The Scale

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley,” grandfather says. Despite the climb, his voice is calm, his breath slow and steady.

Behind them, Marculey’s labored breathing is louder than grandfather’s voice. Beyza has carried a fear throughout the journey that her brother’s wordless speech will be heard, but she calms knowing grandfather feels safe enough here to talk aloud. Before they left, what feels like weeks ago and not days, the need for silence had loomed above every instruction with deadly seriousness.

They are still under trees, making their way in the dark only by grandfather’s feel for the mountains, which Beyza is convinced must be magical. There were long stretches in the night where she might well have been blind, guided only by Marculey’s labored wheezing and the rope grandfather had tied between them, when she lagged and the slack tightened into a pull. Somehow he has brought them here, both undetected and to the right place, past guards and camps, over watched roads and under manned watchtowers, to the only place they might possibly gain entrance to the valley.

Dawn must be coming, because the dark is now shadowed deeper at the trunks of trees, and color is seeping into the leaves overhead, and even a breeze chatters through the branches like something alive. Dawn must be coming because not ten minutes earlier grandfather had untied them and she’d quickfooted past her brother to walk ahead with grandfather. Dawn must be coming because grandfather had told them they should reach the bordercliffs near sunrise, and she could sense before them the ‘unscaleable’ face of rock warming to a rising sun still hidden by forest.

Marculey stops and bends his hands to his knees, heaving. “How,” he says, taking a breath between each word, “close. Are. We?” Beyza is tired, more tired than she imagined she’d be, but proud to not be winded after so hard a journey. She has harder work ahead.

“We’re between men and dragons,” grandfather says, “which is why we can talk. And rest for a short while. But just a few more steps.” The speed with which the forest grows visible surprises Beyza, for when she turns back in the direction they are heading, she can see grandfather’s serious, welcome face and even some ways ahead the cliff they have yet to overcome. Within minutes the forest runs up against the wall of rock and they stop. Finally there is sky above them, though canyoned by tree on one side, endless cliff on the other. The dome of the world is both speckled with stars and warming into lighter shades of blue.

Marculey grunts with pleasure and drops the heavy bag responsible for most of his exhaustion and then sits on it. “You’ve done good, boy,” says grandfather. “It’s the girl’s turn now.” Then he kicks her brother off his seat with the laugh they both know well. Less a kick than a shove, really, and after a startled moment Marculey laughs too, then pretends to fall asleep where he’s tumbled among leaves and branches.

“Eat first,” grandfather says. “Water.” He pulls from the bag a cloth-wrapped bar of oats rolled with the last of the honey, the last of the almonds, the last of the treasured pistachios. Beyza starts to unsling her waterbag and grandfather says, “No, save yours for the climb. Take mine.” Marculey grabs the oatbar but grandfather gives him that look and he pulls off a piece far larger than she expects and hands it to Beyza. Grandfather nods.

Then grandfather is already pulling out the ropes, first the light, thin silk one that Beyza will carry up the cliff and then the heavier coil both old and younger man will use.

So there’s the face of rock grandfather’s spoken about so often, the worn path at its base that the Emir’s watchmen ride each afternoon, also spoken of by grandfather. She chews the oats, savors the near-forgotten sweetness of pistachio and honey, then looks up the gray rock and even though she’d thought she’d prepared herself to see this, thought she’d imagined how high, how hard, how steep it would be, it’s twice that. There are places she’s going to have to climb almost upside down, multiple eyebrows of overhanging rock she’ll not be able to avoid. Way, way up there, what seems like miles, there’s a glow as the rising dawn sun begins her slow caress of light down the stone.

“Quickly,” grandfather says. “He can rest, but you must climb.” Beyza nods, swallows the last of the oatbar and then loops the hundreds of yards of light silk rope around her thin chest. She’s already strapped on the leather shoes grandfather made for her, tight and wedged at the toes for finding the smallest foothold. “Busy busy,” grandfather says, his best potion against the nervousness she’s feeling. “Busy conquers fear.” She looks up the sky-reaching rock, expecting to see dragons circling like birds but there are neither. She looks to one side, expecting to see soldiers on horseback trotting, then galloping their way, but there are none. The path itself is worn, traveled daily by the Emir’s patrols, but undisturbed enough to either side that it’s clear they rarely stop. She looks to the other side, expecting to see grandfather, and he is there, waving her over to a better spot to begin. Her brother is no longer pretending to sleep or snore but deeply wrestling both.

