Icefields (16 page)

In the Alps, the bodies of missing mountaineers have emerged from the wasting ice of glaciers decades, perhaps even centuries, after they were lost.

He paced around the flat, a glass of sherry balanced on the palm of his hand. The fumes rose to his nostrils, potent, innervating. He sat down and read over what he had just written:

Immense pressure, coupled with extreme cold. Combining to produce hitherto unknown effects on matter. Or upon spirit.

The possibility of a spiritual entity trapped, frozen, in ice. Enmeshed somehow in physical forces, immobilized, and thus rendered physical and solid itself.

He finished the sherry, set the glass down, and turned again to the window. The thin lace curtain billowed with a breath of wind and sank back again.

And when it melted out of the ice, would it then just sublimate back into metaphysical space, leaving human time and scientific measurement behind?

If I could be there, observe it, at the moment of escape.

26

He turns from stoking the last embers of the fire, steps across the frozen floor on tiptoe as though over hot coals. He stands hunched over the bed for a moment, rubs his naked arms and chest, marvels at the brief sparks that light his fingertips.

He smiles. Friction, heat. Did her body pass this blue fire to his? It must be an effect of the dry air, the fine dust that settles imperceptibly, ceaselessly, on everything at this elevation.

He climbs between the cool sheets. She is somewhere beside him in the bed, already asleep, but he cannot feel her warmth. He lies on his stomach, listening for her breathing. At times she moves slightly, a
hand, a leg, sliding across the blanket like a whisper. A word spoken in a dream.

They are swimming side by side in a night lake, their bodies never touching. Only the waves of breathing tell of the other's presence.

She had said to him, when she finished the pages he asked her to read,
So you want to know what I think?

He was standing by the fireplace, arms crossed over his chest.

—You don't have to tell me, he said.

—You won't like it.

—Tell me.

She set the notebook on the bed beside her.

—I don't know what this thing was, is, will turn out to be, and right now it doesn't seem to matter.

—I see.

—You should read my journal. Pages of what
is he thinking? Can he tell what I'm feeling? Would he care?

—This, she waved a hand at the notebook, the fact that you let me read this, it's my first bit of tangible evidence. I ought to rush home this instant and write it down. Day forty-nine: a breakthrough. I believe the creature now trusts me.

—That's funny, he said.

—Then laugh.

He sat down beside her on the bed.

—To be honest, she said, I don't think you saw anything in the crevasse.

—You mean I imagined it.

—I mean you saw something, but my guess is, as you said yourself, it might have been a natural shape formed by the ice. Only I would add, not might have been, but probably was.

—You would have made a good scientist. I didn't know you were so unromantic.

—Am I? When I was a girl I believed in the fairies, even though I'd never seen one. I was told it was all foolishness and superstition, but of course I didn't care. One day I went with my brother up the hill above our town, to find a pony that had strayed. But I couldn't keep up with Sandy. As usual, he was in a hurry. I was a nuisance, he said, he had to keep stopping and waiting for me, and finally he told me to turn around and go home. I sulked and wandered for a while, and then I sat down by a stream. On the other side was a great wild hawthorn, and I let out a shriek when I saw there was a girl standing there, in the shade of the leaves. I jumped up. I said hello and waved my hand. She just stood there on the other side of that stream and watched me. Her eyes were green. She was elfin, beautiful. I felt that this was her place on the earth, her life had grown here and was rooted here like the hawthorn, and I was an intruder. I ran home, frightened out of my scarce enough wits, but
almost every day after that I would climb the hill, hoping I'd see her again.

—But you never did.

—Freya reminds me of her, but no, I never did.

—And you've always wanted to know whether she was a dream, a vision, or just an ordinary girl under a tree.

—Yes, but she was not ordinary. That's just it. Years later I thought, she didn't have to be a spirit, a fairy, anything like that. She didn't have to be from another world, to fill mine with magic. I'd never seen anyone, anything, like her. A beautiful girl under a hawthorn, that's enough of a wonder, isn't it?

27

—I wanted to introduce you to my parents.

—As what?

—My friend the doctor. They only saw you from a distance, and you managed to keep it that way.

—Tell me something about your father.

—Oh, he's a fierce man. When my brother and I would fight, he had a truly horrible punishment for us.

—What was it?

—He made us hold hands and sing.

28

—Thank you, she says.

—For what?

—For bringing me here, where no one can find me. I haven't had peace and quiet like this for months. Even on my days off they come looking for me with some problem.

—They won't come looking for you up here.

—No, I don't think they will.

—This will be your chalet. You're the guest whose every whim will be indulged. And you can stay as long as you like.

—No, I can't.

29

—And what did you think?

—About what?

—When you got better, and your mother said it was a miracle. Did you believe that too?

—I don't know.

—You don't remember?

—I remember too much.

—But not that.

—I just mean I didn't know if it was a miracle, and I still don't. But because my mother believed it,
I wanted to believe it too. I became very religious. I even thought about the priesthood. I wanted to be like Saint Francis of Assist, living in the wilderness, loving every living thing, even the trees and the rocks, everything. Then one day, about four years after my father and I moved to London, I was in church by myself, and I got up and walked out and that was the end of it. Just like that. Later that year I told my father I wanted to be a doctor.

—How old were you?

—Fourteen or fifteen. I just dropped it, the great passion of my life, and walked away.

—And what about this great passion, the ice?

—There are times I hate this place. But I keep coming back, as if I'm condemned to do this.

