Part 5 (2/2)

'And we cannot even eliminate the five men on the western cliff,' Richter said to the Shaker. 'It could as easily have been one of them as someone over here.'

'I think it looks like snow,' Sandow said, indicating the leaden clouds that sc.r.a.ped by close overhead. Sometimes, he knew, the mind welcomed a change from one catastrophe to another, merely to be able to stop thinking about the first for even a moment.

Richter surveyed the sky. 'Aye, and we best be moving. At least we can get in two more hours of march before camp.' He snorted in disgust. 'I wish we could progress without being afraid to turn our backs on each other. That, more than anything, will sap our strength.'

They tied up in groups as before and started off on another steep but none too dangerous stretch of ground.

And the snow came!

In wintertime in Perdune, the citizens lived in a state of siege, walled from the rest of the world by drifting ramparts of white. The spring, summer, and short autumn were employed to store away the necessities of life through the long and bitter winter months. Storehouses were stacked high with fuel wood and blocked, dried mosses from the marshlands by the sea, beyond the Banibals. Every housekeeper had a larder packed to the beams, and the merchants made certain that their own salable foodstuffs were well crated to endure until the last month or two of winter-for if the season were longer than usual, they would turn quite a business at a decent enough profit. There were always those who prepared for the average winter, without thought to a late thaw.

In Perdune, by mid-winter, the streets were all but impa.s.sable, narrowed to walks by the packed, mounting drifts. Houses at some locations were swept across by snow-bearing winds until, at last, they were completely concealed from the eye, but for the constantly maintained channel from front door to street. Snowshoed teams of armed men patroled the drifted town, walking at roof level, looking for wolves. There were always some of them who did not leave the valley for the western slopes of the Banibals during the last weeks of autumn. Some stayed behind, their instincts failing them this once, and when they found themselves without food in a cold wasteland, they prowled the drift-packed village, growing emaciated, s.h.i.+vering with the cold, eyes red and weeping tears. Children were most often kept indoors during the hardest weeks of winter; in the beginning, when the snow had only begun to fall and mount, they went out to play and enjoy themselves, well aware of the isolation that came with later days; by January, the wolves and the fierce winds confined all but the stoutest citizens to their warm homes.

The residents of Perdune grew accustomed to this period of the year, and even seemed to look forward to it, despite all the complaints and the jokes about eternal winter and lost spring. It was a time to read, to forget commerce and enjoy leisure. It was a time when warmth and coziness seemed unbelievably precious and wonderful, by comparison to the world outside. It was a time for family games, for baking sessions in sweet-smelling kitchens, a time for games of a frosty night, played around a stone fireplace on the warmed bricks of the hearth, a time for quilts and warm chocolate in bed. When it was gone, when the snows began to melt off, a melancholy settled upon the residents, despite their proclamations of relief and joy in seeing spring approach.

But even a resident of Perdune, the Shaker thought, would flee in terror at the fierce weather the climbers had encountered far up the slopes of the Cloud Range. No sooner than half an hour after he had predicted the snow last night, it began: gentle at first, even pretty- later growing harsh and thick and difficult.

They had made camp at the bottom of a sheer wall which they would have to scale the following morning. Sheets of canvas were brought out from the supplies, and specially trained teams set to work driving the iron braces of the windbreakers into the earth. Even where there was ground instead of solid rock, the earth contained eighteen inches of frost through which the sharpened spikes had to be driven to insure safety. The ch.o.r.e was not a small one, and not without an accompanying rush of curses from every man so employed.

But even when the flapping, whispering breakers had been erected around the close-grouped climbers, some wind managed to reach them. It tore through the camp, sent columns of fine, dry snowflakes whirling like tornadoes It made them huddle over their hot soup and cured, salted beef, made them suck greedily at their steaming coffee and their private bottles of warming rum and brandy. There was no urge to conversation, and all but the guards were soon drawn deeply into their sleeping bags, scarfs wrapped about their heads, hoods of leather coats drawn up and pulled tight with the tie strings about their necks.

The wind was an ululating lullaby.

The cold dulled the senses.

Soon, they slept.

Morning came too soon, and no one's spirits rose with the dawn, for the storm had increased. The wind was a wild, screaming banshee that howled above them s.n.a.t.c.hed at them with strong fingers, flung them forward when they wished to go right, drove them backward when the only hope of safety was ahead.

It was almost as if the wind and the snow and the cold had aligned themselves with Oragonia.

There was no longer any opportunity for reverie, any chance to spend time in an attempt to discover the ident.i.ty of the pair of a.s.sa.s.sins. They not only had to struggle with the killers and the terrain now, but with the weather as well. Every waking moment was another battle in a war that it seemed impossible to win.

The following morning was spent in negotiating eight hundred feet of featureless, icy stone. There was no way around the verticle impediment, for it broke into an even more unmanageable chasm to the right and fell away into nothingness to the left. Once above it, it seemed they could make use of a chimney of stone which would protect them from the elements for another fifteen hundred feet. Yet no one permitted himself to consider such a heavenly possibility, lest it prove false and shatter all the hopes built for it.

