Intellivore - Diane Duane [0]
JEAN-LUC PICARD was out riding. The horse was not his usual mount, but a big bay gelding named Rollo, a soft-mouthed, even-tempered creature. For this ride, the horse would have to be.
It was the third leg of his ride, now, the third day in the saddle, and his muscles were beginning to complain at a strain to which they had become unaccustomed. Sloppy of me, he thought, to let myself get so far out of trim. But we’re sorting that out now! As he reined in again, catching his breath at the twinge in the thigh muscles, Rollo snorted softly: impatience. This was a horse that liked the hard climbs, and would get impatient with a rider who couldn’t keep his pace.
“All right,” Picard said under his breath, amused. “All right, you beast; we’ll see who’s the first to call it quits.” He shook the reins. Rollo tossed his head and started upward again.
The route was a familiar one, though it had been years since he’d rode it last. The first leg meant an early-morning escape from St.-Veran—otherwise the unwelcome sounds of traffic and town life would put the horse out of humor—and the initial, fairly steep climb up through the meadows outside town, to the hiking trail that struck southeast, skirting the peak of Pointe des Marcellettes.
Once on the trail, things settled into the comfortable rhythm that Picard so relished. He could feel the movement of the horse, and hear the sound of hoofbeats, his own breathing, the wind, and the rush of the Aigue Blanche river paralleling the trail. Northward, the jagged crestline of Pic Traversier dominated the view, its flanks shaggy with pines down to the valley level; and below that, the water meadows surrounding the river course, bright with the violet and yellow of the spring pre-Alpine flowers, early mallow, and wild vanilla orchid. Behind, if he had looked over his shoulder, Picard would have had no trouble seeing the valleys and lesser peaks of the Hauts-Alpes falling away gradually through the bright mist toward the central lowlands. But he didn’t look that way. His attention and anticipation were directed toward the eastward road, where the trail zigzagged upward toward the border, and the clear view ahead was shut away by the interlaced fingers of stone that reached down to the trail from one peak or another of the Queyras range through which he traveled.
Picard rode on, too relaxed and happy even to smile. Every now and then the stillness was broken—a rockfall, turned loose by expansion in the warming day, and skittering down the scree slope above the red tile roofs of Marbre village; a little school of Alpine choughs wheeling overhead, stooping down at the trail to dive-bomb the lone rider, so that Picard had to shout to scare them off, and Rollo tossed his head and snorted in annoyance.
But such interruptions were few. The mist burned off, the wind died down; except for the crunch of Rollo’s hooves on the scree and gravel of the trail, the silence grew intense in the heat of the bright blue day.
Picard sighed in sheer pleasure at the completeness of that silence as he and Rollo rounded the spur of Tęte de Longet, and the view abruptly opened out northeastward, showing the narrow valley running back and forth in the shadow of the jagged heart peaks of the Queyras. Here the trail ceased to be any good for vehicles, and the only comment the maps would make about its quality further on was a laconic “passage incertain.” Picard drew rein where the narrowing trail passed the old hikers’ hut under Pic de Caramantran, and eyed the path above them with pleasure and anticipation. They had gained about two thousand feet over the morning’s climb; the sun was still hot, but the air was growing cooler, and in shadow it was cold enough to provoke shivers.
They climbed. Even the insanely hardy Alpine flowers gave up trying to grow here; the Arolla pines had given up a thousand feet earlier. Everything in sight was scree tumble, sloped gravel, blinding patches and streaks of snow, slick shining trickles of ice down gray-and brown-striped, crooked-layered limestone and mica schist,