The Plains of Passage

  Jondalar thought for a moment, visualizing what she described; then he smiled. "Ayla! I think it will work. By the Great Mother, I think it will work! What a wonderful idea! Whatever made you think of it?"

  "That's the way Iza made boots for me. That's how the people of the Clan make foot-coverings. Hand-coverings, too. I'm trying to remember if that's the kind Guban and Yorga wore. It's hard to tell, because after a while they shape to your feet."

  "Will that hide be enough?"

  "It should be. While I've got the fire going, I'll finish preparing this remedy for the cuts, and maybe some hot tea for us. We haven't had any for a couple of days, and we probably won't again until we get down off this ice. We're going to have to conserve fuel, but I think a cup of hot tea would taste very good right now."

  "I think you're right!" Jondalar agreed, smiling again and feeling good.

  Ayla very carefully examined each hoof on both horses, trimmed away the rough places, applied her medication, then tied the mammoth-hide horse boots on them. They tried to shake off the strange foot-coverings at first, but they were tied on securely, and the horses quickly got used to them. Then she took the set she had made for Wolf and tied them on. He chewed and gnawed at them, trying to get rid of the unfamiliar encumbrances, but after a while he stopped fighting them, too. His oversize wolf feet were in much better shape.

  The next morning they loaded a slightly lighter pack on the horses; they had burned some of the brown coal, and the heavy mammoth hide was now on their feet. Ayla unloaded them when they stopped for a rest, and she took on a little more of the load herself. But she couldn't begin to carry what the sturdy horses could. In spite of traveling, their hooves and feet seemed much improved by that night. Wolf's seemed perfectly normal, which was a great relief for both Ayla and Jondalar. The boots provided an unexpected benefit: they acted as a kind of snowshoe when there was deep snow, and the large, heavy animals didn't sink in as far.

  The pattern of the first day held, with some variation. They made their best time in the morning; the afternoons brought snow and wind of varying intensity. Sometimes they were able to travel a little farther after the storm, other times they had to stay where they stopped in the afternoon through the night, and on one occasion for two days, but none of the blizzards were as fierce as the one they had encountered the first day.

  The surface of the glacier wasn't quite as flat and smooth as it had appeared on that first glistening day in the sun. They floundered through deep drifts of soft powdered snow piled high from localized snowstorms. Other times, where driving winds cleared the surface, they crunched over sharp projections and slid into shallow ditches, their feet catching in narrow spaces and their ankles twisting under them on the uneven surface. Instant squalls blew down without warning, the fierce winds almost never let up, and they felt constant anxiety about unseen crevasses covered over with flimsy bridges or overhanging cornices of snow.

  They detoured around open cracks, especially near the center, where the dry air held so little moisture that the snows were not heavy enough to fill the crevasses. And the cold, the deep, bitter, bone-chilling cold, never let up. Their breath froze on the fur of their hoods around their mouths; a drop of water spilling from a cup was frozen before it touched the ground. Their faces, exposed to raw winds and bright sun, cracked, peeled, and blackened. Frostbite was a constant threat.

  The strain was beginning to tell. Their responses were beginning to deteriorate, and so was their judgment. A furious afternoon storm had held on into the night. In the morning, Jondalar was anxious to get under way. They had lost much more time than he had planned. In the bitter cold, it took longer for the water to heat, and their supply of burning stones was dwindling.

  Ayla was going through her backpack; then she began searching around her sleeping fur. She couldn't remember how many days they had been on the ice, but as far as she was concerned, it was too many, she thought as she searched.

  "Hurry up, Ayla! What's taking you so long?" Jondalar snapped.

  "I can't find my eye protectors," she said.

  "I told you not to lose them. Do you want to go blind?" he exploded.

  "No, I don't want to go blind. Why do you think I'm looking for them?" Ayla retorted. Jondalar snatched her fur up and shook it vigorously. The wooden goggles fell to the ground.

  "Be careful where you put them next time," he said. "Now let's get moving."

