Kitabı oku: «The Broken Empire», sayfa 6
11
Wedding Day
Mountains are a great leveller. They don’t care who you are or how many.
Some have it that the Builders made the Matteracks, drinking the red blood of the earth to steal its power, and that the peaks were thrown up when the rocks themselves revolted and shrugged the Builders off. Gomst tells it that the Lord God set the mountains here, ripples in the wet clay as he formed the world with both hands. Whoever it was that did the work, they have my thanks. It’s the Matteracks that put the ‘high’ into the Renar Highlands. They march on east to west, wrinkling the map through other kingdoms, but it’s in the Highlands that they do their best work. Here it’s the Matteracks that say where you can and can’t go.
It’s been said once or twice that I have a stubborn streak. In any case I have never subscribed to the idea that a king can be told where he can’t go in his own kingdom. And so in the years since arriving as a callow youth, in between learning the sword song, mastering the art of shaving, and dispensing justice with a sharp edge, I took to mountain climbing.
Climbing, it turned out, was as new to the people of the Highlands as it was to me. They knew all about getting up to places they needed to be. High pastures for the wool-goats, the summer passes for trade, the Eiger cliff for hunting opals. But about getting to places they didn’t need to go … well who has time for that when their belly grumbles or there’s money to be made?
‘What in hell are you doing, Jorg?’ Coddin asked me once when I came back bloody, with my wrist grinding bone at every move.
‘You should come out with me,’ I told him, just to see him wince. I climb alone. In truth there’s never room for two on a mountaintop.
‘I’ll rephrase,’ said Coddin. I could see the grey starting in his hair. Threads of it at his temples. ‘Why are you doing it?’
I pursed my lips at that, then grinned at the answer. ‘The mountains told me I couldn’t.’
‘You’re familiar with King Canute?’ he asked. ‘It’s not a path I advise for you – since you pay me for advising these days.’
‘Heh.’ I wondered if Katherine would climb mountains. I thought she would, given half a chance. ‘I’ve seen the sea, Coddin. The sea can eat mountains whole. I might have the occasional difference of opinion with the odd mountain or two, but if you catch me challenging the ocean you have my permission to drop an ox on me.’
I told Coddin that stubbornness led me to climb, and perhaps it did, but there’s more to it. Mountains have no memory, no judgments to offer. There’s a purity in the struggle to reach a peak. You leave your world behind and take only what you need. For a creature like me there is nothing closer to redemption.
‘Attack,’ Miana had said, and surely a man shouldn’t refuse his wife on their wedding day. Of course it helped that I had planned to attack all along. I led the way myself, for the sally ports and the tunnels that lead to them are known to few. Or rather many know of them but, like an honest priest, few would be able to show you one.
We walked four abreast, the tallest men hunched to save scraping their heads on rough-hewn stone. Every tenth man held a pitch torch and at the back of our column they almost choked on the smoke. My own torch showed little more than the ten yards of tunnel ahead, twisting to take advantage of natural voids and fissures. The tramp tramp of many feet, at first hypnotic, faded to background noise, unnoticed until without warning it stopped. I turned and flames showed nothing but my swinging shadow. Not a man of my command, not a whisper of them.
‘What is it that you think you’re doing here, Jorg?’ The dream-witch’s words flowed around me, a river of soft cadence, carrying only hints of his Saracen heritage. ‘I watch you from one moment to the next. Your plans are known before you so much as unfold them.’
‘Then you’ll know what it is I think I’m doing here, Sageous.’ I cast about for a sign of him.
‘You know we joke about you, Jorg?’ Sageous asked. ‘The pawn who thinks he’s playing his own game. Even Ferrakind laughs about it behind the fire, and Kelem, still preserved in his salt mines. Lady Blue has you on her sapphire board, Skilfar sees your future patterned on the ice, at the Mathema they factor you into their equations, a small term approximated to nothing. In the shadows behind thrones you count for little, Jorg, they laugh at how you serve me and know it not. The Silent Sister only smiles when your name is spoken.’
‘I’m pleased to be of some service then.’ To my left the shadows on the wall moved with reluctance, slow to respond to the swing of my torch. I stepped forward and thrust the flames into the darkest spot, scraping embers over the stone.
‘This is your last day, Jorg.’ Sageous hissed as flame ate shadow and darkness peeled from stone like layers of skin. It pleased me no end to hear his pain. ‘I’ll watch you die.’ And he was gone.
