LIII
AS HE WATCHED Saryn shift her weight on the ungainly skis, Nylan wanted to shake his head, but he had little enough time for that. Just following the former pilot's tracks was proving hard enough even after his determined efforts over the past eight-days. To navigate and shoot a bow on skis remained an effort, but he wasn't plunging headfirst into the snow or leaning backward until his skis slid out from under him and left his shoulders and rump buried in the white powder.
With a passing cloud, a shadow fell across the trail, and Nylan's eyes squinted to adjust to the change in the midday light, but the relative relief of the cloud passed, and the glare returned.
The snow around and across the Roof of the World was more than seven cubits deep, and twice that in drifts. That was deep enough that Nylan could fall into one of those pits and never make his way out, not without turning into a knot and cutting the thongs. There was no way to untie them hanging upside down in a mass of powdered ice or the equivalent. His fingers twitched around his poles as he thought about the knife at his waist.
He blinked as a clot of snow thrown up from Saryn's skis and carried by a gust of wind splattered above his left eye.
Saryn held up a hand, and Nylan coasted to a stop right behind her, proud that he neither hit her nor fell into the deep snow beside the semitrail that the guards had created through the lower forest.
As he caught his breath on the level stretch before a steep descent through the trees, trying not to breathe too deeply, Nylan put off thinking about the climb back up the ridge that would follow the trip.
"I think there are some deer, and maybe a snow leopard, downhill and to the right. The wind's coming uphill here, and I might be able to get close enough," whispered Saryn.
"If I'm not stamping along?"
She nodded.
"Go on. We're always on the verge of running out of meat."
"Can you just wait here?" asked Saryn, her voice still low. "With your bow ready?"
"I'll wait with a bow handy. How much good it will do I'm not sure." Nylan tried to keep his own voice down.
As the wind whispered through the evergreens, clumps of snow splattered around them, leaving pockmarks scattered on the once-smooth white surface, depressions that the wind seemed to begin to fill immediately with feathery white powder that scudded along the snow.
The engineer glanced back uphill. Already, sections of the packed trail they had followed had begun to disappear beneath the drifting snow. Another shadow darkened the Roof of the World, and he looked up at the white cloud that scudded across the sun.
"You'll do fine. Just don't let our supper get away." Saryn raised her left hand and then slipped down the steeper section of the partly packed snow trail ahead. In moments, she was out of sight in the trees, gone as silently as if she had never been there.
Nylan shrugged and unlimbered the composite bow, wishing that he had practiced more with the weapon. The shadow of the cloud passed, and for a long time, nothing moved in the expanse of white beneath the overhanging firs, nothing except snow scudded between trunks by the light wind that rose and fell, rose and fell.
A gray-winged form plunged from nowhere into a swirl of powdered snow, and a quick geyser of white erupted, then died away as the gray-hawk flapped away, a small white-coated rodent in its claws.
As the hawk vanished, Nylan inched forward on the skis, mainly to shift his weight and keep his hips and knees from cramping in the cold. He looked back in the general direction of the tower, but could see nothing but snow, tree trunks, and the white-covered green of the fir branches.
A rhythmic swishing, almost a series of whispering thuds, rose, just barely, over the hissing of the wind.
Nylan squinted, looking downhill, when the snow cat bounded across the hillside toward the trail where he stood, moving so quickly that what had seemed a small figure swelled into a vision of knife claws and glinting teeth even as Nylan released his first arrow and reached for the second, triggering reflex step-up. The second arrow flew as the leopard reached the snow beside the flat section at the crest of the trail.
Both Nylan and the snow cat seemed to be moving in slow motion, but the engineer forced his body to respond. The third arrow left the bowstring as the cat stretched toward Nylan.
Bow still in hand, he managed to dive into the snow at the side of the trail as the snow cat lunged at him. A line of fire slashed down his shoulder as he half twisted away from the mass of fur and claws. His skis linked together, and he toppled like a tree blasted by a microburst into the deep snow, a heavy weight on his back.
That weight did not move, and, in time, Nylan levered it away from him and, through a combination of rolling, twisting, and gasping, finally struggled into the light.
His knees ached. One leg burned, and the other threatened to cramp. Half sitting, half lying in the snow, he managed to reach one of the poles he had abandoned to use the bow, and with it, to retrieve the bow itself. He laid it on the edge of the harder snowpack of the trail. Then he looked at his boots and the mass of snow and ice around the thongs.
With a groan and more rolling he finally managed to totter erect.
The claws had sliced through the heavy leather shoulder of the hunting jacket he had borrowed from Ayrlyn, but blunted the impact enough that the wound was little more than a thin line skin-deep.
He looked at the snow-covered leopard, then downhill, but the forest was silent. After prodding the cat with one of his poles, he took a deep breath, regretting it instantly as the chill bit into his lungs, and then edged his skis toward the dead leopard.
Nylan knelt and removed the first arrow shaft, wiping it clean on the snow, then replacing it in the quiver. Then he searched for the second.
