The Snow Queen (2 page)
Her eyes were rimmed with red and her face looked pinched and sallow, drained of blood. The chin-whiskers she had recently begun to sprout were more noticeable than usual. “High time you were up,” she said, giving the rabbit on the spit an irritable poke. “Look at this place. It's a pig sty. A proper daughter would have been up at first light, sweeping and scrubbing.”
“Then you should find yourself a proper daughter, shouldn't you?” said Ritva nastily. “It's no business of mine, to clean up after a lot of drunken swine.”
“Nor mine either. There was no rest for me last night.” Ritva's mother dipped a ladle into the soup cauldron and sucked up a noisy mouthful of broth. “Old Lars will live. The spirits have given back his soul. But every time it gets harder. I'm too old for soul-journeying, Ritva. It makes my bones ache.” An edge of self-pity sharpened her voice. “I should be sitting by the fire with my embroidery in my lap.”
Ritva smirked at the idea of her mother doing embroidery.
“Where are you off to?” It was a peevish, old woman's question.
Ritva shrugged. “How should I know? Maybe I'll go hunting. Or maybe I'll ride out to the edge of the world, and never come back.”
Her mother made a noise as though she had something caught in her throat. “You'll be lucky if that poor old bone-rack makes it out of camp, never mind the world's edge.” Her voice rose, became thin and querulous. “And what will become of your kinfolk, if there is nobody to beat my shaman's drum when I am gone to my grave?”
“How tiresome you are,” said Ritva, with an exaggerated yawn. “I'm sick of you always singing that same tune. Maybe I will keep riding forever.” And she stomped across the stone floor, slippery with spilled beer and pigeon-dung, to the far end of the hall where her good old patient reindeer Ba was tethered.
“M
y dear Mrs. Sorensen, it's a scandal, what's happening to our weather.” Fragrant steam curled up as Gerda's mother poured coffee into her best rose-patterned cups. “The coldest January in a hundred years, they say.”
The tall porcelain stove in the Jensen's parlour radiated heat. The room, with its thick hangings and dark mahogany furniture, smelled cozily of beeswax and potpourri and fresh-baked bread.
“Gerda blew on the frosted windowpane and rubbed a clear patch so that she could look out. Behind the green velvet curtains lay a still white world, locked fast in ice. Already, in mid-afternoon, it was growing dark. These days, few townsfolk ventured out. The cold snatched away your breath, made your lungs ache. She thought of stories she had heard, of the far northern lands where the air itself froze, and everywhere you walked, your shape remained behind like a snow-angel or a ghost.
“And how is your house guest enjoying this weather?” Gerda's mother was asking Mrs. Sorensen. “A cousin of yours, I believe?”
“Actually, it seems she's a sort of second cousin, on my husband's side.” Kai's mother was a pleasant enough woman, but inclined to be vague. “She comes from some outlandish northern country â Antarctica, I think she said â so of course this weather suits her perfectly.”
“Oh, surely not Antarctica,” said Mrs. Jensen. She had been a governess in her youth, and had some grasp of geography. “You must mean Iceland. But I didn't know you had connections so far north.”
“My dear, no more did we. But Madame Aurore wrote Mr. Sorensen such a charming letter, to say she would be passing through on her way to Copenhagen, and could she come to call. So of course we invited her to stay with us. She is
such
an interesting young lady, and terribly clever.”
“Your Kai seems very taken with her,” Mrs. Jensen remarked.
“Oh, indeed. He's quite the scholar, our Kai, and she knows about all those scholarly things â the way the two of them go on, about algebra and philosophy and such, it puts my poor head in a spin!”
“I declare, I've forgotten the ginger-cake,” said Mrs. Jensen. “Speaking of having your head in a spin . . . ”
“I'll get it,” said Gerda, turning away from the window. She hurried through the kitchen into the spice-scented larder and lifted down the tin. With one ear on the murmur of conversation behind her, she cut thin slices of cake and arranged them on a china plate.
