Chapter 22
- Nator’ax -
We drain Prak’ox’s pot of frit while the last few bloodwings pass overhead. Then I get up and find the two food packs I buried in the snow when Riley and I were here last. There’s firewood and food, so we’re able to heat the food and eat our fill.
“You’d planned the escape all along,” Riley says, with her mouth full. “Even here, in case we had to come this way.”
“I was hoping we wouldn’t have to,” I tell her. “But here we are.”
“Did you bury packs in other places, too, during your hunt?”
“I buried four packs from the village to the saucer. And I dropped one down a shallow crack in the glacier. But now we have to go. Morning isn’t far away.” I grab Prak’ox’s spear and check the tip. It’s not as sharp as I would have liked, but it’s better than nothing.
We pull the furs around us. Mine is still usable, despite the holes. Once the bloodwings had chewed a few of them to get through, they much preferred the soft flesh beneath.
Riley winces at the sight of me. “I’m so sorry, Nator’ax. I should have known you wouldn’t just give up like that.”
“Perhaps I should have told you more about what I was planning,” I admit as we start to walk. “But I suspected you wouldn’t like it.” I cast a glance back at Prak’ox’s remains and briefly consider hiding them, to further confuse the Gar tribe. But that’s not really a good reason.
“Can you tell me?” Riley asks.
I consider how much to say. One of the plans I had before the storm came is still possible: to go into the chief’s hut and crush his head with a rock, get my sword, then visit cave after cave and kill everyone inside in their sleep.
Or at least the shaman. “There would be a lot of death. I will say no more.”
We hurry on our way to the Gar village. The storm is much less powerful now, and the direction has changed, so that we now get the wind in from the side. Snow is piled up in strange-looking heaps, shaped by the wind. Some are taller than I am. The darkness is withdrawing.
When we near the village, we keep our distance.
But in the newly fallen and wind-packed snow, we leave obvious tracks that I can only hope the tribe will not discover.
If they do, they will only see the tracks of one man.
Riley walks ahead, and I make sure to step in her footprints, deepening and widening them in the way of the jungle.
I want them to have no clue that she’s still alive.
We stop and gaze over at the rock with the caves.
There’s no sign of movement or firelight, but from my experience with night storms in the jungle, it is when the worst is over and the morning is still dark that men sleep most deeply.
The tribe won’t be awake yet, and when they do wake and discover both Riley and Prak’ox gone, and me, they will take time to decide what it means.
“They’ll think we’re dead,” Riley says softly, as if reading my thoughts. “But they will search for what’s left of us. We must hurry.”
We walk on and turn our backs to the village.
The wind weakens until the air is still.
When the sun rises, the light is painfully bright, reflected off all the new and pristine snow.
Everything around us is white, apart from the sky, which holds a faint red tinge.
It would be hard to find our way, but I’ve come this way before, and I know which distant mountaintop to aim for.
Still, I have no chance of finding the food packs I left here during the hunting trip, nor the bundles of firewood. The snow covers the small marks I made.
“Is it getting colder?” Riley asks, teeth clattering. “I thought it would feel warmer when the wind stopped blowing.”
“I was hoping that too,” I admit. “I suppose cold follows the storm. Come, we’ll keep each other warm.” I ram the blunt end of the spear into the snow and open my fur. Riley comes close and opens hers so that we can close both around us.
I embrace her inside, noticing how she shivers all over.
“If w-we meet that t-tribe again,” she says, “w-we won’t go with them w-willingly.”
I bury my face in her hair. “We won’t. They will suffer if they try to take us captive again.”
She looks up at me. “Remember your oath to m-me. Don’t let them t-take me. You saw w-what will happen.”
I pull her closer. “They will not take you. Or me. We would rather die. Together.”
She responds by leaning her head against my chest inside the furs. “I love you, Nator’ax. Just so you know.”
“I love you too,” I tell her. “Whatever happens, in the end we’ll be free.”
We stand in silence for a while as the sun climbs higher, giving off no heat that I can sense.
“I love your heat,” Riley finally says. “I could just stand like this all day. But we should get going.”
We separate our furs and walk on. I look back once in a while, but still there are no Gar search parties coming. They would be easy to spot in the new snow. And so are we, of course.
