Too Cold For Snow

attitude.
    ‘And another imperative reason you should take me along is that when you were probably still asleep, dreaming of friendly nineteen year olds in crop tops and clingy skirts I ran up Crib Goch and back. I’m your fit sort of Amazonian.’
    Krink suggested that he might like to come training with him, as he was just about to go out to Llanfrothen for a bit of a work-out.
    They were both still feeling a little stuffed when they reached the yard and it would be a good while before the digestive juices really started to work. The old quarry site was full of rusting machines, left-overs from the days when the industry employed thousands of workers hereabouts. The engine-room door flapped open and within it jackdaws chattered manically. There was a glassy lustre to the landscape, a sheen of sunlight on the great spoil heaps, where acid rain leached through. On the surface of a nearby lake, black water shirred in the keening wind.
    The trimming room was an impressive space, where dozens of men used to sit in cubicles to shape roof tiles, walling strip, whatever was required. Kamosiwe took off his top and Krink followed suit. They unwrapped the axes – two long affairs with handles of ash and blades honed to the sort of sharpness that could shave things thin enough for microscope slides. Then Kamosiwe took off his Orioles T-shirt to reveal an astonishing body painting – a leopard leaping out of the yaw of a volcano and three powerful birds of prey flying in squadron formation, one carrying a tree which looked both small and huge. Draped over that design was an exotica of feathers hanging from an elaborate necklace.
    Kamosiwe told the story hidden under his shirt, he got it off his chest. ‘The first creatures were the hekura , they are like your fairies and they live in the hills and mountains. They are very beautiful and it stands to reason that they, in turn are also attracted to beauty and so the shamans cover themselves with lovely decorations to try to attract the hekura into their own chests, to live there. And having a hekura inside you gives you power beyond measure. The volcano and the tree and the three birds are a much longer story which I could tell you over a pint sometime.’
    ‘Are you a shaman?’ asked Krink.
    ‘In the absence of anyone else to claim the title in Llandudno Junction, I suppose I am.’
    Krink laughed without causing offence. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘Thank you. I’ll respect your status. But that’s enough folklore studies for one morning. Let’s get on with it. Show me how you can defend yourself…’
    In the indian’s hands the axe turned into a willow wand, a slender pliable taper which he spun around as if it operated outside of gravity’s law. He struck at phantasmal men lunging away from imagined blows and parrying axe strikes. With an iron bar in his hands Krink tried a feint he’d picked up from kendo classes, many moons ago. The two men enjoyed lunging at each other, enjoyed the flashes of physical brilliance and were equally matched, Krink’s experience pitted against the young man’s raw energy.
    They drove down the following evening, arranging it so that they arrived as night fell, when there was hardly any moon. Krink had scoped the place out over the course of the previous week, and just that morning he’d parked a Fiesta just round the corner with three cases of beer left in plain view. He knew it wouldn’t be long before someone jimmied off the door – a Fiesta really is a sardine can with an engine – and Krink had arranged that forty cans were well and truly adulterated. It only took ten minutes for them to spot the booty and a total of eighteen to get it all stashed in the house. He presumed that they wouldn’t be hanging around before necking the lot.
    They parked on a verge about a mile from the estate, playing a game as they crossed the fields and hedges of making no sound whatsoever, not even the crackle of a twig breaking. With Krink it was a taught craft, a skill about which he was inordinately proud. With Kamosiwe it was instinctive. Here was a man who could hit a macaw’s heart across the reach of a broad river with a dart so hard that the bird would explode in a supernova of scarlet feathers. Each man listened out for the sounds of the other messing up, but smiled as they realised that they were walking within thirty yards of each other without hearing so much as a hint of footfall. Krink heard the brittle snap of a twig and felt ready