North Child (21 page)

Unless it was all done by magic. Yet even though I was living with a talking white bear in a castle inside a mountain, my mind still rebelled at the whole idea of magic. After all, I hadn't seen any mystifying transformations, things flying through the air or anything like that. The unlightable darkness of my bedroom and the lamp that went out for no reason were the only real signs that anything supernatural was going on.

I made it a point to wander along the hallway with the tapestry-covered kitchen door, and whenever I saw the two servants, I tried to be friendly. I would smile and speak a few words, offering by pantomime to help them carry things.

The woman would smile back blandly but remained aloof, resisting my efforts. I could see, however, that the little man was interested. He would nod and smile back, and once he let me carry wood for him. The woman was with him then and she frowned, saying something in their language that prompted him to take the wood back from me.

Clearly, if I was to have any luck at all communicating with the man, I needed to catch him alone.

According to my map the woman servant laid the fires in the rooms I used most – the one with the red couch, my bedchamber, the laundry room, and the weaving room. While she was attending to those, she sent the little man to check whether I'd used any of the other fireplaces during the previous day. If I had, which was rare, he was in charge of laying them afresh, after reporting to her.

So one afternoon I used a candle to light a fire in a small room on the second floor, as far away as possible from the kitchen or any of the other rooms the woman would be working in. It was a library of sorts, though it had fewer books than the big library on the first floor.

The next morning I got up early and hid myself in the second-floor room. I watched as the little man entered and inspected the fireplace, which had ash and burned kindling in it. He lit the lamps in the room and then left, so I settled myself with a book in a large, comfortable chair. A little while later the man opened the door. Seeing me sitting there, he began to back out of the room, but I hopped up and, smiling warmly, beckoned him in. With a quick backward glance out into the hall, he slowly entered, carrying his bundle of wood and kindling.

“Hello,” I said brightly.

He just stared at me.

Then I said, “Rose,” and pointed to myself.

Again he looked at me dumbly.

I did it again. “Rose.”

Something lit in his eyes. “Tuki,” he said, and pointed to himself. I couldn't be sure if Tuki was his name, or nationality, or even species, but I nodded enthusiastically and pointed to him, saying, “Tuki.”

And to my pleasure he responded by pointing to me and saying, “Rose.”

I clapped my hands with delight. And then I pointed to the book I was holding and said, “Book.”

He looked a little puzzled but then pointed to the book and said, “
Kirja,
” which I hoped meant “book” in his language.

After that he set down the wood he was carrying, and we went around the room pointing to things, each giving our own name for it. He seemed to enjoy this greatly, as if it were a splendid game, and I wondered if, despite the fact that his features looked adult to me, he might not actually be a child.

As we moved around the room, he would deliberately brush against my arm or hand, and I remembered the first time we had met and how he had appeared to be fascinated by my skin. And for myself, I was struck again by the white-ridged roughness of his.

When we came near the fireplace, he suddenly remembered his reason for coming to the room and quickly retrieved the wood. While he hurriedly laid the fire, I sat in a chair and watched him. He finished, then gazed at me, a questioning look on his face.

I nodded, and only a moment after he had bent over the wood, flames sprung up. I hadn't seen a striker or a candle and wondered if he had used some kind of magic spell to light the fire.

I pointed at the flames licking the logs and said, “Fire.”

He looked at me, grinned, and said, “
Palo.
” Then he left the room.

“Goodbye, Tuki!” I called to him.

I was pleased. This was a good beginning.

One of my favourite rooms in the castle was the music chamber, even though I didn't know how to play any of the instruments. Occasionally I would sit at the pianoforte and play on the ivory keys, but I could not make a melody out of the sounds.

The instruments that I liked the most were the flautos and recorders, especially the lovely flauto in the box with blue velvet. It was so beautiful I had been shy about even touching it, but one day I worked up my courage and took it out of the cabinet. I placed the mouthpiece to my lips and blew. A loud ringing note came out, startling me so that I almost dropped the instrument. But I held on and tried again. As that second note died away, the white bear entered the room. I fought down the instinct to hide the flauto behind my back as though I were a naughty child caught playing with grown-up things. As he came closer I could read a sort of yearning in his eyes. He lay down on the rug near the cabinet and looked up expectantly, as he did in the weaving room when he was ready to hear a story.

I shook my head. “I don't know how to play,” I explained, my cheeks a little red.

“Play,” he said.

“I can't.” But he just stared at me with those yearning eyes. So I tried.

And though the tone of the instrument was lovely, my playing sounded like two birds of different pitch scolding each other.

The white bear closed his eyes and flattened his ears against the sound.

“Well, I warned you,” I said.

Then he got up and crossed to a polished wooden chest and, using a large paw, pushed the top up. I could see bundles of paper inside, some bound, some tied with ribbon. I knew what the papers were.

“I cannot read music,” I said.

The white bear sighed. Then he turned and left the room.

After he'd gone I went to the chest and sat down beside it, taking out a bundle of the papers with music written on them.

It became my new project, learning to read music. I was lucky to find a book in the chest that showed which note corresponded to which hole on the flauto.

Occasionally the white bear would come into the music room and sit and listen while I practised, which made me self-conscious. But he never stayed long. It was as if he could only take it so long, hearing the music he knew mangled beyond all recognizable shape.

Meanwhile, the night-time routine had taken up where it had left off. My first night back I saw that the white nightshirt was neatly folded at the foot of the bed. I picked it up, shook it out, and then carefully laid it on the side of the bed.

