The Snow Queen (13 page)

“And our reindeer?”

The sailor gave a snort of laughter. “What, that old bag of bones? Turn him loose and let him forage.”

Gerda was glad that Ritva understood so little Danish. “He's too old and too tame to fend for himself,” she said. “We can't leave him behind.”

“Well, we'll see what the Captain says about that,” said the sailor.

The Captain, who luckily had a sense of humour, let them tie Ba up in the
Cecilie's
cargo hold. “Better hope we don't run into pack ice,” he told Gerda. “If we get trapped, he'll go in the stewpot.”

“I understand,” said Gerda unhappily. Ritva blew in Ba's ear and tweaked his nose to show her affection; then they left the old beast with a handful of reindeer moss, and settled themselves on deck among the crates and barrels. For Gerda there was a comforting familiarity in the seacoast smells of tar and hemp and brine.

“What's a walrus?” Ritva wanted to know. “Can you eat it?”

“I dare say,” replied Gerda, “if you were hungry enough. But I think they are hunting them for their ivory. I've seen a picture of one — it's a huge creature, big as an ox, with two great long tusks like an elephant's, and it lives in the sea.”

“Elephant?” said Ritva blankly.

“Oh dear,” sighed Gerda. She launched into a description of an elephant, from illustrations she remembered studying in her natural history books.

“Don't be so stupid,” said Ritva. “You know there's no such beast. There's no such thing as a walrus, either.” She leaned back against a barrel of salt beef, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

Of the first day of the voyage, they remembered little. A stiff wind came up and set the vessel to pitching and heaving.

Too wretched with seasickness to move or talk, they lay in their hammocks in the dark airless fo'c'sle, half-choked by the reek of their own garments and the pungent stench of whale-oil lamps.

When they woke next day the wild tossing of the ship had subsided. They climbed out onto the deck into a fierce blaze of sunshine. The sea was calm, and green as meadow grass, a shimmering light-drenched expanse upon which a few huge ice floes floated gracefully as lily pads. In the distance they could see icebergs looming like mountains of blue-white glass.

“So you've found your sea legs, have you?” said the first mate. “Get below, the pair of you — the cook wants to know where you've been hiding.”

In the galley, the cook kept them busy stoking the fire, scrubbing pots, stirring porridge, chopping vegetables for the stew.

“Might as well have stayed home,” grumbled Ritva, peering queasily into a kettle of salt cod. Her face still had a faintly greenish look.

As they sailed northwest towards the coast of Spitzbergen, the sky darkened again, and the wind rose. Soon the surface of the sea was littered with thousands of ice floes, like huge white platters that collided and crunched together with a ceaseless noise of scraping and grinding, piling one on top of the other and up-ending and congealing into walls and towers and parapets. By next morning they were surrounded by a pitching, growling, churning immensity of ice.

As the wind grew stronger, the current battered their ship against the whirling floes. The
Cecilie
feinted and tacked, scurrying after corridors of open water, which narrowed and closed as they approached. Meanwhile the air grew misty, and the cold drizzle that had been falling throughout the day turned suddenly to snow.

All night Gerda lay awake in her hammock, listening fearfully to the grinding and grating and thudding of the ice. Now and then the ship's timbers groaned, and the vessel shuddered like a wet dog. Before dawn the noise had grown to a steady thunder. Feet pounded into the fo'c'sle. Lanterns bobbed and weaved in the dark as the watch roused the rest of the crew.

Gerda rolled to the fo'c'sle deck and fumbled for her boots and coat. Ritva was still asleep, cocooned in her hammock with her blanket pulled over her head. Gerda shook her by the shoulder till she stirred, groaned, and sat up.

“What do you want?” snarled the robber-maid, clawing her hair out of her eyes.

“Get up — we all have to get up. I think we're abandoning ship.”

Someone held up a lantern close to Gerda's face. She blinked in its sudden glare. “Here, get moving, you two — get out on deck.” All around her Gerda could hear orders being shouted, things being shifted, the scrape of heavy objects across the boards.

Gerda and Ritva paused for a moment at the top of the ladder to ease their aching shoulder muscles and catch their breath.The wind had died, but the air was bitter cold, searing its way into their lungs. Everywhere on the foredeck stood bundles of fur garments, bedrolls, oil lamps, cartons of canned goods, muskets and harpoons. All the galley equipment — pots, pans, kettles — had been stacked nearby. The crew were dragging the last boxes of equipment and sacks of provisions from below decks. Gerda looked up, saw that the sails and rigging were coated in frost. The sun was a faint pink stain on the horizon.

And then she saw the ice — a greyish-green jumble of walls and slabs and ridges, rising level with the rails and stretching as far as the eye could see. Amidships snow was piling up above the rails, and as she watched, the whole loose powdery mass toppled over onto the deck. She clung to Ritva in terror as their ship was ground and squeezed and twisted, and her shrieking timbers torn apart. The
Cecilie's
bow shot up in the air, her stem was wrenched sideways as though caught in a gigantic vise.

“Get to work,” someone shouted at them, and startled out of their panic, they took hold of a sack between them and dragged it over the rails, onto the ice.

