To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [218]
They lost a great deal of time circumventing a bottomless creek which, alone, either of them could have bridged or leaped over. There were two streams to cross, neither as wide as a river, but fiercer. Early on, they had achieved a physical congruity not unlike, she thought, that of a small team of acrobats, from which the horse was not excluded. Their limbs, their shoulders, their combined motive power were all part of the machine they had assembled to take them alive through this journey.
Agile and slight as a marmoset, she explored for him, using him as a ladder, climbing over his shoulders to test some high crumbling spur. In his turn, when the leap was too great or the water too violent, he carried her in whatever unorthodox way allowed him to manage the pony. Their hands in their soaked gloves gripped and grasped one another and they smiled, even though it was painful to breathe. She was too tired to remember what she was to call him, and so called him nothing at all. She kept watching what his beard revealed of his face, but his eyes remained clear and intent, although their setting was chipped out of lava. He was extraordinarily even-tempered. As darkness began to come on, and over and over again they were baulked by some hazard, he simply evolved different plans, and she abetted him.
Soon it was apparent that they were not going to reach Hlídarendi. Also, as the snow around them grew dim, she saw something else. Beneath the seething smoke-clouds of Hekla, a smouldering glow had appeared in the vacant dark sky filled with silence. Very soon after that, like a monster disturbed, the ground beneath their feet grumbled and stirred, and was quiet. With one accord, then, they stopped.
He said, ‘So the secondary plan. We have ten minutes of light. We gamble on reaching Hlídarendi, or we use the time to dig in where we can.’
He didn’t have to expound. If an eruption took place, they would be as well or badly off here as at Hlídarendi. In any case, the farmhouse at Hlídarendi, though providing comfort, would be deserted. By now, everyone within reach of both mountains would have left. Robin had gone, and at least the ships had received some sort of warning, if not the one they had striven to bring them. Now they had no one to think of but themselves.
She said, ‘The pony is failing.’
He said, ‘Then we look for some shelter.’ On his own, he would have taken the gamble, she knew. So would she. But to lose was to find themselves caught in the cold and the dark with a sick man who could not survive it.
They found a place just in time: a flaw in the lava, half tunnel, half cavern, and dry beyond the drift of blown snow. As they were lifting the Icelander down from the pony, the animal dropped. She knelt beside it a moment, then unstrapped and brought over the saddle to where the sick man was lying. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing. When she came back with the saddle-turf, her partner had made the leather into a pillow,’ and laid his jacket over the man. She said, ‘We can burn the turf now.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Poor little pony. Well, now he has a life after death. He will make a warm bed, for a while. He will give blood to mix with our whey; we need the warmth and the nourishment. And if the lava entombs us, we can skin him and eat him before we start on each other.’
He had begun to move Glímu-Sveinn to lie in the curve of the horse’s round belly; she helped him. He said, ‘I’ll unpack and get stones. We’ll light the fire and block up the entrance, once the light goes.’
His coat had been stained with Paúel Benecke’s blood. His rough tunic beneath was also stained. She said, as they worked,