Patience, sang several very old songs for them, her singing voice as light as a girl's. She sang a song about dancing in the dark, and two or three others, while they drifted, dozing, munching half-thawed seal blubber, and drinking ice-melt water. They began conversations that often dissolved into the booming winds of the stupendous landscape they swung above… above even the trooping clouds that cruised under the early-winter sun over miles and miles of lake and tundra, sending their shadows across the distant mountains far to the south.
The four of them – and sometimes Errol – rested, only occasionally startled as monuments from the heights above, melted free by the sun, came ruffling, strumming past, slowly turning as they fell… The Shrikes did not rest, but chattered among themselves in tribe-talk, clambering over the glacier's face from perch to perch, filing ice-hooks sharp, sewing torn furs and muk-boots, and testing, greasing, rebraiding their slender lines.
… That sweet ease darkened to a wind-whining night – that faded into a next day of sun-blaze off mirror ice, frost ice, ice sea-green, pine-green, gray-green. And ice – the best, the most reliable – a richer blue than any sky.
Climbing, hacking their way up, slowly approaching two miles of height with bone-aching effort in numbing cold became the truth of living – and all else, all memory and expectation, a foolish lie. Breathing, in air so sparse, was additional labor… required thought, deliberation, and care not to frost and ruin their lungs.
The fear of falling came and went at odd moments, so that Baj, certain he'd come to terms, would discover – at only the slightest slip – that he had not. And the same, he knew, for Nancy and the others, except for carefree Errol.
The Shrikes, as always, climbed their confident, accomplished way, even having lost a man.
… That after-noon, the tilting sun flashing furious reflections off the ice, Richard fell – though only to the stretched and strumming end of his belayed line. Fell, jolted to a savage stop, and spun there, breathless.
Looking down from a rough cornice, Baj saw the great Person's heavy-muzzled face all too perfectly human in terror. The tribesmen saw as well, and Christopher-Shrike, like a copybook angel, descended to Richard, swung him to the ice face – attached an additional slender, braided rope – then persuaded him up.
Toward evening, the wind rising – calling amid immense spires of crystal green and blue – Baj and Richard worked side by side, clinging to a steep and hacking hand-holds. "Now," Richard said, panting at the labor, "- now I know what it is to be absolutely fearless. I pissed all that away when I fell. Every drop."… And it was true that he'd seemed to climb, since, with greater ease and certainty, as if a pact had been made with gravity.
… By the sixth day's morning, Baj and the others, climbing now with the Shrikes as well as beside them, found the world beneath and to the south – twenty miles of moraine, then eighty… ninety miles of tundra beyond that to the mountains – was now only a feature to them, and meant no more or less than a painting of such things.
Since Henry-Shrike had fallen, no one else had died.
One tribesman had had a little toe turn black after stitching had torn in his left muk-boot and let the cold in. Dolphus-Shrike had cut that toe off with his ice-hatchet's blade – an occasion for laughter among the Shrikes – and the nine-toed tribesman had smiled in good humor, folded cloth to the stump, used sewing-sinew to repair his muk-boot… then climbed away.
Baj, by this sixth day, had grown used to exhaustion's visions – found them interesting – but was careful not to be distracted when King Sam Monroe appeared climbing beside him just before sun-straight-up, though dressed in buckskins for hunting. The Achieving King seemed to need no ice hatchets for his holds… Strong fingers, strong wrists. "I like your girl, Baj," he said. "Fox blood does well by her."
"And she'd like you, sir."
The King, climbing quite steadily, had glanced at Baj, smiling. "If I were alive, you mean."
"I… suppose I mean that. Yes."
"Look away, son," the King said then. "Look away from me."
Baj did – and there seemed a change of light beside him, a shadow fled, and the King was gone.
That was the best imagining, the richest vision that came to Baj weary on the Wall, since it seemed to him that the King had loved him truly as a son – and not only as ward, as responsibility, as an amusing boy. The King's face had been a father's.
And there was something else – an odd thing, but he was certain of it – that if the Khan Toghrul, his First-father, appeared at the Wall, it would be as Baj was falling.
CHAPTER 24
Below, in the landscape world, Dolphus-Shrike had said at least six or seven days, and a day of rest, to climb the Wall. And it was late after-noon on the seventh day that they came to the overhang.
Here at its crest, the glacier had thrust out a massive curling wave, like a great sea-roller – but frozen still and hard as granite, though brilliant blue under the sun, and so perfect that many depths were seen in it.
Baj and the others – exhausted veterans now, worn, wind-and-weather burned, bellies aching from days of melt-water and seal-blubber – clung to their pick-perches and examined the thing. The notions of falling, that had to some degree receded as they'd climbed and grown to understand the ice, now came back to them – to Baj at least – with sickening force.
It seemed to him that time for payment might now have arrived under this gleaming great ceiling of gorgeous ice reaching out… far out into the air.
And the more disturbing, since the Shrikes were disturbed. Dolphus and the others seemed surprised by this jutting shelf. They hammered ice-hooks in to swing out to left and right… surveying to find a way past it.
And found none. Baj, wrists aching, hands stiff claws on the handles of his ice hatchets, saw it in their faces. The overhang ran too far to skirt.
"What are we going to do…?" As she'd grown more tired, Nancy had taken to asking Baj these questions, as if he, who loved her, must know an answer.
"We're going to watch the Shrikes rig lines out beneath it, sweetheart – and probably send one man out, then another, until they're able to climb up and over."
Nancy turned her head, staring up at that immense and shining shelf.
Richard clung close to the ice just past them. "I don't know," he said, and coughed. The freezing air had dried their throats, cracked their lips to bleeding. "- I'm big, maybe too big to hang out there." Though he was big, his massive weight of muscle a handicap on vertical places, Richard had shrunk a little in the climb. It had diminished him, brought out the vulnerable human in him very clearly, so he no longer seemed a bear-man – a Moonriser Person – to Baj, but only a big man, and very tired.
"They'll manage, my dear." Patience, annoyed as Errol – above her and restless on a narrow shelf – scattered ice-chips down, had done very well. Slight and strong, though older, and tough with whatever blood her mother had accepted, she stood up against the ice on muk-boot spikes as if part of the Wall. The hem of her colored coat flagged as wind came sweeping past. "Shrikes are good managers…"
As if to prove it, the tribesmen bit off chunks of frozen blubber to chew, clapped mittened hands to warm them, and began to manage… muttering among themselves in slurred near book-English.
They gathered almost all line – leaving Baj and the others sharing only two anchored belays and what purchase they'd made for themselves – and handed through the slender braided ropes, checking the greased lines for fray and ice cuts… Jingling bandoleers of steel ice-hooks were examined, and the curved points of ice hatchets, and the spikes strapped to their muk-boots. Careful preparation.