QUILLER
Wind Mother dies down at sunset, leaving dusk to fall like gray smoke across the snowdrifts that sculpt the shoreline. Everywhere I look, the ocean is a blanket of white; but out across the distances, beams of zyme light shoot upward into the dove-colored sky. It’s a rare sight. A forest of green lances standing on end.
RabbitEar cuts trail ahead of me. His muscular shoulders swing back and forth as his legs hew a dark swath through the white. The mammoth-bone point of his spear, which he’s using to test the snow depth, glints as he moves.
“Slow down, RabbitEar,” I call. “I’m falling behind.”
He slows, but continues resolutely forward.
Freezing, my eyes water constantly. I have to flex my numb fingers to ease the ache. The quest cliff looms no more than one hundred paces away. A ghostly powder of zyme glow covers the smooth vertical face. It’s clear now that snow filled in the handholds and footholds, turning the trail invisible. Even if Jawbone had wanted to, he would have never been able to climb up to us.
I cup a hand to my mouth and shout, “Jawbone? Jawbone, do you hear me?”
Desperately, I stare upward, praying to see our son step to the edge of one of the ice caves and wave to us. The caves are dark. There’s no firelight reflecting from the ceilings.
“RabbitEar, do you see him?”
“No.” Propping his spear, he leans on it to steady his tired legs, and scans each crack that might be large enough to shelter a climber. “Maybe he was caught in the storm, couldn’t see the handholds, and took a different path to get to the top.”
“You mean he may have tried to work outward along one of the horizontal fissures? Gods, I hope not. His arm muscles aren’t strong enough to support his weight.”
RabbitEar shouts, “Jawbone! Answer me! Son, are you up there?”
When no answer comes, I rub my eyes. I’m half snowblind, just as RabbitEar is. “I told you I heard him scream.”
When my husband turns to look at me, he’s white-lipped and silent, unable to say the words neither of us can bear to hear. His hand moves instinctively toward me, reaching out, and I slog through the snow and into his arms.
As he pulls me against him, he says, “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”
He can no longer tell me I’m wrong, that our son is fine and just holed up in one of the children’s camps in front of a warm fire, and it breaks my heart.
RabbitEar hugs me so tight, it’s hard to breathe, but I say, “We should never have forced him to climb this cliff. Not this time of summer when storms are the most unpredictable and fierce. The instant he begged us to take him home, we should have done it!”
“Don’t . . . Don’t do that, Quiller. We can’t be absolutely sure he fell until we’ve searched the camps. He could be lying by his dead fire, senseless from cold.”
I push away and stare at him. “You believe that?”
“I have to.”
RabbitEar turns and wades through the snow to look up at the cliff, the place where the trail should be, then he stares at the tortured drifts piled against the base. My husband is trying to calculate where our son would have landed if he’d fallen from different points on the trail or tried to work his way along one of the fissures.
“We know he made it to the first camp,” I say, slogging forward to stand beside him. “And we saw him climbing toward the second. My guess is that he made it to the second camp. So if he fell, it would have been while climbing up from the second camp to the third.” I extend my arm and draw a line across the appropriate snowdrifts. “Which means he should be somewhere in there.”
RabbitEar gives me a faint nod. His gaze has fastened on a different location, on the worst drifts. The zyme light is so faint, they resemble huge, rounded gray humps, seventy hand-lengths high. We both know what’s beneath them. “If he fell straight down from anywhere along the trail between the first and second camp, he would have landed in the same place as Little Gull.”
My gaze ascends the cliff as I imagine my son’s small body tumbling through the air and crashing into the massive black boulders at the bottom. I feel it, too, that haunted certainty that our son’s dead body is right there in front of us, lying broken and bloody beneath the snow.
RabbitEar says, “Let’s dig a snow shelter in one of the drifts, and we’ll get started at daybreak.”
“No. I know there’s not much light left . . .” My words trail away, for I know it’s a foolish thing to ask. Darkness is falling fast and we’re both exhausted and bitterly cold.
RabbitEar sighs. “I’m not going to talk you out of it, am I?”
I shake my head. “I have to start digging.”
“All right, but we still have to find shelter.” He looks around for any sort of quick shelter that doesn’t require scooping out the drift, shaping and compacting the interior into a bell-like shape, and fashioning an elevated sleeping platform inside that’s higher than the entrance to create a heat trap. A big crevice might work. “I’ll make a bargain with you. If you find us some sort of quick shelter, I’ll start digging. Acceptable? I can clear more snow than you can before it’s too cold to search.”
“Yes. Good. Thank you.”
He trudges toward the buried boulders, while I head northward.
