Baj sighed, and went to ask.
"Why have we stopped?"
The Shrikes at that circle seemed surprised. Why? Why have they stopped? Startled at such ignorance.
The Shrike named Paul looked up at him. "We stopped, because we're here."
"Here…"
The Shrike pointed with his thumb. "Boston – nine WT miles that way."
"Ah…" Baj thought of avoiding the next question, which would cost him respect for at least the day – then remembered he'd been a prince, and asked it. "How do you know?" There was certainly no sign of habitation… no buildings to be seen anywhere in that direction.
Satisfied smiles around the circle at that. "We smell it," Paul-Shrike said. "The city breathes, farts, as a man breathes and farts. It smells on the wind."
Baj found that closeness oddly shocking to hear – snow travel, and for nearly three weeks, did not lend itself to arrivals. Even less, to this arrival.
He went back to the others with the news. "I thought so," Patience said, and Richard nodded. They had all thought so – from wind-carried odor apparently – except of course for Errol, who neither knew nor cared.
Nancy took Baj gently by the nose. "Sunrisers are poor smellers."
"The Shrikes knew."
"The Shrikes are savages," she said, and leaned up to kiss the nose she'd pinched.
"But no houses… no structures at all."
"Boston, Baj," Patience said, "is in the ice, and of the ice."
"Yes, I knew it was, but… all of it?"
"All of it," Nancy said, and tried to pinch his nose again, so had to be parried, then hugged… And doing so, Baj thought of the women waiting in Boston-town. They, so soon to be slaughtered, would feel much as Nancy felt in his arms, sturdy, small, and soft over slender bones. His heart began a familiar tattoo. It sounded in his chest as if it had concerns of its own, of fear, and preparation for action.
"Baj…" Golden eyes, that saw into him as the Shrikes' javelins had entered the bear. "Baj – when we go into the city, I will kill the women for you. Richard and I, and Patience and the Shrikes will kill them. You stand guard for us against the Constables coming."
"Yes," Richard said, his breath smoking in morning cold.
"No. I'll do what must be done."
"And be changed," Patience said, "- from Who-was-a prince?"
"Or not," Baj said. "How many innocents died under the yataghans of my First-father's tumans? How many under the sabers of my Second-father's cavalry? Though neither might have wished it so." He tried a smile. "Who am I, to deny my heritage?"
Breezes, that had brought the odors of the city to the camp, slowly began to strengthen as the night's storm wind – reversing its track – now began to sweep back from a dark horizon. Small swirls of snow were spinning across the glacier's frozen prairie.
The Shrikes, having considered, had risen as one to travel through blowing snow. A semicircular route, a day-long curve at first to the north… then, by night, around east to settle at last where blizzards had driven their burdens into great snow-dunes, only three Warm-time miles from Boston's north gate.
Baj, trotting beside laboring caribou, had time enough to think of other things than necessary murders… He imagined one-eyed Howell Voss, certainly now the King – a man in his fifties, thoughtful, merciless – and with a Queen his equal. Many spoiling heads, all those friends of New England, of the Coopers, would be grinning from Island's battlements. That King, that Queen, and the old ferret, Lauder, would have hunted them down.
A lesson, as well, to the whole Rule – Middle-Kingdom, North Map-Mexico, Map-Texas, and the Western Coast. What Small-Sam Monroe had achieved, would stand.
And the Prince Bajazet? The adopted brother hunted and likely lost in the east's savage wilderness – at most a minor legend, and soon forgotten.
There was… a comfort in the knowledge of it. A freedom the then Prince Bajazet had never known, even in brothel brawls along the river. What he'd been, had vanished as if swept away on the Mississippi's current. What he became, would be of his own carpentry.
Commencing, of course, with the slaughter of innocents. The hostage womens' blood, girls' blood, would run along the rapier's blade to obscure its legend, with good cause…
Under a setting moon, after the last day and night of traveling from the Wall, they reached the snow-dunes – the only major rises Baj had seen in more than two weeks on the plain – and the Shrikes prepared to shelter in them.
First, they loosed their caribou herd – and all the teams but three pairs – scattered them to wander back into freezing emptiness. Then they killed the last – cut their throats as they stood in harness, so the animals, spattering blood blackened by moonlight, slowly knelt in place as if praying to whatever Beast-Jesus cared for them.
Baj and the others then joined the labor of butchering out – Baj realizing as they did, that the Shrikes, expecting death, had left themselves no way to escape it.
The offal – and the sleds, still loaded with shelters and gear – were snow-buried for concealment against passers-by, under drifts the next snowfall would bury deeper.
… It was by the last of moonlight, that the Shrikes began to burrow snow caves deep into the dunes, for shelter and concealment – mining in with knives and ice hatchets and hands to run six to eight-foot tunnels into darkness, then shape and hollow small round buried dens, their snow hard-packed, and with only a javelin's piercing, higher, for through ventilation.
Baj and Richard, having watched, and crawled into one to see how, it had been done, began their own – which ended badly when their entrance tunnel collapsed, so Nancy and Patience (Errol tongue-clicking, capering useless) had to dig them out.
Dolphus-Shrike strolled from moonlight, smiling. " 'If at first you don't succeed…'" A partial and annoying quote. Then strolled away, still smiling, when Richard snarled and picked up his ax.
An annoying quote – but proved. The "try again" was successful, though the den they scooped out with great effort (and seeming large in the labor) was so small they packed it like barreled salt fish. Errol, restless, uneasy in darkness relieved by a single tallow candle, kicked and bit when crowded, until Nancy lost her temper and hit him on the head.
Oddly, it made for a very comfortable place of sleep through the day – except for condensation dripping – warmer than swaddling furs, and out of the wind. Here, by flickering candlelight, with rich twining odors, the silence interrupted only by Errol's restlessness – and once, Richard's thunderous fart – Baj lay with Nancy squeezed close against him, so close that only a small unlacing of fur and leather was necessary to find her dampness and enter it, so they lay locked… hardly moving, happy, and complete.
It was a sweetness so great, so simple, it made Baj weep. Nancy knew it, even in near dark, and licked the tears from his face.
… As the vertical terrors of ice-climbing had become a way of life, then the endless snow prairie another – so days of denning became a third, crawling from snow-tunnels at night for the necessaries, for exercise (mad moonlit races through the dunes), and to share portions of raw caribou, caribou heart, and caribou liver with the Shrikes. It became simply how things were done.
Hibernating in the snow-cave's candlelight, Baj once roused from a dream of his birthday, a celebration at Island. His birthday… his birthday… What was the present date, Warm-time? Not deep enough, yet, into Lord Winter's grip. On the last day of the ancient October, he would be twenty-one.
Time became built of sleep, and waking from sleep, of crawling carefully through the narrow tunnel to eat, then squatting in blowing snow to be rid of what had been eaten… though the rhythm was interrupted once, when seven of the Shrikes came trotting in moonlight from a scout south, with no news yet of the Wolf-General's Guard, though with news of a sort. A family of hunters – New Salem trash, out after musk-ox or bear – had been found by the Shrikes, and killed for secrecy. A baby had been considered to be spared, then not.