasse field! Here is a fissure.
There
is a fissure; who knows how deep? Some are covered by snow. I tried to lead you but you weren’t even watching!’
There
is a fissure; who knows how deep? Some are covered by snow. I tried to lead you but you weren’t even watching!’
I glanced about. Sure enough lenticular cracks were open all around us, in roughly parallel clusters. Looking back at our footprints I realised Dellin had zigzagged artfully between treacherous chasms rendered invisible by a thin crust of ice.
‘I’m sorry.’
She threw a pair of crampons down at my feet. ‘Put these on!’
As I buckled them on - metal ones, which I suspect had been Laochan’s - she continued, ‘I sincerely hope the featherbacks do start fighting each other! Are you going to help me, or join them?’
‘I have to help you, as the silver man commanded.’
‘But you didn’t support me! You let Raven talk on and on! You saw the pelts from hundreds of kills?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the poison they were doling out to those hunters?’
‘Yes—’
‘Well, why didn’t you
do
anything about it?’ She flourished her spear. ‘I could skin him myself! The way he looked at me, considering me less than a goat! Did you see that too?’
do
anything about it?’ She flourished her spear. ‘I could skin him myself! The way he looked at me, considering me less than a goat! Did you see that too?’
‘Yes, actually.’
‘But you didn’t stop him! By the Huntress! This is the service the Castle gives Rhydanne!’
I sighed. Dellin had held her own against Raven with such magnificent determination I hadn’t been able to keep from smirking. Now that she was turning that disdainful attitude on me, she was spicing my amusement with great admiration.
Her features set in anger. ‘Stand still! I’m going to rope us together. See this loop? Thread it on your belt.’
I did so and she passed a rope through it, deftly twisted a knot and tied it around her waist. ‘For want of a proper harness . . . If you fall down a crevasse your belt will cut into you like a lasso into bear fur and squish your guts but at least you won’t plummet to your death. Now, it’s nearly dark and a blizzard’s coming.’
‘How long will it take to reach the Hound?’
‘The rest of our lives, if we don’t look sharp!’
And so we ran. I followed her, her long legs scissoring ahead of me, elbows flashing at her sides, her tight bottom bobbing at the top of my vision. Her long hair flowed down her thin back. Our footsteps crunched lightly on the crust of ice covering the snow. It was transparent but pitted, having been warmed by the sun and refrozen every day. Toe down, the crampons bit; toe up, they flicked out tiny ice fragments, giving me the impression we were running across the surface of a gigantic crème brûlée.
On our right the cliffs soared up into a flaky arête. Fine powder snow hung in their folds and fanned out at the foot of each to merge with the snowfield. Glass-clear ice filled the cracks in the cliffs, in unbroken shafts for hundreds of metres as if it had been poured in to freeze there. Rock columns, their edges as sharp as knives, stood proud of the rock face. Shards shattered from them formed mounds at their base, smoothed by the deep drifts.
We crossed the long shadows of Klannich’s aiguilles striping the snow, cast equally across the surface of the clouds building up below us. Our shadows angled over the ice as we ran on, out of Raven’s manor and into an alien world.
On our right the crags closed towards us; on our left a steep pitch of fifty metres or so fell to the glacier. The snowfield was narrowing and becoming the Turbary Track, a trade route that ran unbroken alongside the glacier, up to its source and over the pass at the head of the valley. It ascended between torn peaks and snaked across cols for over a hundred kilometres, past the impossible cone of Stravaig, onto the high plateau to Scree pueblo.
The sun set behind the ridge at the head of the glacier and the temperature suddenly dropped. The snowfields greyed in the fading light. I took my sunglasses off and smeared grease on my lips from a little leather pot Dellin had given me. Grey-brown clouds were gathering over the head of the valley and yet more clouds were moving in placid herds around the contour of the cliffs and joining them. Thick nimbus was forming on the arc of Klannich’s ridge, blowing off and building into one great mass - the cloud base was lowering until the summit of Klannich then the tops of the lower peaks disappeared from view.
We passed a cairn of rubble, to which Dellin gave a wide berth, so I called, ‘What’s that?’
‘A crevasse marker!’
‘Why is that one marked and none of the others?’
She huffed a laugh. ‘It gave someone a nasty shock! Maybe their partner is still down there!’
The crevasses curved out on our left, like wrinkles on an old woman’s face. Those closest to us were the shallowest, elongated ovals and almond-shaped holes. I could see recent snow at the bottom of the nearest one as if the old woman had packed make-up into her wrinkles. In the distance clouds were creeping down from the top of the valley and obscuring the source of the glacier. The glacier’s surface was less dirty there, where the ice was new. Its broad tail curved up and branched into three, no longer striped but pure white, emerging from the snowfields of the cirques that fed it.
‘I see the Hound!’ Dellin cried.
‘Where?’
