Warlock

we will survive it, and as we have survived greater moments of tragedy. And, too, one must reason that if the boy would never become a man, it is as well that he has not survived to take those reins.”
        
        “Perhaps,” the commander said. “But there is more and worse to my situation.”
        
        The Shaker waited. A candle guttered out across the cavern, leaving one group of men in darkness. Someone went to pull another tallow from the supplies, and in a moment there was softly shimmering orange light against that wall again. Someone laughed, and the brightly illuminated group huddled over some joke or other.
        
        “Jamie was the son of a woman named Minalwa, a dark and beautiful woman with large eyes, long hair, and high, full breasts, with a laugh like that of birds and a voice that was a whisper. The General and I both were in love with her at one time. Perhaps I should have contested his claim. He never realized how I felt, and I'm certain he would have relinquished her if he had understood. But in those days, I worshipped him-still do-as we all did for delivering us from the string of Oragonian tyrants that had made life so terribly miserable for us all. I could not trespass on his wants. And I lost the woman. In time, however, I discovered that she felt much the same about me, and because our mutual affections led us to foolishness, I got her with child. He was a boy, and his name was Jamie Dark, for his father thought it best to leave the General under the impression Minalwa's baby was his own. Besides saving ill blood, I thought my boy would one day rule the Darklands, which was more of a heritage than I could ever give him. But he became what he was, a coward, and my adultery was punished by the gods.
        
        “Now, you see, I must cope with the sadness of my lifelong friend, the General. I must cope with my own sadness over the death of my own son. And I must live with the knowledge that I once sinned and that my sinning led to the death of Jamie in the end.”
        
        “One can blame himself too much for things which are beyond the control of men. Sometimes, simple acceptance is all we have.”
        
        “True enough. But sometimes, acceptance requires a bit of time. Will you stay with me, at least in spirit, until this night has given me that time?”
        
        The Shaker said that he would. In the two great caverns, relatively warm for the first time in days, the Banibaleers curled and slept, their bellies freshly filled with warm broth, stale bread, and dried beef.
        
        Outside, the storm grew in fury, into impossible peaks of howling, thundering wind and impenetrable curtains of snow…
        

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    12
        
        
        
        They reached the pass late the next afternoon.
        
        Before making camp, they had descended a good two thousand feet of the eastern slopes. Even standing on the brink of the pass, so far above the valley where Perdune lay, they could not see the tops of the gigantic mountains around them. Clouds obscured the towering peaks and gave the illusion that there really was no stopping place for them. Two thousand feet down, they found an overhang which sheltered a piece of land from the wind and from the worst of the driving sheets of snow which had become so dense as to almost bar their progress.
        
        The cold had been unbelievable for the last several hours, dropping to forty-one degrees below zero, so that frostbite was a constant danger. The commander would have preferred to move down at least another five thousand feet where it might be as much as thirty and surely no less than twenty degrees warmer. But the men, sapped by the day-long battle with the wind and the cold and the snow which nearly blinded them, could not have managed the descent. There would have been more deaths, and no one wanted to risk that. When the overhang was found, the old man made the decision to remain there, using up all their stores of fuel in the hopes of making it far enough down the next day to be able to survive the following night without fuel.
        
        Fires were built, and special duty rosters were established to take care of them. The windbreakers were strung across the front of the overhang, attached to the jutting rock above and driven into the stone below. The heat was held in where the men huddled, but even so it would be a chilly night