—I’ll do it, Loon said.—Just show me where they are, and you can leave.
Pippiloette frowned.—I will leave, he said after a long pause.—Understand that. You’ll be on your own. I’ll be headed east.
—Fine, I understand. That’s good enough. I wouldn’t expect any more.
—I should hope not.
The summer nights up on the steppe were so short that by the time Pippiloette had made his enquiries with friends around the festival, the eastern sky was growing light. Loon hurried past the bonfires and slipped back into their camp and sat down next to Heather, who was hunched over, drowsing by the little one’s bed. She started awake and sat up to look at him.
—I’m going after her, he said.
She hissed.—I don’t think you can do it on your own.
—I’m going. Take care of the baby. I’ll be careful.
—You’d better be, she said darkly.—And you’ll have to be more than that. It will take trickery, and patience. Go in by night when you get your chance.
—I will.
Suddenly she reached out and clutched his arm.—I don’t think you should go.
—I have to.
And he took off in the predawn gray to meet Pippiloette.
The eight eight festival site was south of an area that Pippiloette called Five Rivers, where several creeks met the Lir. The northers, Pippi told Loon as they hustled out of the festival camp, would almost certainly head up the valley of the Maya, a tributary of the Lir that ascended a gentle straight valley that trended north, often so much so that its river pointed right at the Spindle Star. At the head of the Maya there was an easy broad pass, and then a drop to a broad flat valley that sloped from east to west, where its river emptied into the great salt sea. On the northern side of this broad valley, Pippi said, was the big ice wall that covered everything to the north and in effect ended the world in that direction, just as the great salt sea ended it on its western side. The northers lived at this meeting of ice and land and the great salt sea.
—Does anything else live up there? What do they eat?
—The usual people. Salmon and caribou, geese and ducks, seals on the winter sea ice. Actually they eat very well. It’s just that it’s always cold.
—I couldn’t stand it.
—Don’t say that, Pippiloette said.—Never say aloud what you don’t want, didn’t your people teach you that one?
Loon didn’t reply. He hiked on the traveler’s swift heels, still feeling sick. His guts were knotting so badly they bent him as he walked. He wanted to run, but Pippi set the pace at a walk. A fast walk, it was true; Loon gritted his teeth and followed his guide, watching the ground closely in the predawn light of the steppe. It felt like it would have been easier to run.
Pippiloette breathed hard through his teeth as he walked, making a whistling sound that was like a little song, the song of himself walking at speed. A traveler provided himself with his own company, and Loon had seen a number of different ways they did that; some of them talked all the time, commenting on things no one from Wolf pack would have mentioned aloud; others sang, others beat their walking sticks together in between stabs into the earth. Luckily Pippi was not like any of those, he only had his little whistling, and he was proving to be fast, indeed very fast: Loon had to focus to match his pace.
They followed a riverside path for a long time, then a big tributary forced their trail upstream, to a bend in the tributary, and a ridge that bordered the Maya river valley on its west side. Up there a typical ridge trail broadened, and in the dawn light it was easy to hurry.
But now they had to be careful; the ridge was bare in the usual way, and in the gray they could see up it for a long way; meaning anyone up there could see down. It was crucial not to be spotted. And given that these people had stolen a woman, it was also possible they might leave behind some men to slow down any pursuit that might appear. A quick little ambush and no one would be following them anymore. So as the sky lightened, leaving only the morning star and a few others to prick the gray dome, they got off the ridge and hiked the border of trees and rocks on the Maya side of the ridge. This was hard ground to traverse fast, but they could slip between the little spruces and birches, and stay out of the willow tangles in the streambeds, and check the skyline of the ridge ahead as they proceeded upstream. It was safer, but slower, and so they pushed when they were concealed, to make up time.
They went very hard all that day, stopping only twice to sit and eat some food from their packs, and drink deeply from two of the little tributaries they crossed on fallen logs. Pippi ate fast. His long loping stride did not seem fast at any given moment, but covered ground with surprising speed. Over the course of the day Loon had seen that he had his own ways, cutting across the land in lines Loon would not have seen, but which revealed themselves when right under his feet to be slight trails.
