24
They walked south from the Black Rock and behind her Yaz felt the tether that bound her to her old existence stretching out. With each stride a small voice inside her repeated that she could still go back. She could turn on a heel and rejoin Quell, with whom everyone had always expected her to make a life, rejoin her brother, return to the Ictha with gifts and extraordinary tales and new wisdom. She could get to see the joy on her parents’ faces as she reunited them with Zeen. It would be so easy.
Instead she walked on, letting the distance grow so that even the great mass of the Black Rock would eventually be swallowed up into a white horizon. Quell had let her go. He’d neither fought for her nor followed her. He’d kept his dignity, his composure. There was wisdom in his choice. But Yaz didn’t think love was dignified or wise, not the kind that binds two souls, that draws them together from a distance and joins them into something precious. That kind of love was stubborn; it would fight to survive. Sometimes it was loud, dangerous, even ugly, but it burned bright and outshone common sense. Yaz snorted to herself. She didn’t really know what she was talking about. Such things weren’t the Ictha way; they weren’t in Ictha tales. But Yaz had already seen much that lay wholly outside the experience and understanding of her clan. She glanced towards Thurin, bent against the wind, ice fringing his furs, then to Erris, frost in the blackness of his hair, and smiled. Perhaps the world still had new things to show her.
Distance had reduced the Black Rock to something that could be obscured with an outstretched fist by the time the sun began to sink into the west. The iron dog had proved itself adaptable, claws appearing somewhat belatedly on its blunt feet to provide traction. It pulled the boat-sled all by itself and matched its pace to the slowest member of the group. This proved to be Thurin who, despite a wealth of furs and as much stardust as he could tolerate, still found the realities of life on the surface a shock.
“Who knew ice could be so cold?” he muttered through chapped lips as Yaz fell back to join him.
“You tell us when you need to rest,” Yaz said. “If you push yourself too hard—”
“I need to rest.” Thurin’s shame steered his gaze away from her.
“Camp here!” Yaz called out, raising her arm just as Mother Mazai would to bring the Ictha to a halt. They had covered a shockingly small tally of miles. The Ictha would march three times as far against a north wind. But even so Yaz could feel it in her legs and knew that Thurin, who had lived his whole life in a cave system where no chamber was more than a mile or two from any other, must be finding such labour beyond his experience and imagining.
Thurin tried to help but the cold had blunted his fingers despite gloves of skin and fur, so it was left to Yaz, Quina, and Maya to connect and raise the boards while Erris pounded the iron anchors into the ice.
Thurin was able to brace the boards against the wind while the others secured the supporting wires to the anchors. “It will be easier when the wind isn’t this wild!” he shouted above the gusts.
Maya and Quina exchanged glances.
“The wind is always like this,” Yaz called back. “Except when it’s worse.”
“It will be easier when we’ve done it a few times,” Quina said, her fingers blurring across the fiddly wirework that was taking Yaz an age. Such tasks were always an exercise in frustration when wearing gloves, far worse in mittens, but taking them off risked having fewer fingers to put back in later. A month ago Yaz would have worked barehanded this far south but her new strengths had replaced her old ones and the wind’s bite had become something to fear even here.
Eventually, with the sun spilling the last of its light like blood across the western ice, the five of them stood back to observe their handiwork. The small structure quaked in the fiercening wind, every panel rattling, walls threatening to buckle in first one direction then the other as if it might be swept away at any moment.
“Let’s call it a first draft.” Erris had ice caking the left side of his face, creating a curious two-tone effect. He didn’t seem to have noticed it yet.
“Draft is the word.” Quina hugged herself, shivering. The gaps between the boards were practically shrieking as the wind squeezed its way through.
“Even the Axit admit there are some battles you have to call a draw.” Maya lifted the entrance board. “Get in!”
Thurin needed no encouragement. He struggled through with the heat pot clamped to his chest. Behind him the dog, Zox, had already folded itself into a cube. Beside it the boat-sled stood angled into the wind and tethered to a stake.
One by one they ducked in behind Thurin. Erris came in last, securing the door.
“Well, this is cosy.” Thurin had to raise his voice above the clattering of boards. It was far noisier than any tent. The five of them were crouched down and huddled close, closer even than an Ictha family. The roof was too low for any of them to stand, save for Maya perhaps.
