The Hero of Varay (26 page)

We didn’t reach the track up to the high pass until late the following morning. We had to dismount and lead our horses up a steep, narrow path to reach the higher level. We found a beautiful alpine meadow at something over a mile high. A series of small creeks came down from the ridge on the west side of the pass and combined to flow south and dropped in a waterfall that must look spectacular from below or from the next mountain to the southwest. The grass in the high meadow wasn’t too high, but the horses seemed happy to get at it.

“Seems an awful poor spot to leave the horses,” Lesh said while we walked the animals across the meadow toward the east side, where the meadow bent upward into another mountainside.

“Looks pretty good to me,” I said. “Water, grass.”

“Just look around, lord,” Lesh said. He made a wide gesture with one arm. “It’s so
open
. Dragons could spot them from miles off. We get back, we’re like to find naught but a few odd bits of bone and hair.”

“There are plenty of caves.” I pointed at a couple. That’s where we were headed, toward three caves that were close together. “They’ve got places to hide.”

“Horses are too dumb to find caves in a panic,” Lesh said. “They see a dragon—or just a big shadow from a cloud—they’re like to run off the end and smash themselves to bits.”

“Our elf did say we’d have to block the trail,” I said after we turned the reins over to Timon and Harkane. Lesh and I walked off away from the others.

“There’s plenty of places else they can kill themselves,” Lesh insisted. That was true.

“Well, we can’t take the horses any farther and we can’t afford to leave anyone here to tend them,” I said. “I doubt that we could find a better place to leave them than this. We’ll show them the caves, bring them inside, let them sniff around. Maybe that’ll be enough for them to remember.” I paused a moment. “Anyway, as long as one horse survives for each of us, we can all ride back out of here.”

“How we gonna tote his high-and-mightiness now?” Lesh asked.

“It’ll be awkward, however we do it, but we have to find a way. There’s no use finding things wrong now, Lesh. We have to go on one way or another, and we need him with us.”

We walked a large circle, looking over the meadow.

“Anyhow, we can’t count on anything
he
says for true. He still wants to see you deader’n him.”

“But he also wants to get home to his father, head and body, and the only way he can do that is to see us succeed.”

“Hah. This could all be a trap for you. Mayhap he thinks the Great Earth Mother will whisk him home, or even set his head back on his shoulders.”

“It’s a chance we have to take.”

“It could be the last chance we’ll ever get.”

“I didn’t say I was thrilled about it, Lesh,” I said, maybe with a trace of a sigh.

We spent the rest of the day in the pass and camped there for the night. We kept busy, unloading everything from the horses, putting together the items we needed to carry with us in backpacks, blocking the top of the path to keep the horses from leaving that way, caching the things we weren’t taking in one of the caves, and so forth. We had to rest frequently too. The altitude was hard to get used to. Sure, we were only a mile or so above sea level, but that was ten times higher than we were accustomed to. There were no trees in the pass, so we made several treks back down to the lower level to gather wood for our barricade and for a couple of all-night fires—one for that night, one for when we returned. Positive thinking.

Harkane’s arm was improving, and he seemed fitter in general. He had little pain and the redness was decreasing. Aspirin and penicillin seemed to be doing the trick. And, if my mother was right, maybe my fierce determination that he recover quickly helped.

That night was even colder than the night before, but our cave was better situated and the fire larger. At dawn we ate our fill for the first time since we left Basil. I thought that it would be easier to carry food in our stomachs than on our backs, and we would likely need that fuel before long. We left the beer sitting in the cave, a lure, a prize awaiting our return.

“I know how packhorses feel now,” Lesh moaned when we were loaded up ready to go. We all had heavy packs and long coils of ropes, bunches of rough pitons, and climbing hammers/picks hanging from us in addition to our weapons. There had to be trade-offs or we wouldn’t have been able to move, let alone climb. None of us wore armor, and I left my bow, arrows, and the second elf sword behind, making do with only Dragon’s Death and my dagger. Harkane and Timon had their bows—traditional longbows that they could carry unstrung—but my fancy double-curved compound bow would be too damn awkward to handle while we climbed.

