Crispin's Army

Touch was the first sense Josie was aware of. At her back was the intense cold of the wall of the snow cave. Beneath her was the coiled nylon rope Crispin had laid down on the shelf he had carved, isolating them adequately, if not comfortably, from the snow. And in front of her, pressed up close to her, was Crispin, his chest her pillow, his heart beating in her ear. There was sound, the heart, and the steady breathing, and the occasional slight movement as either he or she shifted on their hard bed. And there was smell, for after nearly twenty four hours of relentless action, including their flight through the sewers, her lover was beginning to smell a little ripe, and she supposed she was no rose herself.

She reached out slowly in the pitch blackness and gently traced the contours of Crispin’s body as he lay beneath her. His chest, rising and falling, his throat, his chin, with its rough, sandpapery stubble, and lastly the bristly mop of his hair.

She smiled contentedly in the dark, letting her mind run over the events that had brought them to this improbable place, and recollected how, once they were safe from the storm in this cave, Crispin had made love to her. She wondered if the impression of the rope coils on her back would be permanent.

They rolled off the bed, yawned and stretched, though the stretching was limited by their cramped quarters. Crispin peered through a ventilation hole at a sky the colour of lapis lazuli.

“It’s still early,” he announced.

Josie checked her watch. “You’re not kidding,” she concurred. “It’s not six yet.” Then she added: “I gave you a watch, didn’t I?”

Crispin glanced belatedly at his watch. “Yes,” he said. “You did. It’s just that old habits die hard.” He began ferreting in the entrance tunnel to the cave, digging away the snow to gain access to the outside world.

“Ah!” He burst through the snow and crawled out of the burrow, blinking like a creature emerging from hibernation.

“Pass me out the gear,” he called back.

Josie passed out the rope, the rocket and grappling iron and the zapper, then their helmets.

When they were kitted out, Crispin led the way to the edge of the glacier, and began walking along the edge of it, probing and scraping the snow with the butt of the zapper, held at arm’s length in the manner of a blind man’s cane. He was raking in the back of his mind for titbits of information overheard around the fire in the longhouse when he sat and listened to the tales of the men who had roamed far and wide through this country. So much had come between those days and now, however, that the memories were faint. He also scanned the glacier, looking for a place to cross it.

“What are you looking for?” said Josie.

“A safe place to cross the glacier,” Crispin replied. “But it’s tricky. There will be crevasses.”

“How will you know a safe place to cross?” said Josie.

“Well,” Crispin answered, “if I could find a band of moraine, rock debris in the ice, it would be safer crossing on that, but it’s impossible to tell where it is under the snow.”

“Is the snow very deep?” said Josie.

“Not very,” said Crispin. “Why?”

“Well, why don’t you use the blaster to melt it and see what’s underneath?”

Crispin stopped as if poleaxed. The ridiculous simplicity of Josie’s suggestion left him stupefied. He turned to her, grinning broadly, and held out his hand for the blaster. “Your turn with the, ah, lateral thinking,” he smiled.

Josie smiled and slapped the blaster into his hand. In return she took the zapper and shouldered it.

They continued working along the edge of the glacier, Crispin melting a patch of snow every few metres with the blaster and examining what lay beneath.

The sun rose at their backs. “That will make things more difficult,” Crispin sighed. “When the ice begins to warm and melt, I fear things on the glacier will become very unstable.”

After twenty minutes, Crispin found what he had been searching for. Beneath the snow he found not dirty ice but frozen moraine, a compacted mass of small, pebble sized rocks held together by a mortar of ice.

“This might do the trick,” he smiled. “We’ll have to move both quickly and carefully, but this stuff should give us reasonable footing all the way across.”

So saying, he led the way up onto the glacier, with Josie following close behind, taking in the stark magnificence of desolate nature, untouched by human predation and seeming haughtily contemptuous of interlopers.

They had not got far onto the ice when they began to feel the moraine breaking up beneath their feet. The combination of the warmth of the sun and their weight was causing it to crumble. It disintegrated, and Crispin sat down hard as his feet were swept from under him.

“Let’s get off the glacier!” he exclaimed. “This stuff’s no good!”

They hurried back to the snow as the `pavement’ under them continued to split and fall apart.

They renewed their walking along the edge of the great river of ice. Crispin continued inspecting the surface under the snow with the aid of the blaster.

“What’s the point of looking again?” said Josie.

