Above the Snowline (14 page)
‘What?’
‘The wood has to last us!’ She ran to my hearth and dismantled it in a matter of seconds. ‘We’re above the tree line, Jant. Do you want to end up using bone as fuel? Because it burns dismally, let me tell you.’ She placed three flat stones in a triangle with small gaps between them, so that air could enter at the points of the triangle, and set the hearth in the space between them. She lit it with a flint and dry grass, and stood a small brass pot of water on top.
‘I’m making kutch!’ she said happily. ‘It’s been days since I last had any. Do you want some?’
‘Oh, no. Not kutch. Certainly not.’
‘Kutch is good for you.’
‘I have water.’
‘Only the dying drink water.’
The brass pot was well scrubbed, but still blackened and patched with iridescence from hundreds of campfires. Dellin laid out one of the hares, shredded its meat and dropped it into the boiling water. Then she poured in a generous amount of Marram beer.
‘I’m not drinking that concoction,’ I said.
‘You can’t afford to be choosy.’
‘Oh, god . . .’
‘And
don’t
use that water to wash! It has to last till tomorrow.’
don’t
use that water to wash! It has to last till tomorrow.’
‘How am I supposed to get clean, then?’
‘Rub snow on yourself.’
‘But there isn’t any snow.’
‘Yet. There will be tomorrow! And besides,’ she continued, ‘you smell better if you don’t wash. Less fake, more like a man. Maybe one day you’ll explain to me why flatland men go around smelling of flowers.’
I knew this had been a mistake. I got up and wandered around while she made the alcoholic gravy called kutch. The Rhydanne are as obsessed with kutch as Awians are with coffee and habitually brew the disgusting broth from whatever meat and spirit is available. Dellin poured some into a mug and drank it with every sign of enjoyment, but it really reeked. I was determined not to touch any but I was ravenous and craved almost any food. Roast potatoes, golden and translucent-crisp; chocolate cake; I could almost smell it; shortbread fingers and fresh coffee . . . why hadn’t I brought any? Coffee would be perfect, but Dellin would have to stick to kutch. One cup of espresso and she would probably explode.
‘Sure you don’t want some?’ she said.
‘No! It pongs! My reputation will be marred badly enough when I arrive at Carnich as filthy as a wolf, without eating like one too.’
Revitalised, she laid down her empty pack and began rolling out her tent, a wide tube of supple leather which had been packed in the base. She unpegged the rucksack frame and took the three longest struts, each just less than a metre long, threaded them into hems at the tent opening and slotted them together. To keep this triangular opening upright she pushed her spear into the ground as a tent pole and hooked the apex of the triangle to it. Then she propped up the other end of the tent with the last of the rucksack frame’s struts - in no more than five minutes she had built a camp out of no more than what she was carrying.
She supported the spear with stones, then sat down beside the fire.
‘What about me?’ I asked.
‘Here.’ She tossed a folded tarpaulin and a length of cord at my feet.
‘What am I supposed to do with that?’
She laughed, annoying me even further. ‘The anchor points are above you.’
I looked up, to the smooth underside of the overhang above my head. She spoke slowly, clearly thinking I was stupid. ‘This is a rock shelter, Jant. When you were a goatherd, did you live in a house?’
‘In a shieling, actually.’
‘You can’t have travelled much.’
‘I spent my first ten years in Mhor Darkling valley.’
‘I’m not surprised you know nothing. There are holes in the rock, look . . .’ She came over and, standing on tiptoe, passed her fingers through a loop that had been carved out of the cliff face. ‘Here’s one. And another. All the way along, see?’
Sure enough half a dozen rugged holes were chiselled from solid rock along the edge of the overhang - I would never have noticed if she hadn’t pointed them out. I set about unfolding the canvas sheet, threaded the cord through its eyeholes and tied it to the loops in the overhang. It hung down like a curtain and made a chamber of the dry recess at the base of the cliff. I stretched the curtain out into an awning and selected some rocks to weigh down its bottom edge. Then I crawled into the serviceable shelter between it and the cliff, stowed my rucksack and joined Dellin at the hearth.
By this time I was so famished I felt faint, and Dellin’s cooking smelt scrumptious. She had threaded slivers of hare meat on bone skewers and laid them across the fire, so the meat was browning already and dripping juices. She had fried the nuts and mushrooms together and left the pan on a warm hearth stone. She had placed all the fruits on the back of her jacket spread on the ground and we snacked from them while she pounded the herbs into paste in a tin bowl.
She was bare-armed in her black vest, her hunched shoulders pointed as she basted the meat with the paste and at length gave me one of the kebabs. It tasted wonderful. The meat, herb-crusted and succulent inside, was every bit as good as one of the Castle’s feasts. Even the spring water, pure and cool, was better than the water on the Plains.
She set the pot to brew more kutch, then used her nails to pull the steaming meat from the skewer. She didn’t blow it cool but chomped it noisily with her back teeth. Then she pointed along the mountainside with the empty skewer. ‘That’s the way we’re going. Good visibility. You can see for about forty kilometres, the full distance we will cover tomorrow.’
