The Snow Queen (19 page)

Ritva turned, and grinned. “While you were dreaming, I also dreamed,” she said. “I sent my spirit southward, to chart our path. And I saw something else in my vision, little rabbit. At the sea's edge, I saw a fine, large boat, just waiting for somebody like us to steal it.”

Before long Kai's pace began to flag and he fell behind. “Wait,” said Gerda, running to catch up with the robber-maid. “We must go slower; Kai is too ill to keep up.”

Ritva turned, and with a contemptuous glance at Kai said, “Then tell him we'll leave him to find his own way home.”

Gerda gasped. “Ritva, you can't mean it!”

“Do you think the Snow Queen's guards will sleep forever? Even now they must be yawning and stirring. Our only chance is to reach the open sea.”

Gerda looked back. Kai was trudging doggedly after them, but he walked like an old man, halt and bent.

Gerda ran back to him, seized his arm. He gave her a despairing look. “It's no use,” he said. “You must leave me, and save yourself.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Gerda, in the firm governess's voice her mother sometimes used. “You must lean on me, and we will walk together.”

They stumbled onward over glittering white plains lit feverishly by the northern lights.

In this kingdom beyond the world's edge, time and distance behaved in unpredictable ways. Only a few hours had passed when they came again to the edge of the ice, and saw a wide channel of open water stretching away south. Drawn up on the ice, just as Ritva had said, was a wide flat-bottomed skin boat with a set of paddles stowed inside. The three of them pushed it into the dark choppy water. Gerda braced her feet on the ice and held onto the painter while Ritva coaxed Ba on board.

Ba, who had shied at first sight of the boat, flung up his grizzled head, stiffening all four legs and digging his hooves into the snow.

Ritva whispered into his ear, “Get moving, you poor old bag of bones, if you ever want to see your own pasture again,” and grudgingly he let her lead him on board.

“How are we to find our way home?” asked Gerda, looking out over the dark, wind-torn water. Beside her, Kai was a silent, huddled presence. She wanted to put her arms around him, warm his cold, gaunt cheek against hers, but so much a stranger had he become, so wrapped in his own grim solitude, that she did not dare to touch him.

“Home is south,” said Ritva, adding, with inarguable logic, “from here, every direction is south, so whichever direction we go, we will be headed home. We must trust to chance.”

Or to God
, thought Gerda, but she did not say it aloud.

“Here,” said Ritva, thrusting a paddle at Kai. “You sit in the back and steer.”

A wind blew up out of the north, and sped them on their way. They must have chanced upon a warm current, because there was open water ahead — a broad ice-free channel like a high road leading south. Gerda's spirits rose. Perhaps, after all, God had heard her, and was taking their fate into His own hands.

She helped Ritva put up the boat's small triangular sail, and they let the wind and current propel them. After a while Gerda fell into a half-doze, a kind of waking dream. She thought that she was at home, and that she was helping her mother hang the bedcovers out to air. But there was a storm coming; the wind bellied out the quilts and made them flap on the line, with a sound like the beating of wings.

Cold and damp, finding its way under her fur garments, woke her. All around them a dense silvery fog swirled and billowed. She could see neither sky, nor water, nor the icefields beyond. The wind had freshened, filling their sail, and they were moving quickly, but in what direction it was impossible to tell.

Suddenly the mist parted, and out of it emerged a great broad-beamed wooden ship with a single square sail. It had come so silently out of the fog that now it was almost upon them. Gerda could see the rapid lift and fall of oars along the sides, the skin-clad warriors lining the deck, and the tall woman in white furs standing in the bow with her pale hair swirling about her.

Swiftly the Snow Queen's ship bore down upon them, the north wind swelling out its sail. Ritva and Gerda paddled furiously, but with every stroke they were losing ground.

“It's the chest,” Kai told them. “All her power is in it, and she will follow it to the far ends of the earth to get it back.”

“The bag of winds,” shouted Gerda, leaning hard into her stroke. “Open the bag of winds.”

Ritva fumbled for the pouch. It hung from her fingers, limp and spent. “It's empty,” Gerda said.

