Jaelle held the pony’s head in her lap; the struggling animal quieted for an instant, and Camilla’s dagger swept down and swiftly severed the great artery in the neck. A few spurts of blood, a final struggle, and quiet. Camilla’s lips were set as she tried to brush away the blood from her riding-cape.
“Get the saddle off her. You have ridden stag-ponies before this. Put it on the chervine with the white face; he’s the gentlest and most trustworthy,” she said briskly, but Magda knew her sharpness concealed real concern. As Vanessa got the saddle off the swiftly freezing corpse (the pony’s leg had been crushed under a great rock, it was a miracle Jaelle had not been thrown and killed) Magda went to Jaelle, who looked almost stunned. She took a tube of cream and smeared it over the frozen tears on her freemate’s face. Mingled with the splashed blood of the pony, it looked grotesque, but it would keep her cheeks from frostbite.
“Are you hurt, breda?”
“No.” But Jaelle was limping, and leaned heavily on Magda. “Something hit me in the shins when the pony fell. I don’t think the skin’s broken, just a bruise.” But she threatened to cry again. “Oh, Dancer!” That was the horse’s name. “Damon gave her to me, the year Dori was born. When she was a colt she followed me around like a puppy. I broke her to the saddle myself. Oh, Magda, Damon will be so angry that I didn’t take better care of her.”
The words were meaningless; she was hysterical and Magda knew it. Jaelle was in shock; they were all in shock.
“Get the other saddles off, Camilla, and we’ll brew tea; Jaelle needs it after that. We all need it.”
At her urging, they moved upslope from the corpse of the pony, around which the kyorebni were already wheeling and fighting. Vanessa began to build a fire. Magda sat Jaelle down on a saddle load and surveyed what had once been a road. It had been all but obliterated above them. Nevertheless they were lucky to be alive, to have lost only one mount.
Magda pushed Jaelle down on a load. With the trail gone, there would have to be reconnaissance ahead. But neither Jaelle nor Cholayna was in much shape to forge on for their route. Tea was brewed and drunk; Camilla got the saddle off the dead horse, and tried to fit it on the smallest and most tractable chervine, but the difference in size and contour, even when the bony back of the chervine was padded with a small blanket, made it an almost impossible proposition.
“I have ridden chervines bareback in my day, but I don’t intend to try if there’s any alternative; that backbone-ridge always splits me in two,” Jaelle complained. With hot tea and some sweets from the packloads, some color had come back into her face, but her shin was skinned raw and bruised bone-deep.
“When we come to another village, we will try to trade for a riding-chervine, or at least a proper saddle for this one,” Camilla said. Magda finished her food, and stood up wearily.
“It’s up to us, Vanessa, to scout ahead and see whether there is a trail anywhere up there.” She scanned the map. It was past noon and the day was still fine, but long, narrow, hook-ended clouds were beginning to blow across the sky from the north, and Magda knew, they all knew, what that presaged: high wind at least, perhaps storm and deep snow.
The map showed something like a settlement or a village. She prayed it would not be a village like the last one they had discovered in emergency.
“Put your leg up and rest it while you can, Jaelle. Vanessa and I will scout ahead.” Cholayna, she thought, looked worse than Jaelle, her breath coming in heavy rasping wheezes. Yet there was no way to return, and no shelter near. They must simply go ahead and hope they found shelter. Magda was not superstitious, but it seemed that the pony’s death was an ill omen. They had had too much good luck on this long trek, and if that good luck had deserted them, who might be next?
Camilla said, “Let me go with you—”
“You’ve got to stay here and look after Cholayna and Jaelle. Vanessa is mountain-wise and I’m the most able-bodied one now.” Magda smiled faintly. She said, “You have the hard part; it’s going to be cold here, not moving. Get out sleeping bags and wrap up in them. At least Vanessa and I will keep warm moving.”
Jaelle said, “In all of Kindra’s old stories, it was made clear that the way to the secret city of the Sisterhood was guarded. I wonder if we are being tested.”
