That morning, the second morning in the mountains, someone didn’t get up. They just died in their tent. A crude autopsy was done- more an examination of the scene than a dissection. It was a widower, his wife died earlier in the journey. His tent didn’t really dry, and apparently he had lost his groundsheet somewhere, if he ever had one. He died of exposure. In his tent. In a crowded campsite. With heat stones not ten yards away. He wasn’t particularly old, though the journey had left him in frail health. The temperature got low, he got wet, and he died shivering in his sleep. And that was that. His goods were divided up amongst the Dusties, his Aurochs hitched to other wagons, and the wagon itself was hauled off the road and abandoned. No use now, and every extra ounce of weight would have to be hauled over mountains. The man was not buried, he was dismembered and scattered for the animals. It wasn’t much of a funeral, but he was lucky he got one at all. Most didn’t, on the trail.

It was a shockingly beautiful day, the sky a piercing blue that brought out all the shades of green and gray the Ramparts had to offer. Not a bad day for a funeral, really. Mazelton tried to compose a poem to celebrate the event, but just couldn’t. It occurred to him that he hadn’t written poetry since he killed the Jasmine in that garret in Old Radler. Maybe they took his poetry with them as they fell to the cobblestones.

Doing a lot more drawing and painting than he used to, though. So that’s something. He learned how to cook a bit. He could tie some basic knots, use a knife for something other than art or violence, set a tent, drive an auroch (maybe, he hadn’t actually tried,) ride a cheve. He now knew something about farming. Not a lot, but something. He… grew as a person. He was not the Mazelton that fled Old Radler. Coming into the mountains, he was someone new. Still Mazelton. Still a Ma to the bone. But ready to start being a Mountain Ma.

He grinned as he hauled himself up next to Duane. “What do you think, Duane? Should I found the Ma of the Ramparts?”

Duane considered this, winced slightly and wiggled his hand from side to side.

“Really? Once I have some generations established, maybe invite a couple dozen more Ma over, you could marry into the Clan! In a few years, even our grandkids could get hitched. Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

Duane gave Mazelton a long look, snorted, and looked back at the trail. Mazelton sighed. He had been joking, but found that he wished Duane had agreed anyway.

“I can promise that the cannibalism is strictly optional? At this stage of our development?”

Silence.

“Our weddings are awesome?”

Silence.

“First ten in-laws get customized face melting weapons?”

That got an interested arched eyebrow.

“Just think about it. No rush, no pressure.”

He had seen Duane knock out a bull auroch with a well aimed punch. Exactly the kind of genes the Ma clan needed. And if those scumbag Bo tried to poach him, he would poach their brains in their skulls.

Father Sun’s wandering rays, could he be some bastard of the Bo clan? He looked over at the man, placidly watching the trail ahead of them.

Nah. Skull’s all wrong.

He let out a small sigh of relief. There was some intermarriage between the clans. After so many epochs, how could there not be? But it certainly was not encouraged. Genetic diversity between the Clans was the key. The Black Parade needed all sorts of marchers, after all.

Mazelton didn’t know quite when it started, but the caravan was now solidly in the folds of the mountains, following the ancient roads that ran along the rivers winding between the ridges. He found that he lacked the vocabulary to describe what he was seeing. Were they all one mountain? Or was each separate peak a mountain? But they had merged together at the bottom, so what counted as a separate mountain? If it took a day to pass through and made a four mile wide canyon between peaks so high you hurt your neck trying to look up at them, were they still mountains?

Lunch came and went, followed by a comparatively slow afternoon. Mazelton wondered about that, until he realized that even after he stopped feeling dizzy, he tired fast. The altitude was still taking its toll. Mazelton estimated that they did barely thirteen miles that day- nothing at all on the plains. Now he watched people sucking down gallons of water, collapsing next to their wagons without the strength to stir another inch.

The campsite was at the edge of a gorgeous lake, a few miles across and so long it ran out of sight. It was strangely linear, like a thick blue line painted in between the folds of the Ramparts, lapping up at their feet. Here and there was a stretch of impossibly green earth, between the mountains and the water, but often the water was washing bare granite. The sheer verticality of the mountains defeating any plants more complicated than lichen.

He could imagine building a cabin on that lake. It would be amazing to just sit on a porch and look out over the water. He could feed the fish his dinner scraps and watch them swim around under his feet. Lots to paint or draw, infinite wood for carving, it would be a little slice of paradise.

Didn’t… Danae write something about snow piled higher than her head? Is that a regular thing here?

“Duane, how much does it snow around here?”

Duane thought it over, then stood on the box of the wagon and stuck his hand out a bit over shoulder high.

“Every winter?!”

Duane shrugged and wiggled his hand.

