Fallowblade (64 page)

‘You should know fear. Vy come-you here?’ asked the wight, rising from his seat and stepping lightly towards the visitor as the bird and beast looked on. He left no footprints in the snow.

‘For the air,’ Arran answered. ‘The ancient air from the morning of the world, trapped in ice.’

‘Ne,’ said the elf. ‘Our statutes are precise; no man may haf our ice.’

With that he set upon Arran, wielding an ice dagger in each hand. The elf moved as swiftly as the man who, being unarmed, could only dodge and weave, and the weathermage was also hampered by the snow, into which he sank with every step. He was not, however, completely unprepared, for while he had been trudging along he had been putting forth his brí-senses to gauge the state of the elements, and marshalling local patterns in such a way that he could call on them in time of need. And call he did. A sudden blizzard swirled around the duellists, so violent that the snowflakes bucketing from the skies were blown sideways.

The blizzard blew the frost elf sideways, too. He was bowled over, but immediately jumped to his feet. Arran, panting from the exertion, used the pause to catch his breath. He expected the wight to resume the onslaught, but the elf put away his daggers, saying, ‘Valiant are you, and more dan man, too. Dat vill suffice; you may haf ice.’ Without delay, lest the elf should change his mind, Arran struck out on his journey again, but the wight left him with a parting shot: ‘You passed Stora Snötrollet, you passed Hrim’s chair, but of da Ice Goblins, bevare!’

Asr
ă
thiel, who had shivered at every mention of Ice Goblins, interrupted her father’s narrative with a question. ‘How did you know the way to the place where this ancient ice exists?’

‘I did not know at all!’ he answered. ‘The spriggans appeared to think it was in the far north, so I merely kept heading in that direction. At length I came to a bay shaped like a crescent moon, which was in fact the partly sunken caldera of a live volcano.’

There he had rested, looking out across the water to an island whose long row of snowy peaks seemed to be on fire, white clouds pouring up like smoke from the summits. At his back rose the sweep of the volcano, its slopes streaked with grey rocks, rust-red oxidised iron, alabaster snow and silver slicks of water. Steam was rising along the shore, where cold ocean currents touched the warm black gravel of the volcanic beach. ‘This is not the place,’ he had said to Fridayweed. ‘There is no ancient ice here.’

So on he went, deep into the snowy wastes, and one night, seated beside a little ball of fire he had summoned to keep himself warm, he watched the sun go down. Sunset streaked the snow with subtle colours of pale peach and mauve, and fleecy bars of cloud were cutting off the tops of the mountains. As evening drew in the clouds sank lower, pouring down the slopes until they obscured the feet of the ranges instead of their heads, and the mountains hovered on a raft of mist. He was musing on the notion that mist and cloud seemed to come from some unknown world and to dissolve the barriers between this world and the other, when the ground spoke to him.

‘Haf you seen,’ growled a voice so deep it was like soft thunder, ‘a vun-eyed greybeard carrying a shtaff, vis a raven on each shoulder und two volfes at his heels following? Vears-he a broad-brimmed hat und a blue traffelling coat.’

The hairs rose on the back of Arran’s neck. ‘No,’ he said, for want of a better response. Looking carefully at his surroundings he spied an outsized, ugly face immersed in a long white beard that dripped with icicles. A giant was looking at him from out of the hillside, as if embedded therein. Some fifteen feet in height, this creature made the snow troll look small by comparison. He could only be one of the
hrimsthursar
, a frost giant, of which the lore-books at High Darioneth recorded very little. The giant appeared to be ruminating on Arran’s rejoinder, which led the weathermage to wonder whether he had just imparted good or bad news. He knew that frost giants could be benign or malign; also that they might be ignorant or wise, and he grew wary. First and foremost, he must show no sign of fear.

‘Man,’ said the frost giant, ‘vat know-you of ice?’

‘I know,’ Arran said courageously, ‘the ten names of icebergs, the eighteen names of sea ice, the twenty names of coastal ices, the sixteen mountain ices and the three ices of the ground. I know all the ices of the polar plateaux and all six of the atmospheric ices. I know the shapes and colours of ice, and how they were formed, and how they will dissolve; blue ice, black ice, white ice and jade-green ice from glacial shear zones; frazil ice, pancake ice and the intricate ice flowers of the polar seas, brash, firn, rime; ice pipes, ice falls and ice lenses.’

