Illengond Page 18

  Sometime in the middle of the night Tienna began to hear a distant rumble. Though she had heard such a sound before, she was slow to place it for it was not a familiar one on the Plains. Once during the night she felt a lurch and heard a loud scrape as the boat slid onto a gravel bar. Using the oars as poles to push off the bottom, they were able to escape without disembarking. Tienna took another short shift at the oars while some of her companions made an effort to sleep. And still the noise grew louder while the air grew colder and damper.

  After her turn rowing, Tienna huddled back down in the boat and pulled some skins over her body. She did not intend to sleep, only to get warm, but her fatigue, the steady thrumming beneath her of wood on water, the gentle rocking of the boat, and the low rumbling that drown out any voice, all had their effect. She fell asleep looking up at a dark sky, and watching stray flakes of snow pass over her head reflecting the torchlight.

  20

  ASCENT

  Loud sounds filled Tienna’s sleeping thoughts. She dreamed of horses galloping across her village, and of thunderstorms rolling across the Plains. She dreamed of lying in a field of wild grains as a brisk fall wind moaned through the stalks above her. This turned into a dream of a Daegmon roaring as it swooped down upon her.

  She awoke with a start just before the Daegmon snatched her in its talons. Her heart thumped within her breast, and it took a few moments for the terror of the dream to give way to the waking reality. The roaring was still there, almost deafeningly loud, but it was not a Daegmon. She lay in the bottom of a boat, pressed between two other bodies. She didn’t know whose. Her face was covered. She pulled skins off of her upper body and sat up.

  It was morning. She sat under a stone gray sky with cold mist falling on her face. Just a long bowshot away, a towering waterfall poured over cliffs from two-hundred feet above her. In every direction save straight downstream, they were surrounded by steep cliffs. On the far side of the river, the cliffs rose straight out of the water and continued another hundred feet above the top of the waterfall. On the near side, where the cliffs were a little lower, a strip of land about twenty feet wide ran along the river. Bushes and small trees grew from patches of soil by the river, or grew tenaciously out of the cliff faces wherever they could find a hold. Mist rose in the air above the falls, clung to the sides of the cliffs, drifted along the river surface like legions of ghosts, and dampened Tienna’s hair and face. Everything dripped.

  So, Tienna realized, during the night while she slept, her companions had paddled them right up into a deep and narrow river gorge. Their boat was roped in the eddy of a rock in the current near the right side of the river. In the narrow canyon beneath a cloudy sky, she could not tell where the sun was or where it’s light came from, but her sense of direction told her that looking upriver she was facing east, and that they were tied off on the south side of the gorge.

  She looked back down in the boat. Lluach lay on one side of her, all but the upper half of his head still buried beneath a skin. Hrevia lay on the other. Her eyes were still closed, but her hand searched for the skin Tienna had just pulled off them both. Others of her companions slept or sat around her. Bandor and Theo, the two remaining Andani, sat in the back of the boat, eyes closed, leaning against each other with a pair of oars tucked underneath their arms helping to prop them up. Anchara, Beth, and Elynna were in front of them, lying on the bottom of the boat at awkward positions but apparently still asleep. Another body lay pressed against Beth. Tienna guessed it was Keet. Several of the Undeani—maybe all of them—were heaped together around the middle pair of oars. Tucked beneath their heavy sheepskin garb, with their faces hidden, they looked like a big mound of wool. Tienna could not tell who was who. Noab and Noaem sat on the other side of Lluach. They had pulled their cloaks over their heads like hoods, and were peering out into the mist.

  Cathros, Aram, and Falien were on the bench near the foremost pair of oars. They appeared to be speaking in low voices, though Tienna could not hear them over the roar of the falls. In front of them, in the bow of the boat, Namha was standing and gazing up at the falls while Nahoon sat beside him like a stump beside a mighty cedar. If anybody other than Namha stood there, Tienna would have thought his position quite precarious with the rocking of the boat, but the Amanti stood straight as a mast.