—I’m a straightwalker, Pippi said when Loon asked about the trails.—I mean, I run a nice clean route. I don’t go straight at the land if it doesn’t make sense, but I don’t like extravagance. Ups and downs are usually not bad enough to justify a divagation. Anyway I look for the best way. I’m always looking to see if there’s a better way than the one I’ve used before, if I’m where I’ve gone before. And if I’m in new land, well, it’s the best thing there is, finding a good way.
—Do you remember everywhere you’ve ever been?
—Oh yes. Of course.
—And have you been this way before?
—Oh yes. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to go this fast. We’d have to track for sign. But as it is, I know where they’re going. And I’ve seen some signs that they’ve been by, and not so long ago. So we can catch up to them, hopefully. It would be ever so much better for your chances if you were to catch up to them when they’re on the move rather than in their encampment.
—Do they do this kind of thing often, then?
Pippi shrugged.—They fight the other northers from time to time. And there’s some wife stealing. As you have seen. Yes, there’s been bad blood up there for a while between some of those packs. Some say the great ice wall scares them and makes them angry, others that they get too cold to think straight. But they act hot, so I don’t know. They’re like otters.
—Ah, Loon said, feeling a shiver of fear. The indomitable otter, the murderous otter.—It seems strange to me.
Pippi looked over his shoulder at Loon, then turned and walked on.
—You come from a good pack. A good pack in a good pays. All the packs in the south are very friendly. But in some pays it’s not that way. The northers are tough. They fight for their lives up there.
—But why?
—What do you mean? There is no why. They like it. They like to fight, because the ones who survive think it’s not so bad. It gets them things, and up there maybe that matters.
Loon sighed, and tried to put the matter of the northers out of his mind. For the moment the task was to follow Pippi close and never slow the traveler down. Be his shadow, as one said when on the hunt. They would see what the situation was with Elga when they caught up to them. But thinking of her was even worse than thinking about these northern otter people. He felt his gut shrinking, and walked like a starved wolf, backbone hunched gingerly over its taut pain. He tried to watch the ground under Pippi’s feet and walk on it neatly.
Here in this long valley the soil was thin. In many places big broken flats of bare rock were furred in their cracks and low points by moss and ground-hugging willows. The rocks were covered with lichen that looked like splashes of paint. In the pass at the head of the Maya, a pale green lichen grew in big circles and then died from the inside out, clearing the rock of other lichens and leaving behind circles of clean pink stone. Briefly Loon glimpsed these things and then fell back into his fear.
He and Pippi crouched behind boulders among the pink and green splotches, inspecting the long prospect to the north. They saw nothing, and during the course of the rest of the day descended a
ridge into the big flat valley running west. Pippi wanted to cross this valley’s river at a ford he knew, which was a bit to the west, he said. He headed that way.
Near sunset Pippi stopped.—Let’s eat, then see if we can go on by moonlight. They won’t do that, so we might catch them.
He pulled his food bag out of his backsack and rooted in it. He had a gooseskin bag of marmot fat in there, and offered it to Loon, who fingered a little of the liquid fat into his mouth. Ordinarily marmot fat was so rich that no one ate it by itself; if you did it would make you sick. Usually it was heated into a broth, and morsels of meat dipped into it. Out on the hunt, however, it could be downed in little sips, and after a little wave of nausea passed through one, it would expand in the gut and give a pulse of energy after. Little sips, fist after fist; it was the main hunting food in certain packs, and Pippi must have come from one of those.
It was the twelfth day of the eighth month, and so the waxing moon hung in the eastern sky at sunset, lighting the land as the sunlight drained from it. Pippi led the way to a low ridge and hiked north on it. He was slower now, and as they came up the ridge to certain knobs he crouched behind boulders and kept off the skyline, looking up the ridge carefully, then down into the valley next to them. Loon did likewise, heart beating hard; but they never saw anything below. Most of the night passed, the moon was setting in the west; they both moved slowly in the cold air. Loon felt the long walk in his feet. But as the moon set and the night blackened accordingly, Pippi topped a knob on the ridge and sat down quickly.—Keep down.
