Wind.
Cold. Icy, biting cold, and he is swaddled in a double layer. He has wool underwear that nobody knows about, except the three Joalians who sold it to him all through one very hard night. D'ward must be frozen to the marrow of his bones.
Slippery wet grass and steep slopes. Not a bush, not a root.
Greasy rock with nothing to grasp hold of.
Always the smooth face of the wall above, merciless and uncaring.
Always the thought that someone up there may chance to look down and see the two intruders. They will be amusing target practice. Even in moonlight, fifty feet straight down is not a difficult shot.
Dosh will remember quite a lot of that journey. Too much.
The dike ... that is the Liberator's name for it, not a word Dosh has ever heard. It is only a narrow buttress jutting out from the cliff face a few feet below the brink, a crumbly black rock about ten feet across. Here D'ward can stand a small way back from the wall to work his miracle. Of course they are much more visible here than they were earlier, directly underneath. Watchers on the battlements will see them easily if they look down.
That is what watchers on battlements are supposed to do, isn't it?
The wind tugs and pushes viciously, striving to throw them both from their perch. D'ward curses under his breath as he fights with the thin line and the wind tries to carry it all away or tie it in tangles. His teeth chatter. In the lurid green light he looks like a walking corpse.
Picture: Dosh unbuttoning his tunic and pulling it off—he offers it to his near-naked companion and it streams out sideways like a flag.
D'ward's angry snarclass="underline" “Stop that! Are you trying to get us killed?"
"You need it."
"No. The others do not have it. Put it on again.” He goes back to tying knots with numb fingers.
The others are not crouched on this accursed ledge a hundred feet above the rapids.
The throw ... the beginning of the miracle.
In the wind and the dark at that impossible angle, the Liberator succeeds at his first attempt. It is beautifuclass="underline" the log rising into the night, trailing the string behind it, the wind arcing it away.
D'ward teetering on one leg, flailing his arms, and somehow recovering his balance. For a moment Dosh is sure he is about to fall. That image will remain always, one of the clearest—the Liberator poised over the abyss, with one leg and both arms outstretched, face rigid with terror, and Dosh leaping forward to catch him just in time....
If the log makes a noise as it falls on the parapet far above, then the wind steals it away.
There must have been a hasty scramble then, back up to the base of the wall, into relative cover. Dosh does not recall it. That is a moment of terrible danger, for if anyone has heard or seen that log arriving then he must inevitably peer down to see where it came from.
The waiting.
How long it lasts, he will never know. The two of them huddling up against the cruel masonry, waiting, waiting ... D'ward looking as if he will freeze to death. Again—perhaps several times—he has refused to accept a share of Dosh's garments. In the end Dosh wraps him in his arms, and the Liberator does not resist the embrace.
It is hardly romantic, anyway, like hugging a glacier.
The fading of hope. The despair...
The moons. Trumb's glare drowns out the stars, but Ysh had risen soon after him, and then Eltiana. Three moons shine together, close together: a huge green disk, a tiny blue disk, and a red star. In the required order. Not quite a straight line, but close enough, yes? Please! Imperceptibly but inevitably, the red and the blue catch up with the green.
The prophecy is being fulfilled. Three of the gods gather, as they do every few years. It is awesome and auspicious, but it is only three. Three are rare; four are epochal.
Where is Kirb'l, the Joker?
The Maiden and the Lady edge closer to the Man. Where is the Youth?
No one can predict Kirb'l. He moves in strange patterns, straying far to north and south. He appears and he disappears at will. Sometimes, at his brightest, he travels from west to east.
Dosh praying.
The Joker!
Dosh will never forget that dramatic entrance. It will be the sharpest of all his recollections of that night—the tiny, brilliant, golden moon flashing into view ahead of Trumb, so that all four gods blaze together in the velvet silver of the sky. Kirb'l, visibly moving, moving east! Four lights. Four shadows.
Eltiana and Ysh on one side, Kirb'l on the other, almost in a line, in perfect order and relentlessly closing on the great disk of Trumb.
Quadruple conjunction, a gathering of the gods!
Wait for it...
The Liberator's sudden hiss, and the brightness in his eyes...
"What?"
"Someone's coming!"
Dosh peers all around, and of course there is no one on this accursed windswept cliff top. Someone up on the battlements, then? How can D'ward possibly know?
(Perhaps that was the beginning of belief.)
"He's found it!” D'ward pushing free, sitting up, tense in the moonlight.
"Here it comes!"
The miracle!
Some weary sentry, cold and bored, walking his beat on the parapet, has found a chunk of firewood. His superiors will not approve of litter where a fighting man may trip over it.
Perfectly natural for such a man to pick up the log and heave it over the side and then resume his march. He will be watching the skies tonight, like any other man.
Not natural for a sentry to overlook the twine attached to the log ... that is the real miracle. Not entirely luck, either, that he does not throw it out the same crenel it came in by. But he does not notice the twine he is thus looping around a merlon, and he does not notice that twine running out as the log slides down the wall, snagged on a stone tooth.
He plays his part in history and walks away to die, and at the base of the wall the Liberator relaxes with a sob, a gasp of breath held far too long.
Miracle.
There are more pages missing here.
One of the two invaders unfastened the twine and attached it to the heavier rope. One of them hauled on the twine, muttering prayers that the string would not wear through on the crenelation or just break under the strain. One of them then grabbed the rope when it came and tied a noose in it and hauled it tight.
It may have been Dosh. It may have been D'ward. It must have been one of them.
The four moons closing.
Faint sounds of chanting coming down on the wind. The priests of the city are rousing the people to come and praise the miracle in the heavens.
They do not notice the miracle on the walls. So small a thing, to bear such fruit—a length of twine looped around the battlements, and then a rope.
The Nagians will be on their way now.
The quadruple conjunction.
Side by side, sapphire Ysh and ruby Eltiana vanish behind Trumb. A moment later Kirb'l slides in front, and the gold speck is lost in the green glare. Only Trumb remains.
A gathering of the gods, omen of great destiny.
No one ever forgets seeing that.
D'ward has gone, gone up the rope. His corpse has not come back on its way to the river; there has been no sound of challenge. He must still be alive up there. Dosh waits to show the way.
He is to remember that waiting as being worst of all, because D'ward is up there alone.
Then the cream of the Sonalby troop emerges out of the darkness in single file, bringing more ropes. Bringing no spears or shields, only their clubs, clambering along that same perilous road.