Then the ice-hooks were pounded in, a slender braided line knotted to them – and a second and third Shrike went hand over hand above two thousand feet of nothing… and beckoned first Richard (his weight sagging the thin rope), then Patience, then Errol – who went easily as the Shrikes had gone, unworried – then Nancy (while Baj closed his eyes). Then his turn.
… Slowly, through this second day, Baj became almost as interested as afraid. The Shrikes' every move was education in ice climbing. Consideration of the varying quality of the ice above all – rich blue-green to crumbling gray – the use of hatchet picks, roping and belaying, the use of muk-boot spikes to kick tiny steps to stand on… and occasionally even their javelins used butt to point as temporary bridging over vacancy. It was interesting even during exhaustion, muscle-wrenching effort, and fear of falling – and all the more interesting since only that education kept them alive.
Baj learned, and saw the others learning – though of course as children, compared to the Shrikes' veteran certainties.
And there were odors of ice – some clear as clear water, others dank as spoiled springs. Those odors, and the bitter cold that struck like willow switches, cutting at any exposed skin while the wind whistled, moaned, hissed past them on vertical pitches, tugging at their heavy packs to pull them out… away from their fragile holds into the perfect freedom of falling.
… Baj spent considerable effort, through a brutally effortful day, in avoiding looking down – but couldn't help it, sometimes. Then, the sunlit gulf, the sheer down-diminishing face of the Wall – shining in places blinding white, in others flashing reflected blues, greens, and diamond clears from broken battlements infinitely greater than any raised in stone by men or Persons – these all fell away beneath him to a singing emptiness that drew him down.
He avoided looking beneath them, and warned Nancy – climbing just above – against it.
Panting at a place, clinging with her hatchet-points, she'd turned her fur-hooded head and said, "I close my eyes." Then, "Oh, Baj… be careful."
And he was – was careful for both of them, constantly considering how he might catch her, reach out and grip her arm if she fell past him. Catch, hold her, and let go never,
… The notion of "catching" did suffer, as evening came after what seemed a week-long day. Baj – hugging a cracked ice-face (kissing it, nearly) – found it very difficult to raise either arm, very difficult to close his fists. His arms burned from fingers to shoulders; his left shoulder ached. The wounded cheek and side of his head felt as if snagged with fish-hooks.
The pain a blessing in a way, since it kept great heights from his thoughts.
Still, Baj missed the day, when the dark came down.
Higher on the Wall, the second night was worse than the first had been, the wind rumbling to crash against the ice cliffs like surf. Twice, almost asleep, Baj lurched alert in terror, sure a flailing anchor-line had worked free… and the fall begun.
Nancy had whispered in his ear, her breath the only warmth in an everything savagely cold. "Even if we die here, we're together."
"We won't die here, sweetheart," Baj said, and kissed her, as if saying and kissing must make it so.
… By morning light, it was seen that Henry-Shrike had fallen. Only unraveled webbing and a swaying guyline's end – worn through where it had rubbed and rubbed on an ice edge in the dark – were left behind.
The smiling Shrikes were smiling no more, silent as they hurried their weary charges to climb… And as he began hacking, kicking his way up, just beneath Nancy – no tribesman helping him now – Baj tried to avoid imagining that death, the shocked wakening at the line's parting, then the sickening long fall… down and down through darkness so complete there'd be no knowing when the impact would come.
If a Shrike could fall – so could any.
Baj minded his hand-holds (kept mittened when he could), and used his hatchets very carefully, left and right, to pick his way up – all the while watching Nancy climbing above him… intending to catch her, or fall with her if that proved impossible.
For whatever reason – perhaps believing Henry-Shrike was sacrifice for all of them – he paid less attention to his own mortality, and found he was climbing better, discovering rhythms to it, an odd affinity for the ice and its different sounds when his steel struck it, ringing or rotten dull… Their height now was such that it no longer seemed a height at all, but a fixed emptiness with only the rule of not-to-fall.
They'd hardly slept, been eaten by exhaustion and fear the day before – fear confirmed by Henry's death – but Baj saw that he and the others were climbing better, learning, as Warm-time copybooks had it, "in a hard school."
…By sun-straight-up, Patience, having tried the morning air – and sunk slowly away, down and down – had struggled back up to them, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed in effort – and swung in to stay. From then, her scimitar strapped to her pack, she climbed fairly well, with a Shrike beside her… Errol, of course, still scrambled the ice like a squirrel a tree, as if he'd been born to it.
Sun-warmed, the Wall began shedding its great pieces, and those murmured, whistled, moaned past as they fell. The Shrikes, their brief mourning apparently over, sang along with those missiles' sounds… made little songs of them, dying away as the sounds of falling died away. So the long day was passed in great effort and risk, to those cheerful tunes… and to a night as dreadful as before.
… But the next morning brought the pleasures of survival, and introduced a good day, climbing – as if deep exhaustion (occasional visions vibrating in colors unnameable), with trembling arms and legs, freezing hands and feet – were just what was required to rise on great ice. Roped occasionally to be hauled up by a snarling tribesman – but still not quite as helpless as before, Baj began to imagine himself a climber, at least becoming competent on high ice, so he swung his pick-hatchets with a will, while chewing a mouthful of frozen blubber.
This imagined competence lasted only until a small cornice broke away under his right-hand point – and he fell several endless soundless feet before striking with his left-hand hatchet into an inch of salvation ice. It was a grateful… grateful Baj, then, and he said thanks to everything, looked up, and saw Nancy – her face still a mask of horror, staring down.
"Don't," she called to him. Meaning "Don't fall, don't die, don't let me see you fall and die. Don't leave me… Don't be such a fool!"
"I won't," Baj called up to her, and became careful being careful.
Still, it was a good climbing day – bitterly cold in still air, though dazzlingly sunny, so the Shrikes saw to it they wore their leather eye-slit masks tied round their heads. Still, the light blazed through, reflecting off wind-polished ice in rainbow colors, shimmering bright as the sun and impossible to look at directly. So, in certain places, it became blind climbing… spiking steel into pillars of ice by touch and balance… listening to the Wall's resonance to hatchet blows, muk-boot spikes kicked in. Listening to others' grunts of effort, and to the murmurs of the Shrikes, conversational.
They climbed, gasping-in freezing breaths, hauling themselves up by wooden aching arms – and once, slowly up through an immense chimney of ice blue as sapphire jewelry, where even the slightest breeze sounded through in a breath-flute's soft uncertain notes. Here, Baj did look down – and was sorry – since the gleaming tunnel, diminishing hundreds of feet below to a tiny circle of sunlight, seemed to call and call to him. "Decide… Loose your hold and fall, to be changed from what you are to something else entirely, imperishable."