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For a moment Illya just stood half bent, pressing a hand to his ribs, trying to catch his breath. Being fit didn’t mean you didn’t get out of breath. It just meant you didn’t have to stand so long like this, lungs burning, heaving frigid air in and out, a little feeling of sickness pushing at your throat.
Then he stood, and looked around. He’d seen the view as he picked his way along the narrow ridge, the land plummeting on both sides. He’d marvelled at it as he’d stopped for moments to let his heartbeat settle on the way up. But now it was there, all around him. The pure mountains of the Carneddau and Snowdonia, capped with snow, just starting to catch that first glow as the sun lowered in the west. The rolling hills of Denbighshire disappearing east. The silvered thread of the river in the valley below. He could see the dark length of Cowlyd lake in its narrow cwm, the craggy boulders of Tryfan shunning snow on its steepest parts. And there, peaking in the distance, the three jagged points of Snowdon, rose and gold.
Beautiful.
Worth it, he thought, as he stood there, utterly alone. He would have liked to have been able to turn to Napoleon at his side and share the moment, but there was beauty, too, in being alone up here. His were the only footprints in the snow. His was the only breath making little pearled droplets in the air.
A raven glided, black against the blue sky, giving out its sonorous caw. It was like a bow being drawn across the strings of a double bass. Resonating, unreal.
He shrugged his rucksack off and dumped it on the ground. He needed to start down soon, but he wanted just a moment to appreciate this, without the weight aching on his shoulders. He pulled his camera out of the rucksack and hung it around his neck, took his gloves off so that he could properly manipulate the controls. He was glad he’d put in the colour film to pick up the blues in the snow and sky, the delicate light and shade.
He took a few steps across the flat mountaintop towards the southern side, to look down more clearly on the black waters of the lake below. Beautiful. The valley looked almost entirely deserted, just a single curl of smoke coming from somewhere east past the end of the lake. He took a few photographs of the spreading view, then turned to take one back the way he’d come, across the flat spread of the mountaintop to the ridge curving back to Carnedd Llywelyn.
He tramped across in the other direction to look down into the hollow of Cwm Eigiau. He’d seen that as he crossed the ridge, seen the serpent curve of the narrow river, seen the tumbled remains of spoil heaps and quarrymen’s housing and the angular carve of the quarry. But then half his mind had been focussed on not slipping on the narrow path.
The quarry was down below, directly below the sheer drop of that side of the mountain. The ascent had been up a trudging, rounded slope, but this side must have dropped away somewhere back in deep time, a lethal cliff nothing like that gradual slope. Illya edged just a little bit closer. He wanted to see down into the serried steps of that abandoned quarry. Maybe there was still equipment down there. Maybe there were the ghosts of the workers.
His foot slipped. For a moment his mind was blank, frozen. Then he could feel himself plummeting. Time felt caught in syrup. His camera swung out and back, slamming against his chest as he twisted. His leg caught against a rock. Hands scrabbled at ice and snow.
He slowed. Stopped.
His heart was hammering, ears singing. Cold. Little scatters of snow were tumbling past him but he was wedged, still, one foot caught on a rock, the other in a crevice. His chest was pressed against the snowy slope which reached up above him, far too steep, far too slippery to climb. Beneath him was just the drop.
He stayed frozen, mind whirling. His feet were planted firmly, but he couldn’t climb up. He couldn’t go down. The snow was freezing against his bare cheek, pressing cold through his clothes. His fingers felt numb where they were clawing into the rock. But he couldn’t move.
He became aware of the pain in his leg. He didn’t try to look down. He just felt it, something like hot nails in his shin, something he knew would hurt worse the instant he tried to move it.
Someone spoke.
It didn’t even seem strange at first. A voice above him, a woman’s voice. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. It was soft, flowing. Welsh.
He tried to move his head. His neck felt stiff. Stiff with fear, perhaps. He was afraid any movement would send him further down. He tried to look up but he couldn’t move enough to see.
A woman?
He hadn’t seen a soul the whole time he’d been up here. But now there was a woman, a voice that sounded strong, firm.
‘Help,’ he said in a voice that was more shaky than he meant it to be. ‘Can you – find someone to help me?’
It was useless of course, unless she was up here with a team of men with ropes. They’d have to lower someone down to him, get him roped on, haul him up. He couldn’t tie a rope on himself. He couldn’t let go.
But she was there. Her hands were about his waist, pushing between him and the sheer, snowy rocks. She was cinching a rope tightly about him.
‘When it’s taut, hold on,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he nodded.
Things were moving very slowly in his brain. English? Was she speaking English now? Or was it Russian? Somehow he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t sure what language he’d used to answer. He couldn’t even see her, somehow. He could feel her there, her arms around him. And then not there. Then the rope was taut, he could feel his weight being taken by it. He moved one hand, inch by inch, until he was gripping the rope. Then the other. It took an enormous amount of trust to finally let go of the slope, and grip that rope.
Steadily he was being drawn upwards. His foot was still caught. He clung to the rope as it pulled relentlessly. He kicked his leg, kicked again, and his leg was on fire. But snow scattered down in clumps, and then a heavy, dull shift, and rock was falling, tumbling, disappearing below. The rope tightened again and he was being drawn up, up, up, face and chest slithering against the snow, camera a hard lump catching and pulling, feet trying to kick against the slope to help a little.
Then he was lying flat on his front, panting, freezing, hands still clenched around that rope, leg throbbing. He lay with his head sideways, seeing the dark blue arc of the sky at the edge of his vision, the long blue shadows cast from each wind ripple of the snow, the sunset gold gilding each peak. It was beautiful, beautiful, but the beauty felt filled with danger now. Too cold, too hard, too exposed. He could so easily die up here.
At last he straightened. He expected a team of men. But there was the woman. Just the woman, standing there near him. First her feet, wrapped in – he couldn’t tell. Was it boots? Shoes? Dirty white rags or gaiters? Why couldn’t he tell. He thought he could see bare ankle, the bone prominent, but then the next moment he thought he was looking at a long skirt, or a trouser leg, or perhaps something of tweed or – bark? Cloth?
He was delirious, perhaps. In shock. Bleeding? He lifted his head enough to crane it down to see the other end of his body. A smear of red on the white snow. Blood, then. His leg was bleeding.
