Urbis

With scarcely a backward glance, Crispin set off through the trees. He was sorry to have to sacrifice the rope, which he felt he might yet have need for as he glanced up at the mountains now looming before him. He looked at his hands: he had lost some skin off his palms, but it wasn’t serious, he concluded. He thrust them inside his cloak and continued to labour up a steep rock-strewn rise, which proved to be demanding of time and energy.

All through that day and the next, he continued to climb steadily through the foothills, the trees becoming thinner, and then reducing to scrub. He had caught enough game to keep him going, but he feared the pickings would become scarcer the higher he climbed. By the morning of the third day, the bushes around him were white with fallen snow, and patches of snow lay in sheltered spots on the ground.

And then he was truly among the mountains, picking a path across scree, jumping from boulder to boulder as he searched the skyline for a possible route. He made his way up a gully which at first appeared to offer no egress at its upper end, and he was about to turn back when he noticed a narrow cleft in the rock face, which opened out further up into a chimney. He jammed himself into it and worked his way up until he was able to press his back against one wall and his feet against the other and slowly rise in that manner. He climbed some ten metres, finally emerging on the clifftop at the head of the gully, but with another almost sheer cliff rising before him.

Holds were few and far between, but he managed a laborious traverse, moving across the face to the right, scrabbling occasionally with feet and fingers when fragments of rock broke away, and then he was pulling himself over the crest, feeling the shock as his arms sank into thick snow.

He was on a steep scarp, rising to a ridge about a hundred metres away. He got to his feet and began stumbling through the deep, drifting snow towards it. It seemed to require more effort than he had expected, and his breath seemed shorter. He found himself crawling up the slope on hands and knees, panting, brushing away the sweat that constantly trickled into his eyes. It seemed to take forever to reach the ridge, and as he finally got close, he hoped that there might be a downward slope beyond it.

It was not to be. He found that the ridge was merely a false summit, beyond which a broad snowfield, a plain of dazzling whiteness, rose at a gentler incline, tapering between two peaks. He moved forwards again, a solitary figure edging across a landscape immeasurably vast and stunning in its pristine loveliness. In other circumstances, Crispin would have been entranced by its beauty, for he had a soul that was frequently touched by the splendours of nature, but for now he saw it as simply an immense, dumb adversary which he must conquer on the way to his encounter with whatever perils lay beyond.

He tramped up the slope, lifting his legs at every step with greater and greater effort, the power of the will contending with aching muscles, always grimly conscious of the relentless passage of time, summoning up Tana’s face to spur him on, unwavering in his determination to rescue her while it remained within his ability to do so.

It seemed, however, that the elements were conspiring to thwart him. As he marched on, he saw the weather change rapidly from a benign to a malevolent aspect. Storm clouds ahead were blotting out the blue sky, their leaden hued masses funnelling into the valley.

He needed to create a shelter for himself. Staggering to a bank close beside him, he began tunnelling furiously into it, hacking at it with his knife and clawing at it with his hands. It was densely packed, and he was able to excavate without any danger that it might collapse on him. As a gale force wind bore down on him with alarming ferocity, he dug himself a neat little cavity big enough to shelter in, with a raised area at the back on which to sleep. In the teeth of a blizzard he dragged his belongings into his cave, plugged the entrance, and with his knife drilled a ventilation hole through the bank. Then he settled down on his makeshift bed, wrapped his cloak around himself as tightly as he could, and awaited the passing of the storm.

Crispin opened his eyes in the dark. His teeth were chattering. For a moment he had no idea where he was, then he recalled how he had dug a shelter in the snow. He reached out his hand and ran it along the wall of this cold tomb. Cold, and airless. His ventilation hole was blocked, his little shelter was getting stuffy. He crouched down on the floor and groped until he found his exit hole. He wormed his way into it, and with his knife began hacking away the snow he had packed into the entrance. Beyond the packed snow was soft, freshly fallen snow. He retreated into the cave, rolled up his wolf skin blanket and gathered his things, then made his way back into the tunnel and began to dig at the soft snow. He had no way of telling how thick it was. He had to stretch the full length of his arm through it before he could see daylight ahead. He dug further into the snow, and began to wriggle his body forward. This dislodged it, smothering and blinding him. In a panic he fought through it, clawing his way forwards, bursting out at last into the brilliant sunshine, his chest aching.

Gulping in great lungfuls of air, and blinking in the light, he got to his feet. He was soaked in both snow and sweat, shivering and sticky at the same time, and for the moment just grateful to be alive.

There was no time to waste. He began shuffling once more up the edge of the snowfield, forcing his way through waist deep drifts and hoping that he might soon at least find something firmer to walk on.

At the top of the slope, between the two peaks, he found the ground at last leading downwards. A sharp declivity before him dropped away for several hundred metres, but beyond that all was lost in unbroken cloud, great belts of cumulus that looked solid enough to walk on.

Proceeding as fast as he could without losing his footing, he gratefully began the descent, hoping always that the cloud might dissipate and give him some idea of what awaited him. But it remained steadfast, and he was soon swallowed up by it.

By the end of the day, he had reached the tree line, and worming his way into the root system of a fallen forest monarch, he tried to ignore the hunger pangs clawing at his belly as he dropped off to sleep.

When he came to, it was still night. He heard the wind sighing in the tree tops. He also heard an animal foraging close by, snuffling in the bushes. He lay on his back and looked at the stars and the moon, peeping through the upper boughs of the slender trees surrounding him. The cloud had lifted, at least overhead.

On the edge of his field of vision, largely obscured by the fallen tree, was a remnant of the cloud. It was a curious colour, tinted a deep orange. It roused his curiosity. He had never seen cloud that colour before. He got to his feet and walked into a clearing and stared in wonderment.

Before him lay what appeared to be an enormous plain, brilliant with lights, lights in their countless millions, lights mocking the stars with their endless fecundity, their brilliance and their colours. Lights, he saw at once, of human making, neither twinkling like the stars nor flickering like flames, but steady, constant, unfaltering, except for a few, here and there, mostly red, which blinked on and off, regular as heartbeats.

Crispin stood gaping, wholly unprepared for the sight that greeted him. It was at once clear to him that what he was looking at was a gathering of people in mind-numbing masses, numbers beyond his comprehension. Tana was there, of that he had no doubt. But Arne had been right. The task was impossible. If he banged on every door in that place for the rest of his life, he knew, he would have no hope of finding her.

He knew at once that Torfinn was well aware of the existence of this place, and suspected that it was a secret shared by all the elders in all the villages. What he could not tell was why such a thing should be kept hidden from ordinary village folk for so long, nor why the preservation of this secret was so important that Torfinn and the others were going to have him killed. Clearly, they had known that this was what was waiting at the end of his road, and had determined that he should not reach it.

Staring down at the lights, he determined that he would learn what kind of place this was, and return to the village - with Tana and the other women, if it were at all possible - and confront Torfinn. And he would make known the secret that the elders had guarded for so long.