The sun was well past midday when Saryn trudged uphill, pulling the carcass of a winter deer behind her. By then, Nylan had dragged the snow leopard out onto the trail and worked out the three arrows.
"I'm sorry, Nylan, but... we do need the meat, and it took me longer-What happened to you?" Saryn stopped and stared at the bedraggled engineer, her eyes going from his shoulder to the body of the snow leopard.
"It decided I'd make a good dinner. I tried not to oblige."
"You were lucky."
Nylan nodded. His jaw still chattered, and his knees were wobbly, especially as he looked at the stretched - out length of the cat.
"But they're all your shafts. So you get the fur. We all share the meat. That's a dubious benefit." Saryn laughed, and Nylan joined her.
Snow-cat meat was tough, gamy, and no pleasure for teeth or tongue, even in a well-cooked stew.
Nylan adjusted the bow in its cover and checked the quiver.
"What will you do with the fur?" Saryn asked. "That's yours, you know."
"Mine?"
"Meat you can split, but not the hide. We all agreed that the choice is up to the one who brings the animal down, especially if you get wounded."
Nylan's eyes flicked to the slash in his jacket. "It's only a cut."
Saryn laughed. "Your skis didn't move much." Her eyes looked to the depression beside the trail.
"That would have been futile," Nylan admitted.
"So you stood there and fired three arrows at a charging leopard?"
"It does sound stupid, when you put it that way."
"Necessary," Saryn said. "What would have happened if you'd tried to ski away?"
"I'd be under ten cubits of snow or a midday meal for the leopard."
"So the pelt is yours. You earned it."
"I suppose it will make a good coverlet for Dyliess. It's light and warmer than anything else."
"Dyliess? Ryba's ... ?"
Nylan nodded. "Mine, too."
"That's a beautiful cradle you're making."
"Thank you. It's almost done, and that's hard to believe." Nylan took a deep breath. "Don't we have to drag this beast somewhere?"
"You get to drag it home. I've got the deer," Saryn said. "I even have some rope."
"You are so obliging."
"Think nothing of it."
How Nylan got the cat carcass back to the tower he didn't know, only that his legs ached even more, his shoulder burned, as did his eyes, despite the eye black under and around them-which he'd have to wash off sooner or later. He felt light-headed.
He had taken off his skis and leaned against the causeway wall and watched as Kadran and Saryn set up the tripod and skinned and gutted the deer and then the leopard. With the pelt off, the cat's carcass was thin, and Nylan felt almost sorry for the dead animal, even though it had certainly tried to kill him. "Thin," he murmured. "So fearsome, and so thin."
"It's a hard life, even for the animals who live here," answered Saryn.
A taller figure skied to a halt beyond the causeway, then bent and unlaced the thongs of his skis. Gerlich looked at Saryn and Kadran. "So you finally got something besides a deer. A real snow leopard. Congratulations, Saryn."
Saryn smiled politely, pulling her scarf away from her mouth. "Thank you, but it isn't mine. I got the deer. Nylan put three arrows through the cat. All of them in the chest, not much more than a span apart."
"In the chest?"
Saryn rotated the carcass on the fir-limb tripod and pointed. "Here, here, and here."
Gerlich inclined his head to Nylan. "My congratulations to you, then, Engineer. Your bows must carry farther in the winter."
"I wish I'd been able to use them at that range," Nylan offered, pointing to the slash in the jacket. "Then this wouldn't have happened. He got a little closer than I would have ideally preferred. It's hard to fire arrows with claws in your face."
After a moment, Gerlich answered, "I can see that." With a look back at Nylan, he crossed the causeway and entered the tower.
"Ser," said Saryn, "we really don't need you. You might think about cleaning and dressing that slash. Relyn and I- we'll start tanning the pelt.. . don't you worry."
Nylan heaved himself erect and picked up the skis and poles. "Thank you. You're probably right."
After carting the skis down to the lower level and racking them and the poles, he started back up toward the fifth level, where the medical supplies were kept. He stopped at the main level and staggered into the great room, where he slumped at the empty table, too tired to climb the steps.
While he really needed to wash out the cut on his shoulder, that meant climbing four more flights of steps, and digging out the antiseptic, what little there was left, and then going to the bathhouse. He took a deep breath.
The main door opened, and Kadran struggled inside with a deer haunch, followed by Kyseen. Neither looked toward the dimness of the great room.
"... should have heard the engineer... 'got a little closer than I would have ideally preferred.' I thought I'd die. Gerlich was going to shit building stones ..."
"Engineer's a tough little bastard."
"... quiet, a lot of the time... have to be tough to deal with the marshal... leopard's probably easy by comparison ..."
Ryba, tougher than a snow leopard? Nylan chuckled to himself. No question about that, but he'd prefer to fight neither.
As the two cooks vanished, he stood and walked toward the steps, and the antiseptic, the cleaning he wasn't looking forward to, and soreness in muscles he'd forgotten he had- and the headache, the headache that seemed not quite constant.