On our march to a hill pass the scouts had located in the early morning, I still felt uneasy with leaving the two boys behind. The gods didn't give us a choice, I kept telling myself. We had to keep moving, had to cross the hills and cling to our hope that we would find food on the way. The wolfpack hadn't done us the favor of showing up in the night, but there was a chance the beasts had entered the pass we now traveled. If they were really to blame for our hunters' disappearance, and Captain Stane didn't let go of this conviction, their den might be near the place where the wolves had attacked.
I had my doubts, but I kept them to myself. The last thing our men needed was someone telling them that Captain's Stane merely clung to a theory, one possibility out of many. Hunger had weakened their bodies enough, and confronting them with the harsh reality of our situation would only serve to break the last resolve their tired minds could muster.
"Over here!"
Demyan's voice echoed between the rugged rocks and woke me up from my bleak contemplation. Ahead of me, I saw several men rush toward him and an almost tangible wave of excitement swept through the crew. I hurried to follow the others and when I saw what Demyan had discovered, I knew our sacrifice in the cave had been worth it.
The elk's body was almost intact, only one of the hind legs was missing from the joint down. The antlers, however, were in a bad condition. There were scratches and cracks, and points were broken off from both sides. This elk had put up a fight, but whatever had attacked the beast had won in the end.
While the crew set up camp and Orfald lit a fire, I walked around the carcass, perhaps to convince myself that it was real. Why had the attacker only taken part of the leg, I wondered. Had it been a lone wolf instead of the pack we expected? If so, it couldn't be the reason for Utir's disappearance. A recent attack then, I came up with a new explanation. Our approach had scared off the attackers and prevented their feast. I was about to share my conclusion with Captain Stane, order scouts to look out for lurking wolves in the distance, but before I went over to him something caught my attention and I froze.
The elk's eyes were gone. Where they should have been, I only saw gaping holes of frozen blood and flesh.
When I woke up from my shock and confusion, I saw Zolya standing on the other side of the carcass, holding the missing part of the leg. My gaze followed his and found a rocky outcropping. The blood looked almost black on the dark stone, and broken pieces of the antlers lay scattered around it. There had been no attack, I realized. The animal had tried to free its leg from this sharp-edged trap, and the only explanation for why it had been caught there in the first place made me shudder. It would have been easy to walk around this treacherous spot even for a large beast like this. But the elk hadn't seen it. It had already been blind.
Something was wrong with this elk, very wrong. Zolya and I both knew it, but neither of us said it out loud. It was futile to discourage the men from eating the carcass, so we saved our breath. Even if the meat had been black and putrid, which it wasn't, it wouldn't have stopped the starving mob. This would be their first meal since we abandoned the ship, and it would likely be the last one for a very long time. And so Zolya and I only watched when they dragged the dead elk to Orfald's small fire, began skinning the beast, and carved the red meat.
Zolya seemed mildly surprised when I sat down next to him on a rock, away from the crowd. "Are you merely giving your crewmen the advantage in the battle for the best cuts? Or are you taking my word of warning serious, after all?" He reached under his patchwork of furs and produced a waterskin, then drank a few sips while calmly watching the bustle by the fire.
"Crows don't do that," I gave back. "They eat carrion. They don't peck out the eyes of the living, beast or man." I took the waterskin Zolya offered to me and drank a swig. "Besides, even if this was a peculiar habit of the crows out here... We haven't seen any birds of prey nor have we heard any caws." I returned the waterskin and sighed to myself, trying to ignore the rumbling of my empty stomach. "These lands are bare of any life and there's something unnatural about it."
Zolya nodded and rummaged around under his layers of fur, carefully looked around, then pulled out a small bag. "Moss used to treat wounds," he whispered when he gave it to me. "It isn't much, but it's a lot more than nothing. And it won't poison us with an unknown malady, though it's not meant for consumption."
"Neither are our belts or bootstraps," I replied just as hushed, though the men around the fire paid us no attention. I hastily opened the bag and shoved its contents into my mouth, an earthy-tasting sludge I found hard to swallow. Zolya held the waterskin out to me, and the icy water helped to wash down the moss.
"It won't sustain us for long," I heard Zolya say. "But I rather share my meager rations than try to make it alone to the Nameless River."
"Alone?" I echoed, but deep inside I already knew what he meant. If the elk was afflicted with some kind of disease, the madness might take hold in those who consumed the infested meat. Zolya remained silent as I looked to the fire, watched the captain take a first bite while hungry men scrambled around him, urging Orfald to hurry and hand them their share. "We need to sleep with one eye open from now on," I finally said. "If they begin to show signs of a madness, we'll split from the group."
