Chương 57: Waggy's domain

A man walks through the high passes and believes he has seen the mountain. The snow leopard has seen the man, the path he took, the boots he wore, and the fear he carried. It has catalogued every creature that has passed through its domain. Perhaps one man in a thousand returns to the valley with a story about a ghost in the snow."

- Old saying, the high ranges of Area 11 The PfP work that morning was straightforward - two of the rice terrace irrigation channels had silted over during the previous week's rain, and Hana wanted them cleared. Kara spent an hour knee-deep in cold mud with a flat-edged tool, working the silt loose in sections while Waggy patrolled the dry bank above, monitoring the process closely, having settled on supervision as his contribution.

"You're not helping," Kara told him. Waggy sat down. The channels ran clear by mid-morning. Kara washed the mud from his arms at the settlement's stone basin, and Hana appeared at his elbow with a cup of something warm. She waited until he had taken the first sip before she spoke.

"The snow starts around the third ridge," she said.

"Before that, the path is good - wide enough, solid footing. After the snow starts, it narrows. The Yamaarashi den above the treeline is the only thing up there that will come at you without provocation, and only if you're too close to a nest. Everything else will leave you alone if you leave it alone." Kara drank. The warmth reached his hands.

"The weather on that face changes fast," she continued.

"You'll see it coming from the north. The clouds stack differently when a front is moving in, flatter at the top. By the time you feel the wind shift, you have maybe twenty minutes. Find cover before that."

"And if we don't find cover in time?" Her mouth thinned slightly at one corner. The look of a woman who found the answer obvious and was declining, generously, to say so.

"The Yamaarashi quills are not worth dying for. Neither is the cedar. Come down and go back up." She took the empty cup.

"Good luck," she said, and went back inside. Kara spent the evening packing. Rope, the long knife, the Mistwater bottle tucked into the inner pocket where it wouldn't shift. Food for five days, weighted toward the second half of the trip when they would be working hardest. He checked the ferrule on his umbrella twice, then checked the cord he had been carrying since the first valley trip. Waggy watched from the bed, tracking each item into the pack, methodically compiling an inventory nobody had asked him for.

"You're not coming in the pack," Kara told him. Waggy looked at the pack, then at Kara, then back at the pack.

"You never fit comfortably anyway." Waggy stepped off the bed and pressed his head briefly against Kara's knee, then went to the door and sat facing it. Isamu was already in the settlement square when Kara emerged into the cold of early dawn. Ren stood beside him with Kohaku settled on his shoulder, the war umbrella across his back, his breath making small clouds in the grey air. Neither of them looked like they had just arrived. Isamu looked like he had been standing there since before the square was built.

He looked at the packs. He looked at the umbrellas. He looked at Waggy, who had pressed himself against Kara's leg and was watching Isamu back with amber eyes.

"Three days up," Isamu said.

"Two down if you are moving well. You know what you are looking for." Ren nodded. Kara nodded. Isamu held them in his gaze a moment longer, doing a final accounting.

"Don't rush the cedar," he said.

"You will know the right tree when you find it. The grain will tell you." Then he turned and walked back toward the community building, and that was the send-off. The cedar forest swallowed them within ten minutes of the settlement. The path ran straight for a while, then began to angle upward, and the light changed as they climbed - filtered first through the high canopy, then cooler and more direct as the trees thinned and the slope steepened.

Waggy moved ahead of Kara and behind Ren, occasionally angling off the path entirely to investigate something in the undergrowth before rejoining without ceremony. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Kohaku flew in long slow circles above the treeline, dropping down periodically to Ren's shoulder before ascending again.

She and Waggy had developed a pattern over the past weeks - she above, he below, the two of them triangulating the space between with a coordination that needed no discussion. The first hour was the easiest. The grade was steady without being punishing, and Ren talked through most of the way, which Kara had come to understand was simply how Ren operated.

"My grandfather made his first war umbrella at nineteen," Ren said.

"He's never told me what tree he used for the shaft. Every time I ask, he says I'll understand when I find the right one myself."

"Do you think he means this trip?" Ren glanced back.

"I think he means every trip until one of them is the right trip." He adjusted the umbrella across his back.

