The Snow Queen (8 page)

“Look after these horses,” Ritva shouted, tossing him the reins as she jumped down from the driver's seat. “And see that nobody goes near this coach, or I'll slice up your liver for the soup.” Ritva had peered inside the coach, had seen the quilted satin walls, the velvet seats, the rabbit furs strewn like snowdrifts on the floor. The surly band of cutthroats and deserters her father called his private army would quickly turn such luxury into splintered rubble.

She dragged the yellow-haired girl down from the coachman's seat and pushed her through the ruined castle's entranceway. As usual it was cluttered with skis, snowshoes, fishing gear, jumbled heaps of wolf and reindeer skins. A guard dog snarled and snapped at the girl, its growls subsiding into a whine when someone shouted at it.

The dim, cavernous hall was thick with smoke. One of the women sat over the low fire that smouldered in the middle of the stone floor. She was nursing her infant and stirring the soup-pot with a birchbark stick.

The girl coughed and put her hand over her nose. It occurred to Ritva that the place must stink, what with all the animals stabled inside, the heaps of pigeon-dung, the jumbled piles of half-cured skins and last week's bones, though she hardly noticed it herself.

Ritva motioned to the girl to sit down on a bench beside the fire, and ladled out some soup to warm her belly, with a crust of black bread to gnaw on. She watched with interest as the girl ate, sipping the soup so daintily that not a drop spilled down her chin, breaking off bits of bread and slipping them into her mouth, and afterwards wiping her lips and fingers on a lacy handkerchief.

“What's that you've got there?” Ritva's mother had crept noiselessly up behind them.

“None of your business,” said Ritva, not turning round. “Go away, old woman.”

“That's no way to speak to your mother.” The shaman pinched Ritva's earlobe between thumb and forefinger and gave it a sharp tug. Ritva slapped the hand away.

“She's a plump little thing,” remarked Ritva's mother.

Ritva glanced round suspiciously. “Why do you say that, old witch? Are you planning to boil her up for your dinner?”

“Plenty of meat on those bones,” observed her mother, with a gap-toothed grin.

“You're a horrible old woman,” said Ritva, “and you're not getting your hands on her.”

“And what do you mean to do with her?”

“I don't know yet. But I had to rescue her from my father — he'd have cut her throat for the sake of her coat and muff.”

Ritva stalked to the fire, where the girl was hunched over her stew. “What's your name?” she asked gruffly, in Finnish.

The girl looked up. Her blue eyes were wide and bewildered.

“What do they call you?” Ritva prompted her with a sharp finger in the midsection.

Still no answer.

She's an imbecile
, decided Ritva, with a pang of disappointment. Then she thought,
maybe she just comes from
some southern country, where they speak a different tongue.

She pointed to her chest. “Ritva,” she said. She levelled a grimy forefinger at the girl, and raised her brows.

“G-g-gerda,” the girl responded, stuttering with fright.

Not an imbecile after all,
thought Ritva.
What a splendid pet
she will make, this little white rabbit. If anyone tries to come near
her, I will stick my knife in their ribs.

It was growing late, though evening light still seeped through the chinks in the wall. The women built up the fire, setting a big grease-encrusted cauldron of soup to boil, and spitting a brace of hares. Thick smoke curled along the blackened rafters, seeking a way out. Then the men of the camp returned, stamping and cursing, and shouting to the women to bring them food.

Ritva took Gerda by the arm and pulled her into the shadowy corner under the pigeon-lathes that she had long since claimed for her own. All the pigeons stirred in their sleep and began to coo as Ritva walked under their perches, and her old reindeer Ba nuzzled the girl with his cold nose. Ritva tickled him with her knife until he backed off.

She took a straw-broom and swept away the day's accumulation of pigeon-droppings, threw down some fresh straw, and spread out her bed of musty skins.

She pulled Gerda down beside her on the straw. The girl sat hugging herself, as still as a hare run to earth by wolves. Only her eyes moved, darting anxiously from Ritva to the immense, echoing, firelit space behind her. Ritva drew her knife from her belt and thrust it under the rolled up rabbit skin she used for a pillow. She liked to keep it handy, just in case.

Some of her father's men had broken into loud, drunken song. Gerda shivered, and turned her head away. Her teeth had begun to chatter. “Lie down,” said Ritva. “They won't bother us here. Go to sleep.”

The girl squirmed down as far as she could in the bed. Every muscle was tensed, her breathing fast and shallow. Ritva lay awake for a long time, conscious of the small, rigid, motionless shape beside her.

“What use is she?” snapped Ritva's mother. “Look at her hands — she's never done a stroke of work in her life. I mean to let Ivar's son Henrik have her. He needs a wife, and he seems to have taken a fancy to her, though what he sees in such a pasty-faced, washed-out creature I cannot guess.”

Ritva imagined Gerda in fat, foul-mouthed Henrik's embrace. She felt sick at the thought of it. “You will
not
,” she said.

Grimacingly horribly, Ritva's mother waved her skinning knife. “Shall I slice off those ears, stupid girl, that will not listen to good sense? Shall I cut out your wicked tongue, that dares to say no to your mother?”

“Not if I can help it,” retorted Ritva, stepping out of reach.

“You don't care about this girl,” said her mother, abruptly changing her tactics. “You do this to make me angry. In everything, you defy me. Never have I had a minute's joy of you, since the evil day I bore you.”

“Nor I you,” said Ritva, unrepentant.

“Can she cook?” asked her mother.

“What, now you'll make a hearth-slave of her?”

“Why not? Or is she too feeble even to stir a kettle, or fetch an armload of wood?”

“What a ridiculous old woman you are,” said Ritva. “This girl comes to us riding in a gilded coach, dressed like the daughter of a king, and you would set her to stirring the stewpot? Clear your head of visions for a minute, Mother. Think what manner of people she must come from — and what they might pay to get her back.”