Loon sat and rested.
—Look, Pippi said, gesturing ahead.—Their fire.
Far downvalley to the north was a tiny yellow flicker.
—Ah yes, Loon said. Hope and fear made a furious crosschop in him.—What now?
Pippi was silent for a long time. Then he said,—They will probably have a night watch. And the day is coming. I don’t think we can do it tonight without being seen. Tomorrow night, if we come on them earlier, we can study them in the moonlight, then move when the moon sets. So I think maybe we should get some sleep now, while we can, and follow them at a good distance tomorrow. Keep out of their sight while watching them.
Loon was weary enough to accede to this. They found flat spots among the rocks, looked for moss to make a quick bed. They both had fur wraps in their backsacks; Loon’s was made of muskrat pelts sewn together so the fur overlapped the sewing lines, Pippi’s was a flank of a bear. They rolled up into these wraps and were quickly asleep.
At sunrise Loon woke briefly; Pippiloette was sleeping. After a moment of welcoming the rays of the sun on his face, Loon fell asleep again.
He woke as he was being jerked to his feet. He was in the grasp of two big northers, with three more holding spears and surrounding them. Pippiloette was nowhere to be seen.
The northers held their spear tips right to him, a frightful thing, and then after he went still, they pulled them back and indicated with them that he was to walk north with them on the ridge trail, or be speared on the spot. Soon they joined a larger group.
Off they all went. The ridge dropped until it disappeared into a steppe. Here shallow streams looped across plains of grass and scree. Sometimes exposed flat rock was split in warp and weft fashion, so that the streams pooled and poured in rectangular patterns.
All that day they walked north over the flat stony plain. During their first stop they indicated that Loon was to give them everything on him except his clothes. Most of what he had was in his backsack, which they already had, but he gave them his belt with all the things in its pouch. They tied his hands behind his back with what felt like a leather braid. While they were doing that, he saw that Elga was there, standing among their women with her head and shoulders down. She turned her head and saw him, then turned her head away. He flinched and did likewise, feeling in agreement with her, that it might go better for them if their captors did not know they knew each other.
Although perhaps the northers were already aware. They spoke in a language that sounded almost right, but that Loon often lost the drift of. It resembled how the people of the steppes sounded, but Loon understood the steppe people better. These people didn’t reply to Loon when he spoke, and he thought they didn’t understand him very well either. Pippiloette would have been useful in such a situation, knowing so many tongues. What had happened to Pippi? Had the traveler betrayed him to the northers, given them a captive for something in return? That didn’t seem possible to Loon, but on the other hand, if Pippi had woken to their danger, or known of it before, why hadn’t he told Loon about it, so they could have both slipped away? Would it have been that much harder?
In the end he could only suppose that Pippi had been as surprised as he had been by the northers, but had waked just in time to slip off into the dark with his things. Certainly the traveler was quick.
In any case there was no real need for a translator, as the northers’ meaning was simple in the end: Go! Ora! And he went.
Possibly they would sacrifice him to their gods, maybe eat him; it was said such things happened in the north. A bad situation, a dreadful possibility.
But Elga was there, and she had seen him. She knew he had come after her. Whatever happened, they at least had that. So he determined to endure, to submit and be a good captive, and to ignore whatever indignities might be inflicted on Elga, if any. She spoke their language, he saw. Back at the festival they had said she was a runaway, that this was her original pack. She didn’t look anything like these men, being much taller, and so dark-skinned she was almost black against the snow. The northers were not that dark, though from a distance, against the snow, every person was dark. Not as black as a black horse, but more the color of mud, which was the point of the story of how Raven first made humans, by clawing up some mud into a ball. Thus they were mostly the brown of the winter shag of a bison. These northers were the lightest brown Loon had ever seen, and their eyes were heavily protected by folds of skin. Most of them were short and rounded, although part of the rounding was their thick clothing.