"A madness..." Zolya got up from the rock and wandered a few steps away, toward the slope of the hills. "Or a something more sinister, a curse haunting these lands. Whichever it is, we should pray that it didn't spread to the Tyroshi and the settlement they came to raid."
﴾ _ ﴿
"Wake up! Ture, wake up!" Zolya's voice carried urgency, hushed as it was. "We need to go, now!"
For one long moment, I just stared at up at him, hunkering next to me like a vulture assessing if its meal was truly dead. Then the haze of sleep left my mind and I jumped up, jolted awake by the realization that the strange sounds were not the wind. It was a chanting; deep, growling and uninflected, coming from the dark figures by the fire.
"What is going on? What are they doing?" I whispered, but Zolya didn't answer, he only grabbed my sleeve and pulled me further away, toward the steep, rocky slope.
"Up the hills," he gave back, dragging me further in that direction. "I took what I could from the dinghy, we'll have to leave everything else behind."
Fog wafted up from the valley, and the moon lay obscured behind ragged, white clouds, but the limited sight didn't stop us from climbing. We felt our way up between sharp rocks and frozen, dead brambles until we reached a ledge far above the pass. Out of breath, I sunk down on my knees and finally dared to look down to the gathering by the fire. "What happened?" I turned back to Zolya, sitting behind me and catching his breath as well.
"The captain, he..." he muttered, then his voice trailed off and he stared into the distance.
The fog blurred the shapes of the men in the pass, and all I could make out was that they formed a circle around something near the fire. Some lay on the ground under furs and blankets, half-covered in snow, but I soon realized that they were not sleeping. Others had apparently just collapsed in unnatural positions, their hands still clutching spears, swords or bows. They didn't move, didn't react when they were shoved away from the fire.
"What about the captain?" I nudged Zolya's leg to wake him up from his trance. "What happened down there while I was asleep?"
"He took his dagger," Zolya replied, though he still sounded as if he was far away. "Cut out his eyes, ordered the men to follow his example, 'so they would see the true path they had to take'." He inched closer to the edge and peered down to the valley. "Some refused... The ones you now see dead on the ground."
﴾ _ ﴿
It was still dark when we descended the northern slope of the hills, but it must have been the early hours of morning. The bizarre events of the night lay behind us, though there were moments when I thought I could still hear the chants and growls echo in the distance. After hours of climbing and sliding through the rocky terrain, however, Zolya and I were sure none of the others had followed us. Either they had been too preoccupied with their gathering, whatever purpose it served, to notice our silent departure - or they had taken the 'true path' the madness had shown them and it simply led in a different direction. "Perhaps they all cut out their eyes. That's what the captain demanded," Zolya remarked. "If there are any survivors, they're probably stumbling around in the pass instead of following a specific path."
We kept walking along the foothills, staying away from the mouth of the pass and advancing eastward, to the coastline. Should the madmen our former companions had become make it past the hills, they better not catch up to us. The storm calmed down when the wan light of the sun fell over the open plane. It felt peaceful, as if the elements had exhausted their rage and granted us a moment to breathe, a gift we gratefully accepted.
"What are our odds?" Zolya asked when we sat down on some large, snow-covered boulders. "How far away is the settlement? Are we the madmen for thinking we stand a chance to reach it on our own?"
"Don't talk like that," I gave back. "It's not hopeless. We don't have to pull the dinghy, we can now trail the coast and won't have to take detours around hills and rough terrain. If the gods have mercy on us and keep the winds as calm as they are, we'll reach the Nameless River in four or five days."
Zolya nodded and stared to the brightening eastern horizon, and for a while it was silent except for the crackling of snow. "Were we mad to come here in the first place?" he then asked, talking more to himself, not expecting an answer.
"Perhaps," I admitted. "But who could have forseen the things that have happened? We only knew there was an opportunity to teach the Tyroshi a lesson and secure supplies for a long, harsh winter at the same time."
We continued our way to the coast mostly in silence, containing the inner turmoil in our thoughts. There was little to say about our situation that hadn't been said twice already, and the monotony of the triste landscape didn't offer any prompts for conversation either. We reached the shore, bleak and frozen, by nightfall, but we only rested there for a few hours. The gods, as distant as they seemed in these forlorn lands, had answered our silent prayers to keep the winds calm and therefore we made good headway despite the rougher terrain.
The endless white plane felt serene, almost inviting, as if the land tried to assure us that it wished us no more harm. Undisturbed snow glimmered in the pale light of the moon, stretching out as far as the eye could see in the northern direction. Even the Shivering Sea to the east seemed peaceful and placid, calm, black waters with erratic, white shapes emerging from the icy mist.
