The Snow Queen (15 page)

At that moment their ice-floe began to spin wildly, like a leaf caught in a whirlpool. Ritva and Gerda clung to each other, and to Ba, as wind and water tossed and whirled them faster and faster towards the black mountain's base. But just as it seemed they would be dashed to bits against the rocks, a narrow opening, a cavern mouth, rushed up to meet them, and the sea, capricious as ever, sucked them straight into the mountain's heart.

Abruptly, the wild motion stopped, and they found themselves floating in a huge, vaulted space filled with a ghostly bluish light. On either side rose black, frost-streaked walls of granite. Pillars of ice stood in ranks, like watchful giants; long, glinting clusters of icicles dripped from the roof. Far ahead they could see a faint grey glimmer, a way out.

And then, waking somewhere in the dim grottos along the cavern walls, came the north wind's voice. It began as no more than an indrawn breath, a sigh, a gentle whisper of air in that echoing silence. But swiftly, surely, it gathered strength. Its sound, now, was the shrilling of the storm through snowbound passes, the creaking of masts in a black squall, the blizzard rattling in frozen shrouds. It was the cry of a wolf, a curlew's scream. It was the beating of enormous icy wings. The wind tore the words from their lips, the breath from their lungs. It battered their fragile raft of ice against the glistening cavern walls.

Then, as suddenly as they had entered, they were through, like a cork exploding from a bottle.

On the other side of the mountain, beyond a narrow channel of dark water, lay a world of utter emptiness and silence, a world of profound night. The moon hung like a great pewter dish in a cobalt sky. Trackless snowfields, stained with violet shadows, stretched away to the dark line of the horizon, where they vanished into a silvery mist.

For a long moment neither could find breath to speak. Finally, in a tired whisper, clutching the robber-maid's mittened hand for comfort, Gerda said, “We've done it, Ritva. We've passed through the Cave of the North Wind. We've come to the Snow Queen's country, where earth and day end.”

And yet, strangely, she felt nothing — neither relief, nor joy at their survival. Sick with cold and exhaustion, she was aware only of an awful hollowness in her stomach, a sinking dismay at what still lay ahead.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

N
o winds blew, in this dark and silent country behind the north wind's cave. The only sounds were the faint snuffling of Ba's breath and the crunch of his hooves through the falling snow. To Gerda's blurred, exhausted vision, those huge flakes seemed to grow larger and larger, taking on fantastic shapes, like knotted serpents, or many-headed beasts.

They pushed on through loose powdery drifts, sinking up to their knees. And softly, silently, relentlessly, the snow fell. They had come to a place outside of time, beyond geography: where snowfields flowed on and on under the frozen stars to the world's rim, where earth and heaven meet.

“I can go no farther,” said Gerda in a faint, pleading voice. She was past weariness, at the edge of collapse. “Please, Ritva, let me rest for a little.” She had lost all feeling in her hands and feet. Her chest ached; she could feel the muscles of her legs quivering with fatigue. She had forgotten what it was like to sleep.

“Don't be a fool, if you stop, you'll freeze,” Ritva snapped at her. “A few more miles — ”

“Or a hundred, or a thousand?” asked Gerda, in despair.

“No. Remember, I made this journey once before, in my vision.”

And then the snow stopped, and the sky cleared. They could see the stars now, an infinite number of glittering pinpoints in a high dark canopy. And all at once the sky was ablaze with arrows and archways and rippling curtains of flame. In the northern distance, across the shadowy snowfields, stood towers and turrets and parapets of crystal, glimmering rose-pink and gold and apple-green.

Snowdrifts clung to the window ledges of the Snow Queen's palace. The tall arched panes glittered with a wintry, ice-blue light. The great doors of crystal and silver stood ajar, unguarded; a powdering of snow filmed the milk-white marble tiles of the courtyard within.

No hearthfires burned in those vast, chill rooms — only the cold and eerie flames of the aurora borealis, blazing down through crystal skylights, flickering across the icy floors. They could hear the faint glassy tinkle of chandeliers, the whistling of the wind down endless, empty halls. There was a kind of music, too — high, keening, crystalline notes infinitely, piercingly sustained, like tones struck on a goblet's rim. The sound was like a knifeblade in the base of Gerda's skull. She clapped her hands over her ears to shut it out.

Nothing had prepared Gerda for a palace so magnificent — and so utterly devoid of warmth and comfort.
No one human
could live in this place
, she thought. And she shuddered at a sudden chilling intimation: living here, what might Kai have become?

Tears of weakness, exhaustion, desolation, leaked from her eyes, and froze into beads of crystal on her cheeks. The cold had crept into her muscles and bones, had wrapped itself round her heart.

From wall to wall, in the Great Hall of the Snow Queen's palace, spread a lake of ice. The surface was fractured into thousands of interlocking pieces, like a gigantic Chinese puzzle. In the middle of the hall stood a tall, spare figure in a white ermineskin coat.

Gerda's heart began to race; suddenly she felt dizzy and faint. She clutched Ritva's arm, half-leaning against her for support. “It's him,” she whispered through numb, chapped lips. “It's Kai.” And then, in bewilderment: “Ritva, whatever can he be doing?”

