The Snow Queen (12 page)

The voice belonged to the oldest, smallest woman Gerda had ever seen, a tiny wrinkled, wizened, toothless creature, all nose and chin and bushy white hair like a witch in a fairy tale. And yet there was nothing fearsome about her. Her eyes, as bright as river stones, were clever and kind.

“Why don't you have a door?” asked Ritva.

“Why would I want a door? My kinfolk bring me whatever I need to live, and hand it through the window. I never go out that way. If I ever leave, it's by the smoke-hole.”

Gerda glanced up at the roof in puzzlement. It was true, the old woman was almost small enough to escape through the smoke-hole, but were those old bones agile enough for such a leap? Then, catching Ritva's eye, she understood: it was not the old woman's body but her spirit that came and went through that narrow hole.

The air in the room was stifling, choking. Gerda felt her whole body bathed in sweat under her heavy coat. The two of them began to peel off their winter garments, layer by layer, until they were down to tunics and trousers.

“Put your boots to dry on the hearthstones,” the woman said.

“We've brought you a message,” said Ritva. She looked a trifle foolish, holding out the stiff, smelly fish. But the old woman accepted it gravely, and read the runes with as much attention as if they were written on the finest deckled parchment.

“I see,” said the old woman. She dropped the cod into the soup pot. “Well, my young ladies, I hope you have not bitten off more blubber than you can chew.”

“I beg your pardon?” Gerda said.

“My friend the Saami woman tells me you have come seeking the Enchantress of the North. She and I are old enemies, and knowing her powers, I fear for the souls of two such innocents as yourselves.”

“I know who you are,” said Ritva, suddenly. “You are the woman who binds the winds. My mother spoke of you. She said you knew how to tie all the winds of the world together with a bit of twine, and when you choose to let all of them loose at once, forests topple, and the roots of the mountains creak.”

“No offense to your mother,” said the old woman, “but what a lot of nonsense people talk!”

“Can you teach me to bind the winds?” asked Ritva, pretending she had not heard.

“What for?” asked the woman slyly. “Are you planning a sea voyage?”

“No,” said Ritva. “But if I am to rescue Gerda's friend from the Enchantress, I will need all the weapons I can find.”

“But this is not your battle,” the woman said. “It is Gerda's.”

Ritva looked at her with startled disbelief. “What, that little one? My little rabbit? How will she fight the Terrible Enchantress? That is a task for heroes, for women of power.”

“Like you? But Ritva, there is more than one kind of power. Never underestimate the power of innocence, of a good and trusting nature.”

Ritva gave a shout of raucous laughter. “A trusting nature? Old woman, how long would I have survived if I had a trusting nature? The quickness of my wits, the knife in my hand, my two swift feet, that's what I trusted.”

“Gerda trusted you. And you repaid her trust. As did everyone she met. How else has she come so far, survived so much, and remained unharmed? Unlike you, my girl — you will always have to fight for what you want. Maybe you will get it — but never without a struggle, never without cost.”

“She survived because I saved her. My father would have slit her throat, or married her to some drunken lout who'd have beaten her black and blue.”

“And why did you save her?” asked the old woman. “Was it only a whim, because you were bored with tormenting your mother and your poor old reindeer, and wanted a new pet?”

“Yes,” Ritva started to say, and then faltered, staring at the old woman, whose level gaze, in return, seemed to see clear through Ritva's skull. “No,” she admitted. “At first I thought I wanted her as a pet, someone to come running when I snapped my fingers . . . ”

“But instead . . . ?”

Ritva grinned, half-sheepishly. “Instead, it was me who came running.”

The old woman gave a small, satisfied sigh. “You see. You see what power she has. You will have your part to play, my girl. But if the boy's soul is to be set free, it is your little rabbit who must do it.”

“But first we must find the Enchantress. They say she has a lodge at the edge of the Frozen Sea.”

“Well, as to that, I fear you have arrived too late. You will need to make that sea-voyage after all. She has left her lodge in Finnmark and returned to her palace, which is somewhere north of Spitzbergen, beyond the Cave of the North Wind, in the midst of the Frozen Sea.”

Gerda's heart felt like a lump of ice in her chest. To have come so far, to have suffered so much, and then to be told that the worst part of the journey still lay before them . . .

“Where did you learn this, old woman?” Ritva asked.

The woman looked sharply round at her. “And where did you learn your manners, my girl? Maybe the wind told me, whistling through the smoke-hole. Isn't it enough that I have told you what you wanted to know?”

Ritva stared down at her boots, abashed.

“Just over there, behind my house, is a stream flowing north. Follow its banks until it joins a river. Follow the river north — it will lead you to a fjord where cod fishermen come to mend their nets. And (this with a mocking glance at Ritva) “if you want to know where I learned this, I made the trip with my kinfolk many a springtime, when they took the reindeer to graze on the high tundra above the sea.”

“And then?”

“Follow the cliff path down to the shore. If you are lucky you may find a boat to hire. But you must go quickly, before winter comes to the Frozen Sea and the pack ice closes in.”

“Gerda, help me put up the tent,” said Ritva. “We'll sleep beside Ba, and leave at first light.”

