The Wicked Day (11 page)

High up on the slopes of the ogre’s shoulder, beside the towering pile of its neck and head, a tiny skull inched its way around the iron strand. The eye sockets peeked down at Jute, and it seemed as if they were filled with the red light of the forge.

“Oh, master,” said the skull. “I spy a mouse. A sneaking, thieving mouse!”

The ogre turned.

“Run!” screamed the ghost.

Jute grabbed the sword and fled. In that one instant, there had been time to see the ogre’s awful eyes glaring down at him, the forge spitting out sparks and heat, and the blade in the ogre’s hand shining blue along its edge. The floor shook under him. He could hear the pounding of the ogre’s feet.

“Run, run, runrunrun!” shrieked the ghost.

“Run, run, run!” giggled the skulls. “Run, little mouse! Run as fast as you can!”

The ogre did not say anything, and Jute, of course, did not say anything either, for he had no breath for anything other than running and trying not to scream. Something whipped through the air behind him. And then the wind picked him up. His feet left the ground, still windmilling madly. Dust blew past him. Dimly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Declan’s body tumble head over heels, bounce painfully off a stone outcropping—well, it looked painful to Jute, but it was doubtful whether the man felt it, as he looked decidedly unconscious—and then fly past him to go sailing up a flight of stairs.

The ogre bellowed in fury.

“Death take thee!”

The stairs shook. Rocks tumbled down from the ceiling. Sudden light blazed across Jute’s sight. It was so bright he could not keep his eyes open. The brilliance burned past his eyelids with dazzling images of red and white and sunbursts of gold. He had a glimpse of a mountainside falling away into nothingness, of a blinding expanse of snow, of sky and the dark line of trees marching across the slopes below like the advancing guard of an army. The wind surged up into a howling roar. Jute fluttered in its grasp, as helpless as a feather. The wind blew through his mind. The mountain shook, and he heard the thunderous crash of rocks falling and the dull boom of the earth sliding away.

And then the wind set Jute down as a gently as a mother would lay down a sleeping infant in its cradle. He opened his eyes and sat up. The sun shone down from a clear sky. He felt its heat on his face and radiating from the stone beneath him, but the shadows of the forest and the deep crags below him looked dreadfully cold. Snow lay all around. The hawk settled next to him in a flutter of wings.

“That was rather close,” said the bird. He nipped at a crooked feather and then nodded in satisfaction. “I was beginning to think it was the end of you. And of Tormay.”

“Where were you?” said Jute, furious and happy at the same time.

“Oh, here and there,” said the hawk. “Here and there. Don’t splutter like that. You look like an outraged infant about to spit up its mother’s milk. You figured it out. The wind woke, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Jute, still spluttering, “I suppose. But—”

“But that’s precisely the point. You can’t always be depending on me, regardless of the severity of the straits you find yourself in. Although I must admit, being in the clutches of an ogre (one of the oldest ogres in all of Tormay) is a somewhat severe strait. You have to learn to do with what you can do, and that includes the wind. We should’ve done better by avoiding Ostfall. Nasty place. I remember now, better late than never, ogres used to hold sway over a great deal of the western Morns. Villages would pay tribute to them, and there were quite a few instances of peculiar offspring among the people. But that was long ago.”

“I could’ve been killed!” shouted Jute.

“Tush.”

“But—!”

“Bosh!”

“When you’re done shouting at each other,” said the ghost, popping out of a nearby snowdrift, “what are you going to do about Declan?”

The boy and the hawk both turned, shamefaced. The rock was larger than Jute had first noticed, for it stepped below him to a shallow ledge and then beyond that into a sweep of stone that fell away down the mountainside. Declan lay sprawled on the ledge. Jute scrambled down toward him. The wind blew past him, and he heard impatience and excitement in its tone.

“He looks cold,” said Jute, forgetting his anger at the hawk. He touched Declan’s hand and it was indeed cold.