  They quickly packed up their camp, but Ayla sulked and refused to talk to Jondalar. He came over and double-checked her lashings, as he usually did. Ayla grabbed Whinney's rope and started out taking the lead, moving the horse away before Jondalar could examine her pack.

  "Don't you think I know how to pack a horse myself? You said you wanted to get moving. Why are you wasting time?" she flung back over her shoulder.

  He had just been trying to be careful, Jondalar thought angrily. She doesn't even know the way. Wait until she wanders around in circles for a while. Then she will come asking me to lead, he thought, falling in behind her.

  Ayla was cold and fatigued from the grueling march. She plunged ahead, careless of her surroundings. If he wants to hurry so much, then we'll hurry, she thought. If we ever get to the end of this ice, I hope I never see a glacier again.

  Wolf was nervously racing between Ayla in the lead and Jondalar following behind. He didn't like the sudden change in their positions. The tall man had always started out ahead before. The wolf struck out ahead of the woman, who was trudging blindly on, oblivious to everything except the miserable cold and her injured feelings. Suddenly he stopped directly in front of her, blocking her way.

  Ayla, leading the mare, went around him. He ran back around and stopped in front of her again. She ignored him. He nudged at her legs; she shoved him aside. He ran ahead a short distance, then sat down whining to get her attention. She plodded past him. He raced back toward Jondalar, pranced and whined in front of him, then bounded a few steps toward Ayla, whining, then advanced toward the man once more.

  "Is something wrong, Wolf?" Jondalar said, finally noticing the animal's agitation.

  Suddenly he heard a terrifying sound, a muffled boom. His head shot up as fountains of light snow filled the air ahead.

  "No! Oh no!" Jondalar cried out in anguish, running forward. When the snow settled, a lone animal stood on the brink of a yawning crack. Wolf pointed his nose straight up and wailed a long, desolate howl.

  Jondalar threw himself flat on the ice at the edge of the crevasse and looked over the edge. "Ayla!" he cried in desperation. "Ayla!" His stomach was a hard knot. He knew it was useless. She would never hear him. She was dead, at the bottom of the deep crack in the ice.

  "Jondalar?"

  He heard a small frightened voice coming from far away.

  "Ayla?" He felt a rush of hope and looked down. Far below him, standing on a narrow ice ledge that hugged the wall of the deep trench, was the terrified woman. "Ayla, don't move!" he commanded. "Stand perfectly still. That ledge could go, too."

  She's alive, he thought. I can't believe it. It's a miracle. But how am I going to get her out?

  Inside the icy chasm, Ayla leaned in toward the wall, clinging desperately to a crack and a projecting piece, petrified with fear. She had been plodding through snow halfway to her knees, lost in her own thoughts. She was tired, so tired of it all: tired of the cold, tired of fighting her way through deep snow, tired of the glacier. The trek across the ice had drained her energy, and she was bone-weary with exhaustion. Though she struggled on, her only thought was to reach the end of the massive glacier.

  Then she was startled out of her brooding thoughts by a loud crack. She felt the sickening sensation of the solid ice giving way beneath her feet, and she was suddenly reminded of an earthquake many years before. Instinctively she tried to reach for something to hold on to, but the falling ice and snow offered nothing. She felt herself dropping, nearly suffocating in the midst of the avalanching snow bridge that had collapsed beneath her feet, an
d she had no idea how she had ended up on the narrow ledge.

  She looked up, afraid to move even that much, for fear the slightest shift in weight would jar her precarious support loose. Above, the sky looked almost black, and she thought she saw the faint glimmerings of stars. An occasional sliver of ice or puff of snow dropped belatedly from the edge, finally letting go of its precarious hold and showering the woman with fragments on the way down.

  Her ledge was a narrow jutting extension of an older surface long buried by new snows. It rested on a large jagged boulder that had been torn from solid rock as the ice slowly filled a valley and overflowed down the sides of an adjacent one. The majestically flowing river of ice accumulated great quantities of dust, sand, gravel, and boulders that it gouged out of hard rock, which were slowly carried toward the faster-moving current at the center. These moraines formed long ribbons of rubble on the surface as they moved along the current. When the temperature eventually rose enough to melt the massive glaciers, they would leave evidence of their passage in ridges and hills of unsorted rock.