Summer cabin. Strictly a summer cabin, for artistic and meditative retreats. How did people live up here?

Mazelton kept looking around at the lay of the land, and frowned. He wasn’t the only one. At some point in the presumably not too distant past, a few tens of millennia at most, the lake had expanded. He didn’t know if it was the reason a mountain slope had collapsed, or if the collapse led the lake expanding, but either way, it intruded deep into the valley. At the edge of the lake was a small river and innumerable streams, stretching down into the river they had been traveling parallel to since Cold Garden. It was a swampy mess. He didn’t want to say “impassable” without checking, but it sure looked that way. The trail detoured around the swamp, crossed the streams at a relatively dry point close to the lake, and then went up and over the scree of rock that the mountainside had collapsed into.

It was beautiful. The mountain had cracked almost flat along one side, but the snow capped peak still stood proud. They were so close that the pine trees actually blocked the view. You had to find a gap and look up… and up… and up to see the top. The spring flowers were long gone, but the wild grasses grew happily, and the marshes and rivers were a riot of birds and fish, with little hunting mammals scurrying here and there. You could feel the life pouring out, like all the winter snow had compressed it into a spring, and during the brief flash of summer, it exploded outward. Mazelton saw Policlitus standing at the edge of the camp, looking grim.

He wandered over, wondering what could have made the man so unhappy. He saw it soon enough. At the bottom of the scree were smashed and rotted wagons. The skeletons, both human and auroch, were picked over and broken apart by all that thriving wildlife. Mazelton was Dusty enough to see life and death as one whole, not two separate things. Policlitus wasn’t a Dusty. He likely had friends amongst those bones.

“Do you… want to bury them?” Mazelton asked.

“No point. You could spend all summer picking up and burying bones, and the only thing you could guarantee is that no one would get all their bones back. No, this whole pass is their tomb. You can’t see it here, but when you get closer to the scree, there is a warning and a memorial carved on the rock.”

“What happened?”

“Use your damn eyes, Mazelton!”

“I am. I’m not seeing what you are seeing.”

“Look at the scree.”

“Looks steep?” Mazelton ventured.

“Yes, Mazelton, it is steep. Remember the “fun” we had at the river crossing where we had to lower wagons and pull them up the other side? And the bodies we left in our dust afterward?”

“I remember.”

“Well that was about, what, ten or twelve feet vertically? That scree is three hundred feet each side. Just barely flat enough for Auroch to walk over and down the other side. Could they pull a wagon over it? Hell no.”

“So how do we get the wagons over?” Mazelton asked patiently.

“One at a fucking time, is how. We walk the aurochs up and over the hill, then we use ropes, long ass ropes, to pull the wagons up the hill. Not, you will note, the aurochs, but us. Because once the wagons are at the top of the scree, there is about ten feet of flat, call it a bit over three meters, then a sharp slope down again. So we have to pull the wagons up the hill, then play the rope out and slowly lower it down the other side.”

Mazelton imagined the scene, then looked over at the smashed wagons at the bottom of the scree.

“More wagons and bodies on the other side of the scree?”

“This ain't even half of them.”

“The wagons are emptier now than they were at the start, of course, but…”

“Yep.”

“Do you unload them first?”

“How do you get the goods over the scree then?”

“Right.”

“You remember how I told people not to bring furniture?”

“Sorry, no, I don’t. I didn’t plan on bringing any, so I didn’t pay attention I guess.”

“Some folks have brought chests or dressers, wardrobes, beds, chairs, tables, all kinds of things. I can understand bringing an anvil. Makes perfect sense. But a dresser?” He shook his head. “I tell ‘em. I’ve been telling ‘em for years. Makes no difference. Every damn time we reach the mountains, some fools discover, AMAZINGLY, that their wagons are too heavy, and they need to dump some furniture. If only someone, anyone, had warned them seven or eight times, including in writing, that this would happen and they should sell it off when they could.”

“They blame you.”

“They blame me. Oh do they blame me! Do you know that this dresser was a wedding gift? Or a valuable antique? How do you expect them to settle into a new home without Grandpa’s beautiful oak bed? It goes on and on.”

Policlitus spat mightly.

“Well I go on and on too. I’m going to tell them that now’s the time they pay for not listening. Going to be a fun evening, I’m sure. But hey, at least tomorrow will be worse.”

They did, in fact, blame Policlitus. It wasn’t just the Dusties either, the Collective somehow thought that they could muscle through the rules. Policlitus just pointed at the smashed bones draped over smashed wagons and told them anyone who wanted to try would cross last. To Mazelton’s surprise, there were no small number of wagons bound and determined to do just that.

