Authors: John Christopher
‘She is naughty, my Nadya,’ Mama Simanyi said. ‘And she is young so she does not know what is tease and what is torment. She saw that you were jealous – that is why she talked as she did.’
‘I know you’re trying to help, but I don’t think it helps to lie to people, even for their own good.’
‘I am not lying.’
‘Then Nadya is to you.’
‘That neither. I talked with her this morning. She is a great liar, but I am her mother – I know when she tells the truth.’
Mary said: ‘There was guilt in Niels’ face.’
‘Do you read a man’s face so well?’ She let the question, with all its implications, hang between them for a few moments. She went on: ‘You had shown you suspected him. You both knew what there had once been between him and Nadya, and Nadya was saying things that would make you think they had happened again. What could poor Niels say? If he denied, it would be worse. No wonder he looked guilty.’
They tramped on in silence; they were a couple of hundred yards behind the sledge.
‘It was thinking,’ Mary said, ‘that if he could betray me at a time like that – with Annabel and me lying out there, cold and hungry, on the ice …’
Mama Simanyi shook her head. ‘Is it any better when you lie in a warm bed and well fed? But nothing happened. I tell you that, for certain. Nothing happened.’
There was silence again. The wind howled on a higher, harsher note. Mary turned round to look in the direction from which they had come. She said sharply:
‘What’s that?’
It looked like a belt of fog, covering the hills – a high, grey wall reaching up to the grey, twilit sky. But the wall was moving. As they watched, features were blotted out of the landscape in a steady and swift obliteration. It was not until it had almost reached them that they understood what it was, and a minute later they were blinded by the driving fury of the snow.
‘Keep together!’ Mama Simanyi said. ‘We must try to keep straight, so we find the others.’
For a short time they were able to follow the tracks of the sledge; then the snow filled them. They tried to carry on in a straight line, but it was hard to know if they were succeeding. They could see for a few yards in front of them, no more. They were in a world without dimensions, a world of wind and snow and bitter cold.
‘We will call to them,’ Mama Simanyi said. ‘Maybe they will hear us.’
They called, straining their voices against the wind, but only the wind answered. Probably they could be heard for not much farther than they could see. They staggered on, calling from time to time, but with increasingly less hope of being heard. Time was passing.
‘If we went straight,’ Mama Simanyi said, ‘we must find them by now. So we are not straight. Too much to the right, I think. We try to the left?’
‘Once we start wandering …’
‘What else can we do? If we stop, then we die.’
They turned to the left, trying to count their paces so they would know how far they had gone from their original course. They found nothing, and the snow, coming from the side, lashed them more viciously. It was still more bitter when they turned into it, in case they had overshot the others. Now, despite what she had said, it was Mama Simanyi who wanted to call a halt.
‘We rest a little – just a little, maybe. Then we will be stronger.’
Mary urged her on. ‘We mustn’t stop. You know that.’
After they had gone a little farther, she collapsed again. She said:
‘You go on.’
‘Not without you.’
‘You have Annabel to think of.’
Mary pulled the older woman to her feet and, putting her arm round her, persuaded her to go on. She fell again, and the coaxing and lifting had to be repeated. They could no longer, Mary felt, go against the wind. They turned and had the blizzard at their backs. It made things a little easier, but not much. And they were lost now, truly lost.
When Mama Simanyi fell again, Mary stood over her for a moment, trying to summon up the strength to help her to her feet. Then she collapsed beside her.
‘You – go on,’ Mama Simanyi said.
But what point was there in going on, when for all she knew they might be heading directly away from the others? Mary huddled against the other woman, hoping to shelter her. She thought of Annabel. Niels would look after her. Niels would …
It snaked across their bodies and had almost gone before she realized what it was and, desperately, reached for it. She caught the rope, but had no power to do anything but hold it against the tug from somewhere out in the blizzard. She did not have to hold it long; almost at once a figure appeared out of the whirling snow. He reached down, and she saw it was Mouritzen. She lifted to him and their two chilled faces met.
‘We walk back along the rope,’ he said. ‘The other end is at the sledge.’
