The Empire of Ice Cream (40 page)

In mid-autumn, just before the ocean became far too cold for swimming, she woke one morning and looked out to sea. There, on a sandbar that had formed overnight, only a hundred yards from shore, lay what remained of a large wooden sailing ship. Without a second thought, she dove into a wave and swam out to it. As she drew closer, she could see that it had an enormous hole in its side. The hulking craft listed, its tall, cracked mast angled against the horizon. By the time she reached the sandbar, the tide had receded and the majority of the hull was visible above the waterline. She entered the craft through its gaping wound.

Save for the wide beam of daylight that entered, focused like a spotlight, it was dark inside the wooden giant. The boards creaked with every wavelet that rolled beneath it, and crabs scurried here and there over the sodden goods of the hold. Coming upon a passageway that led above, she leaned to her side and scrabbled up a set of steps to reach a middle deck. There she found the galley and rows of bunks for the missing sailors. Just beyond the sailors' quarters she discovered what appeared to be the captain's cabin. A globe, a compass, charts, piles of books lay scattered about as if a miniature typhoon had been loosed in the small compartment.

She looked around for things that might be useful back at her home. In her search, she came upon the captain's log. She opened it in the middle and began to read by the light that slipped in from a small hole in the deck above. The first thing she learned was the name of the ship, the
Lonreat
, which hailed from a place called Neerly. She flipped then to the last entry and read:

I have sent the men off on the life boats, for the ship is rapidly taking water through a hole suffered by way of the dragon-headed cannons of the pirate junk
, Jade Bloom.
They engaged us in battle as we sailed southward on our return trip from trading in Giant Land. The only thing that saved us from certain death was a sudden storm that distracted our pursuers' intentions from that of battle to merely saving their own lives. Perhaps we were cursed by our unusual cargo, the great crystal ball containing the severed head of Mar-el-mar, or perhaps because normal men were never really meant to engage in commerce with giants. From the sound of the winds up on deck, it is a good bet I will never get a chance to figure it out
.

My only hope is that some of my men will survive the storm. I go now to strap myself to the wheel. There may be a chance that I can beach the
Lonreat
somewhere. I have given myself a reminder to thank God if I should survive this calamity and return to Neerly. I would mark the time here, but unfortunately I lost my watch in our fray with the pirates
.

Anna skipped back through the pages. In the middle of the log, she read an account of the captain and his crew, when in Giant Land, being entertained by the diva Ybila. They had to climb all day up the side of a mountain, to a high ridge known as the Dog Spine, and there in an amphitheater hewn from solid rock, under the stars, the graceful behemoth sang an aria titled “What Is My Name?” The captain attests that her voice had a sweetly melancholic affect upon his men, and they were plunged into a state not dissimilar to that of the reveler upon opium.
I thought back through my life—the journeys, the people, the places, the joy and sorrow—and discovered a vast ocean inside of me
, he wrote.

Up on the main deck, beneath the tattered shreds of sails flapping in the breeze, she came upon the skeletal remains of the captain. He was lashed to the ship's wheel by a leather belt, still standing upright in a pose that suggested he was scanning the horizon. She thought it a shame that he did not know that he had finally found a place to beach the ship. He wore a jacket with golden designs stitched above the pockets, a hat, and tall boots. Tied around his left index finger was a length of royal blue thread, no doubt the reminder to thank the Almighty. Anna, beset by the tragic end of the good captain, fled the ship by diving headlong into the rising tide. The next morning, the
Lonreat
had vanished.

In winter, the night skies were clear, and she read their grammar. The icy prose told her she was only dreaming that she was asleep and dreaming, and that really she was awake in a dream of reality made actual by the ocean, and the stars, and the wind in the dunes. She didn't really understand but felt in her heart it was true. Then, one night, a star fell, trailing a fiery veil, and slipped into the ocean with a distinct fizzle. A wisp of smoke curled up around the milky moon. This radically changed the grammar of constellations and made the old rules false, initiating a wicked freeze.

