The drop on the far side of the saddle was slight, no more than ten yards in a long slope. At the bottom of the slope lay a flat oval snow-covered space that Mariarta knew was the first lake, the frozen one. Beyond lay Lai da Almas. Even under this dull sky, it lay blue as a sapphire in a story, pear-shaped. The cold wind ruffled its surface, in which cakes and lumps and one great hill of ice floated silently. The far side of the lake ran against the side of the great glacier, which was still mostly hidden by the remaining upward slope to be climbed. But over the lake, the glacier’s side hung out in a massive slanting half-roof of milky and crystalline ice in stripes, sixty feet high or more, the water lapping at the bottom of it.
They made their way downslope, skirting the frozen lake on the right, and were passing the shore of Lai da Almas when they heard a sudden sound like a waterfall. Grugni shied, backing away from the lakeside; Mariarta swallowed, not knowing what terrible thing might be about to happen—and then saw. The biggest iceberg floating in that lake was leaning toward them, bowing in their direction. Mariarta groped for her bow, spanned it, brought it up. The pointed berg bowed like the head of some huge beast—then upended itself in the water, showing, instead of the white “head” crusted with sun-pitted ice and new snow, its bottom side, smaller, rounded, and perfectly crystalline blue, like a floating gem. Water rushed down, streaming; waves spread from the berg as it settled, all the smaller cakes of ice bouncing and dancing as the waves passed. From the ice cakes at the edges of the lake came a soft, musical clunking sound; a sound that, if you heard it at a distance, might have been made by the bells of drowned churches...
Mariarta breathed out, patted Grugni. Off to the left, where the Eggishorn peak fell off steeply, there was a sort of rough stairway of blocks of ice and table-stones, ground together crookedly against the mountainside. Fifteen minutes’ climbing and they were on top.
A mighty road of torn and tumbled ice, three-quarters of a mile wide, climbed in great curves for miles steadily north-eastward, sloping between lesser peaks until it flattened out in a great round basin a mile across. Down to this basin flowed five more glaciers from the shoulders of the three great peaks ahead. Furthest, a black mountain, hunched, its top bare of snow, crouched the Ogre: nearer, the Monk brooded, hooded in white above the great forked spur it sent southward. Then, nearest, joined to the Monk by a snow-piled saddle that fed the middle glacier, rose the Maiden herself; two lesser spurs and an uprearing central peak, a lifted head, proud, cool, the kind of mountain that left you certain it was watching you. From the three peaks to where Mariarta and Grugni stood, the ice flowed down in a tremendous motionless river, scored with long deep lines following the curves of its path; a great white many-laned road, full of death for the unwary.
Mariarta swallowed in the cold wind and nudged the stag. He shook his head and stamped; but he went forward.
The morning went by, and afternoon passed, while they made their way up the glacier. It was, Mariarta thought, about eight miles from Lai da Almas to the foot of the Maiden, where the five lesser glaciers met. But this was nothing like traveling eight miles on a road. Any glacier’s surface was a wrack of ice and torn-up stones, new snow and old, piles and cones of old dirt, crevasses of all depths. But as this glacier was larger than any Mariarta had seen, so its boulders and ice-chunks and towers were huger, some the size of houses; and the width and depth of the biggest crevasses horrified her. There was no question that whole churches could be dropped into them. Lesser crevasses Grugni leapt with little trouble. There was nothing to do with the greatest ones but follow them sideways to find a narrow spot where they could be crossed by jumping or by some old snowbridge—then try to go further northward before having to start working east or west again. Going more than six feet in a straight line without having to go sideways was an event.
They stopped in mid-afternoon, four miles along. Mariarta fed Grugni, looking with concern toward where the five glaciers met at the Maiden’s foot. The weather was clearing, the grey cloud tattering away to show the luminous blue behind: from the Maiden’s head the wind, blowing northward, streamed out a long veil of vapor that thickened into opacity, thinned away to nothing. It was not a good sign.
