Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

As now, below the Wall, it was not.

The cold there did not settle on them as Baj was used to from the river – as if a great soft coverlet of freezing-invisible had come down through the air. This was a cold that sought them out as if deliberately, with intention. Sought each of them out and gripped them, squeezing warmth away like some great festival wrestler, muscled with ice, and in Lord Winter's pay… Cold the more frightening in air as still as deep water, except when some falling great structure disturbed it.

The cold took Baj's easy breaths away, and allowed only careful breathing between guarding lips to keep his lungs from freezing. He put his arm around Nancy – hooded, richly soft in her plush of furs – and she smiled up at him. "Careful," he said to her – meaning, he supposed, she was to be careful of the cold, and climbing. Careful of everything…

His word, "Careful," dissolved before him in a little cloud of crystals that sifted down like snow. Nancy stuck her tongue out at him, but only for a moment.

… The base of the Wall was an enormous confusion of massive fallen cliffs and towers, great gaps and crevasses snow-bridged or open to reveal depths blue-green to black. Through this immense and dangerous labyrinth, the Shrikes led fast – in morning sunshine, now, brilliant light that warmed not at all – crawling, climbing great broken tilted slabs of ice, to descend again. Scrambling over or around gaping pitfalls and many-storied structures of blue ice, white ice, and gray ice caverned by foaming water come rushing, spouting from the glacier's grand foundations.

Baj was surprised how difficult it was to keep up with the tribesmen – each of them so laden… His right cheek still ached slightly, occasional little needles of pain flashing down the stitching there, and along the side of his head. But it was his bruised, shoulder that gave him trouble. What he would, it did – but stiffly.

Dolphus-Shrike, though never turning back to look, seemed to have the talent of Who-is-where, so almost always when Baj slowed, climbing some steep, there would be Marcus or Henry or one of the three nameless men suddenly beside him in support. Muttering, the Shrike would boost him up, taking one of his booted feet in hand to place it properly. – And twice, Baj was simply seized and tossed up to better holds. Impressive demonstrations of strength, though still a strength gathered, however swiftly. Sunriser strength, rather than George Brock's instant and terrific impetus.

… Baj couldn't have said when not-quite-the-Wall became the thing itself. There was a rise that continued to a steeper rise, with no longer even a slight descent, but only going up.

Here, a Shrike was single-roped to each of their charges, except for Patience, who – sitting cross-legged on a snowy ledge, scimitar strapped to her small pack – slowly drifted sideways with the Wall's wind, seeming not to rise very much at all… until she did, with her colored greatcoat ruffling in the wind like the bright plumage of some bird of myth.

The Shrikes – who until then had been clambering as Baj and the others did, though much more easily – unlimbered more of their thick coils of slender braided-leather line, knotted the ends to the steel hooks they carried… then buckled and strapped odd little sharp steel points to their heavy-soled muk-boots… and lifting the similar boots Baj and the others had been given by the Guard, fastened the spikes for them as if shoeing horses.

These points were not comfortable, made simple walking difficult. But using them, and the spikes backing their hatchets' heads, the Shrikes began to demonstrate true climbing – staying, Baj saw, on good green or blue ice where they could, avoiding rotten gray… Working in steady cooperation, they often wove running guard-lines of braided leather – threaded through small steel circles, and anchored with hooks and grapnels – to support them and their charges as they climbed.

It was a remarkable skill to see, to try to imitate, and kept Baj's mind, mostly, from their height above the ground. He'd climbed trees, of course, and various granite walls at Island, sometimes perilously high above the river's currents. But the Wall's ramparts – so very much higher – were different in kind, their ice (so various, patches of it rotten) much more treacherous than solid stone.

He wished Nancy had been left behind, left with the Guard, so he didn't have to watch her climbing just above him, hesitant, hacking at ice with her hatchets or, mittens tugged off, clutching with freezing hands to crucial holds made only of frozen water… Concern for her – and concern for himself, since his rolled blanket and pack (rapier, dagger, bow and quiver strapped to it), seemed to conspire to tug him out and away from the ice cliff to fall.

He used the Shrike hatchets at first awkwardly, so their heads' sharp reverses bounced off ice, or skidded to the side… But after a time (and occasionally in terror), he slowly found the short swinging stroke that drove the narrow points picking into the ice as a war hammer pecked skulls. His wrists looped to the hatchet handles, he picked left-handed into sound ice… hauled himself up to pick higher with the right… then kicked-in standing places with his muk-boots' spikes to swing the hatchets again.

It was brutal work, extraordinarily wearying… but the left shoulder loosened under the discipline, its stiffness fading as the Shrikes' attention to him faded. Soon – the sun past straight-up – no Marcus, Henry, or Christopher came to hoist Baj along.

Above him, Nancy (and Richard, higher) climbed laboriously as he did, with careful hand and foot – while Errol, staying with the leading Shrikes and apparently unconscious of height, seemed to scamper up easily as a southern squirrel, leaving windblown banners of fine ice-particles behind him.

As Baj, already very tired, worked his slow way, a huge cornice, large as a river lord's hold and detached a mile or more above by the sun's mild melting – fell ponderously moaning past, turning… turning as it went. One of many such, large and small, sailing, cascading down throughout the day. Only fortune, only luck unreliable, kept any one of them from wiping all the climbers from the height.

The sun threw a passing shadow across fractured ice beside him, and Baj – minding a slippery stance, a tenuous hold – looked carefully out to see Patience in mid-air, a pebble's toss from the ice-face… drifting cross-legged, eddying like a leaf in wind. Her eyes were open, but she didn't seem to see him. She slowly swung away, away from the Wall's sheer… and it appeared to Baj that she flew – Walked-in-air – with some awkwardness, as if spurning both a cliff of ice and the icy earth below, made for difficulty.

To hold oneself in the air by only thinking it was now so frightening a notion it made Baj look away from her, not wanting to see anyone hanging on nothing – where truly was nothing but empty air… and a great distance to fall.

He stared instead at the ice close before him – and saw, in its crazed surface, mirror enough to make out a hollow-cheeked, scant-bearded man, sewn with scars and no longer truly young. Baj closed his eyes and held on, stayed clutching where he was… only for a few moment's rest… Then, with a scrape and rattle of ice-chips, someone came clambering swiftly down to him, and Dolphus-Shrike, close as a lover though on ice vertical, whispered in his ear. "Who won't climb up, will be thrown down." And was gone, scrambling the cliff, leaving ice powder sifting on the wind.

Baj opened his eyes and climbed.

The evening seemed to come after forever… During the climbing day, Baj had imagined falling – worse, imagined Nancy falling – so many dreadful times that terror itself seemed to weary. After that, he'd climbed only for grim effort's sake – trying clumsily to imitate the Shrikes, for whom these towering battlements of untrustworthy ice seemed nearly a home.