Cholayna said, wrapping a sleeping bag around herself and Jaelle, “I find it hard to believe that they have that much power. Weather, perhaps—I can just manage to believe that. Avalanche? No, I think perhaps that must be marked up to—” she interrupted herself with a prolonged paroxysm of coughing, finishing, half strangled, “to the general cussedness of things. Camilla, is there any more of your witches’ brew?”
Magda was oddly reluctant to turn her back even on the makeshift camp. It was her first experience with being roped up, but one look at the debris-strewn, rocky, icy surface above and below them convinced her to let Vanessa make her fast to the rope. They hugged the glacier, picking their way carefully along the heaps of loose rocks, at the imminent risk of breaking an ankle or worse. From the glacier above, walls of ice seemed to tilt forward and hang over them.
Magda was breathless with the altitude—they must, she thought, be somewhere above five thousand meters. The whole of the slope seemed to be strewn with newly fallen snow and old ice. There were several buttresses of rock widely separated by gullies filled to the brim with loose stone and unstable boulders. There seemed no hint of a trail, no suggestion that anyone had ever traveled this way before.
As they climbed, the whole of the great plateau was revealing itself. They were nearing the vast wall of ice which guarded the summit marked on the map; they crossed the gullies in rushes, wary of fresh rockfalls from above, seeking the safety of the natural stone buttresses which stood out from the slopes, clear of the danger.
“Too damned much loose rock and ice this way,” said Vanessa, pausing to wipe her face in the shelter of one of the huge boulders. “If we bring everybody up this way, we’re going to have to stay awfully close together, which probably means roping the horses and chervines and bringing them up in clusters. Not good. And I don’t like the look of that.”
She pointed, and Magda, already breathless, felt her heart stop in her throat. They were far to one side, and safe, but the great glacier, an overwhelming mass of tortured formations of ice frozen in the very act of toppling over, loomed high above the other slope, the very end of a great bed of ice sitting almost atop the summit they must cross.
Magda knew little of glaciers; the rock slope was a gentle gradient, but she knew that the ice was in slow, inexorable motion, moving, though imperceptibly, down the slopes they must somehow cross or climb. As the great masses of ice, under immeasurable pressure, reached the edge of the summit, they must break asunder and roar their way down into the valley. Such was the avalanche which had killed Jaelle’s pony and nearly taken Jaelle with it. How could they know how soon the next point of inequilibrium would be reached? Were their comrades even safe where they were now?
They hurried across another gully of broken stone and razor-sharp flakes of loose shale which cut at their boots. The sun had gone behind the thickening layer of cloud, and Magda, looking down, could only see a small reddish dot, the sleeping bag Cholayna had wrapped round herself and Jaelle. Looking upward and across the valley, they could see, on the next slope, a few rectangular grayish shapes.
“Now is that the village marked on the map, or is it just a cluster of stone blocks like these?” Magda wondered aloud.
“God knows; and I’m not in Her confidence,” Vanessa said. “But at the moment I’d take out a nice mortgage on my soul for a helicopter. I wonder if this might have been what Lexie saw from the plane?”
“No way of telling. And I don’t like the look of the sky,” Magda said. “If it is a village we’ll have to make directly for it. There’s nothing else that even looks like shelter, and I don’t like the idea of letting Cholayna spend another night in the open. Vanessa, I’m worried, really worried about he
r.”
“You think I’m not? We’d better pray that place is a village or settlement of some sort. I don’t think it’s what Lexie saw; it’s marked on the maps. But it looks a little too regular to be a rock formation. Anyway we’ve got to try for it. The way that sky looks, we have no choice. I don’t want to bivouac in that.”
“Who would?” Magda turned to descend the way they had come, but turned to look at Vanessa, who was standing at the very edge of the cliff in a way that made Magda’s arms and legs prickle with cramping apprehension.
Vanessa said in an undertone, “God, Lorne, just look at it. It makes the mountains of Alpha look like foothills. I was proud of collecting Montenegro Summit. I’ve never seen anything like this. No matter how this comes out, just the chance to see this—” She broke off, and looked at Magda.
She said softly, “You don’t understand at all, do you, Lorne? To you it’s just difficulties and dangers and hard travel and rough going, and you can’t even see it, can you?”
