“How strong are you?” asked Chih in surprise, and Si-yu laughed.
“Strong! I’d flex but it’s not like you could see through my coat, anyway. Here, sit like I am . . .”
There was a horn carved from bone sticking up out of the head of the saddle around which Si-yu had curled her knee, the other leg hanging down opposite. There was a second shorter horn behind her, and clumsily Chih copied Si-yu’s pose.
“Other way, we don’t want to make her list.”
The broad saddle straddled Piluk’s shoulders, set back from her surprisingly narrow neck. There was no way to sit astride, so the northern cavalry all rode side-saddle. Chih adjusted their seat, and Si-yu used her long steel-tipped lance to urge Piluk towards the edge of town.
As they moved among the shacks, Chih was startled by how very far they were above them. They weren’t as high up as they would have been on a royal mammoth, but the tops of the sheds barely came up to their knees, and Chih felt a giddy sense of vertigo at the base of their belly.
“If you’re going to be sick, do it over the side,” Si-yu said without looking back. “Otherwise you’re brushing Piluk down tonight.”
“I’m not going to be sick, and show me how to brush her anyway,” Chih retorted. “I’ll be fine.”
As they left the town and started climbing the road towards the pass, Chih could already feel the burn in their thighs and their lower back. Si-yu sat as easily as if she were on a cushion at home, but Chih’s muscles were better used to long walks, and, if they were entirely honest with themselves, hitching rides in the back of oxcarts.
Well, at least Almost Brilliant isn’t here to make fun of me.
The road through Kihir Pass was steep and wide, bordered on both sides by thick boreal forests. It was home to ghosts, which bothered Chih very little, and bandits, which were more of an issue. Chih had interviewed plenty of bandits over the course of their career, but times had been a little lean lately, and they hadn’t felt like taking the risk. Neither ghosts nor bandits would bother two people on a mammoth, however, and anyway, Chih had never been on a mammoth before. What was the point of being a Singing Hills cleric if they didn’t get to ride a mammoth when the opportunity arose?
The novelty wore off, but the wonder didn’t, and Chih ignored the growing aches in their knee and lower back as they looked down on the world around them, listened to the jangling of Piluk’s iron bells, and hunched behind Si-yu as they pressed into the wind.
Around noon, or what Chih guessed to be noon given the thin gray light, Si-yu brought Piluk to a halt in the shelter of a dense copse of trash pine. Chih was relieved to be returning to level ground, but then they watched in dismay as Si-yu seemed to simply slide straight down the mammoth’s side, landing with a little pah of exertion.
“Do I have to do that?” Chih called, and Si-yu grinned.
“You do if you want to eat and piss.”
Chih did, and taking a deep breath, they threw their legs over and pushed themself off the side, sliding down Piluk’s shoulder. They hit the ground with their knees bent, but still pitched forward right into Si-yu’s waiting arms.
“There you go, well done!” said Si-yu brightly, and Chih groaned.
“You can speak to me as if I were a child all you like, just don’t let go.”
Obediently, Si-yu wrestled Chih over to a sheltered spot behind the trees. Fortunately, Chih’s legs steadied enough so they could handle their ablutions themselves, and then they returned to where Si-yu stretched out on a waxed tarp, legs spread in a nearly perfect split.
“Should I be doing that too?”
“It’ll help.”
Chih managed to get onto the ground without dropping, stings of pain going through the knee that had been bent around the saddle horn and lancing through their core. They weren’t as limber as Si-yu, but they thought they were doing well until the scout turned almost all the way behind her and pulled her bag forward. Chih sighed, sprawling limply on the tarp, and took the small parchment packet that Si-yu handed to them.
“How long did it take to get that flexible?” they asked, nibbling at the dried slivers of pounded reindeer meat inside.
“I just stayed good from when I was a kid. My family’s been in the corps since Mei-an’s day.”
“That was back during the Xun Dynasty, wasn’t it?”
Si-yu shrugged.
“We don’t really count back from the Anh kings,” she said loftily. “That’s some two hundred years ago.”
They of course had counted by the Anh system until just sixty years ago, when the southern defenses failed and the northern mammoths stormed the mountain passes. Anh had forced the north into their reckoning, and just a short while later, the north had forgotten every bit of it.
Chih did not say anything about that. Instead, they tilted their head curiously.
“That’s a long time to be in the corps, isn’t it?”
“Very,” Si-yu said with pleasure.
“And no interest in being . . . I don’t know, palace officials or judges or scholars?”
Si-yu snorted.
“What are you, a spy from Ingrusk? No. Why would I when I’ve got Piluk and the first daughter she calves?”
The mammoth corps was famous, and for that, among other reasons, they were forbidden from taking state examinations of any sort or holding any position beyond that of a district official until there had been no member of the extended family in the corps for three generations. Assassination by mammoth had a rather storied history in the northern countries, but it wasn’t the kind of history that anyone thought bore repeating.
Finally, Si-yu stood up with distressing ease, giving Chih a hand up as well. As they walked back to Piluk’s side, Si-yu turned to Chih for a moment.
“Wait, aren’t you meant to be a vegetarian? All the southern clerics . . .”
“Oh, Singing Hills isn’t very strict on that,” Chih said vaguely. “And we’re meant to take the charity of others where we find it. It’s significantly worse to turn down genuine charity than to momentarily put aside the strictures of your order, or so I was taught.”
“Well, I do have some salted dried lichen for—”
“I like meat, and I am far away from anyone who might stop me,” Chih said bluntly, and Si-yu grinned.
“I will keep that in mind.”
Chih groaned when they reached for the saddle loop, but they managed to get back into the saddle with only a single snicker from Si-yu, so they decided to call it a victory.
The wind bit into the bare skin around Chih’s face over the tall collar of their sheepskin coat. It was a tiring kind of cold, and by the time the sun sank beneath the tips of the pines, they were wavering in the saddle. Si-yu had suggested strapping them in, but Chih shook their head. They didn’t like the idea of being strapped in, and the ground was not so far to fall if Si-yu allowed them to do so.
The wind picked up strength and malice as the sky went dark, and now it felt as if it were rushing through the very seams of their clothes. They thought briefly of the delirium produced by the cold on the steppe, the type that might drive someone to start stripping to relieve themselves of phantom burns. Out of the corners of their eyes, they started to see brief streamers of light, gleaming like sparks from a fire before they disappeared.