“Off you go, Ronaldo.” The climb ahead of us would test a mountain goat. I gave his flank a sound slap and moved on, burdened once more beneath my few possessions. The sword that Snorri had given me was the heaviest of my loads and kept trying to trip me. I held on to it mainly to please the Norseman, though my ultimate plan was to throw it away and beg for mercy if cornered.
The wind became less friendly as we gained height, colder and capricious, seeming to press us to the rocks one moment, then in the next try to yank us clear so that we might tumble back the way we’d come. I paused frequently to check the progress of our pursuit. They had ridden harder than us and abandoned their horses later. A bad sign. These were driven men. Ahead of me, Snorri crested the ridge we’d been aiming for during the long climb. He still hobbled, but his injury seemed no worse than it had been at the start.
“Crap.” The Aral Pass ran between two huge mountains in the Auger range on the Scorron borderlands. I had always felt that mountains could come no larger—the rocks at the bottom would surely be unable to support the weight. I had been wrong. The Aups above Chamy-Nix deceive the eye. It’s not until you get amongst them that you understand just how ridiculously big they are. A whole city would be little more than a stain on the flanks of the tallest. Beyond the ridge we now clung to, defying a murderous wind, rose a second ridge and a third and a fourth, each separated by deep-cut gorges, the slopes between variously lethal with scree or unclimbably steep. And all the ways open to us lay divided by smaller gorges and littered with boulders the size of buildings, each poised to fall.
Snorri set off down, grunting once as his foot tried to slip out from under him. I knew if he started to slow me I would leave him behind. I wouldn’t want to, and I would dislike myself for doing so, but nothing would compel me to stand against twenty mercenaries. It sounded better like that. More reasonable. Twenty mercenaries. The truth was that nothing would compel me to stand against one mercenary, but twenty sounded like a better excuse to leave a friend in the lurch. A friend? I pondered that one on the way down. An acquaintance sounded better.
By the time we needed to start heading up again, there were few parts of me that didn’t hurt. I’ve developed a good degree of resilience when it comes to riding. Walking, not so much. Climbing, none at all. “W-wait a minute,” I panted, trying to snatch a breath from the wind—less fierce in the valley but still insistent. The air seemed thinner, unwilling to replenish my lungs. Snorri didn’t appear to notice, his breathing scarcely harder now than when we started the climb.
“Come.” He said it with a grin, though he had grown more sombre as we went on. “It’s good to make a stand in a high place. Good for the battle. Good for the soul. We’ll make an end of this.” He looked back at the ridge we descended from. “I had dark dreams last night. Of late all my dreaming has been dark. But there’s nothing of darkness in warriors met for battle on a mountainside beneath a wide sky. That, my friend, is the stuff of legend. Valhalla awaits!” He thumped my shoulder and turned to the climb. “My children will forgive their father if he dies fighting to be with them.”
Rubbing at my shoulder and at the stitch in my side, I followed. His “warriors met beneath a wide sky” nonsense was full of darkness as far as I was concerned, but as long as we were still doing our best not to meet the mercenaries anywhere at all, then we were in accord.
We had to scramble in places, leaning so far forwards we practically kissed the mountain, reaching for crevices in the folded bedrock to haul ourselves up. My breath came ragged, the cold air filling my lungs like knives. I watched Snorri path-finding, sure, measured, no fatigue, but favouring his uninjured leg. He had spoken of his dreams, but he didn’t have to. I’d slept alongside him, heard his muttering, as if he argued the night away with some visitor and when he woke that morning on the tavern floor his eyes, usually a Nordic blue, sky pale, were black as coals. By the time he rose to break fast, no trace of the change remained and I could pretend it a trick of shadows in a hall lit only by borrowed light. But I had not imagined it.
I sighted the first of the pursuit cresting the ridge behind us while we closed the last hundred yards to the ridge above us. Losing sight of them as we descended the next gorge gave me some comfort. Troubles are troublesome enough without having to look at them all the time. I hoped they’d find the going as tough as I had and that at least a few of the bastards would take the last tumble of their lives.