He knew his logic was good, and started to get angry when the adventurer shook his head. But Ulric had an answer of his own: “He’d see clouds. We’re above those clouds, looking down on them. Isn’t that something you thought only birds and God could ever do?” No matter how cynical he was, awe filled his voice.
“Well, you’re right,” Hamnet said. “I hope they’re not the last thing we see.”
“So do I. I’d sooner look down on the Rulers than on clouds,” Ulric said. Maybe because of the thin air scrambling his brains, Count Hamnet needed longer than he should have for the pun to sink in. When it did, it made his headache worse – or he thought so, anyhow.
“Come on!” Trasamund pushed himself to his feet again. “We’re almost there. Let’s finish the job. Up on top of the Glacier, by God! No one from down below has ever done that, or we’d have tales to tell of it. They’ll remember us forever!”
In a low voice, Ulric said, “No one from down below s ever done it and then made it back to start tales. Will we?”
“Well, the Bizogot’s right about one thing: we won’t if we don’t get moving.” Hamnet Thyssen heaved himself upright, too. “And we are almost there.”
They had one last bad stretch: nearly vertical, with the ice alarmingly shaky under them. Then they clawed their way up out of the scarp the avalanche had bitten from the edge of the ice sheet. Hamnet s breath smoked as he stared across the top of the Glacier.
It might have been spring down below, but winter still reigned here. Or maybe not. In the midst of all that white and blue, enough dirt had blown into crevices in the ice to let plants sprout here and there. And not too far away in the distance was what seemed an oasis in this frozen desert: a mountaintop that climbed out of the Glacier and showed green streaked with snow.
“Well, we know where we’re going,” Hamnet said. No one disagreed with him.
“Never mind where we’re going for now,” Liv said. “We’re here. We did it! Isn’t that enough of a marvel?”
“Before I started up, I thought it would be. Now I’m not so sure,” he answered. She made a questioning noise. He explained: “Looking at what it’s like up here, seems to me getting down again will be the real marvel.”
She thought about that, then nodded. “You’re bound to be right.”
He wished she had told him he was wrong. He wished she had convinced him he was wrong. The more likely he was to be wrong, the better their chances were.
He wanted to ask her to sleep with him, to make love with him, that evening. But he held back, not so much for fear she would say no as for fear she would say yes and find him unable to perform. After all the fighting and climbing he’d done the past few days, he was far from sure he could. And the thin air up here atop the Glacier only made things worse. He felt as if he were moving under water, with every step costing far more effort than it should have.
He and Liv did sleep in each other’s arms once the sun went down. But sleep was all they did. Hamnet woke once in the middle of the night. When he looked up at the sky, he wondered if he was seeing things. It was blacker than he’d ever known it to be, and a whole host of stars blazed down – far more than he’d seen on a clear night down on the ground.
People who came from the mountains talked about how many stars they could see. He’d always nodded when he heard talk like that, nodded without taking it very seriously. Now he saw he’d been wrong. So many shone here, he had trouble picking out the brighter ones that marked the outlines of the constellations. The Milky Way was a glisten of mother-of-pearl.
And then, despite the beauty, despite the wonder, he fell asleep again. He could admire the night sky for as long as he stayed atop the Glacier. Sleep, though, sleep he needed now.
He didn’t want to wake up come morning, even with the sun smacking him in the face. He yawned and stretched and groaned. Then he saw Ulric Skakki gutting a snowshoe hare. For a heartbeat, that meant nothing special to him, which only proved how tired he was. Then he blinked. “Where did you get that?” he asked through another yawn.
“Oh, I looked in my pocket, and there it was,” Ulric answered airily. Hamnet Thyssen growled, down deep in his throat. Ulric laughed. Then, before Hamnet attempted mayhem on his exasperating person, he went on, “It just came hopping along, happy as you please. It stopped to nibble on one of those little patches of plants they have up here, and I put an arrow through it.”
“I wouldn’t eat raw rabbit down below,” Trasamund said. “I’ve known too many who got sick after they did. Up here .. . Up here I’ll eat anything I can kill, and worry about getting sick later on.”
They still had horseflesh and musk-ox meat, too. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t hungry any more when he started trudging towards the peak that stuck up through the Glacier. Tired, stiff, sore, trying to suck in more air than he readily could … all of that, but not hungry.
He saw more rabbits hopping across the Glacier, and other little creatures he couldn’t name so readily. “Do they go from one mountaintop to another, like boatmen in the Southeastern Sea sailing from one island to the next?” he wondered.
“Seems so,” Audun Gilli said. “Those mountains are islands here, is-lands of life.”
“Islands of life,” Count Hamnet echoed. It was a pretty phrase, and one also likely to be true. The two didn’t go together all that often. “What would we do if one of them weren’t close by?”
Ulric Skakki had a one-word answer for that: “Starve.”
That wasn’t very pretty, but it too was likely to be true. Hamnet trudged along the top of the Glacier. They might starve anyway, once their food ran out. How many hares and voles and whatever other little creatures that lived up here could they catch? Enough to live on? He would have been surprised.
A fox trotted past, unfortunately well out of bowshot. Spit flooded Hamnet’s mouth as he watched it go. Fox meat was bound to be rank, but it was meat. He got the feeling that if he stayed up here long he wouldn’t sneer at anything even remotely edible. In this thin air, in this cold, a man needed to eat like a sabertooth to keep going.
But for its eyes and nose, the fox was white. Down on the Bizogot steppe, the animals had turned brown. There wasn’t enough dirt up here to make that worthwhile.
“We can drink ourselves through every tavern in Nidaros with this tale, and never once touch our own money,” Ulric said.
“If we get back,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Well, yes, there is that,” the adventurer allowed, “though you didn’t hear me being rude enough to talk about it.”
“I’d like to drink my way through a tavern or two,” Audun Gilli said wistfully.
He’d spent a lot of time in Nidaros drinking – mourning his family, lost in a fire. He’d had his head stuck in the ale vat for three years, but he’d done well enough and stayed sober enough since Ulric Skakki hauled him from the gutter and made him dry out. One thing seemed plain: he wouldn’t have a chance to do much drinking up here.
No matter how far Count Hamnet and the other refugees walked, the mountaintop seemed no closer. Hamnet had heard the air in the southwestern deserts was clear enough to make things seem closer than they really were. God knew what air there was up here was achingly transparent.
“We should have brought some horses up the avalanche,” Trasamund said.
For a moment, Hamnet thought he meant it. That only proved he wasn’t getting enough air to keep his own wits working. Vulfolaic needed longer to realize it was a joke than he did, which made him feel a little better. The other Bizogot did a splendid double take, then sent Trasamund a dirty look. “You could have strapped three or four of them on your back and carried them up that way,” Vulfolaic said.
“Don’t be foolish.” Trasamund shook his head. “The wizards could have shrunk them, and we’d each have one in our belt pouches.”