Above the Snowline (27 page)
A multi-layered cornice as thick as a pie crust curled off the eaves over the door. I pressed my glove to the deeply weathered wood. Its grain projected like the bones on the back of the Emperor’s hand. There’ll be other Rhydanne inside, I thought, and felt apprehensive. Then a fine contempt rose within me. I can deal with any Rhydanne. I’m not a boy now, as I was when they hounded me from Scree Plateau. I worked a hand under my parka and tugged at my sword hilt but the damn thing had frozen fast into the scabbard.
Fuck it. My mouth was dry with dehydration, my tongue stuck to my palate and my face was so numb with cold I couldn’t feel it. I pushed the door wide and went inside.
Many pairs of glowing pale gold eyes stared at me from a range of spiky silhouettes. The door slammed shut behind me on its springs. I stepped forwards, blinking at the brightness of the fireplace in the centre of the room. The silhouettes resolved into a handful of Rhydanne sitting at tables, backlit by its red light. Some further in lounged on cushions and rugs on the ground and against the walls. Others in niches recessed into the walls made the room look rather like a dovecote. I had never seen so many in one place before.
A few Awians, halfway through a game of cards, occupied the table nearest to the fire. I shrugged the rope from my shoulder, flung it on a table and eased the crossbow strap and scabbard from my back. Slabs of snow fell from the creases of my coat and thudded to the floor. I hung my crossbow bag on the back of a chair, unwound the scarf from my face, unhooked my frozen coat from my aching wings and dropped it on the table.
The Rhydanne uttered not a word and continued to stare like a pride of lions. The Awian trappers rustled their wings nervously and lowered their gaze but they hadn’t continued with their game. They were listening.
The room smelt, I could sense it now my nose was defrosting, of a mixture of gloopy meat stew, the kind of thick, half-burnt gravy that sticks to the side of the pan; musty goat bedding; dog hair; creosote; lanolin; the sandy smell of crushed rock and, above all, rugs soaked with slush and almost rotten. There was also sappy pine smoke and whisky. The scents I’ve come to associate with Rhydanne.
On all sides dark doorways led away. In the middle, on the stone chimney hood, hung an old dog lead, an iron spring trap and a shabby pair of snowshoes. Two huge, white avalanche dogs slept in front of the grate. Their ribcages rose and fell, their lips flopped back from drying canines. The breed was used by the Rhydanne for hunting, but their senses are so fine-tuned they can give advance warning of an avalanche. A couple of their canvas sled harnesses and the packs they can carry hung on the nearby wall.
I looked down the room for Dellin. She was already sitting on the floor at the far end, talking animatedly to a couple of hunters, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. The chunks of wood spat and crackled in the hearth and sparks whirled up the flue. A patter of feet and two Rhydanne children, one thigh-high, the other so small he ran under the table without touching it, dashed to me and stopped just short of crashing into my knees. They turned up their faces and stood regarding me solemnly with big cat eyes.
‘Hello,’ I said.
The smaller boy looked to the larger one. Their faces were very pinched, pointed noses and chins, framed by black hair tangled with neglect.
‘If they bother you, just cuff their ears,’ a voice resounded from behind the fireplace. It was a fleshy voice, and added in Awian, ‘If you can catch them. I never can.’
I stepped to one side, peered round the fireplace and saw that it had been obscuring the bar. A woman stepped out from behind it, untying her apron strings. She thrust out her arm as brawny as a man’s and offered me a hand like a side of ham. ‘Ouzel,’ she announced, in tones so loud she made the tankards rattle. ‘Welcome to the Frozen Hound!’
I shook her hand, feeling rather put out. ‘Call me Jant. You don’t seem surprised.’
‘Last March Dellin told me she was going to find the silver man, and when she came in just now - she’s over there, see? - and said she had company, I thought: who else would the Emperor send? Though I never thought I’d see an immortal in the flesh. Ha ha. Excuse me, Jant. I’m sorry. Been up here a long time. Forgot my manners. Do you want some kutch?’
