The Fall of the Crags

First came the weight. Something hard and cold was crushing her ribs against the slate, and each time she tried to breathe her mouth filled with powder snow. Nerea moved her toes. Then her fingers. Then she pushed her boot against an outcrop and heaved the captain's body off her; he rolled aside with a groan of iron.

She felt for her belt. The knife was still in its sheath.

"Alive, mountain girl?" Lope's voice came out hoarse, at floor level.

"Alive, and sick of carrying your ironmongery." She took the flint and steel from her waxed pouch. "Don't move a span or I'll put the blade in your groin before you find your sword."

Lope let out a broken laugh that bounced through the darkness like an old dog's bark.

"The sword stayed in a fir tree up there. Put your iron away. We've got who knows how many varas of snow on top of us, and the air in this rat hole will last as long as it takes your first wick to go out."

The sparks caught the tallow-smeared tinder. The flame, small as a fingernail, lit walls of ice so old it had turned black: dark blue at the surface and opaque inside, with fir branches and the bones of beasts no one had ever seen alive trapped in its depths like flies in amber.

Nerea stopped breathing.

She knew that wall. She knew the white vein that crossed it diagonally like a scar, and the ledge at chest height where someone, many years ago, had stacked flat stones so the salt wouldn't touch the ice. The bowels of the dead glacier, the shepherds called it. Her mother called it the larder. She had kept the salt of the bad winters there, and one spring she had gone in for it and the mountain had closed behind her. Nerea was eleven. Jarek's men dug for four days and never found the entrance.

"What is it?" Lope had pushed himself up on one elbow. The visor of his morion was split and a thread of blood had frozen in his eyebrow.

"Nothing."

The captain touched his left shoulder and clenched his teeth until they creaked. His collarbone jutted forward under his buff coat at an angle no healthy bone makes.

"That wasn't the mountain," he said after a while. "You smelled it same as me. They blew the cornice with petards."

"Your Walloons."

"Not mine. Colonel Hinojosa's." Lope pulled off his gauntlet with his teeth. "The order was to wait until the red-haired woman's caravan was halfway across the bridge. No caravan, no route through the Souls; no route, and every grain of salt on the border has to pass through the Burgos excise. They gave me the command because I know the passes. I told them no. That same night they put a price on my head."

Nerea studied him in the trembling light of the tinder. The armor without arms. The boots split by two weeks of mountain. The wolf's weariness that had settled at the back of his grey eyes.

"And still you climbed."

"I climbed to cut the fuse before they lit it." He nodded upward, toward the ceiling of ice. "I got there late."

"And Jarek? The boys?"

"I saw the old man shove them toward the lower ledge before the first stone fell. If anyone knows how to jump on this mountain, it's him." Lope closed his eyes for a moment. "What I don't know is whether the Walloons saw them jump."

Nerea thought of Iker clinging to the mule's tail and gripped the knife until her knuckles ached.

She got up and walked the cave with the wick held high. Twelve paces long, four wide. At the back, through a crack the size of an open hand, a thread of air came in, whistling like an old kettle. Nothing else. No mouth. No light. Only, on the ledge of flat stones, a clay jar with its stopper sealed in wax and a mark cut into the ice with the point of a knife: three lines and a circle. Her mother's mark.

She went back to Lope and knelt beside him with the jar of yew salve from her satchel.

"If you want to see tomorrow's sun, captain, grit your teeth. I'm going to put that bone back where it belongs."

"Do you know how?"

"In the mountains we learn to set bones before we learn to pray."

She put a knee on his chest, gripped his arm by the wrist and pulled. The bone went home with a dry snap and Lope let out a roar that made the ice needles on the ceiling shiver. Then he went white and still. Nerea felt for the pulse in his neck, covered him with the cloak and, once she was sure he was breathing, went back to the ledge.

She broke the wax seal on her mother's jar. There was no salt inside.