Sons of Fortune by Malcolm Macdonald Page A

lichen-eaten stones of the school buildings. The sky was a russet grey, hovering between the purple of night and the red of sunrise. Not a cloud was in sight. It was very cold and still. Everything, even little pebbles that normally would have kicked loosely away or wobbled underfoot, seemed to have been cast in a single block of iron and painted to resemble a frozen world. The exit from the schoolyard onto the moor lay through an arch flanked by four giant stone troughs, filled with water and capped with thick sheets of ice.
    “We dip in those on our way back,” de Lacy said. “It’s best to work up a good lather coming down, then you can be in and out without cooling off much. If you go in cold, you’ll stay cold all morning.”
    Boy wondered how they were to dry off. No one had brought towels and none were to be seen around the place. He and Caspar joined the scattered throng of more than a hundred boys in every variety of dress, trotting through the arch. He found a way of running that did not hurt his toes too much.
    “There’s chief,” de Lacy said. “With Agincourt today.” He pointed to a crowd of about forty boys running toward them over the moor; in the thick of them was a tall, chunky, well-built man with curly blond hair. “Agincourt’s his own House,” de Lacy added.
    The whole world was white. Bog, marsh, moor, pasture, and scree were reduced to one appearance. Only the forms of the dalesides provided any relief; they were like pictures of the tops of clouds as sketched by balloonists; above them towered two giant masses: Whernside—a daunting climb even from here, halfway up its side—and Ingleborough, several miles down the valley.
    On its way to Ingleborough the moor rose gently to a broad crest that obscured any view of the coastal lowlands beyond; it exactly symbolized the remote, own-worldliness of Fiennes.
    Both Boy and Caspar, in imitation of their father, loved to look at landscapes and talk with knowing superiority of the geological forces that had shaped them.
    “Glacial,” Caspar said.
    “It’s colder at the top,” de Lacy told him.
    The two Stevensons exchanged amused glances. “Until it carved its way out through that limestone ridge the water must have formed quite a lake here,” Boy said.
    “The bog must be the remnant,” Caspar replied in bursts of breath. The hill was growing steeper and talk less easy. The weaker runners were dropping into a plodding walk until the chief or some senior fellow would shout, “Brace up!” and then the walk would take on the veriest tinge of a trot. At the steepest places these fainthearts made parallelograms of muscle, hands pushing on knees to make the climb tolerable.
    The higher they went the more dales came into view—it was surprising what a difference even a few feet could make: Cam Fell, Oughtershaw, Foxup Moor, Fountains Fell, and more distant humps rolled in folds under the pale blue snows. Here and there the black, yet-to-be-frozen waters of upland tarns mottled the otherwise unbroken surface.
    “Gordale Scar is about twenty miles that way,” de Lacy said. “It’s really sublime.”
    Another boy, overhearing, turned round and mocked: “Sublime! Oooh hooo!”
    “Pox your bum, Randall, you fiend,” de Lacy said evenly.
    Very few boys were talking.
    “In milder weather you can stay asleep from your bed to the top and all the way down again,” de Lacy said.
    No one lingered at the top. De Lacy had been right: It was much colder there, on the ridge, where the lightest breeze from any direction was whipped around the breastlike pinnacle of the summit. Running down was easier but less comfortable, especially for Boy, who had to try to run on the side of the foot Blenkinsop had mashed.
    “I’d really like to hurt Blenkinsop,” Caspar said again. He felt he owed Boy something for that offer to walk the beam twice last night.
    By the time they were halfway down, Boy had drawn well ahead. Caspar then found a way of catching up