‘
Anything
apart from kutch.’
Anything
apart from kutch.’
She strode back behind the bar and vigorously slopped stew and dumplings into a wooden bowl. ‘I only sell homebrew, kutch and spirit. Here you go.’
‘Thanks. I’ll have water and a whisky.’
She turned her back, unhooked one of the cups, opened the spigot on a cask, and filled it. Her voice was no less stentorian for her facing away. ‘Only beer, kutch and spirit. You see, everything has to be carried up here. By mules and my good self, ha ha.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Oh, where people are from has become important, has it? I thought that’d happen, though it never should, ha ha. Well, I’m from Rachiswater - but a very different Rachiswater from the one Raven knows.’
‘Yes, Raven is the problem.’
‘Well, it’s very good of you to come and sort our problem out.’
The bar was a low wall of coarse stone topped by a great timber slab, its grain worn to smooth corrugations. Behind it, rows of small kegs on stands nestled like fat suckling piglets. Above it, hefty stoneware bottles, all carefully corked and labelled, lined the shelves from which all shapes and sizes of tankard hung on pottery or stitched leather handles. It was a bizarre mixture of crockery of various ages and farmhouse designs, but all was clean and neat. It gave an impression of belongings kept carefully for a long time and added to with the wisdom of extreme economy. The can-do effect was embodied - and what a sturdy body! - in Ouzel herself. ‘Did you build all this?’
‘I did.’ She indicated a table, and the two Rhydanne sitting at it sloped away to lounge on some floor cushions. ‘Eat your stew. Well, you won’t do that without a fork, ha ha. Here’s a fork.’ She had a weird way of half-saying, half-laughing ‘ha ha’, but heartily, not suspiciously, with her head thrown back. ‘I didn’t build it all at once, of course. It took twenty summers. And not all by myself; with the help of my boys.’
‘Your boys?’
She gave a piercing whistle. ‘Snowblink! Spindrift!’ The dogs by the fireplace pricked their ears, sprang to life, bounded over to her and collapsed like drifts onto her boots, which I saw were thick leather with reinforced toes. She tickled their tummies. ‘My boys, ha ha. And my son - in the back room. And some Rhydanne, of course.’
‘Raven said the Rhydanne aren’t capable of building.’
‘Raven knows nothing of Rhydanne! Nothing at all, ha ha.’
I cut into a suet dumpling and munched it thankfully. I knew I was hungry from the climb, and that would have affected my judgement, but Ouzel’s cheese dumplings were one of the best things I have ever tasted, on a par with the pepper-glazed sirloin served at Rachiswater palace and Tre Cloud the Cook’s signature chocolate torte. As I ate I watched Dellin, at the end of the room. She crouched and leant forwards to harangue another group of hunters bedecked in tooth necklaces and bangles.
I had never met a woman quite like Ouzel. She was enormous in every respect: her very physical presence, her capacity for talking and the fact she quite clearly didn’t give a damn whether she was addressing the Emperor’s Messenger or a muleteer. She had the practicality, but not the suspicious shrewdness, of the orphan girls I had known in gangland Hacilith. She was nothing like the drippy aristocratic women with whom I’ve mostly had to deal since I joined the Castle: the vain wives of governors, or the gold-diggers, crystalline with envy, who inhabit boudoirs and emerge fully fledged each night like basilisks into the ballrooms. She was nothing like the female Eszai, who were constantly intent on their work. She looked with matriarchal fondness on the people in the bar, Awians and Rhydanne alike. And to be honest, a room full of Rhydanne is rather like a room full of hyperactive six-year-olds. Ouzel’s formidable vigour made all those other women look pale. Her rounded brown wings were too small for the rest of her. Her red check shirt was made of the same material as the curtains. She wore her sleeves rolled in a businesslike manner, and her trousers, swelled by her belly, were patched and darned to within an inch of their being. She was as rosy as a cask of very powerful cider and she gave the impression of seizing life and hugging it in her strong arms every day.
