The caravan could be divided into four unequal pieces. First was the Nimu Caravan Company. Professional caravanners, they had the most experience and the greatest quantity of specialist equipment. Almost all their wagons were purpose built for long haul cargo work, and even the ones with remnant tech built in were heavily tested. Since they were all employed by the same entity, they worked well together. They had the highest ratio of wagons to people, in that they generally only had one or two people per wagon, and a small staff of professional merchants, accountants and the like.

The next group were the Dusties. They tended to have the worst, or second worst, wagons, as they were almost all converted farm wagons rather than purpose built for long distance transport. On the other hand, they had big families and were very communitarian. They didn’t tend to act as a block, but you would see little “mini-Covens” eating and working together. They had the highest ratio of people to wagons.

After them came the Collective. Their wagons were a mix of farm wagons and the logistical supply wagons that the Collective used for their mercenary army work. Most of their number didn’t have any professional experience with wagoneering or logistics generally, but they were certainly well familiar with the concepts. They worked very well together, but their numbers just weren't as high. There were only so many retiring veterans that the Collective could send, and their families never got a chance to grow that large.

The last group were the independents, and they were a real mixed bunch- there were unaligned settlers in their converted farm wagons, professional traveling merchants in their cargo wagons, some with remnant tech, some with broken remnant tech that kind of worked for what they wanted to do with it. There weren’t a ton of them, and they were about as unified as dry sand. The independents even had a Madam Lettie.

Mazelton had wondered about Madam Lettie’s wagon for a while. Simply put, it was too normal. It was the kind of normal you get when someone is trying really, really hard to act normal, but they aren’t really sure what normal is. For a start, she only had one auroch. Two was considered the absolute minimum, and frankly, inadvisably few. Auroch got injured, or sick, or just died. What were you going to do then? Given that it generally took two aurochs to pull a loaded wagon all day? But Lettie had one, and while it looked quite normal, it never seemed to get tired.

The wagon itself was a purpose built traveling merchant wagon. It had the nameplate of a well known carriagemaker in Sky’s Echo screwed to the back, and was probably only five years old. Practically new, as those things went. It was a little longer than the farm wagons, and a bit more narrow, but it had the same four wheels and wooden body as most. Mazelton would unscrew his own head before he believed that a wagon a Pi Clan member had spent months in could be, in any way, normal. Surprising no one, or at least no one named Mazelton, she came down with the “weird” wagons.

The process of shifting the wagons across the skree, as best Mazelton could tell, was to walk the aurochs over, hobble them on the other side, then push the wagon up to the top, lash ropes to the frame, and lower it down the other side. It was back breaking, dangerous work. Or you could do it like Madam Lettie.

When morning dawned, Lettie’s wagon wheels had suffered some sort of accident or indignity. They had quadrupled in width, and were covered in some manner of soft, not quite tacky material. Likewise, some manner of soft overshoe had been fitted over her auroch’s hooves. She didn’t bother untethering the beast from the wagon. Far from it, she had added all manner of bracing material to the harness. She just walked the auroch up to the top of the skree, pulling the wagon with her, neatly backed the auroch around (in a turn radius every teamster in the caravan swore blind was impossible) and walked the auroch, backwards, down the skree. She then pulled the wagon off to the side of the trail, not a hair out of place. Mazelton saw several teamsters snap their goads in frustration, and that was just this side of the skree. He could only imagine the symphony of profanity taking place on the other side.

He grinned and waved, then looked back up the skree. His eyes had healed much faster than he feared, and he decided that the remnant sparkles and shifting colored lights just add charm to the day. He would have to see what she was doing with the skull, though.

The next few wagons had their own strategies for going up and down- detachable treads, big spikey wheels, a sort of snapping, sputtering orb that levitated the wagon a few inches above the ground… then suddenly stopped working half way down the other side. The wagon made it to the bottom with only modest damage. It’s driver did not. The show got a lot less funny, watching his wife numbly pull the broken limbs away from the bottom of the hill, begging for help to pull his torso out from where it was wedged between the wheels and the wagon bed. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It was just the trail.

The next few wagons took painful care, but in an odd sort of way, the caravan relaxed. The first person had died. An odd fatalism had taken over. You could do your best and still die. So they just did their best and tried not to think about it too much.

Once the weird wagons were over, the body of the Nimu Caravan Company made their crossing. The aurochs were herded over by a couple of the scrawnier teamsters, who then turned them over to the weird wagon drivers to keep an eye on. They then, bitching and moaning mightily, hauled themselves back over the skrim and set up the thick ropes they would need at the top of the hill.