Busy busy.

And yet, despite the urgency, she pauses before the first handhold - already her mind is mapping out a route up the stone - and asks grandfather, “What do you mean there weren’t always dragons?” Rather than answer he waves her towards the rock with his fingers.

Busy busy. Quickly quickly.

The rope around her chest is still a little loose so she tries to get it tighter, but it’s too long. Grandfather sighs impatiently and takes an end and wraps it bodywise around her chest and waist a few times, then ties it off. He snugs her small water bag against her chest as well, tugs the laces on her shoes, even pinches the braid on her hair, and then pushes her at the wall.

Beyza starts up.

It’s always easy at first, the rock nearest ground grooved and cracked, fingered open by plants and seeds as if everything close to the dirt is greedy for the mountain. So she goes up fast and when she looks back down grandfather is already small, not even looking up at her, but walking the area making sure there will be no signs of their presence, no reason for the afternoon patrol to stop, to look up or around, for suspicion, for reason to wait and hide in the woods for when they come back down with their treasure. Marculey still sleeps.

The sun is rising, warming the air into a gentle breeze, but the trees here are taller than anything she’s ever climbed, so looking out offers little to see but trunk and leaf. She’ll need to be much higher to see above them.

She doesn’t stop. Hand, foot, foot, hand, hand, foot. Stretch, reach, look. She’s hardly thinking, acting on some inborn instinct or impulse, like a goat. Of course it’s a nickname, ‘Goat’, but one that hasn’t ever really stuck, likely because it was grandfather’s long ago. Mostly she’s just Beyza, the Little Climber. She reaches a smooth spot with no further hold in reach and arcs back with her fingers somehow firm to the smallest dent in stone, searching above for another crack in the mountain’s blank gray face. It’s there, above and right, but an arm’s length out of reach. She looks down, through and around her feet at the route she’s come, looking for a missed path elsewhere. None. She checks the rock once more, this time leaning back with only one hand on the mountain but sees nothing useful.

She has no net, no safety. If she falls, nobody will be able to catch her, she’s too far up, will plummet too fast. She’d kill whoever’s under her. Grandfather has spoken of wealthy climbers, Royal hobbyists, who use ropes and metal hooks they pound into the rock as they climb, all manner of device to not die. This seems, she thinks, a kind of cowardice. Disrespectful of the mountain, an insult to the act. Not that they could ever afford such a luxury anyway. As it is, the ropes, both the one below waiting to be hauled up the cliff (she’s most worried about that challenge yet to come) and especially the silk line wrapped around her body, cost the family dearly.

If they succeed, she’ll be able to afford it. When they succeed, but she has imagined a universe of extravagance and none involves climbing cliffs, safe or not.

The left handhold is closer to her feet, so she lets go the right and one-handedly snugs up the rope around her shoulder and waist, judging its weight, checking for a deadly loose coil. Then she bends down, stretching that left arm on the hold until it’s above her head, then launches herself at the out-of-reach crack in rock, into the air, nowhere to go but down to death or to the mountain and life, right hand finding it, sticking, her body now a pendulum with the legs reaching for another thin ledge further right.

Easy.

She keeps going up the mountain wall. Hand, hand, hand, foot, foot, hand, foot. Pull, swing, stretch. Busy busy. Usually, on the other cliffs back home, by this time she’s run into all kinds of creatures, ants and spiders especially, but also lizards, birds, crickets, butterflies, bees and hornets. Yet up this cliff wall, hardly anything. Just a few ants. One yellow and white butterfly. A resting moth waiting on the night. So far, she’s the only breathing animal on the rock.

She reaches the first overhang, a ceiling of stone stretching left and right far beyond her route, unavoidable. She’s going to have to go from goat to lizard. When she practiced back at home, on cliffs that were the largest around though children compared to this, roots and other perfect handholds broke through from the sky-facing roof above, but here there is nothing. Just more rock.

