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fingers. She rode easily, as disconnected from what was happening as a child
bobbing on her back in the ocean, lost in the sky and cloud. Then it was dark and
the horse had slowed to a stumbling trot. She blinked and reined to a halt. Again, the
sky was clear, utterly silent and still. The moons hung two-thirds full, and she was
cold. She twisted in her saddle. Nothing but white quiet. Where was she?
With her eyes closed, it was easy to picture her map. Then she revisualized the
taars, the setting sun, and the direction of the burning yurtu, and calculated. She had
fled due north. Ollfoss lay north and east; she would find it, somehow.
She turned the mare s head in the right direction and kicked her to a walk. All she
had to do was keep going, not think about the fact that she had no food, no shelter,
no sling, no spear, and no fuel; that even being a captive of the Echraidhe might be
better than dying out here, alone, in the frozen wastes. For now, it was enough to be
free. That was important. Freedom meant something, didn t it? Her furs tickled her
chin and she pulled the snow mask tighter.
When the moons set, she was still riding. She realized she had been searching for
a suitable stopping place: a stream, a bush, some shelter anything that stood out on
this endless stretching white. There was nothing. There would be nothing. She reined
in and dismounted, and the mare hung her head while she uncinched the saddle.
When she pulled off the headstall, the icicles hanging from the mare s shaggy mane
broke off. She started to rub the poor creature down with her gloved hands before
she remembered something Aoife had told her: the snow and ice in a horse s coat
could act as insulation the same way a snow tunnel could shelter and insulate a
person.
She squatted, pulled off a glove, and rubbed snow between her fingers. Dry
snow. Good building material. She took a careful swig of locha and began.
First, she took off the headstall to hobble the mare, who could scrape up snow
from the moss and find her own grazing. The saddle went on the snow. Marghe knelt
next to it and began scraping snow up around her. She managed to curve the walls in
slightly, but when she tried to make a roof the way Aoife had shown her, it kept
collapsing under its own weight. She tried several times, first with lightly packed
snow, then with snow she had packed almost solid, finally by trying to form a
cement of ice by running her blade along the snow. Nothing worked. Stubborn, her
father had always said, stubborn as a Portuguese donkey. Not today. She curled
herself into a tight ball, laid her head on the saddle, and went to sleep.
She woke about two hours later, rippling and shuddering, her muscles pulled so
tight against the cold that her bones ached. No more sleep tonight. She did some
breathing and stretching before saddling the mare. Even that made her dizzy. She
needed food. She had none all she had was a half-full skin of locha. She leaned her
forehead against her mount s shaggy flanks. There was still time to retrace her tracks
to the yurtu. Her stomach did a slow roll forward. No. Not again. She had plenty of
furs, her palo, a knife, the locha, a horse. A few days, just a few days. She could last
that long. She pulled herself into the saddle, set the mare s head toward Ollfoss, and
nudged her into a walk.
The second night, she simply lay on her back and wriggled until snow covered
everything but her face. She woke to a world of seamless white and hunger sharp as
a rodent s tooth. The sky was soft and milky, like the plain; it was as if she stood
inside a hollow pearl. It made her dizzy. She finished the locha and hung the empty
skin back on her saddle. If she found nothing to fill it with, she could always try to
eat it.
This time she had to kick the mare to get her moving.
Marghe woke on her third morning alone to find that her hunger had passed from
pain to a dull ache; she knew she was hungry, but she no longer minded so much.
The snow underfoot was as soft and white as the furred back of the mythical
cyarnac. Today, it was beautiful. She smiled to herself as she looked around.
Everything seemed dusted with crystal. When she brushed snow from her sleeves,
every fiber of her overfur was magically clear. She studied her saddle dreamily: every
pore on the leather was distinct. She could have spent hours watching the light in tiny
droplets of ice on the mare s coat. Hunger was no longer important. She heaved the
saddle onto the mare and blood flowed warm and strong through her veins. Her
limbs felt smooth and light. Today, she felt& fine.
The mare kept her head down, cropping the frozen ice moss, while Marghe
tightened the girth. The wooden buckle slipped easily into its usual hole and the
buckle itself nestled comfortably into the slight bed it had worn into the leather. But
the straps were too loose. Too loose. She took a step backward and forced herself
to see loose skin and jutting ribs instead of individual hairs. Her horse was starving.
So was she.
The mare pawed aside more snow, cropped. Marghe watched and licked her lips,
thinking of ice moss. When it was cooked and dried it could be ground like flour
and made into flat cakes. Raw, it would not be poisonous, but probably indigestible.
But she had to eat something.
She squatted and scraped bare a small patch of moss. She yanked it up, a clump
at a time, and set it aside. There was something else she wanted to try first. The
ground was hard as iron; she had to lean her weight onto her knife blade and twist
the point until she loosened a tiny lump of soil like frozen gravel.
It took hours to cut a vertical hole about the size of her forearm. Her mare kept
cropping and pawing, cropping and pawing. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]