formed an unbroken wall of stone spanning the continent from north to south. Their snow-crowned summits jutted raggedly from that continuous lofty breastworks of bare rock; were we supposed to go over the top, or would there be some way through? I knew of Salla’s Gate, and that our route lay toward it, but somehow the gate seemed mere myth to me at that moment.
Up and up and up we rode, until the generators of our groundcars were gasping in the frosty air, and we were compelled to pause frequently to defrost the power conduits, and our heads whirled from shortness of oxygen. Each night we rested at one of the camps maintained for the use of traveling septarchs, but the accomodations were far from regal, and at one, where the entire staff of servants had perished some weeks before in a snowslide, it was necessary for us to dig our way through mounds of ice in order to enter. We were all of us in the party men of the nobility, and all of us wielded shovels except the septarch himself, for whom manual labor would have been sinful. Because I was one of the biggest and strongest of the men, I dug more vigorously than anyone, and because I was young and rash, I strained myself beyond my strength, collapsing over my shovel and lying half dead in the snow for an hour until I was noticed. My father came to me while they were treating me, and smiled one of his rare smiles; just then I believed it was a gesture of affection, and it greatly sped my recovery, but afterward I came to see it was more likely a sign of his contempt.
That smile buoyed me through the remainder of our ascent of the Huishtors. No longer did I fret about getting over the mountains, for I knew that I would, and on the far side my father and I would hunt the hornfowl in the Burnt Lowlands, going out together, guarding one another from peril, collaborating ultimately on the tracking and on the kill, knowing a closeness that had never existed between us in my childhood. I talked of that one night to my bondbrother Noim Condorit, who rode with me in my groundcar, and who was the only person in the universe to whom I could say such things. “One hopes to be chosen for the septarch’s own hunt-group,” I said. “One has reason to think that one will be asked. And an end made to the distance between father and son.”
“You dream,” said Noim Condorit. “You live in fantasies.”
“One could wish,” I replied, “for warmer encouragement from one’s bondbrother.”
Noim was ever a pessimist; I took his dourness in stride, and counted the days to Salla’s Gate. When we reached it, I was unprepared for the splendor of the place. All morning and half an afternoon we had been following a thirty-degree grade up the broad breast of Kongoroi Mountain, shrouded in the shadow of the great double summit. It seemed to me we would climb forever and still have Kongoroi looming over us. Then our caravan swung around to the left, car after car disappearing behind a snowy pylon on the flank of the road, and our car’s turn came, and when we had turned the corner, I beheld an astonishing sight: a wide break in the mountain wall, as if some cosmic hand had pried away one corner of Kongoroi. Through the gap came daylight in a glittering burst. This was Salla’s Gate, the miraculous pass across which our ancestors came when first they entered our province, so many hundreds of years back, after their wanderings in the Burnt Lowlands. We plunged joyously into it, riding two and even three cars abreast over the hardpacked snow, and before we made camp for the night we were able to see the strange splendor of the Burnt Lowlands spread out astonishingly below us.
All the next day and the one that followed we rode the switchbacks down Kongoroi’s western slope, creeping at a comical pace along a road that had little room to spare for us: a careless twitch of the stick and one’s car would tumble into an infinite abyss. There was no snow on this face of the Huishtors, and the raw sunpounded rock had a numbing, oppressive look. Ahead everything was red soil. Down into the desert we went, quitting winter and entering a stifling world where every breath tingled in the