Still, she spies a way, rocks that dip, plenty of cracks just deep enough for feet and finger to wedge, and then, halfway to the edge, a great knifelike break wide enough for her body. From there, easy easy. She counts the moves to that crack. Fourteen. Just fourteen. She’s been in shadow this entire time, but in the break ahead, her goal, is a thin shaft of sunlight that seems itself like a rope she could take to the top.

Grandfather says, ‘When you climb, don’t look out, don’t look down. Focus. Looking elsewhere will take your attention out of yourself. It’s you and the rock in front of you. You and the rock.’ So she hangs herself upside down and spiders those fourteen holds to the crack. The overhang starts at a slight slope, so she’s able to get both hands snug to stone, then a foot, then the other, then the left hand, one move at a time, always with three limbs firm, making what ends up being a full circle of her body, like the slowest demonstration of a cartwheel in the world. Finally she wedges herself into the upside-down canyon and inches out into the promising light.

She knows she must move fast. In the months leading up to this moment, probably even years, speed has always been grandfather’s focus. When he did it, decades ago, before grandfather was grandfather, before he was father even, just a boy not much older than Beyza, he’d climbed it alone, and once past any point the Emir’s guards would be able see, would think to look up, he was out of sight. But this time, to carry back the treasure that awaits, grandfather and Marculey will come too, up on the rope she will drop to them after reaching the peak. But this means they need hours, not minutes. Time for her to climb with the thin rope to the top, time to lower that rope, time to tie the thicker rope to the thinner, and for Beyza to haul the stronger cord skyward. Time to tie it off the sturdiest tree she can find (grandfather assures Beyza there are trees up there) and finally time for strong yet clumsy Marculey and strong yet old grandfather to use that rope to meet her, hauling it up behind them, leaving no trace of their presence at all.

Grandfather thinks the patrols come past this area in the afternoons, but there’s no way he can be sure. Both he and father have tried, in the village, to ask discreetly about such things of the occasional soldiers passing through, or the even less frequent traders, but neither know much at all, and the traders, always suspicious, always looking for something to trade - and information is the most profitable merchandise of all - posed too much of a risk in these uncertain times.

So, speed.

Still, once through the crack she does pause for a moment and look out past the mountain, if only because she needs to rest and drink water. Climbing often makes her feel like a bird, looking down at the tiny world below, but this makes her feel like she’s actually flying. She’s not just above the treetops, she’s treetops above the treetops. The forest goes on and on and on, and she realizes with astonishment that those are the woods they have come through. No wonder they were tired. There’s a strong cooling wind, but the sun is also warm in her face. It’s pleasant.

Miles away are the watchtowers they’d crept under in the night, from this distance just matchstick platforms peeking over the trees. She wonders who might be looking this way, if anyone might be using one of those strange eyeglass inventions she’s heard about, the ones that make long distances leap into view. Back home, on one of the many many evenings the family had plotted this adventure, father had asked of that, if they would be seen, but grandfather had blown his laugh through his nose dismissively. ‘Nobody watches the cliff,’ he said. ‘Just the skies.’ Still, she can’t help but imagine eyes out there, looking her way.

There’s nothing on this slope of rock but more rock. She steps down to the edge and looks over, but between the angle and the distance, the sun above and shadow below, she cannot make out grandfather.

Down below, the path the Emir’s guards take along the base of the cliffs is free of trees, a worn braid of horse and cart path that she hadn’t really noticed from the ground, evidence, she imagines, of years and years and years of back and forth passage. It reminds her of the groove dug into the dirt around the house of the meanest man in the village, Amit Lakh the Stonecutter. A white scar that tests the limit of the rope he ties his dog, a snarling, all shoulder and teeth and foamy saliva beast he calls Gash. The meanest boys in the village taunt the beast and pretend their bravery, placing their jeering faces just this side of the dog’s leash. The brave kids, like Beyza, test themselves, stepping inside the border when the dog isn’t looking and leaping to safety at the last minute. A few have scars.

If the path she is looking at is the limit of a rope holding back soldier and dragon, she and grandfather and Marculey are now well inside.

But she looks left and right, an unrivaled miles long view of path and cliff and tree and sees no evidence of danger. The Emir’s dogs are nowhere near. Above, no dragons soar.