“Wait,” said the old woman as they were preparing to set out in the morning. She reached through the window and thrust something into Ritva's hand. It was a small reindeer-skin pouch, with a drawstring of twine. “No, no, you must not open it yet,” she shrilled, as Ritva, curious as always, tried to loosen the three knots that held it closed.

“When?” asked Ritva. She held up the pouch and peered at it. To all appearances it was empty.

“You will know when the time comes,” said the old Finnmark woman.

“Now go with the wind, for time is wasting.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

T
hey pushed north along the riverbank beyond the last straggle of stunted birch, crossing bleak stretches of tundra where nothing grew but grey, prickly reindeer moss.

Thus they came at last to the edge of the land, where a windswept bluff overlooked an endless, heaving waste of iron-grey water. Below them was a desolate shoreline, half-glimpsed through fog — but neither village, nor fishboats, nor any sign of human habitation were to be seen.

Gerda stared down through the mist in stricken silence. This was what her wilful stubborness had led them to. They could go no further; must they turn, now, and retrace their steps across those empty miles of marsh and forest, with the northern winter settling in?

“The old woman was mistaken,” she said at last. “No one comes here. There are no fishermen. There are no boats.” Her throat ached with shame and self-pity. “I was wrong to bring you here. It's all my fault.”

Ritva's reply was lost in a sudden gust of wind. Gerda leaned closer. “You were not wrong,” Ritva said, her hands cupped around her mouth. “In my dream-journey, on the back of the white elk, I flew over this place. I saw boats, and fishermen. The old woman spoke the truth.”

A steep, stony path led down the side of the bluff into a rocky cove, sheltered by the fjord's high flanking cliffs. The fog grew thicker as they descended, swirling and billowing around them. Underfoot was a treacherous floor of smooth round stones, slick with damp and seaweed.

“Maybe around that point . . . ” said Ritva, not very hopefully. She picked her way gingerly across the rocks and disappeared beyond a promontory jutting almost to the water's edge. “Come and look, come and look!” Gerda heard her shouting after a moment. Her voice was shrill with excitement.

Around the point was another, larger cove; and just offshore, pitching and swaying on the surge of the incoming tide, lay a sloop with furled sails. She was flying the blue Norwegian cross.

Ritva danced up and down on the rocks. “I told you there'd be a boat!” she shrieked.

“Not a boat, Ritva, a ship! A proper sailing ship.” Gerda could just make out the letters on the hull: the
Cecilie
.

On a narrow strip of sand out of reach of the tide a dinghy was beached. Beside it crouched a blonde-bearded man who appeared to be mending a sail.

Gerda clambered onto a tumble of weed-slimed rocks and waved her arms. “Hallo,” she shouted in Danish, over the clamour of wind and waves. “Hallo! Can you hear me?”

The man glanced up from his work. At the sight of Gerda, his mouth fell open with such a comical look of surprise that she began to giggle — helplessly, foolishly, out of sheer relief.

The man got to his feet and strolled toward the two girls. He was a big, burly man, with a leathery wind-tanned face. He looked up at Gerda and Ritva with quizzical blue eyes, and said, in good Danish, “How can I help you, my young friends? If it's the rest of your herd you're looking for, I haven't seen them.”

At that instant Gerda saw herself, and Ritva, through the sailor's eyes — two half-grown boys dressed from head to foot in skins and furs, feet big and shapeless in grass-stuffed boots, nothing showing under their caps but chapped lips, windburned cheeks, a few greasy locks of cropped-off hair.

Gerda hesitated, waiting for Ritva to reply; but Ritva, oddly, was hanging back, looking uncertain and ill at ease. Gerda drew herself up as tall as she could, met the sailor's bright blue gaze, and said, with all the boldness she could summon, “We're not looking for our reindeer, we're looking for work. Do you have work to give us?”

The man laughed. “Well, we've not much need for cabin-boys, unless the cook could use a hand. From the sounds of it you're Danish-born, like me — and we're both of us a long haul from Copenhagen. Further still, before this voyage is over — we're bound for Spitzbergen Island.”

“As are we,” said Gerda.

“Not for the walrus hunt, I'll be bound.”

Gerda shook her head. The best lie, she thought, is the one that lies closest, in most particulars, to the truth.

“I must go to Spitzbergen in search of my elder brother,” she said. “My mother is a widow, and we are her only two sons.”

“And what is your brother doing on Spitzbergen? There is nothing there but rock and ice — and walruses.”

“And lichen,” said Gerda. “It seems there is also quite a large quantity of that. My brother is a student of botany, and he has gone to Spitzbergen to classify the various sorts of lichen according to Dr. Linnaeus's rules of taxonomy.”

“I hadn't heard about that,” said the sailor.

“No, I dare say you wouldn't,” said Gerda gravely. “The expedition was privately funded, and the sponsor wished to avoid publicity.”

“Yes, I see,” said the sailor, who quite obviously did not.

“For fear of attracting the attention of rival botanists,” elaborated Gerda, warming to her subject. “But something has gone amiss, we have had no word for months, and we fear that the expedition has come to disaster. My poor mother has been distraught. She can neither eat nor rest. And so I have travelled all the way from Copenhagen in search of my brother.” She paused for effect. “Or his unfortunate remains.”

“It looks like you're in luck,” said the blonde sailor. “The Captain says we can spare a couple of hammocks in the fo'c'sle, and you can earn your passage by fetching and carrying for the cook.”