“If I understand it correctly,” said Crispin, “that stuff was too small to be stable. If we can find a moraine belt made of larger pieces, it might hold together longer.”

“I see,” said Josie, not encouraged by his explanation.

Half a kilometre further, the sea of ice was carving its way through a deep valley. Crispin and Josie were obliged to climb up onto the ice, picking their way along its fringe. Shortly, Crispin found some more moraine, but it was the same pebble-dash material, so they pressed on. The glacier passed over a hump in the bedrock far below, and effect of the tension was deep transverse crevasses running across the ice like deep scars. They laboured up the slope and over the top. A little further on, the glacier then crossed a dip, and the reverse was visible: compression pushing huge wedges of ice called seracs proud of the surface of the glacier. The two travellers had to slip through narrow crevices worn between ice and rock.

A hundred metres down the slope past this, Crispin found more moraine, this time composed of larger pieces of rock.

“This has got to be it,” he said glumly. “Look.” He pointed. Two hundred metres further on, the glacier terminated. It was impossible to see what lay beyond it, but the likelihood was, he knew, a long drop onto granite rubble.

“I think we’d better get roped together,” Crispin said drily.

So saying, he took the rope from his shoulder and tied one end around his waist. He paid out twenty metres, and Josie secured the rope around her waist before looping the remainder through her belt. Crispin shoved the blaster into his belt, Josie secured the zapper across her back, and they began once more to make their way across the glacier.

They moved as quickly as they dared on the uncertain surface, casting wary glances about. To their left, the ice rose to a crest. To their right they could see the foot of the glacier, where savage pinnacles rose.

When they were half way across, Crispin felt his heart rise. It seemed as if they would make it without incident. But he felt the warmth of the sunshine on his face and saw tremulous wisps of steam rising from the ice.

There was a cracking sound.

“Crispin!”

Crispin spun to see a huge chunk of ice, a fragment of a sérac, broken loose, crashing towards them.

“Down, Josie!” Crispin yelled in alarm.

They both threw themselves on their faces. Crispin unshouldered the grappling hook. The slab of ice rushed between them, snagging the rope. He heard Josie screaming, and the rope dug into his stomach as it took her full weight, dragging him slithering and sliding over the ice towards the drop at the end of the glacier. He rammed the hook into the ice, but it merely scored the surface. Again he struck the ice, the hook scraped, dragged, and held.

Josie’s screams had reached an ear-splitting pitch. Looking round, Crispin saw the rope disappearing over the edge of the glacier where the ice slab had smashed its way through the pinnacles. A cloud of powder snow was settling.

“Josie?” he called. “Josie! Speak to me!”

After an almost intolerable delay, there came a grunt. “What would you like me to say?”

“Are you in one piece?” He called.

“One moment,” she called back. “I’ll check.”

Crispin smiled. Even in this extremity, her laconic humour didn’t fail her.

“Bruised like you wouldn’t believe,” she announced, “but I don’t think anything’s broken. What do we do now?”

“Are you close to the ice?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’m going to pull you up. You can help by walking up the ice cliff. But hang on, I’m going to make things a bit easier this end.”

“Hang on!” Josie wailed. “There’s not a lot else I can do!”

Crispin drew the blaster and adjusted it to a moderate setting. He played it over the ice in front of him, cutting steps one by one.

When he was sure that the steps had frozen firmly he called to Josie again. “Josie! I’m going to start pulling you up.”

“Well, hurry up!” she demanded. “I can’t wait around here all day.”

Crispin dug the soles of his boots into the two lowest steps as hard as he could, grasped the rope, and took the strain. Centimetre by precious centimetre, he began hauling up the rope and its helpless cargo. He edged backwards up his steps until he reached the topmost one, whereupon he wound the dearly won slack round his left forearm and cut more steps with his blaster. Then he repeated the process, pulling Josie back from oblivion. Four times he repeated the action, gaining a couple of metres each time, until he felt close to exhaustion, and his left arm was complaining bitterly of the tourniquet effect of the rope snaking round it. At last he was rewarded with the sight of hands, arms, a much-beloved head emerging from the monotony of white.

In the same moment the cracking sound was heard again. He saw the horrified expression on Josie’s face as she crouched on hands and knees at the very edge of the glacier.

His head spun in the opposite direction to see another immense projectile hurtling towards him.