The ocean turned to ice, and wrapped in all her garments, those made of vine, the brocaded paisley shawl, obviously from the closet of a long dead queen, the Sherpa's cap, and sealskin boots, she ventured out among the crystal waves beneath a perfectly blue sky. Up and over, up and over, she went, exploring. Three hundred yards from shore, she found a wooden crate, the top missing. Lying in it was a human figure made of wax—an elegant woman, naked, with a wig of chestnut horsehair and delicate tattooed eyebrows, lashes, and pubic hair.

Over a period of days, while the water remained solid, she pushed that crate to shore. She stood the wax woman outside her house, afraid the figure would melt in the heat from her fireplace. She called her new companion
The Lady of Fashion
and visited with her daily. From her collection of sea treasures, she dressed the woman in a violet shift and put dried flowers in her hair, a corncob pipe in her mouth, and adorned her with a pendant of rarest malachite. At first the two merely gossiped, but before long, The Lady of Fashion revealed her story.

“I was made by a giant dollmaker to stand in the parlor of a giant child's dollhouse at the front window, staring out at my two wax children while they sat, one at either end of a seesaw. Maxwell was ever in the ascent, his arms thrown out wide, a smile on his face, while Cloe dropped, every second, toward the ground. I understood I had a husband, but I never saw him. His voice would come up from the basement where he was working on some infernal project. And you know, weeks went by and I stared out that window. What was my choice?

“Then, one night, in her play, the mischievous giant child picked me up and laid me on the bed in the master bedroom. A few moments later, she laid my husband down on top of me. She turned off the lights and left us there, perhaps in hopes of us making love and eventually siring another wax child. I only saw my husband briefly before the room went dark. He was a handsome man with a beard and long, black hair. ‘I'm sorry to be crushing you,' he said.

“‘Do you feel any excitement?' I asked.

“‘No,' he said, ‘I'm made of wax. But I have been devising a plan for your escape.'

“‘How is it you can move and make noise in the basement, but I can not stir even so much as a finger?' I asked.

“‘That noise you hear is coming out of my head. Through very hard concentration I have created a machine made of thoughts that will cast an aura of desirability around you that no giant can ignore,' he said.

“‘What about our children?' I asked.

“‘My dear, can't you tell they are not real? They are merely dolls, no more than stylized balls of earwax.'

“‘Why are you doing this?' I asked.

“‘Enough,' he said. ‘I must think.'

“His mind sent up a racket then, a pounding, as if the headboard was rhythmically slamming the wall, with grunts and groans and protracted sighs. It must have been a marvelous invention. Eventually I fell asleep, and somewhere through the night, perhaps in my dreams, perhaps not, I felt something warm and inconsequential move between my legs.

“Two days later, a parrot-head giant came to the giant girl's house, traveling door-to-door, selling heart medicine in brown bottles. The girl's father went to fetch his money pouch, leaving the salesman alone in the room where the dollhouse stood. By then I had been placed back in the parlor by the front window. Upon seeing me looking out, the parrot-head giant opened the front door and stuck his rubbery fingers into my home. He grabbed me, and hid me in his pants pocket just before the girl's father returned.

“Parrot Head left town immediately and traveled to another place where there was an open-air market. He sold me for five gold coins to a bearded giant who was a magician. This magician, Mar-el-mar, took me down the street to an open place and set me in the middle of a chessboard atop a table. I was barely as big as the other chess pieces. In a loud voice, he called all those in the market place to come and witness a miracle. When the rabble had assembled, he pushed back the sleeves of his dark robe and cast a spell beginning with the word
Wendatamu
… Instantly, I came to life.

“The crowd of giants gasped, and the noise was deafening to me. I put my hands to my ears. Life, life, life was a strange, beautiful experience, being able to move, to breathe. My wax became flesh, and I heard myself scream, but just as suddenly as that sweet condition came to me, it was taken away. The Giant King's personal guard pushed through the masses and seized the magician. Right on the spot, they forced him to kneel in the street. The captain of the guard announced that the magician was guilty of practicing the dark arts. Mar-el-mar spat on the cobblestones and said, ‘May the king's wife flee his kingdom and lose herself in the world.' They chopped his head off, and the life went out of me.

