North Child (10 page)

It is close now. Very close. And it shall unfold as I had planned from the beginning.

“Would you like to play?” he had said. A boy with a curling-up mouth and a voice soft as fresh-fallen snow. With those words came the wanting. And all was changed. Irrevocably.

I was Princess then, and The Book my father had given me was new. The Book had been a gift to me on the eve of my first journey to the green lands, to begin recording my royal days.

Today I travel to the green lands and I can hardly believe it. Ever since I was a baby, Urda, my old nurse, has told me stories of the softskin folk. Now at last I shall see them for myself.

When the king's eldest child reaches the age of knowing, it is the tradition to take him or her to see the green lands that lie outside Huldre. It is a strange world, my father says. He says it exists mainly for us to use – a place to get slaves and the raw materials for some of our food and clothing.

He says they are a very queer people, the softskin folk, not like us at all. They are backward and plain. Short lived. No arts like ours. Their jewels are pale, and except for a very few who are of royalty, most live in small drab huts, like our servants' quarters. It sounds very strange indeed.

But Urda told me more, told me about different things they have, amazing things. Something called music. And many, many kinds of animals. And bursts of fragrant colour that grow out of the ground, called flowers. And their food is melting soft, too, exotic and all different flavours. My father calls it repulsive, says it would make me sick, but in spite of that I am curious.

The journey was long, but the sleigh was comfortable and there was plenty of hot slank to drink. In fact, it grew so warm after a time that we gradually had to peel away all our furs. How can the softskins stand this pressing warmth? It makes me feel choked and prickly.

We will stay for a week in the green lands. Our lodging is in a palace of rock, though my father says it is nothing like the Ice Palace of Huldre. He said it is not used often, only when we need to journey here to replace servants. And it is hidden from the softskins' sight.

Softskin folk do not live as long as we do and must be replenished. So we come every twenty or thirty years to take away more. My father says it is best to choose unwanted, unmarried people, not children, because less fuss is made when they disappear. Not that they could find us anyway. It is too long, arduous, and puzzling a journey for softskin folk. And it is too cold in our land for softskins; without slank they would die within a few hours, a day if they were well equipped. Father says there have been a handful of softskins called explorers who have journeyed to within a hundred miles of our land. We collected one or two of these, he says, and they made especially good servants because they were so hardy.

In appearance the softskins are very different from us, but we are able to move among them easily because of our arts, and they don't even know we are there.

Urda takes me tomorrow to see softskin folk. I can hardly wait!

I cannot sleep. The most amazing thing has happened. I actually met one of the softskin folk! A boy. I touched his skin and it was as soft as they say – softer! And his voice…it was like a…I don't know. Like the song of the creatures they call birds that we heard on our journey south, yet odder and more beautiful.

In Huldre I have seen the softskin servants only from a distance, for they do the most menial work in the kitchen and stables. (Troll servants wait on the royal family.) And our softskins are dull and broken from living long in Huldre. So I had not known what they are truly like. Urda had told me they are ugly and their voices sound awful – thin and watery – but she was wrong.

Urda fell asleep; because she is old she is always sleepy, and she drank plenty of slank with the picnic lunch we had. So I wandered off by myself. I moved through the grass, which was green and soft when I bent down and ran my fingers across the tops of the thin stalks. I felt almost dizzy from all the smells that filled my nose. Sweet and thrilling they were. And the changeable feel of the gentle wind on my skin. So different from the hard and constant wind in Huldre.

Then I saw some children playing in the distance and thought I would use my arts to get closer without being seen, but abruptly their game ended and they all went away.

Except there was one boy who came back.

“Would you like to play?” he said, holding up a round red object.

Because of my arts, I could understand his words, but still I could only stare. What had happened to my breathing? I wondered. Then the round thing came flying at me and I ducked.

His mouth curled up, showing even more teeth, and he ran to get it. “It is a ball,” he said. “I'll teach you how to catch it.”

And his words and the curling-up mouth made me feel strange inside, warm and melty, like taking a gulp of slank on an empty stomach. “Show me,” I said eagerly in his language.

And there came a surprised look on his face. “Have you been ill? Your voice is…” he started but stopped.

After that I didn't speak again, but I began to understand about throwing and catching the thing he called a ball.

“I hope you didn't think I was teasing you,” he said. I didn't understand the word
teasing, but he went on. “Your voice is fine,” he said. Still I kept silent, and we continued to throw the ball, back and forth.

Then I heard the sound of someone calling, and he said he had to go, that his servants were looking for him but perhaps we could play again another time.

I watched him run down the mountain towards a large building. He moved quickly, with grace.

When I went back Urda was searching for me, still groggy from her nap. I told her I had taken a walk. I decided I wouldn't tell her about the boy. The next day I would make her take me there again. And I would make sure she drank even more.

The white bear headed due south of the farm, keeping to the woods and away from the places where people lived.

It was a frosty, clear night, and the stars shimmered against a black sky. Usually, looking up at the stars on such a clear night filled me with a breathless pleasure, no matter how often I gazed at them. But that night I was hardly aware that there
was
a sky.