“Your Gerda is growing into quite a beauty,” she heard Mrs. Sorensen say in her high, clear voice. “When I think what a tomboy she used to be . . . ”
Gerda snatched up the plate and went to listen behind the half-open door.
“Tomboy indeed,” said Gerda's mother. “Hair always in a tangle, boots muddied up to the ankle, petticoats a-draggle, racing after your Kai.”
“How they do change,” said Mrs. Sorensen, a trifle wistfully. “My Kai is such a sober-sides now, you'd never think what devilment he used to get up to, falling out of trees, letting the Larsens' pigs out of their pen . . . they were two of a kind, he and Gerda, like sister and brother, and scarcely a jot of sense between them. But your Gerda, I can see she's turned into a proper young lady . . . ”
“When she chooses to be,” said Gerda's mother. “But she's as headstrong as ever â always acts before she thinks, her father says. And lately she's taken to writing poetry . . . which is all very well, I suppose, but I wish she could darn stockings as tidily as she makes rhymes!”
Gerda's cheeks flamed. Was this how her mother saw her â headstrong, thoughtless, a draggle-hemmed hoyden? And Kai â now that he was so grown up and serious-minded, did he think she was still the same wild girl who had climbed trees with him, and fallen into streams, and shredded her stockings clambering through bramble hedges? If only she could learn to be pale, and elegant, and mysterious, like the Sorensen's lady visitor. Then perhaps Kai would see her as somebody worthy of his attention.
“Gerda, my dear, have you fallen asleep in there?” Her mother's voice was half-amused, half-impatient. Gerda straightened her morning-cap and smoothed her kerchief. She drew herself up as tall as she could and swept into the parlour with what she hoped was an air of ladylike composure.
“And of course you'll both be going to the Kristoffersen's winter soiree?” said Mrs. Sorensen, accepting a slice of ginger-cake.
“Of course,” said Gerda's mother.
“Of course,” echoed Gerda, practising a cool, mysterious smile.
“You'll never guess what our dear Madame Aurore let slip to Kai â it seems that her late husband was a Baron. My dear, imagine it!” Mrs. Sorensen waved her ostrich feather fan so emphatically that her bonnet ribbons danced.
“Well, you must admit, she dresses like a Baroness,” said Gerda's mother.
“Indeed, such gowns, such furs, such jewels . . . how could I have not guessed she was of noble rank? What an honour for our house!”
Just then their hostess Mrs. Kristoffersen, the Mayor's wife, bore down on them, imposing in emerald green taffeta.
“My dear Mrs. Jensen, how lovely to see you. And you, Mrs. Sorensen. And you've brought along your charming house guest â you
will
introduce me, won't you?”
“With the greatest of pleasure,” said Mrs. Sorensen.
“What a lovely gown she's wearing,” said Mrs. Kristoffersen, sounding faintly dubious. “But don't you think it's a little . . . ”
“Elaborate? Perhaps a little. But it's the festive season, after all. And my dear, I do think we are far too provincial here.”
“Actually, I meant a little youthful-looking, for a woman of her age.”
“Oh, but she's really quite young,” said Mrs Sorensen. “It's just that she's been widowed, and of course that would make one look more . . . mature.”
“How curious,” said Mrs. Kristoffersen. “I'd have taken her for thirty, if she was a day.”
Gerda hung back in the shadows, glowering at the tall woman in the ice-blue damask gown. An hour ago, setting out for the Mayor's house in her new lace-flounced dress of mulberry-coloured velvet, with her hair done up in a mass of yellow ringlets, her heart had raced with anticipation. Kai would be at the soiree, and surely he would dance with her.
Kai always danced with her. They would grow flushed and breathless in the quadrille, and when they waltzed together he would whisper silly riddles in her ear. They would go in to supper together, and make jokes about the other guests, and the coolness of these past months would be forgotten. But Kai had not spoken to her all evening. Instead, he had danced attendance on the Sorensen's visiting cousin as though she were the Queen of Iceland.