By good fortune the giant had questioned Arran about a subject he had studied in depth. Few weathermasters had ever frozen an entire lake; Arran was one of those few.

Between snow-shine and star-twinkle the giant rumbled, ‘I hight Bergelmir, son of Thrudgelmir, son of Thrym. It is vell, man, dat you know some-ting of ice. Yet dere is much you know not.’

Bergelmir proceeded to tell Arran
other
names, and secrets of ice previously unknown even to weathermasters. He shared the
hrimsthursar
’s knowledge of water and air and fire. By all this Arran knew the giant to be wise and benign, so he revealed his own name. All through the night they conversed, and as day dawned Arran asked the wight what he knew about precious bubbles from a bygone era, trapped in ancient crystals.

The frost giant told him that the air ensnared into that special matrix was scorched by the passage of stars that fell from the sky and created the wells of immortality, thousands of years ago. Winds drew that star-burned air over the frozen plains, and snow fell, which turned to ice and remained thus in the eternal cold. Those antique gases, called
skjultånd—
hidden-breath—had special properties, but their exact science was unclear.

‘Prithee Bergelmir, son of Thrudgelmir,’ said Arran, ‘tell me how to find this
skjultånd
, so that I may take some home to my wife.’

‘Shtay here, Arran son of Avalloc,’ boomed the frost giant. ‘Shtay here und learn da secrets of da universe from da
hrimsthursar.
Become-you da king off scholars.’

Arran said, ‘No, I must go on.’

‘Then I vill tell you how to find vat you seek,’ said Bergelmir, ‘but it may not a cure be.’ And the giant told Arran how to make his way to a certain nearby shore, where lay an enchanted vessel in which he must voyage if he meant to achieve his goal.

Just before they parted, Bergelmir said, ‘Und ven you return to your home in da south you vill pass srough lands dat vunce vere varmer. In dose days dere vere human farmshteads, und at dose shteadings da tömte used to dvell. Da human beings haf gone, since da cold south-crept, but some of da tömte remain. If find-you any, tell dem you vere sent by Bergelmir und dey might you-help. If you spy a vun-eyed
gammel
greybeard along your vay, ’tvould be best to shtay clear of him. One final vord of varning, Arran son of Avalloc; bevare-you of da Ice Goblins.’

After expressing his gratitude without directly thanking the giant—for he was well aware of eldritch protocol—Arran went to the designated shore. There he found an elegant shell-like boat, just as Bergelmir had said he would. The boat sailed by itself, carrying Arran out onto the sea, where lumps of clear ice floated amidst the brash. Leaning over the side the weather-mage scooped up a lump of this clear ice, noting with delight the masses of tiny bubbles crammed therein, like a paralysed fizz of sparkling wine. He chipped off a small piece as the boat took him back to land, stowed it in one of the phials he carried and kept it frozen by means of weathermastery.

That night, with Fridayweed snuggled into his hair, Arran lay down to sleep in the snow, as usual murmuring a heat-summoning to keep them both warm, though he had no victuals to nourish him. But he was excited about finding the
skjultånd
and slept fitfully, half waking from time to time. Once, when he raised his head, he fancied he saw a cavalcade of extraordinary knights and ladies riding by in the distance, lit by moonlight and snowlight or perhaps by a brilliance of their own. He thought he heard them speaking; he could not understand their language but he received the strong impression that they were recalling persons they once had known, persons they yearned to see again. A sprinkling of glitter rained from their hands and garments as they rode by, and lay upon the snow. It might have been a dream, for he felt afraid without knowing why.

The weathermaster woke in the morning to see the colours of sunrise tinting the drifts, and presently he came across a scatter of crystals as pure and bright as diamonds. When the sun’s first rays struck these prisms they reflected a series of images. He gazed at them in wonderment; the faces of a crowd of strangers, all comely beyond compare, yet with a cruel look; and one, a masculine countenance, whose beauty outshone the others as a comet to fireflies. In the sunlight the visions melted away, and with the two outlandish remedies in his possession Arran turned at last for home.