"That's how he teaches everything. You do it until you understand it, and he doesn't tell you when you've understood it, you just know."

"He smiled after the second valley trip. His version of it anyway," Kara said.

"First time in two years I'd seen it." Ren adjusted his footing on a root crossing the path.

"He doesn't smile when things go well, usually. He smiles when something clicks." They stopped at the second ridge to rest and to train. It had been Ren's suggestion the evening before, and Kara had agreed immediately. Two weeks of morning instruction and afternoon practice, but always in parallel - Kara with Waggy in the northern clearing, Ren with Kohaku in the lower field. Isamu had never put them together, and neither had asked why.

The objective was coordination - four of them, one shared space, working out how to move through it together without stepping on each other. Kara opened his umbrella. Ren opened his. Kohaku lifted from Ren's shoulder and held altitude. Waggy padded to the far edge of the flat ground and turned to face them, waiting. The first attempt lasted about thirty seconds before Waggy cut through a line that both umbrellas had committed to simultaneously, and everyone stopped.

"Again," Ren said. They ran it slower. The problem was not aggression or speed, it was geometry. Two umbrellas created overlapping spaces, and their companions needed to read not just their own partner's canopy but the other pair's as well. Kohaku managed this almost immediately, adjusting her angle of approach to thread between the two canopies, and made it look like nothing at all.

Waggy managed it on the fourth attempt, and then lost it on the fifth, and then found something closer to instinct on the sixth - moving with the umbrellas rather than across them, reading where the coverage was and filling the gaps instead of crossing them. There was one stretch of perhaps two minutes where all four of them were moving at once and nothing conflicted. Everything was exactly where it should have been.

Then Waggy overcommitted on a turn and Kara had to drop the canopy fast to avoid clipping him, and their coordination dissolved. Ren lowered his umbrella and looked at Kohaku, who had already landed back on his shoulder.

"She reads the space before she moves," Ren said.

"I've been trying to get her to be more aggressive and she keeps correcting me." He paused.

"I think I've been wrong about that." They packed up and continued climbing. The snow started at the third ridge, exactly where Hana had said it would. A thin cover at first, crunching under boots, then deepening as the path narrowed and the trees fell back on either side. The cedar forest below had smelled of damp earth and resin. Up here it was the opposite, each breath arriving clean and almost stripped of everything the forest had put into it. Waggy changed with it. It was not a single moment.

It was the accumulation of small things over the course of an hour. His gait loosened. He moved across the snow with a sureness that had no analogue in the cedar forest below. He found purchase on slopes where Kara was still testing his footing. He moved through a narrow section between two rock faces with his body contouring around the geometry in a way that could not have been learned in four months of life. At one point he stopped on a flat shelf of rock that jutted out above a long white slope.

He stood at the edge of it, looked out across the mountain face below, and went very still. This was his domain and he was slowly realizing it. Kara watched him from three paces back and let him have it. The slow-growth cedars were above the next rise. Isamu had described the look of them - the grain running tight, the bark denser and darker than the valley cedars, the trunk diameter smaller for the age.

They found the first grove as the light was beginning to flatten, the sun dropping behind the western face and leaving the snow a pale grey-blue. Ren walked the perimeter slowly, running a hand along bark, checking the grain at a broken branch. Kara did the same. The wood felt different - the bark had none of the give of younger cedar, no yielding at the surface, just a solidity that went all the way through. Decades of compressed winters in every ring.

"These are right," Ren observed quietly. Kara agreed. He stood for a moment with his hand against the trunk of the largest one, feeling the grain through his palm, thinking about what this wood would become. What Isamu intended it to become, though neither of them had been told that yet. They made camp at the grove's edge, where a rock outcropping blocked the wind from the north. As the last light faded, Kara looked up and saw exactly what Hana had described.

Clouds stacking on the northern horizon, flat-topped, arriving slowly but surely. The wind too was starting to shift. Ren was already watching the northern clouds. He checked the cord on his umbrella, then checked it again. Kohaku had tucked herself close against his side, her red-gold fur bright even in the fading light, her eyes on the horizon. Waggy pressed against Kara's leg and looked up at the mountain above them, and at the clouds beyond that, and decided he was ready.