I became aware of a tugging on the back of my chair. The two Rhydanne babies had unlaced my crossbow bag, managed to pull out the crossbow and were investigating it. The older one poked his thumbnail into the cracks between the mother-of-pearl inlay. His smaller accomplice in crime, who couldn’t have been more than a month old, was biting at the drawstring of the quiver full of bolts.
‘Put that down!’ said Ouzel, and leapt out of her chair.
The boys evaded her and nipped under the table. ‘Tearaways! Little terrors!’ She reached under for the nearest and they both raced past her, almost quicker than the eye could follow. ‘Told you I’ll never catch them!’ she said. ‘Rubha, will you look after your children?’
The smaller child dropped the quiver and instantly his brother pounced and scooped it off the rug with one clawed hand. He rolled onto his hands and knees, tipped the bolts out onto his long palm and poked at them inquisitively. He had left the crossbow unguarded, and his brother hunted it down, dived onto it and tried to escape but was brought up short by the elder grabbing his hair. They began fighting over it. Ouzel waded in. They scattered. Then the taller one, who was probably only eight months older, rolled his brother over, cuffed him soundly and gained both crossbow and bolts.
I was about to intervene when a Rhydanne woman at the next table shot out an arm and grabbed him by his collar. He stopped at once and went limp. She lifted him up and put him on her back. He clung with his arms around her shoulders and his knees on her hips as if riding. I hastily retrieved my crossbow and reached for the quiver, but - too late - the other boy snatched it, zoomed under the tables, past legs and with a high-pitched giggle was soon hunting fleas and other peoples’ belongings at the far end of the room.
I’d look ridiculous if I chased him. I looked to Ouzel, ‘He took my bolts.’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘But he might hurt himself.’
‘Oh, they’re quite used to sharp objects. We can get them later; he caches stuff behind the bar. Rubha, keep them under control - I’ve told you before!’
Rubha gleamed at me like an angry cat, and went to sit on a slanting ladder that led to a loft where, presumably, Rhydanne slept.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘The lock just freezes anyway.’
Rubha passed a strip of dried meat to her baby, who chewed it eagerly. He pushed his mother’s tangled tresses aside to ogle me over her shoulder. By the end of his second year he would be starting to hunt; he’d be a fully grown adult by the time he was ten.
Rubha’s clothes were worn to shreds, her leggings stonewashed so many times they had faded from black to a brindled grey. She wore a threadbare Awian bodice, battered and with no eyeholes; she was so starved the edges of the material overlapped where it was laced. Bandages swathed her left foot, which looked horribly misshapen. Her ankle was purple and red threads of blood poisoning were climbing up it.
‘She was caught in a trap,’ said Ouzel.
‘Her foot?’
‘Yes. She was hunting in the forest and walked into one of the Awians’ spring traps. The sort with jagged jaws that’ll shatter a wolf’s leg. It bit her to the bone. She was there for hours before she managed to prise it open with her spear. So I also had to treat her for frostbite.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘Yes. Last summer she was a proud hunter; now look at her. Pissed every day and with a Shira child. She was raped . . .’
‘By whom?’
Ouzel sighed. ‘By some of the tame Rhydanne that Raven employs. She can’t run fast enough to escape them any more. By the Huntress, she can’t run at all!’ She clapped her hands and the lame woman looked up. ‘Rubha Dara, go and wash your foot again, the way I showed you. Rub some more silver ointment on it and use a clean dressing.’
Rubha nodded and climbed into the loft, her baby clinging to her naturally, the way he had known since the day of his birth.
‘I keep telling her to find a husband to protect her. But of course no one wants to marry her because she can’t run. The men think her worthless, even more so than if she was a Shira. So she’s taken to drinking.’
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