She pointed to the cliff on our right, buttressed by a jumble of snow-sheeted boulders, but we were loping along so quickly I couldn’t see where she was indicating. I stared at the boulders until my eyes stung - and a slow movement caught my attention. Above them a black shape was flapping like a huge bat.
‘I see a flag!’ I called to Dellin.
‘Yes! So we can find the Hound against the snow!’
Where on earth was it, then? I scanned the cliffs and realised that the boulder pile below the crag
was
the Frozen Hound Hotel. Just as growths on tree bark resolve into a face, or clouds floating past morph into maps of the world, now I saw that the crevice in the centre was a doorway, and a zigzag cleft below it was a staircase carved into the rock. Diverse recesses at differing levels and of various sizes must be shuttered windows. I couldn’t tell how far the Frozen Hound extended. It rambled away on both sides under the shelter of the cliff and merged indistinguishably into the rest of the talus froth and ice.
was
the Frozen Hound Hotel. Just as growths on tree bark resolve into a face, or clouds floating past morph into maps of the world, now I saw that the crevice in the centre was a doorway, and a zigzag cleft below it was a staircase carved into the rock. Diverse recesses at differing levels and of various sizes must be shuttered windows. I couldn’t tell how far the Frozen Hound extended. It rambled away on both sides under the shelter of the cliff and merged indistinguishably into the rest of the talus froth and ice.
Dellin stopped and crouched down. I anticipated some disaster and braced myself with the rope but she beckoned me over. We had come upon a set of tracks proceeding in the same direction. ‘A Rhydanne?’ I asked.
‘Yes, just one, about two hours ahead. A hunter, probably, and a poor one - he only has bone crampons.’ She spread her hand like a bird’s claw over one of the heel marks. ‘It’s good to have footprints to follow among these crevasses.’ A snowflake landed on her nose. She brushed it away, grinned at me, then we were up and running again, with scarcely enough light to see by. All the time I was thinking, she’s fantastic. I admired her skill, her knowledge of genuine things. And why did I never notice before how cute her bum is? Bobbing in repetitive motion, her bottom hypnotised me and I ran almost in a trance.
Further on, a double set of prints curved in and joined us. Dellin pointed out scuffed snow on the shelves of the cliff where two Rhydanne had climbed up, and we followed their footholds, sipping the freezing air with gritted teeth.
Another flake, white against the steel sky, then a gust of wind blew and the snow began falling heavily. I pulled my hood down to my brows, slitted my eyes and turned my cheek to it. In a few minutes I’ll be in the warm with my hands wrapped around a glass of whisky, I thought. I couldn’t wait.
We climbed through shrouds of snow slung between the rock pinnacles, kicking footholds clear in every crevice. The snow we dislodged fell and rolled down the slope, gathering more and ending up at the bottom as fair-sized snowballs. Flurries swirled across my vision, left to right from the head of the valley. The granite front of the trading post came and went through them. It was so deeply blanketed it rose in a smooth, white tump. Hummocks were extensions leading off on all sides, passages and rooms, their roofs all varying heights. Some had two storeys, others were tumbledown as if burrowing into the cliff face.
We reached some steps where yesterday’s snowfall had been shovelled clear and piled on either side. The blizzard was now driving grey and the sky so black I could no longer distinguish between it and the outline of the cliff tops above us. Snow was sticking to our clothes and freezing there: I was covered in it like a suit of armour and Dellin was completely grey against the pitch black, with lines at her elbows, knees and around her neck where the snow had cracked away.
We passed a bothy where the heaped snow was dotted with trodden-in mule droppings, each one surrounded by a brown ring varying in size depending on how long it’d been there. Goat bleats swept on the wind; a low rattle of copper bells, then a louder jingle as one beast shook himself. We walked alongside the passage from the bothy to the front of the trading post. It was a door dark with creosote and two windows shuttered so tightly no light leaked from them. Smoke poured from a stout stone chimney and vanished immediately on the wind. So many extensions led off that the building looked like a grey mite: a rugged body surrounded by uneven, ugly legs.
I walked straight into a cane with a beer bottle on top and set it rattling. I stared until my eyes watered and could just make out a few more, planted in a line in the snow. Good signs to attract Rhydanne - and here was one for Awians: the creaking timbers of the flagpole. Its weather-tattered flag cracked and flapped in the blackness above us, showering us with ice grains and unfurling momentarily to reveal a device of a white dog rampant.
Dellin released the rope from her waist with a couple of deft moves, left it trailing and barged straight in. The door banged shut behind her. I sighed and coiled the rope around my arm. Alone now, I became aware of the colossal space around me, without being able to see it. Only gasping logic told me that the inhumanly vast valley pass still lay ahead, the glacier stretched from end to end of the landscape below me, and Klannich’s array of spines skewered the deficient air a thousand metres above.
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