Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [101]
A cramp hit me as we traversed one such section: a fairly broad lip of rock beneath a jutting boulder made of some striated element more impervious to the weathering effect of the wind. I fell to my knees, clutching at my calf.
The pain was agonizing, as if a ligament had snapped or a muscle had torn. I was familiar with the sensation - I used to play rugby for Blackheath -
but it as no more welcome for that. Fortunately Ace was also familiar with cramp, and forced me to lie flat whilst she massaged my calf until the muscle relaxed.
'Are you sure that we're headed in the right direction?' I asked as her fingers probed my leg.
'No. I haven't seen anywhere for them to have diverted, though, so it looks like we're headed for the top.'
The wind picked up as we climbed higher. It attacked us first from one direction and then from another, circling around to find our weakest spots, sometimes insinuating its cold, hard fingers into our clothes and sapping the strength from our limbs, sometimes buffeting us hard and making us lose our precious fingerholds. There was no mercy here: the elements were pitting their strength against two pygmies who had dared profane this sacred place. Perversely these natural attacks gave me some small measure of comfort, for compared to them the evil of men such as Maupertuis and his mysterious master were as nothing. If we could defeat the mountain, I felt that we could defeat anything.
That epiphany proved to be the turning point of the climb. Perhaps the cold had finally got to me and numbed my marrow but I felt warmer and more confident after that. Even when the rock vanished, to be replaced with a sheer wall of black ice, I did not quail. Ace and I took turns with her miraculous weapon, which she had set to produce a thin knife of sunlight, cutting steps into the ice. I took my cue from her: each step that she cut was precisely the right size, no deeper than it should be, and spaced apart from its neighbours by a comfortable distance. My own initial attempts were farcical but I soon learned how to wield the device, and I found that I could match her delicacy of touch.
At one stage, when Ace was above me, cutting away, and I was clinging to the steps that I had recently cut but which had refrozen within seconds, I looked past her. The mountain could only have been a few hundred yards in diameter at that point, and I was shocked to discover that the sky was only a few body-lengths away. At that range the ice was pitted, rough and grey. Gaps existed between the ice and the mountain: black voids, like wounds in reality. The river of liquid atmosphere, just a trickle at this elevation, emerged from one of them. The view was half-hidden by tendrils of mist which curled around us. Looking down, first a few inches, then a few feet, and then further, I found that I could no longer make out the ground.
We were suspended between heaven and hell, cocooned in the mist.
'Jesus, I didn't realize we were so close.'
Ace's voice surprised me out of my reverie. I climbed past her and took the lightgun.
'A few more minutes should see us to the top,' I grunted, and set to work cutting a set of steps and then a rough platform for us to stand on, side by side.
Reverently, I reached up and touched the sky. It was as hard as the mountain had been, and as cold. I craned my neck and looked out, upside down, along its surface. My mind played funny tricks with perspective, for a moment I couldn't tell which direction was up and which was down, what was surface and what was sky. Some primitive part of my brain kept screaming that I was going to fall, but only for a moment.
And then a distorted face thrust itself out of a patch of mist at me, and I did scream.
Ace laughed.
'It's only one of the skaters,' she said.
Catching my breath, I looked closer. The face, which looked so much like a gross caricature of a well-fed, gout-ridden Dickensian gentleman, or a rector straight out of Trollope, gazed with an expression