They made a little space for Thurin to set down the heat pot. The smell of charring rose from his furs where he’d held the pot too close. Yaz sat back on the hide-spread boards that comprised the floor, and willed the small stars in the pot to spend their energies a little faster. And slowly, despite the drafty joints of their creaking house, the space within began to warm.
“Fingers and toes,” Quina called, tugging at her left boot.
“W-what?” Thurin shot her a suspicious glance under the dark fall of his hair.
“Fingers and toes,” Maya repeated Quina’s words and pulled off her gloves.
Erris raised a brow. “I believe they are suggesting that you check your extremities.”
“It’s standard after a long trek on the ice.” Quina wriggled five pink toes at the heat pot. “Got to make sure the cold hasn’t got its teeth into you.”
This was new to Yaz too and she blushed at the sight of naked toes so brazenly displayed. The Ictha only checked for frostbite in the worst of the polar extremes. Something in their makeup made them less susceptible to it than the other clans.
“Want some help?” Quina reached for Thurin’s foot. He backed awkwardly, bumping into the wall of the shelter.
“Careful!” Maya cautioned, a small smile tugging at her lips.
Quina shrugged and sat back to unlace her second boot. “Can be hard to get off without help. That’s all I was thinking.”
Erris snorted, and Yaz began to frown, wondering if she was missing something here. She glanced from the amusement on Quina’s sharp features to the confusion on Thurin’s.
“Thank you. I can manage.” Thurin moved closer to the heat pot again and proceeded to demonstrate that he really couldn’t get his boots off without help.
The footwear that he’d been furnished with was more substantial than what the Broken wore down in their wet and windless caves. He struggled to undo the laces with cold-clumsy hands. Quina gave a sigh of mock exasperation and moved in too fast for him to evade. She unlaced them in a blur of fingers. “There.”
Even then it took Thurin an extravagant amount of effort to remove them, almost falling on his back while the rest of them suppressed laughter. When his feet finally did emerge they were worryingly white, but some massaging in the warmth of the pot did eventually restore the pinkness to them.
“We’re going to have to pay close attention to those toes,” Erris said, only half joking.
Yaz nodded. She hadn’t appreciated quite how fragile Thurin was, born and raised below the ice. This had been his first full day in the wind. His power over ice and fire had made her think him invincible, but he was far from that. His power was over water. He held no special sway over temperature. Yaz made a mental note to sneak some stardust into his boots while he slept . . . even if that did mean that Quina would spend the rest of the journey calling him twinkletoes. She glanced at the girl, who was still watching Thurin rub his feet. It was clear that behind her teasing lay another kind of interest. Clear to everyone but Thurin at least.
“Frozen fungus, anyone?” Maya pushed forward a lump of grey-scales and brown-caps all welded together with ice.
Despite being ravenously hungry, Yaz hesitated. All of them did. This was to be their life now for the foreseeable future, maybe for the rest of their lives. Endless trekking across the ice, endlessly battling the wind, huddled together by night in a rattling shelter that might be torn away by the next storm, and chewing on tasteless frozen fungi for survival.
“Well . . .” Thurin reached into the bundle of his furs and with a grin pulled out a low-sided iron pot with a long handle. “There’s this.”
“What is it?” Quina peered.
“A frying pan,” Thurin said. “And . . .” He opened his other hand, showing a scattering of white crystals.
“Salt!” Maya cried, delighted.
“Melt some ice and we’ll stew the fungi up.” Thurin held the pan over the heat pot.
Erris unslung the hide bag over his shoulder and rummaged inside. He brought out three frozen herrings. “The priests’ food stores were remarkably well stocked. I just helped myself. There’s more on the sled.”
Yaz blinked, amazed, delighted, and annoyed in equal measure. She’d been so wedded to their original plan that the idea they might restock from the Black Rock hadn’t occurred to her. Quell and Zeen’s departure had further tunnelled her vision. Everyone looked to her to lead and she’d already failed on something as fundamental as food. The task had fallen to someone who didn’t even eat. “Thank you, Erris.” Delight was starting to win out. She turned to Thurin, who had spent a lifetime eating Madeen’s stews down in the ice caves. “Let’s have a feast then!”
They ate and it was mouth-scaldingly gorgeous, like devouring the essence of life. Yaz could feel the glow of it spreading out from her stomach towards her extremities. And by the end of the meal the shelter was almost warm. For the first time Yaz began to truly believe that the journey might be doable. They could survive the night like this. And a journey was simply a matter of surviving a series of nights, each separated by a day’s walking.
