Above the Snowline (24 page)

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Authors: Steph Swainston

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‘But all these skins!’ she wailed. ‘What do you do with the meat?’

‘Feed it to the dogs.’

‘Do you sell the skins to Tarmigan?’ Jant asked.

‘Yes. Every month I send a full wagon train down to Rachiswater, under Snipe’s guard. My brother’s steward and various other merchants pay Snipe, who purchases our provisions and returns.’

‘I see.’

‘So this is just one month’s hunting?’ she whined in amazement. ‘It’s a year’s worth of food! The scale . . . twelve times this? Why work so hard? Why waste so much? You could freeze the meat and live off it for the rest of the year!’

‘We don’t eat carrion.’

‘Soon you’ll be eating nothing, because there’ll be nothing left!’ Snipe was standing in the doorway. ‘If we keep trapping, there might be fewer wolf attacks,’ he said.

‘Ah yes, the white wolves have been a nuisance. We must protect our children and beasts from them . . . and from other carnivores.’

Jant scowled. ‘Clearing wolves is one thing, but overhunting and inadvertently starving out Rhydanne is quite another.’

‘Comet, I am not overhunting, I assure you.’

‘Show me the rest of your fortress.’ He slammed the lantern back into its niche and we descended into the overpowering mountain sunlight. I led them through the bailey, between the chalets, as I had planned, using the track furthest from the armoury and our storehouses full to bursting - which would give the lie to my assurance that our livestock and trapping were all we had to live on. It was true, in a way - I needed every last sack of flour, because my troops will quadruple the population of Carniss.

We passed the dog compound and stable where the sleds were kept. The barking was deafening. ‘Why do you have so many dogs?’ Jant asked.

‘They’re sled dogs.’

‘Yes, but hundreds!’

‘Only one hundred. I’m making sure all my villagers know how to dog sled. Mushing is the most convenient way to get around.’

‘What are those buildings over there?’

‘The settlers’ cabins. You can see how dedicated they are.’

‘If we didn’t work hard, we’d perish in days,’ Snipe added. The log cabins in neat lines were indeed poor but meticulously kept as I had ordered. Every one had foundations of rough stone and covered stores of firewood in the space where their sloping roofs reached the ground. Their shutters were cheerfully open, and smoke poured from every chimney.

‘And that,’ said Jant, pointing to the empty barracks. ‘What’s that?’

‘A new smokehouse, as yet unfinished.’

‘I see.’

He doesn’t believe me, I thought, and felt a rising sense of dread. He doesn’t believe a word I’m saying. I fought the panic down, lest it show on my face, and breathed steadily in the thin air. I swung my arms casually, although my palms were sweating.

We ascended between snow-covered outcrops, every one of which we had used in our building, so the fronts of some cabins emerged from roofed-over cracks in the rock; a terrace of stables had been built against a crag providing their rear walls, and other houses were ingeniously constructed over shallow chasms, which gave them cellars for cool stores in the summer. We ascended a causeway between granite slabs stained red with iron ore and I noticed that neither Jant nor Dellin felt the need to use the handrail. Eventually we arrived at the end of the promontory, where on a clean swathe stood a tall pylon of flexible green pine. We walked up to its base and I patted its timbers.

‘And what on earth’s that? A bell tower?’

‘Another of my innovations.’ I said. ‘For avalanches and earthquakes. If the ground shakes, the bell tolls and gives us warning. What do you think, Comet?’ I added proudly. ‘Rather remarkable for two years’ work?’

‘It’s extraordinary.’

Our Rhydanne guest had been gazing around with her arms tightly folded, paying no notice whatsoever. She was as petulant as a teenager on a school tour. It’s typical of Rhydanne: as soon as you bring them to a serious topic their attention disappears, they become obstreperous and dash away to start drinking. Sure enough, she made some remark and set off back to the gatehouse, her moccasin boots squeaking the snow. We followed.

‘She’s hungry,’ said Jant.

‘They always seem to be hungry.’

‘Fast metabolism. Otherwise they’d freeze.’

‘So they must eat continually? Yes? And drink?’

‘There’s stuff in their blood that naturally stops them freezing solid.’

‘Gin?’

‘It’s metabolised from alcohol. That’s why they have to drink all the time. Would you be comfortable in a minus-forty blizzard?’

I winced. ‘Considering she knows you’re an Eszai, she doesn’t pay you much respect.’

He smiled, as if he preferred it that way. ‘You don’t know the half of it! You should have seen me trying to put her in a coach.’

The awe-inspiring bulk of Capercaillie reared in front of us, dwarfing the gatehouse. Jingling goat bells echoed back from its rock walls, giving the impression that the mountains themselves were ringing. ‘Capercaillie always takes my breath away,’ I said, and laughed. ‘Literally, at the beginning. Everyone had altitude sickness, and although we’re acclimatised now it still sometimes affects us. But I believe my climbers will scale Capercaillie one day. We need to discover a means to breathe up there.’

‘It’s called Klannich,’ said Jant.

‘Pardon?’

‘That mountain is called Klannich. Not Capercaillie.’

‘Claniss?’

‘Klann
ich
.’

‘To you, perhaps, but not to us.’

‘It means the Hitching Post of the Sun,’ he insisted.

‘How pretty. It had no name on our maps - none of them did - so I named them all.’ I stopped and pointed to the long arête which joined the two summits. ‘Raven’s Ridge. And that one’s Becard Spur after my father.’