“Any thought of setting anchors and using pulleys?” Mazelton asked Duane, who looked manifestly disinterested in helping anyone else after he carefully skidded their wagon down the skree. He just pointed to one side. Mazelton didn’t see what he was getting at, so he hopped off the rock he was sitting on, and wandered over. There was… another big rock. Based on his total knowledge of rocks, it was one. Yep. Maybe the same kind of rock as the rocks on the skree? He stroked his chin. He was a genius geologist. He took a longer look at it. The thing must have weighed close to half a ton, or even half a tonne. It looked pretty cracked and chipped, like it had been bashed up at some point. He found a deep hole in it, two fingers wide, and stained a reddish brown. He looked back towards the skree, and noticed that there were no mature trees along the way. Lots of broken stumps though.

He may also be the world's greatest detective.

“Alright, that’s a bad example of what could happen, but maybe longer anchors or bigger rocks?”

Duane shrugged. “Didn’t work any time we tried it. Too loose.”

Mazelton looked up at the skree. The rocks and loose dirt weren’t being held in place by anything other than friction and gravity. A lot of both, of course, but he could see how leveraging a multi-ton wagon against even a quite large rock would end badly.

He could faintly hear a work song coming up from the far side of the skree, as the first Nimu wagon crested the peak. The teamsters collapsed at the top for a moment, having pushed like hell to get it up the few hundred feet to the top. The skinny guys already up there quickly secured thick ropes to the frame of the wagon, lashing them down like only a teamster or a blue water sailor could. Having taken a “generous” two minute rest break, the teamsters staggered to their feet and picked up the rope. Mazelton had imagined that the last man on the rope would wrap it around himself, becoming the anchor. No such thing was done. He looked over at the smashed up rock. Smart teamsters.

The tongue of the wagon had been pulled up as high as it would go, then tied down tightly. The wheel brake, such as it was, had been set. The wagon was gently pushed over the edge, as the teamsters took up another song. Hand over hand, they played out the rope, lowering the wagon along the slope. If the wagon looked like it was drifting off course, one side would lower a little less rope to pull it straight again. They were sweating like mad by the time it was half way down, and gasping by the time it reached the ground. The teamsters collapsed on the spot, unwilling to move another inch. Someone at the bottom untied the ropes and coiled them up. They kept coiling as they walked the ropes back up the skree. The gasping teamsters were sent back down the eastern slope to rest and have some water, while the next team started up.

It reminded Mazelton of skilled construction crews that he had seen. Heavy labor, dangerous conditions but… he got the sense that it was just the job, to them. He had a hard time imagining himself carrying a load of boards, walking along narrow scaffolding, laboring out in the sun all day. Working hard was normal. Nothing strange about working hard. But the outdoor manual labor was always something done by other people. What was it like to live, knowing that you were the other people? Did they think about it at all? Or was that just life for them?

But they pushed and lowered and sang their work songs, and if any of them died in the process, Mazelton didn’t spot it. Their experience showed, as did the advantages of purpose made wagons. It turned out that, despite being built for carrying more weight than the average farm wagon, they were lighter. It was purely down to construction materials and build quality. A lot of those farm wagons had been built, or re-built, by farmers rather than expert wagon makers. Nimu could afford good quality, wagons, and knew that they were not the things to go cheap on. It had paid off every step of the journey, and today was no exception.

It didn’t go perfectly, of course. Quite a few teamsters were pulled down the slope by the wagons, getting long, nasty cuts in the process. A few damaged wheels, some parts that would definitely need replacing. But all and all, a textbook crossing.

Mazelton was drafted into purifying and sewing up the wounds again. His protests were summarily ignored or refuted with displays of neatly healing cuts that he stitched up after the last time. He got to work, resolved to grumble internally through the whole process.

The Dusties went next, and it was… not exactly a shit-show, but you certainly wouldn’t brag about it either. They threw numbers at it, on the “Many hands make light work theory.” The number of smashed wagons started climbing, as did the number of smashed bodies. Some groups just didn’t have enough rope to lower the wagons down the far side of the skree. They had to put their backs to the front of the wagon and slowly walk it down, acting as the brakes. That worked… some of the time. When it didn’t work, people died, or worse, were mangled.

Yes, worse. Everyone knew they were dead. There simply was no way they were going to survive the journey with two broken legs and a smashed pelvis. Even if, by some miracle, they made it to their new homes, they couldn’t possibly survive frontier life. Never mind the burden on their families and community. How could they ask others to go hungry, just to feed them?

