Power to Burn (15 page)

‘My ankle hurts,' Angelica whispered loudly. ‘Throw down your rope.'

‘But won't that set off the avalanche?'

‘How else am I going to climb out of here?'

I slowly stood up and pulled the rope from my shoulder. I shook my arm free. It felt so light suddenly without the heavy coil binding it.

I wound the rope a couple of times around the trunk of a nearby tree and tied a knot. Then I fed the rope down the side of the crevasse. Angelica swung out her hand to grab it. With both hands she pulled herself till she was standing up.

‘I've got it,' she called. ‘Pull now!'

My God, she weighed a tonne. With all the strength in my skinny arms, I heaved. She only rose about ten centimetres. The miner's light on her head was bobbing around as she tried to get a foothold. But the snow was so loose it was hard to dig in.

She cried out in pain. It must have put pressure on her ankle.

‘Pull!' she called.

For the second time since I came here I wished to God I'd done weights. The sweat was coming out on my forehead. I could feel it turning to ice as I pulled. I rested five seconds, and pulled again. My arms ached intolerably. I remembered my sports master once saying that you had to cross the pain barrier. The pain ran like a burning liquid up from my wrists into my shoulders. I tried to ignore it. To disown my arms. To think of them as a crane made of metal, not flesh.

It was getting easier now, she must have worked out how to help lift her weight, springing out from against the side of the crevasse.

I could see the top of her head clearly now, the torchlight dancing against the snow. With one knee she clambered over the edge, and crouched on all fours, there on the snow.

I pulled her to her feet. She winced, lifting her left foot off the ground.

‘Can you walk?' I asked.

‘Not much further,' she said.

‘We don't have to go far now. Look.'

She turned to see where I was pointing. A path of yellow light, on the crest of a hill to our right, shone from the shadowy shape of a house.

The branches of a tree moved in a sudden breeze, feathering the light. The path flickered.

‘Can you make it?'

‘Yes.'

I looked at her eyes. They were still big and shining, tremulous almost, but her face was white with pain. We were both shaking uncontrollably. I didn't know if it was from the strain on our muscles, or fear. It didn't matter, we were almost there. It seemed inevitable now, the end of our journey, as if it had all been written somewhere.

At the same moment we both turned toward the light. I took a step forward and Angelica leant against my shoulder, using my support to drag her left leg.

We'd gone perhaps three metres when Angelica swung round and pointed her torch behind us.

‘
Dio
,' she whispered. ‘It's gone. The crevasse has disappeared.'

I crept back to look. The deep hole had been filled in, you never would have known it had been there except that the snow in that area, a jagged circle, was slightly whiter, fresher, than the rest.

Without another word we turned and went on, toward the light.

T
he chestnut tree was an ice sculpture. It stood in front of the house, its ghostly branches glowing in the dim light filtering from the window. At the foot of the tree, sticking up out of the snow, was a wooden cross. The grave.

Angelica reached for my hand. Together, we walked past the tree and the grave, up to the door. It was slightly open, a crack of light shining through. Angelica gave it a push and we were inside.

The floor was slippery underfoot and my right leg shot out ahead. I almost fell. I hung onto the door and we lined up with our backs against it. There was a kerosene lamp making a small yellow halo of light in the square room. Angelica shone her torch down at our feet and we saw that the ground was icy and smooth, like a skating rink. She shone the circle of light round the walls, flashing it onto a wardrobe, a rectangular table, a chest of drawers.

Ice covered everything.

The blue-grey crust shone like mottled glass in the torchlight. On the inside of the window there was a lacy pattern of ice like the complicated pattern of branches.

We heard a sound then, a footstep. A figure emerged from the deep shadows of another room.

My heart leapt. I closed my eyes for a moment, but the after-image burnt into my brain.

She was ice. Her hair hung in thin stalactites onto her shoulders, snapped off at the ends in savage points. But it was her face, her face, that I couldn't bear. Her features wore a mask of ice, like the walls, the table. A grey-white, flat sheen, roughened at the eyebrows, dripping slightly at the mouth, covering the slide down to her throat. A thin film of grey netted her eyes, but I saw the sudden white, like tears of snow, at the corner of her left eye.

She said nothing. She was hardly human.

I knew we must not look too long at that face. Like a magnet, it drew us in. I tried to tell Angelica, but her eyes were locked onto the horror. I pulled at her shoulder, but she flicked me off like an insect.

The cold in the room deepened. It was slow, gradual, the currents of cold, swirling dully around the room, almost visible.

I couldn't believe it could grow any colder. But the time out there on the mountain, walking and puffing, seemed now like a memory of warmth, and life.

The cold dug into my clothes. It crept through my coat and my jumpers, picking past my singlet into my skin. It felt almost personal, like icy fingers burrowing. Behind my eyes, where it hurt most, I began to feel sleepy. It was like a poisonous gas, this cold, it made you want to lie down, stop fighting.

I looked for a moment at Lucrezia. She was motionless. She could have been an ice statue, except for her eyes. Behind the slippery veil they darted from me to Angelica, and back again.

And now I could see the fumes of cold surrounding her like a halo. They grew whiter, thicker, floating out in waves toward us, coating the walls with new frost.

The blurring in my mind deepened. I was so tired. I felt Angelica lean on me like lead. Her weight and the room were like a dream, growing further and further away. Then I felt Angelica slip, her knees folding. She crumpled onto the floor.

