Relentless

10

The next hours never came back to him clearly afterward. He moved in a disoriented daze with the icy wind driving right through him. It kept blowing him off his course, or so he kept thinking. He rubbed the palm of a glove over his face, scraping off frost. Needles tingled up his legs as his feet hit the ground and his bowels were knotted with unreasoning hollow terror: a child’s awful fear that not only is the house empty but nobody will ever come back to it. Hunger, and the thought that the beans he’d eaten in the cabin had been his last meal. Shoulders and head butted into the blast, he had the feeling he was only treadmilling in his own former tracks.

The wind was a grating roar, a deep rumble like a heavy artillery barrage, and the snow driven upon it never reached the earth: it flew horizontally, beating his cheek, rolling against him with a steady weight that made him lean into it to keep balance. The world spun drunkenly. He lost sensation in the flesh of his face and tiny icicle fringes hung like sweat beads from his nose and ear lobes and eyebrows. In one lucid moment he estimated that fifteen minutes more would mark the farthest limit of his strength: find shelter or die.

Like debris torn loose from anchor he flapped through the snow and somewhere in that run of seconds or minutes he remembered the woman’s name and began to shout with the full power of his lungs: “Marianne! Marianne!”

And could hardly hear his own voice as it whipped away. He beat his hands together, staggered with numb legs… He jerked himself erect and discovered that he had fallen; yanked his body forward with the desperate knowledge that he had to keep moving as long as the muscles would pull.

A spasm of agony wrung him out. It was unendurable. So stiff with cold he could hardly move, he kept sawing painful breath into his chest to call her name and the pitch of his voice climbed in panic.

Most of the time he moved with his eyes shut, keeping the wind against his left cheek, trusting the pain in his feet to keep him moving. When the pain made way for no feeling at all that would mark the end of hope.

Now when he passed them he could vaguely see trees bending in the wind. Must have descended in the lee of a mountainside, out of the full blast of it.

His foot caught, he went down again. His belly churned; his thinking wheeled as if in a dream. He lay where he was, unable to rise and wanting sleep, and he fought a battle there and won it and forced his frozen body up. Now a strange question came to him: were his legs really moving or were they not; was he lying in the snow imagining he was walking? Something whipped his face, tingling sharply yet distantly, and he reared his head back, supposing he had run into a branch. He felt the lash of it again and blinked.

It was the woman, standing vaguely before him, slapping his face. Putting her lips by his ear: “Stop shouting. I’m here. Stop shouting.”

He realized he had still been shouting her name.

Laughter bubbled out between his stiff lips.

“Come on-come on.” She had him by the arm and he felt himself being dragged along. When she let go his arm he fell to his knees. His hand had fallen on the horse’s fetlock and the horse stirred, frightening him, but when he looked up he could make out the horse’s ghostly gray outline against the paler background, the tops of windbent pines. He could see his hands and the ground under them.

When he looked up again the woman was standing there against a tree, slumped, her stomach thrusting forward, and another bundled figure stood on two widespread legs looking down at him. Hargit, he thought. Major Hargit. You could never get away from that man. Sudden tears came in a scalding, bursting convulsion and vomit pain twisted his stomach and he fell flat on the frozen earth…

The man was bending over him, stripping off a glove, laying his fingers behind Walker’s jaw hinge. Walker felt his own pulse beat against the man’s hard fingers, and he heard the man’s voice-not the Major’s voice, not any voice he’d ever heard before: “You’ll be all right. Come on.” And the man was picking him up under the arms, lifting him onto his feet.