“Didn’t you say you were building a house out back of your wife’s?” It was a teamster Mazelton knew… but couldn’t remember the name of. He struggled with that sometimes. He had plenty of time for self reflection on the trail, and he was honest enough to realize that most of the names he could remember belonged to people in a Clan.

“Yes, a little place. I don’t know how much I will be using it, but I do want my own space, you know?”

“Guess I do, but my question was more… once you got four walls up, what's your plan for furniture?”

“Oh. I don’t have one. I’ll keep using my camp stuff indoors and hire someone locally to make me any furniture I need. I guess I could try and make a crude table myself, but honestly, I don’t even know where to begin on making planks.”

“Kinda expensive though?”

“Hi, I’m your new neighbor, Mazelton! I can’t help but notice that your food is rotting and you are covered in insect bites. Looks painful! You must go to bed early, what with the cost of candles. Hey, here’s an idea-”

The teamster laughed. “That should work.”

“Yep. And the best bit is that they will think they scammed me.”

“Huh? How do you figure that?”

“They have zero, or very few, polished cores. That makes cores, and heat, very valuable. On the other hand, they have no end of sweat and pine trees. That makes those things cheap. You follow me?”

“I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s what the caravan does. The merchants, at any rate.”

“Yep. Buy it where it’s cheap, sell it where it’s expensive. Oldest game… one of the oldest games in town.”

“What’s the oldest?”

“I wonder about that a lot.”

That night, before bed, Mazelton carved himself a rough, fist sized ball out of a piece of pine. It wasn’t close to perfectly round, but for ten minutes work with a knife and a baton, it was pretty good. He hiked up the scree. Even on foot it was uncomfortably steep, like a flight of stairs that hadn’t quite decided if it was a ladder or not. The footing was bad, but not as bad as he initially feared. The rock pile had been covered in a layer of smaller rocks, and so on, until the top layer was a sort of pebbly gravel and soil. Your boots could dig into it well enough, though he could see wagon wheels skidding through it. Gravity and a brake would not keep them in place.

He hiked to the top of the scree, and looked west. The valley ran west and slightly south, between yet more mountain ridges, six of them, or maybe eight, it was hard to tell. Each pair of mountains had their own long valleys running Northwest-Southeast. Three (or four) a side, very tidy, with each having a valley no more than a mile and a half across. Or at least that’s how it looked from where he was standing- who knows what those long, narrow valleys would turn into.

The sunset drowned the sky in layers of color, from the remnant pink of the sun into every shade of blue and indigo as the stars rose in the east. It was exhilarating, feeling the vastness of the world and standing at the peak of it. He stayed there until the sun finished sinking below the mountains. Then, while he still had a little light left, he dropped his wooden ball down the western slope of the scree. It bounced and picked up speed, rocketing down the slope. It got about two thirds of the way down before it hit a slightly larger rock and smashed into pieces.

Mazelton carefully returned to his tent, watching where he put his feet. He had to make sure everything was packed very, very snugly and lashed into place. It seemed like a good time to get carving on his new weapon, too. Better to have and not need, and all that.

Morning came, and with it Policlitus’ instructions to fill up on breakfast, as it would be a long morning. Mazelton was once again instructed, in no uncertain terms, to stay out of the way and do not, under any circumstances, try to “help.” Mazelton pinched the skin on his belly and frowned. He had been eating more, he knew he had, but he still looked like a damn ascetic. Two kilos in a week. It could be done! He would gain two kilos in a week even if he had to kill someone to do it.

“I will gain two kilos in a week, mark my words!” Mazelton told Duane. The big man just patted him on the shoulder and gave him a kind smile.

“Sure you will, little buddy.” Duane didn’t actually say that, but Mazelton was quite sure he heard it anyway. He swore, and got seconds.

The first wagons across were the “weird wagons,” those with remnant tech built into them. Most of them were Nimu caravan wagons or the independents. The Collective didn’t feel the need to make them for their settlers, and the Dusties were too broke to buy them on the open market. They tended to provide significant advantages over the standard farm wagon conversion, either in speed, weight, carrying capacity, comfort or defensibility. On the other hand, they cost a fortune and when they went wrong, they really went wrong.

Mazelton’s wagon was one of the “weird wagons” both by virtue of the little ball at the bottom of the wagon that provided both forward motion, steering and a bit of lift… and the fact that a polisher was on board with all his stuff. As instructed, Mazelton waited for the wagon ahead of him to make the crossing (it had some kind of built in winch, and was thus considered an excellent pilot wagon,) and then walked over the ridge. The view was still stunning, though he did manage to lose his footing and slide three meters on his ass before he got his boots under him again. Once returned to level ground, he found a good rock to sit on well away from the foot of the scree and started to watch the show.