Makin nearly walked into me from behind. ‘Problem?’
I shook the off the daydream’s tatters and picked up my pace. ‘No problems.’ Sageous liked to pull the strings so gently that a man would never suspect himself steered. To make Sageous angry, to make him hate, only eroded the subtle powers he used. My first victory of the day. And if he felt the need to taunt me then I must have worried him somehow. He must think I had some kind of chance – which made him a hell of a lot more optimistic than I was.
‘No problems. In fact the morning is just starting to look up!’
Another fifty yards and a stair took us onto the slopes via a crawl space beneath a vast rock known as Old Bill.
When you leave the Haunt you are immediately among mountains. They dwarf you in a way that high walls and tall towers cannot. In the midst of the heave and thrust of the Matteracks all of us, the Haunt itself, even the Prince of Arrow’s twenty thousands, were as nothing. Ants fighting on the carcass of an elephant.
Out on those slopes in the coldness of the wind, with the mountains high and silent on all sides, it felt good to be alive, and if it had to be, it was a good day to die.
‘Have Marten take his troops and hold the Runyard for me,’ I said.
‘The Runyard?’ Makin said, wrapping his cloak tight against the wind. ‘You want our best captain to secure a dead end valley?’
‘We need those men, Jorg,’ Coddin said, straightening from his crawl. ‘We can’t spare ten soldiers, let alone a hundred of our best.’ Even as he argued he beckoned a man to carry my orders.
‘You don’t think he can hold it?’ I asked.
And that set Makin running in a new direction. ‘Hold it? He’d hold the gates of heaven for you, that man; or hell. Lord knows why.’
I shrugged. Marten would hold because I’d given him what he called salvation. A second chance to stand, to protect his family. For four years he had studied nothing but war, from arrow to army, the four years since he came to the castle with Sara at his side. In the end he would hold because years ago in the ruins of his farm I had given his little girl a wind-up clown and Makin’s clove-spice. A Builder toy to make her smile and the clove-spice to take her pain, and her life. The drug stole her away rather than the waste, and she died smiling at sweet dreams instead of choking on her own blood.
‘Why the Runyard?’ Coddin wanted to know. Coddin couldn’t be put off the scent so easily.
‘The Prince of Arrow doesn’t have assassins in my castle, Coddin, but he has spies. I tell you what you need to know, what will make a difference to your actions. The rest, the long shots, the hunches, it’s safe to keep locked away.’ I tapped the side of my head. For a moment though the copper box burned against my hip and its thorn pattern filled my vision.
‘I’d be happier on a horse,’ Makin said.
‘I’d be happier on a giant mountain goat,’ I said. ‘One that shat diamonds. Until we find some, we’re walking.’
Three hundred men walked behind us. Armies are wont to march, but marching in the Highlands is a short trip to a broken ankle. Three hundred men of the Watch in mountain grey. Exiting the sally port amid the boulder field west of the Haunt where the tunnel rose through the bedrock. No crimson tabards here, or gold braiding, no rampant lions or displayed dragons or crowned feckin’ frogs, just tatter-robes in rock shades. I hadn’t come out for a uniform competition. I came out to win.
Behind us rockets took flight, lacing the dull morning with trails of sparks, and leaving a loose pall of sulphurous smoke above the castle. Wedding celebrations to amuse the Highlanders, but also a convenient draw for the eyes to the north of us, the uninvited guests.
The Prince’s army had started to move, units massed in their attack formations, Normardy pike-men to the fore, rank upon rank of archers on the far side, men of Belpan with their longbows near tall as them, crossbow units out of Ken, beards braided, brown pennants fluttering above the drummers, each man with a shield boy hurrying before him. The archers stood ready to peel off and find their places on the ridges to our east, the useless Orlanth cavalry at the rear. Their day would come later, after wintering in the ruins of my home, after the high passes cleared and the Prince moved on to increase his tally of fallen kingdoms. The Thurtans next no doubt. And on to Germania and the dozen Teuton realms.
We came down the slopes west of the Haunt in a grey wave, swords, daggers, shortbows. I’d spent most of dear uncle’s gold on those bows. The men of the Forest Watch knew the shortbow, and the Highland recruits learned it fast enough. Three hundred recurved composite shortbows, Scythian made. Ten gold apiece. I could have sat every man on a half-decent nag for that.