They scaled the face in teams of three and four in order to diminish the dimensions of any possible disaster. The ninth group that started up the wall was struck by an almost consciously malicious wind of such a degree of viciousness as to almost insure their deaths. On the top of the cliff, men grabbed for pitons which were jammed into the thick ice crust. At the base, men were blown from their feet, sent tumbling along in the snow until they could find something to grasp and hold to. But out there on the blank face, strung together by a pitiful rope, cringing to the toothpick handholds of their pitons, the four-man climbing team could hardly hope to last for long.

And did not!

The second man from the top was ripped loose by the wind, slammed against the stone, then flung outward over nothingness. Yet he was still safe enough, held to his stable comrades by the team line. How long the others could accept his weight and still cope with the storm was a question no man could answer. As it turned out, they did not have to struggle much longer. The last man's foot slipped from his piton, and he dropped, taking up slack in the team line, his sudden jerky slip pulling his upper hand piton loose as well. When the jarring tug of that fall reached the others, the final two men were ripped from their desperate holds to the cliff face, and all four of them went flying outward and down as the wind flung them over the heads of the men below, took them to the left and over the side into the bottomless cleft in the earth where mists and swirling clouds of snow eventually obscured them and blotted out their faint-hearted screams.

Sixty-four enlisted men, three officers, and the Shaker and his boys. Soon, the killers would be easily found, for there would be no one left but a.s.sa.s.sins and their last victims. Richter agreed with the Shaker that the four deaths on the wall had not been in the a.s.sa.s.sins' plans but were genuine accidents. They both voiced hopes that both the killers had been in that party. But neither believed his own wishful thinking.

Indeed, there was a fifteen hundred-foot verticle flue of stone above the cliff, and for a time they were sheltered from the wind, though the loud whistling of it across the top of the chimney almost deafened the men climbing inside.

The afternoon stretched on toward evening.

The snow was up to the knee now, deeper at places where drifts had built up.

Ice packed the coats and britches of the climbers as the wind drove the hard grains of snow against them. Richter had early advised Shaker Sandow, Mace, and Gregor not to break the crusted ice loose from them-selves, for it added a layer of protection against the fierce wind-no matter what its added weight might do to their pace and their sense of comfort. Comfort hardly mattered when even the preservation of life was in doubt.

Everyone wore tightly knitted masks of wool with eye slits and a gash across the mouth for breath to be drawn more easily. Still, it was best to close the eyes as often as possible, even if only for a few seconds at a time. The temperature had dropped so low that tears froze on the skin even beneath the woolen climbing masks. One was also forced to breathe shallowly lest the lungs freeze with the gulping intake of great quant.i.ties of sub-zero air. There were fifty-two degrees of frost, Sergeant Crowler said-twenty degrees below zero-and the tender tissue of the lung collapsed under that if it was taken in too heartily. The slower breathing also slowed their pace, but Richter refused to call a halt until he had found some place better than open ground for the making of camp.

'In the open,' the tough old officer had told Mace, 'we will all surely freeze to death this night!' He had given Mace the duty of keeping his eyes open for the sign of a cave which might be all but drifted shut with snow. He trusted the giant's eyes more than even his own, and he was known for his hawklike vision.

Even under the fur-lined hoods of their coats, their ears grew cold and enflamed.

Even through the thickness of two pair of gloves, their fingers became frost-bitten, and they had to exercise their hands, slap them against their thighs as they walked.

It was almost five-thirty with darkness closing in around them, when young Captain Belmondo died.

Not ten minutes earlier, he had taken half an hour duty in the lead, testing for snow bridges which had now become an ever-present danger. Whistling sheets of snow could drift outward from two opposing cliffs and form a crust across a narrow gorge perhaps as wide as twenty feet in these high winds. The way would appear as safe as any, but the unwary climber would be setting foot on cotton and would plummet through to destruction.

Belmondo walked carefully, almost cowardly. Since he had taken the advance position, the pace had slowed by half, even though the weather had already slowed them considerably. He never moved a foot without first testing for solid ground again and again. That was why it was such a shock to everyone when, suddenly, he found himself in the middle of a snow bridge that was giving way beneath him.

He turned, scrambling back toward Richter who was reaching for him. But the crust cracked, s.h.i.+vered, fell and he was gone, his face so terror-stricken and his mind so dumbfounded by the realization of his own death, that he had no chance at all to scream.

Immediately, Commander Richter ordered all the Banibaleers onto their hands and knees so as to distribute their weight over four points rather than two. They also eased away from one another, for there was no way of telling how many of them had strayed onto the shaky bridge of snow that was now the only thing barring them from oblivion.

Also on their hands and knees, Richter and Crowler crept forward to the hole Belmondo had made. Looking down, they saw the battered corpse two hundred feet below, wedged in snow-swirled rocks. It was easy to see what had happened. Once the bridge had been formed, the wind had continued to whistle underneath, packed more and more snow on, blowing harder and harder until the bottom layers began to turn to ice. Perhaps two inches of clear, hard ice bottomed the snow bridge. It was this hard surface which Belmondo had felt with his probe and which he had taken to be solid earth. He had been trained to distinguish the sound of an ice sub-structure, but he had either never learned it properly or had forgotten.

And now he was dead because of it.

'It should be st.u.r.dy enough to support the men until they get off, don't you think?' Crowler asked Richter did not answer.

'Sir?'

Richter stared down the hole.

'Sir, the men?'

Richter stared at the body.

Slowly, his mask pulled back from his face to give him a better view, Richter began to weep. The tears froze on his cheeks!

11.

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