  Tienna extricated herself from beneath the skin, covered Hrevia back up, and moved to the front of the boat where she squeezed onto the edge of the bench between Aram and Cathros. They greeted her, as did Falien and Nahoon. Then Falien turned back to Cathros. “You’re crazy if you think this whole company can scale one of those cliffs,” he said.

  The suggestion grabbed Tienna’s attention. Though she recognized half-consciously that they’d reached a dead-end in their upriver voyage, she had not been awake long enough to give thought to their next step. Now she took a more careful look at the cliff faces all about her.

  “And you’re crazy if you think I’m going to stay in this boat any longer,” Aram retorted. “Especially if it means rowing back down into the lake to where those Daegmons are waiting.” He spoke loudly to be heard over the falls, and Tienna thought this made him sound angrier than perhaps he was.

  Nahoon’s voice was calmer, though he still spoke loudly. “How far back downriver would we have to go to escape the gorge and go up another way?”

  Nobody answered. Cathros looked at Tienna, as though she might have an idea. Tienna was frustrated with herself for not knowing. “I fell asleep for the final part of the voyage,” she said guiltily. “And even before that, the cloud cover made it too dark to see anything of the shore beyond a looming shadow. The torches showed no more than the water right in front of the boat.”

  “Well whatever the distance, it couldn’t take long going downstream,” Falien finally said. “The current would be with us.”

  “That’s right,” Aram said. “In just a few minutes we’d waste hours of labor. Not all of us were in favor of rowing this boat up here, but now that we’ve done the work I don’t want to turn around.”

  “What do the others think?” Tienna asked. “Especially Bandor and Braga, I mean. And what does Namha think?” she added, looking at Nahoon.

  “We haven’t spoken of this to anybody yet,” Cathros replied. “It is only for the past half an hour since the sky first grew light that we were able to fully grasp our situation.”

  Nahoon laughed. “I’m sure Namha would think nothing of these cliffs, but that doesn’t help the rest of us.”

  Tienna glanced up at the tall erect form of the Amanti warrior. He seemed unaware of the conversation or that they were talking about him. She turned back to Cathros. “Let us wake the others, then,” she suggested. “Maybe somebody will have a different idea. If not, at least we can decide together what our course should be.”

  It did not take long to wake the rest of their companions, though a few of them rumbled at having to crawl out from beneath warm skins into the damp chill. The dialogue started slowly, however. Those on opposite ends of the boat could barely hear one another. Almost everything had to be repeated, and then translated into Undeani.

  “Let us go ashore where we can hear one another more clearly,” Theo said after several minutes of shouting across the boat.

  They climbed out of the boat onto a spit of wet gravel. The roar was just as loud, but at least they could stand in a close circle facing one another. Cathros repeated his proposal. Though it appeared they had trapped themselves, he thought they could scale the rock face to the right of the waterfall and continue upriver on foot. Or they could climb all the way out of the gorge, though they would have to scale much taller cliffs to do so. “Either choice is better than turning around and losing all of work we’ve done to get so far upriver,” he concluded.

  Several voices murmured concerns about the prospect of climbing such a sheer face. Falien was the most vocal of them, but Beth and Noab shared similar doubts.
Braga, Bandor, and Theo spoke most in favor of Cathros’ plan.

  “Do you truly think we can scale these rocks?” Beth asked. “It’s cold and damp, and they are much higher than the ledges we climbed when we escaped Citadel.”

  “The Undeani can,” replied Braga. “We are all climbers. It is necessary for survival. We always carry ropes and gear for climbing.”

  “Rope would make a big difference,” Falien acknowledged.

  “How much rope do you have?” Aram asked. “All put together, I mean. How much do we all have?”

  “And who will climb first?” wondered Hrevia. “Who is the most skilled climber?”

  “I have some rope,” Noab said. “But not enough. Maybe one third of what we would need.”

