The Tale of Oriel (30 page)

The gate stood open, and they crowded into the undefended yard. The door to the house stood open to the cold. It was as if the inhabitants had risen from their meal, with only half of it eaten, and fled the house. But where would they have gone? Rulgh had no question about
why
they had fled.

Neither had Oriel, and he had just enough strength left to be glad that the inhabitants of this vast northern land had some means of warning one another when danger ranged, before he and Griff were set to work, while the Wolfers fell onto the floor by the fire and slept.

The Wolfers slept so deeply that Griff could ask Oriel, “If we ran away?”

Outside, in that white wilderness, Oriel and Griff would have no chance to live. Oriel couldn't find the words inside his head to push out through his mouth, but Griff understood. He sat down beside Oriel and closed his eyes, to sleep until their masters called them awake.

Before the blizzard lifted there was rest, and food, days and nights of howling winds, and the Wolfers sleeping like winter-fat animals in their caves, or waking to quarrel. As soon as the sky cleared they moved on, the boards once again strapped to their feet.

The mountains rose like a wall, high and white and sharp.

At night the wolves crowded closer, bolder—Oriel was wakened by Griff to drive them off with the boards.

It was only Rulgh's voice that made it possible to continue moving forward, only knowing that Rulgh would jab the point of a sword into his back—cutting through the fur he wore wrapped around his body—or into Griff's back, if they faltered—

He wondered if they had moved at all, some days, so slowly did they move up the mountain's side—

Only the promise of more pain if he halted kept him moving.

They followed a shallow ravine between two tall hills, until the ravine became broad enough for two or three abreast, moving swiftly now with the boards along level ground. When Oriel looked up, the mountains rose all around him.

They were trapped among the mountains.

Oriel didn't even know what direction would lead them out.

He didn't think Rulgh knew, either, except that there was a plume of smoke far ahead. Oriel pushed his legs forward, pushing the boards through the snow. Beside him, Griff breathed.

Downhill, he thought, downhill would be out. They were moving steadily uphill, and he didn't know when he had last seen a tree. Bare white-grey rocks, whole hillsides of only rock, where the wind had blown all the snow away. White fields and hillsides of snow, and a white-blue sky above.

Oriel couldn't hear his own breathing.

When they came to it, the smoke seemed to rise out of a tiny hill of snow, up against bare rock. The Wolfers pulled at the hillside with their hands, and a man crawled out—bareheaded, wearing cloth; his face was pale but his eyes were dark under thick white eyebrows, and his long white hair blew in the wind. He beckoned them to enter the mountainside, and he held back a doorway made of skin.

The ten Wolfers entered and when they were safe inside Oriel and Griff could follow. They leaned the boards against the stone. The man urged them all to sit close around his fire. He gave them thick hot food. He rubbed fat into their feet and hands and faces. The firelight moved over the one room, like sun running over water.

How long he slept, Oriel didn't know. There was a time when his fingers and toes ached, the bones of his body pathways of pain; and he thought he heard men moaning.

Oriel knew it wasn't Griff's voice. So he could sleep again, since when he slept the pain of his bones went to a distant place. From that distant place, the pain had trouble reaching him.

He awoke to see Griff's face, shadowy in firelight. Griff looked as wild as a Wolfer, a stranger's face. Except for his eyes.

Oriel struggled to sit up. Sitting, he saw the white-haired man feeding someone across the small room, on the other side of the fire. “He wakes,” Griff said, and the white-haired mountain man answered, “Good. Do you want to try him with some porridge?”

It was not until he had eaten, and slept, and wakened to eat again that Oriel realized what he had heard: his own language.

RULGH LIVED, AND THREE OF
the others. The rest were gone, as if they had never been. The mountain man's room was in fact a cave that ran back into the mountainside for forty or fifty paces before it ended at a damp stone wall. The man had filled the back of the cave with branches of wood and great mounds of ground stuff—it looked like a mixture of leaves and nuts. This, cooked with melted snow, made his food. The wood burned for his fire. The mountain man had supplies to keep himself, and guests, too.

When Rulgh could speak, he demanded to know who this man was. The mountain man understood his question, but had no words to answer it. “Why does it matter who I am?” he asked Oriel and Griff. They couldn't tell him. “Come,” the man said.

He led them outside, where the sun reflected off fields of snow, to warm the air. The white peaks rose all around them. In the bright light, the mountain man's eyes were blue, with flecks of brown in them, like bits of ice floating down a river in the spring melt. “Ask him where he is taking you,” the man said to Oriel.

“To the Kingdom,” Rulgh answered.

“My homeland,” the mountain man said. Oriel put this into Rulgh's language.

Rulgh demanded, “Where is the pass?”

“Why do you go to the Kingdom? Ask him,” the mountain man said.

Rulgh took a breath to answer but was interrupted by a sound that filled the air, as if somewhere nearby a giant had been punched in the belly and expelled a bellyful of air, “Mhhuummphh.” Or perhaps, Oriel thought, looking around to find the source of the sound, it was as if the mountain itself had belched, gently, like a girl at a feast.

The mountain man didn't seem alarmed, but still Oriel moved next to Griff, for better defense should they need to defend themselves. Rulgh looked around, at peaks and sky, and almost as if in answer to the question he hadn't asked, the sound came again, “Mhhuummphh.”