The Prince’s scouts saw us. That had never been in doubt. A sharp-eyed observer on their front lines might have seen us across the mile or so that remained. But why would they be looking? They had scouts.
I picked up the pace. There’s nothing like mountains for making you fit to run. At first when you come to the mountains everything is hard. Even the air feels too thin to breathe. Years pass and your muscles become iron. Especially if you climb.
We moved quickly. Speed on the slopes is an art. The Prince of Arrow wasn’t stupid. The commanders he had picked had chosen officers who had selected scouts who knew mountains. They moved fast, but the few men that fell didn’t get up again before we caught them.
It’s always nice to surprise someone. The Prince of Arrow hadn’t expected me to charge his tens of thousands with my three hundred. That’s probably why we were able to arrive only seconds behind the first word of our advance, and long before that word could be acted on.
Three hundred is a magic number. King Leonidas held back a Persian ocean at the Hot Gates with just three hundred. I would have liked to meet the Spartans. That story has outlived empires by the score. King Leonidas held back an ocean, and Canute did not.
I could feel the burn in my legs, the cool breath hauled in and the hot breath out. Sweat inside my armour, a river of it under the breastplate. Hard leathers these, cured and boiled in oil, padded linen underneath, no plate or chain today. Today we needed to move.
When I gave the shout, we stopped on the rock field, scattered on the slope, two hundred yards from their lines, no more, close enough to smell them. On this flank, far from the archers bound for the ridge, men of Arrow formed the largest contingent, units of spearmen in light ringmail, swordsmen in heavier chain, among them the landed knights who had levied the soldiers from farm and village or emptied their castle guard in service of their prince. And all of them, at least the ones we could see before the roll of the mountains hid the vast expanse of their advance, marched without haste, confident, some joking, watching the sparks and smoke above the Haunt. The great siege engines creaked amongst them, drawn by many mules.
I didn’t need to tell the Watch. They started to loose their shafts immediately. The first screams carried the message of our attack far more effectively than scouts still hunting for their breath.
Aiming at the thickest knots of men made it hard not to find flesh.
We managed a second volley before the first of the enemy started to charge. The Prince’s archers, massed on the far side of the army column a quarter mile off and more, could make no reply. Know thyself, Pythagoras said. But he was a man of numbers and you can’t count on those. Sun Tzu tells us: Know thy enemies. I had lost men I could ill afford patrolling these slopes, but I knew my enemy and I knew the disposition of his forces.
The Prince’s archers would have found us hard targets in any case, loose amongst the rocks and the long morning shadows.
Another volley and another. Hundreds killed or wounded with each flight. Wounded is good. Sometimes wounded is better than dead. The wounded cause trouble. If you let them.
The foot-soldiers came at us in ones and twos, then handfuls, and behind that a flood, like a wave breaking and racing across sand.
‘Pick your targets,’ I shouted.
Another volley. A single man amongst the forerunners fell, skewered through his thigh.
‘Dammit! Pick your targets.’
Another volley and none of the runners fell. The dying happened back in the masses still milling in confusion, caught in the press of bodies. One of mine for every twenty of theirs. Stiff odds. If we’d managed ten volleys before they reached us we might have slain three thousand men. We managed six.
12
Wedding Day
‘Be ready to run,’ I shouted.
‘That’s your plan, Jorg?’ Makin’s face could take surprise to a whole new level. Something in the eyebrows did it.
‘Be ready,’ I repeated. In truth if I had a plan I held no more than a thread of it, teasing it out inch by inch. And the thread I held told me, Be ready to run. Sun Tzu instructs: If in all respects your foe exceeds you, be ready to elude him.
‘If that were the fucking plan,’ said Makin, shouldering his bow, ‘we should have started two weeks ago.’
The first of Arrow’s soldiers reached me, purple-faced from the race up the mountain.
Katherine Ap Scorron fills my nights. More than is healthy. And all of those dreams are dark. Chella walks in some of them, stepping direct from the necromancers’ halls beneath Mount Honas, wicked and delicious. Her smile says she knows me to my rotten core, and Katherine’s face will writhe across hers as firm flesh turns to corrupt undulation.