  “We have rope in plenty,” Braga said. “Amark, Jama, Kreeg, and I all carry lengths in our packs. Together we have at least enough to reach from top to bottom two times. And as I said before, any of my folk could make this climb even without rope. With rope—if somebody climbs and drops it down—then the whole company should be able to get up.”

  “I will climb,” Theo said. “You have trusted me with climbing before and I did not fail.”

  Tienna looked at Theo, the youngest member of the company except Keet. She had liked him since the day they had met so many weeks ago, and now he reminded her of his cousin Thimeon. If the company chose to continue forward, she did not doubt he could make it. Still, Namha was a more obvious choice. This would be nothing for his skill. Though the drawback was that Namha might choose a route that was easy to him and yet impossible for others. And how could they let Namha bear all the risk no matter how great his skill? He was the last of the Amanti. She looked up the wall again. Then she remembered Elynna’s paralyzing fear of heights. Elynna had not yet spoken. “Beth is right,” Tienna said. “I believe it is possible, but this will be much more difficult than our ascent to the Plains.”

  “Yes,” Theo replied with a sober nod. “I know. But my father—before the Daegmon crippled him—was a great climber among our people. He has taught me well.”

  “Well I still say it’s foolishness,” Falien said. “What do we gain from it?”

  “We keep ourselves away from the Daegmon,” Bandor replied. “And if we travel upriver we move closer to Illengond where Thimeon wants to meet us. That’s the message Cathwain spoke to Elynna.”

  Tienna closed her eyes. She knew the conversation that would follow. They had gone back over it several times already. What had Elynna really heard? And what had it meant? Some of Tienna’s companions thought Thimeon wanted them to go to Illengond. Others worried it was a warning to stay away from Illengond. Elynna, the only one to actually hear Cathwain, was not sure herself. She’d said only that the message carried some sort of warning. Maybe it didn’t even matter. That was Tienna’s fear. The wilderness around Illengond was so vast she had little hope of ever finding him there. Still, she trusted Thimeon. If he wanted them to go there, they should try. Or were her own emotions clouding her judgement?

  “Maybe Falien is right,” Aram said after a moment. “I’m not afraid to scale the cliffs, especially if we have rope. But what are we climbing for? We can’t risk everything for some message none of us understands. We’re basing our hope and plans on something nobody is at all sure about.”

  “What other choice do we have?” Bandor answered. “At every turn, we’ve been moving irresistibly closer to the Mountain.”

  “All the more reason to resist,” Aram argued. “If the Daegmons are driving us here they must have a reason. So I’d think that we’d do everything we could to go someplace else.”

  “I didn’t say it was the Daegmons,” Bandor replied. “I said only that our movement has been irresistible. It may be that we are drawn rather than driven to Illengond. I mean, if anything, the enemy has been trying to keep us away. Think of Golach’s attack on the Plains. He went right to the pass to cut off our escape northward. Then the Daegmons tried to lure us west across Undeani land to keep us away from the Mountain. When it looked as though we would escape across the lake, they pressed their attack to prevent us.”

  “What are you saying?” Aram asked.

  “I’m saying that perhaps—just perhaps—we’ve been led here by some Power even higher than the Daegmons. Don’t all the old stories say—”

  “I trust my sword, not old stories.”

  Tienna found herself growing strangely tense as the argument progressed. “Stop!” she shouted. “This arguing serves nothing. Whatever force brought us here, we are here, and we need to act.”

  “But how do you propose we act?” Cathros asked calmly. “That’s what we’re trying to decide, isn’t it?”

  Tienna took a deep breath. She avoided looking at Elynna. “One thing we know. If we turn and go downriver, we are headed back toward Golach. And though the Daegmons can fly, I don’t think the Gaergaen can. So to turn around now would be go back toward him as well. Maybe toward the Daegmons too. Two of them seemed to have been injured in our battle and aren’t flying.”

  “So we go onward?” Bandor asked. He looked pleased.

