Part 2 (1/2)
They stayed a night. But the next day they walked onto rock again, and Night-Dawn could see no more ice ahead.
The rock began to rise, becoming a slope.
They had no food. Occasionally they took sc.r.a.pes at the rising stone, but it threatened to crack their teeth.
At night the wind was bitter, spilling off the flanks of the mountains, and they huddled as best they could, their backs to the cold, their faces and bellies together.
”We'll die,” One-Tusk would whisper.
”We won't die,” Night-Dawn said. ”We have our fat.”
”That's supposed to last us through the winter,” hissed No-Sun.
One-Tusk s.h.i.+vered and moved a little more to leeward. ”I wished to father a child,” he said. ”By Ice-Cloud. I could not. Ice-Cloud mocked me. After that n.o.body would couple with me.”
”Ice-Cloud should have come to you, Night-Dawn. You are the Bull,” No-Sun muttered.
”I'm sorry,” Night-Dawn said to One-Tusk. ”I have fathered no children yet. Not every coupling--”
One-Tusk said, ”Do you really think it will be warm in the mountains?”
”Try to sleep now,” said Frazil sensibly.
They were many days on the rising rock. The air grew thinner. The sky was never brighter than a deep violet blue.
The mountains, at last, grew nearer. On clear days the sun cast long shadows that reached out to them.
Night-Dawn saw a gap in the mountains, a cleft through which he could sometimes see a slice of blue-violet sky. They turned that way, and walked on.
Still they climbed; still the air thinned.
They came to the pa.s.s through the mountains. It was a narrow gully. Its mouth was broad, and there was broken rock, evidently cracked off the gully sides.
Night-Dawn led them forward.
Soon the walls narrowed around him, the rock slick with hard gray ice. His feet slipped from under him, and he banged knees and hips against bone-hard ice. He was not, he knew, made for climbing. And besides, he had never been surrounded before, except in the huddle. He felt trapped, confined.
He persisted, doggedly.
His world closed down to the aches of his body, the gully around him, the search for the next handhold.
...The air was hot.
He stopped, stunned by this realization.
With renewed excitement, he lodged his stubby fingers in crevices in the rock, and hauled himself upward.
At last the gully grew narrower.
He reached the top and dragged himself up over the edge, panting, fur steaming.
... There were no people here.
He was standing at the rim of a great bowl cut into the hard black rock. And at the base of the bowl was a red liquid, bubbling slowly. Steam gathered in great clouds over the bubbling pool, laced with yellowish fumes that stank strongly.
It was a place of rock and gas, not of people.
Frazil came to stand beside him. She was breathing hard, and her mouth was wide open, her arms spread wide, to shed heat.
They stood before the bowl of heat, drawn by some ancient imperative to the warmth, and yet repelled by its suffocating thickness.
”The Collision,” she said.
”What?”
”Once, the whole world was covered with such pools. Rock, melted by the great heat of the Collision.”
”The Collision is just a story, you said.”
She grunted. ”I've been wrong before.”
His disappointment was crus.h.i.+ng. ”n.o.body could live here. There is warmth, but it is poisonous.” He found it hard even to think, so huge was his sense of failure.
He stood away from the others and looked around.
Back the way they had come, the uniform hard blackness was broken only by scattered islands of gray-white: ice pools, Night-Dawn knew, like the one he had left behind.
Turning, he could see the sweep of the mountains clearly: he was breaching a great inward-curving wall, a great complex string of peaks that spread from horizon to horizon, gaunt under the blue-purple sky.
And ahead of him, ice had gathered in pools and creva.s.ses at the feet of the mountains, lapping against the rock walls as if frustrated -- save in one place, where a great tongue of ice had broken through. Glacier, he thought.
He saw that they could walk around the bowl of bubbling liquid rock and reach the head of the glacier, perhaps before night fell, and then move on, beyond these mountains. Hope sparked. Perhaps what he sought lay there.
”I'm exhausted,” No-Sun said, a pillar of fur slumped against a heap of rock.
”We should go back.”
Night-Dawn, distracted by his plans, turned to her. ”Why?”
”We are creatures of cold. Feel how you b.u.m up inside your fat. This is not our place...”
”Look,” breathed One-Tusk, coming up to them.
He was carrying a rock he'd cracked open. Inside there was a thin line of red and black. Algae, perhaps. And, in a hollow in the rock, small insects wriggled, their red sh.e.l.ls bright.
Frazil fell on the rock, gnawing at it eagerly.
The others quickly grabbed handfuls of rocks and began to crack them open.
They spent the night in a hollow at the base of the glacier.