Du was long. Nor had he seen any brothers, scattered or otherwise. Not even the smallest brothers were to be found growing on the warmed surface of the rocks.
He had no alternative. He pushed southward, running now, even though he was thin, honed to a fine tenseness of form. He ran in the light of Du and he ran in the dims, which became darks as the distance behind him lengthened and lengthened and then, after running through a dark, he saw, with Du's first rays, a dull green sheen on a rock ahead. Tiny brothers grew there, and he shared their life, careful not to disrupt their colony. There was new strength in him, although he needed water badly. On another morning he saw in the distance a spike of green and there was a small brother, so he knew that he was nearing a zone of life. He used the emergency water supply then, drinking it in one long, satisfying draft from the shell of the nut brother. Soon he was moving through a landscape of scattered soil pockets and scattered, small brothers, and still there was no snow.
He rested, and slept long, and woke with pain in every joint, the pain of cold. A heaviness was atop him. He tried to move and panic grew in him when he opened his eyes to see nothing, only an impenetrable blackness, and he was cold, so cold. Every movement was an effort. He shook, lifted his arms and legs against resistance, and then, with a scream of sheer terror of the unknown, he bunched his energies and exploded upward from under a fresh blanket of snow that had covered him during the night. As far as he could see there was that deadly whiteness, but, when he had begun to move, trudging through a smooth, even snowfall that came halfway to his knees, his blood flowed and his cells were not ruptured by the ice and he knew that the cold was not a killing cold, as long as he kept moving.
There was food now. It was dry, tough, cold period fodder, but it was full of energy and the snow satisfied his need for water. He moved swiftly into a land of more and more brothers of one type, tall, thin, cold-resistant brothers who dropped dead limbs in profusion, making it easy for him to have a warm fire when he rested.
Never had he seen such darks as he saw when he entered a forest of tall brothers so dense that the glow of the sky's night fires, a newness to him, were hidden by the overlapped boughs. And the darks were long, and cold, and he had to travel through them, sleeping little, not daring to rest, for the cold was on his heels now, as he'd been warned, and to sleep long meant death.
He stumbled into the first of the waters. It was nothing more than a shallow, marshy pool, but it was water, and icy cold, and so delicious that, in spite of the cold he lay there where he'd fallen, gulping great draughts of it until he was bloated with its goodness. For a long period of lights and darks—Du was bright, but surprisingly distant—he waded, swam, skirted lakes, streams, bogs where delicious green brothers grew, until he began to notice that the tall brothers were increasing in size to assume, as he entered a great congregation and lost himself in darkness, sizes beyond his wildest imaginings.
The cold was becoming dangerous. Even when he found a sheltered spot and built a roaring fire he could not warm himself all the way through. So he moved, ran, walked, waded, pushed his way through drifts of snow, with Du a weak source in the sky and the cold always with him. He could not believe that he would see the Enemy there, for it was too cold, the snows too deep, the darkness among the tall brothers too complete.
A howling wind carried a cold unlike any cold Duwan had ever felt. Once, in youthful curiosity, he'd climbed out of the valley during the time of the long dark to find a world of crusted white. Then the barrens had been covered to a depth equal to more than his height in snow, and there was a still, quiet cold that gradually seeped into one's cells, but even that cold could not compare with the cold of the wind there among the tall brothers. And snow came with the wind, and there was no softness in the snow. It stung his face. It irritated his eyes so that he had difficulty seeing. The wind was so powerful that it blew him, hard, against a tall brother and the shock of the impact brought to him a sense of growing urgency. The depth of the new snow sapped his energy. He sank to his knees, had to lift his feet high, had to struggle for each brief passage from tall brother to tall brother. The storm had dimmed the day, so that he had no sense of time. He was only beginning to comprehend that time had a different shape in this land of many tall brothers, far from his native valley. In the valley, time was measured by that lovely period when Du circled around the valley and gave light. The long dark, when Du left the valley, was merely a period of endurance, with time, itself, of little import. He knew only that the time of darkness was long, but bearable, made bearable by the constant output of the hot springs, a warmth so effective that snow melted as it fell to become a mist of dew that gave life to the valley even in the absence of Du. Now time was measured by short periods of light and periods of intense darkness longer than the periods of light and each dark seemed to become more deadly, for the cold intensified and seemed capable of attacking even the flames of his night fires. The cold seemed to impregnate the fallen, dry branches of the tall brothers, so that he had to use extravagant amounts of his carefully stored tinder to start the smallest twigs burning, and then they popped and cracked and smoked and burned only reluctantly.
The winds blew for days, and the snow continued until he was, at times, struggling through drifts up to his chest. His very skin ached. His blood seemed to move in his veins at a slowed pace. The necessary intake of snow for water allowed the cold to invade the core of his body, so that it seemed to seep outward as well as inward. For food there was only the dry, brittle, acidy needles of the tall brothers and, occasionally, dry fodder—if he had the fortune to find a spot where winds had cleared the snow enough to allow him to dig down to ground level.
By the time the storm ended his southward progress amounted to no more than an arrow's flight each day and he was keeping himself in motion only with the expenditure of all his will, and the memories of Alning, his father, his mother, and his duty to the Drinkers of the Valley. From a sky washed clean by the storm Du gave him strength. He opened his multiple layers of clothing and let the life-giving rays do battle with the frigid air, and the net gain was negligible. One could not live in such cold. The cold froze small limbs on the tall brothers so that, in the stillness, broken only by Duwan's panting, the sharp crack of rupturing cells came, crisp and clear, echoing off the wall of tall brothers. After a night of pain, when the cold seemed to turn to fire in his body, he struggled onward and paused, knowing not hope but astonishment, as the tall brothers ceased and a wide, level clearing lay ahead of him, so extensive that the tall brothers on the far side were dwarfed. He hoped that the clearing would make for easier travel, but there the soft, new snow was just as deep, and he came to realize that he was crossing a frozen lake, had just enough capacity for thought left to be awed by the sheer mass of water that lay under the snow and ice.
The winds came again when he was only halfway across, roaring down from the northwest with a suddenness that numbed him. Into the stillness came a distant mutter. The mutter became a roar and, looking over his shoulder, he saw a roiling mass of dark clouds springing up from the horizon, moving so swiftly that he could only stand and watch in fear as the storm approached with astounding speed.
