5.Death of Chaos
XI
A COLD WIND blew through the door, and scattered snowflakes danced into the waystation. A thin carpet of snow lay inside the doorway.
I climbed out of my bedroll, somewhat stiffly, and struggled with a few scraps of wood and some twigs I collected from the scrub bushes. Before too long, a small fire burned, heating water in my single battered pot. I needed tea or something.
Gairloch had whuffed and whinnied the whole time I gathered wood and twigs, and I went back out and untied him.
Whheeeee... eeeeee... eeee.
“I should have untied you first? Is that it?” I led him to the spring, and then let him browse as he could while I used my pot to make too-strong tea to go with biscuits that had gotten hard enough to use my chisels on. Instead I dunked them in the tea, ignoring the tea-smoky taste. Then I had some raisins and the last of the olives. Olives don't travel that well, except in brine, and brine's heavy.
My washing up was cursory, with no shaving, since I wasn't likely to sweat, not with the chill wind off the higher peaks and the scattered snowflakes reminding me that it was almost winter, although the pass was never supposed to be closed by snow. Or not for long, because it was so far south.
I looked at the clouds before I went back into the waystation and stood in front of my little fire. While order-mastery did keep my body from getting too cold, a fire helped, too.
A small piece of older cedar wedged in the corner of the near empty wood bin caught my eye, and I wriggled it free. It wasn't that long, perhaps a third of a cubit and maybe three spans wide, but it had been rough-sawn at both ends, and discarded as too short for firewood, I guessed. The grain was even, and while I warmed myself as the fire died down, I took out my knife and began to experiment. Carving hadn't been my greatest strength, and it could use some improvement.
A face lay under the wood, but whose face it might be remained to be seen as my carving progressed. I couldn't tell with the little I did before the fire died and before it was time to head onward toward Hydlen. Then I fastened my jacket and packed the cedar into one of the bags on Gairloch.
Gairloch whinnied. His breath steamed, and the whiteness mixed with the snow flurries.
“Let's go, old fellow.”
The road climbed gradually, and the snow got heavier. I had a sense that it was not going to get too heavy, but I worried, since it was beginning to stick on the road and especially to build on the scattered patches of grass and on the cedars.
So Gairloch put one hoof in front of the other, and I worried, and we traveled east until we reached the top of the pass. We didn't rest there, not only because of the snow, but because, according to Yelena, the descent was longer, and the road twisted more. I didn't want to be too high in the hills if my senses were wrong about the amount of snow.
For a time the snow got heavier, but the wind dropped off, and the flakes fell almost straight down. A light blanket of white coated just about everything, Gairloch's mane included, until I brushed it off.
Then it stopped, but the air remained still, and the only sounds were Gairloch's breathing, my breathing, and the stolid clop of one mountain pony's hoofs.
The white blanket got blotchier, with boulders sticking through, and the snow began to slide off the bowed branches of the trees, mostly cedars in the higher sections of the road. In time, the way followed another stream, narrow and with only a trace of water, but the trace became a brook, and then a stream as the road wound its way lower.
Whheeee... eeee...
“All right. You're thirsty. We'll stop, but not here. Down there where the bank isn't so steep.”
I guided Gairloch toward a flattened space by the stream, mostly clear of snow. The little that remained was melting away, although the sun remained hidden by the woolly gray clouds.
The earth thrown loosely over blackened branches, the rodent tracks, and the scrapes in the ground showed others had camped there, though not too recently. I walked Gairloch down to a sandy bank, and he lapped the water greedily.
“Easy... easy... That's cold water.” I knew. I touched it with my finger, and it was cold enough to chill right to the bone, order-mastery or no order-mastery. Cold as it was, it smelled clean, with just a hint of evergreen resin.
After he drank, I gave him a little grain before I remounted and continued downward on the road to Faklaar.
Somewhere on the way eastward, I noticed the change in the trees. On the far west side of the Lower Easthorns had been cedars, twisted low cedars clinging to the reddish and sandy soil between rocks and boulders, with only patches of grass, and scrub bushes.
I was seeing oaks now, black and white, with softer woods, and an occasional lorken tucked into a grove-good supplies and healthy trunks for a woodworker. The trunks were straighter, and some were old-older certainly than the impressive trunks in the woods south of Land's End in Recluce and some of those Recluce trees dated back to Creslin and Megaera-the mythical Founders. The trees in Hydlen felt older, even if they weren't bigger. But the trees of Recluce reportedly had been planted by the ancient order-masters. That would have given any tree a certain advantage.
Trees or no trees, I kept riding, and the clouds eventually broke enough that once or twice in the afternoon there were patches of sunlight.