71

Chapter 19

Stone has his flint out again, and a small pile of wood (He has everything in his bag. There were also a couple stunted trees growing from the cracks in the stone, and he had broken up those) sits before him. Suddenly golden sparks fly, illuminated against the shadows, and smoke rises from the wood, turning to a small flame, which grows into a controlled blaze.
I wander around the steep slope, and find a few large rocks, which I roll down to our temporary campsite, and arrange like chairs around the fire. Stone is already sitting on a stone (How ironic. I guess it's hard to have a name that's a common object. How often do you say Ash?) so I place one for me and one for the kid. I also use one, and lean it up against the outcropping that had protected the man and Clay, to prop up the patient.
The ash (Okay, but still, 'Stone' is way more common than 'Ash') from the fire rains down from the heavens, falling on Stone's jet black hair, speckling it with white like snow. Then I realize it is snow.
"It's snowing." I say, but it's rather unnecessary, because it's now falling in large white globs, more like snowballs than snowflakes. The fire flickers and dies, the coals rolling across the stony mountain, blown by the growing wind.
We have nothing to hide below, nothing to shelter us, but the mountain itself. That might have helped, had the wind not been blowing the snow from the wrong side, right at the mountain, battering us.
Stone's pack, which is slumped on the ground, begins to slide up the path, and he scrambles to get ahold of it, throwing it on his back. The wind begins to howl stronger, my thick brown hair streaming like a flag straight out behind me.
The way we are positioned on the mountain, we're almost around the back of it from the beginning of the trail, so the wind is pushing us up and around to the other side of the mountain.
Clay is hanging on to his father again (That poor man) and the man (I need to stop calling his that. It's the middle of a snowstorm, so I can't ask him right now, and I decide to call him Fox for now, because I'm not in a creative mood.) is groaning, clutching blindly at his chest. You know, I don't understand why he won't open his eyes- it's not like he got shot in the eye.
"Against the wall!" Stone shouts above the wind, but his voice is almost lost. He flattens himself to the stone side of the mountain, hair blowing across his face is the whipping wind. I go to copy him, and then I see a large boulder being pushed up the hill, right in front of us up the path.
My head turns as I follow it, and it slowly is rolled by the fierce wind all the way up and over the far side of the mountain.
"No!" I cry, and Stone frowns at me. Fox and his son are protected by the outcropping of rock, so they aren't experiencing anything near what me and Stone are.
"No, we can use the wind! Let it carry us up the path! The mountain will protect us on the other side!" I yell into the wind as loudly as possible, feeling as though the biting air were sucking my breath away.
Stone opens his mouth to day something, then a couple boulders are rolled up the path by the force of the wind. He looks back at me and nods.
"What about them!" His voice barely reaches me, but he jerks his head toward the fox people. I purse my lips- yes, that presented some difficulties.
I stare out into the now biting storm, as snow like bullets pounds my face, burning my flesh. There's a dry scraping noise below us on the trail, and I turn to see what it is.
A long, wide scrap of bark is being blown up the hill, just about the size of a stretcher, which gives me an idea.
"Get it!" I call to Stone, leaping off the wall, and catching the bark, before it can get any further. Stone grabs it too, but he looks confused.
"How-" His eyes travel between the bark and Fox, and then he slowly nods in understanding. "Ah... Hold it, I'll get him." He makes sure I have the bark grasped securely, and strides over the man, head-bowed against the wind.
It's no easy task holding the stretcher. It's like a sail in the wind, pulling away from me. I allow my claws to shoot out, digging into the bark, as I wait for Stone to get the wounded man.
He's saying something to the kid, Clay, but I can't make it out over the howling wind. I'm squinting, and blinking rapidly, the snow and ice freezing on my eyelashes, turning my lips blue. My feet are bare, and the snow burns my flesh like fire.
Clay relinquishes his grasp on his father, and Stone bends, hoisting Fox onto his back fireman style. Luckily, Fox isn't a big man- Stone might be taller- and Stone is very strong.
I want to shield my eyes from the digging wind, but I need both hands to hold the sled. As it is, I can barely move my fingers from the cold, and I hope I won't lose any from frostbite.
A large gust blows in a huge amount of snow, and the other's are temporarily lost from my view, even though they're only about five feet away. Then there's a dark shadow that appears through the blinding white, and Stone emerges, Fox draped over his back. He kneels by the bark, and grunts, setting Fox down as gently as he can. He stands, and goes back to where he had been, presumably for the kid.
I glance down at the wounded man, his eyes still closed, face pulled back in a grimace. I feel pity for him- Not only because he has a hole in his lung, but because all he has covering his upper body is the bandage. In retrospect, I think we should have put his tunic back on.
"Hold in there, Stone's getting your son." I say to him, though I'm not sure he can hear me over the storm. Speaking of which, I can't believe is happening.
