At necessary halts, some troopers, whirling humming slings, galloped along beneath the sailing clouds of birds – their moose pounding through puddles in spray – and sent stones hissing up to bring down several.
At one such delay, Nancy ran up alongside Baj's mount with his bow and quiver in her hands.
'Oh, for Christ's sake…' That ancient exclamation still risky in some places.
'Get one!' said the merciless girl, and reached them up.
The moose had no change of gait beside ambling rolling trot or a dead run, and dead run would be required for duck chasing. There also seemed a question whether the reins had any function – they'd certainly had none for Baj so far.
He gritted his teeth, which hurt the hurt cheek, strung and braced the bow in the saddle – something he'd done before, hunting, though not with a bruised and aching shoulder – then drew an arrow from the quiver – one of his last from the River. He took the rein-ends in his teeth, nocked the arrow to the bowstring… and drummed his heels into the moose's massive flanks.
What reins and duckings did not do, kicks apparently did – and Baj found himself tearing along from a brutally wrenching start, going at a racehorse's speed but with side-swaying and surging up and down like a festival crank- ride.
The velocity, and tossing this way and that as the animal galloped – hammering sedge, smashing through milky runs of melt-water – had all the discomforts of nightmare. Baj's sore head and sore shoulder seemed to snarl at him as he flew across the tundra, out of the saddle as often as in it.
It was so bad, so painful it became funny, and Baj released himself so he seemed to drift laughing beside that unfortunate rider, reins in his teeth, clutching his bow as he went flying, jouncing, reeling across the country on a great, black, bulge-eyed beast.
'Hattie,' the trooper had named her as he'd handed her over, dubious, but giving Baj a leg up.
Baj called
Then he gave up, spit the leather out, and went along – as copybooks often had it – 'for the ride.'
He even managed to draw with an unhappy shoulder and shoot at seven ducks whirring over (though not going much faster than he was) – missed the flock by a distance, and of course that arrow lost in melt-water.
Hattie gave no sign at all of slowing, but Baj, growing used to windy great speed, jolting pain, and eccentric motion, managed to nock a second arrow – shot it at almost random, and out of a great whistling dark ceiling of geese, killed one.
The day after, they were under the loom of the Wall. The companies, at sunset, camped two miles from its base in a wilderness of foaming rapids not yet frozen, and fractured fallen mountains of blue ice and white ice. Boulders – seeming, in number, a heaped limitless drift of river-bank pebbles – lay with many big as manor houses, and all ground smooth-sided as planed planks.
The milky river rapids, the threads of short-summer's melt – though many ran several bowshots wide – thundered in waterfall down from massive ice-faces, parapets, ramparts here rising two miles high, to crash in fountaining spray, then surf along great dunes of the glacier's till… That sound, continuous as it had been for centuries – though greater or lesser with freeze and thaw – shook the ground, drum-rolled to echo from the Wall, then rumbled away to the east and west as if the Wall asked and answered questions fundamental, along three thousand miles from ocean to ocean.
Kingdom River, the Mississippi, could have run along the base of that frozen monument, and been no more than moat to a fortress inconceivable.
Somewhat subdued since his ride the previous day – Hattie having been retrieved by her concerned trooper, carefully examined, kissed on the nose, then taken away to the Line to feed – Baj had seen the Wall before, from a headwater branch of the River, though at a much greater distance… But this was the near thing itself, a miles-high, horizon-wide palace, its vaults ice-white, ice-gray, ice-blue, with glittering sheets of melt in sunset light, their roaring waters carving down great crevasses, shaping ice canyons in the air, persuading immense formations – twice, as he stood watching – to slowly lean… lean out and away from the mass, and topple dreamily down.
Then the thunder and breaking in huge fountains of white spray, while the soaked soil shook under Baj's muk- boots, vibrated like a drumhead.
Nancy came to stand beside him, looking up as he looked up, and raised her voice to nearly a shout.
'Come eat,' Nancy spoke into his ear, and they walked hand-in-hand over rubble and freezing drift, though air drafty with blowing mist, heavy with the odors of ice and stone.
… Though Baj's aches and injuries, already much less painful, wouldn't have troubled him after a second evening's bellyful of goose and its grease, roasted over horded dried dung – the Wall's earth-shaking, its crashing sounds, did not permit a night's sleep in more than snatches. So he rose – as they all, and the companies rose – weary in a bitter morning, to their rye-porridge.
It seemed to Baj, despite the night – and present noise – that the glacier's towering front had become slightly more peaceful.
'Probably,' Richard said when he mentioned it, '- summer melt's ending, so it'll be a little quieter every day. Already be starting to freeze hard in places along the rim. Let three, four WT weeks go by, you could camp here in almost quiet… And after that, in very quiet, though rivers run beneath it always. – Lord Winter's piss, the Shrikes say.'
Errol stood up with porridge on his chin, and pointed over the outwash plain, its ponds and lakes gleaming with night ice. More than a mile away, past a great mounded drumlin-hill, a herd that must have been thousands of caribou was lacing through frozen cirques and melt-leads… Baj could make out swifter, smaller shapes sifting through the herd's edges. Wolves.
'No better hunting,' Nancy said, '- than before the Wall.' Her breath steamed in the frigid air.
'For white fox, white weasel, white hare, wolf, white bear, musk-ox and caribou.' Patience was packing her possibles. 'The white bears also hunt
Errol, still staring out at the caribou, was jogging in place as if to chase them.
Nancy clapped her hands for his attention. 'Come sit!' He turned to her… wandered over.
'What when he's grown,' Baj said, '- and won't come when called?'
Errol stared at Baj, head cocked.
Baj smiled at him, though his sewn right cheek felt stiff as he did. 'Yes, I'm talking about you – but not in a bad way.'
'He knows when we talk about him,' Nancy said. She tongue-clicked for his attention, patted a space of hide beside her. 'Want to come sit?'
Errol stayed where he was, turned his head to watch the caribou.
'And when he's grown?'
'Baj,' Richard smiled, rolling his blanket, 'none of us are likely to have much more time to grow.'
'Why,' Baj said, 'do I keep forgetting that?'
'Because you wish to.' Patience stood, shrugged on her pack.
'Because you're a fool.' Nancy came, crouched, and began to tickle him.
'Don't.' Baj tried to get up and get away. '- I'm wounded!' But she tickled anyway.
Richard tugged on his furred muk-boots. 'We have company.'
Four mounted Persons were galloping toward them – their mooses' splayed hooves making rapid dull thump- thump-thumps over drifts of till.
'The General.' Richard stood up. Baj and Nancy as well.
Sylvia Wolf-General rode in among them as she had before, as if to use her saber – it seemed to Baj her accustomed approach – and pulled up hard in the same sliding stop as her troopers followed, her big mount tossing strings of clear slobber.