“Cold he may be,” said the hawk. “And cold he is, but the sea is even colder still.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Yes,” said the ghost. “What do you mean by that? What has the sea to do with us? Brr! Wretched sort of cold, that is. I remember a day spent fishing for flounder or, er, some kind of fish. Who cares? It was fish! Started out fine and dandy, as all stories do that end horribly, and then up came black clouds and wind and the surf pounding away I caught a miserable cold.” The ghost sneezed in evident enjoyment of its memory.

“Never mind what I mean,” said the hawk, “for it isn’t mine to explain.” And the bird bent over the man’s head to whisper in his ear. Both Jute and the ghost edged closer to listen, but they were not close enough to hear.

The wind hushed its voice, for it heard what the hawk said. Out across the horizon, two days’ journey to the west, a wave surged higher on the shore than the surf had gone in many a day. Fishermen mending their nets on the sand were caught unawares by its advance and came up sputtering in the foam, to the amusement of their drier and safer fellows.

Declan stirred. He opened his eyes and sat up.

“I was dreaming,” he said.

Declan looked around him in sudden and dawning dismay, at the fields of snow and the mountain slopes that stretched away on either side. His hand reached to his collar to feel at the necklace there. He sat in silence and gazed west, but the eyes of man are not strong enough to look over such a distance to see what he wished to see. If the hawk had mounted high into the sky over the highest peak of the Mountains of Morn, even his keen eyes would not have reached the sea.

“I was dreaming,” he said again.

“But are you well?” said the hawk.

Declan gazed at his hands unhappily. The gray pallor of death was gone from his face and his skin was already burned red by the cold and the wind.

“Well enough,” he said.

“All well indeed,” said the ghost. “And what if, one day, we find ourselves in similar sorry straits without you conveniently nearby, master hawk? What then? Shall we just sit by and watch the poor man die? At least teach young Jute here the words. The full power of language doesn’t seem to work with ghosts. It’s our lack of definition, our ghostliness, I suppose.”

“Your point is taken,” said the hawk somewhat sourly. “Here, then, it’s a simple thing. The mere mention of the sea will prove a powerful tonic for whatever ails Declan, but it must be said in an older tongue.
Brim ond mere
. Will you remember those words? I warn you, they mustn’t be spoken with careless intent.”

“
Brim ond mere
,” said the ghost greedily. “Delightful. I think I knew these words once, yes, it's coming back to me now. Of course, of course. Careless intent? Never. Now, you try it, Jute.”

“
Brim ond mere
,” echoed Jute.

“No,” said the ghost. “More emphasis on the last word.
Brim ond mere
!”

“
Brim ond mere!
”

“Silence!” said the hawk.

The snow shifted in creaking groans around them, drifts warming and collapsing down into water to reveal the real and awful depths of the white fields. The rock on which they sat trembled. A bank of snow on their left slid away in a whisper that grew in tumbling fits and sudden, soft thunder to a rumbling roar as it bounded down the mountainside, growing and gathering to itself more and more snow as the avalanche careened toward the tree line below.

“If that had happened above us,” said Jute. He did not finish his thought but looked higher up the mountain in alarm.

“Words are dangerous,” said the hawk, glaring at the ghost. “None more so than the older tongues, for they reach back to the eldest tongue of all, in which language a word defines the nature of a thing, rather than the thing defining the word. Once the word’s known, the thing itself is controlled, and this is a terrible danger.”

“Yes, yes,” said the ghost in sulky tones. “The strictures of naming. I taught that class many times when I was alive. I could teach it in my sleep.”

“Then you’d do well to remember,” said the hawk. “Asleep or otherwise.”

“It was Jute who said it,” mumbled the ghost. “I’m just a ghost. There’s no power in a word when I say it.”

Happily, they discovered that the wind had kindly deposited not only Declan’s sword on the rock slab, but also both their packs and a bewildering assortment of treasure. The sun shone brightly on the silver and gold, so brightly that the flash could be seen from miles away, for the wind had scoured the trove clean of the dust of hundreds of years.