It’s a safe perch, really, and if there was anything at all she could secure rope to, she might be able to lower the lighter strand she carries to grandfather, secure the heavier cable, haul it up, and have them climb this quarter distance to safely wait while she monkeys up the rest, but there is nothing at all she might anchor. So busy busy it is, still up the rock.

The rope on her chest is tight, but she snugs it further and climbs. Hand, hand, foot, hand, foot. Just Beyza and stone, stone and Beyza.

When she stops again for breath and water, on a perfectly flat little ledge she could stay for days, she guesses it must be near mid-morning, for the sun is halfway up the sky. Fortunately, there are strolling bundles of those happy white clouds overhead to cut the glare and heat. Unfortunately, she’s working hard enough that her greatest threat - sweat - is unavoidable. Fortunately, here she can use the white powdery chalk grandfather had secured for her back in the village, another great expense, for such minerals were rare. ‘You can’t chalk where the patrols can see,’ grandfather had said. ‘They’ll see and stop and wait. But once high enough, use it, use it, use it.’

Father, ever finding every possible worst disaster, had asked, ‘And what of the watchtowers? What of the dragons?’

Grandfather had shrugged. In Beyza’s memory, father fed another log to the fire and Marculey slept. But in the day, many times, grandfather had warned of the climber’s greatest threat: water. They chose this time of year for that reason, late in the dry season, and the weather has obliged. There’s been no rain for months. Well, there’s been little rain for years too.

‘But water doesn’t just come from the clouds,’ grandfather told her. ‘It can rest in the air, the way morning grass is damp. It can seep through the ground, trickle out holes in the cliff. It can lay in wait in birdshit, be held to the chest of mosses and mushrooms. You must always be careful of that which can make you slip, and your own water is the most dangerous.’

Before starting up again - busy busy - she takes the cloth she keeps behind her back, belted in near her spine along with the bag of chalk, and wipes the sweat from her neck and forehead. Then she generously powders her palms and fingers and starts up again, this time leaving a white-dotted map of her route for any to see. If they could fly.

She’s so high her ears pop. Grandfather had told that might happen, but like so many things on this trip, she’d not understood until the experience. ‘The higher you go,’ he said, ‘it’s like the air changes, gets lighter, even though the wind is harder.’ She has not encountered the wind he spoke of, but her ears seem to have bubbles.

In a climb sometimes it’s hard to know where the end is, because one is so close to the wall that every dip or slope obscures what’s beyond. So it comes as a surprise when Beyza looks up to chart her next moves and realizes she’s only a few body lengths from what might be the top. She’s so, so tired, but this brings a rush of energy and in moments she is, indeed, one-legging onto a ridge that is the end of her long long journey. That rush of energy is followed by a wave of exhaustion and for a moment she just lies there on her back, staring at those happy clouds not so very far overhead, fighting the urge to take a nap.

But she is not finished, not by any measure, so she hauls herself to her feet and starts unwinding the rope from her body. Busy busy, but this time it’s quite the relief to free herself from the chain of silk. Light as it is, it’s still binding and the morning keeps getting hotter.

Before entering the woods so many days ago, they’d had a view of these cliffs. From that distance of leagues and leagues, the mountains reached skyward with chilling sharpness, less peak than cliff, less earth than blade. There were no trees that she could see, certainly no green, and grandfather said that years ago from fall to spring the top usually held snow, but from that distance it was hard to be sure of anything. ‘There’s trees,’ grandfather said. ‘There’s trees,’ and for a moment Beyza thought she heard in his voice the suspicion of uncertain facts.

But there are trees, she sees, twisted, stunty pines, all fist and no finger, barely green, tucked away from the edge as if hiding themselves from the land below. In their distant view those days ago, it seemed the mountain and cliff were like a blade and though grandfather said that was not the case, she had envisioned needing to straddle the peak like a branch, then descending to find whatever tree she was to tie the ropes onto. Instead, the land slopes rather gently away from the cliff, even rising again some distance along. If there is a valley here, she can’t see it.

