Mitchell Smith: Moonrise

Nancy sighed and lay back into his arms. "Sad child Errol," she said, as if she'd read his mind. "He was always with us, yet not with us. I miss him, gone only this morning. I look around, here and there, to see that he's behaving…"

"He saved your life, comb-honey. May Lady Weather warm him for it."

"You bad man." She nipped the side of his neck. "You do not pray to any Great!"

"I make a Thanks-exception, for the gift of your life."

… Baj was first out, climbing from the tank to the wooden walkway – dripping, with fine threads of blood lacing down his forearms – and down his back from the left shoulder.

"A duty call, sweetheart," he said, to Nancy's questioning look. And to all of them, drifting – wallowing, in Richard's case – he raised his voice over the guardsmen's racket. "Meet at the troopers' mess .,…"

His wounds – no bone chipped, no tendon or spurt-artery sliced through, though one had been slightly nicked on his right forearm – were unbandaged and cleaned at one of the bath-house tables with vodka (the shoulder-cut stinging worst), then sewn and rebandaged by a Guard medic with a dog's dark and sympathetic eyes.

Treated, then passed along for new issue to a grumbling quartermaster of the Guard – advantage apparently being taken of soldiers and commanders actually clean – Baj was surprised to be directed to the senior officers' benches. "Staff's orders for you an' yours, Sunriser. – Travelin' goods."

There, he was clothed in underthings, foot-wraps, and buckskin. Then fitted with a light, superbly wrought mail hauberk and its Corinthian helmet, and dressed in rich furs (lynx, fisher-cat, and wolverine) from a great heap of all sizes of luxury plate and mail, fine cloaks, trousers, and jackets – treasures no doubt courtesy of Boston's plundered shops and storerooms… And, with some difficulty finding a fit, was presented new muk-boots as well.

Washed, injuries stitched, dressed so well and warmly – and impressed by the Guard's attention to such matters, with a desperate battle won only hours before – Baj went down the bath pavilion's carved-ice staircase, his new fisher-cat cloak thrown back as he buckled his sword-belt. He noticed, among the several sewn-cut pains and muscle strains, a deep ache in his left hip, bruised by some blow he couldn't recall.

A bath attendant – Sunriser-human, elderly, and frightened – had given him directions to what he'd called "A Grand Unusual, well-known, and kept in C-Creche Solitary." The old man had told the way, then ducked as a trooper with odd ears surfaced grinning from a tank beside, and splashed him.

As he walked, helmet under his arm – and noticing even the so-fine hauberk's weight – Baj traveled the ice paths and narrow streets of a city silent and waiting. He saw faces at iron-framed apartment windows, men and women shocked by the sudden loss of what had always been. Now, having to accept a future unimagined only the day before.

… Baj encountered several Guards patrols – menacing, then recognizing him – armed Persons pacing along the frozen streets. They were swiftly weaving the binding cords of the Wolf-General's rule, while the citizens of Boston, so many more thousands strong, still huddled, stunned, in their homes. – And doing so, of course, were completing their defeat. Walking, Baj had so far met only nine of Boston's people passing, hurrying by. None had looked him in the face, as if not to see, was not to be seen.

The bath attendant's directions seemed to have been certain enough, though distance hadn't been mentioned. It took more than a glass hour for Baj to reach the river – first trudging down Court Street (its sign in wrought iron on a post), then turning right onto Cambridge, to walk a very long way past many-storied buildings frosted white as celebration cakes.

As he went, the Township's heaven of high lamps shone their golden ever-daylight, throwing his shadow multiple. And it occurred to Baj that the Wolf-General would have to keep the Talents to sail up and serve them. Would keep the Talents, perhaps, for other chores as well…

From Cambridge Street, at last, onto a pleasant, pillared bridge – built of strong blue ice-blocks, and signed Longfellow. A shallow stream of glacier water wended below, white as goat's milk – melted perhaps by Boston's close breath, perhaps by the warmth of earth not so far beneath its bed.

Over the bridge, at River Street, there was a very small church, polished clear as best glass, and sculpted along its walls with Warm-time matters: ships with no sails, carriages with no horses drawing, planes in air and supported by nothing, or by whirlers, pro-pellers. Prayers in ice, it seemed to Baj, for those times' return – though he thought that Frozen-Jesus must dislike prayers intended to melt the Great they addressed.

As he passed this chapel, Baj saw through open iron doors that it held only one Boston citizen. A woman in handsome middle-age stood naked, her breath frosting in bitter air. She was praying amid a forest of small wonderfully-carved trees of ice, their perfect leaves scintillant under mirrored lamps.

Baj considered calling to her to go home. The Guard was certainly under discipline, but perhaps not perfectly at the end of this constantly-lit day of triumph… Then he decided not, and left her to her prayers.

At the end of River Street, past four quite-elegant ice-brick buildings – perhaps the homes of notables – Baj came to the Township's edge at a looming barrier of ice, cracked and fissured, that rose in gleaming blues and greens to shadowed heights where no bright lamps hung.

In that uneven shade, a relief from lamplight constant, Baj found the large letters A, B, and C, posted in iron on a narrow, uneven path running along the base of the ice. A and B were indicated left. C, to the right, and he went that way.

There was a droning whistle sounding… sounding louder the further he went – climbing the steepening path, and annoying his sore hip… That noise, the vibration of a single deep note, made his rapier buzz in its scabbard like a short-summer bee. Made him slightly sick with the sound – and perhaps from the long day's weariness, and sting and ache of his injuries. He stood still on the ice path, taking deep breaths so as not to vomit.

He saw sudden brightness, though his eyes were closed – brilliant as sunshine, so he thought for an instant that frozen Boston burned. But the light was in a dream, a dream while awake and standing, of the sun shimmering over an endless ocean of ice.

Baj staggered… opened his eyes only to the wonderful silent city – and as he did, felt illness fall away, so he was able to climb on up the path, though tired, and yawning.

He turned a corner to the left – edged around it – and saw a cut cave-mouth making that deep droning as the wind blew past it. There was a neat iron gate set into blue ice, but its key-turn and chain hung free.

Baj stepped down the path, gripped cold black grease on the iron – frigid even through new fur and leather gloves – and shoved the gate open on almost silent hinges.

Warmth… and warm darkness immediately. He drew his sword – when would that begin once more to seem hasty, odd? – and walked onto something less slippery than ice. Cut stone. He went on into darkness, the rapier's blade questing before… until what might have been faint lamplight ahead, became certain.

Still, he kept the sword drawn into richer and richer warmth. Off to his left, in what seemed an iron chimney vault of its own, the rumble and shuttered glare of a double-vented furnace heated itself to the dullest red. There was a soft splash of melt-water running through an ice-cut dug deep beside it.

Here was the warmest air Baj had known in weeks. Warmth at first, then becoming heat almost sickening, so he sheathed his rapier, tugged his gloves off, swung his cloak free and folded it over his arm… then kept moving, furred boots grating softly on graveled stone.