‘We should be able to cover fifty.’
‘No. Because tomorrow it will snow.’
Nothing seemed less likely. The sky above the cliff was a rose-pink haze and a cloudless blue out to the east. We were already in shade, as the sun set behind the highest peaks, which cast their long shadows over us and down to stripe the mountainside.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I can smell it. Can’t you?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve been in the flatlands too long,’ she said contentedly.
‘I can smell the snowfields. The glaciers, Jant! After a morning’s ascent we’ll have to use snowshoes. I hope for a little snow at first, to break you in—’
‘I can cope with a bit of snow!’
‘Oh, really?’
I gazed ahead to the endless terrain of pinnacled cliffs stretching out above boulders and scree slopes. It didn’t seem so difficult.
She sipped her beery broth. ‘Do you want some?’
It was easier to refuse this time. ‘No, I’ll never drink kutch!’
‘Please yourself. But take some more nuts. You can’t live on hare alone. It’s too lean so, no matter how much you eat, you will end up starving. You need a mixture of food, plenty of fat - the hazelnuts are best . . . How wonderful this is! We have made tomorrow safe. Our equipment is sound and we have enough food. So we have left nothing to chance. We will start tomorrow well.’
She fell silent, and gradually I became aware of the crackling of the undergrowth, the very sound of plants growing, respiring, dead plants decaying and water permeating down through the soil. I could smell the mountains! My senses unblocked, first hearing, then acute smell. I could scent the fragrance of grass and lichen, woodsmoke, the stone itself. The air was full of the clean, crystalline smell of snow. This is what Dellin must feel like all the time. I glanced at her. She watched the mountainside, relaxed. This is what it’s like to be Rhydanne, senses alert all the time, confidently aware of your surroundings. With her cat eyes, their reflective membrane protection against snow glare, and her thick hair, each strand of which is hollow for insulation, the higher Dellin climbed, the more at home she was. She knew all the sounds, the capercaillie clucking and the bellowing of deer. The mountains are in constant communication with her, telling her about themselves and what tomorrow will bring. The mountains themselves talk to her like friends. No wonder the solitary Rhydanne are incapable of loneliness.
The sun set and a fine line of roseate haze above the peaks shone on the snowfields and turned them pink. Higher up, it merged into peach, then pale yellow segueing into blue, then darker and darker towards the zenith. To the east, the sky was growing velvety blue-black and several stars appeared. Above the ridges bright platinum streaks of cloud still reflected the light of the sun below the horizon. The air was decidedly chilly. I shuffled closer to the little hearth, which seemed to give out as much heat as one of the fyrd’s big bonfires.
Dellin watched me shrewdly. ‘Your clothes are inadequate, Jant. Even your overcoat . . . and that ridiculous long-tailed hat.’
I was indignant. ‘These are the best fyrd-issue kit. The Castle designed them! Every soldier at the front in winter wears them.’
She didn’t even bother to snigger, just shook her head, swishing her ponytail from side to side. ‘They’re silly.’
I took off my grey velvet hat and turned it over. ‘I thought it would be perfect for Carnich.’
‘Even hunters feel the cold up by the Frozen Hound Hotel.’ She stirred the fire. ‘Will the Awians be wearing similar sorts of clothes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Good.’
I could no longer distinguish the features of the cliffs. They were all black, and as I strained to make out the rest of the camp, tiny blue specks prickled in my vision. Dellin’s skinny front and sharp chin were lighted orange by the embers; the dying fire hollowed her eyes and blotted her hair into a mane. Her head was bowed; she seemed thoughtful. ‘No signals. If there are any Rhydanne nearby they don’t suspect our presence. Well, that is good too, I suppose
. . . Are you hungry?’
‘No.’
‘Then I’m going to sleep.’ She unlaced her boots, stood nimbly and put them inside her tent. She took off her parka and trousers in front of me, without any shame - her skin was vividly white in the darkness against her cotton vest and drawstring shorts. She crouched and spread out her overclothes in the tent.
‘Don’t leave anything edible outside or the wolves will come,’ she said. ‘Bury the hare bones, put a few more sticks on the fire and leave it burning.’ She climbed into the tent with her head poking out, plumped up her parka hood as a cushion and went to sleep. The haze was clearing in the cool air and constellations spread across the sky. More distant knife-sharp peaks were becoming visible as their ragged shapes blacked-out the familiar stars.
There were no lights at all, and the stars between stars made a nonsense of the constellations you would recognise from the plains or the city. So many stars, so brilliant they outshone the noctilucent clouds. I made out the Strongman, with a square of four for his chest and three for his vaunting axe, and the Archer, near the zenith, but the Messenger hadn’t risen yet. There was Lynette, ‘the Beauty’, standing on her tiptoes as she does in winter, but now I could see a haze of fainter stars around her seven bright points. And, spanning the entire sky, the dusting of tiny stars in a milky river that Awians called the Whitewater. So many awe-inspiring millions that I was glad of Dellin’s presence or I might have lost myself among their lonely points of light. Dellin and I had the mountains to ourselves.
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