‘Come to the tent,’ she told him. ‘You’ll freeze.’
He got to one knee, then the other. His knees were bruised. His ribs were starting to feel bruised. His lower leg seared. He was so cold.
He was standing, and she was helping him walk. He dragged his leg across the snow.
The tent? There had been no tent, but there was a tent. A low orange canvas thing, he thought, worn and faded, pitched on the flat centre of the mountain top. A low, curved thing like a native shelter built of bent willow, birch, hazel, covered in tattered hide and bracken. Something low, anyway, with a low entrance that he crawled through. Then there was a fire, there was a dry, softish bed beneath him, and he had given up trying to work out what anything was made of. The blanket she drew over him smelled of lanolin, unworked, unwashed wool. Thick, soft, like a cloud over him.
Underneath her hands were working, pulling zips open, undoing laces, buttons, peeling cloth from his limbs. He didn’t even think to resist, didn’t think of modesty or vulnerability. He just lay there while she stripped him, until all his bare skin was cocooned in this unworked wool, and somehow the fire’s heat was pressing through the gauze into his bones.
He lay with his head propped on something soft while she lifted the wool from his lower leg, and her hands touched his skin. Her hands felt like ice. They felt like snow. They felt like something aged beyond comprehension, like something of nature, not man. He hissed when she touched the ragged wound on his leg. He couldn’t see it, quite, in the flickering orange light. She lifted his leg to rest on her knees as she knelt beside him, and she was layering something over what looked like a mess of bruise and laceration, a mess of blood. There was a strong smell, herbal, fatty, maybe comfrey and lard. His leg still hurt, but the salve was comfort. She covered the wounds in that fatty stuff, then softly wrapped it in something thin and white and light, so that was the only part of him clothed at all. She laid the wool back over his leg then, and let it rest back on the bed.
‘Did you – ’ He felt bewildered, shaken. Had he hit his head? ‘Did you pull me up alone?’
He couldn’t believe it. He let his eyes settle on her now. She was kneeling by the fire, not on snow but on some dark surface, some matty covering over the ground. Her hair was loose and long. Brown-black or grey, perhaps. He could hardly tell. Her skin was pale. Her eyes – he thought of hazel, moss, dark mud, but every time he settled on a colour, it changed. She looked age old, young, like nothing. Beautiful, nothing. Every time he thought he had it captured it was gone.
But she was strong. He could see that much. It was like looking at the muscle and sinew beneath her clothes and skin. He could see the strength in every part of her.
‘Of course I did,’ she said. ‘Is there anyone else here but you?’
He could believe it then. That strength he could see. He couldn’t think how she had managed to climb down that slope, and then up again, and then haul him up, but it had happened, and he could see her strength.
He tried again to understand the language she was speaking. Welsh, he couldn’t understand. But English? Russian? French? It didn’t feel like any of those, and he didn’t know how he was replying, but she was speaking and he was speaking, and they understood one another.
How had he fallen? He hadn’t been so close to the edge. He was careful, always careful. The slope started to drop away, but he hadn’t gone that close. Just enough to try to see that old quarry. Just enough but not too far. And yet, he had slipped. He had fallen. His leg was throbbing, aching under the dressing and salve. His ribs ached with every breath. His arms ached from holding on. He could feel the bruises about him like the mottle on a trout’s skin.
She was holding a fragrant bowl, perhaps something carved from wood, perhaps something baked from the earth’s clay. Wood, he thought, something hollowed out from a fallen oak. Something polished with the fats of food and the heat of the fire. She held it to his lips and he sipped, swallowed. It was hot, not burning, just hot enough to spread warmth through his throat and chest. He was shaking, teeth chattering, but she held the bowl, and he drank and drank at that fragrant soup.
‘Who are you?’ he asked when the bowl was taken away.
She smiled, he thought. He thought it was a smile in the flickering firelight.
‘Who are you, climbing in my land?’ she asked. ‘Who are you, standing up here when no other man has been here? When the snow is clean?’
He lay there, blinking. His brain felt very slow. He had seen some footprints up here. The hopping imprints of birds’ feet, the circles of ponies’ hooves, the places where they had scraped away the snow to get at the starved grass beneath. He had seen a few men’s prints early on. But there had been nothing across the ridge from Carnedd Llywelyn, and nothing up the steep side of Pen Llithrig y Wrach. He had broken his own path all the way.
He hadn’t even seen the birds’ claw prints up here, he thought. No ponies. Just the raven flying overhead, that low, resonant caw. Where did they go at night, he wondered? He couldn’t imagine them perching in trees. Where did they go at night? Maybe they perched like gargoyles on the cliffs, guarding the dark valleys below.
‘Who are you, Illya Kuryakin?’ she asked him.
He blinked at her, bleary, sleepy, so warm in his cradle of fleece. She knew his name. Of course she knew his name. His name wasn’t what she had asked.
‘I – am a man who wanted to walk, he said slowly. ‘I wanted to walk here. It’s beautiful up here.’
‘It is that,’ she agreed gently. ‘Yes, it is that.’
There was silence. He lay there looking up at the canvas above his head, or the covering above his head, the linen sheets or the worn hides or the arching, barked withies of willow and hazel. The sky must be darkening on the other side. Where had the ravens gone?
He looked sideways. He saw a raven perching by the fire, hunched over the fire, the amber light shining from iridescent black plumes. He saw a woman sitting, very still, still like stone, her eyes never wavering from his face. Perhaps he was dreaming. Perhaps this was all a dream.
‘You wanted to walk alone,’ she said. ‘You’re a solitary creature.’
‘No, I – ’
He pondered that, let it revolve. Was he solitary? He had loved walking alone, nothing but the sound of his footfalls in the snow, the wind cutting past rocks and cliffs and over the scoured snow surface. Nothing but the little noises of human life drifting up from the far valley, sometimes the whistle of a train.
‘I would have walked with someone,’ he said. ‘But I’m here alone.’
She paused, waited, digested. It was as if she were waiting for him to speak again. As if she wanted to draw something out of him, as if she were sitting at a wheel gently teasing a twisted thread from a puffing handful of raw wool. Was that what he was? A loose puff of combed wool, waiting to be woven into a tale?
‘I would have walked with someone,’ he said again. ‘But I was alone. It’s a different thing, walking alone. He couldn’t be here. He’s a long way away.’
