Cold grey stones, p.7
Cold Grey Stones, page 7
Oh, the Ice Maiden. He has been hearing of her since he can remember. Her dark and coiling hair with the gleam in it of blue-green coal, her jewellery of icicles, her eyes that are like frost on lapis lazuli. But her skin is warm, the colour of honey, which from a distance can make her for an instant seem almost human. She dresses in the pale furs of winter beasts which she charms from their backs, leaving them naked but for shivery flesh and bones in the bitter cold. And then she clothes them instead in ice and they become ice-creatures, and her servants.
Nirsen worked in the town. He had been apprenticed at five years of age to the Kuldhoddr, who with his boys bought the unwanted things of the townspeople and hauled them to his yard, where they were sorted and turned into other things – such as broken pots into filling for wall-building, or spoilt furniture into firewood, or old garments into rags – and resold. Nirsen was by now nineteen and this was all the life he knew, the town life of buying, sorting, smashing, chopping, tearing, and so on. He knew the shabby house of the Kuldhoddr, where he slept in a shed off the yard with the other once-boy, now twenty, Jert. This one did not like Nirsen, had bullied him when they were children, and currently sneered and played adult tricks on him. The Kuldhoddr was himself a villain, and his wife a sow. The house, the work, the bad food, the winding narrow self-centred town, the whole of existence were foul to Nirsen. Even the red-cheeked girls that Jert leered after did not entice him.
Yet beyond the town lay the fields that in summer turned yellow, and in the winter black then white. Out there too lay the stretches of the river that were not choked with muck, but flowed in summer like, ale with strawberry fish in it that in winter froze themselves to pewter. Beyond, the great forest began, ash and birch and pine, and this ran all the way to the distant mountains, far as outer space. And the summer woods were green and the mountains lavender, but in winter both were white and the home of the Ice Maiden.
Where had he heard of her first? Nirsen could not recall, but he must have been a baby then, for it was before the Kuldhoddr bought him (one more thrown-out thing) and clobbered and smashed and thrashed him into a new, more useful article.
Even in the house of the Kuldhoddr, however, the Ice Maiden was spoken of, as a sort of curse – “May the Ysenmaddn take him and hang his skin on her trees!” Or whispered to by the wife as she stirred her filthy soups on the fire: “Don’t you be harming my poor fingers, Lady Ice.” For it was a fact the wife had had a finger bitten off by the frost one year, and everyone knew the Ice Maiden made the frost. It spun from her blue eyes and dropped from her mouth in her cold sweet breath, but changed to needles and knives in the air. It would paint the round windows prettily over, but if ever the Ysenmaddn caught you out of doors and you could not get away, she kissed you and froze you, and then her frost filmed over your eyes like the windows and blinded or crippled, or you were dead.
Amulets were put up to placate her on half the houses, though it was supposedly a Godly town. These were in the form of little man dolls all in a white spindly mummy-wrapping, like the rime, or they were polished awls, or the long teeth of wolves or foxes or the skull of a white cat or a white owl. She liked white animals best (if she took their coats she made them new ice ones that were whiter.)
Offerings, such as dead hares and round cakes were slung by the forest’s edges or along the inner tracks, by hunters and wood-cutters. But few ventured into the trees once snow was down.
And now it was.
The russet town was muddy white, but the fields and forests and the mountains and the sky were whiter, like scrubbed china. And as they ran from smoky hot brazier to brazier at the corners of the streets, the children sang this rhyme:
Leave on our hands, Queen of Ice.
Leave on our feet, Queen of Ice.
Leave on our noses, Queen of Ice.
Yet take it all and leave us life –
Such a small price, such a small price.
One freezing night Nirsen went to the tavern on Killfox Street and drank a couple of cups. He spoke to no one, liking no one. As for the tavern girls he turned his face away, and then they called him names – High Nose, Little Cockerel. He had never been with any of them. They loathed him like an alien, as if he had two horns growing out of his head. But the drink was comforting.