The elf remained in his birdcage. There was really no option to that. A short cord held the cage to the top of Harkane’s pack. We had given Harkane a bit less weight to carry, and he volunteered to carry Xayber’s son. Lesh and I were carrying the most weight. We were the biggest, the strongest. Harkane had less, mostly because of his injury. Timon carried the least. He was the lightest and youngest of us, far from full-grown.

“Okay, where do we start?” I asked Xayber’s son.

“Southeast end of this pass,” he said, so we started in that direction. I took the lead, with Harkane and the elf head just behind me, Timon next, then Lesh. The horses were busy grazing. They didn’t pay any attention to our departure.

    When mountain climbing first entered my awareness, when I was ten or eleven, my impression was that climbers were always strung out along a sheer rock face, looped together with ropes, scrambling to find minuscule finger and toe holds. Sometime not long after that, I mentioned it to Dad, and the next thing I knew we had two books on climbing techniques. We went through the books together, did a little easy climbing in Kentucky and Tennessee, then spent two weeks one summer—when I was fourteen, I think—out in Colorado at a climbing school. We took the advanced course the following summer. I learned what climbing was really about. Sure, the exciting and dangerous work on rock walls is part of it, but there is a lot more. Working your way across thick scree can be just as dangerous, and there is considerable technical knowledge you need before you have any business getting on a rock wall. And, often, you have to hike for miles on the flat or on deceptively gentle slopes before you even unlimber a climbing rope.

We moved south and east for nearly two full days before we did any of the bits that look so exciting on film. Most of the time we followed ledges that gave us room to walk almost normally. Occasionally, we had to clamber up or down a slope. During those stretches, we roped ourselves together for safety, and to get into the habit, but they really taxed nothing but our endurance and our leg muscles. Walking along a sideslope, or spending hours going up and down those
gentle
rises, can be agony. We all had charley horses from the strain.

Just past midafternoon of our second day on foot, we went into a blind canyon. At the far end, the walls came close enough together to form a chimney, a route up to the next level, a good 150 feet above. The chimney looked fairly easy, but for people with no experience it could be touchy.

“We’re going up that?” Lesh asked.

I nodded. “It’s easier than it looks, easier than some things we may have to do. I’ll go up first with a rope, lower it back down.”

“Just tell me what to do, lord. I’ll go up first,” Lesh said. “It’s my place.”

“Not this time, Lesh. I know how to do this. I’ve done it before.”

When I was fifteen, I thought that shinnying up a rock chimney, feet on one side, back against the other, was the height of fun and adventure. Strange how it became draining work by the time I was twenty-four. I left my pack at the bottom, carried one rope coiled from shoulder to side, and paid out a second rope while I climbed. Dragon’s Death would be in the way going up a chimney, so I had it slung at my side, where it wasn’t
quite
as much of a nuisance. I stopped a couple of times to pound pitons into the rock for safety and laced the second rope through each piton. Lesh and Harkane were on the far end of the rope, ready to take up the slack if I lost my footing and fell.

The basic technique for climbing a chimney is simple. You walk up it, using the pressure of your back and shoulders on the other side to replace gravity. Move your feet, straighten up to push your back higher, and repeat as needed. If the walls of the chimney are at a comfortable distance, you can climb quite quickly—until the strain hits your shoulders and calves.

After fifty feet I had slowed considerably. By one hundred feet, I was wondering if I would ever finish. My breaks came more frequently and lasted longer. When my shoulders reached the top, I took a quick glance to make sure that I had somewhere safe to land, then pushed myself out of the chimney onto the flat and just lay there, perhaps for five minutes, before I tried to move. I stretched and rubbed at my legs to ease the aches before I looked back down and waved to let the others know that I was okay. I pounded two pitons into the rock on top to belay the ropes, the one I had strung coming up and the extra one to haul up our packs.

