The Snow Queen (9 page)
“See how he loves me, my old Ba? He would do anything for me. He would lie down and die for me, if I asked.”
The poor thing looks ready to lie down and die in any event
, thought Gerda, but was wise enough not to say so.
“But you â” Ritva swung round to stare at Gerda. Her eyes were bold and black under her heavy brows. “You say you love this Kai. Would you die for him, then?”
Gerda was about to reply, when it occurred to her that this wild girl might put her to the test. “He would not ask me to do that,” she said cautiously.
“But if that's what it took, to save him?” Clearly, Ritva was enjoying this game. She stared at Gerda, unblinking, unrelenting.
Suddenly Gerda was furious. How dare she mock her for loving Kai? This coarse creature, whose only notion of love was to hurt and torment?
“Yes,” she said, defiantly meeting Ritva's gaze. “If that's what it took, I would die for him. Have I not already proven that, following him to the ends of the earth?”
At this, Ritva made a rude noise. “The ends of the earth! What could
you
know about the ends of the earth?” And she stamped off across the straw-littered floor, raising a cloud of dust and flies. Gerda met Ba's doleful, eloquent gaze. She had the uneasy feeling that the conversation had not been about Kai, or herself, or the reindeer, at all.
Ritva tossed sleeplessly in the white summer night. Finally she pushed herself up on one elbow and stared down at Gerda. “So how
did
you get here, anyway?” No response. She prodded Gerda sharply in the ribs, and heard her squeal with surprise.
“Talk to me.”
“What should I talk about?”
“Tell me how you came to be riding in a coach with a coat of arms, out here in the middle of no place. There has to be a story in that.”
“There is,” Gerda said. “A long one.”
Someone howled a curse at the far end of the hall. A bench fell over, and then a table. Bottles smashed.
“Then why not tell it,” said Ritva. “We've got all night.”
A
t last Gerda came to the end of her tale. Ritva yawned and lay back, staring up into the rafters.
“All these people who gave you food and shelter, loaned you their coaches â what did you have to give them in return?”
Half-asleep, Gerda puzzled over the question. “Give them? Why, nothing. They helped me out of the goodness of their hearts.”
“Don't be so stupid,” said Ritva. “They were strangers, not kinfolk. Why would they help you, unless they wanted something from you?”
“In my country,” said Gerda, “people do not steal from innocent travellers. They do not ambush them on the road and cut their throats. They do not kidnap them and hold them for ransom. Until I had the misfortune to meet you, I was treated with nothing but kindness and Christian charity. But I suppose, having a bandit for a father, you wouldn't know about that.”
“He wasn't always a bandit,” Ritva said. She spoke without rancour. “Not when he married my mother. He was a soldier then, in somebody or other's private army. The way he says it, he was drinking one night with soldiers from the garrison at Boden, and they were telling tales about the
birkarls
of old.”
Gerda had read in history books about the
birkarls
â ruthless armed bands, licensed by the southern kingdoms, who robbed the reindeer herders in the guise of taxes.
“Well, my father thought this was a fine idea. But instead of robbing the reindeer folk of skins and the like, he thought he'd turn the tables by robbing southerners of their gold.” She added, as an afterthought, “Mostly, though, he does it as an excuse to kill people.”
“He killed the coachman, didn't he? And the coachman's boy.”
“The coachman is dead,” Ritva said. “As for the boy, I heard the men complaining that he ran into the woods. Probably the wolves got him.”
Gerda rolled over, turning her back on Ritva so that the robber-girl would not feel the thudding of her heart. What if the wolves had not got the coachman's boy? What if he had made his way to Boden? What if the princess's nephew had called out his troops and even now was scouring the woods in search of her? She fell asleep at last, dreaming that she was home, in her own bed, between clean white sheets.
But as the nights lengthened, and the brief northern summer vanished in autumn wind and rain, and no one came, that small hope vanished.
Winter closed in. The wind howled through the pines; snow clogged the forest paths. The men of the camp settled down beside the roaring hearth for a winter-long night of drinking. Gerda's terror dulled into a numb despair, and finally into resignation. No one would come to rescue her now. She was trapped forever in this vast, filthy, Godforsaken place, where the wind shrieked like a wounded animal through broken walls, and wicked drunken brutes of men staggered and spat and cursed and fought, and she was at the mercy, always, of this harsh-tongued, ill-bred, spiteful girl who was her sole protector.
Now that day and night were the same, Gerda slept as long and as often as she could. It was her only means of escape. But even that respite was broken by feverish dreams. She dreamed of the gnawed bones of the coachman's boy, lying beside a forest path under rotting leaves and snow. She dreamed of her mother, watching thin and forlorn beside her window, weeping for a daughter who wrote no more letters, and would never return. And sometimes she dreamed of Kai, whose dark eyes stared at her from an ice mountain's blue-white depths, pleading desperately for release.
There was cold comfort to be had from Ritva. When Gerda woke in the dark, shivering and crying out, the robber-girl would mutter a curse and prod her with a sharp elbow, or rap her irritably on the side of the head. But sometimes it was Ritva herself who woke, whimpering and trembling like a frightened animal, in the black depths of the night.
