Winter Song (30 page)

    They entered a natural amphitheatre that was sheltered from the ever-present wind. Groups of smaller humanoids rested beneath animal-hide sheets strung between boulders. Wo
men and children,
Loki said. A few rock-eaters nuzzled at the ground for plant-life.

    "They aren't migrating?" Karl said.

    Coeo said, "They live here. Guard the way to Godsfall."

    At a signal, one humanoid separated from the others and launched into a foot-stamping dance. Others marked out a square by drawing in the thin sand covering the rocks.

    "You wrestle," Coeo said. "If you win, we travel onward."

    "If I lose?" Karl said.

    "We die."

    Karl took a deep breath. "Agreed," he announced in Kazakh.

    The humanoids answered with more whistles and shrieks. Bera looked horrified at the sudden commotion.

    "Two falls wins," Coeo said, pointing to Karl's shoulder blades. "You must hold your enemy to the ground to the count of five. If either of you leave the square you stop – but if you try to escape that way, is a fall to him. No holding fur."

    Damn, thought Karl. There goes one advantage. He accepted the glamurbak tail passed to him for refreshment, and chewed it. The sponge-like tail was almost all water, but to him it tasted of congealed fat.

    His opponent stepped into the square and Karl paused.

    The humanoid wrestler was a giant, almost as wide as he was tall and nearly Karl's height. Karl mirrored his opponent, settling into a crouch, wondering how he was supposed to get hold of the sumo-humanoid without clutching fur.

    He tried not to think of failure. It wasn't just his life at stake, but the others' as well.

    He reached for the giant, who faster than thought had Karl in a grip and wrestled him to the ground, to shouts and yells from the crowd.

    On three, Karl managed to wriggle free and using all his strength, tip his opponent over. But he couldn't keep hold without clutching fur.

    "Stop!" shouted the chief, who was refereeing.

    "You crossed the line, is why," Coeo called.

    Karl sneezed, his nostrils and mouth full of the strange scent of the humanoids; like Coeo his opponent smelled of musk and mint and something else cheeselike, but in his case it was almost overpowering.

    Karl turned, and was suddenly flat on his back. "Five!" The referee counted before Karl could blink, it seemed. One fall down.

    The next time Karl grabbed an ankle, but his opponent somehow flipped him again and the count was on four and we're going to die–

    He put everything into flinging his opponent off.

    Karl's opponent landed just inside the square, stunned or winded it seemed, not moving. Karl flung himself on him.

    "Five!" shouted Coeo. "You're one fall each!"

    Karl lurched to his feet, the yelling and stamping from around them almost enough to break his eardrums.

    At the restart Karl's opponent still seemed stunned. Karl managed to grip wrist and ankle and tip him over, and transferred all his strength into pinning the struggling, writhing humanoid down.

"Five!" Coeo screamed. "You are the victor!"

"You'll live." Ragnar patted Thorir on the shoulder.

    "Frostbite," Thorir said. "What an idiotic thing to happen. I thought I'd checked the water-bottle was sealed properly." He kicked a stone into space and cursed. "Bloody thing leaked in the night, all over the furs."

    They were a full two kilometres below the Death Zone, and Ragnar knew that the cumulative effects of hypoxia and the false comfort of being "safe" often lulled travellers, making them sloppy.

    "If we take the two smallest fingers off, you should be OK," Orn said.

    "Lucky it's not your sword hand," Ragnar pointed out.

    "It could be worse." Arnbjorn lifted his booted foot. Trenchfoot from permanently cold, damp footwear had cost Ragnar's son his little toe. Unable to walk without losing his balance until they could fit a prosthetic back at Skorradalur, he had to ride one of the few horses that hadn't fallen, or been slaughtered for food to replace their dwindling supplies.

    "Do it," Thorir said through teeth already gritted.

    Needles always made Ragnar a little queasy, which had amused his wife when she was alive; "A man happy to chop off a man's leg, but who can't bear a little needle," she'd laughed when he'd admitted it to her.

