Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Since Henry-Shrike had fallen, no one else had died.

One tribesman had had a little toe turn black after stitching had torn in his left muk-boot and let the cold in. Dolphus-Shrike had cut that toe off with his ice-hatchet's blade – an occasion for laughter among the Shrikes – and the nine-toed tribesman had smiled in good humor, folded cloth to the stump, used sewing-sinew to repair his muk-boot… then climbed away.

Baj, by this sixth day, had grown used to exhaustion's visions – found them interesting – but was careful not to be distracted when King Sam Monroe appeared climbing beside him just before sun-straight-up, though dressed in buckskins for hunting. The Achieving King seemed to need no ice hatchets for his holds… Strong fingers, strong wrists. "I like your girl, Baj," he said. "Fox blood does well by her."

"And she'd like you, sir."

The King, climbing quite steadily, had glanced at Baj, smiling. "If I were alive, you mean."

"I… suppose I mean that. Yes."

"Look away, son," the King said then. "Look away from me."

Baj did – and there seemed a change of light beside him, a shadow fled, and the King was gone.

That was the best imagining, the richest vision that came to Baj weary on the Wall, since it seemed to him that the King had loved him truly as a son – and not only as ward, as responsibility, as an amusing boy. The King's face had been a father's.

And there was something else – an odd thing, but he was certain of it – that if the Khan Toghrul, his First-father, appeared at the Wall, it would be as Baj was falling.

Below, in the landscape world, Dolphus-Shrike had said at least six or seven days, and a day of rest, to climb the Wall. And it was late after-noon on the seventh day that they came to the overhang.

Here at its crest, the glacier had thrust out a massive curling wave, like a great sea-roller – but frozen still and hard as granite, though brilliant blue under the sun, and so perfect that many depths were seen in it.

Baj and the others – exhausted veterans now, worn, wind-and-weather burned, bellies aching from days of melt-water and seal-blubber – clung to their pick-perches and examined the thing. The notions of falling, that had to some degree receded as they'd climbed and grown to understand the ice, now came back to them – to Baj at least – with sickening force.

It seemed to him that time for payment might now have arrived under this gleaming great ceiling of gorgeous ice reaching out… far out into the air.

And the more disturbing, since the Shrikes were disturbed. Dolphus and the others seemed surprised by this jutting shelf. They hammered ice-hooks in to swing out to left and right… surveying to find a way past it.

And found none. Baj, wrists aching, hands stiff claws on the handles of his ice hatchets, saw it in their faces. The overhang ran too far to skirt.

"What are we going to do…?" As she'd grown more tired, Nancy had taken to asking Baj these questions, as if he, who loved her, must know an answer.

"We're going to watch the Shrikes rig lines out beneath it, sweetheart – and probably send one man out, then another, until they're able to climb up and over."

Nancy turned her head, staring up at that immense and shining shelf.

Richard clung close to the ice just past them. "I don't know," he said, and coughed. The freezing air had dried their throats, cracked their lips to bleeding. "- I'm big, maybe too big to hang out there." Though he was big, his massive weight of muscle a handicap on vertical places, Richard had shrunk a little in the climb. It had diminished him, brought out the vulnerable human in him very clearly, so he no longer seemed a bear-man – a Moonriser Person – to Baj, but only a big man, and very tired.

"They'll manage, my dear." Patience, annoyed as Errol – above her and restless on a narrow shelf – scattered ice-chips down, had done very well. Slight and strong, though older, and tough with whatever blood her mother had accepted, she stood up against the ice on muk-boot spikes as if part of the Wall. The hem of her colored coat flagged as wind came sweeping past. "Shrikes are good managers…"

As if to prove it, the tribesmen bit off chunks of frozen blubber to chew, clapped mittened hands to warm them, and began to manage… muttering among themselves in slurred near book-English.

They gathered almost all line – leaving Baj and the others sharing only two anchored belays and what purchase they'd made for themselves – and handed through the slender braided ropes, checking the greased lines for fray and ice cuts… Jingling bandoleers of steel ice-hooks were examined, and the curved points of ice hatchets, and the spikes strapped to their muk-boots. Careful preparation.

The day was cruelly cold, but clear as the best silvered mirror. Clinging to ice, Baj turned his face from the Wall to see, two miles below, the rest of the earth lying inconsequential… What had been boulders and ice blocks, immense, immeasurable, had now become grains of sand – which, with those infinite lakes reduced to puddles, now made a map of miniatures. What appeared only a patch of tundra, green and brown, seemed to stretch a few feet to little hillocks, whose ranges might be stepped over by a child… And past those, the definite, gentle horizon-curve of the round world itself.

"Worth it," Baj said, his breath frosting.

"What?" Nancy carefully turned from watching the Shrikes' preparations.

"All worth it, to see that."

She followed his gaze… dung looking out as Lady Weather might, above and over the earth. "Almost," she said, "- except for losing Henry-Shrike."

There was stirring among the tribesmen… a releasing of holds, and changing stances on ice vertical. Then one, Christopher – heavy pack and possibles left hanging from a hammered hook on the Wall's face, his hood thrown back, his mittens off and dangling from sleeve strings – reached out and up to the great ceiling overhead, while two men belayed a line knotted around his waist.

He leaned far out… took a small ice-hook from his bandoleer, placed it up against the overhang, and using the flat of his hatchet, hammered it in, listening for the sharp notes of firmly-set. Then he reached back, caught the tossed end of a second line, and fed it through the hook's deep curve, where the steel nearly closed upon itself.

… Christopher drew that slender rope through and along, then pulled himself up it to hammer in a second hook, and slipped a loop of his belay line through that. – Then he swung free… dangling now farther out with the second line draped over his shoulder. Baj saw the Shrike take a breath, then begin to swing with purpose, back and forth, as the other tribesmen clung to their holds, gripping both lines fixed to anchoring ice-hooks and steel circlets.

Christopher swung out, struck up into the ice ceiling with his hatchet to pick a hold – and failed, the hatchet rebounding as if it struck stone. He swung back, swung forward… swung back… forward, and struck up for a hold again. The hatchet's pick snagged a place, held, then broke free, and Christopher swung back and away… used that momentum to swing forward again, struck up at the ice ceiling a third time, and the pick held.

Dangling in vacancy, he reached up with his free hand to twist a hook shallow into the ice – and hanging from one hatchet, took his second from his belt, hit the ice-hook three hard blows. Then he set and hammered in another.

Tugging for slack, he looped each his lines side by side through this second pair of hooks.

As Christopher swung away, a hook broke – its steel snapping clean with a crack – and he fell, seeming slowly… almost drifting down, until yanked to a hard halt at his line's end, the belaying Shrikes grunting at the shock.