The crippled were pulled to one side, on the soft grasses and in the shade of wide trees. If it looked like they would linger, they would kiss their families, tell them they loved them, then call for Father’s Mercy. Sometimes it was an eldest child, or spouse, a sibling or just a family friend. A sharp knife would open veins in the legs and wrists, eyes blurred with tears and shaking hands making the job harder. They moved on to the next part of life quickly, and in as little pain as could be managed.

What a lousy time to be without a Humble. Mazelton wanted to offer to help, he could make it instant and painless but… this was something for families. He knew his help was not wanted, and no one would be thankful he offered.

He felt like shit for thinking it would be a show. He knew these people. He didn’t know their names, but he had been in their wagons, purified their food and water, saw their kids splashing in the rivers and driving aurochs. Some were known scumbags, but mostly they were just people. His people, even if they weren’t Ma.

The slope was getting more and more torn up with each wagon that fell out of control, and it became harder and harder to lower the wagons safely. People got tired. Accidents happened. Mazelton saw one wagon make it down in rather good shape, but he knew for a fact that the family of seven was missing an adult woman.

“We got to go get her. We can’t just leave her here!”

“Of course we can’t just leave her, but you heard her, she won’t go.”

“What if we, I don’t know, burned the furniture or something? Smashed it up?”

“You really think that would help?”

“She won’t leave the furniture, so if there was no furniture…”

“It’s trail madness.” An older man grieved. “She has gone mad. We have seen it happening for more than a month now. I thought we could handle it. But only Mother Moon and Mara herself can save her now.”

“We can’t just leave Mom!”

It went around and around, as the auroch were hitched to the wagon and they moved on to the campsite two hundred yards up the road. Apparently, their wagon was overloaded. Part of that was some heavy furniture- a bed, a table and a chest of drawers. Mazelton had no idea how they had managed to get so much furniture this far, especially with all the food they would have needed for seven people. But there was just no way, no possible way at all, to get the overloaded wagon over the skree.

It was either leave the train and try to find another path through the mountains, or dump the extra weight. The family sensibly did the latter, without realizing that their mother, their wife, was part of that extra weight. It was trail madness. It could be so much worse. They left her an ax, some canvas for a shelter and some rations. One of her sons swore that he would stay with her and try to catch her up to the caravan. He got a lot of pitying looks, but not much encouragement. She wasn’t the first to go mad on the trail.

Eventually all the Dusties had made their way down the skree. The Collective came next, and the teamwork showed. The wagons were lowered with ropes, even if those ropes broke occasionally. Knotting together two ropes made a weak point in the rope, which was news to Mazelton and, apparently, the Collective. Or maybe they just didn’t have any better options. One of their wagons snapped its rope, the end snapping around and hitting an old man on its left. It hit him hard enough to slice his face open and he spun around on the loose, rocky, skree. He fell forward and smashed his head open.

The Collective froze. The wagon was dropped, ignored and allowed to smash its way to the bottom of the hill. They scrambled over to the old man, screaming, demanding that he say something. Shouts in their language, calling for help, calling for someone to make this not be happening. They grabbed his body, patted him over, scooped him up off the ground and carried him to the base of the slope like he was on his last breath and not well past it. Mazelton couldn’t even shake his head. The old timer was on to whatever came next before the wagon reached the bottom of the skree.

He hadn’t taken a good look at the man, but he seemed somewhat familiar. Was he the elder who was singing after a funeral, months ago? Mazelton stayed well clear of the Collective’s wagon circles. They made it clear that he was not wanted, and he wanted nothing to do with them either. But hell, the Caravan wasn’t that big, and you sort of got to know everyone’s face. He had some vague recollection that at big events, mostly funerals and big feasts, the old man would get out his instrument and sing these strange songs, full of long pauses and intonations like he was explaining the vicissitudes of life to the crowd. That was all he knew about the man. Apparently, there was a lot more to him than just that.

More and more members of the collective came panting over the skree, going down the pebbly slope way too fast. Mendiluze came charging down, bellowing a name- the old man? He fell to his knees next to the body, kissing his forehead and pleading with him. He wept. And then he stood and gathered himself. He stopped being just himself, and became his people’s leader. He called out, pulling attention to him. Then he started to sing. Hoarsely. Badly. But everyone knew the words and joined in. As they sang, Mendiluze began to deliberately tear his clothes. Everyone was singing, yelling out through their tears. At the end, they bowed in the old man’s direction. Two young men with rifles stood as honor guards. People were assigned to pull the smashed wagon to the side and recover what they could. And then the crossings continued, because that had to happen too.

Mazelton sat very still. He really thought that they would kill him if they saw him make the slightest move towards the body.

Thirty people died on that skree, and innumerable more were injured. It was a terribly cold camp that night, though not a quiet one.