The five of them lay down, wrapped in everything they’d brought with them, huddled close to share body warmth and present less of a target to the slim, sharp fingers that the wind poked through the jointed walls.
Thurin pitched into sleep immediately, barely managing to swallow his last mouthful. In his slumber he looked almost a child, his haunted, sometime haughty features surrendering to a previously hidden vulnerability.
Maya snuggled up against Yaz’s back, Quina resting between Erris and Thurin, her sharp features softened in the heat pot’s glow. The boards rattled and shook with the wind’s violence but already Yaz’s mind was beginning to pattern the noise into the background. She reached out with her mind and willed the dozen or so small stars in the pot to quiet themselves, still giving out heat but less than before.
“How long will they last?” Quina asked. Quina always wanted to know.
Yaz shook her head. “Weeks rather than days. Months, I hope. It depends how much we have to use them.” The stars burned away as they shed their power. The bigger ones lasted longer: take a star twice as big, eight times the volume, and it would last a hundred times longer. Perhaps the full-sized stars the Missing had, the ones from which all these fragments came, would last forever, or at least for so many lifetimes as to be the same thing.
“Maybe we should have brought more,” Maya said.
Yaz shrugged. “We also have the big one.” They’d debated how many stars to bring. How much of the tribes’ wealth to risk on this venture. If they died on the ice the stars with them would be lost forever. Also the presence of too many stars would prove intolerable to all of them save Erris and Yaz. The “big one” was a gold-green beauty as large as both Yaz’s fists. It remained on the sled and was the reason that the dog had to drag it on long reins so it kept a little way behind the group. The stars in the pot represented months of labour by the Broken, and they should last the journey. At least she hoped so.
“How do they work?” Quina asked, putting Yaz on the spot.
Yaz shook her head. “They just do.”
“There’s always a reason.”
Yaz furrowed her brow. “I think they’re like holes in the world. Holes punched through to the . . .” She wanted to say to the river that flows through all things but the priests had called it the Path. “Holes that let the power of the Path leak out. And like a hole in a waterskin the smaller they are the quicker they freeze over and seal themselves.” She met Quina’s gaze, challenging her to ask for more detail.
But Quina just smiled thoughtfully and laid her head down. “Thank you.”
Yaz put her own head down, listening to the wind singing through the support wires and wondering how long it would take for sleep to reach up and drag her down.
Yaz woke with a cry, curling into a ball as the world shattered around her. A savage gust of wind shook the shelter like a blow and the frigid air filled with the sound of cracking followed by the clatter of pieces falling. She braced herself for the killing blast of the gale. With their shelter gone they would likely greet the dawn as frozen corpses.
“Everyone alright?” Erris raised his voice above the din.
Yaz lifted her head. The boards were holding.
“What happened?” Maya’s head emerged from her furs.
“Ice buildup on the boards,” Erris said. “When the gust flexed them it all came down at once. We—” Another gust shuddered the structure, drowning out whatever he had to say.
Quina sat, hugging her skins and furs around her. “We should have stayed longer and bartered for a tent.”
Yaz knew it was true. She also knew that if they had stayed longer they would probably never have left. If she had gone to the Ictha for a tent she doubted she could have said goodbye to her parents and the larger family that had been all she’d ever known for the vast majority of her existence. Kaylal in the Broken’s forges had a saying: “Strike while the iron’s hot.” It had seemed to apply here too.
All of them were awake now, save for Thurin, who still lay dead to the world. Yaz settled back and stared at the quaking roof. The ache of the day’s walking weighed in her legs. A year ago she could have run the distance and thought little of it.
“Tell us a story.” Maya’s voice inserting itself into a momentary lessening of the wind’s fury.
“I only know Ictha stories,” Yaz said.
“We have Zin and Mokka stories in the south too, you know. Only we tell it that Zin favoured his Kac-Kantor daughter over all others.” Quina lay back down. “Tell us one of those.”
Yaz glanced at Erris. “Would it keep you awake?”
He shrugged and smiled. “I don’t think I need to sleep. It’s more of a habit. Tell your story. They interest me.”
Yaz smiled back, glad he didn’t dismiss her tales even if they seemed to be at odds with the life he’d lived at a time when trees grew even here. Some clans, like the Quinx, held storytelling to be for children. Clearly, they hadn’t had to endure a long night of three months.
