Knotted to the free rope, given no chance to climb, they were drawn up to signaling whistles – up in swift surges, scraping… spinning off the ice, warding it as best they could.
… Baj, having seen Nancy disappear above him, was circled with a heavy line knotted tight enough about his waist to hurt him, then patted on the shoulder by a smiling Paul-Shrike. Paul whistled painfully shrilly, and let Baj go to swing up into the air as hard hauling took his breath away, pained his back as if the line were sawing him in half.
Rising, he struck the ice face several times… tried to get his feet up to guard, but spun away.
There was a rounded foam of soft snow above him as he rose… the sky above its edge an extraordinary deep blue. The borderline between the snow and that blue seemed another color entirely than either of them, abrupt and perfect.
He was yanked up into the snow – its resistance spilling, clouding around him as he was pulled through it, then dragged a way over gritty surface… and left to lie there on his belly.
Lie… It was the first time in twelve days that Baj had been able to lie down. The first time his body's weight had stretched out easy on a level, wonderfully pressed down by his pack and what had been the clumsy, maddening impediments of sheathed rapier, dagger, bow, and quiver. The sensation was so wonderful… so new and old at once, that he closed his eyes to enjoy it. He heard conversation, people saying something much less important than lying still on a surface that wouldn't let him fall to his death.
"Baj…"
"What is it, sweetheart?" Still lying with his eyes closed, feeling muscles easing after days of desperate labor, and the cramps of fear.
"Baj, look."
He opened his eyes… and sat up to see they had climbed the Wall.
He and the others – all but Errol – sat or lay in the snow like exhausted children. Most of the climber Shrikes sat also, while their tribesmen – having camped spaced along the crest, waiting – ministered to them, giving them body-warmed water-skins to drink from, laughing and joking with them about what had been, apparently, a near-record slow ascent.
The last of the climbers, Dolphus, came over the rim, stumbled in the snow, but kept his feet. "So far," he said, "- so good." Wonderfully apt, certainly from a copybook.
Baj, reluctant to leave the level even to stand, crawled to Nancy, took hold and hugged her to him, feeling that small strong body deep in plush fur, kissed her and was love-nipped on a chapped lower lip. He squeezed her hard, grappled her to him as if tears of honey might be pressed from golden eyes… His prayer for her, or his avoidance of prayer, had been answered, and she lived.
"Well," Richard said, and coughed, "- we're alive. And thank Frozen-Jesus for it."
"Thank the Shrikes," Baj said.
"Yes," Patience said, "thank the Shrikes." With some effort she got to her feet, and went to those climbers as they sat resting, or stood coiling line, and kissed each on the cheek.
Murmurs from the other tribesmen. Baj counted fourteen, fifteen men. They'd brought no women with them.
A number of long light sleds lay near – with each harnessed team, three pairs of caribou, standing restless, casting the stretched shadows of end-of-day. A small herd of the animals shifted in a rope enclosure, antlers clicking softly as they touched others… Past them, the gently undulating plain of snow, the great glacier's cap, stretched away and away to its own horizon.
The waiting Shrikes, short and sturdy in their caribou parkies and high muk-boots, javelins casual over their shoulders, were taking their friends' heavy packs, rope-coils, and bandoleers of gear from them, to pack on the sleds… Three came to Baj and the others, and shouldered their packs to load. Left them their weapons.
Baj stood, took Nancy's hand, and walked back near the Wall's crest as if to assure himself they'd truly done what they'd done. There, standing safe from that supreme vertical, it seemed to him this snow-prairie was one world, and the land miles below, quite another. So strong a notion was this that he looked up as if a third – a sky-world – might hover still higher over their heads… But there was only depthless blue.
They walked back to Patience and the others; Marcus-Shrike and several tribesmen were standing with them. "You all," Marcus said, "did very well, for strangers. But that witless boy," indicating Errol, who was peeing a pattern on the snow, "- he did best."
"We are very sorry," Patience said – and was certainly going to say "sorry about the loss of Henry-Shrike" when she noticed a change in the tribesmen's faces, so she never finished. And no one else mentioned it, either.
"I know why," Richard spoke low to Baj later, as the Shrikes rocked their sled-runners loose, preparing to travel north. "For them, what is not spoken of is not completely so. They will never want a final good-bye for Henry-Shrike, since that will mean he's truly dead."
Whistles, then. Apparently the Shrikes' equivalent of drums and trumpets. Whistles for the start.
All the climbers rode for a long while, resting, as the sleds glided behind the caribou over glittering perfect white that undulated slowly up, then slowly down, as if they sailed a calm snow-sea. But after a distance gone toward night and halting, first the Shrikes, then Baj and the others, climbed off to stretch their legs, trotting alongside. Poor trotting, with staggers and tripping at first, even for the tribesmen, the level taking getting used to.
The relief from every instant's threat of death also took getting used to – Baj startling the tribesmen once by diving into the snow to stretch and roll like a hound freed from kennel, in celebration of the gift of safety. Nancy fell to join him, and Richard also lay ponderously down. Then Patience came, and Errol bounded over to flop down beside them… They all mouthed the snow of safety, as the tribesmen turned to watch them, and the sleds slid by.
Then all were on their feet again, trotting unsteadily over the snow in sunset light after the Shrikes' steady-pacing teams, whose harness jingled with steel-and-copper sequins. They hurried along the narrow ruts the sled-runners left behind, Baj holding Nancy's mittened hand to confirm he had her still.
… At nightfall in a sled-circled camp – the rising moon blurred by buffeting wind, blowing ice-crystals – Baj and the others, drowsy as tired children after meat and blubber cooked over cold-dried caribou dung, were steered to hide-sheltered fur pallets. Where, nested with Nancy in an odd little leather tent pitched within a larger round one – for additional warmth, apparently – Baj had no reason but fear-remembered to jolt awake, certain a braided climbing-line had parted, and the long fall begun.
… Then, what more delicious than safety realized? Safety, warmth, and love, with Boston's North Gate seeming only a Map-place, to be found in some forever future, but never now.
CHAPTER 25
The glacier's snowy plain – broken only here and there by stupendous crevasses whose depths, blue vanishing to black, echoed to no tossed chunks of ice – proved otherwise featureless but for its gentle rises, gentle descents.
It became a dream's frozen landscape for Baj as they traveled on, trotting beside the sleds, then riding for a while, then off to trot again. They traveled as if through time, on time's white and frozen road – from day to night, night to day, day to night once more – with only occasional howling storms come over endless ice to fasten them to a present.
The Shrikes ran almost silent over the glacier's broad back, but for impatient whistles, signings of this task or that to be done: lashings to be checked; the restless caribou stung with whipped leather lines to stay hauling each sled in harness together; scouts to go running ahead… scouts to drop behind to catch up later. Then, as early evening fell in shrouds of hazing ice-crystals or blowing snow, the caribou unharnessed to wander in a guarded herd, pawing the snow for last season's lichen. The sleds unpacked, the great round hide-tents – "biggies"- set up supported by long fanned struts of precious southern pine. Then "bitties"- little hide tents placed as dens within the great ones – were pitched with tensioned cords tied strut to strut.