  Tienna looked back toward the walls of the gorge, and then toward the lower cliff beside the waterfall. “I think we should stay in the bottom of the gorge. Scale up beside the waterfall where the height is least. If we can reach the top there, we might be able to follow the river upstream. I will climb up first carrying rope. If I succeed, I will secure the rope and lower it back down.”

  “And if you fail?” Aram asked.

  “Then you try another way up, and a different climber,” she replied flatly.

  “It is a good plan,” Theo said. “Except one thing: I will climb.”

  Tienna rose and put her hands on her hips. She could feel her pride rising up within her. “Do you think your skill surpasses that of a huntress?”

  Theo met her gaze. “No. Not in a hunt. And not in battle. And maybe not even in climbing. But if I am the one who falls, we do not lose one of the gifted.”

  A long awkward pause followed. Though she knew Theo was right, Tienna wanted to argue more. Yet hadn’t she thought something similar about Namha? And he was less likely to fail and fall than she was. To argue with Theo would be hypocrisy.

  “Theo is right,” came a clear and strong voice. Tienna turned toward the speaker. Once again she was surprised to hear such a decisive statement from Elynna. When and how had Elynna grown so much? “We cannot risk your gift of healing,” Elynna continued. “If you fall, nobody else can heal you.”

  If one falls from this cliff, there will be no healing, Tienna thought. But she held silent.

  “Theo and Elynna are right,” Braga added. “But Theo will not go alone. I will go with him, We will work together, and we will secure a rope at the top for the rest of you.”

  A short time later, Braga and Theo stripped off their outer cloaks and heavy trousers. Theo took a length of rope over his shoulder. Braga took a small pack emptied of all weight except another length of rope and some oddly shaped pins and metal rings. “Climbing devices,” he explained to Theo. “An Undean smith developed them. We live in a land of cliffs and crevices. I keep a few of them with me wherever I am. They have saved my life more than once.”

  Theo picked one up and looked it over.

  “These pins fit in cracks in the rock,” Braga explained. “They will hold the weight of two men. If we put them in while we climb and feed the rope through the rings, then even if we fall we stand a chance of surviving.”

  Theo looked the pins over carefully, then nodded. “I guess you get to go first, then, and show me how they are used.” He looked at the others. His young face had a grim expression. “As soon as we are both secure on the rocks, row away. If we fall, you don’t want to be below us.”

  Tienna watched, then, as Cathros, Bandor, Arreg, and Noab rowed Braga and Theo upstream to the right of the falls. Th
e rowers used their oars as poles on the river bottom to kept the boat steady in the swirling current eddy beside the cliff while Braga and Theo moved to the front of the boat.

  Braga reached toward the rock. The boat slipped a few inches back and for a moment Tienna thought Braga was going to start with a dunking. Then his foot found a hold and he stepped off. Within two minutes he had ascended about a dozen feet and planted one of his pins in a crack. He fed rope down to Theo who secured the rope around his chest and then stepped onto the same outcropping of rock. As soon as he was off the boat, Cathros and Noab pushed off the rock. The current swung them around and they drifted back down to join the others. They disembarked again, and then Tienna sat with their eyes glued to the scene beside the falls wishing she were the one in Theo’s place.

  Progress was slow. To the onlookers, the two climbers looked like ants crawling up a wall. Twenty minutes passed and Theo’s feet were barely two body lengths above the water. Forty minutes and Braga stood paused at a shelf about forty feet up. They had nearly two hundred feet left to go. Maybe more. Nobody could see what was above the falls.

  About an hour and a half after they started, Braga reached a ledge a hundred feet up. The ledge was invisible to Tienna, but she could tell from how he stood that his feet were on something wide and flat. Soon Theo was standing beside him. They paused for a minute and drank some water from a leather flask at Braga’s side. When they continued, Theo took the lead. For a time their progress slowed as Theo got the hang of using the climbing pins, but then he made good time. Soon a hundred and fifty feet of rope stretched down the cliff through the rings they had left behind, marking the zigzagging path they had taken up from one hold to another.