(eng) Paul McAuley by Austral

Author:Austral [Austral]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

16

Close to the end of the day the girl and I drove up out of the forest and crossed the broad snow-covered saddle between the Cayley Valley and Blériot Basin. A solitary peak stood off to the north, hard pinkish light glowing on its flanks, and the wind blew cold and clean and the last of the sunlight turned the snow crust’s icy lace into a carpet of diamonds.

We’re simple creatures. A change in the weather or a glimpse of a distant panorama can transform our mood in an instant. Looking across snowy ridges towards that mountain peak I was struck head to toe by a tingling charge of exhilaration. We had escaped, I was about to take up the path Mama and I had once followed, and this time it would all come right.

But as we descended between stark bluffs towards Blériot Basin I saw that much of the forest through which Mama had led me all those years ago had been replaced by square regiments of dark green conifers and a loose grid of access roads. A rocky hill rose from these plantations like a besieged castle. Further off, the lights of a cluster of greenhouse domes shone small and distinct at the mouth of the Blériot River, and a dab of white smoke feathered from the tall chimneys of some kind of processing plant.

I quickly disabused the girl when she pointed to the settlement and asked if that was where we were going. My brief euphoria had been displaced by nervy apprehension. When I spotted something glinting high in the darkening sky, heading north above the basin, I thought for a moment it might be a police heli or some kind of military craft, then realised that it was one of the cargo drones which transported fresh seafood from the coastal fishing villages to the cities. Still, I felt horribly exposed as we drove on in blue twilight, over stony slopes and through threadbare meadows at the eastern edge of the basin. There was entirely too much civilisation here for my liking, a good chance that we might run into a crew of foresters, a security patrol, a stray hiker …

We stopped for the night in the cover of a patch of trees growing alongside a swift little stream. I constructed a half-circle of loose stones and the girl helped me pack the chinks with snow and roof it with cut branches. While she warmed herself in front of the fire I’d lit in front of our little shelter, I foraged along the bank of the stream, finding patches of trampled snow where reindeer had snouted for moss and lichen, no sign of any other life except for a small bird that, scared up from a clump of dead grass, whirred away above the water and was quickly lost in the twilight.

I picked leaves from low tangles of box-leaf barberry and dwarf willow and winter’s bark, dug up willow roots, set out the wire loop traps I’d taken from the refuge.

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