“Not the way you do, Vanessa,” Magda confessed. “I never wanted to climb mountains for their own sake. Not for the love of it.”
Unexpectedly, Vanessa reached out and put an awkward arm around her. “That’s really something. That you keep going, like this, when it doesn’t even mean anything to you. Lorne, I’m—I’m glad we’ve got to know each other. You’re—you’re what they always said you were.” Her cold lips brushed Magda’s cheek in a shy kiss. Abruptly, she turned away.
“We’d better get back down, and tell them what we found. If anything. I’d feel damned funny to climb all the way up to that cluster of gray stuff and find it was just a bunch of rotten old square rocks!”
“Funny isn’t exactly the word for what I’d feel,” Magda agreed, “but it’s the only halfway repeatable word for it.”
Going down was easier, though they picked their way carefully to avoid a fall. As it was, Vanessa stumbled and was saved by the rope from a long fall down a debris-strewn slide; putting out her hand to save herself she wrenched her wrist painfully.
The sky was wholly clouded over now, and a cutting wind had begun to blow; Magda was shivering, and halfway down the slope they stopped, sheltering behind one of the rock buttresses to dig out the emergency rations from their pockets and suck on honey-soaked dried fruit. Magda’s face felt raw in spite of the cream she had smeared on it. As the sky darkened it was harder to place their feet. How, in heaven’s name, were they going to bring horses and chervines, not to mention the ailing Cholayna, up this way? She had no chronometer, but it could not be so late in the day as that sky presaged. Did that mean one of the blizzards, roaring down out of the impassable north?
“How far away would you say that place was?”
“A few kilometers; if we could ride, a couple of hours, no more. Climbing, God only knows,” Vanessa said. “Maybe when we get past the bad part, we can put Cholayna on a horse and lead it across, at least.” She drew the strings of her hood closer around her face.
It seemed to Magda that the wind was growing fiercer, that it held the very smell of heavy snow. She told herself not to borrow trouble; things were bad enough as they were. As they approached the spot where they had left the others, her mind was tormented with sudden fears; suppose the campsite was deserted, Jaelle and Cholayna and Camilla gone, snatched into oblivion by the hand of the sorceresses who had perhaps led Lexie and Rafaella into some doom in these mountains…
But as they picked their way carefully down the last slope they could see a flash of orange against the rock and snow, Camilla’s old riding-cape, and the gleam of a campfire. Then they stumbled into the camp and Camilla thrust mugs of boiling tea into their hands; Magda collapsed on a spread sleeping bag. Nothing, it seemed, had ever tasted so good to her burning throat.
Revived a little by the hot drink, warmed (but not enough), she asked, “How is Cholayna?”
Jaelle tilted her head to where Cholayna was sleeping between piled sleeping bags and blankets. Even from where they sat Magda could hear the rasp of her breathing. Vanessa went and bent her head to listen to the sound at close quarters.
Camilla asked, “Well?”
“Not very well at all,” said Vanessa, tight-lipped. “There’s fluid in her bronchial passages; I don’t know enough to know if it’s spread to her lungs. But we’ve got to find shelter for her before very long. Let’s just pray that what we found will be shelter.”
And I didn’t want Vanessa to come. What would we have done without her?
Quickly they told what they had discovered, saddled up ponies and loaded the chervines, roping them together. Cholayna, rousing quickly from her light sleep, protested that she was able to walk with the rest, but they insisted she should ride and set her on her horse. Magda took the reins, and they started upward. For the first stretch, at least, they need not be roped up.
But a few hundred feet above the spot where they had camped after the avalanche, the rocks and ice were so loose under foot that Vanessa insisted on getting out the ropes and roping them all together.
“I’m sorry, Cholayna; you’ll have to get down. I don’t trust any horse’s footing here. If you could manage to ride a chervine—”
“No need of that.” Nevertheless, Cholayna clung to the chervine’s saddle-strap to haul herself along; it was the elderly female, the most tractable of all the animals, and although it whickered uneasily, it did not protest as Cholayna held tight. The other chervines followed their leader; the horses, too, had to be trusted to pick their own way over ice and rubble. Magda knew it would be a miracle if all the animals got across undamaged. Once Camilla’s foot slipped and only the taut-stretched rope kept her from rolling down the long rocky slope; she hauled herself to her feet, swearing breathlessly in a language Magda hardly understood.