  While she was waiting, afraid to move and holding herself very still, she heard faint mutterings and muted rumblings in the deep icy cavern. She thought at first that she imagined them. But the mass of ice was not as solid as it seemed on the hard surface above. It was constantly readjusting, expanding, shifting, sliding. The explosive boom of a new crack opening or closing at some distant point, on the surface or deep within the glacier, sent vibrations through the strangely viscous solid. The great mountain of ice was riddled with catacombs: passages that came to an abrupt halt, long galleries that turned and twisted, dropped off or soared upward; pockets and caves that opened invitingly, then sealed shut.

  Ayla began to look around her. The sheer walls of ice glowed with a luminous, unbelievably rich blue light that had a deep undertone of green. With a sudden jolt, she realized she had seen that color before, but in only one other place. Jondalar's eyes were the same rich, stunning blue! She longed to see them again. The fractured planes of the huge ice crystal gave her the sensation of mysterious flitting movement just beyond her peripheral vision. She felt that if she turned her head quickly enough she would see some ephemeral shape disappearing into the mirrored walls.

  But it was all illusion, a magician's trick of angles and light. The crystal ice filtered out most of the red spectrum of the light from the burning orb in the sky, leaving the deep blue-green, and the edges and planes of the tinted, mirrored surfaces played games of refraction and reflection with each other.

  Ayla glanced up when she felt a shower of snow. She saw Jondalar's head extending beyond the rim of the crevasse, then a length of rope came snaking down toward her.

  "Tie the rope around your waist, Ayla," he called, "and make sure you tie it well. Let me know when you're ready."

  He was doing it again, Jondalar said to himself. Why did he always recheck what she did when he knew she was more than capable of doing it herself? Why did he tell her to do something that was perfectly obvious? She knew the rope had to be tied securely. That was why she had gotten angry and stomped off ahead and was now in this dangerous predicament ... but she should have known better.

  "I'm ready, Jondalar," she called, after wrapping it around her and fastening it with many knots. "These knots won't slip."

  "All right. Now hang on to the rope. We're going to pull you up," he said.

  Ayla felt the rope grow taut, then lift her from the ledge. Her feet were dangling in air as she felt herself slowly rising toward the edge of the crevasse. She saw Jondalar's face, and his beautiful, worried blue eyes, and she gripped the hand he held out to her to help her over the rim. Then she was on the surface again, and Jondalar was crushing her in his arms. She clung to him as tightly.

  "I thought you were gone for sure," he said, kissing and holding her. "I'm sorry I yelled at you, Ayla. I know you can load your own packs. I just worry so much."

  "No, it's my fault. I shouldn't have been so careless with my eye protectors, and I should never have rushed ahead of you like that. I'm still not familiar with ice."

  "But I let you, and I should have known better."

  "I should have known better," Ayla said at the same time. They smiled at each other at the inadvertent matching of words.

  Ayla felt a tug at her waist and saw that the other end of the rope was fastened to the brown stallion. Racer had pulled her out of the crevasse. She fumbled to untie the knots around her waist while Jondalar held the sturdy horse close by She finally had to use a knife to cut the rope. She had made so many knots and had pulled them so tight—and they'd grown even tighter as she was lifted out—that they were impossible to untie.

  Detouring around the crack that had so nearly proved disastrous, they continued their southwesterly course across the ice. They were growing seriously concerned as their supply of burning stones was becoming depleted.

  "How much longer before we reach the other side, Jondalar?" Ayla asked in the morning after melting water for them all. "We don't have many burning stones left."

  "I know. I had hoped that we would be there by now. The storms have caused more delay than I planned on, and I'm getting worried that the weather will turn while we are on the ice. It can happen so fast," Jondalar said, scanning the sky carefully as he spoke. "I'm afraid it may be coming soon."

  "Why?"

  "I got to thinking about that silly argument we had before you fell into the crevasse. Remember how everyone was warning us about the evil spirits that ride ahead of the snow-melter?"