The dead child will wander in and out of many dreams, holding the thorn-patterned box in crimson hands. He takes different names. William most often, though he is not the brother I knew. But he follows Katherine whenever I call her to my bed; fresh killed in some, the blood still running, and in others grey with rot.
The telling of dreams is a dull business, but experiencing a stranger’s dreams at first hand may be another matter. Crafting nightmares as weapons or shackles and setting them loose to hunt your victims could very well be entertaining. It seems to keep a certain dream-witch busy.
My father thought Sageous to be his creature. Perhaps he thinks he sent the witch away after I broke his power in the Tall Castle, and maybe the Prince of Arrow now thinks he owns Sageous’s services. Like Corion, though, and the Silent Sister and others scattered across the empire, Sageous sees himself as a player behind the thrones, pushing kings and counts, earls and princes across the board. I have never liked to be pushed. The Prince of Arrow also struck me as a man who would prove hard for the dream-witch to move, but we will see.
Sageous learned twice over not to send his creatures out to snare me in my sleep. I think each failure takes something vital from him. Certainly he did not persist. The child is not his creation. I would know if it were.
The heathen watches though. He stands on the edge of my dreaming, silent, hoping not to be seen. I have chased him to the edge of waking and fallen from my bed choking the pillow. Once my sleeping hand found a dagger. Feathers everywhere. He seeks to steer me with the most gentle of prods. Even a soft touch, if it is made sufficiently far ahead of the crucial event, can have a great impact. Sageous seeks to steer me, to steer us all, his fingers swift and light as spiders, pulling delicate threads, until the power he wants is delivered into his lap as if by accident.
Tutor Lundist said Sun Tzu should be my guide in war. My father may have executed Lundist a week after I fled the Tall Castle but what the tutor taught will stay with me longer than any lesson Olidan Ancrath inflicted on his son.
All war is deception, Sun Tzu tells me on pages yellow as jaundice, dry as sand. All war is deception but where are my chances to deceive? I have spies in my halls, watchers in my dreams. The grave’s a fine and private place they say, but I suspect even there secrets can be hard to hold in these broken days.
And so I use what I have. A copper box that holds memories. One that stores a memory so terrible I couldn’t keep it in me. I have the box and I use it. Long ago I learned that pressed to the forehead, hard enough to leave its thorn print marked upon the skin, it will steal a memory, a thought, a plan, whatever is foremost in your thinking. The plan is lost but safe from Sageous’ kind, and all that remains is the recollection that you had a good idea, and the memory of where to find it again when needed.
Hold the box tight in your hand and you can feel the dark edges of horror inside, cutting, burning. The pain leaks out, robbed of its context, raw and cold, and with it, if you’re clever, if the fingers of your mind are deft, you can draw the thread of a previously stored stratagem from a place beyond all spies. And if you can surprise your enemy, then surprising yourself is small price to pay.
13
Wedding Day
The first man I killed in my eighteenth year had done most of the job for me. Running two hundred yards up a steep and rocky slope in chain armour is hard work. The soldier looked about ready to keel over, like the old woman in the market who never got up after seeing Gorgoth for the first and last time. I let him run onto my sword and that was the end of it.
The next man went pretty much the same way, only I had to be a little faster and thrust at him rather than just let him impale himself. In battle the thrust is a much cleaner death than the cut. Unless of course it’s the guts where you get it and then you’re going to have a long hard time of it before the rot sets in and carries you off screaming days later.
The third man, tall and bearded, took the two bodies at my feet as a hint and slowed down to face me. He should have waited for his friends behind him on the slope, but instead he came in swinging his broadsword, still huffing and puffing from his run. I stepped back to avoid the sweep of his blade then swung my own and took his throat. He turned, spraying arterial blood over the friends he should have waited for, then tripped and fell amongst the rocks. Until you’ve seen it you won’t believe how far blood will spurt from the right cut. It’s a wonder we don’t feel that pressure inside us all the time, a wonder that we don’t just explode sometimes.
I should have turned and run at that point. It was the plan after all. My plan. And the men of the Watch were already in full retreat behind me. Instead I advanced, moving quickly between the two blood-spattered soldiers who leapt out of Beardy’s way as he fell. I made a figure-eight cut, lashing out from one side to the other, and both of them fell, their mail torn, a shattered collarbone on the right, sliced chest muscle on the left. It shouldn’t have taken them both down, but it did, and I felt that four years’ hard practice with the blade hadn’t been entirely wasted.