When he got back he entered the yard beside the Kuldhoddr’s house. The Kuldhoddr was away at the other end of the town, bargaining and drinking with some merchants. In the kitchen window smeared a tiny orange chink of light. Nirsen rapped softly on the door. The idea of the fire’s embers appealed before he slunk to the shed.
When no one answered he slipped the latch.
Inside the kitchen, ah now. The sow wife was riding with Jert, and each of them grunted and moaned in pleasure. Nirsen felt sick, for he hated them both as they him, yet too they broke his heart, poor things, trying to find joy in the glacial heart of winter and unkindness. He would have gone away and said nothing.
But Jert on some sudden impulse turned from his work and learned he and the wife had been seen.
He shambled up, pulling his clothes together, his face already a clenched fist.
“You,” was all he said. But the single word was a malediction.
Then he sprang and Nirsen fell back on the stone floor under the weight of him.
There they struggled, and in the background the dishevelled, nine-fingered woman babbled, and then she grew utterly quiet and a shadow splayed over the fighters which smelled of ale and said, “What’s this?”
Both Jert and Nirsen were bloody but Nirsen had perhaps had the worst of it. He was lighter, and anyway Jert was accustomed to fighting.
It was Jert who rose and, with the wife whimpering behind him, he exclaimed, “She screamed out so I come running. He was at her, had her down, and Mrs trying to beat him off and calling for you. Hadn’t I come in he’d have done her, your wife.”
Nirsen lay stupidly marvelling at Jert’s ingenuity, and heard the woman say, “It’s true. Ruined I’d have been, you off at your business. But Jert was our friend and saved me.”
After which the Kuldhoddr leaned right the way down to the kitchen floor, and he lifted Nirsen up from it with a curious sort of tenderness, all the time peering into his face. The Kuldhoddr did not ask what Nirsen had to say on any of this. Nor did the Kuldhoddr pass any comment. About a minute after he slammed his fist twice into Nirsen, at the heart and at the jaw, and everything collapsed in a storm of black pain and roaring.
When he came to, Nirsen did not know immediately where he was. He had been somewhere similar during the summer, for occasionally in the long fine evenings he would walk out to the edges of the fields, sit on the grass of the pasture and watch the fringes of the forest, where rabbits and squirrels and birds darted in the last westered sunlight. But he had never been out here in winter. Few ever were. It was another country now.
And in the land of full winter, here he lay, and much closer to the wood indeed. Over his very head arched the first deep ranks of the trees, the ash and birch with thick foliage of white snow, and the tall pines and firs beyond, crystallized. Glass beads and pipes and strands of ice had spun all the trees together too. The forest hung now inside the web of some giant ice-spider. Darkness was coming, the sky cold lead, and a thin wind whistled through the forest’s avenues.
Nirsen understood well enough what had happened while he was helpless. He had been cast out for his supposed crime of attempted rape. There were stories of such punishments as this. No one would have minded. Why harbour the wicked when the winter would see to him?
He found they had bound his hands and his feet in case he should wake and struggle with them, but he had not woken till now. He shifted round to see and one of the cords on his wrists snapped. His hands were not well tied, both Jert and the Kuldhoddr would have been drunk. Besides, the cold made such cheap rope brittle.
Quite soon Nirsen was free. Then he stood up and looked back from the forest towards the town.
How small and murky it was under its huddle of dirty snow and smokes. The bleak fields between, white as starched tablecloths in rich houses, showed only the trample of the two men’s feet and the snake-track of Nirsen’s body as they had dragged him.
Without warning Nirsen found he had fallen down again. It came to him how hurt he was, also that he must have lain here most of one night and a day unconscious, for it had been before midnight when he reached the yard and now a second night was just starting.
Surely he should be dead? Perhaps he was. His face ached and gnawed where it was struck and his heart felt sometimes as if it stumbled. His hands were almost numb, the fingers too pale, threatening the awful frostbite. He could feel nothing of his feet – partly the reason he fell. He wore his outdoor clothes but they were not of course of the best. His head was uncovered.