Grugni nuzzled her. “Are we great idiots?” Mariarta said to it, rubbing its flank. “Me for hunting and hunting—you for following me—” She sighed. “But you at least can take care of yourself if something happens to me....” Mariarta looked at the dreadful height of the Maiden, robed all in white except, here and there, for the bare stone of some jutting precipice too sharp and terrible to hold even the wettest snow. The sun came out, and the whiteness became blinding; glorious, but unbearably so, a pain to the eyes.
Mariarta put her blindfold on, and spent a few minutes trying to make something similar for the stag; but the cloth irked it, and it shook it off, blinking and tearing. “All right,” Mariarta said. “I just hope you don’t miss your step....”
They went on, Grugni picking his way, sometimes leaping, sometimes standing at the edge of a crevasse, blinking and tearing in the light as he judged his chances. More than once Mariarta reined him back instead and urged him along the edge of the crevasse, the long way. It was a relief when the sun finally slipped behind the Aletschhorn peak to the west.
An hour later Mariarta dismounted, weary with the tension of the ride, and stretched. They stood in the middle of that great meeting-place of glaciers, and all around them the mountains reared up, so tall they seemed to be leaning inward. The afternoon blue of the sky was shading toward evening, and the shadow of the westward mountains lay blue and cool over the glacier.
Mariarta stood still and listened. All day the glacier had been talking to itself, especially when the sun was on it—the chuckle of water, far below their feet, the creak of ice loosening in the warmth when the sun came out; and other less-understood sounds—hisses, moans, bubbling noises. Now the noises were louder, and stranger. The blue mountain-shadow crept across to the mountains on the far side, and the moaning was no more an occasional thing, but constant. Many voices, high and low, could be heard; some crying regularly, as if in the grip of an old, unrelenting pain, others silent a while, then crying out loud and terrible, sobs mixed with moans and strangled cries. Words were muttered or shouted, but in no language Mariarta understood. All the souls.... Mariarta shuddered. This was no place to spend the night.
The sunlight was dwindling, slipping toward the last crest of the Maiden, the mountain’s shadow slipping up the walls of the Monk and Ogre, drowning the long serrated wall of stone and snow to Mariarta’s right in a flood of blue. Nothing moved anywhere but that shadow; nothing spoke but those voices. Ahead of Mariarta, where the glacier gave way to the frozen firn-snow that fed it, was a great expanse of unbroken whiteness, leading up the mountain peaks to the few barren ridges or thorns of stone. Here and there were a few holes in the firn, pits where some crevasse’s old snow-bridge had suddenly fallen in, opening a wound in the smooth whiteness. Holes and snow together were drowned in that deepening blue, a reflection of the twilight settling chill over everything—
—everything but one snow-rimmed crevasse some ways under the saddle between the Monk and the Ogre. That was a paler blue than the rest. Mariarta got some more grain out of her pack and fed it to Grugni in her hands, watching that crevasse. While the shadows deepened, while the color of the sky became the color of the shadows filling this great mountain-rimmed bowl of ice, and the last outline of fire slipped away from the Maiden and the other mountains further westward, that crevasse kept the paler-blue color of a depth seen during the day. As the dark grew, that brightness remained, becoming stronger by contrast.
“That has to be it,” she said to the stag. He turned to follow her gaze as she wiped her hands clean. “Has to be.”
Grugni looked at the sky, then looked pointedly at his saddle, and at Mariarta.
Mariarta laughed through her shivering. She mounted up, and they made for the slope of the Monk.
Th
e snow was frozen hard, and once the slope became acute, there was no simply walking it, any more than you might walk up a wall. Mariarta had to repeatedly use her hunter’s walking stick to break that crust, opening a small hole which she would then stamp deeper. All this in deepening dark—putting one foot in the new-punched step, bringing the second to rest in the last one made, while behind her Grugni performed the same operation, nervously, with four feet rather than two. Mariarta’s heart was thumping with fear of what they might be about to find, fear of not finding it, fear of slipping. Her muscles twitched with fatigue. Mariarta tried to swallow, couldn’t for the dryness of her mouth, kept going; one step, the next, the next—
—and she pitched forward as the stick went its whole length through the crust she had slammed it on. Mariarta gasped and wavered forward. Something grabbed her by the neck of her jacket, hard, so that the front of her throat rammed into the collar-fastening and she choked. Mariarta punched another hole closer to her feet, found firm surface, used it to push herself upright again, gasping. Grugni let her go, looking over her shoulder to where the stick had gone in. From just ahead of the hole, in darkness, came a faint tinkling sound that Mariarta knew: icicles, dislodged, falling. Then surprisingly, soft, sounding distant, several small splashes.