Her mother's eyes narrowed. “You have not spoken to your father about this?”

“When did I ever speak to my father about anything?”

“Have your pet princess, then, if you must,” said Ritva's mother. “Do with her as you will.” Her voice was sullen, but Ritva had seen the flicker of greed in her face, not quickly enough concealed. “Talk to her. Find out what place she comes from. I will find her family.”

“And how do you mean to do that?”

“I may be a stupid old woman, in your eyes, but I have my powers yet.”

But Ritva knew that those powers were fast fading. Each time the healing trance or the journey of far-seeing left her mother more exhausted, as though the return from the spirit world became more arduous as the mind and body grew more frail. One day, Ritva thought, she will not return. And it will be through me that the spirits speak, my body that the spirits possess.

She thrust away those thoughts, for they weighed heavily upon her.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

“H
ere, eat,” said Ritva. “You'll get as scrawny as my old reindeer.” She ladled some porridge into a bowl and thrust it in front of Gerda.

Gerda's stomach twisted at the sight of the grey, slimy mess. She pushed away the dish and shook her head.

“Stupid thing, you have to eat. Why will you not eat?” Ritva reached out to put her hand on Gerda's forehead. “What's the matter? Are you sick?” After the first day or so she had given up on Finnish and now spoke to Gerda in a rough soldiers' Swedish picked up from her father's men.

“Not sick. Afraid,” said Gerda.

“Afraid? Of what? Of those drunken louts?”

They sat in the midst of the wreckage caused by last night's feasting. One of the bandits still snored in front of the hearth with his head in a puddle of beer. The women calmly stepped over him to tend the fire and stir the porridge-pot.

“They won't dare lay a finger on you. They know if they do I'll stick my knife between their ribs.”

“Not only them.” Gerda shot a wordless glance towards Ritva's mother. The Saami woman was wearing her shaman's robe, decorated with magic signs and hung about with the skins of small animals. All that night, and all the day before, she had crouched in a dark corner of the hall, neither eating nor drinking, speaking to no one and glaring venomously at anyone who dared to approach. With a curved prong of reindeer horn she beat a slow monotonous rhythm on a round skin-covered drum.

“What, my old mother?” said Ritva. “She's all bluff, she won't harm you. Anyway, look at her, she hardly has a foot in this world anymore.”

“What is she doing?” whispered Gerda.

“One of the men has the lung sickness. My mother's drum is a reindeer, and she is riding it to the Land of the Dead to ask for his soul back.”

“Has she always been like that?”

“What, a shaman?”

“I meant, has she always been so . . . ” Gerda groped for a tactful word, “ . . . so uncivil?”

Ritva snorted. “Uncivil! Is that what you call it, in the south? If you want to know, she's an evil, disgusting old woman, and I hope that next time she goes into one of her trances, she never comes out.”

“But she is your mother,” said Gerda, appalled.

“So what if she is? Is that supposed to make me like her?”

“Perhaps,” said Gerda, thinking about the wicked stepmothers in fairy tales, “she is not your real mother?”

Ritva threw back her head and gave a hoot of laughter. “Oh, she's my mother, right enough. Who else would have suckled a brat as horrible as me? But you haven't told me why you ran away from home. Did you have a mother like mine, who thumped your ears and pinched your nose and let you go hungry when you disobeyed her?”

Gerda had a sudden vision of a cozy, lamplit sitting room, smelling of beeswax polish and fresh-brewed coffee and pot-pourri. She imagined her mother's gentle, anxious face, bent over a lapful of knitting; the restless flicker of needles in her long slim fingers; the way her jaw would tense and her eyes widen at the sound of footsteps on the walk, the opening or closing of a door. Tears of guilt and homesickness welled up; her throat ached. She swiped her sleeve across her eyes. Not trusting herself to speak, she shook her head.

“So why did you run away?” It was a game for Ritva, this relentless questioning. She tormented Gerda with her curiosity, like a cat tormenting a mouse.

“I didn't,” Gerda said. “My mother is not like yours. She is kind and good.”

“But you left.”

“Only because I had to find Kai.”

“Then tell me about this Kai. Is he your brother?”

“No.”

“Aha!” Ritva grinned at Gerda, her eyes mocking. “Your lover, then.”

“No!” exclaimed Gerda. “He is my friend. Only that. I love him as a friend.”

“Neither your brother nor your lover? And still you followed him into these wilds?”

“Wouldn't you search for your friend,” asked Gerda, “if somone had put an evil spell on him, and stolen him away?”

“I don't have friends,” replied Ritva. “My old reindeer, Ba — and the knife in my belt. Those are all the friends I need.”

“How very lonely you must be,” said Gerda. She spoke more with anger than with sympathy.
Truly, she is her mother's
daughter
, Gerda thought
— spiteful and mean, caring for no one
but herself.

“I could never have come this far without the help of friends,” said Gerda. She thought of dear, trusting Katrine, whose trust she had betrayed; of the coachman's aunt, of Madame Eriksson and the Swedish princess. And then, with anguish, she remembered the princess's two servants, who, but for Gerda, would still be alive and safe at home with their own families.

“Come and see Ba,” said Ritva, suddenly jumping up as though bored with her game.

The reindeer was old, and so thin that his ribs showed.

“Don't you feed him?” Gerda asked.

“Of course I feed him. He's skinny because he's so old. But I love you dearly, don't I, you miserable old bone-rack?” So saying, Ritva tickled the reindeer under the chin with the point of her knife. The animal regarded her morosely, but did not move his head. Ritva put the knife away in her belt, and blew softly through pursed lips. The reindeer lowered his gaunt head and gently nuzzled Ritva's neck.