The metal tube felt colder than the air around it. It seemed to have absorbed the deep, ancient cold of the glacier’s bed. It held the frost in its dense brass walls until the metal burned through the palms of Tomas’s mittens like hot iron.
“Is it open?” Corin asked, clambering down the scree bank with a stiff canvas wrap clutched under his arm. His woolen mittens were gray with rock flour. “If there are coins inside, we ought to count them before the guard post court guard comes riding up from the bridge.”
“It’s not open,” Tomas said. He didn’t look up from the brass casing. “And it won’t be opened on a gravel bank in the wind.”
He laid the metal tube gently onto the coarse wool canvas the laborers had spread over the shale. The metal was pitted with tiny green blossoms of green rust where melted snow had seeped into the stampings. But the main seam remained sealed by a ribbon of braided hemp twine bedded in black stone pitch.
Above them on the glacier wall, the courier’s body remained anchored by his lower limbs. With the dispatch satchel removed, his gray tunic hung loose. It showed the skeletal thinness of the ribs beneath the frozen wool. The man had not eaten well before he sat down to die. His leather waist-belt had been notched three times past its made eyelets, the excess strap wrapped twice around his hip to keep his trousers from falling.