“I was whisked off the chessboard and given to an old woman, who was ordered to throw me into the furnace at the blacksmith's shop. This old woman went to the shop as she had been instructed, stood before the flames, but found she could not destroy me. Instead, she took me home and dressed me in the fine clothes from a doll she had bought long ago for a daughter, her only pregnancy, who had died soon after birth. She put me in a small box, and then at midnight, went to the stream that runs along the southern border of that town. She sang me a lullaby, and with tears in her eyes, set me adrift down the waterway that led to the ocean.”

“But what became of the dress the old woman had put you in?”

“I've been sailing so long, it rotted away, turning to mere threads. Pieces of royal blue thread litter the oceans of the world.”

In the early days of the following summer, during an unusual heat wave, The Lady of Fashion melted. Amidst soundless shrieks of agony and pleas to Mar-el-mar to spare her soul, she dripped away into an ugly puddle that eventually seeped into the sand. Nothing could be done to save her. The violet shift blew out to sea one bright and blustery afternoon. A beach rat stole the corncob pipe, and all that was left was the pendant of malachite lying on the sand to mark the presence of a missing confidant. Anna wept bitterly at the loss of her friend.

To the south lay the ocean. To the north, past a few hundred yards of sand and then a line of boulders, lay the woods. To the east, at some definite distance, but she was not sure how far, sat a rusted car, if it had not already been washed out to sea, and a path to the interstate. To the west, though, lay nothing but dunes, an immeasurable vista of rolling sand hills, some cresting in the far distance to magnificent heights. She decided, after the demise of her wax friend, that a journey might be just the thing to drive off her grief and loneliness.

She set out due west early one morning, carrying a knotted silk kerchief with enough dried fishes and berries to last an overnight stay. At first she did not take to the dunes, but made her way along the shore in order to save her strength, the better to climb in amongst the hills when she was farther from home. She found the act of walking, of simply moving, curative, and she covered a great distance before the sun began its descent. In the late afternoon, she turned toward the dunes and began to explore them.

Just before nightfall, she came to the base of a dune so tall, she could not see the top from where she stood. She realized then that the challenge its ascent presented is what she had been looking for. Before beginning, she sat down and had some dinner to rebuild her strength; as darkness came, she started up the slope. The stars were resilient that night in their beauty, and she felt as though she were climbing toward them. The wind was mercifully cool.

As she drew close to the top, she could feel beneath her that the sand was giving way to rock, and when she crested the peak the moon was visible, hanging low in the sky, having been blocked from her view all evening. In its pale light, she made out that she stood on the edge of a kind of ridge that snaked like a path to the east. She followed this path, and soon there was no sign of sand or sound of the ocean in the distance. Mountain ranges lay on either side.

As she traveled through this strange place, she heard from up ahead a noise not unlike a woman sobbing. The sound grew to near-deafening proportions. Then Anna came to an obstruction in the middle of her path: a giant boulder with a strange growth—some kind of long stringy moss, like hair, covering the top of it. The mournful vibration seemed to originate from within this huge formation. She stepped forward and placed her hand upon it, and when she did, she realized it was not a rock at all.

Stepping quickly backward, she saw two cracks form in the mass and open wide. She soon recognized they were eyes. What she had mistaken for a boulder was in actuality the head of a giant. Anna froze with fear, remembering her imprisonment in the birdcage. The giant, a female, looked up and saw her standing upon the path. The sobbing ceased abruptly.

“Hello,” said the giant, pulling herself up to rest on her elbows. She wiped the tears from her eyes.

“I'm sorry to have awakened you,” said Anna, hoping she would not be eaten.

A simple conversation ensued, and Anna soon learned she had nothing to fear, for this was the giant Ybila, and the path she had been traveling was the famed Dog Spine.

“Why are you unhappy?” asked Anna. “I have heard you are a great singer.”