Will Power by A. J. Hartley Page B

for an opening in the rock that would get us out of the freezing night winds.
    I watched as they set off again and wondered, as I have often wondered in their company, what the hell I was doing with these people.

    The cave which Mithos’s keen eyes picked out of the mountainside was almost obscured by a great slab of granite. Behind it a fissure in the rock admitted us into a short corridor which we passed through two abreast, and thence into an L-shaped chamber, a long entrance stretching back into the cliff and then curving left through a narrow fissure. Its walls were irregular, in parts jutting out sharply, and it was, if anything, colder than it had been outside.
    I crossed the uneven floor with a sour look on my face: There was a musty, almost rancid scent to the place and the air was moist as well as cold. Droplets of water pearled on my face. I brushed them off, wandering to the back of the cavern and the hollow, which cut to the left. This was dry, though much of the larger cavern (the two parts of the L were virtually separate “rooms”), was mossy, and a thin slime covered the floor by the entrance, where a trickle of water ran down the wall. No hand had carved the cave: only the wind, the rain, and the awesome splitting power of freezing winter and spring thaw, if spring ever came to this frigid wind-trap.
    “Excellent,” said Orgos in a voice apparently without sarcasm.
    “Just like home,” I added.
    “We’ll soon warm it up once we’ve got a fire going,” said Mithos. “Renthrette, see if you can hang the blankets across the doorway. Keep the wind out.”
    The horse was led inside, much to my distaste, and offered what little greenery Renthrette had found.
    “Must we sleep with the animal?” I whined.
    Renthrette gave me an angry stare and said, “We’ve had to ever since you joined us.”
    “Funny,” I observed. “I mean that great stinking manure factory.”
    Renthrette glanced at the horse to make sure it hadn’t been offended.
    “Can’t leave it outside,” said Mithos. “There may be wolves about.”
    “Oh, great,” I said. “Knowing our luck we’ve probably holed up in their den. The horse would be safer as far from here as possible.”
    “No animals have lived here lately,” said Orgos, our resident naturalist. “There’s no dung, bones, or anything.”
    “Pity,” I said. “There might have been something edible. Do we have anything for dinner at all?”
    “One loaf of bread and a block of goat cheese,” said Orgos, fishing through a saddlebag.
    “I suppose we could always eat the horse,” I mused. “Better than sleeping with it.”
    “I’d rather sleep with the horse than with you,” Renthrette snapped.
    “I’ll bet,” I said. “I’d suggest you invite it over for dinner first, but since we’ve sod-all to eat . . .”
    “Give it a rest, Will,” she muttered, balefully. Orgos grinned at me briefly and then joined Mithos in the center of the chamber.
    They squatted down and began striking the steel and flint into the few dry leaves we had managed to find. When a flame appeared they cupped hands around it, whispering nurturing words as they fed it twigs and blew softly at its base. Renthrette joined them and the three of them crouched together, urging the fire to life as if tending a newborn calf, willing it to breathe or to take its first step. I watched from the back of the chamber, oddly distant from their seemingly familiar ritual. When the flames were strong enough to set their teeth to some of the larger branches we had gathered, the group shared a collective smile of comradeship and achievement. I shivered, as much at the exclusion as at the cold.
    The cave did warm up, and within an hour or so, after a meager supper and the smallest gulp from Orgos’s water flask, I was as comfortable and ready to sleep as I was likely to get. The four of us were seated quietly around the fire, watching it as we had done months before, only days after I met them.