“I’ll tell you the story of one of the times Mokka journeyed the ice, which is a thing she did many times, for Mokka was made by a God in the Sky and the wind’s wandering was in her blood. So, often she would leave Zin in the tent they shared and go by herself following the west wind or the north wind, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. Once even for thirty years, for time in those days was more difficult to count and the centuries hardly weighed on the first man and the first woman.”
When Mokka went wandering across the white death of the north, Mashtri the trickster god followed her, hoping for fun. Mokka went on her way, walking into the wind for day upon day, weaving her way from sea to sea, for in those days the hot seas opened wide and often. It was a time of plenty when the Gods in the Sea spoke to the Gods in the Sky and parted the ice so that they might talk.
“Look,” said Hua, least of all the Gods in the Sea, he that had made Zin, the first of men. “See what I have wrought.”
“Look,” said Aiiki, least of all the Gods in the Sky, she that had made Mokka, first of women. “See what I wrought before Hua did.”
And so they argued, as they ever did, about which had come first, the man who climbed from the sea or the woman who was camped at the top of the ice cliff when he got there.
And others among the gods looked up from the sea and down from the sky and wondered, not about whether the man or the woman had been made first, but about whether there should be more.
Some fools tell it that all the tribes of man sprang from the loins of Zin and the womb of Mokka, and that we are all bred from brother knowing sister. And perhaps those foolish few are indeed the result of such unwise unions. But the truth is that the second man and the second woman, and the third man and the third woman, and so on and so forth for many times, were not born of Zin and Mokka but made by other gods, who set their players upon the board to see what fate the wind and the sea and the ice would lead them to.
And so it was that the trickster god, blowing her way along with Mokka in the fifth year of her wanderings, saw in the great whiteness a man who was not Zin. Mashtri, alone among the gods, though she was not the least of them, had long since found herself unable to make either man or woman. The hoola was one of her attempts, the bear another. The dog was the work of another god, for Mashtri would never have been able to craft something so useful. Jealousy and failure lie behind many cruelties, even with the gods, and so it was with Mashtri.
Mashtri breathed herself across the ice and encircled the man, leading him with whispers and visions until at last he spied Mokka’s tent black against the setting of the sun. Seeing fear in the man—who had thought himself alone in all the world—Mashtri cracked her cheeks and blew hard, driving him forward.
At the man’s calling, Mokka came out into Mashtri’s gale, little troubled by its teeth for she was born of the wind.
The man, born of the sea, suffered in Mashtri’s gale and the dying light, and so Mokka let him into her tent.
She smiled and asked his name, for he was not the first man she had found in her wanderings.
“Name?” The man had never needed a name, thinking himself the only one on all the ice.
But Mashtri put the name Zin into his mouth and put Zin’s image into Mokka’s eyes, waking the loneliness that had haunted Mokka for many months. And Mokka was glad that Zin had come looking for her and took him to her furs.
They travelled together for ten years and the confusion that Mashtri had wrapped them in faded in time. Mokka named the man Shem and their son Shemal. They parted on the ice when the boy was old enough to help his father fish. Mokka had grown to love them both but warned that they should stay far from Zin for Mashtri’s trickery would both sadden and anger him.
Mashtri followed the boy then and for many years thereafter. The god saw Shemal as her own creation for he was born of her trickery. And this is why the Shemal have trickery and theft in their hearts and must be shunned by the trueborn descendants of Zin and Mokka.
Yaz laid her head down and quieted the stars in the heat pot still further. The tale she had told was an old one that spoke to the danger of the unknown. Nobody Yaz had ever asked had met any of the Shemal clan. Perhaps they no longer existed. For certain, though, the shadow of their memory lay across the unexplored ice where strangers wandered and kept their own lore unknown to the Ictha.
It had seemed an appropriate tale since they were heading into the southern ice held by clans whose names were not spoken in the north. And the old truth was that the further people travelled from their home seas the more likely they were to meet the Shemal and fall prey to their deceit.
It seemed to Yaz as she drifted off to sleep that they would do better to be like Erris, to whom all the clans were unknown, and who opened himself to their ways with the eagerness of the truly lonely. Eular and his priests had made an “other” of the people in the green lands and used that as an excuse to plan bloodshed on an unheard-of scale. Yaz wanted to find the green lands too, but not to take them by force. She wanted to see them—needed to see them for the hope they offered. For the knowledge that life could be led differently, more richly, and that humanity could do more than run to stand still in the face of a dying world.
And that hope would be no hope at all if the habit of thinking of strangers as enemies could not be broken.