She waited again. He felt like a child, naked in his cocoon of soft wool. It wasn’t even woven wool, this, he was sure, he was just lost in a cloud of unspun wool, perhaps gathered from the gorse and hawthorn, gathered from the fences, brought together into a pool of soft wool to hold him. A chick inside a shell.
‘Does your heart feel torn in two?’ she asked him.
She had been very still, but now she was leaning a little closer, her lips a little parted as if to breathe in his response. Her face was caught by the firelight, her hair like strands of gold in the firelight.
‘I – ’
He let himself feel it, tried to let himself feel it. Where was Napoleon this week? He’d lost track. North Africa, he thought, somewhere in Morocco the last time he’d heard, a world away from this frozen place. He tried to shut down his heart when Napoleon was too far away, alone on a mission. He tried not to think about him except when he was checking in. He hated those few missions that meant Napoleon had to go alone. Risking his own life was one thing, but Napoleon’s was infinitely more precious.
‘My heart is my heart,’ he said after a long moment. ‘Just a heart. It can’t be torn apart.’
A little huff through her lips, a little billow of pearled white air as if she had breathed into a frozen world. A long, hard silence hanging in the air like the mist of her breath.
‘Every hour,’ she said at last, ‘every moment, can be bringing someone closer to you. Or further away. When they’re far, there’s no way of knowing.’
That felt like a stab, like a sharp needle of ice pressing into his chest. A cruelty. He looked at her face in profile. A hardness in her face, a cruel look.
‘In my line of work,’ he said, ‘you have to get used to not knowing.’
The wind pushed the fabric of the tent. There was the sound of something, a smattering of snow perhaps. The sun must have gone down now. It would be frigid out there. Impossible to get down from this mountain in the dark, with an injured leg, in this snow.
‘It’s falling thickly,’ she told him, as if she had read his thoughts. ‘No light. No path down. You wouldn’t manage it.’
‘No,’ he murmured.
‘In the summer,’ she said, ‘you can walk down the spine of this place, down to the valley. You'll pull your legs through heather, thick with the smell of honey, full of bees. You'll find cottongrass and bilberries, little berries on the stems. Mountain pools in peat. But now – Now it’s all lost under the snow. You won’t know where the fences are, where the pools are. If you fall into one of those pools you’ll be done. You don’t want to walk down there alone.’
‘No,’ he said, as if he were dreaming. ‘No, not alone.’
‘It can be a terrible thing to be alone. Beautiful, but terrible. Terrible.’
Her face was like a sheet of ice, like something still and frozen in time. Were her eyes blue? For a moment, her face a little turned from the firelight, her eyes looked like ice. The wind pushed at the tent and all the stiff supports shivered. He felt impossibly warm under his cocoon of wool. Where had the tent come from? Where had the wool come from? The fuel for the fire?
‘What is he like?’ she asked.
The firelight flickered orange and gold on her pale cheek. She wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t looking at the fire. Maybe she was looking at the flap he had crawled in through. Maybe she was looking at nothing.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘What is he like?’
He didn’t have to ask who she meant.
‘Dark hair,’ he said. ‘Dark eyes. An inch or two taller than me. Well built.’
The hiss she made sounded more animal than human, like a woodland creature angry as its prey was ripped away.
‘What is he like?’ she asked again. ‘I know the hair, hair like a rook’s wing. Eyes – that dark silt that washes into the streams in the spring. I can see that in you. I can see all those things. What is he like?’
He took in a breath. This felt raw. It felt more vulnerable than the ragged wounds in his leg.
‘He’s – mercurial,’ he said. ‘He can be mercurial.’
‘Like the wind.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Like the wind. More optimistic than me. Positive. Hopeful. But sometimes – ’
His breath billowed back as he exhaled against the soft wool tucked at his chin. He thought of Napoleon in his darker moods, when his eyes didn’t seem to be focussed anywhere, when his dark gaze was just resting in the mid-distance. He never really spoke about what overtook him in those moods. Illya suspected it might be something about Korea, something about being a man too young in a place too brutal. Or maybe it was just the necessary darkness of the job they did. They had both killed. They had both faced terrible things, together and alone. It was something Napoleon rarely spoke of, and Illya didn’t press him.
‘Sometimes,’ she prompted.
‘Sometimes – I see the dark in him,’ he said. ‘He’s been through a lot, I think. I know. He’s seen a lot of things.’
She turned herself so her back was to the fire, so her face was shaded, like a cliff with the sun setting behind. He couldn’t see her eyes now, couldn’t see the set of her mouth.
‘You have both seen,’ she said. ‘More than this hilltop. More than this life.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured. He breathed in steadily. ‘Last week – I killed a man with my hands.’
He flexed his hands under the covers, remembering the feeling of that man’s neck under his fingers, the racing of the pulse, the panicked little noises of his breath. It had been hard work. His hands had ached afterwards, his fingers stiff and tired.
‘Quickly?’ she asked him with a little eagerness in her voice. ‘Easily?’
‘Quickly,’ he nodded. ‘Not easily.’
‘He fought?’
‘Of course he fought,’ Illya said, his voice edging towards a snap. He could feel the sinews of his neck, the frantic beat of his heart, in his memory. Her interest was a little too hungry, like an animal sniffing for blood. ‘No one, very few men, want to die. It shouldn’t ever be an easy thing to do. It’s – one of those things there’s no going back from. You can’t make it right.’
‘But it was right for him to die,’ she said.
‘He wasn’t a good man,’ Illya replied. ‘He was a dangerous man. He would have killed a lot of people if I hadn’t stopped him.’
‘You feel – a darkness. A sadness,’ she said.
‘Not for that,’ he said, then repeated more slowly, ‘Not for that. You can’t feel sadness for every man you kill. You’d never be able to sleep at night.’
She was leaning closer. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he could feel them on her. She cast a frigid shadow, blocking him from the fire’s heat.
‘Death is life,’ she said. ‘Life is death.’
He let that settle, his mind digesting.
‘You – You feel very alive as you kill someone,’ he said slowly. ‘When you kill them like that, close quarters. When you can feel the life under his skin, there, then gone.’
‘Yes,’ she said, leaning so close her head was low over her knees. Her breath smelled like moss. ‘Yes? When it happens under your hands, yes?’