‘Annabel?’
‘She is all right. Can you walk? I will carry Mama.’
She nodded. ‘I can walk.’
‘The rope,’ he said. He looked at her. ‘Three metres less and I could not have found you.’
She sighed. ‘I knew you would look after Annabel.’
‘Why not?’ He put his face to hers again. ‘She is our daughter.’
Day by day he had watched her grow weaker. From time to time he tried to persuade her to eat something; she would take a mouthful or two at his urging, but this was known by both of them – although it was never stated – to be a token only, a sign of companionship and love.
Strangely, it was not a sad time. From minute to minute, hour to hour, they were happy together, and they looked no farther ahead. Even after he had realized that she was dying, and knew that she knew this too, there seemed to be no constraint between them. Only once, when he got hot water and washed her, he saw her thin white body, lying without movement, as a corpse; and fear savaged him. But he looked up to her face, and saw her smiling. He dared not look at the future, and so he did not look. In the present they were both serenely happy.
In the afternoon he went to the window and looked out. He came back to his customary seat on the side of her bed. She looked at him in inquiry.
‘The wind’s getting up,’ he said. ‘Blowing snow up from the fjord in places. I’m glad we’re not out there in a tent.’
‘We’re lucky,’ she said.
‘Very lucky. Are you comfortable? Shall I prop you up?’
‘I’m all right.’
She hesitated, and then said something. Her voice was weak and he did not catch the words. He bent down to her. ‘What was that?’
‘Perhaps it’s silly.’
‘Tell me.’
‘That.’ She pointed feebly. The typewriter case was lying by the foot of the other bed. ‘I don’t …’
He thought he knew what she meant. ‘Don’t like seeing it? I’ll put it out of sight.’
She said, speaking quickly and with more strength:
‘I don’t want that to be with us when I die.’
It was a breach of their unspoken agreement and should have been appalling; but neither was appalled by it. He offered no protestation. He simply said:
‘I’ll take it outside. Will that be better?’
She nodded. ‘You can bring it in again, afterwards. It will be quite safe, won’t it? There’s no one to take it.’
‘Wait for me.’ It had its significance; he bent and kissed her. ‘I won’t be long.’
He had thought at first merely of carrying the case out and burying it in the snow; it would be easy enough to mark the spot so that he could find it when he wanted to. She had said: ‘You can bring it in again, afterwards.’ And she would be lying there, white and unmoving, and this time she would not smile. He found himself saying, as though to that dead body, ‘It was for you – there’s no point in it otherwise,’ and knew that it was true. It was she who had given him hope and redeemed him from failure; he had willingly lied and cheated and stolen for their future together, and now the future was over and done with.
There was only the present, and no room in it for anything but the two of them. No room, certainly, for what he was carrying in the typewriter case.
He climbed up the slope behind the hut; he had gone up there the first day they had been left alone, and found the torn carcases of the two bears, and looked down at the still sprawled figure of Thorsen at the bottom of the ravine. He decided he would throw it down there. Thorsen had wanted it: he could have it. Then he could go back to the hut and tell Sheila; it made no essential difference but he wanted her to know that it had only been for her, and had no meaning without her.
The carcases were stripped to the bones now, and the bones had been crunched and scattered. There were marks of animals in the snow: probably wolves. When it happened, he would not put her outside. He would let the fire go out, and let the cold creep in, and lie there beside her. He brushed away the sick feeling of fear that this thought gave him. The present was not yet over.
Although it was hard to be sure from this height, he thought that Thorsen’s body had so far escaped the scavengers. He leaned over and dropped the case. It bounced on the side of the ledge and broke open and spilled its bundles of paper out on to the rocks below. He watched them scatter on to the snow and then turned away.
Almost at once he saw the grey cloud sweeping across the surface of the fjord. It moved faster than he had expected; in a minute or two he felt the sharper bite of the wind and then the cold, burning harshness of the teeming snow. He let it turn him away from his previous route. If he went over the next ridge, he thought, there would be some protection from the storm and he could beat his way down to the other side of the hut.