“The ogre will be missing his baubles, I think,” said the hawk, and then he added, somewhat sadly, “the wind always did have an eye for shiny things.”

“We can’t just leave it all lying here,” said Jute. He scrambled over the rock to sit on his haunches by the shining sprawl. “Someone’s bound to take it.”

“Squirrels?” jeered the ghost.

“I reckon this’d go for a nice price in Hearne.” Jute picked up a red stone laced about with gold filigree as fine as spiderweb.

“Leave that be,” said the hawk. “There’s no telling when an ogre gets its hands on something. It changes, and never for the better.”

“Aye,” said the ghost. “Leave it for the squirrels. They’ll crack it like a nut.”

After some discussion, mainly between the hawk and Declan, they decided it would be quicker to head up the mountainside rather than backtrack down into the Rennet Valley and so find the pass to Mizra. It was bitter, cold work, trudging up those snowy slopes. Jute fell into a daze as he followed in the path that Declan trod. The crags rose around them as they climbed, for the Mountains of Morn reached up like the points of spears into the sky and their peaks were unscalable. Dimly, as if from a distance, Jute heard the hawk and the ghost arguing about the history of the duchy of Mizra and finer points, such as whether or not the city of Ancalon predated that of Hearne, and the degree of autonomy of the mountain hamlets on the eastern slopes of the Morns. The cold worked its way deep into Jute’s bones. It would be a fine thing to fly over the mountains and be done with the journey. What good was being the wind—what on earth did it mean: being the wind?—if he could not fly about when he wanted? Jute tried to step into the air as he had done before, but his legs felt as if they were made of lead.

Well, then why don’t you just carry me?
he said to the wind, but the wind just chuckled in his ear and blew past in a flurry of snow.

Much later in the day, their way began to descend. Jute wasn’t sure when, but he was only aware of a new and more agonizing pain in his legs (going down a hill is always worse than going up a hill), and the sunlight vanished behind the crags to the west. It grew colder. Ice covered the snow, undiscernible in the shadows. Jute slipped and fell. He could not feel his hands.

“I don’t know how much longer the boy will be able to go on,” said the hawk.

“Best to keep moving,” said Declan without turning around. “Two more hours and then we’ll stop. Down under the lee of the mountain. Below the tree line.”

“I can’t feel my toes,” said Jute, his teeth chattering.

“Can’t stop now. Nothing to build a fire with here. We’d freeze and die.”

“Precisely,” said the ghost, cheering up at these words. “You’ll freeze and die. Death by freezing is fascinating. Your blood turns to ice. Your skin turns blue. Your hair gets as brittle as old women’s finger bones and then just snaps off, strand by strand, until you’re bald. Your eyes freeze into pebbles rattling around in your skull until they pop out and go bouncing across the ground. Your stomach fills up with wind and you’ll find yourself thinking thoughts of ale, hard cheese, and witches with long noses.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said the hawk.

“Yes, but true. Many people who’ve frozen to death have reported similar experiences. The truth is often strange, my fine-feathered friend, but it’s still the truth.”

“I don’t even know why I bother,” said the hawk.

Jute didn’t hear the rest of their conversation, for his mind was filled with thoughts of ale and cheese. This alarmed him. Perhaps it meant he was freezing to death? But then he realized he had only started thinking about ale and cheese after the ghost had mentioned them. After all, he wasn’t thinking about witches with long noses, and for several minutes he had to concentrate hard to avoid thinking about witches. He could do with some ale and cheese. Mulled ale, steaming hot. And bread fresh from the oven to go with the cheese.

They continued for what seemed much longer than two hours. It was an endless, dull stumbling through darkness and cold that grew darker and colder with every step Jute took. Thoughts of ale and cheese congealed into ice and fell away, too heavy to carry even as hope.

Pine trees rose up from the icy slope, singly at first like sentinels of an army; past them were the thicker groves of the battalions standing at attention for the return of the sun. Above their snow-bowed heads, the moon skated across the frozen expanse of the sky.