T
he antlered man stepped out of the dark huddle of the pines. The lower half of his body was hidden in a swirl of ground-mist; his chest and shoulders were covered with a soft white pelt. Under the wide sweep of his horns, his face was wise and gentle. In her dream, Ritva spoke to him in the secret language of the animals. He smiled, and held out his hand to her. Just as their fingers touched, she woke.
And found that it was Gerda, snuggled beside her in their rabbit-skin nest, whose small damp hand gripped hers.
“You were talking in your sleep,” Gerda said. She propped herself up on one elbow and stared down at Ritva. Her expression was half-curious, half-worried. “Was it in Finnish? I could not understand a word you said.”
“Stupid one,” said Ritva, yawning. “How should I know what language I speak in my sleep?”
“It must have been Finnish,” said Gerda, with infuriating certainty.
“It was
not
,” said Ritva. “I was talking to my guardian animal.”
Gerda's eyes widened. “Oh,” she said, caught off guard. “What sort of animal?”
“A white elk.”
“I didn't know you had a guardian animal.”
“There's a lot you don't know,” said Ritva, unpleasantly.
“Do
I
have a guardian animal?”
“Everybody does. Even you. I think yours is a little white rabbit with pink eyes.”
“You're making fun of me,” said Gerda, offended.
“Of course I am. I like to make fun of you.”
“I know,” said Gerda, her eyes reproachful. “You tease everybody â me, your mother, Ba. You're a mean, cruel girl, and one day God will punish you.”
Ritva gave a howl of laughter. “God! Which god?”
“Why, what do you mean? There is only one.”
“Only one! Well, that can't be much use to anybody. My mother's people have dozens of gods. There are very little gods, and bigger gods, and great gods like Aijo, the father of shamans; and Baei've the Sun-God, and the God of Thunder, and the Old Man of the Winds.”
“And where do you find all these gods?” Gerda's voice was scornful.
“Where? They are everywhere. They live in the forest, the river, the hearth fire, in the rocks and bushes â everything has a god in it.”
I suppose she can't help it if she was raised a heathen
, Gerda thought. Still, she wondered what their good Pastor Larssen would think of all this. Little gods who lived in rocks and trees, indeed! And how Kai would laugh! “Shall we go to church and pray to the benches and the altar-cloths?” she could imagine him saying. “Shall we sing a hymn to the door knocker?”
“If you had been brought up among Christian folk,” said Gerda, “you would know there is only one God, and he lives in Heaven.”
Ritva sat up in bed. She seized one of Gerda's plaits and yanked it so viciously that Gerda gave a shriek of pain. “Don't speak to me of the Christian god,” Ritva hissed. “I know about him. He is the god of the southerners, who rounded up my mother's ancestors, and murdered their shamans and burned their drums. If you mention him to my mother, she will pull out her skinning knife and slit your throat.”
Tears of pain and injured dignity oozed down Gerda's cheeks. She had long since lost her pocket handkerchief; these days she did as others did, and wiped her face on a filthy sleeve.
“That's not how it was,” she said. “The missionaries were God-fearing men who built schools and churches to teach the gospel.”
“And dragged the Saami people into those schools and churches by force, and made bonfires out of their drums,” said Ritva. “One thing my mother taught me, is to hold my tongue when I don't know what I'm talking about.” Gerda felt a rough hand grasping the wooden crucifix that still hung on its frayed ribbon at her throat. There was a sharp, angry tug, and the ribbon broke.
“This is what I think of your God,” said Ritva. And beside her in the blackness, Gerda heard the brittle snap, snap of wood.
When Ritva was asleep, Gerda fumbled in the dark for the broken pieces of her crucifix. Weeping with helpless rage, she hid them in the damp straw beneath her bed, where she prayed that Ritva would not find them. They were the only talismans left to her now, and the only reminders of her other life.
W
ater dripped from the eaves, and on the frozen river ice creaked and groaned. The birch trees budded and the days lengthened; the sun hung like a yellow flower in the midnight sky. On the first warm morning Ritva pulled the covers off Gerda's bed, seized her by both hands and dragged her to her feet.
“What's happening?” yawned Gerda, rubbing sleep out of her eyes.
“Winter's over, and both of us stink, and I'm going down to the river to wash. You're coming with me.”
Gerda jerked her hands out of Ritva's grasp and crept back into her pile of skins.
Ritva stood over her, scowling. “What's the matter with you? Are you afraid of water?”
Gerda shook her head. “The men . . . the men will see us.”
“Not today. They've all gone off hunting, and they won't be back till nightfall. Make haste, lazy one, the morning is half gone.”
All Ritva had put on that morning was a long woollen shirt, gathered at the waist with a strip of leather. Bare-legged, she leaped and strutted down the slope to the riverbank, with Gerda trailing dolefully behind. The feel of the warm grass under her bare feet filled Ritva with excitement. At the river's edge she pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it to one side. Naked, she gave a whoop of joy and leaped into the stream. The icy water cut like knives into her skin. “Come on,” she shouted to Gerda, splashing water onto the bank.
Slowly Gerda peeled off her grimy layers of skirts and petticoats, until she stood shivering in the grey, bedraggled remnants of her shift.