I know this stretch of shoreline as well as my own village, but everything looks different in a sea of windswept snowdrifts. All the usual landmarks are gone, swallowed up as though they never existed. Nonetheless, somewhere ahead, sandstone ledges create overhanging shelves. I must find them.
As I hike, the hiss of zyme grows louder, and I hear faint trickles of glacial meltwater flowing beneath the snow. I can imagine green arms methodically creeping up the trickles. Soon, no ocean will be visible along the shoreline. The zyme will have reached the cliffs and begun to climb them like perverse vines. By midsummer, these cliffs will be solid green walls.
When the drifts to my left slope downward, I stop. Using my sleeve to break the ice crust from my eyelashes, I have to blink several times to clear my vision before I can distinguish the fine details that might tell me what lies beneath. In several places, zyme light throws shadows, meaning the drifts are undercut.
Wading through deep snow, I make my way around to the front, and kneel down to start excavating beneath the ledge. The sun-warmed sandstone must have held its heat after it was buried, for there’s a dry cavity inside. How deep is it?
“Quiller?” RabbitEar calls. “Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“Over here!” I wave a hand. “I found the ledges. I’m going to see if we can sleep comfortably beneath one of these overhangs.”
“Don’t get out of my sight!”
I wave back, and he bends down again. In the green gleam, I see a haze of glittering snow fly as he tosses it out of his way, searching for our son.
The campfires of the dead burn brilliantly tonight, creating points of light across the sky. I can’t help but wonder if Jawbone is sitting around one of those campfires with my dead mother and father. I know they would have run to meet him when he stepped from the Road of Light into the villages of the dead.
Suddenly, it’s as though it’s me stepping off the Road of Light and watching Jawbone running toward me with his small arms open. He’s laughing, excited to see me . . .
The vision is so clear I have to shake myself, as though from a dream, before I can turn back to my task.
Sliding beneath the ledge on my belly, I clutch my spear and drag it along beside me as I wriggle forward, stopping often to feel out the shape of the dark hollow. When I hit the back wall, I lay my spear aside and use both hands to measure the space. The cavity is about two body-lengths deep, but it’s very shallow back here. I may be able to roll to my side, but RabbitEar will have to sleep on his back. His shoulders are too wide. Nonetheless, we’ll be able to rest comfortably stretched out side by . . .
“Quiller!” RabbitEar shouts, and my heart stops.
Terrified of what he’s found, I’m shaking when I scurry from beneath the ledge and get to my feet to search for him. “Did you find Jawbone?”
RabbitEar must be crouching down, or hidden in the hole he dug in the snow bank, for I don’t see him.
Instinctively, I start running toward the last place I saw him, then I see a dark shape lunging toward me through the zyme light.
“Get back!” He’s bashing his way through the snowdrifts, waving frantically with his spear. “Get back under the ledge!”
I’m confused for an instant, then I see the pride of giant lions trotting absolutely silent through the snow behind him. They have their massive heads up. Their eyes flash.
“Blessed gods!”
I scramble back beneath the ledge and slither to the very rear with my heart slamming against my chest. In less than ten heartbeats, RabbitEar’s body blocks the light and his cape scrapes across the sandstone as he crawls toward me on his belly.
“How many?” I ask.
“Can’t tell. Ten, maybe.”
Ten lions.
Both of us go quiet, concentrating on sounds. I hear nothing except the distant washing of waves and the rumbling of the Ice Giants. That’s what makes lions terrifying. You can’t hear them until they’re right there staring into your eyes in the darkness. By then, it’s too late.
Panting . . .
I grip my spear tighter, but RabbitEar is the one in front. He’ll have to fight them back. There’s nothing I can do.
Their feral smell seeps beneath the ledge—a mixture of lion musk and blood-scented breath from their latest kills.
RabbitEar whispers, “They’ve eaten recently.”
I nod and try to identify the scent before I whisper back, “Smells like bison blood.”
“Probably been up high hunting newborn calves.”
We both heave relieved breaths. Means they’re not starving. If they were, it would be virtually impossible to keep them out.
Low growls vibrate the darkness, but most are simply panting from their run.
My ears track their movements as they circle our shelter, seeking the way inside.
RabbitEar shouts when a huge paw swipes beneath the ledge.
Instinctively, he lunges forward, spears the paw, and leaps back.
A cacophony of growls and roars erupt and echo across the beach outside.
“There’s at least two trying to squirm under the ledge!” RabbitEar says as he shoves me hard against the rear wall.
“They can’t get inside,” I cry. “Their heads are too big to fit beneath the ledge!”
“But they can reach in for us!”
Paws thud on the roof right over my face, then sandstone screeches as claws slash at the rock like knives. A cacophony of growls erupts. The pride starts loping around the shelter in frustration.
Then I hear paws digging snow.
“They’re trying to dig us out, Quiller!”