He knew he was lost quite soon. Just beyond the ridge he plunged into deeper, softer snow, and by the time he fought his way clear he had lost all sense of direction. The blizzard which, smothering and blinding and freezing, surrounded him, was from the north, and he had a hazy idea that he must struggle across it and down, but the slope of the land here was confusingly different. He plunged again into a drift, and was tempted by the warmth and softness. But he remembered that it was important to keep going; and Sheila, in the hut, was waiting for him.
At least, he thought with relief, he no longer had the case to carry. He was travelling light, as Sheila was. There was nothing now to tie them, or hold them back.
His face had been first cold and then numb. Now, somehow, he felt warmth on it. He tried to look up, to see if in some incredible fashion the sun was shining. Nothing to hold us back, he thought … we can go anywhere we like … to the island she dreamed of … the great golden sun, the warm waters – the feasting and the singing and the dancing …
In the hut Sheila waited, feeling the tiredness spread farther and more deeply into her body. She tried to speak when it reached her throat and was at first distressed when the words would not come. But it did not matter. When Henry came back he would talk and she would listen. She found a heaviness lying on her eyelids, too, dragging them down despite her efforts to keep them open. That did not matter, either. He would sit beside her and hold her hand, and the touch would be enough.
The wind outside howled more fiercely; she hoped he would come back before he got too cold. But perhaps he had not been long; perhaps the dragging tiredness dragged time out as well. When he came back it would be like that – seconds stretched into minutes, hours, years even.
The wind rattled the door and she saw it open, and saw him stand there, smiling at her. His body was framed against bright sunshine, and as he came forward the sunshine poured in behind him, making the small room swim with light.
‘I waited for you,’ she said; and closed her eyes again.
Olsen had seen the storm coming up in time for him and Josef and Nadya to get back to the sledge before it engulfed them all. With Stefan and Josef he fought to get the tent unpacked and erected, while Nadya and Mouritzen, with the aid of the longest rope, made a continuous searching arc for the other two. The wind was too strong for them. In the end they had to compromise with a shelter formed by a canvas stretched from the top of the sledge. They huddled underneath this, keeping close together for warmth. At the beginning the freezing wind blew in through all the open chinks, but as the blizzard continued, snow piled up round them and gave them some protection. For the time being they were safe.
As to the rest, much depended on the duration of the blizzard. If it lasted over three days, as the first had done, there was no hope of their surviving it. It was impossible to get at the food, or the blankets. Even in the shelter of the snow, cold would seep in. Already Olsen’s feet were numb with the beginning of frost-bite. Without food their bodies could not fight for long against the Arctic chill. Some of them might survive the night: he doubted if the child would.
This land of ice and snow and bitter winds had defeated them: the effort had been good but now it was drawing to its end. Olsen felt no resentment; rather he felt respect for an adversary that fought so fiercely and relentlessly, and fought, at the same time, with such a wild and burning beauty. Whether one conquered it or was conquered by it, it was a good land, a clean and savage place.
He could see the luminous face of his watch when he pulled his hand from inside his jacket; he had crossed his arms in front of him and tucked the hands in to protect them. The hours ticked by towards the moment when defeat would be made final. When, after the blizzard had been blowing for over four hours, the wind sounded stronger than ever, he abandoned the half-protected hope of an abatement sufficient to let them get the tent up. The cold was in his legs and at his back. He found himself dozing, and no longer struggled to remain awake.
Silence woke him; a surrounding silence in which the breathing of the others was loud, even harsh. He was bitterly cold. Blinking, he saw that it was nine o’clock by his watch. He did not know how long he had slept: it might be morning.
He was at the most exposed end, which made it easier for him to get out without disturbing anyone. He pushed his way out through the snow into a night of clear, still brilliance.
There was no moon, but the stars were intensely big and bright, and all across the northern sky hung curtains and rays and arcs of light. As he watched, they changed; shifting, pulsating, dimming and bursting out into new and more splendid forms. A cluster of rays seemed to be slowly spinning on a central axis. High up in the sky there was a corona, such as he had sometimes seen around the moon, but in its centre there were only stars.