By the time everyone and everything was up—Lesh came up last and retrieved the pitons on the way because we might need them again later—it was time to look for a place to spend the night.

“Sure must not figure on folks coming to this shrine, or they’d make it simpler,” Lesh said when he came out of the chimney and caught his breath.

The elf didn’t bother to comment.

I was guessing, but I figured that we had to be about two miles up by then, maybe higher. We couldn’t find a cave or much cover of any kind, so we had our coldest night yet. There were no trees, so there was no deadwood to make a fire with. We had several cans of Sterno, but that wasn’t enough for warmth, just enough to heat water for our coffee and our freeze-dried meals. It was a long night, more than a match for our thermal underwear and the thermal blankets we used to save weight.

Luckily, that was the only night we spent totally in the open. The rest of the time we were able to find some cover, even if it was only a small niche in a rock face, open above and on one side.

Over the next three days we had a number of spots of hard climbing, some as touchy as anything I had ever attempted, like inching up a cliff along a six-inch-wide ledge that climbed at a fifty-degree angle, and a knob that I had to creep around with holds that were nearly imaginary just to set two pitons on the other side so my companions could use rope handholds to make it. Finally, at something approaching three miles up, we had to cross a sloping ice field, hacking out steps and using the primitive crampons Baron Kardeen had found for us. It was my first time on a high ice field, so my climbing experience didn’t help much there.

“It’s mostly downhill from here,” Xayber’s son said when we reached the ridge above the ice field.

It might not have been the top of the world, but it felt like it. I felt a giddy exhilaration that could hardly have been greater if I had been on top of Everest, a lightheadedness that was only partly a result of the thin air. We stood on the ridge looking around. There were mountain peaks in every direction. Many of the peaks south of us were clearly much higher than the one we stood on.

“How much farther?” I asked the elf. We were close to the midpoint on the food we had brought along and I hadn’t seen any game larger than a squirrel in days.

“To the maze, one more day. After that, who can tell?”

One more day would take us right to the halfway point on our victuals. We might yet be tightening our belts before we got back to our horses and the cache of food we had left behind.

The crest above the ice field was relatively ice-free, so we walked along it, then down it, losing five hundred feet in altitude before we had to leave the ridge. My biggest concern then was carelessness. The slope wasn’t extreme and there wasn’t much ice on the southeastern side, but the way was steep enough that a bad slip might send any of us tumbling toward a drop so far I couldn’t even estimate it.

But we found a dandy cave to sleep in that night, dry and deep enough to get us completely out of the wind. Harkane’s arm was healing nicely by then. There was only minor redness about the center of the cut, no soreness, swelling, or seepage.

The altitude was telling on all of us, though. We were tired most of the day, and any stretch that called for real exertion required a long rest afterward. That night, in the cave, I told the others to forget about taking turns as sentries. I made up my bedroll nearest the entrance and decided to trust my danger sense—and perhaps the extra sensitivity of our elf. We all needed the sleep, except for him, and maybe even
including
him. I never asked him if he slept, but he did close his eyes for long stretches of time.

I didn’t wake all night. In fact, I didn’t wake until more than an hour after the mountain’s early dawn. We all slept well and woke moderately refreshed for the last push on to the shrine and its guardians.

When we emerged from the cave, we had a surprise. Snow had fallen during the night and the sky was still overcast. “I know we’re awfully high, and we’ve already crossed ice, but this
is
still August, the height of summer. What are we doing with fresh snow?” I wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular, but Xayber’s son chose to answer.

“It might be natural, of course. At this altitude, snow is possible any month of the year, but it might also be your first greeting from the defenders of the shrine.”

“Or maybe Santa Claus is coming to town early this year,” I replied, irritated by the elf’s tone. Snow was a nuisance, but unless we came to some really tricky stretches, it might not be that great a danger.

“Their
first
greeting,” the elf said. When I didn’t reply, he added, “We are getting close to the maze. Angle down this slope to the east. When we round that next shoulder there, we may be able to see the temple and its maze.”

It was closer than I thought.