Both men were flopping on the ground, calling out about their wounds, as I cut the sixth down, another staggerer, exhausted from his charge. That done, I turned and fled, outpacing the pursuit and working hard to catch the Watch.
The men of Arrow were never going to outrun us, but they could hardly stop the chase and let us come back to practise our archery again, so they kept at it. The captains driving them were making the right choices given what they had to work with. What they should have done, however, was to withdraw to the main force and rely on their commander’s battle sense to deploy his archers as a defence against us. Though perhaps the Prince of Arrow was happy enough sending a few thousand soldiers up the mountain to contain the threat and to keep his army focused on the Haunt.
I caught Makin up a few minutes later, threading my path past Watch men with less go in their legs than I had that day. Watch-master Hobbs ran with him, his captains beside him, Harold, Stodd, and old Keppen who’d made the wise choice and refused to jump for a previous watch-master back at Rulow Falls years ago. I say the Watch-master ran but by that point ‘brisk walk’ would cover it.
‘Set four squads on those ridges,’ I said. ‘Let’s shoot a few more Arrows.’
‘And when the enemy reaches them?’ Hobbs asked.
‘Time to run again,’ I said.
‘At least they’ll get a rest,’ Keppen said, and spat a wad of phlegm on the rock.
‘You’ll get one too, old man.’ I grinned. ‘It’s your squads I’m thinking should stay.’
‘I should have jumped,’ he muttered. He shook his head and raised his shortbow high, its red marker ribbon snapping in the wind. His men started to converge behind him as he jogged off toward the ridges.
‘Running’s all very well,’ Hobbs said, striding on, ‘but we’ll run out of mountain in the end, or be chased out of the Highlands entirely.’
‘Which sounds like—’ Makin heaved in a breath ‘—the best option when all’s said and done.’ Of all of them he looked the worst off. Too many years letting a horse do the running. He clambered up a large boulder and stood on top looking back down the valley. ‘Must be three thousand of the bastards after us. Maybe four.’
‘Likes to keep the odds in his favour does the Prince,’ Hobbs said. He scratched his head where the grey grew thickest and the hair thinned. ‘I hope you’ve got a hell of a plan, King Jorg.’
I hoped so too. If not for Norwood and Gelleth these Watch men would have fled an age ago. How quickly fact turns into fiction, and strangely when fact becomes legend, folk seem more ready to believe it. And maybe they were right to have faith, for I did reduce the Lord of Gelleth, his mighty castle, and his armies all to dust. Maybe they were right and I was wrong, but I found it hard to believe in whatever tricks I might have stowed in a small copper box.
Believer or not, the box was all I had. So I pressed it to my forehead, hard, as if I could push the memory I needed through the bone. The feeling is like that misremembered name appearing without preamble on your tongue, ready to be spoken, after so long dancing beyond reach on its tip. Except that instead of one word, there are many, images with them, and touches and tastes. A piece of your life returned to you.
The memory flooded me, taking me from the cold slopes, back across years. Gone the crowded Watch men, gone the shouting and the screams.
I lunged for the next hold, throwing my body after my arm and hand, loosing the last hold before my fingers had found a grip on the next, before I lost momentum. Climbing is a form of faith, there’s no holding back, no reserve. My fingers jammed into the crack, the sharp edge biting, toes scrabbling on rough rock, the soft leather finding traction as I started to slip.
There’s a spire of stone in the Matteracks that points at the sky as though it were God’s own index finger. How it came to be, who carved it from the fastness of the mountains, I can’t say. One book I own speaks of wind and rivers and ice sculpting the world in the misty long ago, but that sounds like a story for children, and a dull one at that. Better to talk of wind demons, river gods, and ice giants out of Jotenheim. It’s a more interesting tale and just as likely.
Arm aching, leg straining, curved in an awkward pose across the fractured stone, I gasped for air, stealing a cold lungful from the wind. They say don’t look down, but I like to. I like to see the loose pieces fall away and become lost in the distance. My muscles burned, the heat stolen by the wind. It felt as though I were trapped between ice and fire.
The spire stands clear of a vast spur where one of the mountains’ roots divides two deep valleys. From the scree slopes at the spire’s base to the flat top of it where a small cottage might squeeze, there are four hundred feet of shattered rock, vertical in the main, in places leaning out.