Once this world had been on the periphery of his imagination, a place from which one returned to tell the tale. Now it has become the centre of his field of vision. And more than central: inevitable. From this vantage point, for good or ill, he believes that his life could have taken no other road.

The contours of the icefield, even those he cannot see and must envision from the maps of others, now seem to embody a form he has sensed vaguely all his life.

30

Trask nudges Hal with an elbow.

—I don't believe it. Look.

Hal follows his pointing finger past the corral fence, down the sloping lawn to the footpath where Elspeth and Byrne are climbing into view.

Trask shakes his head.

—I cannot for the life of me understand what she sees in him. The man's spent so much time on that glacier I'll bet he shoots icicles.

31

The next day Elspeth returns, unexpected, to visit him. Freya is with her, but she says very little, inspects the shelter and then stands in the doorway, looking out at the glacier.

—A bachelor's hideout, she says. Nothing new.

—You shouldn't have come up on your own, Byrne says.

—She didn't, Freya says. I'm here.

Elspeth sets a basket on his worktable.

—There's some cold roast beef, potatoes, rolls. And an orange.

They smile at each other, at their shyness in the presence of Freya.

—Wonderful, Byrne says. Especially the orange. Scurvy is a hazard of this kind of work.

—So is insanity, Freya says.

She tugs a small book out of her jacket pocket and holds it out to Byrne.

—I brought you something too, she says.

He takes the book and opens it to the title page. A tattered volume of plays by Shakespeare.

—I found it by the outlet of Grizzly Creek, in an old circle of campfire stones. Elspeth told me you collected things like this.

The pages of the leatherbound book are swollen from years of exposure to wind and rain. A dry deposit of grit in the gutter. The print has faded, but in many places miniscule marginal notes can be seen.

He examines the book from front cover to back. Stamped on the endpaper is a heraldic family crest: on a field of azure, a celestial city, proper. And the motto:
J'espére.
Freya leans forward.

—Do you know who lost it?

—Yes.

32

This book may have been mislaid by Sexsmith,
Byrne writes in his notebook that evening,
or he may have left it with Viraj. And then perhaps it was tossed aside by the
surveyors after they had plundered and torn down the trading post.

Almost all of the marginal notes concern the plays. But in the last pages are a few scratchy lines about the icefield. And a hastily scribbled map with a blank area at its centre. Byrne copies everything into his own journal. He pieces together the final hours of Sexsmith's quest.

33

Before them lies a sea of drifting, hissing snow. On all sides indistinct peaks rise like islands above the blurred horizon. Sunlight gleams fitfully on the ice cap of the highest summit, far across the plain from where they stand.

They take shelter in the lee of a rock outcrop at the edge of the open expanse. The Stoney brothers build a thrifty fire with scraps of wood saved from the last encampment.

Sexsmith says nothing. He stares out at the white expanse, watches it disappear slowly behind a wall of blowing snow. While the brothers cook a meal, Sexsmith goes for a walk onto the snow field in the fading light of dusk. The relentless wind soon turns him back. It is obvious that no animals come here to graze. There is nothing to hunt, there will be no way to replenish the food supply.

All that I see is stale, flat, unprofitable.

He has left his journal with Viraj. The only book he carries with him now contains the Bard's least inspiring creations.
Antony and Cleopatra. A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Back at the camp, in his tent, he lights the lamp and tries to read, but his wind-blistered eyes are too sore. Instead he makes a few perfunctory marginal notes, pushing the pen with numb, blistered fingers to form words he can barely see.

In the raw morning, Sexsmith sips his tea while the Stoney brothers pack up the camp.

Sexsmith spills a few drops of tea onto the snow at his feet. They disappear instantly, even the brown stain absorbed into the white surface.

He digs absently with the toe of his boot. There is a faint blue shadow in the hollow where the spilled liquid fell. He crouches, brushes away the snow crust with his gloved hands, digging a hole into the powdery layers beneath. Further down the snow solidifies again. Sexsmith stabs his alpenstock into the hole, strikes a hard surface. Rock, he thinks, and scrapes at it, glimpses a faint reflected gleam.

Blue, silver. What is it?

He pours the remains of his tea into the hole, hacks at it with the point of the alpenstock. Crystalline shards fly out.

Ice.

He understands now that he is walking across a
bowl of ice on the top of the world. The glaciers have been spilling from its brim.

Nothing. A dreary waste of ice.

The brothers have shouldered their packs and stand waiting for Sexsmith. He turns away and stalks out into the icefield, hacking at the snow crust with his alpenstock. The brothers follow. Sexsmith stumbles in the deepening snow and halts as the brothers approach. He hears them and turns, a bitter smile on his face.

A spirit place.

That evening they make it to the camp on the ridge. In his journal, the pages blotched with frozen tears from his inflamed eyes, Sexsmith writes nothing about the plain of ice. Only the date and

Disappointment.

34

But was that all? Byrne wonders. Why would he keep silent about it? Unless, like me, he encountered something that he dared not set down in his memoirs.

Disappointment. Nothing but snow, ice, cloud, wind. That was all he found. And what he could not accept. A world with a wasteland like this at its summit.

35

After many notebook pages of measurement and calculation, Byrne writes down a year, places a question mark beside it.
In the summer of that year,
he writes,
the region of the glacier into which I fell should reach the terminus. Rather, it will
be
the terminus, and will therefore begin to melt.

Whatever is embedded within it must, by the laws of nature, reappear.