    So he studied the harsh beauty of the mountains while Orn injected precious penicillin into Thorir's hand to halt the spread of the infection. Seconds later, he winced at the choked-off scream that followed the thud of Orn's axe.

    The others packed away their furs, and Orn his medical equipment. They wolfed down breakfast and resumed their grim march. Ragnar's men spoke little, preferring to save their breath, which had to be hauled into their lungs in thimblefuls ready for the icy trudge.

    Ragnar found it hard to stay angry with Karl; even at this lower altitude, it still cost too much energy. Lift one foot; put it down; lift the other; put it down in turn; repeat the process. So the hours passed through the morning. The world narrowed, to a snow-covered path through the jagged-toothed rocks puncturing the aquamarine sky.

    Even a metre either side of the path was beyond his mental horizon at the moment.

    So though the attack that followed should have been as predictable as the sunrise, it took them completely by surprise.

Morning in the deep desert: the silence was broken by a pig-like squeal.

    Bera sat upright, blinking at the light. "Dauskalas," she mumbled, her breath steaming in the freezing air. Shielding her eyes, she squinted up at black bat-like shapes cartwheeling in the sky. Belatedly she realised both that she'd allowed the furs to fall away, and that Karl was studying her bare breasts where they goosepimpled.

    He stifled a yawn. "Nah, it came from ground level." He added, "Aren't you cold?"

    She stared at him. He looked up and met her gaze and she felt heat, down below. To ease the tension, she grabbed her top and pulled it over her head. "Not now." She almost added, "You're not interested anyway, so why worry?"

    They had slept against one another for warmth these last few nights, and while she wasn't sure that she could yet bear to have him actually inside her, she had wanted him to want her. His limpness against her backside had been like a slap to the face.

    Coeo squatted, offering them the now near-daily piece of glamurbak tail, raggedly cut into three. Bera took the furry stump, picking out pieces of the scales that covered the animal. It was better than dipping into their meagre supplies.

    She glanced at Karl and burst out laughing.

    "What?" He wiped his chin, stared at his hand. "Oh, it's only blood from the tail. And you can talk."

    Bera groped among the meagre Kazakh vocabulary that she'd picked up from Karl. "Thanks," she said to Coeo.

    The humanoid mumbled acknowledgement around his mouthful of tail.

    Three days had passed since Karl had bowed in response to the humanoid chants of "Ul-lah! Ul-lah!" taking the acclaim of the victor. "It's a corruption of something from an old Kazakh religion," he told Bera afterward. They had stayed the night with the humanoids, eating and drinking barely enough of the celebratory feast not to give offence.

    Still, Bera had suffered stomach cramps in the morning.

    Karl checked the still and fished a drowned sandurlund out of the water. "It'll do for the horses." He added, "I'll load them when they've fed." He dug out the plastic sheet, and carried it gingerly over to them.

    They wasted no time making tracks. When they had left Skorradalur they had travelled over a hundred kilometres a day. Now they covered barely half that. They were slowing day by day, as their horses grew steadily thinner and weaker, despite their eating Skorri's rations. So there was little time to waste. Bera knew Ragnar was somewhere. He wouldn't let them get away.

    Throughout the morning Karl asked several times what was bothering her. He sensed that something was wrong. He was sensitive – she had to grant him that.

    She had all but managed to overcome her reluctance to be touched. She'd been on the verge of guiding his hand down across her stomach the night before, but she couldn't make herself beg, and his obvious lack of desire had been humiliating.

    He joked with her, he flirted with her, he slept with her – to keep warm.

    But he didn't want her. That much was clear. All her fantasies of him – slippery skin against skin, lips seeking lips, of straddling him, taking him in her mouth, being taken by him – left only ashes in her mouth. She wasn't sure when she'd fallen in love with him, but fool that she was, she had. And he didn't want her. She was crossing Isheimur with a man to whom she might as well be made of wood.

    So when he asked her several times what the matter was, she told him about the horses. She wasn't lying, not exactly. Their fate did bother her.

    When it came, it was entirely unexpected.