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘When it happens under your hands. It's a terrible thing, but – You feel your own heartbeat so strongly. You feel your own pulse. You feel – vibrant, almost. So alive.’
‘And love,’ she said. Her voice was like a song, like a far off wind, like a stream tumbling down the hills. ‘And love. This is feeling alive too, yes? When you love?’
He thought of Napoleon and his heart ached. Aching was a way of feeling alive. It was a way of feeling real. He thought how his heart sped a little when Napoleon’s fingers brushed over his hand, just so. When he leant in when quietness was everything, and whispered in his ear. The warmth of his breath. The low sound of his voice. That was being alive.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you feel alive when you love. You feel like – your body is more than just you. Like you don't stop at your own skin.’
The mist of wool around him was like that. A radiating of himself, as if he reached further, filled more space. As if his atoms were spaced further apart. Napoleon could be inside that cloud of wool with him, and they would be together and the same.
She was drinking this, he felt. Imbibing. Every word he said was being taken into her body like something that nourished.
‘When you know he’s far away – ’ she said, prompting.
‘He’s often far away,’ Illya said. ‘Like now. We spend a lot of time together and a lot of time apart. I couldn’t let it consume me, when he’s not there.’
‘But when you let the silence in,’ she whispered, close to him. ‘When you let it consume…’
‘An ache,’ he said. His voice felt slow and tired. ‘Like you’re looking for something that’s been taken away, but you can’t remember what it is or where it should be.’
‘Death is like this?’ she asked. ‘Grief?’
‘Worse,’ he said. That ache in his heart swelled. Whenever Napoleon was gone on a mission without him he felt that ache, that fear that missing would turn to grief at a moment’s notice. ‘Grief is – when you know that part can’t be brought back. When you’ll never be able to fill that hole.’
‘But love,’ she said.
It felt like a song, like the sway of a boat, back and forth. Love, grief, grief, love, back and forth, back and forth.
‘Sometimes it feels like that fire,’ he said, turning his eyes to rest on the flickering flames. ‘Dangerous, hot, like if you let it, it could take control of everything. Consume everything.’
‘But you don’t let it consume you,’ she said. ‘You build a wall. There is the fire like this fire, then the sides of this tent, and then the frozen world outside. Yes? That is how you feel it. You keep it captured in a box of ice.’
Oh, the ache that pushed through him. He thought again of Napoleon, the colour of his hair, the natural little wave of the strands before he tamed it. The brown of his eyes. His smile. He thought of the bones of his wrists and the movement of his fingers whenever he was doing any delicate task. The warmth of his breath when he whispered, clandestine, into Illya’s ear. How could he let that out of the box of ice? How could he let it consume him?
‘Being alone,’ she said. ‘Is being alone worth the pain? Is fear worth the pain?’
His lips parted with a reply, but he didn’t know what to say. His heart ached. He thought of finally confessing, of letting Napoleon know. He thought of grief, of losing. What if he let Napoleon know, and in revealing himself, he lost him?
‘Being alone is strength,’ she said. ‘But it is a void inside. It is the same as being a rock, or a pool of ice. Being alone can make you nothing.’
He felt that coldness, that void in his chest. It felt like ice spreading out, consuming him.
She moved as if to lay a hand on his brow. He could feel the cold of her skin, cold down to her bones, without her even touching. She didn’t touch. She just let her hand hover there for a moment, then drew it away.
‘You must sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s not safe to travel down until morning. You must sleep.’
She turned to the fire, her hands moving where he could not see them. Steam rising, perhaps, or was it smoke? He felt very small, very young, like a child watching his mother on the other side of the room, just a figure in the half-darkness, moving about at tasks that didn't matter, that were too big and too mundane to involve him. Then she was turned back towards him again, her attention like flame, like an arctic wind. She held a little cup of horn towards his lips.
‘It dulls pain,’ she told him. ‘It helps sleep.’
Like a child with his mother at his bedside, he didn't question her. He just let his lips part a little and drank the hot, sweet drink. Honey, he thought. Summertime. Bees rising from heather. Something of hot honey about this drink.
It came over him like honey, slow and warm. Sleep running into all his bones, sleep running into his mind. The soft wool around him, the sweetness on his lips. He slept, slept. Dreamed of ice creeping towards him in six-armed crystals, pushing into every crevice. Then there was heat, fire, flames dancing. A voice, he thought. He stirred and his leg ached under the soft wool covering, and he couldn’t open his eyes to see the source of that voice. A woman’s voice, was it, saying, Hush now, hush. All’s well.
A hand on his skin. He felt the hand touching his shoulder. He opened his eyes but he could only see what was very close, small things, details. Napoleon’s hand. He knew the creases of his knuckles, the back of his hand, the thin black hairs. Napoleon’s hand stroking over his shoulder, tracing his collarbone. He tipped his head back, lips parted, and he heard Napoleon saying, Hush now, hush, so he let each vertebra rest back into the softness, his body naked as a newborn in his cocoon as Napoleon’s lips came down to his. His mouth tasted of summer air, of sweetness, something like warm honey as they kissed and kissed, and his bare body moved against the soft wool cloud, as Napoleon’s hands found every inch of him. He saw small parts of him, the dark of his eyes, the flop of his dark hair, the curve of a muscle in his upper arm. His chest, the light trail of dark hair starting about the sink of his navel, the hard plates of muscle, and then – Oh, Napoleon was naked too, sinking into this floating wrap of combed wool, existing with him inside the wool, touching him over every part of his body until his nerves sung. Napoleon’s lips on his, his hand between his legs, touching, touching, bringing him to such a peak…
There was a raven watching. He was aware of that. A raven, watching, its eyes like glass beads. The fire was dancing high, the flames flickering on the curving fabric of the tent. Too hot. Air full of smoke, steam, something that made everything blurred. That intense awareness of his nakedness inside his soft nest of wool, of the arousal of his body, of the animal reality of his own body. Nothing of mind, nothing of intellectual thought, just the animality of his body, the heat and arousal and need. Nothing mattered but skin and bone and blood and all the chemicals of desire. He felt so human he wanted to scream aloud.