For months he tramped, but he never forgot the frost giant’s advice. As soon as he saw the misty peaks of the Northern Ramparts on the horizon, which indicated that he had re-entered the lands that had once been home to human farmers, Arran began to look for a tömte. Tömtes were, he knew from his studies, farmyard helpers; a kind of northern version of brownies. He had spied no such wights on his outbound journey through this windswept country, where clumps of wiry grasses and thistles clung to iron-hard ground between patches of snow; and he saw none on his return. Still hoping, he took to boldly calling out, ‘Tömte! Tömte! Come to me!’ though the only things that came to him were the croakings of crows, windborne motes, cold breezes and grit that lodged in his worn-out boots to make him even more footsore.

He was passing amongst the first foothills of the Ramparts when a white hare started up from the grasses and loped away. It stopped and turned to look at him, and he could have sworn that it was inviting him to follow, so he took off after it. The hare led him a merry chase through the sedges, while in his pocket Fridayweed wailed in protest against the jolting. Before Arran knew what was happening he had tripped and fallen flat on his belly, and a rope net was pinning him down. Bruised and aching he looked up and saw someone observing him with a wry air.

‘Why have you done this to me?’ the weathermage demanded indignantly. ‘Let me up!’

‘Ouch,’ Fridayweed said in muffled tones, squeezed somewhere in Arran’s ragged clothing.

‘Man, man, catch me if you can, why call-you the tömte tiptoe tasty treat?’ the someone said in a high-pitched voice.

Arran rolled his eyes and sighed. He felt glad that the tömte was fluent in the common tongue, but evidently it had its own whimsical way of expressing itself, like many eldritch wights. He hoped the fellow would keep rhetorical questions to a minimum and be sparing with phrases such as ‘If you asked me on a Moon’s Day I’d say yes, but if you asked me on a War’s Day my answer would be no.’

‘Bergelmir sent me,’ he said.

Up went the net of rope, and Arran was free. Fridayweed poked out his head, glanced about, grimaced and withdrew.

‘What said the
jotun
, slow one ice-pale as a whale, that Bergelmir yesteryear?’

‘He said you might help me. My name is Arran, son of Avalloc.’ Sitting up, the weathermaster came face to face with a wiry little chap who had a weatherbeaten face, a pale, bushy beard and twinkling eyes. He was wearing a conical red hat that drooped down one side of his head, a long coat of polar-bear fur with a high collar, mittens, green trousers and reindeer-hide shoes with turned-up toes. The tömte was stowing the entire net—obviously a magickal one—in his sleeve. White tufts of pointed ears, like a hare’s, jutted from beneath the furry brim of his cap.

‘I am seeking a remedy to bring my wife out of her long sleep,’ Arran said. ‘I have found
cneadhìoc
and
skjultånd
, but there is no knowing if they will be of any use. Her sleep is deep, only one step from death, and if there is anything more that might help her, pray tell me.’ The weathermaster gingerly rubbed his chin where a leaf of crowthistle had prickled it when he lay on the ground. After a while he said, ‘Good tömte, did you hear me?’

‘Rognvald is thinking, blinking,’ the wight said sharply, opening and shutting his lids. ‘Blink-king of spades to dig for answers! Did a lot of drinking when farms thrived, bees hived, honey for the mead, there is a weed.’

‘A weed?’

‘Beneath the snows something grows. Snow melts in Summer daisy dozy lazy days, and three leaves.’

‘What is there, when the snow melts?’

‘Little lobes of lichen like lace lick the lovely face of rocks. Misty, moisty moss, fairy floss, green as emeralds for the queen, have you seen? And the prickly one, the stickly one thickly grows purple-petalled in Summer sun of Avalloc. Pricked your chin! Needles in!’

‘Lichen, moss and crowthistle,’ Arran translated. ‘What of those three herbs, friend Rognvald?’

At the mention of crowthistle, Asr
ă
thiel drew breath sharply. The term triggered agonising memories. Her gasp passed unnoticed, for all attention was focused on her father. The barely intelligible wight had told him about some rare varieties of those plants, which grew nearby. Taking these ingredients in specific proportions and treating them in certain ways, a health-giving remedy,
trebladen
, could be made, to be taken by mouth. ‘They may not cure, to be sure, the leaves of herbs upon the moor,’ said the tömte, ‘but they oust bloodsuckers, feather-pluckers, liver flukes and leeches, creechers what bites, toads and nematodes, spongers and scroungers, lollers, lawyers and other parasites.’