Read SGA - 14 - Death Game for Free Online Page B

brilliant greens, reds and lambent purples, the turquoise that is my favorite.
    “It’s only a short trip,” my father said. “There is no reason Teyla cannot come. We will stay one night on Narada and return in the morning.” I was beside myself with excitement, especially when my father got out my winter coat, now packed away neatly for the season, as it was coming to summer in the lowlands by Emege That Was. “It’s winter on Narada,” he said. “Their winters are cold, so you must bundle up when you play in the snow.”
    It is true that some parts of Athos are cold. There is snow in the mountains aplenty, but I had lived my life in the lands near Gate Field, where winters are rainy and cool, with ice in the mornings that sometimes coats the trees until they shine like glass. Real snow is rare and does not stay long. That is how we were, on Athos. You came to us in the uplands, when we had just moved to our summer pasturage with the return of the sun. In winter we were far away, in the deep valleys where the cold does not cut one to the bone. It is good that you came then. Had you come a tenday sooner, you would have found no one at all.
    And so I stood beside my father in summer, bundled into my winter coat, while the great Ring of the Ancestors hummed to life, flaring blue as I waited. With good wishes ringing in our ears we stepped up, hand in hand, eager and unafraid.
    I do not remember what I thought of the gate itself, of the transit, the sudden cold and the sense of disorientation, but we stepped out into snow. We stood in a broad courtyard, sculpted evergreen trees bowed beneath the weight of the snow, high mountains almost invisible, white against the pale sky. Great white flakes were falling, sticky and huge, drifting on the light wind. The stones around the gate had been cleared, and the new snow there only barely covered my boots, but the drifts around were higher than my waist. I let out a breath, and it came out steam in the frosty air. I turned my face to the sky, watching the flakes in their swirling dance, while in the distance we heard the voices of people and the sound of bells moving in the wind.
    What may I tell you except that I was entranced?
    We spent the day in the markets of Narada, where every good thing is sold, and my father made many trades. I played in the snow, drank warm tea on a bench beside a park where bigger children played a game I didn’t know, sliding around on snowshoes with two hide balls. We stayed in a small hostel, eating beside a roaring fire alive with the crackling of evergreen wood, and went to the Temple of the Bells by starlight to watch night play on the snow, with the distant glow of lights on the mountains where people lived. We sat in the pool of a hot spring to warm up afterwards, and I was half asleep already when my father took me up to the loft where we would pass the night. I lay drowsy and comfortable, wrapped in a soft feather quilt, looking out the tiny window at the late moon rising in a silver crescent over the mountains, the snow reflecting its pale light, until waking turned into dreams.
    That was my first gate, and I have never looked back. Since then I have never ceased from travel, from wanting to dare one more gate, to see one more sunrise. It makes me a bad Athosian. We are stolid people in many ways, fatalistic and accepting of the world as it is. We have consigned our romantic past to stories, to tales of daring deeds that once were, but life is too hard for such things now. We are children of war, of a war that never ends. Most of us do not grow old, and while we tell stories of the great cities we once lived in, of heroes who once lived and dared all, we know those days are past. Such things do not happen in the real world.
    When you came to Athos, we thought you were marauders who would try our strength. What else is there to think of a group of wary armed men whose eyes are not hard but frightened, as though they did not know what waited