He was lying in the wool, breathing fast, a thin sheen of sweat on every inch of skin. His eyes were looking up at the fabric above him, fabric or thin leather or something woven, he couldn’t tell. He felt as if he had been running. He could feel his heart thudding. He moved a hand limply under the covering, let his palm rest on his chest to feel that solid beat. He stroked down himself, feeling his ribs moving with each breath, the dip of his stomach, then down between his legs to the softness there. Just soft, still, damp with sweat. That was all. He thought he had been a man, pulled to full arousal, but there was just softness.
He let his head turn sideways. She was sitting by the fire still, turned a little away, the light of the flames just catching the angle of her cheek. She wasn’t breathing fast like him. Her skin was dry. She looked as if she were a million miles away in thought, just sitting by the fire, something in a black iron pot simmering slowly over the flame.
Nothing made sense. Was this all a dream? He was so warm, and his heartbeat was slowing, his breathing slowing. He felt as though he were sinking, falling deeper and deeper into the softness. The tent above him blurred. Her silhouette became not more than the feeling of a presence. Sound died away. He was asleep.
((O))
The light was blue, thin, cool. He was lying still, a little too cold. He moved his hand slowly under blankets, felt the bare skin of his body. The fire was burning low, almost out, just a little haze of smoke in the air. The tent was empty.
He sat slowly, letting the blanket fall. Something thin, brown, the fibres worn. Blankets above, blankets below. The ground felt hard through that thin barrier.
His clothes were there, folded by the bed on the groundsheet. Was that tarpaulin? Leather? He couldn’t tell. He just picked up the clothes, piece by piece, and dressed himself in the shivering cold.
Last night… He remembered being cocooned in fleece. The fire had been burning high. He remembered sweating, fever, something – Some dream, maybe. Napoleon. He had dreamt of Napoleon, he thought. Making love with Napoleon. Had he dreamt of that?
There was an ease through all his bones, a feeling as if he really had made love with Napoleon in the night. As if that little restless part of him were resting for now.
He stopped with his shirt half buttoned. He was still naked from the waist down, still covered under the blankets. Thin, old, brown wool blankets. Hadn’t it been unspun wool last night? Fleecy, white, like a cloud?
He felt so confused. But his leg ached. He gingerly moved the blanket aside. His foot looked white, bloodless with chill. The bruising began around his ankle, purple edging into yellow-green. There was some kind of bandage on his calf, brown, dried stains of blood in the white fabric. It looked like – what was it? Muslin, gauze? Something not quite real. He didn’t try to unwrap it. He just touched his fingers over the places where the blood had seeped through, and hissed at the pain when he did. Everything felt excruciatingly tender, his bone a cool, bruised rod in the middle of a mass of torn and swollen meat.
Carefully he drew on his underwear, then his trousers. He made a little whimpering sound as the fabric pulled up over his shin. For a moment he felt dizzy.
He had fallen, hadn’t he? Slipped over the edge as he tried to look down. He didn’t remember getting close enough to the edge to slip like that, but he had slipped all the same. Caught his leg between the rocks.
He looked at the palms of his hands, saw the grazes there, saw the chipped and torn nails, little bits of brown blood. He hadn’t been wearing his gloves. He should have been wearing his gloves. He remembered his camera then. It had been around his neck when he fell. But there was his rucksack, next to where his clothes had been, and the camera was sitting by it, the strap curled neatly around its body.
He picked it up. The metal casing was scratched, the lens smashed. Of course. He couldn’t have expected the lens to survive. Carefully, he took the film through the final few exposures, then wound it into the canister. He took it out and tucked it into a zipped pocket. He wouldn’t be taking any more pictures with that lens.
He sat for a moment, fully dressed now, just his boots waiting to go on. He didn’t want to try pulling his boot on over that ankle. He sat with the blankets tumbled around him, just looking at the fading embers of the little fire, angular chunks of rock ringing the burnt sticks. The fire was the only thing that felt still and definite. He touched the groundsheet and one moment it felt like leather, another like oilcloth. One moment the tent looked like faded orange canvas, another like leather scraped thin to translucence.
There was no sound at all outside but the little flaps as the wind hit the tent, and somewhere above the long, piercing cry of a bird.
He put his boots on at last, cinching the laces tightly on his right to try to give the ankle more support. The joint throbbed and pulsed in that gripping tightness and he bit down on the pain. He had to be able to walk.
He looped his hand through one strap of his rucksack and crawled out of the tent.
She was standing on the mountaintop in the snow, back to him, looking out over the valley where the slope dropped away. He stood for a moment, wavering a little. He could touch his foot to the ground, but it hurt. He didn’t know how much weight he could put through that joint.
The world all around him was white. Every slope covered in snow, the valley below just edging into green near the river. The sky was white with cloud, thick and full like the fleece he had lain wrapped in through the night. The snow on the ground around him was thin, though, showing patches of frozen ground beneath where it had been scoured away by the wind.
And there she was, standing looking down into Cwm Eigiau, her hair a plaited rope beneath a woollen cap. She was wearing clothes much like his, layers of coat and knitwear, trousers of heavy grey cloth. Was that what she’d been wearing last night? His thoughts blurred. He thought he remembered – something more natural, more like cloth wrapped around her, less sewn by man. He thought he remembered – something less. Pale skin made gold and rose by firelight, gold and rose like the snow had looked under the setting sun. Her lips… He thought he remembered her lips…
He had that strange feeling of ease, that warm feeling through his body as if he had made love last night. He remembered the dream about Napoleon. He remembered pale skin in rose and gold. He didn’t know what to think.
She turned. Her face was like something carved, wood or ice or bone, but then she smiled and it became human. She walked easily across the hard ground, her boots making a little crunch on the ice and snow.
She held out a stick, something that looked as if it had been cut from a growing tree and not carved with a knife, but just pared, and polished, until the wood seemed to glow from within. The top crooked over, made from a natural joint, but smoothed to something that would fit in the hand without discomfort. He wondered where she had got it from. He turned back instinctively to look at the tent, but there was no tent, just a patch of snow and scoured earth no different from the rest of the mountaintop.
He looked back, a question on his lips that he didn’t ask.
‘A gift from the hawthorn,’ she said, holding the stick out to him.
He took it. It felt warm despite the chill air, smooth against his bruised fingers. He leant on it a little, and it took his weight easily.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
She was holding something else out then, crumbling cakes of meal the colour of pale straw. He took one, bit into it, tasted oat. It was good. Suddenly he felt ravenous, as if he hadn’t eaten for days.