Riley can’t walk fast, and it takes us until sunset to reach the glacier. Here, on the slippery ice, no snow has fallen. Likely, the wind has blown it right off.
“No saucer,” Riley says as we approach the site, and I can hear her disappointment in the flatness of her voice. “I hope it’s still under the ice.”
I shield my eyes to look. “The hole is still there, at least.”
We reach it and stare down into the opening the saucer melted. And the saucer is still there, only as far under the surface as I am tall. But that distance is all ice—frozen solid, clear, but with a slight blue tinge to it.
I tap my chin. “I saw it drop much further than that. It must have risen again, then stopped right where it is now.”
“And the water it melted froze on top of it,” Riley says. “Maybe we can hack our way down there.”
I examine the head of my spear. The Gar tribe didn’t do much iron-smithing, and that shows. “We can try, at least. I think it will take us many days.”
She glances back toward the Gar village. “It can take as long as it has to. We must get away. Can I start?”
I hand her the spear, and she walks to the middle of the frozen hole and looks down through the ice. “This will wake him up, at least.” Then she brings the spear down hard. Small shards of ice fly.
“It’s hard ice,” she comments as she keeps hacking. “But I don’t know how much the spear can take.”
I nod. “Not much. It’s not steel, just ordinary iron. It can shatter, too. But keep going. I’ll be right back.”
I wander off and locate the one food pack I placed in the shallow crack, and to my surprise, it’s still where I left it.
“This will help a bit,” I say when I return.
“There’s no frit, but there’s firewood. And we know where to get more of it.
Let’s make a fire in the middle of the hole. Perhaps it will help melt the ice.”
Riley keeps hacking. “Wait until this hole is bigger and deeper. The fire will work better then.”
I hide a smile, charmed by her determination. “The Gar tribe don’t like walking at night. There’s no sign of them yet. It’s around midday we can expect them, if they start to walk early in the morning. They won’t be here today.”
Riley hacks faster, as if encouraged by that. “Good.” She drops to her knees to scoop ice slush out of the hole, then tips it into her mouth. “Clean water.”
I let her continue for a little while before I offer to take over.
“Okay,” she says in her alien way, and wipes sweat from her brow despite the cold. “We might get through tomorrow.”
She’s made a hole about a hand’s width deep, but it has taken considerable time. I can’t go much harder, because if the spearhead breaks, then the only thing we have left to make the hole is Riley’s small knife.
“We should make a hut,” I say as I hack the spear down into the ice. “We can’t do this all night. But our furs can be the outer covering.”
“There’s no need for that,” Riley says, and points to the side of the glacier, where the storm has left huge, strangely shaped heaps of snow. “That will be our hut.”
“The snow?” I ask, puzzled. “Won’t that be cold?”
“It’ll be nice,” she says with such confidence that I almost believe her. “You haven’t seen snow before, but I have. Many times. And I know what we can do with it. We’ll start when the underside of the sun almost touches the mountains.”
I shrug. She seems very sure of herself. “Very well. Open that food pack and eat something, if it’s not all frozen.”
I keep hacking until the hole is deep enough that I can just about touch the bottom when I reach my whole arm down. “About one third down,” I estimate. “We’ll start early tomorrow. Now let’s think. The Gar tribe will almost certainly be here tomorrow around noon, to look for us.”
“That’s one reason why we’re going over there,” Riley says, and points to the snow that towers up by the sides of the glacier. “They can’t find us. We don’t leave footprints on the ice, especially not if we’re careful.”
She has a point. If we avoid stepping on the patches where the snow has been able to stick and gather, we can walk on blue ice to the edge of the glacier without leaving tracks.
“Then let’s go.”
This time I walk ahead, scouting for hidden cracks and testing the ice with each step.
We walk a ways up the glacier to cross the wide crack where the stoka fell, at a narrower point.
The snow heaps here are much larger than they looked from a distance, and some tower over me with strange, wind-carved shapes.
“We’ll dig into this one,” Riley says, and points. “From behind, so nobody can see from the saucer.”
I study the mound she points to. It rises higher than a man, shaped by the wind into a curved wall, its surface hard and smooth where the storm has pressed it tight.
I circle it, testing the snow with my hand. It is not soft like I expected. It resists my fingers, packed tightly, but not like stone. When I strike it lightly with the butt of the spear, it leaves an indentation. “Very well. Show me.”