“I finally see why you wouldn’t let us call those hills around Glassforge mountains,” she told Dag.
“There are mountains up in northeast Seagate even bigger than these,” Dag said. “So tall it’s winter on top all year round, and the snow and ice never melt off.”
“You’re pulling my leg!” said Finch.
“Nope. Seen it with my own eyes,” said Dag. “Floating up all white against the blue summer sky, the peaks and ridges like something out of a dream.”
“I wonder if you could make a trade in that ice,” said Whit thoughtfully.
“Pack it down in the summer and sell it to folks.”
“It would be a lot of work, climbing a mountain that high,” said Fawn in doubt. “And ice is heavy. Maybe it could be slid down somehow…”
“Actually,” said Dag, “folks in those parts cut ice from their ponds in the winter and store it in cellars packed in straw. It lasts longer than you’d think.”
“That sounds a bit more practical,” said Fawn.
“Huh,” said Whit. “The things you learn travelin’. I might try that at home.”
Once he’d carefully described what they would be up against, Dag let the farmer boys sort themselves out to tackle the first big mountain pass. That dawn, the four pack animals were unloaded and added to the wagon traces, and the wagon’s cargo reduced. Bo was left at the foot of the pass to guard their gear, because he really wasn’t quite as recovered from the belly stab of last fall as he made out, and Hod set to guard Bo. The plan was to make it to the top by midday and down as far as the first good stopping point, then send some of the boys and the unloaded pack animals back to Bo’s camp for the night. The other half of the party would rest up till they arrived next day, then continue the almost equally painstaking descent, using rocks and logs to help brake the wagon’s wheels and prevent a disastrous runaway. After that would be another four days of relatively easy travel up another long, running valley before they had to do the drill again.
Everything went according to plan till they were halfway up the hill at midmorning, and came upon another wagon blocking the road.
Dag, flanked by Indigo, rode around it to encounter a bizarre sight.
The team hitched to it consisted of three mules and a skinny horse, blowing and marbled with wet and dried white sweat; one of the mules, a wheeler, was down on its knees, tangled in the traces. A woman knelt next to it, weeping, a burning brand in her hand.
A rough, weak voice issued from the depths of the wagon’s raised canvas cover: “Light its fool tail on fire! That’ll get it up!”
“Missus, what are you doing to that poor mule? ” cried Indigo in outrage.
She turned up a red, tear-streaked face, crisscrossed by brown hair falling from its topknot in messy strands. She might have been any age between an exhausted twenty and an equally exhausted thirty, her shirt sweat-stained and skirt dirty. “It’s fallen, and it won’t rise and pull.”
“I can see that,” said Indigo. “If you got that rig up this far with just those spavined beasts, it’s likely spent. You’re crazy to try to drag a wagon that size up this road with only two pairs! Our wagon has five pairs and it’s barely making the grade.”
“It’s all we have. One mule died two days back, so we put the horse in. They have to get us up. They’re all we have…”
“Who you talkin’ to out there, Vio? ” came the hoarse male voice again. “Don’t you go talking to strangers…!” From under the stuffy canvas, a child’s voice began crying.
Dag reluctantly opened his groundsense as the man lurched out to the driver’s box on his knees. His face was fish-belly white, his arms shaking as they propped him up. He peered around suspiciously. In addition to the man, the wagon seemed to hold two children. A half-grown girl, also sick, lay on a pallet. A toddler boy was tied inside by some sort of harness, likely to keep him from falling over the side and under the wheels, and he fretted crossly at the restraint. He’d likely howled before and would howl again, but just at the moment was still working up to the next spate.
The woman’s gaze drifted to Dag. She recoiled. “Grouse, help, there’s a Lakewalker fellow on this road!”
“Where? What-” The man staggered back inside, then crawled out onto the box waving a boar spear. “Keep away, you! You won’t have our bones!”
“Is he crazy?” muttered Indigo.
“Fevered, I think,” said Dag. Not that he couldn’t be crazy as well.
Dag wheeled Copperhead out of range of the wavering spear point, and bellowed back down the road, where Sage’s wagon had halted and the other riders were starting to jam up, “Fawn! Berry! I need you here!”
The two women rode up and dismounted, taking in the scene, and Dag backed off slightly to avoid unnerving the distraught travelers further. Vio burst into ragged sobs at the sight of such friendly female faces. The man slumped to his knees behind the box, bent over the seat, still clutching the spear he could barely lift. Under Fawn’s soothing murmurs and Berry’s crisp questions, it wasn’t long before their tale tumbled out.
The Basswoods were a poor couple with no due-shares from a village south of the Hardboil who had fled their life of drudgery in hopes of the rumored free land in Oleana. Sage and Finch left their animals and walked forward in time to hear most of the sad story. Fawn looked over their rickety rig with a shrewd eye.
“You two are a mite underequipped for homesteading. It’s good land, mind, but it takes a lot of hard labor for better than a year, usually, before you could expect to live off it. Though I suppose if you could make it to the Grace Valley, you could get day work there and build up your supplies.”
“That’s the life we just left!” said Vio.
Grouse growled from his slump, “Not going back. Not going back to be scorned and made mock of!”
“Well,” said Berry the ex-boat boss, who for all her youthful blond looks didn’t suffer fools gladly, “if you can’t go up and you won’t go back, it looks like you’ll just have to set and starve on this here hillside. Which’ll save you steps, I reckon. But don’t set that silly mule on fire. It can’t tow you up this mountain nohow.”
“It’s best if you turn around now,” said Dag, reluctant to draw attention to his scary Lakewalker self, but feeling the need to voice support of Berry. “Even if you somehow made it to the top here, there are two more passes farther along the Trace that are as bad or worse. You’ll founder.”
“Anyways, you still have to shift your rig to the side so’s others can get by,” said Berry firmly.
Vio’s weeping increased. Inside the wagon the children, Plum and Owlet, heard their mother’s distress and began to cry along.
Dag saw the sympathy in Fawn’s eye, and guessed what was coming.
“Sage,” she said, “we’re bringing half our animals back down for another go anyhow. What if you brought your team back later and hitched it on with theirs? Their animals could have a rest while they waited. Then, with seven pairs to pull, this wagon would go up the hill in jig time.”
Indigo scratched his head. “Actually, if we hung together to the next pass, we could hitch on all our mules to each wagon in turn, and wouldn’t have to do all that shuffling around with the packhorses.”
Vio stopped sniveling and looked up in hope. “Would you? Could we? Oh, please, say yes, Grouse!”
The fevered man mumbled something about Kill us in our beds, which his wife ignored in her fresh concentration on Indigo. “Grouse’ll make better sense when this bog ague spell passes off. One more day, I promise, and he’ll be back on his pins. Oh, please… oh my, so cruel, oh, you shouldn’t ought to have said it if you didn’t mean it…!”
Which was how, that night, they all ended up camped at the top of the pass in a chill fog, instead of lower down in some more pleasant location, and Dag and Arkady were pressed into trying to force bog-ague remedy into a half-delirious man who fought them every step. Grouse’s terror took the form of swearing and abuse, mainly. His wife was helpless in the face of it, but Berry lent a hand, and a voice, that settled him as swiftly as a drunken keeler. Arkady was less taken aback than Dag expected; his prior experience with difficult sick farmers seemed to be wider than he’d quite let on.