Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Nancy had whispered in his ear, her breath the only warmth in an everything savagely cold. "Even if we die here, we're together."

"We won't die here, sweetheart," Baj said, and kissed her, as if saying and kissing must make it so.

… By morning light, it was seen that Henry-Shrike had fallen. Only unraveled webbing and a swaying guyline's end – worn through where it had rubbed and rubbed on an ice edge in the dark – were left behind.

The smiling Shrikes were smiling no more, silent as they hurried their weary charges to climb… And as he began hacking, kicking his way up, just beneath Nancy – no tribesman helping him now – Baj tried to avoid imagining that death, the shocked wakening at the line's parting, then the sickening long fall… down and down through darkness so complete there'd be no knowing when the impact would come.

If a Shrike could fall – so could any.

Baj minded his hand-holds (kept mittened when he could), and used his hatchets very carefully, left and right, to pick his way up – all the while watching Nancy climbing above him… intending to catch her, or fall with her if that proved impossible.

For whatever reason – perhaps believing Henry-Shrike was sacrifice for all of them – he paid less attention to his own mortality, and found he was climbing better, discovering rhythms to it, an odd affinity for the ice and its different sounds when his steel struck it, ringing or rotten dull… Their height now was such that it no longer seemed a height at all, but a fixed emptiness with only the rule of not-to-fall.

They'd hardly slept, been eaten by exhaustion and fear the day before – fear confirmed by Henry's death – but Baj saw that he and the others were climbing better, learning, as Warm-time copybooks had it, "in a hard school."

…By sun-straight-up, Patience, having tried the morning air – and sunk slowly away, down and down – had struggled back up to them, sitting cross-legged, eyes closed in effort – and swung in to stay. From then, her scimitar strapped to her pack, she climbed fairly well, with a Shrike beside her… Errol, of course, still scrambled the ice like a squirrel a tree, as if he'd been born to it.

Sun-warmed, the Wall began shedding its great pieces, and those murmured, whistled, moaned past as they fell. The Shrikes, their brief mourning apparently over, sang along with those missiles' sounds… made little songs of them, dying away as the sounds of falling died away. So the long day was passed in great effort and risk, to those cheerful tunes… and to a night as dreadful as before.

… But the next morning brought the pleasures of survival, and introduced a good day, climbing – as if deep exhaustion (occasional visions vibrating in colors unnameable), with trembling arms and legs, freezing hands and feet – were just what was required to rise on great ice. Roped occasionally to be hauled up by a snarling tribesman – but still not quite as helpless as before, Baj began to imagine himself a climber, at least becoming competent on high ice, so he swung his pick-hatchets with a will, while chewing a mouthful of frozen blubber.

This imagined competence lasted only until a small cornice broke away under his right-hand point – and he fell several endless soundless feet before striking with his left-hand hatchet into an inch of salvation ice. It was a grateful… grateful Baj, then, and he said thanks to everything, looked up, and saw Nancy – her face still a mask of horror, staring down.

"Don't," she called to him. Meaning "Don't fall, don't die, don't let me see you fall and die. Don't leave me… Don't be such a fool!"

"I won't," Baj called up to her, and became careful being careful.

Still, it was a good climbing day – bitterly cold in still air, though dazzlingly sunny, so the Shrikes saw to it they wore their leather eye-slit masks tied round their heads. Still, the light blazed through, reflecting off wind-polished ice in rainbow colors, shimmering bright as the sun and impossible to look at directly. So, in certain places, it became blind climbing… spiking steel into pillars of ice by touch and balance… listening to the Wall's resonance to hatchet blows, muk-boot spikes kicked in. Listening to others' grunts of effort, and to the murmurs of the Shrikes, conversational.

They climbed, gasping-in freezing breaths, hauling themselves up by wooden aching arms – and once, slowly up through an immense chimney of ice blue as sapphire jewelry, where even the slightest breeze sounded through in a breath-flute's soft uncertain notes. Here, Baj did look down – and was sorry – since the gleaming tunnel, diminishing hundreds of feet below to a tiny circle of sunlight, seemed to call and call to him. "Decide… Loose your hold and fall, to be changed from what you are to something else entirely, imperishable."

He looked up – saw Nancy's fur-trousered bottom, her scrabbling muk-boots as she struggled for a higher hold – and climbed to set his shoulder beneath her, let her rest on it for a moment.

He took a shallow breath, called out, "Adventure…!" and heard her laugh. Heard Patience laugh above her.

… Though it had been frightening while they were in it, the chimney was the sort of climbing Baj and the others had almost become used to. When, late in after-noon, the Shrikes led over the abyss on a narrow wind-sculpted snow bridge of rotting compact – mealy, pocked, mottled gray – they found their last days' fears of hard ice cracking were great comfort beside depending on surface that was no surface, but only fragile possibility.

Richard, passing over it, nearly stepped clear through that ruined stuff into empty air… And here, with the Shrikes now silent, fear returned redoubled, so Baj and the others moved slowly, uneasily as if in a fever dream… and forgot any Jesus, forgot Lady Weather and Lord Winter, and prayed only to the narrow, delicate corruption beneath their cold-numbed feet and red, chapped, wounded hands – unmittened for desperate gripping.

Baj began a prayer for Nancy as she inched across, panting. Then he stopped praying, afraid it would only bring attention, would remind reality that it could let her fall. The prayer unfinished… she crossed safe as all the others.

Baj, climbing last, started across crouching as if that made him lighter, less a burden to this span of spoiled snow and frost-feathers. He wished – as he had wished many times, climbing – to reach over his shoulder, loosen the rawhide ties of his awkward bow, his awkward quiver, his dear awkward sword, and let them fall so as not to hinder him. He wished, but didn't do it… and went on, crouching, muk-boots sinking deep, so he felt the gulf waiting just beneath them.

He thought the snow bridge trembled. Wasn't sure, but thought he felt it – and out of sympathy, out of a sort of understanding, as if the bridge's difficulty were his, shared by both of them, he went carefully to his knees and lay down, lay full-length on his belly in the worst place – what he was sure must be the worst place, since here the bridge certainly trembled beneath him, eager to let itself go, fall, dissolve into vacancy.

On his belly, he began a sort of slow swimming motion in crumbling snow across the span, gentle as a fish in easy currents. A Shrike had snaked out a line for him to take as the others had taken it to be helped across the last of the bridge… hauled up where a great spike of hard ice – blessedly glass-green – was belay.

But something, perhaps a shift in the shallow spoil beneath him, perhaps a faint sound he hadn't known he'd heard… something advised him not to kick and lunge to take the braided leather lying only feet away.

Baj accepted that advice while the Shrike – one of the nameless ones – clicked an impatient tongue (exactly like Errol) such a short safe distance above him. A distance greater than to a star.