He sat on the white earth under the white trees and the web of the giant spider, and knew if not yet dead still shortly he must be. But he could not go back to the town. Only the forest seemed to offer any shelter. At least it was a better place to perish, cleaner and far more beautiful.
Once again he rose and stamped about until, though no feeling came, yet his balance re-established. Presently he moved forward in among the trees.
Night arrived. The forest sank to dark silver.
As he trudged drearily onward, Nirsen heard the sound of darkness begin, the night chorus of owls and foxes, and once maybe a wolf, for in such weather wolf packs might well run this way. But there were stranger sounds also. He started to hear them and put them down to the sudden cracks of branches broken under the snow’s weight; frozen streams that had fissured in the greater tepidity of day and now were sealing shut again; the wind, breathing. But really he knew what they were.
He was entering the kingdom of the Ice Maiden.
Those splinterings were the noise of her mirrors smashing; those murmurs like sealing ice were the resonance of draperies drifting over floors of snow. The clink and hush of the wind was an echo of some music played for her. And there! That sheer light platinum note – oh, that was the Maiden’s laughter. Something had amused her tonight. Maybe it was the thought of one more lost outcast stumbling through her world, with Death treading close behind.
Nirsen continued until he could go no further. He was aware that to stop now meant that he must stop living. But finally another footstep became impossible. He took it but never moved. So then he slid down and leaned against the silver stalk of a tree, and watched the forest glowing though no moon had risen, shining from its own deathly whiteness, so the black sky changed to tin threaded with the blue sequins of stars.
But the blue stars were the eyes of the Ysenmaddn. Pitilessly they gazed at him, and yet it was not truly pitiless. How could one like she comprehend that his wretched little existence had been precious to him, or that to lose it was, for him, his greatest tragedy? Go to sleep, he imagined that she whispered through the snow-leaves. Go to sleep like a good child. And only a slight impatient indifference was in her voice. Nothing sinister or cruel. For she had no heart to be heartless with, the Ice Maiden.
An animal crouched over him. This now was what woke him up. He took it for a wolf – perhaps the very beast he had heard earlier in the night. But then his sore eyes, caked with rime, widened and Nirsen saw it was one of her creatures. It was a wolf of ice.
Whiter than any whiteness of the woods, it gleamed with the sleek pure sheen of steel. Every tuft of its pelt was sculpted from ice. Its mask-like face was ice, yet had both expression and potential ferocity, and the profound, solemn wolfish eyes gazed through, the unexpected colour of gold. And then it licked out across its glacial meltless mouth with a living tongue, and he saw its ivory teeth – all that, inside the skin of ice the Ysenmaddn had given it.
The beast will kill me, he thought. He woodenly composed himself, half dead as already he must be, to endure this finish as best he could
But the wolf only touched his cheek with its rock-hard freeze of muzzle, then raised its head. The howl raked the forest, the sky. The stars shook but did not fall.
Then the others drew near. Nirsen, in his deathly trance, watched. Not for an instant did he reckon he dreamed any of this. There were the two ermines, now ice-clad, their black markings caught perfect in the white slippery glitter of their coats. There was the albino bear, its thick fur all ice and ruffling and combing back and forth as it moved. Some ice-foxes came and played savagely before him as if to demonstrate that even when nipped or scratched their icy overlay was not disturbed. Ice-rats bustled from between the claws of tree roots and stared with chestnut eyes. Last the white owl floated down, silent as a single white feather, and settled on his boot, regarding him from its own round eyes which, in that moment, reminded him oddly of the pale lemon faces of two clocks that showed time had ceased.
Maybe he lapsed; it was like sleep but was it only death? Yet then once more he was woken and he was being dragged again, as his two human enemies had dragged him from the town. Now it was the wolf and the bear that pulled him, their taloned nails, their teeth, fastened in his clothing. The foxes pushed at him. The rats ran by and across him like overseers, and the ermines padded like bodyguards at his sides. The owl flew above them. He observed its metallic solidity passing along weightless just below the web of white quartz branches. Its wings hypnotized him: every feather chiselled from ice –
Nirsen sensed the earth under his body turning toward morning. He did not grasp what that could be, for he had had no education and did not know it was the earth which turned, as he had never seen that, only the sun rising or going down.