‘Eat enough to fill you,’ she said.
He did. He ate, and drank icy water from his flask, and ate again, and his stomach felt warm.
‘Can you walk with the stick?’ she asked, her head a little on one side, all feminine concern.
He didn’t know what to think. One moment she felt like a woman, another she seemed part of the mountain. But here she was now, dressed in hiking clothes like his, a little flush of real blood in her cheeks, a few strands of dark hair escaped from the plait and playing about her face in the wind. Was that hair dark like peat, gold like straw, auburn like a fox’s fur? He couldn’t tell. Dark, he thought one moment, but then he was reminded of the sun.
He looked up, watched as a raven glided overhead, then looked back to her. He leant on the stick, tried a few steps. Hot spikes of pain ran up through his ankle, but the stick helped.
‘It might take me a while to get down,’ he said, ‘but I think I can walk.’
‘In summer there are pools, crevices between the rocks, cushions of heather,’ she reminded him. ‘They’re still here now. You just can’t see them. I’ll guide you down. I know where every rock lies.’
She came to stand beside him. He held the stick in his right hand and leant on her arm with the other. There was strength in her arm, like leaning on a tree branch. It felt strange to touch her, as if he had expected his hand would go right through. But there was the strength of bone and muscle under her clothes, and he began to walk. She made him feel lighter than he should be. Pain spiralled through his bad foot, but it hardly touched the ground as they began to make their way down the slope, heading east along the lowering ridge that ran between the two valleys.
It was still beautiful. He saw places where horses had scraped the snow from the ground to get at the plants beneath, and he let go of her arm to step a little closer. The next step took him knee deep, and then thigh, and he stood there, panting, feeling the cool seeping from the snow into the hot ache in his ankle. Her hand put light pressure under his arm, and she smiled quietly.
‘I know the path,’ she reminded him.
He dragged himself on. The snow was shallower at the next step, and then only a few inches thick. His muscles felt thin and weak, as if he had been lying in bed for days.
‘There, heather,’ she said, nodding her head left. She looked right. ‘There, the peat is deeper than a man, and wet. I know the path.’
He continued to follow, probing the snow with the hawthorn stick with each step before trusting it with his feet. They lost a little height, and the wind grew quieter. Somewhere, far off, he heard a horse whicker, and another reply. His cheeks and nose felt frozen, his fingertips half numb in his gloves. This long ridge leading down from the mountain felt too long, too difficult. They came to a wire fence just visible above the drifts as a few poles and wire strands with blown ice attached, and he felt too tired to struggle through that drift and then to climb. But she put her hand on his arm again, and he felt a warmth in his veins.
‘A little more food,’ she said, offering him more of those oat cakes. ‘A drink, and a rest.’
He ate and drank, then struggled on, over the fence, into more snow beyond. His ankle hurt badly, and he stumbled, leaning on the stick and her arm. She put her hand over his. She wasn’t wearing gloves.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said.
He couldn’t feel her fingers through his own gloves, but her naked hands must be frozen. She showed no signs of cold. She showed no signs of fatigue, no signs of change. She just walked beside him, letting him lean on her arm.
He thought of tales of lost men, men struggling at the limits of their strength, hallucinating someone walking beside them. Men interpreting that presence as God, Jesus, the ghost of a loved one. She was nothing like that. There was nothing of God about her. She was just there, keeping him walking. Real. She must be real. He remembered again the intensity of last night’s dreams. The heat. The feeling of Napoleon there with him, cocooned with him in that wool. But Napoleon hadn’t been there. It had been her, only her. He had that warm feeling, as if he had made love, spent his seed. But Napoleon hadn’t been there.
The mountain felt like a long, stretched out back, as if he were walking along the spine, as if it were miles from nape to hip. The land was flat before it dropped away on either side. He was flanked by valleys, the shallows of Eigiau lake to his left, the depths of Cowlyd to his right. He couldn’t see either from here. It felt like a world of snow, and nothing outside this broad, long reach of land was real.
‘I knew an owl,’ she said, seeing his eyes turning towards where that deeper lake lay. ‘He lived there, lived through generations of men. He was the oldest being I ever met.’
‘Owls – live for about ten years,’ he said. His breath was pearling in the air.
She just smiled. ‘How long does an oak live?’ she asked. ‘Is it longer than an owl?’
He blinked. He felt tired, hungry again, the pain in his ankle raw and strong.
‘An oak – ’ he began.
‘He outlived the oaks,’ she told him. ‘He outlived oaks that grew large enough to make the crucks of men’s halls, oaks that were felled and grew again, and died and grew again. He was the oldest being I ever knew.’
Illya looked at her face. It was a moment, just a moment, where she looked human again, unfrozen, as if she were feeling pain.
‘He died,’ he said gently.
‘Yes,’ she said, and she looked away. He felt something in his chest, as if a hole had opened up, as if he were falling. It was like falling into loneliness. It made him want to weep.
They were reaching a wall banked up with snow on one side, so only the rounded grey stones of the top were visible. On the other side the land began to drop away.
‘There,’ she said as they approached the wall. ‘This is where we part.’
He stared at her suddenly, confused. He felt as if he had been dropped, as if a mother had suddenly let go of his hand in a wild and surging crowd.
‘We part?’ he echoed.
‘You've given me everything I need,’ she told him.
She pressed her cool hand over his then drew away, laid her palm flat over her womb, and smiled.
‘This is where we part,’ she said again. ‘The walls of man. The lowland. On the other side you’re on safe ground. Head down. Head east. You’ll see the fires of man.’
His mouth was part open. He wanted to protest. He didn’t know this woman, couldn’t even work out the colour of her hair, but he couldn’t imagine carrying on alone. His ankle hurt too much, the snow was too deep, she felt too – He shook his head. She was too fundamental, like the ground beneath his feet. She felt as if she had been beside him forever.
He turned his head to speak to her, to try to persuade her. He turned again, turned. There was a muddled trail of footprints in the snow to show their path, birds gliding high in the sky, the clouds thick and low like a canopy of wool. He couldn’t see her. She wasn’t there.
He felt as if he were falling all over again, tumbling from the side of the mountain down towards the valley. No rocks to catch him, no hand to pull him up. He couldn’t see her breaking her path back the way they’d come, couldn’t see footprints leading off any other way. She just was not there.
