I could see, at least, that a great deal of confusion was upon us and that we had better act quickly and rationally.  I began looking around and discovered the faint tracks of footprints in the snow behind the dead priest.  I told everyone that this corpse must have been carried here and abandoned, probably when the bearers saw us coming.

     "Vermin," said our translator, "these beggars are all liars and will kill us if we don't get out of this land."

     I immediately agreed with him.  But our captain spoke up next.  "The book, the book is here.  We’ll take it and go."

     The four of us now grabbed the dead bishop and began prying at his frozen arms to remove the treasure.  We pulled and pried and hammered with our staffs and even chipped away with our sickles, but the body was so stiff with ice that we made no progress.  The snow was falling thickly and I warned that if we didn't leave now we might not find the village again, seeing as our guide was not functional.

     Our leader wouldn’t depart without the book.  So we decided to drag the corpse back to the village, across the frozen ground. I insisted we take the guide too.  The others wanted to leave him there and would have, until I came up with the plan of strapping him on top of the dead man's body with my belt.  I suggested that the heat of his body would melt the book free by the time we got back.  We tied two other belts around the dead priest's torso and pulled the load easily across the hard snow.

     New snow was now falling in a thick blanket.  Along the way the old guide woke up and began screaming when he saw where he was.  But our translator running along beside gave him another clout and quickly put a stop to that.

     We made it back to the village at a jogging pace and would have never found it, so thick was the snow, except that it happened to lay right in our path.  As we came up we heard the cries of our poor, burned companion.  We ran to the ruins of the church only to find our dear friend lying there in the corner of the room, stripped almost naked and shivering to death.

     The others were gone.  He whispered to us that several men had come back, taken everything, including his clothes, and led the others away.  The snow was so thick that there was no chance of pursuing them.  Had they left just minutes before their escape would have been hidden as if in the blackest of nights.  But in fact they were covered by the whitest of snows.  Our problem was that they’d taken all of our gear with them.

     Then we discovered that the fire in the stove had been put out with a few handfuls of snow.  I checked it and not a single ember remained.  The snowfall had also extinguished what was left of the fires from the night before.  I ran to the charred remains of the cabins, and dug through the snow here and there , but everything was cold.  A shiver ran down my spine.

     Now our dilemma was clear to everyone.  Our interpreter flew off in a rage, kicking the poor guide who’d just woken up again, in his side.  He untied him and began cursing the inhabitants of this region in several languages, all the while stripping off the clothes of the guide and throwing them at our naked companion.  But it was too late in either case.  Both were unconscious.

     Our translator now produced his knife and talked of spilling the naked wretch's guts to warm his hands.  We stopped him from this and dragged the body outside.  Then we dressed our own fellow and rubbed his blackened limbs, but to little avail.  He moaned now and then and seemed to doze off every few minutes and then wake up with a start and cry out some more.  What we needed was a warm shelter.

     We began collecting the wood we could find to build some kind of hovel before night fell in the one intact corner of the church.  Soon we had a small lean-to we could all fit in, carpeted with fragments of burnt rags.  In the last few hours of daylight we searched the grounds once more and found, to everyone's surprise, some frozen potatoes and a corked bottle full of fermented spirits, which we promptly drank.

     All this time our leader and interpreter were knocking away at the dead priest's arms with butts of wood, trying to pry loose the sacred book.  They were fixated on it, and our leader declared that he wouldn’t leave before he had it.  But they made no progress, and without fire were unlikely to make any.

     I suggested that we simply bury the body in the snow.  But he retorted that this wouldn’t be sufficient, that the first Spring thaw would bring the evil to light again.  It was decided against all sanity that we’d drag the corpse into our hovel and lay with it all night, trying to thaw it with our body heat.  We’d leave the following morning, taking with us either the larger or the smaller parcel in tow.  To my mind the prediction of the guide was coming close to fulfillment.

     So we pulled the body into our nest of rags, closed a crude door and began gnawing on the potatoes that we’d been warming up for the last hour under our shirts.  This worked well for the potatoes, and our corpulent friend suddenly declared that he would lay that night directly upon the corpse with his large coat wrapped around the both of them, to thaw and free the book by morning.

     We all had wretched bouts of sleep that night, so tightly pressed together in that dark hole.  Our poor burned friend woke us up with occasional jerks and shrieks and our fat translator snored loudly.  But the sounds subsided towards dawn and we all found a few hours of rest.

     When we stirred and kicked out the door of our shelter another gruesome discovery awaited us.  Our burned friend was dead and already stiff.  When we tried to rouse our interpreter we found that he too was dead and almost stuck to the corpse that had sucked the heat and life out of him while he slept.  We had trouble prying the two apart.  His bare flesh was melted to the frozen clothing of the priest.

