Page 1 of The Summer Pass

Chapter 1

The Summer Pass

They had a sunny day for the funeral. It was nearly midsummer, the days long and warm on the slopes above the Spring Pass. The pyre lit well, a small piece of good luck.

It was not traditional to light the pyre in the morning. Padunu had to point that out. Vanu could see him trying to resist and failing.

“We should be lighting it at dusk and tending it through the night, especially for the funeral of an august personage. However—” Padunu held up a hand in a display of tolerance. “I am ready to accept the necessity of proceeding with the funeral expeditiously.”

Which meant, as far as Vanu understood it, that the shaman was not going to make a fuss. That was another small piece of luck.

They lit the pyre in the morning, Padunu chanted his chants and clanged his bell and threw his incense into the flames, and by evening the fire had burned down enough to be decently extinguished and covered over with dirt and stones. Vanu had built the pyre at the back of the great house so that they could raise the burial mound on the same spot and not have to wait for the ashes to cool and be gathered into a vessel for the burying ground. And in any case, the regular burying ground was outside the fortress wall where they couldn’t get to it. Even Padunu hadn’t suggested that they try.

When the last stone had been laid on the mound, the remaining residents of Umtúshta gathered in the yard behind Vanu’s house, outside the door of the round hut. The animals—with the exception of Jin the dog—and most of the goods that they were taking with them had already been transported down the mountain to Sakka.

Vanu looked at the members of his household standing there in the warm summer dusk. Khatu, Barda, Otoni, and Nomi stood together in a knot with Jin weaving between them and rubbing against their legs. Most of them were red-eyed from crying at the funeral. Even the dog had a sympathetic look. Gurti just looked tired. Tirtu stood awkwardly beside her, shifting from one foot to the other and looking like he wasn’t sure whether he should put his arm around her or not. Halza was doing something similar next to Susami, although in his case there was a clear answer to that question.

Susami and her sisters had shed their own tears weeks ago when the decision was made to leave the Spring Pass. Now they looked much as Vanu felt—relieved that the long days of waiting were over.

Padunu came jogging into the yard with a wooden cup in his hand.

“One last thing, my lord.” He presented the cup to Vanu. “Water from the well. Drink but do not finish it.”

Vanu took the cup, swallowed a mouthful, and passed it back to the shaman. Padunu tipped the cup and poured the remaining water out onto the ground of the archery range with a flourish.

“May you return to Umtúshta. May you return home.”

Home? Vanu looked up, but the shaman was already turning away, probably not thinking he’d said anything surprising. Maybe it was obvious that this fortress was Vanu’s home and that he did want to return here. He didn’t want to leave.

It was the dispute between the villages of Dukka and Sakka, down the mountain in the Spring Pass, that had done it in the end. That had been going on since the spring, since the larger village raided the smaller, when Faru had first been wounded. There had been retaliations, hostages taken on both sides, herds stolen, and crops burned. The headmen of both villages had tried to negotiate a truce, but their own hearthmen had broken it. By the time Tirtu suggested casually one evening at dinner that what they needed was a strong outsider to enforce peace, Vanu had already made up his mind that he would have to get involved.

He went down and summoned the leaders of the two villages, with their retainers, to meet on neutral ground. Tirtu brought the lion banner that had been rolled up in a cupboard for the last three years. With Mikhi as interpreter, Vanu told the headmen of Sakka and Dukka that their feud was making them easy prey for the lowland king’s armies and that if the Hawakhaba wanted to maintain control of the mountains, they had to stop raiding.

They listened to him. The Lion of the Summer Pass was back. He had outwitted the invader king and escaped from captivity, and the men of the Spring Pass were ready to hear and follow him. They were even ready to hear him order an end to the raids, having got themselves stuck in a bloody cycle of raiding and counter-raiding that threatened to ruin both their villages.

He’d figured he had a week at most before news of his return reached the guards outside Umtúshta’s gate and they broke in to find out whether it was true. So the residents of Umtúshta began making their plans to leave. They took care of the animals and began transporting goods down through the caves, converting their wealth into portable form and procuring horses and wagons and hired guards for travel.

Then Faru, who had never fully recovered his health after he was wounded in the spring, fell ill. When the day came that they had set for departure, he was too sick to travel. For three weeks he lingered, showing no sign of improvement. The rest of Vanu’s household waited with fraying nerves for sounds of rocks being torn down from the gate or arrows flying over the walls. Everyone moved into the great house and Vanu’s house, hovering close by the entrances to the caves. There were daily arguments about who should go down the mountain to safety and who should nobly stay behind, and whether either would really be safe or noble.

In the end, they stayed together, and Faru died with his wife and sons and daughter-in-law by his side, and no arrows had yet come over the walls or stones fallen from the blocked-up gate. But it was past time to be gone from Umtúshta now.

Vanu held the lantern as the household filed down the stairs into the cavern below their fortress, into the network of caves that would take them to the villages of the Spring Pass, to the vehicles and men waiting for them below. They would travel together because it was the only safe option. No one would be secure inside Umtúshta once the king’s men found out Vanu had left it.

And they would find out. The Lion of the Summer Pass was finally, truly returning to the world.

They called it the Summer Pass because some years, when there was heavy snow on the gaunt, grey peaks on either side, it was only in the height of summer that the road between them was passable. There was a river, the Rakhiri, running through the valley, and it would overflow its banks with dangerous force in the spring as the snow melted, washing away bridges and cutting off the settlements on either side from one another. In winter, it could snow heavily enough even in the valley to render travel difficult. Avalanches were always a possibility on some stretches of road.

In the few months of good weather, though, the Summer Pass was the best place to cross the mountains—that is, if you could pay the tolls and avoid raiders.

The pass was a steep cleft between the peaks, and the road leading to it zigzagged up next to where the river plunged down, in a long, free-falling cascade like a white horse’s tail or a sage’s beard. On one side of the waterfall, right up in the crook of the pass, was the fortress of Tagra Degra; on the other, further down the slope, the village of Tsuruva.

Lill stood outside the door of a small house at the top of a meadow above Tsuruva and looked across the river at the towers of Tagra Degra. At the bottom of the meadow, the village forge stood quiet in the early morning light, no smoke yet issuing from the smoke-hole in its tiled roof.

Tsuruva was the highest village on this side of the pass, with the mountains rising up starkly all around. Lill thought it was maybe the most beautiful place he had ever seen, and the little house above the forge was one of the best places to see it from. Every morning, he came out of his door and drank in this view and felt almost happy.

A breeze moved across the meadow, ruffling the grass, and Lill felt as if it were blowing through him, as if his state of tranquility had made him porous like a wooden window lattice.

The fortress of Tagra Degra was where Vanu had grown up. Lill had expected to like it better because of that. After all, he thought about Vanu every day, carried the memory of Vanu around with him like a treasure. But Vanu’s childhood home was ugly, an ungainly huddle of grey towers on the edge of a scree-covered slope, poised as if at any moment it might start lumbering down the valley to splash into the river below.