The bloods of infantry – bear and wolf – their drums thumping, were spaced between Supply's pack-moose and two-wheel wagons, and the trotting squadrons of near-Sunriser troopers… whose trumpeters, loping past the ranks, sounded the first notes of 'Yanking Tootle' as they rode.
Watching those formations… those solders go – old Sergeant Givens certainly perched on a wagon, with his barrels and baked goods – Baj felt his fathers standing beside him.
Just-before-dawn was announced by an avalanche thundering off the Wall – to startle all of them, even the Shrikes.
'Wall calls,' a sleepy tribesman said, and awake, the Shrikes, with Baj and the others, gathered around a fresh-started dung fire to warm themselves a little in freezing silvery air, and eat frost-coated pieces of yesterday's ducks.
Food finished, and all having scattered into the landscape to do the necessary, equipping began of possibles, extra coiled leather line, rolled blankets, fat leather sacks of seal-jerky and strips of frozen blubber. Ice hatchets, cords looped to their handles, were thrust through belts, weapons all strapped firm to back-packs, and full canteens and water-skins swung on cords beneath parkies to keep their water liquid.
'Here…' Dolphus-Shrike distributed leather masks with dangling rawhide ties, each narrowly slit for vision. 'Wear them when the sun is out, or the ice will blind the fool who doesn't.'
A sad loser of many honor-promises to Patience, playing pickup sticks the evening before, the Shrike-chief seemed a little out of temper. '…
'Understood.'
'
Finished, they all stood thickly furred, slightly bent under bulky burdens – the Shrikes most encumbered with coils of braided line, and their jingling bandoleers of steel hooks, rings, and little grapnels.
Dolphus-Shrike looked the party over, nodded, then turned to Nancy. 'Women have difficulty holding their water, then have to bare butt to lose it. Done your pissing?'
'Fuck you,' Nancy said. And at a glance from Patience,'… Just joking.'
Dolphus smiled, his first of the morning. '- And no one has packed what is not needed to live?'
'… Little chess set,' Richard said.
The Shrikes were amused.
'We're ready,' Baj said.
'Then,' Dolphus said, '- catch us if you can.' The Shrikes all turned together and trotted away north, where the Wall – a flock of sailing geese only infinite specks across its gleaming front – grumbled awake to a rising sun.
… It took two glass-hours of fast marching across moraine – much of the time skirting streams and a shimmering lake of milk-white melt – to reach the base of the Wall.
The thunder and volley of toppling ice, the seething rapids they hiked beside – the Shrikes moving steadily – echoed to Baj something of the sounds of Warm-times, at least as he'd always imagined them… continuous racket, rushing, roaring, thumping, flushed with color and busy with millions of men and women racing here and there in bright, whining machines – having work adventures and love adventures and crime and war adventures… Of course, there must have been boredom, discontent – those appeared in the copybooks, as well – but surely very little and only among fools, when the whole world was open to them, and warm… warm, so winter for them was only an interesting season's passage.
As now, below the Wall, it was not.
The cold there did not settle on them as Baj was used to from the river – as if a great soft coverlet of freezing- invisible had come down through the air. This was a cold that sought them out as if deliberately, with intention. Sought each of them out and gripped them, squeezing warmth away like some great festival wrestler, muscled with ice, and in Lord Winter's pay… Cold the more frightening in air as still as deep water, except when some falling great structure disturbed it.
The cold took Baj's easy breaths away, and allowed only careful breathing between guarding lips to keep his lungs from freezing. He put his arm around Nancy – hooded, richly soft in her plush of furs – and she smiled up at him. 'Careful,' he said to her – meaning, he supposed, she was to be careful of the cold, and climbing. Careful of everything…
His word, 'Careful,' dissolved before him in a little cloud of crystals that sifted down like snow. Nancy stuck her tongue out at him, but only for a moment.
… The base of the Wall was an enormous confusion of massive fallen cliffs and towers, great gaps and crevasses snow-bridged or open to reveal depths blue-green to black. Through this immense and dangerous labyrinth, the Shrikes led fast – in morning sunshine, now, brilliant light that warmed not at all – crawling, climbing great broken tilted slabs of ice, to descend again. Scrambling over or around gaping pitfalls and many-storied structures of blue ice, white ice, and gray ice caverned by foaming water come rushing, spouting from the glacier's grand foundations.
Baj was surprised how difficult it was to keep up with the tribesmen – each of them so laden… His right cheek still ached slightly, occasional little needles of pain flashing down the stitching there, and along the side of his head. But it was his bruised, shoulder that gave him trouble. What he would, it did – but stiffly.
Dolphus-Shrike, though never turning back to look, seemed to have the talent of Who-is-where, so almost always when Baj slowed, climbing some steep, there would be Marcus or Henry or one of the three nameless men suddenly beside him in support. Muttering, the Shrike would boost him up, taking one of his booted feet in hand to place it properly. – And twice, Baj was simply seized and tossed up to better holds. Impressive demonstrations of strength, though still a strength gathered, however swiftly. Sunriser strength, rather than George Brock's instant and terrific impetus.
… Baj couldn't have said when not-quite-the-Wall became the thing itself. There was a rise that continued to a steeper rise, with no longer even a slight descent, but only going up.
Here, a Shrike was single-roped to each of their charges, except for Patience, who – sitting cross-legged on a snowy ledge, scimitar strapped to her small pack – slowly drifted sideways with the Wall's wind, seeming not to rise very much at all… until she did, with her colored greatcoat ruffling in the wind like the bright plumage of some bird of myth.
The Shrikes – who until then had been clambering as Baj and the others did, though much more easily – unlimbered more of their thick coils of slender braided-leather line, knotted the ends to the steel hooks they carried… then buckled and strapped odd little sharp steel points to their heavy-soled muk-boots… and lifting the similar boots Baj and the others had been given by the Guard, fastened the spikes for them as if shoeing horses.
These points were not comfortable, made simple walking difficult. But using them, and the spikes backing their hatchets' heads, the Shrikes began to demonstrate true climbing – staying, Baj saw, on good green or blue ice where they could, avoiding rotten gray… Working in steady cooperation, they often wove running guard-lines of braided leather – threaded through small steel circles, and anchored with hooks and grapnels – to support them and their charges as they climbed.
It was a remarkable skill to see, to try to imitate, and kept Baj's mind, mostly, from their height above the ground. He'd climbed trees, of course, and various granite walls at Island, sometimes perilously high above the river's currents. But the Wall's ramparts – so very much higher – were different in kind, their ice (so various, patches of it rotten) much more treacherous than solid stone.
He wished Nancy had been left behind, left with the Guard, so he didn't have to watch her climbing just above him, hesitant, hacking at ice with her hatchets or, mittens tugged off, clutching with freezing hands to crucial holds made only of frozen water… Concern for her – and concern for himself, since his rolled blanket and pack (rapier, dagger, bow and quiver strapped to it), seemed to conspire to tug him out and away from the ice cliff to fall.
He used the Shrike hatchets at first awkwardly, so their heads' sharp reverses bounced off ice, or skidded to