    It was near noon, the twin suns high in the sky, almost warm despite the lateness of the year, their altitude and the high latitude. Karl – shirt off – was deep in murmured conversation with Coeo. Bera dozed in the saddle.

    He and Coeo pitched forward.

    Grainur's screams split the stillness as her riders fell from the saddle. The ground had collapsed beneath her, revealing sandurlund diggings.

    Bera leapt from Taitur, knowing what she would find before she landed. The grey's forelegs were broken, and Bera felt as if her heart would burst with grief. "I'm sorry, old girl," she whispered, her vision dissolving. Her faithful Grainur deserved better reward than to spend her last moments in agony.

    Bera thrust out her chin, defying Karl to offer sympathy. She grabbed her rifle, brushing tears away. Karl looked away, but she wouldn't. She lined up the barrel. "I'll see you in Valhalla, lovely."

    The shot echoed across the featureless plain.

    As it faded away, she took out her knife. "More food for us," she said, her laugh shaky. "The gods know we need it."

    Karl took a knife and helped her butcher the carcass. "We can re-pack the bags so that everything fits into one."

    Bera nodded, licking chapped lips. They never seemed to have quite enough moisture now, no matter how many glamurbak Coeo caught, and Bera wasn't sure whether her constant headaches weren't linked to trace elements in its tail. "We need to drain her blood into the empty bottles," Bera said, "and drink whatever we can."

    "Good idea," Karl said. When he'd packed everything into the remaining saddlebag, he took the last flare and placed it in the carcass. "We should give her a proper funeral."

    "What?" Bera frowned. "No, no time. We still have to skirt those hills –" she indicated a purple stain on the horizon "– and we should keep going for as long as possible."

    "You ride Teitur," Karl said. "Coeo and I can walk. His foot's better now, almost completely healed. So let's wait an hour or two. We'll keep going into the evening."

    "No," Bera said. "We go now."

    Karl didn't answer immediately. He sighed. "Look," he said, "even in the time we've been travelling, I've grown fond of the horses, and it seems wrong to just butcher her and leave her where she is. I thought that it would be a mark of respect to have a little…" He tailed off at Bera's look. "Yeah, it's a lame idea," he said. "Let's go."

The foothills grew so slowly that Karl couldn't be sure at what point they changed from shadow to substance.

    Coeo had started to limp again after a glamurbak mother nursing her offspring had objected violently to his presence and side-swiped him.

    "According to the Oracle they don't breed often," Bera had said with a certain satisfaction as she swabbed where the scales had scraped him raw. "So Mama Glamurbak will nurture Baby G for many years. It tends to make them a little over-protective."

    "There speaks a mother," Karl said. "Exactly how much time did you spend quizzing the Oracle?"

    "Far, far too much, according to the others," Bera said, without looking up.

    Karl sighed. "Until that wound heals, no more glamurbak hunting. Even if it makes us dependent on our water-bottles, and what we get from the still."

    They stopped, and Bera laid out the maps. "If we went over, rather than around, the hills," Bera said, outlining with her finger, "we could cut maybe half of the week to ten days it'll take to get to the lake. But even then, I don't think that we'd make it."

    Karl was tempted to argue, but one look at their physical condition stopped him.

    Instead Coeo beckoned them. "Come!" he called in Kazakh, then astonishingly repeated it in passable Isheimuri.

    Bera stared at Karl. "You've been teaching him, as well as him teaching you?"

    "Yep," Karl said.

    Coeo stood before a narrow crack in the rock wall. He suddenly disappeared.

    "Do we follow?" Bera said.

    "He hasn't led us wrong so far," Karl said.

    "Maybe he's been waiting for his moment."

    "You really think so?"

    Bera shook her head. "No."

    They followed Coeo.

    The air was markedly warmer in the tunnel. Karl smelled sulphur. The walls were damp.

    Teitur, who had shrunk to little more than skin and bone, licked the wall gratefully, his tongue rasping along the rocky surface.

    "It's getting darker," Bera said. "We have a torch in here some – ah, here it is!" A cone of light cut into the darkness and Bera gasped. "Are these troll drawings?"

    Karl had Loki ask the question.