Across the Face of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

see the northern wall of the cabin beginning to bend. Suddenly a sharp banging noise came from behind them.

    The farmer shouted something at Leith, waving wildly in the direc¬tion of the bedroom. Leith nodded and ran off. He could feel air rushing past him as he ran. A shutter had come loose in the bedroom. As he went to close it, the wind slammed it shut in front of him, nearly taking off his hand. He struggled to push the rusty old bolt properly closed, hammering it home finally using Hal's staff.
    The people in the room settled in to a tense wait. Conversation was all but impossible as the wind howled about them and the timber of the cabin protested with groaning and, more ominously, cracking noises. It was as though some giant had snatched up the cabin and was shaking it with a series of random jerks calculated ro catch those inside off guard. Leith wondered how the other families in the village were coping with this monster wind. He wished it was light outside so he could see the storm; what stories he could tell the others! For a moment he began to think about Stella in her cabin at the northern end of the village, at the edge of the forest. Her gossipy, shrewish mother, her dour father, her brother the drunkard.
    How were they coping with the Icewind?
    Then he forgot all about Stella as he saw a corner-post bend slowly, fractionally inwards.
    Such was the roar from the wind that none of the others seemed to have noticed.
    With a loud report it broke in two.
    The wind roared in like a wall of water and snuffed out the candle, throwing everything into confusion. The noise was over¬powering. A voice shouted 'Out!' in his ear, a strong hand grabbed him by the shoulder and propelled him towards the bedroom door. In a moment they were all in the bedroom with the door bolted. The same hand then pushed Leith down into a sitting position with his back to the door, and someone sat down heavily beside him.
    Somehow, probably by the smell of tilled earth, Leith knew it was the farmer.
    The door buffeted his back with every gust. It felt like a living being, a beast of prey, communicating fear through the wood and into the muscles in his back and shoulders. Leith began to feel the insane desire of the wind to break through the door and get at them; it seemed that a malevolent force had launched an irra¬tional assault on the house and its occupants. Maybe the Fenni, the mountain gods of the northern wastes, were real after all.
    Stick people, the Fenni were supposed to be, nine feet tall with claws for hands; a hateful, violent race, slaying intruders who dared venture into the mountainous heartland of Firanes, a race of gods who used lightning bolts to kill and who wielded the weather as a weapon. As freezing gusts whipped under the door and snaked around his legs, sending a chill climbing up his spine, the stories telling of the Fenni seemed believable. The pressing darkness settled close about him, while all around the howling, creaking, groaning, whistling of the wind battered his ears and his brain. And in the noise and the darkness a cocoon of weariness enveloped Leith, and everything else save the warmth at his shoulder receded into the distance.
    Some time near morning the old farmer shook him awake.
    'Move your legs, boy!' he rasped. 'You don't move your legs, you won't walk for days.'
    Leith stretched his legs and felt pain in his knees. After rubbing them for a moment, he pulled them up to his chin and clasped his arms around them. He wondered how his mother and Hal were feeling, only a few feet away in the darkness, and hoped they had managed to find sleep in this cauldron of noise and violence. He thought about the village caught in the storm and tried to imagine what it was like outside, with trees bending and breaking, snow piling up in drifts and people inside, clenched up against the wind and the cold. He hoped no one was caught outdoors in the storm. In his mind he pictured himself high in the Common Tree,