Cautiously, Mariarta used her stick to chip away at the snow overhanging the edge of the crevasse. It fell away with more chiming of dislodged icicles, raining into that dark open space beneath them: after a pause came more splashes.
The opening stretched for many feet to either side, concealed by one of those wind-carved snow cornices which sometimes piled against such an opening. The actual edge was barely a forearm’s length in front of Mariarta’s feet, and the crevasse itself fell away straight down in a wall of frozen snow and faint blue ice, as if someone had split the mountainside with a giant’s axe. The crevasse’s far side was a hundred feet away; beyond it the snow lay untroubled, straight to the Monk’s summit, a thousand feet higher.
The ice inside the crevasse shone with that faint blueness, like a thick-glassed lamp lit from far within. The bottom of the crevasse could not be seen: only the great smooth ice-wall, vanishing into the darkness...
Mariarta reached sideways with her stick, dislodged another couple of icicles. Chiming, they fell. One breath...two...then, softly, came the splash.
“Well?” she said softly.
Grugni moaned.
“I don’t see what else we can do,” Mariarta said. “What I can do. Look, brother, go free: you needn’t—”
Grugni snorted at her, and glared.
She laughed, and hugged him. “To the right, then,” she said, “and I’ll go left, so we won’t foul each other going.” She turned and spent a moment seeing to the saddle’s rigging and the fastenings of her pack with her bow and so forth. When everything was as tight as she could make it, she faced the crevasse, trembling. What if the water’s not deep enough, her mind started screaming, what if—
She jumped.
The air tore at her clothes, her body flailed in terror. Then came the splash, and the shock, greater than the impact or losing the air, of finding the water was warm. The thunder of another splash came from right beside her as Mariarta broke surface, gasping and choking more on fear than water. She whipped her hair out of her eyes—her scarf had come off—and started to dogpaddle, staring around her desperately in the dimness. All around her the walls of ice came down, and dimly, through them, that blue light gleamed. Behind Mariarta, Grugni’s head broke surface. He blew water out of his nostrils and made past Mariarta for something she couldn’t see.
She followed. Grugni heaved his shoulders out of the water in a rush, finding bottom. Mariarta stubbed one foot on a submerged ledge, staggered onto it, and lurched after Grugni. They came onto a shingle of scored stones, gravel, and the powdery “flour” of stone one sees at the bottom of glacier-fed rivers.
Mariarta stood gasping, and started to shiver in the cold air flowing from the mouth of the crevasse above them. Grugni shook himself all over, like a dog, spraying her.
Mariarta fumbled with her pack, hoping that the leather bag inside it with with her spare shirt and overshirt and breeches might not be wet right through. She found to her immense relief that the clothes in it, wrapping around the statue, were only wet in places. Hurriedly Mariarta stripped off her clothes and got into the dryish ones.
Warm air was coming into this hole from somewhere, certainly the cause of this pool of meltwater. Down the length of the strand where she and Grugni stood, Mariarta saw a low opening through the ice-wall off to the left, a place where the quality of the blue light in the ice changed, becoming both brighter and deeper.
She made for it. Grugni followed her, bending as she did to pass through the narrow opening. Past it lay a curving tunnel. Mariarta followed it, brushing her fingers against the wall as she went. The ice was not wet, though the air around them was still warm, and getting warmer.
The tunnel twisted, alternately climbing and slanting downward; sometimes widening, sometimes narrowing until there was barely room for Grugni’s body. Every now and then Mariarta thought she saw something buried in the ice of the walls—figures carved of ice themselves, then frozen in more; figures of men and women, animals, glowering many-toothed monsters, odd objects she didn’t recognize. Mariarta would squint into depth upon depth of blue ice until her eyes teared, trying to see one clearly, but to no avail. Turn away, though, and something would be looking at her, ice entombed within ice, almost invisible, but there, and disturbing. After a while Mariarta stopped looking at the walls.