Riding a bear was nothing like riding a horse. First of all, the bear was far larger, and I could not ride with both legs straddling his back, the way one does with a horse. At first I didn't move at all but stayed frozen in the position I had been in when I had landed on the broad back – sort of a crouch, my legs tucked under me. When he first began to move, I instinctively grabbed hold of the great ruff of fur at the back of his neck to keep from sliding off.

But after a few hours I grew stiff. I had the feeling we would be travelling for a long time, so I got bolder and began to shift my body, trying to find a comfortable position. I finally settled with one leg dangling down and the other bent under me. I didn't need to use my legs to hold on. Despite his enormous speed, the white bear's gait was surprisingly smooth and his back so broad that as long as I kept a firm hold on his thick fur, I was in no danger of falling off.

The white bear's fur was extraordinary. It was as soft as rabbit's fur, yet much thicker and longer. When I burrowed my hands into it – which I only worked up the courage to do after we had been riding a long time and my fingers were numb with cold – my hands and forearms disappeared up to my elbows. And the fur was so warm. It took only moments for my fingers to thaw. My legs, too, stayed warm, nestled in the deep fur.

But the rest of me – my face and upper body – was cold, and I was very glad of my cloak. I thought of Neddy finding pins and carefully lining up the torn edges, and my eyes blurred with tears. Better not to think about Neddy.

I thought instead of the beast upon which I was riding. I remembered the imaginary companion of my childhood. How many times had I imagined myself riding a magnificent white bear through the night?

He moved faster than I would have thought possible for such a large animal, and by daybreak we had journeyed far, into country I had never seen before. The land was heavily forested; there were fewer and fewer evergreens, more broad-leaved trees. We were still heading south.

Though the journey lasted seven days, the white bear stopped only once.

During that time I must have been in some kind of trance – or maybe it was an enchantment or spell. For those seven days I neither ate nor drank, nor slept. The strangest thing was that I didn't feel any different, except extremely aware and alert. It all seemed very natural; I was drinking it all in – the vivid greens of unfamiliar plants, the distant call of a strange bird, even the approaching smell of the sea.

When the white bear did stop, it took me by surprise, and I found myself slipping off his back and landing quite hard on sand. Catching my breath, I sat up and gazed around me. We were on a remote stretch of brown sand and waves were breaking not twenty feet away. It was dawn, and over my right shoulder the sun was just beginning to rise. Considering the direction we had been travelling, I guessed that this must be the southern reaches of Njordsjoen, the North Sea. And even though there was an enormous white bear not two feet from me, I felt a thrill of wonder. My grandfather had sailed this sea, and my great-grandfather before him. I had always promised myself that one day I would come to Njordsjoen, although I never could have imagined it happening quite like this.

Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the bear fiddling with something small and dark, and then he pulled at it with his great paws. Like taffy, whatever it was began to lengthen and grow.

I watched, dazed and fascinated, and then suddenly he came towards me, and before I knew what was happening, I was being encased from head to toe in some kind of soft, pliable covering. It was brown and smelled of fish and musk, and I thought maybe it was a sealskin. Then he pulled it up over my eyes and I felt myself being patted all over, as if I were a bairn being checked to see that my blankets were snug on a cold night. Suddenly I felt a pressure on the back of my neck and shoulders, a clamping down. I was being lifted and we were moving forwards. Then the light and sound changed, became dimmer and muffled, distant.

Though I could see nothing, I knew we were then underwater.

I panicked for a moment, wondering how I was going to breathe, but I quickly discovered that I could breathe quite normally and gave myself over to the sensations of travelling under the sea, swaddled in sealskin and being carried, I suspected, in the jaws of a great white bear.

We were not long in the sea. If anything, the white bear swam faster than he ran. A strange regret overcame me when I felt myself being carried out of the water and laid upon the ground. The bear made quick work of removing me from my cocoon, and soon I was again on his back and we were speeding through a completely foreign country.

Only once did the white bear speak. It was soon after our sea crossing. We were moving through a lush, rocky valley crowded with rushing streams and slippery boulders.

“Are you afraid?” came the words from deep inside the bear's massive chest.

“No,” I answered, and it was true. I had been too busy watching and listening; absorbing all the sensations, from the wind on my face, to the rhythmic rocking of the sightless underwater world, to the rich, flowery smells of the air as we moved southwards. I had been caught up in the easy grace of the bear's motion and had given little thought to where we were going or to what would happen once we got there.

But later, during the fifth or sixth night, I did begin to think of those things. I must have sensed that we were nearing the end of our journey.

The moon had waned since that first night we set out, but it was still bright and I could clearly see the landscape around me. The land was mountainous in places, though the mountains were small and green rather than towering and jagged as in Njord. There were no pines at all; instead there were lush, broad-leaved trees, some with splashes of bright-coloured blossoms. The smell was different, too – a thicker, richer smell of earth and flower and ripe fruit.

I was suddenly very hungry and thirsty, and found myself wondering if the white bear was hungry, too. The thought crossed my mind that
I
was to be the beast's meal, at the end of a long journey. I shivered, though the air was warm.

We were moving along the base of a small mountain, through a thick forest of some kind of pungent, wide-spreading tree I had never seen before. Though I could not make out any sign of a path, the white bear was surefooted. I had the feeling he had gone this way many times.

Without warning he stopped, and after seven days and nights of constant motion, I felt dizzy at the lack of it. There was a ringing in my ears. My stomach growled and my throat was dry.