The Pass of White Wind

On the third day, the glacier of the Three Sisters stopped looking like the map.

The moraine of loose stone was behind them, and now they were climbing an inclined plain of old ice, scored with blue crevasses that opened under the soft snow without warning. They were roped together at the waist with twelve fathoms of tarred hemp. Rodrigo broke the trail, sounding every step with an iron-shod ash staff; Leonor walked behind him on crampons they had made from old horseshoes in the monastery forge. Behind them, far below, the smoke of the escort's fires rose each morning a little closer.

Rodrigo stopped and unrolled the portolan against the wind. According to the fine line, the pass ran straight toward the third Sister. In front of them, straight toward the third Sister, the ice was broken into a maze of crevasses wide enough to swallow a cart.

He wrote on the slate with stiff fingers: In three hundred years the glacier has come down. The pass isn't here anymore.

Leonor looked at the maze, looked at the clouds piling up over the crest, and said the only thing there was to say.

"Then we find it."

They skirted the maze for an hour, looking for a snow bridge that would hold. Rodrigo found one, smooth and white, spanning the narrowest crevasse like a gangway. He threw a fist-sized stone at it. The stone went through the snow without a sound, and they never heard it reach the bottom. Leonor crossed herself, which she hadn't done since her father died.

The white wind fell at midday. It came down from the cirques like a curtain of needles and in a minute visibility was down to two varas. The howling was so loud that Leonor could shout right beside Rodrigo without his hearing her, and he couldn't even shout.

She slipped on a plate of ice hidden under the snow. The rope gave a dry jerk that nearly dragged Rodrigo into a chasm opening on the left. He jammed the toe of his boot into a crack in the rock, wrapped the hemp around his forearm and pulled until he felt his shoulder coming out, until Leonor found a ledge with her knees and crawled to him.

He pushed her under a boulder of black granite the wind had scoured clean. The hollow barely held two people sitting with their knees together. Rodrigo blocked the opening with his back and the blanket and took her hands to rub them. Her lips were blue and her eyelashes were clotted with crystals.

Leonor said something. The storm ate it.

Rodrigo saw her lips move and, for the first time in two years, it truly hurt not to have a tongue: not in order to speak, but to ask her what she had said.

Then he opened her right hand, turned the palm up and wrote on it with the tip of his index finger, letter by letter, slowly, so she could follow: I'm here.

She went still. Then she took his hand and wrote on his palm: I know.

For as long as the blizzard lasted they talked that way, in the dark, with their fingers. She told him how her father used to show her the stars from the deck, one by one, by the names the pilots gave them and not the astrologers. He told her that on the night before the cautery he had spent the hours reciting aloud the names of every river in the kingdom, just in case. At some point she stopped writing and laid her hand on his face, and he didn't need to read it to understand. The kiss tasted of snow and salt jerky.

Toward midnight the wind tired. The sky opened all at once, black and clean, with more stars than Rodrigo had ever seen from the scriptorium.

"The Pole Star," said Leonor, pointing. "The Wagon Wheel. The Pilots' Guide, the one with the red gleam."

Rodrigo took out the compasses and the boxwood ruler. She called the stars to him and he measured the angles against the profile of the three Sisters, jotted figures in the notebook by the glow of a tinder ember, rubbed them out, measured again. When he had finished, he drew on the portolan a new line, in pencil, that veered away from the old one to the east and skirted the maze along a spur of rock that on the queen's map didn't even have a name.

His hands were shaking with cold; he had to repeat the same measurement four times, and Leonor didn't hurry him once.

Leonor looked at it over his shoulder and wrote on the back of his hand: Sure?

He didn't answer. There was no need. He pointed downward, toward the foot of the glacier.

There, in the blue snow of dawn, black dots were moving in a line. The escort had found their tracks.