The Ridge Pact

It's them," Lope whispered. "Hinojosa doesn't trust an avalanche. He'll want to see the bodies."

"Or it's my people."

"Would you bet your neck on it?"

Nerea listened. The shovels weren't singing. The clans always dug singing, a muleteers' ditty to keep the rhythm; these shovels struck in silence, with the discipline of men paid by the hour. She took the waxed paper from her jerkin and spread it on the cloak in the light of the last tinder.

"My mother wasn't storing salt here. She was opening a way out." She showed him the crooked line. "Twelve varas of ice and stone to the ledge above. She did six."

Lope looked at the drawing and then at her, and Nerea saw in his face that he had understood what it meant too: her mother had died six varas from the light.

"Then let's do the other six."

They dug in turns, in the dark, with the folding spade from Lope's canteen and the antler hilt of the knife. The soft ice in the crack gave way in slabs that fell with the clink of broken crockery. At the sixth vara, exactly where the paper said, the blade struck stone. Nerea took out her mother's nails and drove them into the joints one above the other, hammering with a flat stone, like rungs. Lope climbed behind her with one arm and clenched teeth, and didn't complain once.

Below, the shovels kept striking, closer and closer.

At the ninth vara a nail gave way under Nerea's boot. The stone slipped out of her hands, her body tipped backward, her stomach jumped into her throat. A hand caught her by the belt and held her against the wall: the hand of the bad arm. Lope didn't cry out. He breathed through his nose, very slowly, until she found another foothold.

"That was the shoulder you set," he said when she could move again. "Now we're even."

The last nail went into the stone and the stone moved. Nerea pushed with her shoulder and a plate of hardened snow gave outward. The light blinded her. A white light, a clean morning's, coming in on a wind with no blizzard in it and a smell of burning juniper.

They came out onto the ledge of the three lines, a hundred varas above the pass. From there they could see everything. The path of the avalanche, a dirty tongue of snow and rock running down to the river. And in the middle of the tongue, digging in a line, a score of Walloons in morions and grey greatcoats. An officer on horseback, further down, was pointing with his crop at the spot where the cornice had fallen.

"Hinojosa," said Lope.

Nerea put two fingers to her mouth and whistled. A muleteer's whistle, short and long, that was lost on the wind.

On the far side of the slide, among the pines of the lower ledge, someone answered.

They found them in mid-afternoon at the mouth of the sulfur caves: Jarek and the six boys, the four mules and nine of the twelve panniers. When they saw Nerea appear among the rocks, the boys let out a shout they had to half swallow so it wouldn't carry below. Jarek didn't shout. He reached for his crossbow and aimed it at Lope's chest.

"That one wears the boots of the tercios that hanged the muleteers at the pass."

"That one pulled me out from under the cornice before it fell," said Nerea, stepping in front of the bolt. "And he's carrying this."

She gave him the order. The old shepherd couldn't read well, but he knew black wax and he knew the word guide. He read slowly, moving his lips. When he reached the last line, he lowered the crossbow.

Lope unbuckled the bandolier with the bronze eagle, weighed it for a moment and threw it into the void. He made no speech. He just stood there, unarmed, his arm in a sling and his beard full of frost, waiting for someone to decide what to do with him.

Jarek untied the wineskin from his saddle and held it out.

"This afternoon we go down to Oakhaven by her mother's route," he said, nodding toward Nerea. "If you're coming, soldier, carry a pannier. Nobody goes empty-handed here."

Lope shouldered a pannier with his good arm. Nerea took her place beside him at the head of the train, with the colonel's order sewn inside her jerkin, against her chest, next to her mother's drawing. They went down the north face of the dead glacier while the sun struck copper glints off the snow.

At the last crag, she turned around once. Far below, on the dirty tongue of the avalanche, the Walloons were still digging, patiently, for two bodies they would never find.