The Snow Queen (14 page)

“Well, it was walruses we came for, and walruses we've got,” said the first mate dryly, as they listened to the roaring and snorting of the great sea-beasts.

In the morning Gerda and Ritva made themselves useful by collecting driftwood and dry birds' nests for fuel, while the men went out with muskets to lay in a store of meat and skins for winter. Then the crew set to work to build a driftwood hut, sinking the floor three feet into the ground, and chinking the cracks in the walls with gravel and moss. For the roof they used walrus skins stretched over a driftwood rooftree and held in place with stones suspended from rawhide thongs. To enter the hut they crawled on hands and knees through a tunnel and then pushed their way past heavy bearskin curtains. Inside there were plank beds covered with bearskins, and blubber lamps that shed a smoky light.

“You know we can't stay here,” said Ritva.

“I know,” Gerda mumbled into her pillow. She was warm at last, her belly was full; she could think of nothing but sleep.

“We must find Kai . . . but Ritva, first let me rest a little.”

“Rest all you like — your precious Kai has waited this long, he can wait a little longer. But I meant, we can't spend the winter here. How long do you think it will be before they discover we are women, not boys?”

Gerda rolled over and gazed blearily up at Ritva. “And what if they do?”

Ritva snorted. She parroted Gerda's words in a high, mincing voice. “‘And what if they do?' Can you still be so innocent, after spending a winter in my father's hall?”

“Oh, surely not,” said Gerda, shaken. “These are not bandits; these are honourable men. They would never molest a Danish citizen.”

“You think not?” said Ritva. “They are men, like all other men, and we'll be shut up in the dark with them from now till spring. I keep my knife in my sleeve, and you'd better do the same.”

Now Gerda was wide awake. “And when they run out of food, they will eat Ba.”

“That too,” said Ritva grimly. “We must go soon, before the Long Night sets in.”

“But how shall we travel?”

“As before. On foot. Northward, across the ice. We must find the Cave of the North Wind. Beyond that lies the Snow Queen's Palace.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

F
or weeks Gerda and Ritva had been gathering lichen and dried herbage for fodder, and grass to line their boots. They lamented the loss of their skis and tent, their fishing gear and pots and kettles, abandoned in the Cecilie's hold, but Ritva was a determined scavenger and an accomplished thief. There were candles and tins of chocolate stuffed under her pillow, and stolen friction matches in her pocket, wrapped up in a scrap of sealskin to keep them dry. Hidden away in an ice-chest among the rocks were strips of seal and walrus meat pilfered bit by bit from the cook's stores.

“We won't starve,” said Ritva with satisfaction, as she added another handful of ship's biscuits to the cache behind her bed. “Now hope that the sky stays clear, so we can find our way by the Pole Star . . . ”

“And by this too,” said Gerda. She reached under her blankets.

“What's that?” Curious, Ritva prodded the object in Gerda's hand.

“A compass,” said Gerda, with a trace of smugness. “I saw it in one of the smashed boats, and it seemed a pity to leave it behind.”

“What's it for?”

Gerda looked at her in astonishment. “You mean you've never seen a compass?” She held it up in the murky lamplight. “Watch the needle. It points the way straight to the North Pole. When you have a compass, you don't need to see the stars.”

The night sky glittered like a gigantic chandelier as they crept out of the hut and loaded their hoarded provisions into Ba's saddle-baskets. Fresh snow lay thick underfoot, and ice-glazed drifts were packed to the top of the shelter. Ba pushed his nose into Ritva's palm, and stamped his hooves as though impatient to be off. Swaddled in sweaters and reindeer tunic and fur-lined wolfskin coat, Gerda felt almost too cumbersome to walk, but she could feel the sharp sting of the icy wind on her face, and when she took off her mitts to tighten Ba's laces, her fingers turned blue and numb.

The quivering compass needle pointed their way north.

Everything known, familiar, had been left behind in the walrus-hunters' hut. The only sounds, now, were the shrilling of the wind and the crunch of snow under their boots, and from time to time the ominous rumble and screech of shifting ice. Sometimes they felt shockwaves running beneath their feet, as though somewhere in the distance immense slabs of ice were toppling.

The moon came out and flooded the broken snowscape with its chill white light. Never had Gerda imagined a scene so beautiful, or so forbidding. There was something dreamlike, hallucinatory, about this northward journey. Always before there had been lakes and rivers, hills and forests to help them chart their way. Now there were no more landmarks, and the thin shell of ice upon which they walked was like a vast unfinished puzzle, the pieces endlessly lifted and turned and shuffled by a giant hand.

Gerda had not thought it was possible to be so lonely. Though she was grateful for Ritva's steadfast presence, each of them, trudging silently through that frozen world, was locked in her own solitude. Is there anything more frightening, Gerda mused, than to be utterly alone with one's own thoughts? It was no wonder that arctic travellers panicked and went mad.