“Hurt, Camilla?”
“Only shaken up.” She was favoring one foot, but there was nothing to be done about it here. Slowly, they forced their way up the long slope, under the lowering sky, pregnant with undelivered clouds of snow. It was deliberate, hard going; Magda, who had covered this upward route already once today, felt her knees would hardly hold her up; she heard her own breath deepen and roughen, whistling loudly in and out. Her head throbbed and her ears ached, but there was no longer any feeling in her face. She drew up her scarf over her nose in a rude mask, but the warm breath condensed and froze so that her face was soon covered in an ice-mask.
Her world reduced itself to this; one step, then another. Yet outside the little circle described by the sound of her own breathing, she was aware somehow of her companions, could feel the stab of pain in Jaelle’s bruised leg, the knife-edge of pain through Camilla’s foot every time she set it down, knew that the ankle Vanessa had hurt early in the trip was still paining her in this cold, felt the dull pain in Cholayna’s chest. She fought to shut it out, knowing that she could do nothing for the others except to hoard her own strength so that she needed no help from them. She knew that Vanessa was crying softly with weariness and pain. She too had climbed this route once already today.
Just one step and then another. Nothing outside this.
It was a long nightmare. They had been climbing forever and they would go on climbing forever. I will take ten more steps, she bargained with herself, and then I will give up. And at the end of ten steps; I will take ten more steps, only ten more, I will not think any farther than that. She could just manage, breaking it up into these little segments, carefully not thinking farther than this, seven, eight, nine, ten steps, then I will lie down and never get up again…
“Magda,” it was Vanessa’s voice, very soft. “Can you help Cholayna?” Looking up, outside the circle of her own preoccupation, she found that Cholayna had let go the chervine’s rein and sunk down in the snow. Vanessa was struggling with one of the horses, fighting to lead it over the rubble, and with one part of her brain Magda wondered why she bothered, while a small detached part of herself knew that if they lost any more horses they would never make it to
that village they had seen.
She made her way to Cholayna’s side, bent and took the woman by the arm.
“I’ll help you. Lean on me.”
Cholayna’s face was a mottled mess of cream and half-frozen pale patches against her dark skin, her eyes reddened and sunken in her face. Ice clung to loose strands of her hair. Her voice was only a harsh whisper.
“I’m never going to make it. I’m only holding you back. You others go on. Leave me here. No reason the rest of you shouldn’t get across. But I’m done, finished.”
Magda could feel, inside her own mind, the depth of Cholayna’s weary despair, and fought against making it part of herself.
“You’re only tired. Lean on me.” She bent to slip her arm under Cholayna’s shoulders. Part of her was angry, she had barely strength enough for herself, but the other part knew that this was a final struggle. “Look, we’re only a little way from the summit, you can ride from there.”
“Magda, I can’t… I can’t. I think I’m dying… ”
And for a moment Magda, looking at Cholayna, believed it; she half released Cholayna’s hand… then something, anger, a final spurt of adrenalin, flooded her with rage.
“Damn it, don’t you dare pull that on me! You bullied us into letting you come when I told you you couldn’t make it, I told you you couldn’t travel past Nevarsin, you wouldn’t let us send you back from there! Now you haul your stubborn old rear end up out of that snow, or I’ll kick you to the top myself! You’ve got to do it, I haven’t the strength to carry you, and the others are worse off than I am! Get up, damn you!” She heard herself, half incredulous. But the anger was flooding her to the point where she actually raised her arm to strike Cholayna.
Cholayna’s breathing rasped in and out for a moment, then she stirred, wearily. Magda held out a hand and Cholayna dragged herself upright, clinging to the outstretched arm for a moment. She said between her teeth, “If I had the strength I’d—” but the words evaporated in a spasm of heavy coughing. Magda put an arm round her.