The bear it was who alone hauled him the last distance, bundling him across huge roots that slammed his spine like hammers, so this beating seemed far more brutal than anything Jert or the Kuldhoddr had done to him.
By then a sort of mist or smoke was lifting from the ground. It was like breath on a mirror, and through it the embroidered boughs of the great trees had been unstitched. A view opened. A lake spread before him. It was frozen to alabaster, save now and then you saw thinner places that dully glimmed. In the middle of the lake something rose up.
The bear dropped Nirsen. From behind, the wolf now was pushing at him. He found he had sat up.
The mist rippled and somewhere near a flower-pink stain was seeping: dawn sharpened the scene of the frozen lake, and so Nirsen saw the palace of the Ice Maiden standing at the lake’s centre.
It was like a vast crystal goblet, and filled with a fizzing champagne light.
He thought, flatly, Well, I have seen it. It exists. Hadn’t I come here I should have missed it. At least this I’ve done.
But then he glimpsed the sled of ice that had appeared on the lid of the lake, and how by itself it glided to the shore. The bear with a grumbling curdle of a growl rolled him over on to the sled. How cold the sled was, far colder than the snow. It seared him and he did not care. He would be dead before he reached the palace. Good, good, that was good.
There are chimes all through the house of the Ice Maiden. They depend from all the high, high walls under the wide sky, for here there is no roof. The snow never falls here, or if it does it becomes simply part of everything else – a curtain, a screen, a mosaic. But the chimes chime with a fearful tinsel deliciousness. It is like sucking raw icing-sugar to hear them. They please, but they sting.
There are no windows. The entire edifice is transparent. Any who are inside can always see out. Yet from the outside nothing can be seen within but for the lumination of the enormous chandeliers. These stretch from the roofless spaces above until they reach the floors that are perhaps a quarter of a mile below. Prisms and slender opal pillars comprise the chandeliers, and they convey a candleshine that has no candles, nor, night or day, do they go out.
These floors of the Ice Maiden are laid with circular tiles, each of which is the top of a human skull, remorselessly waxed and rubbed so slim it has become impervious and will magically carry any weight. Who – what – then rubbed them? The refining winter wind, who is never afraid of the prolonged harsh work of brooming, beating, scouring.
There are ice cisterns set in the bone floors where fish, scaled in ice, swim and frisk over little pebbles like polished zircons, which possibly they are.
Then the Ice Maiden comes in.
She is attended by invisible or partly visible beings that are wind-spirits, frothy flurries of light snow, or beasts which have died and become themselves bones, but that still want to remain with her nevertheless.
She is as they say she is. Her skin is like honey, and from a reasonable way off she looks almost like a young mortal woman. Her hair is wavy and darkest blue – that might also seem pale black until you look carefully. She is crowned with a diadem of ice. Her garments are white fur. But her ears are like the ears of no human thing, more dainty, pointed, and she wears in them jewels of ice.
Her eyes. Her eyes define and defy everything ever said of them. You believe they may be dark until she looks at you. Then they are blue as lapis, just as all the legends tell, lapis lazuli behind sparkled casements of frost. And they are terrible. For they have no wickedness in them and know no malignity and no wish to deliver pain. But they know nothing of need, nothing of empathy, nothing of the merest momentary kindness, nothing like that. And they never will.
Nirsen has stood up on the floor of impervious skulls. Thinking he is dead now he feels strong and not unwell.
He bows to the Ice Maiden because he knows one must, with royalty, or they will be angry. But too he senses she feels no anger either. To bow is foolish, but he does.
She says nothing to him. Although he has been shown her eyes, if she even really glances at him he is unsure.
Does she credit he is here? Will it matter to her?
