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ripping a few seams with their knives, converted it to a canopy which the y
tied above the campsite. They dried as best they could and got back into the
wet hammocks. The heat and humidity were terrible, but Cirocco was so tired
she quickly fell asleep to the sound of water beating on the tarp.
They woke again, shivering, two hours later. "One of those nights," Gaby gr
oaned.
Cirocco's teeth chattered as they unpacked coats and blankets, wrapped them
selves tightly, and returned to the ham- mocks. It was half an hour before she
felt warm enough to sleep again.
The gentle swaying motion of the trees helped.
Cirocco sneezed, and snow fluttered away. It was very light,, very dry snow,
and it had drifted into every crevice of her blanket. She sat up, and it aval
anched into her lap.
Icicles hung from the edges of the tarp and the ropes that suspended her h
ammock. There was a constant cracking sound as wind whipped branches up an d
down, and a constant clatter of ice hitting the frozen tarp. One of her hands
was exposed, and it was stiff and chapped as she reached across the gap and
prodded Gaby.
"Huh? Huh?" Gaby looked around with one bleary eye, the other held shut b y
frozen lashes. "Oh, damn!" She was racked by coughs.
"Are you okay?"
"Except for a frozen ear, I guess so. What now?"
"Put on everything we have, I guess. Then wait it out."
It was hard to do, sitting in a hammock, but they managed it. There was one
disaster as Cirocco fumbled with numb fingers, then saw a glove quickly va
nish in the swirling snow beneath them. She cursed for five minutes before
recalling they still had Gene's gloves.
Then they waited.
Sleep was impossible. They were warm enough in the layers of clothing and
blankets, but they wished for face masks and goggles. Every ten minutes they
shook the accumulation of snow from their bodies.
They tried to talk, but the spoke was alive with sound. Cirocco found the m
inutes stretching into hours as she reclined with the blanket over her face
and listened to the wind howling. Over that sound, and much more frighteni ng,
was a sound like pop- ping corn. Branches, overloaded with ice, were sn apping
off as the wind whipped them.
.They waited five hours. If anything, the wind grew colder and stronger. A b
ranch snapped near them, and Cirocco listened to it crash through the ice-cr
usted forest below.
"Gaby, can you hear me?"
"I hear you, Captain. What do we do now?"
"I hate to say it, but we're going to have to move. I want to be on thicker
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bra nches. I don't think these will break, but if one breaks above us, we've
had it
."
"I was just waiting for you to suggest it."
Getting out of the hammocks was a nightmare. Once out of them and standing on
the tree limb, it was worse. Their safety ropes were frozen and had to b e
painstakingly bent and twisted before they could be used. When they began to
work their way in, it was strictly one step at a time. They had to atta ch a
second safety line before going back to remove the first, then repeat the
process, tying knots with gloved hands or removing the gloves and doing it
quickly before their fingers grew numb. They used hammers and picks to chip
ice from branches they had to walk on. With all their caution, Cirocco fell
twice and Gaby once. Cirocco's second fall resulted in a strained mus cle in
her back when the safety line stopped her.
After an hour of struggle they reached the main trunk. It was steady and wid e
enough to sit on. But the wind blew harder than ever with no branches to b
reak its force.
They drove spikes into the tree, lashed themselves to it, and prepared once mo
re to wait it out.
"I hate to bring this up, but I can't feel my toes."
Cirocco coughed for a long time before she could talk. "What do you sugges t?"
"I don't know," Gaby said. "I do know that we'll freeze to death if we don't
do something. We've got to either keep moving, or look for shelter. "
She was right, and Cirocco knew it. "Up, or down?"
"There's the staircase at the bottom."
"It took us a day to get this high, with no ice to complicate things. And it's
another two days back to the stairs. If the entrance isn't buried in snow."
"I was about to get to that."
"If we move, we might as well go up. Either way, we'll freeze unless this w
eather breaks soon. Moving would postpone that a while, I guess."
"T'hat was my thought, too," Gaby said. "But I'd like to try something else,
first. Let's go all the way to the wall. Remember earlier you talked about
where the angels might live, and you mentioned caves. Maybe there's caves ba
ck there."
Cirocco knew the main thing was to become active again, to get the blood flo
wing. So they crawled along the tree trunk, chipping ice as they went. In fi
fteen minutes they reached the wall.
Gaby studied it, then braced herself and began attacking the ice with her p
ick. It fell away to expose the gray substance, but she did not stop choppi
ng. When Cirocco saw what she was doing, she joined her with her own pick.
It went well for a while. They hacked a hole half a meter in diameter. The
white milk froze as it oozed from the wall, and they chipped that away, too
. Gaby was a demon of snow; it caked her clothes and the woolen scarf drawn
over her mouth and nose, turned her eyebrows into thick white ledges.
Soon they reached a new layer that was too tough to cut. Gaby attacked it vi
ciously, but eventually conceded she was getting nowhere. She let her hand d
rop to her side and glared at the wall.
"Well, it was an idea." She kicked disgustedly at the snow that had fallen a
round them as they worked, shaken down by the vibrations. She looked at it,
then craned her neck and stared up into the darkness. She took a step back,
grabbing Cirocco's arm to steady herself when she slipped on ice chips.
"There's a darker patch up there," she said, pointing. "Ten ... no, fifteen
mete rs up. Slightly to the right. See it?"
Cirocco was not sure. She could see several dark places, but none of them lo
oked like a cave.
"I'm going up to take a look." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]