“What's happ—?” the Wolfers asked.

“Hush,” the mountain man said. “Listen.”

Oriel signaled Rulgh and the others to quiet.

There was no sound in the great icy silence of the mountains. They waited. Then Oriel could hear a distant waterfall, rumbling.

But no water could fall, not in these frozen wastes.

The noise was gone so quickly, he couldn't be sure he had really heard it.

The mountain man waited for a long soundless time. Then he spoke again. “It's over now, the avalanche.”

“Va-lanish?” Rulgh echoed.

The mountain man shrugged. “The snow falls over the hillside, like a landslide. If you are caught, and if you aren't smashed, and you make room to breathe before it freezes over you, and settles down on you, and if you dig your way upward and you are lucky, if you are a lucky man, then you live.”

Oriel started to translate, but Rulgh waved him to silence. “The pass,” Rulgh insisted. “The Kingdom.”

“Who are you, to him?” the man asked Oriel.

“We are his captives,” Oriel said.

“You don't have the look of captives. You wouldn't be captives in the Kingdom. Mightn't they be servants, though?” he asked, and listened to his own question as if it had been spoken by another.

“He knows the pass?” Rulgh demanded.

“Now we go inside, to eat, and then sleep. Tell your man that,” the mountain man said to Oriel.

Rulgh didn't want to cooperate, but he gave in, grudgingly, with an eye on the white disk of the sun, which was sinking towards the tallest of three spiked peaks. “All right,” he said.

“The pass lies there, just below the sun,” the mountain man said. Oriel told this to Rulgh. “Tell him, the sun goes through the pass every night, he goes between the middle and right peaks and into the Kingdom, where he sleeps in the arms of his beloved. For the women of the Kingdom are beautiful.”

When Oriel told Rulgh this, the Wolfer burst into harsh laughter.

“Tell him that later—he will see it—the moon comes searching for her husband, but she does not know where the pass into the Kingdom is.”

“Tewkeman,”
Rulgh answered.
“Brautelman.”

The mountain man turned his two-colored eyes to Rulgh and stared for so long that the Wolfer became uneasy. Still the mountain man stared at the Wolfer, until Rulgh made the sign of the horned animal, to protect himself. Finally the mountain man spoke. “Yes, I think so. Come inside, before you freeze, for if you freeze here there is no other person but me to find you, and save you again.”

When they had dipped their fill of porridge out of the pot with their fingers, for there were neither bowls nor spoons for them, the mountain man said, as if no time had passed since his last words, “and I will only save you once.”

“Tewkeman,”
Rulgh muttered, but without conviction.

“She was my sister, and she carried his child, and the soldiers came to kill her. And they killed her, as it was the Lady Earl's wish and order, and so I wanted to kill the Earl, they said so, so I had to run away, because it was the Lady Earl who should die. Not that boy. It wasn't the boy's wish and order. He couldn't order, nor wish, neither, I think; for when I found him he lay there and didn't blink or breathe, all the time I asked him for my sister.”

The man leaned his head close to Oriel's, as if what he said now was spoken in secret. “I came through the pass, when he rescued me, and brought me here, and he drew the mountains up behind me.”

“Who rescued you?”

“Jackaroo, he carried me along in the palm of his great hand, and set me down—so gently—so I would live safely here. Not for your profit and service!” the man cried out at Rulgh; but then he winked at the Wolfer with a friendly smile.

That decided Rulgh. Oriel could see him make up his mind. So Oriel was not surprised the next morning to have a pack strapped onto his back, filled with the mountain man's dried porridge. Griff carried wood.

The mountain man seemed untroubled by their departure. He hung around Oriel's neck the curled hollow horn of a mountain goat. “If you are in need, call on this. I will answer you, or I will send a mountain to your aid.”

“What now?” Rulgh demanded.

“Tell him, he knows where the pass is,” the mountain man said. Oriel told them this. They all stood outside the skin doorway, under bright sunlight. The mountain man pointed off to the east, where the sun hovered over a distant line of peaks.

“This is not what he spoke before. I believe nothing,” Rulgh muttered. “Follow me.” He moved off.

They followed, with long gliding steps on the boards. With every step, Oriel and Griff fell behind.

By midday, it was as if they had never found shelter with the mountain man. Rulgh drove all of them forward, always uphill. Oriel kept the triple peaks in his view—because he could remember them, not because he had faith in the mountain man. Also because when Rulgh's voice called them forward, faster, unless Oriel thought of the triple peaks he would have refused to move.

Griff would refuse, if Oriel refused.

They would both die, then.

That night, as they stood guard, Oriel tried to ask Griff. “He meant an avalanche,” Oriel said. “With the horn. To call one down, if I hear . . .”

“Ah,” Griff said. His voice sounded so thick with sleep that Oriel almost didn't tell him, but he thought that Griff also had a part in the choice, since he had a part in the danger. He had never given Griff a part in the choice before, but now he thought he had owed it to Griff.

“Wake up, Griff. Listen. If I call down an avalanche, if I can do it, we may be swept into it.”

“Yes,” Griff said.

“To our deaths,” Oriel said.

“Yes,” Griff said.

“And there may well be no pass,” Oriel said.

“I know,” Griff said. “But he gave us no food tonight.”

“He'll let us die,” Oriel agreed.

“If you can do it, then you must,” Griff said.