The closer the trees are to the edge, the more they lean away from it, as if terrified of the land beyond. That thought, of fear, sends her searching the skies for the fabled dragons of this place, and she can see now that what she thought were the specks of distant birds are in fact the shapes of even more distant giant beasts swooping and circling. Again what she imagined shatters against the actual experience. She realizes she’d never truly believed there’d be dragons at all.

Beyza wants to look more but again, busy busy. She walks down the slope a little ways to the thickest of the stunted trees and ties one end of her silk rope to it. As a single line it’s almost impossibly light, and even more impossibly strong for being so weightless. She has to be obsessively cautious, because the worst thing to happen would be for the line to get tangled in itself. It’s so light that knots are nearly impossible to undo and she certainly doesn’t have the time at all for such a task. She wishes the silk alone was strong enough to hold grandfather or Marculey, but they have tried back in the village, and while the strand is strong enough to hold weight, the back and forth drag of a man hauling himself up catches easily on any edge and tears. So down below is a thicker rope that she will haul straight up, hopefully.

She finds the right sized rock and carefully lays the coiled silk on the flattest ground she can find nearest the cliff’s rim, then ties the open end to the stone and takes a half dozen steps away, trailing the line. She gets as close as she can to the edge and looks over. Down below, so so far down, there is a small blot of red. It is the large cloth grandfather has placed on the ground at the edge of the forest, for her to see, a target and a marker just in case, on her meandering path up the cliff, she strays too far from where she started. If they should miss the silk coming down, all would be lost. Once again Beyza appreciates grandfather’s meticulous planning.

She swings the stone around her head just as she practiced so many times back home, faster and faster, teasing out the line bit by bit until it reaches the right speed and then she lets go. The stone sails out over the edge, into the sky, trailing its fantastic tail, for a moment acting like it’ll just keep going up, and then it drops and the thread unspools behind. There are moments of this adventure that cannot be planned around or for, where chance can doom them all. The stray guard, rain, a slip, an accident. A wild dog, bad food, a careless sneeze. The line tangling on the way down is one, the rock it’s tied to catching on some obstacle. Beyza sees it being pulled towards the cliff by the trailing thread and her breath catches when it meets the ridge she’d had to climb under, bounces, and sails over the edge.

She breathes again when the silk keeps unspooling but then it doesn’t stop at all even though the stone must surely have reached the ground and she realizes that its own weight, all those yards and yards hanging in the air are still pulling downwards, so she grabs the end and waits. Grandfather has overestimated what they would need and a long coiled pile remains, so she gathers it up and walks it over to the tree and ties it off. Maybe they’ll be able to use the rest, somehow.

Then she goes back to the edge of the world and waits for grandfather to signal with a tug from the bottom that he’s ready for her to start pulling.

Beyza sits down, weariness sweeping over her, through her, starting in her back and shoulders and spilling into her legs as if she’s a vessel for fatigue. She has the silk loose in her palm and imagines what grandfather and Marculey must be doing down there in what feels now like the well of the world. There’s a slight tug and she perks up but then no more, which means grandfather has merely taken out the slack. Still, he has it. He has it.

The sun is now overhead, but the happy clouds still sweep across the sky giving that lovely cloud-shade more often than not. Beyza gazes without much thought at all across the plain of trees, its own kind of bumpy cloud ceiling, but green. Way way way in the distance there’s a sense of the forest ending, a different shading where villages and towns and even cities begin. To the left, another set of mountains, though really just hills compared to what Beyza is on, where her own tiny village lies tucked away alongside one of the rivers, slowly, like nearly everything else out there, dying. The summer was unusually dry, as was the summer before that and the summer before that. There is a war to the south, and barbarians to the north. Dragons seal off the west, and ocean walls the east. She knows hunger. They all do.

But she’s so tired that there’s little thought going on in her head. She wonders again, mildly, what grandfather meant by ‘no Dragons in the valley’ but she’s too tired to attach any further meditation.

She puts her head on her knees, sideways, unfocused vision idly stroking the long gray slate sides of the cliffs she has just climbed, almost like petting a cat’s fur, if such a thing could be done with sight, when she comes to the bottom, miles and miles away, and sees what looks like a dirty cloud down there, so different from the crisp white ones overhead.

It takes a moment, but then she understands.