It must have been around midnight when we took our only break that night. We ate some of Zolya's moss while watching the quiet, black water from the edge of the ragged coast, then we pressed on toward the settlement we believed to be our salvation. Three days, just three more days, I kept telling myself. We had come so far, of course we would make it.
﴾ _ ﴿
The weak sun stood high when we came across a first and undeniable sign that our quest wasn't futile. We had seen the sparse forest of pine trees from the top of a slope, and the vegetation alone would have been enough to replenish our hope. The prospect of shelter and a chance of finding edible roots or more mosses captured our imagination and meant an end to our silent march. But what we found exceeded all expectations.
Nestled between the vines of a thorny thicket, we discovered a shelter, clearly man-made, albeit abandoned. A large skin, likely a bear's or a direwolf's, was stretched above a shallow ditch, sheltering it from wind and snow. Some steps away from it, a small, triangular snow pile hid the remains of a fire pit, and a kick revealed the charred stack of wood. Upon further inspection of the campsite, we found a second ditch next to a fir tree. This one was filled with snow since there was no skin above it, but under the tree we discovered two long branches that had been cleaned from twigs with some kind of blade. Makeshift fishing rods, I concluded, or perhaps attempts to fashion simple spears.
"We can't be far from the settlement," Zolya said. He was trying to lit a fire in the pit while I freed the bear or wolf skin from the snow pile weighing it down. "If they came here to hunt, it might just be the nearest forest."
"It probably is." I nodded to a vague point somewhere behind the thicket. "Some trees over there have been cut as well. Can't imagine they dragged them a longer distance than they had to."
Having finished my work, I went to inspect the second ditch by the tree. Perhaps there had been tools left behind or I'd find the missing skin buried under the snow. From the corner of my eye I saw Zolya lean down to blow on the twigs, apparently he had succeeded and finally ignited the wood. "I wonder what they were hoping to hunt here," he said when he sat back up. "They crafted spears or rods, but there's no sign of game in this forest. You'd think every bird, fox and hare would flock to these trees, but there's no rustling, no caws, no tracks in the snow."
"They might have gone deeper into the forest," I suggested, though 'deep' was a rather relative term out here. The trees stood far apart and if it hadn't been for the ground fog in the distance, we would probably have seen where the forest ended from our position. "Or they came here for firewood and hunting only occured to them as an afterthought, who knows?"
I listlessly poked around in the ditch with the rod I had picked up, and to my surprise, there was something buried under the snow. At first I thought it was a rock or a chunk of ice, but I knelt down and dug it out anyway. A small package of leather, wrapped around something soft.
"Is that...?" I heard Zolya ask, disbelief echoing in his voice.
I couldn't unwrap the bundle fast enough. "It is..." I gave back, equally awed, staring down at the piece of red meat in my hands.
For a while we just sat there, unable to turn our eyes away from this glorious gift. Then disenchantment set in and I looked over my shoulder to Zolya. "How do we know?" I asked.
I brought the meat over to him and he carefully inspected the piece from all sides. It was in a decent condition, all things considered. Being buried under the snow had spared it from rot, even though it had probably been there for a while. Still, we didn't know where it came from. If the beast still had eyes when it died. "We'll take the risk and roast it," Zolya finally said. "The meat comes from a hare, not a large beast. Whoever left the bundle here must have eaten some of it and saved this bit for later. We can't be certain, of course, but I think if the meat was infested, we'd have found this place in disarray."
It was the best meal I ever had in my life, this hare meat from a snowy ditch in the Lands of Always Winter. Zolya was right, I told myself. If the hunters had succumbed to the madness, we might have found an eyeless corpse instead of a neatly wrapped bundle of meat. They had probably not even been hunters. It seemed more likely that people had come here for wood, and merely forgot about the bycatch once they were busy with the cumbersome task of transporting large trees to their village. This theory also supported the hope of the settlement being nearby, a thought that further lifted our spirits.
We decided to stay in this camp for the night and conserve our strength for the next day. It would be the last stretch of the journey, we were certain of that, and we might face a new problem upon our arrival. Two men couldn't raid a settlement nor seize a ship, so we had to come up with a solution. Maybe we'd be able to sneak into the cargo hold at night, maybe it would be wiser to negotiate and omit our true motives for traveling to these forsaken lands.
Evening had approached when rustling and the cracking of frozen branches jolted us out of our conversation. Our heads spun around almost simultaneously, then we froze in motion when we saw the source of these sounds. The lanky figure shambled along the path, almost tripped over a rock, then stopped and stared at the fire.
"Skello?!" Zolya and I blurted out with one voice.
