The Snow Queen (20 page)

“Foolish indeed,” said Carlsson. “You are fortunate to have survived. But I fear we cannot help you to rejoin your ship. Like yourselves, we have been engaged in geographic studies, charting the coast of Spitzbergen. But now we are homeward bound to Gothenburg by way of Vardö.”

“But we don't want to go back to our ship,” said Gerda sleepily. “By now our colleagues will have sailed without us, believing us to have perished. Kai and I must return at once to Copenhagen, to let our families know that we are safe.”

“Then once again you're in luck,” said Carlsson. “Our chief cartographer is Danish, and I'm sure he'll be pleased to escort you safely back to Copenhagen.”

Gerda thought happily of Copenhagen — soft towels, white sheets, clean clothes, and then a carriage to take her home. The voices around her faded to a pleasant blur.

And then she felt someone tugging urgently at her sleeve. She looked round to see a scowling Ritva.

“Come here.” The robber-maid dragged Gerda around a bulkhead, out of earshot of the crew. “What is this man saying to you?”

“Why,” said Gerda drowsily, “that they will see Kai and me safely home to Denmark. We have been a long time absent, Ritva, and our families will have given us up for dead. Think how happy they will be when I return, and bring Kai with me.”

“And me?”

In the robber-maid's dark eyes, for a fleeting moment, there was a look of wistfulness, of yearning.

“Ritva, if you wish they will take you back to the coast of Finland, and from there you can make your way to your father's camp.”

Ritva's face suddenly hardened, became heavy and sullen. “Why would I go back to that place? There is nothing for me there.”

“Your mother is there. Surely in her own way she must care about you.”

Furiously, Ritva shook her head. Gerda was startled to see that her eyes glistened with tears. In a gruff voice Ritva said, “And what will you do when you get home? Will you marry
him
?” She jerked her head towards Kai with undisguised contempt.

Gerda felt the blood rushing to her face. Stammering, she said, “Why . . . yes, if he'll have me . . . that's what we always planned . . . ”

“And that will make you happy? Scrubbing the floor and mending his shirts and wiping the noses of his brats?”

“It's what we've always planned . . . ” Gerda repeated, helplessly.

But what were Kai's plans, now? At this moment he was hunched over a table with the chief cartographer, watching him draw up new charts of the Spitzbergen coastline. And she realised that Kai had spoken scarcely three words to her since their rescue.

Ritva stared over the rail into the ice-flecked, sunlit sea. She quoted, with bitter sarcasm,

A maiden's life is bright as a day in summer,
a wife's lot is colder than the frost.
A maiden is as free as the berries in the forest
a wife is like a dog tied up with a rope.

“That's horrible,” said Gerda. “Don't you ever mean to marry?”

“Me? Not a chance. Can you see me darning trousers, and stirring the stewpot? I am a shaman, little rabbit. I am a woman of power. I have travelled to the spirit kingdom. I have defeated the Dark Enchantress, and brought you safely back from beyond the world's edge.”

“A woman of power,” repeated Gerda, liking the sound of those words.

“As you are too, little rabbit,” said Ritva, surprisingly. “It was you who saved Kai's life. And see how grateful he is, how he gets down on his knees to thank the hero who rescued him.”

At once, Gerda leaped to Kai's defense. “It's only that the Snow Queen has put a spell upon him. You'll see, Ritva, now that he has escaped from her clutches, he will soon be his old self again.”

“And what was that like, his old self? Was that the one the Snow Queen stole from him?”

“Oh, Ritva, if you could have known him then — he was clever, and witty, and brave, and I loved him . . . ”

“So it seems,” said Ritva wryly. “To follow him to the world's end. And Kai? Did he love you as much as that? If the Snow Queen had stolen you, little rabbit, would your Kai have set out across the frozen seas to save you?”

Gerda stared at the robber-maid in stricken silence.
Oh, yes
, she wanted desperately to say.
He was my dearest friend. Of
course he would have saved me.
But the words stuck in her throat. With Ritva's sardonic gaze upon her, all she could utter was the sad, inadequate truth.

“Oh, Ritva, do not ask me that, for I cannot answer.”

“Then ask him.”

“Ritva, don't be absurd, I could never do such a thing.”

“I could,” said Ritva, turning purposefully in Kai's direction.

“No!” cried Gerda, horrified.

Ritva waited.

“Oh, very well,” said Gerda. “Of course I will not ask him that, but it will do no harm to speak to him.” She marched resolutely across the deck. “Kai,” she said, standing at his shoulder. “Kai . . . ”

He glanced up in polite inquiry, his forefinger marking his place. There was colour in his cheeks now, and his eyes were clear and alert. But where, in that thin, worn stranger's face, was the friend of her childhood, the kind, clever boy for whom she had dared so much?

Had the Snow Queen stolen Kai's true self — or had he simply lost it somewhere, laid it aside and forgotten it like a cap or a half-read book?

And the thought came to her, like cold fingers clutching her heart — if you lose your self, can you ever find it again?

Kai gave her a slightly abstracted smile. “Can we talk a little later, Gerda, when I've finished with this?”

She bit her lip. “It was nothing, Kai,” she said, as she turned away. “Nothing that cannot wait.”

“And what will you do, now — you and Ba?”

Ritva gave Gerda a sly look. “Maybe we will ride south one day, and visit you in your rose garden.”

“Would you? Truly?” For one moment Gerda had an image of Ritva sitting in her boots and ragged tunic in the Jensen parlour, drinking coffee and eating ginger-cakes from the best porcelain, while Ba, with a wreath of roses round his antlers, munched on carrots. She clapped a hand over her mouth to hide her smile.

“Why not? But first I am going to pay another visit to the old woman who writes on codfish, and the old woman who binds the winds. Maybe they have other things to teach me.”

Gerda thought of the unlooked-for joy, the rapturous lightness of spirit she had felt on their autumn journey across the empty northern lands. She remembered the thrill of triumph that had come in the midst of cold and despair, when she and the robber-maid, standing fast together, pitted their skills against the Snow Queen's magic.

She remembered the sun glinting on arctic seas the colour of emeralds, of aquamarine, and the wild flare of the northern lights across a starlit sky.

She had been to the farthermost edge of the world, where earth and day end. There was no road, now, that she would be afraid to travel. How could she be content to dream away her life in a southern rose garden?

Gerda leaned forward, put her arms around Ritva's shoulders, pressed her own chapped, windburned cheek against the robber-maid's.

“Come soon, dear friend,” she whispered. “While the roads to the north are clear. I will be waiting.”