     Our leader began sobbing and declared that it was all his fault the two had died.  He commanded us to leave at once to the south.  He would bury these men himself, and then set out in our footsteps.  We couldn’t abandon him in this place.  They were our mates too and we would quickly bury them together.  We did this under the few remaining floorboards of the church.  The ground outside was impossible to dig.

     Then we wrapped as many of the rags around our bodies as we could and were about to leave, when we found out that it was still the intention of our leader to take back the corpse clasping the book.  He was tying his long belt around its neck and then around his own waist, expecting to drag it across the snow just as two of us had done the day before.

     "I know I can’t ask you to help me in this," he said.  "But, old as I am, I will accomplish a task for which two very good men have died.  I owe it to them."

     Both of us pleaded against such a doomed project.  We had two long days of travel ahead, only a few bites of food left, and no tents.  It would be a miracle if the clear weather lasted and we made it at all.  But we couldn’t change his mind.  In sad resignation the two of us looked at each other and then went over to the corpse and added our own belts to the load.  We pulled it down to the river's edge and found that along most parts of the river, where the wind had blown away the snow, we could travel at a jogging pace, our burden sliding smoothly behind us.

     That whole day the air was calm and we covered many miles at our hurried pace.  We even pushed on several hours after dark, until we ran into some drifts on the ice and thought we might lose our way.  Though we were exhausted, our motion kept us warm.  Now we feared that we might freeze like the others had the night before.

     I’d brought along one of the shovels and we dug a cave deep into a snowbank and huddled together, this time leaving the corpse outside.  We shivered more than we slept, but we made it through and set out again at the first hints of dawn.  The river ice in these parts was rough, which slowed our pace.  But we still travelled at a fast walk and covered many miles.

     As the afternoon wore on we slowed even more.  Our leader could no longer pull and needed to rest every few hundred yards.  My toes were frozen and I think my companion's were even worse off, from the way he seemed to walk on his heels.  By dusk we were still out of sight of the village, hoping to see it any minute.

     When darkness fell we were in a predicament.  I knew we couldn’t possibly survive another night in the cold.  Our only hope, I told my fellows, was to leave the corpse here and mark it and when we reached the village we could come back in a few days with help and recover it.  Our leader was so near to collapse that he didn’t object.

     We dragged the body to a snowbank near the river's edge and our leader marked the spot with his own staff.  Then we wearily trudged on through the dark and with a good deal of luck stumbled straight into the village, half-dead, a few hours into the night.  We banged on the first door we came to and were carried to the small temple and fell asleep almost instantly in a warm room, surrounded by a full complement of priests and nuns.

     To end my story on a positive note I can only say that we never attempted anything like this again.  It took us several moons, instead of days, to recover and rise from our cots.  My companion lost some of his toes, and our leader, several toes and fingers.  I was spared.

     It was early Spring when my leader and I and four stout townsfolk set out to recover the corpse.  But much to his anguish we couldn’t find the spot.  The landscape had changed with more snows and the staff had disappeared.  He seemed to hold this against me, for he went out every following day without me, with many more villagers, to scour the area.  The spring thaw had begun and he was hoping every day that the receding snows would reveal his treasure.

     While he was still bent on this search he sent me and my companion off to the south, with several long reports and letters, a few of them sealed.  After a slow but safe voyage we reached the capital at Leuka.  Our reports, to my surprise, were well received.  My wounded friend was given an important desk job, while I was given these added insignia to my staff and a commission to travel to the Far East, for more book-hunting.

     Of our captain's fate I heard only one story, several years later.  It was said that after he searched the whole region for the body without luck, he had a large boat built, filled it with supplies and set sail down the river, thinking the corpse had also drifted that way.  It was early summer when they set out, and from two messengers they sent back it was known that they travelled very far, perhaps to the polar sea.  But they were never heard from again and a relief expedition the next year found nothing.  The whole region was punished by the Church for this disaster.

     Meanwhile, I made my way by foot into the lands of the East, with many pathless deserts and snow-capped mountains in my way.  I traversed two wide continents until I reached the place I sit today, where I have the good fortune to be able to tell my story.  May your own quests be easier and happier than mine.

The world is a wide place, filled with wonders, but we find we are most like ants in crawling so long across the surface of it.”

With these words he fell silent.  His listeners stared at him, as if in a trance.  It was late, and when he rose they all rose from the table and proceeded to their cells.  He was shown to the same room he’d been given the last time.  He lay down in the dark and found himself much too tired to do the thinking he’d planned on.  There would be trials ahead, but a life of hardships had taught Jonathan never to muddy the hours of quiet and drowsiness.  He fell asleep without a single care or worry.