He flung himself sideways as best he could, his arm still a captive of the rope, and pressed his body as deeply as he could into the snow. He felt the rush of wind as the ice hurtled past, then he heard it smash loudly at the foot of the glacier.

He raised his head tentatively and saw the dark figure of Josie lying face down in the snow. Furrows in the ice showed where the missile had swept past her, less than a metre from her.

“Josie?” he called.

She looked up, her face drawn but resolute. “I’m okay,” she called.

Crispin slithered down the slope to her, and almost continued over the edge. He gathered her into his arms and looked deep into her eyes. He had so nearly lost her! They kissed passionately, clinging to each other as they might cling to life itself, there on the very brink of death.

Another slab of runaway ice schussing past scant metres from them brought home to them the unsuitability of the locale for their passion.

“How do we get off this wretched glacier?” said Josie.

“All our options are dicey,” said Crispin. “I hate to have to say it, but...”

Josie followed his gaze to where the loop of the rope between them still hung in space. “You’re kidding!” she gasped.

Crispin plucked at the webbing harness across her chest. “We have the means to rappel down the face. This place is getting very unhealthy, and that is our quickest way out. Undo your end of the rope and drop it over.”

Mumbling something under her breath, Josie freed herself from the line and watched with trepidation as it snaked away into space, coming to an abrupt halt a metre and a half above the pieces of fragmented ice.

“Only just long enough,” Crispin sighed.

While Josie coupled herself to the line, Crispin returned to where the grappling hook was embedded in the glacier and stood with his feet planted over the shaft, willing the flukes of the hook to bite deeper into the ice.

Josie positioned herself on the lip, gave a little wave, and disappeared again, this time under control. She descended the ice face in a series of bounds, pushing off from the wall with her feet, until she landed with a satisfying crunch and a sigh of relief at the bottom. She stepped away to one side.

“All yours, maestro!” she called.

She watched Crispin get into position above her. Then she heard the now familiar noise of another serac snapping, then the whoosh as it sped down the launching ramp of the glacier.

“Oh shit!” Crispin gasped. Then he yelled: “Josie! Hide!”

He launched himself into his descent not a second too soon as a monstrous frozen projectile catapulted off the ice precisely where he had been standing.

Josie flung herself against the cliff face, arms raised protectively, as the ice smashed to smithereens a short way further down the mountainside.

She looked up to see Crispin serenely dropping the last few metres and releasing himself from the end of the line as she had done.

Josie ran to him and hugged him. “I thought you were going to be killed!”

Crispin gave her an impetuous grin. “So did I.”

“And I would have been left out here in the middle of nowhere on my own. If there’s any more of that stuff to be done, you can go first. That way, if I die, you can go on on your own. If you die, I’m stuffed.”

Crispin put an arm round her shoulder and squeezed. “No one’s going to die,” he reassured her. “But we’re not out of trouble yet. Hand me the zapper.”

He began picking his way over the ice and slush, staring up at the dangling rope.

“Crispin,” Josie moaned softly. ”Please be careful.” He gave her a look which he obviously hoped would be reassuring. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“That rope could well be useful again,” Crispin observed.

He took aim with the zapper at the point where the rope passed over the top of the glacier and fired. Amid a cloud of vaporised snow, the severed rope fell to the bottom of the cliff. Crispin went and picked it up. The heat of the zapper beam had fused the individual strands as it cut the rope, and in the chill air, the molten end had hardened by the time it reached the ground.

Crispin coiled the rope neatly and looped it over one shoulder.

“Right,” he smiled. “Let’s get going before anything else comes down on our heads.”

“Suits me,” said Josie. They started walking. After a few minutes she added: “Any chance of something to eat? My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”

“Same here,” Crispin grinned. “Trouble is, there won’t be much game running round at these altitudes. Still, keep your eyes open.”

As they headed on down the mountain, Josie scanned all about for something they could catch and eat. In so doing she glimpsed, high up, the flash of sunlight on metal.

She snatched at Crispin’s sleeve. “Look,” she urged, pointing up into the majestic essay in azure and white behind them.

Again the glinting. “Persistent, aren’t they?” said Crispin, his voice betraying an ill-concealed respect for fellow hunters.

“These helmets are a dead giveaway,” Josie observed.

“That’s right,” said Crispin, his hand moving to his chinstrap. “They are. Let’s lose them.”

They undid the shiny helmets, flung them aside, and quickened their pace.