They walked a long time without anything happening. The only changes were in the light coming from the ice—which slowly, slowly got brighter—and in a strange feeling of breathlessness that was coming over Mariarta, as if she couldn’t get a deep enough breath to do her good. Behind her, Grugni’s breath was coming heavy too. When the tunnel left room, Mariarta walked with one arm around his neck, trying to reassure him.
Mariarta lost her sense of how long they had been walking, though she thought they were heading more or less westward, toward the Maiden. The light kept brightening; the sound of groans and voices speaking in tongues got less, finally fading away altogether, to Mariarta’s relief. But breathing got harder, and the distress in Grugni’s eyes grew.
The tunnel through which they moved began to widen again, and its ceiling drew away. This unnerved Mariarta, for some reason, almost as much as her difficulty breathing—she was finding it hard to even walk straight. Gasping, she brought the bow out, and spanned it: then went on between the glowing walls of ice, Grugni pacing behind. The light in the walls seemed to shimmer off something directly ahead that moved and gleamed like falling water. As Mariarta walked toward it, she gasped, found no air at all—then tried to gasp again, found her lungs locked—
Behind her Grugni made a strangled noise and bolted past her, into the shimmering curtain; passed through, vanished. Mariarta could not speak or breathe, could think of nothing to do but follow him through the ripple of clear light. As she burst through, it trailed a shock of bitter cold over her. Half-blind with terror and lack of breath, she blundered a few steps further and rammed into Grugni: gasped one more time, but this time got a breath, and then another one, perfectly normally.
For a few moments she leaned on Grugni, trying to recover her composure. The darkness all around was a relief after the uncanny light of the tunnel. Darkness, at least, was something Mariarta expected to find inside a mountain. She glanced around, then gulped with surprise. The moon, hanging low above the tops of distant trees, was not something she had expected to find inside the mountain. And not a young crescent moon. Only last night she had come to Fiesch under the light of a fat bright moon just past its full....
And there was starlight. The Plough hung upside down in a configuration of spring midnight, with the great Triangle standing high. April, possibly... The ground here was scattered with pine needles; Grugni was browsing absently on a
branch of arolla pine, and the air was thick with its green fragrance. They stood at the head of a long clearing, running downslope.
Quietly she started to walk down the clearing; Grugni followed. That moon above them was brighter, as a crescent, than the gibbous moon had been the night before—so bright it hurt to look at it, and the old moon in the crescent’s arms glowed dust-silver, like an ember under ash. It wasn’t setting, despite its thinness and how low it hung above the trees.
The land fell away gently, the clearing leading into another, wider, angled toward the left. Everywhere else, the country seemed covered with pine forest. In one place Mariarta saw water gleaming faintly silver: a lake. But the oddest thing was how, in the distance, the forested country sloped up again, giving way to barren slopes of scree and stone, and then to pale jagged peaks that gleamed at the edges, their upper snows backlit by the burning moon.
They followed the clearing over soft turf, and came to its end, pausing at the spot where it joined the second. This too led downslope, but more gently, and the trees about it changed—less pine, more of the silver birch that one saw in the mountains below the snowline. As Mariarta went she saw the buds on the gracefully upheld branches swollen, but not a leaf showing yet. All those trees shone white in the moonlight and threw a tangle of sharp, delicate shadows on the moonlit ground, so that Mariarta and Grugni paced through a webwork of silver and black, surrounded by white half-lit tree-pillars—all in utter stillness, with never a breath of wind.
After a while the second clearing came to an end in a scatter of tall birches. Irresolute, Mariarta paused and gazed into the wood, while Grugni nibbled the tender buds. Mariarta found that she could see some of the birches deeper into the wood much more clearly than she should have been able to; the dark halves of their trunks seemed to hold a soft light in them, like the old moon in the new moon’s arms.