His captors were joined by some of their men carrying parts of a caribou they had killed and cut apart. That night they roasted the head first, and Loon could see that they liked the same parts that other people liked; tongue and brain, but more than that, the jowl, and the pads of fat behind the eyes. After that they roasted the brisket, then the ribs, then the pelvis.
Meanwhile Loon and the two other captives they had with them, neither of whom Loon understood, though they did not sound like the northers, were fed the lungs, the heart, and the entrails, although not the entrail fat, which was scraped off by the women, melted in long-handled antler spoons, and poured into pokes.
Loon chewed the hard muscle of the caribou heart with a dignified lack of expression, as if thinking of something else. It would not do to be among these people like an evil presence or a manifestation of bad luck. He had to accept his standing and perform it as well as he could. He saw how it was that captives helped to capture themselves, just as part of staying safe, of biding one’s time, of hoping.
They walked for day after day. The steppe first sloped down to a big river, which looped westward through a broad marsh and grassland, supporting big larch and alder thickets in the loops and along the riverbanks. At the river itself, a leather braid rope crossed the river, tied to tall spruce trees on each bank. There were log rafts floating in the shallows on each side. They got in one, looped two loops of rope over the big rope bridging the river, and pulled themselves across with their hands and arms, moving the loops forward one at a time. Their raft stretched the big rope downstream, so they had to paddle and pull hard as they approached the northern bank.
Back and forth they ferried themselves and their loads. At the end of the crossing, some of their men took both rafts across to the south side, left one, and came back together on the other.
After that they ascended the steppe on the northern side of the valley. For most of the second day
of this ascent, they passed through a strange forest, composed of the usual spruce, pine, larch, birch, and alder, but all of them only half as tall as they were to the south, and many tilted this way and that, as though the ground under them had collapsed. And apparently it had, for they passed big ponds sunken deep into moss beds, the water level well below the ground. Sometimes the banks of these sunken ponds were strangely white under the water line, turning the water a sky blue. There was ice down there. The soil and pine spill that made up the floor of this forest, and all the beds of moss and patches of muskeg, even the many ponds—all of them were resting on an underlayer of ice, it seemed, which here and there you could see down to. Whenever this underlayer of ice happened to melt, the trees growing on top of it tilted like festival drunkards. It was a strange forest to walk through.
On the upper edge of this drunken forest, the little trees gave way to low scattered ground willow and pine scrub, and they could see a long way ahead, to a range of hills. Then, as they topped a low ridge that headed northwest, and stayed on it, on a broad trail, they could see above the range of hills a white mass, a mass of ice overtopping all the hills in a stupendous white wall. Ice fingers fell down from this wall, filling the valleys between the hills under it, then splaying out onto the steppe in steep-walled ends, rounded like horse hooves. Some of these ice splays had overrun forests, so that crushed trees lay in a tangle under the bottom of the ice hooves. The big ice mass above looked like the ice caps in the mountains west of the Urdecha, but immensely bigger. Everywhere they could see to the north, ice ruled. Maybe it went north forever, in the same way Pippi had said that the land continued forever to the east, and the great salt sea to the west.
They came to a rise and could see down into a shallow valley under the hills and the ice, running toward the great salt sea in the west, which formed the mouth of the valley. Across the valley, under the hills, lofted columns of campfire smoke. As they got closer, Loon saw that there was a line of poles like bone needles, standing between the great salt sea and the smoke columns. Closer still he could see they were the dead trunks of immense trees, trees taller than any he had ever seen, and much taller than any growing up here. These barkless bare tree trunks were stuck upside down in the ground, their root balls at their tops all white and broken to the sky, with skulls hung on colored string from the outer tips of the roots. They were much like the dead trees at the eight eight, and something in that Loon found reassuring.