He felt an aching in his heart, an aching in his loins. His ankle throbbed. He closed his hand hard on the polished wood of the hawthorn stick. That was still there. That was real, holding his weight.
The wall should have been five feet tall, but it was lost in the snow. He walked on snow packed hard by the wind and clambered over the top, then let himself down on the other side, sinking into the lower drift there. He pushed the end of the stick hard into the ground and used it to right himself, to probe the depth and find his best path and push on. He could see the smoke she had spoken of, the smoke of men somewhere below, down and to the east. His ankle shrilled in pain without her to support his arm, but he had to carry on.
The hill had run into a slope. He could make out the path by the way the snow was thinner, by the way the snow covered humps were broken in a meander that led down and left. He leant on the stick and hobbled. He came around a little rise of land and saw the lake off to the right, stretching long and low towards a cleft in the hills, a dam at the closer end. The water was black, rimmed with black stone that crumbled into snow. Huge black pipes led from the lower end towards the main valley below.
He followed the path, sometimes pocked with cloven footprints and patched with the dung of sheep. He felt exhausted, as if the cold and pain had finally hit him now her support was gone. It felt too hard, too far, his ankle too sore to carry on. But he could see the smoke rising from that chimney off to the left. The path led down that way, and it was starting to feel like more of a real path, less of luck and whim. He came across a gate, pushed the wooden bars open against the snow. There was a huddle of sheep there, heads down, mouths pulling at hay in a frame. He stood there for a moment, resting, leaning on the gate, his foot lifted from the ground. The hay smelled like summer, like warmth and sweetness. Their wool looked dirty and yellow against the blue-white snow, and mud was trampled where they had walked. This was civilisation.
The smoke was closer. Those great black pipes like the boilers of steam engines stretched along the valley side and the path wound downwards and eastwards, and it looked as if the two would converge. He pushed on through the gate, closed it firmly, hobbled on across the field where now there were the footprints of men as well as of sheep. Then the path met a cart track, and then he could see the grey stone of the farmhouse, the low roofed barns, the squat little outhouse, the way past all muddied and mashed up with use. The great pipes were only yards away down the hill.
He found himself leaning against the door, breathing hard, holding the stick against him for a moment before he could make himself knock. Then the door was opening and he almost fell into warmth and smoky, still air.
It was a woman grown to stoutness with age, hair tied up in a scarf, apron tied about her body, and he took her arm as she held it out, hobbling inside. She was saying something, talking, words he couldn’t understand. It was how that woman on the mountain had sounded, but this time it resolved into nothing he could understand. But then she was asking him in heavily accented English, ‘Well, did you spring from the mountainside? Hiker are you? You must be mad, in this weather.’
Perhaps he was mad. He sank onto a thinly upholstered couch, hissing at the pain in his ankle. Coal was burning in the grate, a kettle sitting on the iron plate above. She must have been tending to the fire when he had knocked on the door.
‘Thank you,’ was all he could say. ‘Thank you.’
He was so cold his jaw felt stiff, words felt hard to form.
‘Duw, duw,’ she muttered as she went back to the stove, shaking her head. ‘Yn y tywydd ’ma? Bobl bach…’
He sat as she poured hot water into a brown teapot, and then presented him with a mug of steaming, milky tea. She was undoing his boot laces without asking, revealing the bruised and swollen ankle. She unwrapped the gauze without a word and threw it into the fire, where it blazed like tinder. Illya gazed numbly on the lacerations on his leg. They were starting to heal.
‘When Iwan comes in I’ll send him down to the village for help,’ she told him, beginning to wipe a warm cloth over that aching mess of his ankle. ‘There’s no getting the land rover out, he’ll have to take the horse. No phone up here, I’m sorry.’ She looked up at him, touched a hand briefly to his jaw. ‘How long were you lost up there, del?’
He blinked. It had been a night, hadn’t it? Everything felt weird, blurred.
‘Just overnight,’ he said. ‘Sprained my ankle. I couldn’t make it down in the dark.’
It didn’t even enter his head to mention the woman. He just sat there with his hands around that mug of tea, drinking deeply, while she carefully cleaned his ankle like a mother, and wrapped it back in bandages.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t freeze to death,’ she said.
He must have fallen asleep. He didn’t remember falling asleep. He remembered the tea, and food, and his ankle throbbing in its new bandages. He remembered her telling him to put his legs up on the sofa, to rest his head on a cushion she put behind it. He remembered the warmth pressing from the stove, an oil lamp being lit that hung from the ceiling. Then he was waking, brown woollen blankets tucked close under his chin, the window blue with dusk outside. The fire was still pressing heat into the room, and she was shifting a pan on top. There was the scent of cooking meat, sausage, maybe.
He felt exhausted in every bone, as if exhaustion ran from his skull to his feet, as if the sofa were the only thing keeping him together. Then she brought him a plate heaped with boiled cabbage, potatoes, and sausages and said, ‘He’s been down to the village. Seems like you’d raised quite a fuss down there. We don’t hear any news up here. He’s out now checking on the cattle.’
He looked up over the plate, wondering who had raised the fuss. He had come in by train the morning before and tramped up the mountain from the valley floor, and he hadn’t thought anyone would have worried about him being overdue by a day.
‘I suppose I didn’t make my hotel booking,’ he murmured. He was too tired to think.
‘They’ve had dogs out. All the local farmers, the police. All on the other side of the hill, though. We didn’t hear a thing,’ she told him.
He felt a little guilty, but mostly he wanted to sleep. Even after all that sleep, he just wanted to sleep and sleep. He touched a hand to his chest under the plate he held, felt the beating of his heart inside his ribs. He remembered that night, the dream of Napoleon, the feeling of satiation. He hadn’t dreamt at all this time. His sleep had been empty.
A banging at the door almost made him drop the plate. He looked towards it, startled, and the woman dusted her hands off on her sides and walked to the door. She opened it, and he just caught a glimpse of a man, before she moved aside and Napoleon stepped into the room, stamping mud and snow from his boots.
Illya blinked. Hadn’t Napoleon been in – Morocco, wasn’t it? He had been in Morocco, miles away from this snowy place. But he was standing in the doorway in thick winter clothes, just undoing his coat collar to reveal the thick knit jumper underneath.