Seeing me pointing, the Dellin woman demanded a translation. She heard it in dismay and clawed the air. ‘No! It’s always been called Klannich!’

‘Then what do you call Raven’s Ridge?’

‘That’s Klannich too!’

‘And Becard Spur?’

‘Chir Klannich too!’

‘So all the mountains have the same name?’

‘Becard Spur is part of Klannich. It’s such a short run from the summit the Rhydanne see no point in giving it another name.’ Jant continued warningly, ‘You think you’ve travelled far, but by Rhydanne standards you’re still sitting on your brother’s doorstep.’

We began walking again. ‘I had assumed Rhydanne didn’t name places. I thought they lacked our impulse to categorise.’

‘You have very strange ideas about them, Raven. Of course they name features. How else could they hunt if they couldn’t refer to places?’

‘Like pumas, I suppose - just taking down whatever game they come across. Many people say Rhydanne don’t have exploratory minds. I thought they never classified the world around them. They certainly don’t have any art.’

Comet switched to High Awian for effect: ‘Raven, I have never heard such nonsense! It’s a matter of degree.’

‘Not of kind?’

‘No! You exalt history and heroes in your place names; Rhydanne may remember where a great hunter killed a fearsome bear. They have little parables too, and let me tell you, their titles are more poetic than yours! Far behind Klannich, there’s a mountain which no Awian has ever seen. It breathes sulphurous smoke and steam from holes on its bare slopes, and my grandmother called it the Mountain Where All Clouds Are Born. On the western rim of Scree Plateau is the residue of a lake; no water but just caustic soda - white crystals covering black grit as far as the eye can see. Eilean called it the Tarn of Stinging Salt. If you trek north to the furthest horn in the range, you’ll see it ends in a mountain as large as Klannich. In the remote past an earthquake sheared it in half. The half that remains is a neat wedge. It looks out over the Paperlands with a two-thousand-metre rock face as smooth as an iron, and Eilean called it Bhachnadich: “God’s Doorstop” . . .’ He was becoming angry at himself for seeming to side with the Rhydanne. His speech dried up, like a stream into sand, and he sighed.

‘Let it pass,’ I said.

‘Let it pass.’ He reverted to the common tongue. ‘You can call it Capercaillie if you want.’

I began to think it would be easier to deceive him than I had feared. His memories were his weakness. Beside the keep the northern wall wasn’t yet finished, and some men on top were adding a course of stone. All were silhouetted against the sky, but a thinner black shape crouched nearby with his knees jutting out and arms folded across them, his long fingers hanging down like claws. Jant shaded his eyes and looked up. ‘That one’s a Rhydanne.’

‘Yes. I employed him two years ago. He carried the first rope up the cliff, from which we ran thicker cables and mounted our pulleys. He’s still useful if we need someone to scale rock faces to fix the first supports for our climbers. Or if the builders drop something, he shins down the cliff and fetches it.’

‘So he doesn’t do any building?’

‘No.’ I frowned. ‘They’re not capable of building.’

‘They built Scree pueblo.’

‘By an accumulation of small dens, as rabbits build warrens, so I’m told. There is something of a difference between Scree and Carniss.’

‘Do you pay him?’

‘Oh, yes. In meat and drink.’

Dellin was aghast. She raised her face and called to him. He ignored her, I was pleased to see, and when she continued her savage yells he shuffled around on the wall summit to face outwards, and presented her with the mute expanse of his back. She looked downcast and started spinning her spear as if to show she didn’t care.

As we approached the staircase turret, hobnailed boots echoed in the undercroft beside it. A group of explorers walked out, blinking from the sunlight and laughing at some joke. Then they sighted the Messenger and turned as white as snow. My guard captain was leading them. He came to join us and bowed low, then put a finger on the bridge of his sunglasses and pushed them onto his forehead.

Three Rhydanne bearers loped out of the passage, covered in the climbers’ equipment, with coils of rope across their bodies and karabiners jangling in bunches from their belts. They had adapted items of our clothing, and wore mismatched T-shirts and coloured scarves with their suede parkas. One had forsworn his native clothes completely and wore fyrd fatigues, which is understandable as our clothes are better quality. They all had necklaces made of pierced pound coins; they carried skis over their shoulders, and ice-axe handles projected from their rucksacks. When they saw that the explorers had gone inside they cheerfully dropped all the gear in the snow and dashed to the captain’s house, where many Rhydanne footprints converged on a barrel on the veranda.

I said to Jant, ‘I’m glad you have the chance to see we employ Rhydanne as porters - and guides too; they show us the best spots for prey, silver and gems. Don’t they, Crake?’

‘Yes,’ said the captain, ‘when they behave.’

‘Don’t they work well?’ Jant asked.

‘They tend to get bored. Then they dump our packs and shoot off into the corries. And they seem childlike. They don’t understand money at all.’

‘They’re not stupid.’

‘I’m not calling them stupid. They just don’t see the point of exploration. And they have a really short attention span.’

‘Perhaps that’s a comment on the attractions of your conversation? ’

I stepped in. ‘Did you find anything?’

‘Yes, my lord. Karbhainn found us a fissure with a vein of tin ore.’

‘Tin? Not silver?’

‘Not today, my lord. Cassiterite with tourmaline and topaz in the same vein. Possibly arsenic too.’