“No. There are two more knots.” Ritva pulled off her mitts and with cold, stiff fingers she worried at the knots till she had worked both of them loose. There was a sighing, a hissing, a roar, and Ritva fell backwards with a thump as the winds rushed out. With the force of an arctic gale they battered the Snow Queen's warship, heeled it over, spun it round.

“Paddle,” shrieked Ritva, picking herself up. “Just keep paddling, don't turn around.”

But Kai, crouched in the stern, looked back; and moments later, with bleak resignation, he said, “The winds have died down. She is gaining on us again.”

Ritva glanced over her shoulder, and mumbled something in Saami. “Here, you, come forward and take over.” Gingerly she and Kai changed places.

Ritva turned to Gerda. “Do you still have our flint and tinder in your pocket?”

Gerda nodded. For one wild moment she imagined that Ritva intended to set them all afire. “Why?”

“Give it to me. Am I not the daughter of shamans? Have I not accomplished every task the Snow Queen gave me? Have I not stolen her treasure chest from under her nose? I am a hero, like Väinö. What Väinö could do, I can do also.”

She snatched up a handful of the dried moss they used for tinder, crunched it into a ball, and threw it over the stern. And lacking her drum, she used her right hand to pound out a rhythm on the boat's taut skin hull. Her voice rose, fell, rose again in an eerie wail. Her arm and hand kept up their rhythmic motion, beating out her shaman's tattoo. The rest of her body was rigid, every muscle quivering with tension. Veins bulged in her temples; her lower lip sagged and foam gathered in the corners of her mouth. Her eyes stared blindly into the fog.

The clump of moss bobbed for a moment on the black surface of the water — and then, spongelike, it began to swell. Now it was as big as a bread loaf; now the size of a cheese. As Gerda and Kai stared in delighted disbelief, and Ritva kept up her monotonous drumming, the tinder continued, improbably, to grow. Where there had been open water there was now a great, dark, mossy reef that blocked the whole width of the channel. On one side was their heavy-laden, lumbering skin boat; on the other, the Snow Queen's swiftly-moving warship.

They could hear shouting, the splash of oars, the creak of timbers; a sound of slithering and crunching; and then the bow of the Snow Queen's vessel ploughed its way straight through the reef.

“Now give me the flint. And keep paddling. I'll stop her yet.” Ritva drew a long, deep, rasping breath, and once again began to beat on the side of the boat. As she drummed she muttered and mumbled to herself, sometimes singing a few incomprehensible syllables. Her eyes were shuttered, remote. A thread of saliva worked its way slowly down her chin.

Then she drew back her arm and with all her remaining strength hurled the fragment of flint over the stern. At the instant it struck the water, the flint began to grow.

For years afterwards Gerda was to dream of the wall of glistening grey-black stone that suddenly and impossibly, like a mountain newborn from the sea's bed, thrust itself out of the depths. At that moment, for the first time, she glimpsed the true nature of Ritva's power. This was no illusion, no conjurer's trick, but real stone, solid and impenetrable, created out of a bit of flint, and air, and sea-spume.
Truly
, thought Gerda,
Ritva is the
heir of the magical smith Ilmarinen in the old tales, who forged a new
sun and a new moon for the heavens, and welded the arch of air.

And now the Snow Queen's ship was trapped behind the mountain Ritva had forged, and after all it seemed they might escape.

Out of the mist that wreathed the clifftop flew a huge white bird, its silvery wing tips gleaming in the starlight. It hovered for an instant on powerful wings, then dove down upon their boat like an eagle swooping at its prey. They could see the malevolent glitter of ice-blue eyes, talons pale and glimmering as shards of ice.

Ba's eyes bulged with terror; he flung his head wildly from side to side. A pale, exhausted Ritva seized his rope and whispered in his ear to calm him.

Standing upright in the rocking boat, Gerda flailed at the bird with her paddle. The creature flew so close that its icy wing tips brushed her face; then, as though taunting her, it darted out of reach. Gerda fought to keep her balance. Her arm and shoulder muscles shrieked with pain.

Just then Ritva, savagely swinging her own paddle, landed a heavy blow. Squawking and screeching, one wing drooping, the white bird fluttered away. It hung in the air a paddle's length off, glaring at them.

“The chest,” Ritva hissed to Gerda. “It's the chest she wants; her magic is in it.”