A hundred feet below I could see the ledge where had I met the goat. The heights a mountain goat will scale for the possibility of a green mouthful never cease to amaze me. They must use their own kind of magic to climb without the cleverness of fingers or toes. I’d pulled myself up and come eyeball to eyeball with the beast, its long face framed by two curling horns. There’s something alien in a goat’s eye, something not seen in dog or horse or bird. It’s the rectangular pupil. As if they’ve climbed out of hell or fallen from the moon. We sat together in mutual distrust while I caught my breath and waited for life to find its way back into limbs and extremities.
I found the rock pillar in my first year as King of Renar and in all my time on the throne it was perhaps that spare needle of mountain that came closest to killing me. I failed to climb it seven times, and I am not a man who gives up any attempt easily.
Coddin once asked me why I climb and I spun him some pretty lies. The truth – at least for today – is that back when I hadn’t many years on me, my mother would play for William and me on an instrument from the vaults of the tall castle. A piano. A thing of magic and many keys in black and white. We were trouble, Will and I, it has to be said. Fighting, scheming, digging out mischief of any kind that might be had – but when she played we fell silent and just listened. I remember every moment, her long fingers moving on the keys so fast they blurred together, the sway of her body, her hair hanging in a single long plait between her shoulders, the light falling across the wooden body of the instrument. But I can’t hear it. She plays behind glass, walled behind too many years, lost when I walked away from it all, from her, from that damn carriage and the thorns.
I see, but I can’t hear.
When I climb, and only then, on the very edge of everything, I catch stray notes. Like words robbed of meaning on the cusp of hearing … the music almost reaches me. And for that I would dare any height.
I made an eighth assault on the Spire at the start of the summer in which the Prince of Arrow crossed my borders with his armies new laden with loot from conquests in Normardy and Orlanth. Loot and, it must be said, recruits, for the lords of those lands were not well loved and the Prince won the people’s hearts almost before their dead were boxed and buried.
Climbing is about commitment. On the Spire there are places so sheer that one hold must be wholly relinquished before the next can be obtained, and sometimes then only by hurling yourself up an open expanse of rock that offers no purchase. In such moments you are falling, albeit upwards, and if the next hold escapes you then that fall will carry you to the ground. There are no half measures in such ascents: you place everything you are or will be on each decision. Lives can be lived in this manner, but I do not recommend it. In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives – the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.
There comes a point on a long climb when you know you have to surrender or die. There’s no quarter given. I hung to cold stone fifty feet beneath the summit, weak as a child, aching with hunger, blistered hands and feet, arms screaming. The art of survival in the mountains is knowing when to give up. The art of reaching the top is knowing when not to.
‘If I die here,’ I whispered to the stone. ‘If I fall and die, I will count it a life lived, maybe not well, but fully. No book will know my end, but I will have died in battle none the less.’ And summoning my strength I started to climb again.
Like the Scots king and his famous spider, my eighth attempt proved the charm.
Retching, slobbering on the rock, I crawled over the final corner, horizontal at long last. I lay trembling, gasping, half sobbing, as close to the end of my endurance as I had ever come.
When you’re climbing you take nothing with you that you do not absolutely need. That’s a good discipline to acquire, and the mountains teach it to you for free. They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. The mountains are also great teachers and better still, they let the occasional star pupil live.
The mountains teach you to be prepared for change. Amongst the peaks the weather can shift from fair to foul quick as blinking. One moment you might be clambering up a forgiving slope and the next you could be clinging to it as though it were your mother, whilst an east wind tries to carry your frozen corpse off with it.
Climbing God’s Finger I learned a lot about holding on by my fingertips. By the time I finally hauled myself weak and trembling onto the very top of the spire, I had come to realize that I’ve been holding on by my fingertips my entire life.
I flopped to my back. I lay there on the rock with nothing to see between me and a relentless blue sky. I had climbed light, taking nothing unneeded with me, no room on that narrow peak for anyone else, ghosts or otherwise, no Katherine, no William, my mother and father four hundred feet below, too far away to hear. Not even the shadow of a child on the rock or the glimmer of a copper box in memory. It isn’t the danger or the challenge that keeps me climbing, it’s the purity and focus. When you’re a five-second drop from being a smear of guts and pulverized bone, when your whole weight is on eight fingers, then seven, then five, your choices are black and white, made on instinct without baggage.
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