Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Baj didn't even shake his head "no." He continued his odd slow swimming – felt absolutely a tremor beneath him – swam on as if he were delicate, clotted, and gray, the same sort of stuff exactly. Swam on… did not attempt the rope-end when he came near it… and was then surprised to come at last where a knife-edged ridge of sound ice rose a little above his left hand.

In sudden panic, he reached out, gripped it – and as he hauled himself up, clinging to that shelf, heard a groan just behind him… then a soft thump and great hissing, rushing noise as the snow bridge fell away.

Perched to the side on muk-boot spikes while coiling the line, the nameless Shrike shook his head at beginner's luck.

"Baj…!" Higher, Nancy had looked back and seen the bridge Baj smiled, tried to call back, "Adventure …" but found his throat closed to speech.

… That night, hanging suspended in blizzard, they all dozed – to come awake, frightened, when their sleeping sling thrashed hard to the gale… Baj and Nancy clinging close, wrapped in stiff ice-crusted blankets over freezing furs.

Toward morning – at least what seemed toward morning, the storm slowly eased, rumbled away east, and was replaced by a silence that seemed as loud.

In that frigid stillness, awake, Nancy murmured to Baj the story of her mother's suffering… of the barely remembered breeding-pens of Boston town, when she was a little girl and kept a pet rat named Dandy before they took her away, as they took all children from the mothers… Then of being assigned to the Companies at her first bleeding-between-the-legs. Of being protected from the worst by Richard, a kind lieutenant… then captain. And, after three years, fleeing with him following the stabbing, and his trouble with Major Donald-Fishhawk… Errol, the mess-cook's bruised chore-boy, trailing along.

Then, WT weeks of wandering… until, one late-winter day, Patience had sailed down to them out of a gray sky, stumbled a little on landing, and said, "I've been watching for two days. And it seems to me, that you foolish lost ones might have something better to do than journey in circles, and cook squirrels for supper."

… Kisses from Baj, then, to comfort her.

Dawn had barely marked the east, when a cheerful Dolphus come sliding down out of darkness on braided leather to kick their swaying nest. "Oh, what a treat we have for you brave climbers!"

"What?" Richard grumbled, hoarse.

" 'What?'" Dolphus reached out to grip the netting and shake them alert. "A day of rest is what! You five have nothing to do but loll in your net, chew delicious seal-blubber, sleep, and pee down the Wall. A day of rest – a gift, though it slows us."

"Thank Frozen Jesus," Richard said, as Patience roused, and Errol, yawning, clambered out of the sling to explore.

Baj shoved a stiff-frozen blanket aside, and kissed Nancy good morning. "I think they're concerned they'll lose us."

She peered out of ice-powdered wool and fur to look out where day's first light poured into vacancy. "I think they wouldn't mind if we all fell. They've already lost one of their own, and we hinder them."

"Whatever their reason…" Baj stood in his parky (balancing carefully on springing netting), breathed-in air as thin and edged as a knife blade, and stretched, feeling muscles easing down his back. "Whatever, I'm grateful."

"And here's more to be grateful for." Marcus-Shrike, overhearing, sailed swinging by them, trailing frosting breath, a muk-boot resting in a loop of narrow line. He tossed short sticks of frozen blubber to them as he went.

"Only seal?" Patience sat up in the netting. "Nothing else at all?"

"Those people," Nancy said, as the Shrike climbed his rope like a southern spider, back onto the wall. "- People who don't mourn their dead." She tucked both pieces of blubber beneath her blanket, and sat on them to thaw.

"Better melt your drinking water as well, Lady… under that pretty bottom." The Shrike, calling from high above.

"Savages," Nancy said.

"And what's worse," Baj said, "full of very good advice." He found the water flasks among their covers – one chilled to granite, the other only rattling with ice when shaken – grimaced, and tucked them under him.

"Two chicken-birds," Nancy said, "sitting on eggs," and began to giggle.

Richard turned his massive head. "I find no reason, in such a place, for laughter."

"Thaw your water, Captain of the Guard," Baj said, "and become wise."

… Feeling oddly secure in their netting roost, that once had seemed so frail, so insubstantial, Baj and the others – except Errol, who climbed here and there, encouraged by the tribesmen – Baj and the others sat at ease, only standing to stretch, through the day's empty hours.

Patience, sang several very old songs for them, her singing voice as light as a girl's. She sang a song about dancing in the dark, and two or three others, while they drifted, dozing, munching half-thawed seal blubber, and drinking ice-melt water. They began conversations that often dissolved into the booming winds of the stupendous landscape they swung above… above even the trooping clouds that cruised under the early-winter sun over miles and miles of lake and tundra, sending their shadows across the distant mountains far to the south.

The four of them – and sometimes Errol – rested, only occasionally startled as monuments from the heights above, melted free by the sun, came ruffling, strumming past, slowly turning as they fell… The Shrikes did not rest, but chattered among themselves in tribe-talk, clambering over the glacier's face from perch to perch, filing ice-hooks sharp, sewing torn furs and muk-boots, and testing, greasing, rebraiding their slender lines.

… That sweet ease darkened to a wind-whining night – that faded into a next day of sun-blaze off mirror ice, frost ice, ice sea-green, pine-green, gray-green. And ice – the best, the most reliable – a richer blue than any sky.

Climbing, hacking their way up, slowly approaching two miles of height with bone-aching effort in numbing cold became the truth of living – and all else, all memory and expectation, a foolish lie. Breathing, in air so sparse, was additional labor… required thought, deliberation, and care not to frost and ruin their lungs.

The fear of falling came and went at odd moments, so that Baj, certain he'd come to terms, would discover – at only the slightest slip – that he had not. And the same, he knew, for Nancy and the others, except for carefree Errol.

The Shrikes, as always, climbed their confident, accomplished way, even having lost a man.

… That after-noon, the tilting sun flashing furious reflections off the ice, Richard fell – though only to the stretched and strumming end of his belayed line. Fell, jolted to a savage stop, and spun there, breathless.

Looking down from a rough cornice, Baj saw the great Person's heavy-muzzled face all too perfectly human in terror. The tribesmen saw as well, and Christopher-Shrike, like a copybook angel, descended to Richard, swung him to the ice face – attached an additional slender, braided rope – then persuaded him up.

Toward evening, the wind rising – calling amid immense spires of crystal green and blue – Baj and Richard worked side by side, clinging to a steep and hacking hand-holds. "Now," Richard said, panting at the labor, "- now I know what it is to be absolutely fearless. I pissed all that away when I fell. Every drop."… And it was true that he'd seemed to climb, since, with greater ease and certainty, as if a pact had been made with gravity.

… By the sixth day's morning, Baj and the others, climbing now with the Shrikes as well as beside them, found the world beneath and to the south – twenty miles of moraine, then eighty… ninety miles of tundra beyond that to the mountains – was now only a feature to them, and meant no more or less than a painting of such things.