I will not think, she promised herself. I will not think of anything at all. If she let herself dwell for so much as an instant on the journey ahead, she knew she would fall to her knees on the ice and weep with helpless terror.

When they were too exhausted to go on, they threw up a makeshift shelter with poles and blankets, wrapped themselves in reindeer hides, and took turns to sleep. With daylight, Gerda saw that they had been lying on a narrow island of solid ice surrounded by a crazy-quilt of thin cracks. Here and there she could see gaping fissures with black water showing through. She roused Ritva; they fed Ba, breakfasted on some frozen strips of walrus meat, drank some melted snow, and plodded onward.

That second day dawned clear and windless. Through the brief hours of sunlight they trudged over ice-rubble and plains of soft loose snow. The sky changed from a bright wintry blue to turquoise, and then to ultramarine. On the southern horizon a pale red sliver of sun vanished in mauve-coloured haze. Soon the last of its light faded.

“Oh, look,” said Gerda, awestruck, as the black sky filled with swirling ribbons and darting, flickering shafts of rainbow colour. “Ritva, look, the northern lights!”

“I see them,” said Ritva impatiently. She added, with sour irony, “Why are you whispering? Who's going to hear you?” And Gerda realized that her voice was as hushed as if she were in church.

Somewhere in the near distance there was a thunderous crash; the ice shuddered and rocked beneath their feet. Ritva caught hold of Ba's collar as he reared in panic. In the shimmering light of the aurora they saw a huge crack opening up not twenty paces ahead.

An ice-block the size of a cottage thrust halfway out of the fissure, and then slipped back. There was a grinding, splintering sound, and with a jolt the ice tilted sharply beneath them. Suddenly everything seemed to be moving, shifting, eddying. It was as though some huge sea-creature was threshing wildly beneath the ice.

Gerda's heart gave a sick lurch as she watched a black, windbroken expanse of water widening before them. Ever since they had abandoned the
Cecilie
this was the thing she had dreaded most, the fear that had haunted her restless sleep. They were adrift, at the mercy of wind and tide, on an ice floe hardly bigger than the Princess's swansdown bed.

Gerda tugged off one of her mittens and groped for the compass. They seemed to be moving in an erratic but more or less northerly direction. “God is looking after us,” she told herself sternly. If she clung to that thought, perhaps she could slow the frantic thudding of her heart. Aloud, she said, “We're drifting towards the Pole, Ritva. You'll see, it will be all right, maybe the sea will carry us all the way to the Snow Queen's palace.”

There was no answer. She turned to look at Ritva. Frost glittered on the woollen scarf that half-covered the robber-maid's face. Above it, her eyes were wide and terrified. She was leaning against Ba, her hip pressed into his bony flank.

She is more frightened than I
, thought Gerda, with a sudden shock of realization.
She is more afraid of the sea than I was afraid
of the wilderness, or the robber's camp.

A fierce gust from the northeast sent their ice-raft spinning. They were moving faster now. Gerda stared at the compass needle in dismay. They were travelling steadily southwest, losing whatever distance they had gained.

Gerda sent up a silent, panic-stricken prayer. “Please, God, let the wind shift again. Please, God — send us a wind from the south.”

And then she remembered: a doorless hut, the smell of smoke and dried fish and reindeer stew, and an old woman putting something into Ritva's hand. What had she whispered to them, that old woman who kept the winds of the world bound up in a sack?
When the time comes, you will know.

“Ritva, where is the bag the Finnmark woman gave you?”

“What?” Ritva clung to Ba's collar, as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a sinking mast.

“The skin bag. Do you have it still?”

Ritva nodded. Still clutching Ba with her other hand, she dug awkwardly under her coat and the tunic beneath.

Gerda seized the pouch, and with numb fingers picked clumsily at the first of the knots.

Sudddenly the pouch began to swell like a blown-up bladder, the skin growing parchment-thin as it stretched to twice, thrice, ten times its size. “Help me,” Gerda shouted, tightening her grasp on the strings. The bag, still swelling, swayed and tossed above her like a giant hot-air balloon. Feet planted apart, backs braced, they struggled to hold the bag against the insistent tug of the wind. Then, just as it was about to lift them both off their feet, there was a shrill hiss, like steam escaping, and some immense, invisible thing shrieked its way out.

In the open channel before them, water churned and swirled as though stirred by a gigantic spoon; columns of water spun upward, glittering with starlight. And then suddenly the wind seized them, spun them round, propelled them into another widening channel, where the current caught them in its teeth and swept them northward.

All the rest of that night they drifted towards the Pole Star. It was so bitter cold, now, that hoarfrost grew on everything — on Ba's hooves and antlers, on the saddle-packs, on the shoulders of their wolfskin coats. Their eyelashes froze; their lungs ached.

No sun rose that morning; before dawn an icy fog, thick as oat-porridge, had settled around them.

Then, towards afternoon, the mist thinned, and straight in their path, towering hundreds of meters against the steel-grey sky, they saw a mountain of black, ice-fissured rock.