  "Yes!" Ayla said. "Solandia and Verdegia said they make you feel irritable, and I was feeling very irritable. I still do. I am so sick and tired of this ice, I have to force myself to keep going. Could that be what it is?"

  "That's what I was wondering. Ayla, if it's true, we have to hurry. If the foehn comes while we're up on this glacier, we may all fall into the cracks," Jondalar said.

  They tried to ration the peaty brown stones more carefully, drinking their water barely melted. Ayla and Jondalar started carrying their waterbags full of snow underneath their fur parkas so their body heat would melt enough for them and Wolf. But the conservation wasn't enough. Their bodies couldn't melt enough for the horses that way, and when the last of the burning stones were gone, there was no water for the horses. She had run out of feed for them, too, but water was more important. Ayla noticed them chewing ice, but it worried her. Both dehydration and eating ice could chill them so that they wouldn't be able to maintain sufficient body heat to keep warm on the freezing cold glacier.

  Both horses had come to her looking for water, after they had set up their tent, but all Ayla could do was give them a few sips of her own water and break up some ice for them. There had been no afternoon storm that day, and they had kept going until it was almost too dark to see. They had traveled a good distance, and should have been glad, but she felt strangely uncomfortable. She had trouble getting to sleep that night. She tried to shrug it off, telling herself she was just worried about the horses.

  Jondalar lay awake for a long time, too. He thought the horizon was looking closer, but he was afraid it was wishful thinking and didn't want to mention it. When he finally dozed off, he awoke in the middle of the night to find Ayla wide awake, too. They got up at the first faint shift from black to blue, and they started out with stars still in the sky.

  By midmorning the wind had shifted, and Jondalar was sure his worst fears were about to materialize. The wind wasn't so much warm as less cold, but it was coming from the south.

  "Hurry, Ayla! We've got to hurry," he said, almost breaking into a run. She nodded and kept up with him.

  By noon the sky was clear, and the brisk breeze blowing in their faces was so warm that it was almost balmy. The force of the wind increased, enough to slow them down as they leaned into it. And its warmth blowing across the cold surface of the ice was a deadly caress. The drifts of dry powdery snow became wet and compact, then turned to slush. Little puddles of water began t
o form in small depressions on the surface. They became deeper and took on a vivid blue color that seemed to glow out of the center of the ice, but the woman and man had no time, or heart, to appreciate the beauty. The horses' need for water was easily satisfied, but it gave them little comfort now.

  A soft mist began to rise, clinging close to the surface; the driving, warm south wind carried it away before it could get too high. Jondalar was using a long spear to feel the way ahead, but he was still almost running, and Ayla was hard-pressed to keep up. She wished she could jump on Whinney's back and let the horse carry her away, but more and more cracks were opening in the ice. He was almost certain the horizon was closer, but the low-lying fog made distances deceptive.

  Little rivulets began streaming over the surface of the ice, connecting the puddles and making footing treacherous. They splashed through the water, feeling its icy chill penetrate, then squish through their boots. Suddenly, a few feet in front of them, a large section of what had seemed to be solid ice fell away, exposing a yawning gulf. Wolf yipped and whined, and the horses shied away, squealing with fear. Jondalar turned and followed the edge of the crack, looking for a way around.

  "Jondalar, I can't keep going. I'm exhausted. I've got to stop," Ayla said with a sob, then started crying. "We'll never make it."

  He stopped, then went back and comforted her. "We're almost there, Ayla. Look. You can see how close the edge is."

  "But we almost walked into a crevasse, and some of those puddles have become deep blue holes with streams falling into them."

  "Do you want to stay here?" he said.

  Ayla took a deep breath. "No, of course not," she said. "I don't know why I'm crying like this. If we stay here, we'll die for sure."

  Jondalar worked his way around the large crack, but as they turned south again, the winds were as strong as any from the north had been, and they could feel the temperature rising. Rivulets turned into streams crisscrossing the ice and grew into rivers. They worked their way around two more large cracks and could see beyond the ice. They ran the last short distance, and then they stood looking down over the edge.