the oracle?’ The father stuttered the words out, wanting to run but having come too far to leave without answer.
‘Greatness,’ Agatta said. ‘Greatness and torment.’ A pause. ‘And fire.’
In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz had always known about the hole. Her people called it the Pit of the Missing and she had carried the knowledge of it with her like a midnight eye watching from the back of her mind. It seemed her entire life had been spent circling that pit in the ice and that now it was drawing her in as she had always known it would.
‘Hey!’ Zeen pointed. ‘The mountain!’
Yaz squinted in the direction her younger brother indicated. On the horizon, barely visible, a black spot, stark against all the white. A month had passed since the landscape had offered anything but white and now that she saw the dark peak she couldn’t understand how it had taken Zeen’s eyes to find it for her.
‘I know why it’s black,’ Zeen said.
Everyone knew but Yaz let him tell her; at twelve he thought himself a man, but he still boasted like a child.
‘It’s black because the rocks are hot and the ice melts.’
Zeen lowered his hand. It seemed strange to see his fingers. In the north where the Ictha normally roamed the whole clan went so heaped in hide and skins that they barely looked human. Even in their tents they wore mittens any time fine tasks were not required. It was easy to forget that people even had fingers. But here, as far south as her people ever travelled, the Ictha could almost walk bare-chested.
‘Well remembered.’ Yaz would miss her little brother when they threw her into the pit. He was bright and fierce and her parents’ joy.
‘You’ve spotted it then?’ Quell came alongside them. He had no sled to drag and could move up and down the line checking on the thirty families. He nodded towards the Black Rock. ‘I remember how big it is, but still, it always surprises me when we get close.’
Yaz forced a smile. She would miss Quell too, even though at seventeen he boasted nearly as much as Zeen.
‘Always?’ she asked. Quell had been to the gathering twice. Once more than her.
‘Always.’ Quell nodded, almost concealing his grin. He held her gaze for a moment with pale eyes then moved on up the column. He passed Yaz’s parents and uncle, who between them pulled the boat-sled, pausing to swap a comment with her father. One day soon he would have to ask her parents for permission to share Yaz’s tent. Or so he thought. Yaz worried what Quell might do when the regulator picked her out. She hoped he would prove himself grown enough to embrace this fate and not shame the Ictha before the southern tribes.
‘Tell me about the testing,’ Zeen said.
Yaz sighed and leaned into the sled traces. She had of course told Zeen everything a hundred times over but she had been the same herself before her first visit to the hole.
‘You’ll be fine.’ Zeen’s worries were nothing, it was just the mind turning on itself when there wasn’t anything to do but pull a load mile upon mile, day upon day. The journey had proved difficult, the ice rucking up before them in pressure ridges as if seeking to impede their progress. For the last week the pace had been gruelling as the clan-mother sought to make up lost time. Still, they would arrive a day before the ceremony. ‘Don’t worry about it, Zeen.’
On Yaz’s first trip south she had been sure the regulator would sniff out her wrongness. Somehow she had passed inspection. But that had been four years ago, and what had been starting to break within her back then was now fully broken. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘But what if I’m not?’ The sight of the Black Rock seemed to have opened the gates to her brother’s fear.
‘The southern tribes are not like the Ictha, Zeen. They have many that are born wrong. We have to be pure. Weakness was bred out of us long ago,’ she lied. ‘When you walk the polar ice you are either pure or dead.’
‘Strangers!’ Quell came hurrying back down the column, excited. ‘We’re getting close!’
Yaz looked to where her parents had turned their heads. Faint in the distance a grey line could be seen, another clan trekking in from the east. And between the two columns, a single sled closing on the Ictha at remarkable speed.
Zeen stopped to stare in amazement. ‘How can—’
‘Dogs,’ Yaz said. ‘You’ll get to see your first dogs!’ Even now, as the distance narrowed, the hounds pulling the sled resolved into dots in a line before it. Soon she could make them out against the snow: heavy beasts, silver-white fur bulking them up still further, their breath steaming before them. In the far north the cold would kill them, but south of the Keller Ridges all the tribes used dogs. The Ictha said that a true man pulls his own sled. The southerners laughed at that and called it something that only a man with no dogs would say. Even so, everyone gave the Ictha respect. Anyone who has known cold understands that only a different breed can dare the polar ice.
‘Get along!’ Behind them the Jex twins shouted. Zeen started forward again just in time to avoid having them drag their boat-sled over him. Yaz kept level with her brother, watching the strangers approach.
Within a few minutes the whole column came to a halt while at the front Mother Mazai greeted the men dismounting their sled. Yaz could smell the dogs on the wind, a musky scent. Their yapping rang in ears unfamiliar with anything but the voices of men, of the ice, and of the wind. The sound had a strangeness to it and a beauty, and she found herself wanting to go closer, wanting to meet with one of these alien creatures, bound just like her to a sled by strips of hide.
‘They’re so different!’ Zeen struggled out of his harness and broke from the line to get a better view. He meant the people not the dogs.
‘I know.’ It had been the first thing to strike Yaz at her previous gathering. It wasn’t so much the difference of the southern tribes from the Ictha, it was that even among themselves they were varied, some with the copper skin of an Ictha, some redder, so dark as to almost defy colour, and some much paler, almost pink. Their hair varied too, from Ictha black to shades of brown. Even their eyes were not all the white on white that Yaz saw at almost every turn but a bewildering range. Many had eyes almost as dark as the mountain behind them where the rock won clear of the ice. ‘Don’t stare!’
Zeen waved her off and edged up the column for a closer look. She understood his fascination. Mazai said that where there are many tasks, many kinds of tools are needed. The Ictha, she said, had a single task. To endure. To survive. And to survive a polar night required a singular strength, one recipe. The clan-mother spoke of metals and of how one might be mixed with others to gain particular qualities. There was, she said, a single alloy fit for the purpose of the north, and that was why all who dwelt there held so much in common.
Yaz edged out to join her brother, ignoring her mother’s hiss. Soon they would cast her down the Pit of the Missing into a darkness from which there was no return. She might as well see as much of what the world had to offer as she could before they took it away from her.
‘That one’s the leader.’ Zeen pointed to a man who stood taller than any Ictha and thin, too thin for the north. In places strands of grey shot through the blackness of his hair.
In the months-long polar night the breath you exhaled through your muffler formed two types of frost, the normal southern one, and a finer ice that would smoke away into nothingness within the tent’s warmth. The Ictha called it the dry ice for it never melted, only smoked away. In places, in the depth of the long night, dry ice would drift above the water ice and, when the sun’s red eye returned, a great cold fog would rise in clouds miles high. The storyteller had it that dry ice formed when part of the air itself froze.
Yaz