She moved closer, stepping cautiously over the broken surface. As she watched, Kai sank to his heels, crouching awkwardly on the ice, and with both hands prised up a flat, heavy, puzzle-shaped piece. Straightening with the slow, painful effort of an old man, he dragged the ice fragment for a few meters, hesitated, and laid it down again. Then he stood, head bent, seemingly lost in thought.

“Kai,” Gerda shouted out to him. “Kai! It's me, it's Gerda!” Her words bounced back to her, tauntingly, from the frost-rimed ceiling, the glassy white walls. The air crackled with cold. Kai's head lifted for an instant, turned slightly towards her. She drew in her breath to shout again. The cold pierced her lungs. But Kai had looked away, was staring down at the ice at his feet.

“Go to him, fool,” hissed Ritva. She put her hands on Gerda's shoulders, gave her a determined shove.

The broken ice crunched under Gerda's feet. Her breath, freezing in front of her face, whispered like torn tissue paper.

“Kai — don't you know me? Won't you look at me?” She could hardly speak for the huge, aching lump in her throat.

The bent figure lifted its head. Red-rimmed, dark-shadowed, Kai's eyes seemed to stare straight through her. Gerda clasped his gloveless hands in her own. They were bloodless, brittle as frozen twigs, blue-white with cold.

He was like a figure carved from ice: blind, deaf, unfeeling. He stooped, and began to shuffle some small jagged pieces of ice from one place to another, as though trying to see a pattern in them. There was a terrible sense of futility, of defeat, in his stiff, painful movements. It was as though he had picked up, and rearranged, and set down those same pieces of ice a thousand times before.

“Kai. Talk to me. Tell me what you're trying to do.”

He looked up, and at last something stirred behind his clouded pupils.

“It is the Game of Reason,” he said. His voice cracked, as though he had not used it for a long time.

Gently, patiently, cradling his icy hands in her own fur-mittened ones, Gerda asked, “This Game, Kai — does it have a purpose?”

His eyes searched her face, as though there too he sought some pattern he could recognize.

“To spell out a word,” he said.

“What word, Kai?”

He gazed down at the ice-puzzle in tired perplexity.

“I don't know,” he said. “That is what I must discover. If I can only make the puzzle spell out the right letters, I will comprehend everything, all the knowledge in the world will be mine. This is what the Baroness Aurore has promised me. But I have been re-arranging the pieces for a very long time, and try as I may, I can't make them fit together.”

“Shall I try?” asked Gerda.

He gave a hoarse bark of laughter. “You? What can you do? Will you spell out a poem about summer roses?”

“You are cruel,” said Gerda, but she spoke without malice. His words had lost their power to wound her. This was not Kai, this creature of ice that the Woman of the North had created in Kai's image.

When she looked down at the shattered surface of the lake, she saw that every broken fragment of ice was like a mirror, and in each one she could see an image of her own face. How strange and ugly those reflections were — her features grotesquely lengthened, flattened, twisted into monstrous shapes. Was this how Kai saw her? Was this how he saw the world, through the distorting lens of the Snow Queen's magic? She thought,
what if after all this ugliness is the true reflection, and
everything I have found beautiful in the world is a false image, a
foolish lie I have been telling myself?

And then a sudden gust of wind came shrilling across the ice, so intensely cold that it bit through Gerda's garments of skin and fur and wool, and clawed its way into flesh and bone. She gasped with the ferocity of it; shuddering, she clutched her scarf across her face.

A woman was approaching, gliding swanlike over the frozen lake in a silver-sequined gown. Ice crystals glittered in her loose pale hair, on the shoulders of her ermine cloak. She was tall and slender and beautiful. Her skin was white and delicate as camellia petals, her eyes the glacial blue of sea-ice.

“Well, children, you have found your way at last. Let me congratulate you on your perseverence.”

The Snow Queen's voice was as cold as the wind that shrills across the arctic wastes.

“What have you done to Kai?” Sick with anger, Gerda shrieked the question at her.

“Done? I have given him what he wanted most in the world, to look into the Mirror of Reason. And should he succeed in solving my puzzle, then he will know as much as I, and will have nothing more in the world to wish for.”

“He will know everything in the world, and feel nothing,” Gerda said. She realized as she spoke that she was no longer in awe of this woman, nor afraid of her powers. She had come too far, had survived too much. “You've made a monster of him — a sad, pathetic monster.”

In the Snow Queen's eyes there flickered, for an instant, a knowledge as ancient and pitiless as the northern ice. “I made a monster of him? No, my dear child. I think he did that to himself.”

“If I can solve the puzzle, then will you let Kai go?”

“You? Let me explain something to you. A hundred philosophers, a hundred men of science have tried and failed to solve my ice-puzzle. What chance could you have of succeeding?”

“But if I do?”

The Snow Queen's laughter, freezing into a cloud of crystals, drifted lazily around them.

“You won't, and I will be bored past endurance watching you try. After a while a game becomes tedious, when you know all the players are bound to lose. So let me propose another kind of game. You fancy yourself a hero, I think, after all your adventures. A hero who has come to free her lover from the sorceress's spell.

“And you —” she turned her chill blue gaze on Ritva — “you are the warrior-shaman, who has come to defeat me, to steal my power from me in my own house.”

Ritva stared back at her, unflinching. “I will if I can,” she said.

“Well,” said the Woman of the North, “if you would play at being heroes, then I will join you in your game. Three impossible tasks to be performed — three challenges. Isn't that how the rules go? You know the fairy tales as well as I.”