It's late fall, so it's timing isn't unusual. It was a cool day, but not freezing. The sunset had been a winter one, pale and washed-out, and the sky had been gray, but there hadn't been a single storm cloud in the sky all day. The storm had come out of nowhere.
Stone emerges from the whiteness, Clay clinging to his back. I expect him to put the kid down on the stretcher with his father, but instead he waves me on, cueing it's time to move.
I let go of the stretcher, hoping the wind won't blow it off the cliff. Instead, it skates forward across the stone, slower than it had been going, due to the weight of Fox, but it was moving at a controlled rate up the hill, so if it started to go off the side, we would have time to grab it.
I bend my head, stepping up the slope, and we begin the trek. The wind whips my dress around me, the light fabric billowing around my legs. It's a relatively thin dress, and doesn't offer much protection from the icy wind and snow.
Stone is a little bit behind him, giving Clay a piggy-back ride up the mountain. Fox's stretcher moves a little ahead of me, stopping and starting to scrape across the stone, as the wind drops and picks up.
The only thing that really keeps me going, is the thought of shelter from the biting wind on the other side of the mountain. It's so wide though, we have to walk almost a mile to reach it. The wind is at our backs, though, which lends us speed, so we don't have to work so hard to travel up the steady slope.
All I can think the entire way is- Oh my God, this is day one. It's supposed to take two weeks to take the top. Two weeks of this. It's not an encouraging thought, but I can hope that the storm will let up soon. Or else we'll all freeze to death by the morning.
"There'd-d b-better be re-rebels on the t-top of this-s g-od-forsaken m-mountain, S-Stone!" I call back to him, gritting my teeth at the thought we might climb this entire thing for nothing. But, no, there had been so many people trying to reach the rebels. And what had happened to the people ahead of us? Some of them had been shot down, but most of them had survived. That meant we were bringing up the rear of the reinforcements.
"And if-f there isn't?" His voice comes through the storm, sounding hollow and far-away, muffled by the wind.
"I p-push you off the s-s-side!" I shout back, forging on. My legs are numb, I can't feel the fabric of my dress beating against them anymore, my feet stinging with pins and needles every time I take a step. My arms are bundled around me, trying to keep in my body heat, but I begin to wonder if I could move them down if I wanted to. My ears are burning with a numb, throbbing sensation, and I'm betting they're beet red, as well as my nose. Looking down to my fingernails, the sensitive skin underneath is turning purple/blue, which means my lips are too. I can see frost forming between my lashes, making it difficult and painful for me to blink, and I'm now scared to open my mouth, if the saliva might freeze and suffocate me.
I'm sure my legs are turning to lead. I continue to stumble over nothing at all, scraping my skin on the sharp rocks around me. The path is growing more narrow, so now we can only go single-file. I watch Fox on his bark stretcher carefully, making sure he doesn't tumble off the side of the mountain.
"Almost t-there..." Stone says behind me. Fox groans on his sled, clutching his chest, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"We b-better be. Fox can't hold-d-d on much lon-longer." I call back to him.
"W-who?" I realize I had called the man what I call him in my head.
"Him!" I look over my shoulder, jerking my head towards the injured man on the sliding stretcher. I see Stone nod, Clay clutching his little paws (I just say that because they're small and red and furry, like permanent gloves. They're actually the shape of a human hand, except a little rounder, the fingers a little stubbier. He also has claws.) around Stone's neck, almost throttling him.
I turn back to the path ahead of me, squinting through the pounding storm. I can barely hear anything but the howling of the wind in my ears, and my jaw hurts because I'm grinding my teeth, trying to ignore the burning pain on my arms and face. The rest of my body is numb.
Then I see a light up ahead. A flickering, reddish glow, that vanishes after a moment, hidden by the billowing snow. I blink, wondering if I'm going crazy after about thirty or forty minutes exposed to this violent storm. No, there it is again, a warm golden light up ahead.
"There's a light!" I exclaim, picking up my pace. The wind picks up, and Fox's stretcher surges forward, a little too far to the left. I throw myself forward, fingers grasping the edge of the bark, just before it goes over the side. Straining, I pull the sled back onto the trail, as far away from the edge as possible, and give it a little push.
I glance over my shoulder. Stone is close behind, the fox kid on his shoulders pressing his face into the first's fluffy black hair, flattening his black wolf ears. Stone looks irritated, but I find it incredibly funny.
I turn back, putting my remaining resilience into the next few steps. So, so close. My foot catches on a rock, and the ground comes up to meet my face, knocking the breath out of my. I glance at my foot, blood dripping onto the stone surface beneath it, but I feel no pain. I know if I live long enough, I'll feel it though.
I pick myself up, and surge forward again, determined. I haven't come this far just to die in a snowstorm, so close to shelter. My claws come out, digging into the ground. I press myself up against the side of the mountain, clawing at the rough rock for extra propulsion. So close...