She's much too old for him
, thought Gerda spitefully.
Thirty if
she's a day.
But what did age matter, if you were were tall and slim and elegant, if you skimmed across the floor in your Paris gown like a beautiful blue-feathered swan? Above the wide bell of her skirt Madame Aurore's waist was slender as a girl's, her shoulders, bared by her low-cut bodice, marble-white. The glittery threads woven into the blue damask sparkled like ice-crystals under the chandeliers. Her hair, the pale white-gold of winter sunlight, swooped modishly over her ears and was caught up at the back with a diamond clasp.
And now the musicians had struck up a waltz and Kai was leading this woman out onto the dance floor while Gerda lurked morosely behind a potted palm: hating her new gown, which â she now decided â made her look twelve years old, and fat, hating her straw-coloured corkscrew ringlets, her round cheeks and rosy complexion. I'm too short, she thought despairingly; too healthy-looking; and worst of all, too young.
Gerda's throat felt tight; there was a prickling behind her eyes. She slipped quietly into the cloakroom, where she stood among the fur overcoats and boots, dabbing at her cheeks with her pocket handkerchief. Through the cloakroom window she could see fresh snow falling.
R
itva rode into the pinewoods that girdled her father's camp. Ba's reins hung slack; the old reindeer knew the way to Ritva's secret place as well as she knew it herself.
In the crotch of a tree, at the edge of a shadowy clearing, someone had long ago wedged a bear skull. The skull faced the sunrise. Its weatherworn surfaces made a glimmering white patch against the dark wall of pines.
Ritva dismounted, laid a handful of dried cranberries at the foot of the tree as an offering. Then she stood with Ba's reins gathered into one hand and remarked to the bear skull, “I
hate
this place.”
“This place?” the skull asked, sounding a little aggrieved.
“No, not this place. I mean my father's hall. I am sick of stepping in spilled beer and vomit. I am sick of always having to sleep with a knife under my head. And most of all I am sick of my mother.”
“And what has your mother done to offend you now?” asked the skull, in its sombre, deliberating way.
“The same as always. She spits, and slobbers, and has fits, and falls on the ground in a trance. She is a horrible old woman, and I hate her.”
“She is a shaman,” the skull reminded her. “She is not responsible for what she does when the spirits possess her.”
“And this is what I will become? A foul-tempered, drooling old hag?”
“You are her daughter. Her power is in you also.”
“When did I ask to inherit her power? I don't want it. I want to live by myself in a hut by the river. I want to ride south, to where it's always summer.”
The skull said, “Child, you may not turn your back on the gift the great god Aijo has given you. Nor on the obligations birth has placed upon you.”
“I didn't ask for his gift. Come to that, I didn't ask to be born.”
“No,” the skull agreed sadly. “Nobody asks to be born. Nor do most of us ask to die. Those are things the gods decide. And their gifts are not easy to refuse.”
O
n sunny mornings the roofs and chimney pots seemed wrapped in spangled cotton batting. The meadows beyond the town were covered with a glittering white crust, as hard as pavement. Even the Sound was frozen over, so that if you wished you could walk all the way to Sweden. The river was crowded with skaters, scarved, capped and mittened, their breath smoking on the crystal air.
Gerda had been to church that morning in her new fur-trimmed bonnet and her garnet-coloured mantle with the velvet collar. Still dressed in her Sunday finery, she asked leave to go skating; her mother, preoccupied with luncheon preparations, nodded absent-minded permission. Minutes later Gerda and her friend Katrine â hands tucked in quilted muffs, shawls and mantles billowing â were gliding sedately over the ice.
“What has become of Kai?” asked Katrine. “I never see you together.”
“What he does is no business of mine,” said Gerda. She had meant to sound offhand, but the sharpness of her voice betrayed her. Katrine looked round, surprised.