Ki awoke to the beginning of gray daylight. In the cool air, her memories and dreams of last night came swirling back to her, mingled to incoherence. She flinched at her own emotionalism. She pushed the covers back experimentally. The cold touched her and she slid silently from the sleeping platform to hastily pull on her outer garments. Vandien slept on, an arm flung over his face. Ki dragged the cuddy door open. It slid stiffly.
The wind had ceased in the night. Snow was blown up against the wheels of the wagon, was smeared across the wagon seat. But now all was still and calm, and the cold pressed down harder than ever. The arched sky was a far and pale blue. Empty. Ki scanned it from the cuddy door, then climbed out on the seat to stand on it and survey the whole sky. Pure it was, no clouds, no far dark wings.
She breathed in relief. Then her eyes fell on the gray huddle of horsehide in the snow, the crumpled fallen shapes. ‘Damn!’ she screamed, and leapt down to run to them. With a lunge and a snort, the horses rose, shying away from her sudden movement. Ki laughed in relief. They had been sleeping, legs folded beneath them for warmth. She called them back with gentle words and a handful of grain. They came, shy at first, then eagerly, to munch from her hands. She slid their blankets off and led them to the traces. She harnessed them quickly.
Some time in the night an iron determination had been born in her. She could be on her way, right now, to conquer this pass and take her freight through. Woe betide any Harpy that tried to bar her way. Or any man. She heaped the team’s blankets about her on the seat, wondering if it could get any colder.
The wind had erased the wagon tracks behind. Before her the trail wound across the face of the mountain, rippling with tiny low drifts. It would give the team no problems. Ki stretched, feeling her shoulders pop and crackle. She started the team. The wheels rolled almost silently, cutting their narrow grooves through the white snow. The team needed little guidance. On one side of the trail, the ground dropped away abruptly. On the other, the bare stone reared up.
Ki heard the cuddy door slide open behind her. She turned quickly to face Vandien as he emerged, blinking at the snow-brightness and rubbing his face. ‘By noon today we shall pass the Sisters,’ he said with satisfaction. He began coughing, shaking with the effort it demanded. He settled down hastily on the seat beside her, tugging at the blankets and arranging them about like a nest. When he was settled and had his breath, he pointed a hand ahead to where the trail seemed to go off into empty space. ‘Around that bend of the mountain, and we shall be able to see the Sisters. Though from this close they won’t look like anything more than a rise of black rock on the cliff face. Once we’re past the Sisters, we travel a short way more across the face of this mountain. Then the trail begins to take us around the side of the mountain, and down. I shall be glad to see the other side of this pass.’ He whistled tunelessly for a moment. ‘Hungry?’ he asked Ki suddenly.
She nodded, and he dove back into the cuddy. She could hear him opening cupboards and rummaging in drawers. Ki called back, ‘There’s cheese wrapped in cloth on the shelf above the window.’
He pushed the laden platter out onto the seat before him. He had heaped it with chunks of cheese, slices of sausage, and two pieces of hard bread. It was all cold, making it harder to chew. Ki ate absent-mindedly, one eye on her team and one on the trail ahead. The sharp curve Vandien had pointed out to her was an illusion. As they approached it, Ki found the bend was gradual, following the rounded flank of the mountain. Around the bend the snow began to grow perceptibly deeper with every turn of the wheels. Here the wind had not swept the snow from the trail but had heaped and packed it on the ledge. The grays plowed through it gamely, but Ki felt growing apprehension. All morning she had marveled at the good fortune that had given her a road clean of snow and a sky clean of Harpies. Now she decided that the Harpy knew this pass, and would wait until she was mired in snow before he struck. Ki set her teeth. She squinted her eyes against the snow’s brightness. Her face felt stiff, her nose was prickly with cold, her eyelashes clung together when she blinked. The deep cold, the heaped snow, and a Harpy overhead. Ki spurred herself with her own desperation.
The snow was the worst right now. The team could barely lift their heavy hooves clear of it to plunge into the snow ahead. With every step it grew deeper. The tall wheels began to stick and jerk, and Ki could hear the brushing of the snow as the wagon bed passed over it. Soon the wheels were sliding as much as they were rolling. The team floundered and bucked along, no longer pulling smoothly as a team but seesawing the wagon along as best they could. Ki halted them, and steam rose from their huge bodies in whirling eddies.
‘The Sisters!’ Vandien’s voice was muffled. He had pulled his hood up as far as it would go and held it mostly closed across his lower face. Ki looked up.
They loomed ahead over the trail. Soon the wagon would pass directly under them. As Vandien had said, they were no longer the two embracing women they had appeared several days ago from far down the mountainside. Now they were a slight outcropping of shiny black stone towering high over Ki’s head. The snow reached nearly to the base of them. A chill not of cold swept Ki as she looked up at them. They brooded above her, perfect in their endurance and vigilance, guarding their pass eternally. Watchfulness – that was the emotion they conjured in Ki now. None of the beauty and love she had glimpsed below shivered through her. She dreaded passing under their close scrutiny. She sensed the rightness of Vandien’s anxiety to be past them, to be going down the other side of the pass.
Ki started her team again. They had gone but a handful of paces before both horses stumbled. They recovered swiftly, but only by stepping high to get their front hooves onto a hidden ledge before them. Ki watched in some surprise as the grays struggled onto the higher ground, where the snow was shallower. The harness creaked with the unusual strain of having the team on a higher level than the wagon. Then the wheels hit with a jolt, jamming against the hidden ridge of ice under the snow. The team jerked back, nearly snapping the harness. Vandien clutched at the seat and Ki with a surprised yell.
‘Why didn’t you warn me this part of the trail was uneven?’ she snarled at him as she held in the confused team.
‘In summer, the trail through this pass is smooth and flat as a causeway. I’ve no idea what we’ve struck.’
They looked at one another for a moment, then both climbed cautiously down from the wagon and waded forward through the snow. Ki bent down to sweep and dig snow away from before the wheels. Ice. Solid ice, a ridge of it, rose in the trail. Ki frowned down at it and scanned the cliff face above them, looking for some sign of a runoff that would explain the ice. There was none. But Vandien cursed from the other side of the team.
‘Snow serpent!’ He spat sourly. ‘It must have come up from the other side of the pass, then doubled back for some reason. Probably for the express purpose of leaving this ridge here to block us. The gods spit upon my destiny.’
Ki did not answer. She considered the obstacle. Even under the snow that had masked it, it was impressive. The step up the grays had taken was as high as Ki’s knee. The horses shifted uncomfortably in the harness that dragged back and down at them.
‘We shall have to somehow chop a ramp in it, so the grays can pull the wagon up onto it.’
‘And down the other side with a jolt!’ Vandien added savagely. ‘This is the track of a big serpent, Ki. It has ruined the trail ahead of us. This rise of ice here is only the beginning. If it has slithered back and forth across the trail, we can look forward to humping up and down from here to the other side of the mountains. And if it has traveled straight, you will find that it has left a ridge of ice on one side of the trail or the other. Do you fancy riding along with one set of wheels perched up on that ridge while the other side of the wagon sticks and jerks in the deep snow?’
Ki did not reply. She waded back through the snow to the wagon to fetch the horses’ blankets and her firewood hatchet. Even her stubbornness had to recognize the ridiculously small tool she had to use for such a job. This would take time.
She unhooked the team from the wagon, leaving their harness on them. She took their blankets and her own worn ones and spread them over the horses. Best not to leave them standing in this cold unblanketed after they had worked and steamed