He wasn’t sure, facing this upward perspective, that it was going to be much better up there.
But the road he was on still looked to be faster than the other from bottom to top, maybe even by a couple of days, even with the road in the condition it was in. He’d lost precious time, two whole days he was relatively sure of, drying out his clothes and his gear and nursing his headache, or his several headaches, counting the knots on his skull.
He’d been concussed, he was almost certain—not thinking too clearly for a day or so; and concussed meant, if you talked to doctors, lie down, do little, eat and sleep, if you had somebody to wait on you.
Fine, he’d rested, between the necessity to get a fire going and to fend for himself. He’d used up money-bought supplies he’d rather not have touched, but a forced lay-up was what such supplies were for—he supposed they were well-spent. He was alive.
He’d done some fool things—but close as he was still to Anveney and doctors, rational or irrational (as he’d been when he’d taken that ride after wood instead of going for an Anveney doctor), he’d turned out all right. He didn’t need any townsman doctor, one he couldn’t talk to, understand, or deal with. He wasn’t going to have any strangers, however well-intentioned, poking around at him while Burn fretted at the gates. He’d known, when he waked that morning with the headache that didn’t go away, exactly what he had, at worst, unless his skull was fractured, which time proved it wasn’t. He certainly didn’t need any high-paid town doctor to tell him that his head hurt, and not to walk any distance in that condition.
So he’d won. So he’d been able to lie about feeling his head expand and contract, and watching the colors come and go behind his closed eyelids, wanting occasionally to pass out until it was over—
Eventually you died or you got better. And since he hadn’t caught pneumonia, and he hadn’t gone into coma, and since the leg the bank guard and the marshals had banged about didn’t seem infected, just ached like hell, swelled, and hurt when he walked on it—he guessed he’d saved himself and the town doctor the bother, and he was still going to make the Ridge before the snows came down. He was going to deal with Aby’s problem, and finish Aby’s business up there. Money was hindmost in that calculation: the doctor would have cost time and kept him off the trail; and the snows would have beaten him.
And by the time they’d gone up a distance, with him walking and limping on the steep grade, he began to fear they weren’t going to make the speed he would have wanted today: his sore leg was aching, his good one was burning, his head was splitting, and his breaths came as if he’d run a race. He leaned on Burn’s side and stood there a while staring up at the first true hairpin before he could find it in him even to consider going on up the grade.
He walked as far as he could: Burn wasn’t going to make any speed, either, slogging along under his weight at the angle the road climbed.
A turn or so higher, Burn took him up, and when Burn tired again—where they stopped for breath and for him to get off—the view down, where the edges had eroded in a series of slides, was absolutely spectacular: raw rubble spiked with trees that had found a foothold on the slopes; while the view up from there was enough to give a man or a horse serious doubt whether they were sane to try this road at all. He couldn’t see some of the roadway, the angle was so steep—what he could see of the zigzagging trace of back and forth hairpins and phone lines was daunting, entirely.
But underfoot, tribute to mechanical persistence, he could still see the scarring that trucks this summer or last had made on the road, such tough, small trucks as ran emergency supplies and phone lines for the line-riders.
The modern log and lumber monsters, and the tankers, couldn’t hope to take even the lowest and easiest of the turns to get up here. It was risky, his eye could well judge, even for the line repair trucks, and they couldn’t go all the way up these days.
<Truck going over. Tires over the rim.>
Once that happened you hadn’t a chance, no way to recover your traction.
He pulled back from that thought, heart pounding as if he’d been onthat edge. He started walking, diverting himself with the pain in his leg and the search for breaks in the phone line, not that he could do anything about them, but Cassivey had promised him to call Tarmin and warn them if the lines were up.
If he knew a call couldget through—that would take at least some weight of necessity off his mind. But it looked chancy. Watching where the line climbed, ahead of them, he saw poles braced up with rocks—some of them leaning in impending breaks. Wait till the winter winds, he thought. Wait till the ice. They wouldn’t hold. They might not have held on the road above.
No phone line at all on the main road—that was why they’d kept maintaining this old run on Anveney West, specifically because the phone lines were already here and because avalanche was constant hell on the other one in winter, sweeping poles and all away, more than they lost here to slides. So Aby’d said. And they kept the phones going.
Fifty years ago, when the gold fever had been rampant in the hills and speculators in every sort of vehicle had made Anveney their base of operations, this ill-conceived switchback had been all the road that served a network of mining roads and little, isolated camps. Most who had tried winter camp, with just their guns and their gold-fever to insulate them from the Wild, hadn’t made it through the first winter, but by the second winter, the survivors had clumped in larger camps and the survivors of those had made a dozen villages up on the Ridge, only a few of which still held out— compared to those that had once been. That, also, Aby had said: her man in Anveney told her so.
<Come on, Guil, you’ll like it up there…>
And, headache and all, he looked for line-breaks. But you couldn’t, as the inside edge of the road grew more wooded, always see the poles, let alone the lines. Thickets of greenwood and shag had grown up around them, unrestricted.
Worse, washouts were multiplying, eroding away the outside edge of the road in graveled gullies that were a real danger to the trucks. Weeds, untouched by trucks’ undercarriage chains, had grown up on the center ridge. Scrub leaned well over the wheel tracks, and grass had grown up in the tracks themselves. It had to have been some time since the last line repair truck had come up here—let alone the road crews it badly needed.
And that neglected road repair, it took no intelligence even for a lowland townsman to guess, increased the frequency of spooks along the way: like weeds, spooks were, no single breed, just vermin, prolific and nuisanceful to humans. Hunted out of any traveled territory, they expanded right back into any territory where brush provided adequate cover. He heard them as he rode: a constant shifting image of giant grass and the noise of something large and the fear of something <formidable> nearby—which was, of course, themselves, and the grass wasn’t giant except to the creature doing the sending. Burn heard them very well, and occasionally sent out his <nighthorse> and <eating willy-wisps> image, which cleared the area in short order.
The little spooks were no harm to a rider, or anyone a rider escorted. But once little spooks grew plentiful, they made rich hunting for midsized spooks, which would happily add the vermin-rich offal heaps of villages like Tarmin and Verden to their hunting range; they’d dig and gnaw and try the defenses of supplies in the rider-shelters—and clear out fast if riders showed up.
One had to know, though, that after the middle-sized spooks like nightbabies and lorry-lies moved in, serious trouble was right behind: goblin-cats and spook-bears and bushdevils and every other sort of creature that could make a village’s dreams uneasy. Tarmin and the rest of the high-country villages in Anveney’s mining union should have raised hell about the washouts and the brush. It was a steep, steep face, and if it grew brushy and the road got beyond even riders, then there was a breeding area and hunting ground for things the villages up on the Ridge might not like for neighbors.