When the lights went out (and I still stubbornly kept at least one lamp or candle lit each night, just in case the enchantment might fail), I felt my visitor climb into bed and pull up the covers. I thought I heard a sigh, the kind of sigh a child would give after a thunderstorm is over, a sound that said that everything was once again all right. My throat grew tight with sympathy, and I felt pangs of guilt thinking of how cold and lonely the bed must have felt in my absence. I wondered if he had worn the nightshirt.

I began to have dreams about my nightly visitor. The first was actually a pleasant dream in which I awoke in the morning to find the white bear by the side of the bed, wearing the nightshirt (which had magically expanded to fit his large frame), and he was telling me he would take me home. So I climbed onto his back and we floated up into the air and flew above the land until I could spy my family's farmhouse below. We began to descend, too fast I thought, but the white bear said, “You are safe,” and we landed softly in a field of snowdrops.

When I actually awoke in the morning after that dream, I half expected to see the white bear standing by the bed, but in the dim light from the lamps in the hall, I saw only the empty space beside me.

Sometime later I had another dream that was very different. In the dream I had managed to light one of the oil lamps. When I brought the lamp close to the stranger, I saw that its face was green and scaly and had a long, thin tongue that slithered in and out of its mouth while it breathed. I let out a cry and the monster awoke, opening a pair of hideous yellow eyes. Its tongue then brushed across my face and I woke up screaming, this time for real.

Again it was morning and I could see in the dim light that my visitor was gone, but I shuddered. What if it
was
a monster that lay beside me every night?

Tuki must not have said anything to the woman about our first encounter, for the next morning he appeared in the room where I sat waiting for him.

We went through much the same routine as before, teaching each other new words. I wasn't at all sure we would ever get to a point where we could actually converse and I could ask him questions about the white bear, but I felt I must try. And I believed the most important thing about my getting to know Tuki was the feeling I was finally doing something.

This went on for several weeks, though I was constantly worried that one day the woman would figure out what was going on and put a stop to it. Tuki seemed to trust me, even like me, and I was growing fond of him. He was so like a child – eager to please, sometimes impatient, and always wishing to be praised and petted.

We ran out of things to point to, and not wanting to upset our routine by shifting to another room, I began to use books, pointing to illustrations in them to continue our makeshift language lessons. Tuki was not a quick learner, but his eagerness to please kept him trying, and he was starting to remember some of the words I was teaching him, like
Rose
and
hello
and
goodbye.

I found his language difficult but was beginning to understand parts of it. I made a little dictionary, to which I added new words every evening before bed. I kept it hidden in the closet, in my pack from home.

Finally I decided the time was right to introduce the subject of the white bear, and in preparation I went through practically every book in both libraries until I came across a book on animals that had a small picture of a white bear. I took it with me to the room on the second floor.

When we began our game that morning, I casually picked up the book about animals and began to leaf through it. I pointed to pictures of a wolf (“
susi
”), a beaver (“
majava
”), a rabbit (“
kaniini
”), and then finally came to the page with the white bear on it.

“White bear,” I said.

“
Lumi karhu,
” he said, then added, “
vaeltaa.
” Then he looked at me a little uneasily. I cast about in my mind for words he might recognize that would help me ask him about the white bear. But I realized that nearly all the words I had learned were objects, not verbs. Annoyed with myself for not being better prepared, I decided I would have to settle for knowing the name for white bear in Tuki's language. It was a start.

“‘
Lumi karhu
'?” I repeated. “Or is it ‘
vaeltaa
'?” He nodded at both, and I got the impression that they were two separate names for white bear. I wished I could press him, but I could tell he was uneasy. To distract him I pointed to more animals and we resumed our game.

The next time I brought a book of maps I'd found in the library. It was a beautiful volume entitled
Ptolemy's Geographica,
and in addition to the maps, which had been wrought in vivid colours and gold leaf, there were detailed drawings depicting the various regions of the world. I had heard of Ptolemy from my father; he was a Greek who had lived centuries before and was one of the first mapmakers. I thought of Father with a pang. How he would have treasured such a book.

I opened to a map of Njord and pointed to the spot where the village of Andalsnes would be found. “Rose from here,” I said.

He stared down at it, shaking his head, mystified.

“Tuki from where?” I asked, riffling through the pages of the atlas, a questioning look on my face.

He smiled to see the pages fluttering and reached over to take the book, wanting to do it himself. Gleefully he thumbed the pages, causing them to cascade down. He did it over and over – fast, then slow. Suddenly something caught his eye, and he stopped and paged back to what he had seen.

With a smile he pointed to a small drawing that lay next to the map of the far northern land of ever winter that lay within the Arktik Circle. In this book the land was called Glacialis. In my country we called it Arktisk. The illustration Tuki was pointing to depicted high ice cliffs amid a frozen landscape of snow.

“Tuki is from Arktisk?” I asked.

He shook his head, not understanding.

“Tuki from a land of snow?” I hugged myself, as if cold.

He nodded enthusiastically, hugging himself and pretending to shiver. “Tuki,” he said, pointing again to the picture of ice cliffs.

Then I pointed to the wind rose at the corner of the page. “North?” I asked, pointing to the
N
at the top.

He shook his head, again not understanding. I sighed.

That day I learned the words for snow (“
lumi
”, which explained the first word Tuki had used for white bear) and ice (“
jaassa
”), and then he came out with the word “
Huldre
”. I wasn't sure, but I thought maybe it was the name of the land he was from. And I got the impression that Tuki was homesick for his icy home; his face had taken on a sad, faraway look.

Several days later we were looking through some other books I had brought from the library. We came to a picture of quite a grand palace in a book of old tales.

“
Jaassa
,” he said excitedly, jabbing his finger at the drawing. I was puzzled, wondering if the same word was used for
ice
and
palace
in his language.