‘Napoleon!’ he said in amazement, sitting up a little more, as the woman gestured him into the room. ‘Napoleon, how are you here?’
Napoleon looked lean, easy, his face slightly tanned from his recent mission. It seemed impossible that he should be here.
‘When your partner goes missing for nine days, an urge rises in you to try to find him,’ Napoleon said dryly, coming across the quarry tiled floor to stand over him. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said as she handed him tea. ‘Thank you, very gracious of you. I’ve come to relieve you of your Russian polar explorer.’
She looked as bewildered as Illya felt, but perhaps that was just Napoleon’s manner, the entry of a suave American into her cottage sanctuary.
‘Nine days?’ Illya echoed.
‘Nine days and nights, partner. Why? How long did you think you were gone?’
He shook his head slowly. He had taken the train to Tal y Cafn, disembarked with his rucksack on his back, and walked up into the hills. His goal had been Carnedd Llywelyn, and he had made it. Then that ridge had been too tempting, and he had picked his way along it to Pen Llithrig y Wrach. And there he had almost fallen. There he had mangled his ankle between the rocks, and that woman – that woman had been there. That woman had brought a rope around his waist and hauled him up, and he had been there in that tent for a night. One night.
‘I – A night,’ he said. ‘I was up there for a night.’
Napoleon crouched in front of him and touched a hand to his cheek. His fingers rasped in stubble.
‘Nine days,’ he said again, ‘unless you’ve been very much neglecting your personal grooming.’
Those wounds on his leg had started to heal. He touched his own hand to his cheek and felt the beard growth. He felt the tiredness in his bones. That dream. The heat, the flame, being over Napoleon’s body, in Napoleon’s body, all around him. That night had felt full of dreams, full of his blood singing in his veins.
He felt the heat flush into his cheek under his hand. Napoleon was just crouching there, regarding him.
‘Did you come up here on a horse?’ he asked suddenly, remembering what the woman had said about the land rover.
‘I did,’ Napoleon told him. ‘A kind and innocent gentleman in the village leant it to me.’
Illya snorted. Napoleon suited cars, he suited aeroplanes, he suited trains. He did not suit horses.
‘I don’t know why you’re laughing,’ Napoleon retorted. ‘You’re going down on the donkey.’
((O))
Illya was clean, shaven, his clothes freshly washed. The scent of laundry powder rose around him instead of the scent of sweat, the clean smell of snow, the clean smell of the air. He thought he preferred sweat and snow. His leg was elevated on the compartment seat, resting neatly on his folded coat to save the seat and deflect the wrath of the conductor, should he come round. The train was swaying lazily as it rattled along the coastline. There was no snow down here, this close to the sea.
He watched the hills through the opposite window, receding into the distance. There was still snow on the highest peaks, but the rest of the world was green.
‘It seems very green here,’ Napoleon said, following his gaze.
Illya snorted quietly. ‘After Morocco? I dare say it does.’
‘After Morocco. After New York. Things never seem to stop growing here, do they?’ He looked Illya up and down. ‘How’s that ankle?’
Illya shifted a little on the seat. They had offered him crutches at the hospital, but he had chosen to keep hold of the hawthorn stick. No break, they had told him, but the ligament was torn and the joint sprained, and the pain was little different.
‘Throbbing,’ he said.
The hawthorn stick was lying along his side between his thigh and the seat. He let his hand rest on the smooth, polished wood. It felt like something alive, or like something frozen and timeless, as timeless as a fossil.
‘Well, after you spent over a week wandering in the wilderness,’ Napoleon said. He leant forward then, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘Illya, how did you survive up there for nine days? You should have been dead.’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ Illya said rather drily, and Napoleon tutted.
‘I’m serious, Illya. What, you were – in a snow hole? In a mountain refuge?’
Illya shook his head. He didn’t even know how to begin to explain, didn’t know how to describe that woman. Even her image had started to feel like a dream. Dark haired? Golden? The colour of autumn bracken? He couldn’t even say what colour her eyes had been.
‘In – a snow hole,’ he said, keeping his fingers moving over that living wood, his eyes on the lines of the grain. ‘I knew I couldn’t get down with my foot like that.’
‘Illya,’ Napoleon prompted him gently, as if he knew he was lying.
Illya looked up suddenly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in sudden exasperation.
The police had asked him how he had survived, the doctors had asked him, the journalist from the local paper had asked him. He hadn’t had answers for any of them. All he remembered was that tent, the flickering fire, the long, long night of dreams. He remembered her saying Being alone is strength, but it is a void inside.
His inside felt hollow. He remembered that long dream, the heat, being together with Napoleon as if they were one. He let his eyes move sideways, clandestine, and saw Napoleon’s hands, the neat fingernails, the shape of his knuckles. Something in his stomach flipped over.
‘All right,’ Napoleon said gently, as if he knew he had tired the patient. ‘You hit your head, maybe. You found somewhere to shelter. You didn’t know how much time had passed.’
Illya touched a hand to his head. He didn’t remember hitting his head, didn’t remember losing consciousness, except to sleep. There was no pain there, no bruise. But the bruise on his ankle had been turning to yellow green by the time he was in that house in Cwm Cowlyd, and the cuts were starting to heal.
The train curved on along the track, the scent of sulphur in the air, the hills stretching away on one side, the sea on the other. It felt like an unreal world, like a place that shouldn’t exist. The little gap of space between the seat he reclined on and the one Napoleon was occupying opposite felt like an impossible gulf, as if he could reach out his hand and never touch the other side. But he reached out and, after a moment, Napoleon’s fingers touched his. It felt like electricity, like something had come alive. A connection.
‘You all right, partner?’ Napoleon asked gently.
‘Yes,’ he said, then again, ‘Yes. I’m all right.’ He sat there in silence for a moment, right hand on the cool of that polished stick, left one tangled with the warmth of Napoleon’s fingers. He thought of blood, heat, fire, of living bodies. He thought of the solitude of that mountain top, the feeling that those stones had been alone for aeons, the feeling of loneliness that filled the air.
He looked up, met Napoleon’s eyes. They were brown, his hair brown like peat. There was no sense of shifting, of uncertainty. He was there and real, and his eyes and hair were brown.
‘Napoleon, when we get to London, would you have dinner with me?’ he asked.