Just then the ship gave a kind of groan and listed further onto her side. Abruptly Ritva let go of the sack, and without a word turned and raced back to the ship.

Long anxious moments passed. At every creak of the timbers Gerda's stomach twisted itself into a tighter knot. Another minute, she thought . . . one minute more and I will go after her.

And then Ritva reappeared, leading the old reindeer over the tilted railing onto the ice. He was trembling, and his eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, but he seemed unhurt.

“Oh, praise Heaven,” cried Gerda, running to meet them. Without stopping to think, she threw both arms around Ritva. “I was so afraid you'd got trapped.” She felt Ritva stiffen, heard her hiss a warning, and remembering that she was no longer Gerda Jensen, but a cook's boy, she dropped her arms and hastily stepped back.

“We nearly didn't get out,” said Ritva. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “One side of the hold is caved in, and it's a wonder this poor old brute wasn't crushed as flat as a hearth-cake.”

She tickled Ba absent-mindedly behind his ears to calm him. Snorting, he rubbed his nose against her cheek.

By afternoon the ship was all but stripped of supplies. Everything, including three large sledges and two of the boats, had been carried out onto the ice, and canvas tents were thrown up.

Gerda was too exhausted to spare much thought for tomorrow. She ate the bread and butter and chocolate that was passed around, drank the whey milk the cook had warmed over a blubber lamp.

How could she have imagined the Captain was joking when he talked of being trapped in pack ice? Then a dreadful thought occurred to her. That was not the only joke the Captain had made. She sought out the first mate, who was driving tent pegs into the ice.

“You must not kill Ba. He is a good and faithful beast, and will serve us well if we must walk across the ice to Spitzbergen.”

The first mate looked round in a puzzled way. Then he grinned. “What, that old reindeer? No, lad, we are well provisioned, he won't go in the pot yet awhile. And I doubt we'll be walking as far as Spitzbergen.”

That night Gerda and Ritva stood with all hands in the shadow of their crushed ship, listening to the captain speak. A cold silvery mist was rising around them; the wind, keen as a knife, riffled the men's beards and tugged at the corners of the tents. Their breath smoked.

“It's not as bad as it seems,” said the captain, though his tired, strained face belied those encouraging words. Perhaps, thought Gerda, he hopes with calming speeches to ward off the panic that seizes men who are trapped in the arctic wastes. She had read about that paralyzing fear in explorers' tales; she had never thought to experience it herself.

“Mr. Stemo's been aloft with his spyglass,” the captain was saying. “He's spotted what looks like an island, no more than twenty miles off. We've plenty of provisions — and when those run out, they say the flesh of arctic foxes is good as venison, and a polar bear or two will keep us alive for months. Plenty of icebound sailors before us have survived the winter cozily enough.”

“Aye, and plenty starved, and froze as stiff as kipfish where they lay,” Gerda heard one sailor mutter; but he kept his voice low, so only those standing nearest him heard, and gave him nervous grins.

Next morning they set out across the pack ice in search of land. With canvas bands strapped across their chests, the men took turns hauling the two salvaged cutters and three heavily-laden sledges. It was slow, hard, treacherous going, dragging those cumbersome loads hour after hour over the ridged and buckled icescape. The boats were weighed down with tents, cookstoves, kettles, stewpots, fur-lined deerskin sleeping bags, spare boots and moccasins, caps and mittens, tobacco, ammunition. On the sledges were barrels of salt meat and hardtack; casks of flour and oil, and dried cloudberries to ward off scurvy; hogsheads of wine and beer.

They sank to their knees in mush-ice, edged their way around hummocks, nervously skirted cracks and fissures with black water showing through. Ritva trudged silently beside Gerda, sullen-faced but uncomplaining. Ba's load was lighter now; their own gear had been lost with the ship.

When darkness overtook them the sailors threw up tents on the ice, and they crawled into their clammy bedrolls. Gerda slept little that night. All around her she could hear the ice creaking and groaning. She thought of children in her own village who had ventured onto the frozen Sound at break-up time, and had been swept out to sea. How fragile it was, how impermanent, this brittle crust of ice on which she lay. How long before it began to splinter, shatter, letting the bottomless black waters break free?

But in the morning, waking to a glittering white world under a cloudless sky, her spirits lifted, and that afternoon they reached solid ground.

They dragged the sledges onto a grey beach littered with huge boulders brought down from the icefields. Scattered up the treeless slopes were brilliantly coloured, lichen-encrusted rocks, and bright clumps of saxifrage blooming amid patches of snow.

“Is this Spitzbergen Island?” Gerda asked one of the sailors, with faint hope. He shook his head. “Some Godforsaken rock in the middle of the ice, not big enough to be on the charts.”

The crew hoisted the Norwegian flag, and then they gathered around a driftwood fire to eat their evening meal of pemmican stew. “It looks like we'll be spending the winter here,” grumbled the seaman sitting next to Gerda. “I thought all along we were pushing our luck, so late in the season. It looks snug enough now, but wait until midwinter, when rations run short, and hoarfrost grows on our faces while we sleep.”