And all labor made twice – three times – the labor by cold and wind. At its gentlest, the wind sliced slowly, shallowly as a stroking razor; at its fiercest, it struck like an ax.
When – rarely now, as days went by – the sun came flashing off the ice, it blinded for hours anyone who stared without slit-goggles to take pleasure in it.
The cold days' work wore fingers raw through every glove or mitten. Made numb faces, feet, and hands. So Baj saw, in their world, the forming of the Shrikes by weather with no mercy, no forgiveness in it, where only green lichen and the caribou made life possible at all.
Still, there was an ease. When lying exhausted in a close bitty-tent, with Lord Winter bellowing a gale outside the biggy, Baj rested wonderfully warm by a single tallow candle and the heat of naked Nancy beside him on the furs – her odor mingling fox with weary girl – so his sleep was the richest he'd known, a pleasure anticipated through each traveling day.
… More than a Warm-time week had certainly passed when this fine sleep was broken by an animal's bleating scream – and Baj was off the furs and out of the bitty-tent, struggling into his parky, hopping to get fur trousers on, and muk-boots. Then out of the biggy's entrance-flaps into still and absolute cold under rich moonlight, bending to set his bow. Nancy was coming out behind him, scimitar drawn, when the animal screamed again – and Baj saw, an easy stone's throw away, a great mound of snow with dead-black eyes standing upright over a fallen caribou. The mound of snow opened dreadful jaws, bent for a great ripping bite, and the caribou's screams ceased.
Icy arrow nocked to the string, Baj stood clear of a sled's heaped load, drew to his ear – and as he released, was struck hard across the face with a whipping crack as the bow exploded in his hand. Its ruins hung by the bow-string as Shrikes came running in shuttling moon-shadow, setting javelins to their atlatles.
The white bear turned toward them. Annoyed, unafraid, one huge paw resting on his prey.
"A relative!" Richard, heavy double-bitted ax in hand, had come up beside Baj.
The javelins began to hum, the Shrikes grunting with effort at each throw, and Baj saw what their atlatles provided – another foot-and-a-half of throwing leverage as they whipped the light spears away. The javelins flicked over the snow, far, and almost quick as arrows. They hummed like short-summer bees, swarming, converging on the bear, impaling him thump thump thump so he staggered, snarling, quilled with them. He turned to pace away as if disgusted, leaving spattered blood black in moonlight.
The Shrikes, with shrill celebration whistles, ran him down, thrusting javelins here and there – and as the great bear stumbled, two leaped on its massive snowy back, hacking, stabbing with their knives as it moaned, shuddered, and lay down to die while still the long knives worked away.
It was a sample of Shrikes in battle, and sobering.
Richard set his ax on his shoulder. "Your bow…"
"Went to pieces."
"Must have frozen through on the Wall, Prince!" Dolphus-Shrike returning from the killing of the bear. "Too many woods glued together…" He tossed a javelin in the air, caught it. "In Lord Winter's country, simplest is best."
"Yourself excepted, I suppose."
"I," Dolphus-Shrike said, "- am the exception that proves the rule." And on that fine copybook quote, strolled past.
The tribesmen retrieved the huge hide only – and squatted around it in the snow, industrious in the moon's uncertain light, scraping it clean of fat and sinew with their knives. They brought no meat to camp.
"Eat black bear or brown bear," Marcus-Shrike, answering Baj's question, "- and you get strong. But eat white bear, and you get sick and sometimes die. There's a badness in the flesh, for certain in the liver."
"No one in Boston," Patience said, "- eats white bear. Same reason. Either tiny worms in the meat, or something unfortunate in the liver."
" 'Unfortunate.'" Marcus-Shrike shook his head. "So much meat left to the ravens and white foxes."
… After the encounter with the bear, Baj looked for other interruptions, other events as they traveled. But there were none – except a painful interlude, when Patience plucked out the stitching in his cheek, and the side of his head… Otherwise, nothing to vary the running alongside the sleds to spare the laboring teams, nothing to vary the occasional ride to rest, the sled's runners whispering, sliding through snow behind the pleasant tinkling of decorations on the caribou's harness… Patience, usually running with them, sometimes Walked-in-air – but low, beneath the horizon's line of sight, and watchful of sudden crevasses falling away beneath her… Once, as she trotted beside him, Baj heard her murmuring to her son, as if the child might hear her over a wilderness of ice and snow. "I'm coming to you, darling. My sweet, sweet boy…"
They traveled through various weathers. As if to a rhythm Lord Winter might be beating out, there came brutal cold in brilliant sunshine days, when the snow plain flashed and sparkled unbearably bright, so even the eye-masks were insufficient. Then, Baj and the others – the tribesmen, too – ran sometimes with eyes shut, depending on the sounds of the rest to stay close, and not stray out and away over the blazing prairie to wander alone and blind in searing light.
There were those days, and – almost alternately – days of blizzard, not quite as cold, but battering by howling wind and driven snow that flayed exposed skin, so Baj imagined the Wolf-General, head thrown back, howling as her condemned were flayed on Headquarters Street.
It came to him, as they ran and sledded, that the affairs of Sun-risers or Moonrisers would always seem of less importance, since Lady Weather had administered her lessons of the Wall, and the glacier's plain of snow. They were all only climbers, only travelers-by, whether Sunriser Kings or Khans, Moonriser Generals or Boston Talents. Even dear Nancy – and himself – were only come… to go, while the cold-struck earth, seeming so mighty a traveler, rolled on through even colder, grander emptiness, that noticed it not at all.
… As the days passed, then a second WT week, the drinking of snow melted in canteen or water-skin tucked against the belly, the chewing of seal blubber and strips of caribou slow-roasted over dung-fires – became the only way, and thoughts of other drink, other food, other weather, only foolishness. The climbing weariness was long gone, and Baj and the others ran as the Shrikes ran, and rested rarely.
Sometimes, in the evenings, he and Nancy fenced lightly – cautious for their steel's fragility in such cold – and both practiced hurling javelins from atlatles, providing amusement for the Shrikes, who stood out beyond the sleds as targets for them, considering that safer than bystanding.
"I see no reason," Dolphus-Shrike said, watching them one evening as their javelins gadded hissing off to left or right, "- I really see no reason why we Shrikes should not rule the world."
… Days later, in a clouded gray dawn following a snowstorm more severe than usual, the Shrikes rose only to squat in circles – as if around ghost fires – chewing the inevitable seal-blubber. Waiting, not traveling.
Baj and the others stood together, also chewing.
"Well," Patience said, "- who's going to ask, to be certain?"
They'd learned that the tribesmen, like all primitives – and, of course, many of those not primitive – counted power in momentary increments, so that to have to ask indicated weakness, and to be asked, strength, no matter how unimportant the question.