“No! The chest is mine!”

Gerda closed her ears to Kai's anguished protest. She dropped her paddle and reached into the bottom of the boat. Lifting the chest over her head, she flung it as far as she could over the side. But just then the boat lurched in the wind, and her aim went wrong. Instead of falling into the water the chest struck the base of the flint cliff. The wood splintered and the decorated lid flew off, scattering ice fragments like diamonds across the wet black rock. One by one they slipped down the face of the cliff into the sea.

With a shriek of fury the great white bird dove down, snatched up in its beak a single shard of ice, and flew away with it.

Ritva gave a long sigh and sank down in the bottom of the boat.

“Look,” cried Gerda.

On the dark surface of the water, the ice fragments were shifting and bobbing among the splintered remains of the chest. Bit by bit they came together, made a pattern. Silently Gerda's lips formed the single word the ice spelled out.

Was it just another riddle, Gerda wondered — a cruel trick by a sorceress who had only riddles to offer, and no answers? Or was it the answer to a question that Kai had never asked? She took his icy fingers in her right hand, and with her left she pointed to the shimmering ice-characters that danced on the dark skin of the sea.

“Remember, the Snow Queen said that if you solved the puzzle, you would comprehend everything, all knowledge would be yours. But you did not ask how long it would take you, Kai.”

One letter a time, in a cracked, hoarse voice that seemed wrenched from somewhere deep in his soul, Kai spelled out the word that he had laboured so long to discover:

E.T.E.R.N.I.T.Y.

Gerda saw his face twist into a mask of rage. Leaning over the stern, he shouted into the teeth of the north wind, “Witch, have you no mercy? You have tricked me again!”

His words were swallowed up in the infinite grey air, in the eternal restless music of the sea.

How many others before him, wondered Gerda, had discovered too late the capriciousness of the Snow Queen's favours? How many had forfeited their souls because they listened to her promises?

But hearing the fury and despair, the naked anguish in Kai's voice, Gerda thought,
at last the frozen shell around his heart is
melting, he is remembering how to feel pain.

Their boat sped on, steadily southward. They passed through the Cave of the North Wind, out of winter and night, into the long bright arctic summer. The sun glared down on dazzling icefields that parted to let them through.

And in the southern distance they saw a glimmer of white sails.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-THREE

T
he Northwind was a sturdy two-masted schooner, her hull planked all over with oak timbers and her bows iron-sheathed to withstand the Arctic ice.

“Ahoy,” someone shouted in Swedish over the side. “Do you need help?”

“Yes! Yes!” They hurled their joined voices into the wind.

“Come alongside,” said the sailor, and flung a rope ladder over the rail.

“Our reindeer,” Gerda called up to them as Ritva steered their boat towards the ship. “We have to rescue our reindeer.”

A red-bearded man in a parka grinned down at them. “We're scientists here,” he said. “Hold on. We'll think of something.”

Moments later he returned with a canvas sling and dropped it down to them. Bracing themselves against Ba's heaving flanks, Gerda and Ritva cinched the sling securely around his belly. With a long unhappy sigh the old beast resigned himself to this fresh indignity, gazing accusingly back at them as he was winched slowly up the side of the ship.

With Ba safely on deck, Gerda, Ritva and Kai clambered aboard.

Immediately someone threw woollen blankets over their shoulders; someone else handed them steaming mugs of coffee, laced with spirits and tasting of salt.

The red-bearded man introduced himself as Otto Carlsson, the Assistant Navigator. He took them into the cabin and sat them down in front of a blazing coal stove, then watched with a mixture of amusement and concern as they worked their way through a huge meal of rye bread, walrus meat, salt fish and stewed apples. At length he leaned back in his chair with a fresh mug of coffee and said, “What in Heaven's name are you doing adrift in these waters? Were you shipwrecked?”

Stupefied by exhaustion, the fire's warmth, the hot food in her stomach, Gerda could, for once in her life, think of no convincing lie. And if she were to tell this rational-minded man of science the truth, how could she expect him to believe her? It was Kai, finally, who spoke up.

“We were with a geographic expedition from the University of Uppsala, exploring the west coast of Novaya Zemlya. But foolishly we became separated from our ship, lost our bearings, and were swept out to sea.”