I knelt down and lifted up her chin. Her eyes were closed. And over the skin of her face a sheen of ice was forming. Barely perceptible at first, more like dew on morning grass, it began to harden and thicken, particle joining particle, until within minutes she resembled the icy statue before us.

She shouldn't have looked so long. Oh, Angelica, you thought understanding was everything, but sometimes it's just not enough. I held her and the pain behind my eyes became a dull ache and the sleepiness, like fog, came down again.

I felt myself drifting into a dream. I knew there was something I should do, but the drowsiness was so soft, such a relief. The pictures in my head grew stronger than the room around me. I saw Angelica at the cafe at San Gimignano. How she made the fish appear in the carafe of water. How she talked about imagination, believing in something so strongly that she pulled its shape out of the air. How she bullied me to remember, to dream, to wake up. And the way she'd held me when I cried.

And with the warmth of those pictures, another image came. There was the burning sun on the waves and me paddling out to sea. I looked back to see Mum sitting on the shore, her hand shading her eyes, her body tense with watching. She always thought I was going to die when I went out surfing. But she still let me.

Poor worried Mum. Always watching, waiting, hovering. Sitting on the bath when we were little, making sure we didn't drown. I felt a surge of love. It had nothing to do with thoughts, it was like a memory, a way of being, a time when I was safe and warm.

A lid was twisting off inside. The energy ran down my arms into my fingers. The tips began to tingle. Soon, the tingling became unbearable, and small tongues of flame shot out from my fingers.

Angelica's coat was singed around the waist. I bunched up my fingers into fists and concentrated on drawing the energy back inside. My hands smouldered and blackened a little, but I noticed that the clouds of my breath were thick and warm.

I put my cheek next to Angelica's and the thin layer of ice on her skin began to move, running and dripping down her hair line, onto her coat. I could see her eyes moving under their lids and then she opened them and looked at me. I went on holding her.

‘Where is your Nonno?' A harsh voice like ice cracking.

I looked up at Lucrezia. She hadn't moved. But there was a deep slit in the ice beside her mouth.

I looked away and turned my mind back inside my body, working at the heat. ‘Are you all right?' I whispered.

‘Better now,' Angelica murmured. She looked up at Lucrezia. ‘He couldn't come,' she said. ‘He's an old man and he's ill.'

The ice statue shifted and there was a rent, like a ship tearing slowly through a solid sea.

‘He hasn't always been ill,' Lucrezia said. ‘He won't ever come. He won't admit the harm he's done. But I'm not going to die, not yet, without hearing him say that he is sorry. That he did wrong.'

Angelica pulled herself up on me and lurched over to Lucrezia. I saw her eyes beginning to glitter. ‘You're not the only one who suffered,' she said.

‘Angelica!' I whispered fiercely into her ear. ‘This isn't the way. Don't let her into you!'

But Angelica was straining toward Lucrezia. As if all her life she'd wanted to arrive here, in this freezing room, to meet this cold witch.

‘How do you think it was for me, the silence?' she said. ‘At three, to leave Mamma? Nonno watching at first, every movement, every word I spoke, as if I were some kind of bomb about to explode. Oh, there was the half-love, the
kindness
, so conditional it was like a maths equation –
sì, sì
, it came out so neatly if I behaved as they wanted. I learned to sedate myself, stuff my magic down deep, way down deep inside so that no one could even smell it. I lived on the surface like a shadow, missing Mamma, missing Roberto, missing . . . myself.'

Angelica was shaking and the shine in her eyes spilled over into tears. They streamed down her face, making warm tracks in the spattered crusts of ice on her cheeks and she reached toward Lucrezia.

Watching the two of them, looking into each other's faces, I had a sudden, weird feeling that
they
were the twins. They seemed so alike, standing there, icy and bitter. Only Lucrezia's ice was hardened, so ingrained that I could imagine her heart was a fist of ice, barely pumping. I looked at my sister, watching Lucrezia, and I wondered if Angelica was seeing the road that she could have taken.

‘The power,' Angelica was almost whispering to Lucrezia, as if they had their own secret language. ‘The
maledetto
power. It's ruined everything!'

Lucrezia stepped forward. Her icy hand shot out like a steel blade and caught Angelica's arm.

‘It is not the power,' she rasped. ‘The power is not the curse, you know that, girl.'

The sheets of ice that formed the planes of her face and throat were shifting as her mouth worked. They hung sharp and jagged at crazy angles so that she looked like a grieving figure in a Cubist painting. My hand went to my eyes instinctively. I could hardly bear to watch her.

She let Angelica's arm fall. ‘It is Papà,' she said. ‘Papà is our curse.'

She leant forward slightly and reached out as if to touch Angelica's hair. It was almost a gentle movement, slow and reflective, then her arm dropped back to her side. ‘Allies or enemies,' she murmured. ‘He breaks up the world,
quel mostro
, that monster.'

She said nothing for a moment, just examining Angelica's face intently, the way a child stares openly at a stranger.

‘My little sister's baby,' she said. ‘Cornelia.' Then the ice of her body grated as she turned to me and said, ‘And you, boy.
Un maschio
. A treasured male. Don't tell me that you have suffered from this curse, too!'

The sarcasm in her voice was freezing. She looked straight at me, her eyes two icy points burning into my mind. Her words lit up my anger and I flinched inside as if I'd been struck.

‘Is this a contest of pain?' I said. ‘None of us are winners, not even Nonno. Do you think
he
has lived a good life? With both his daughters gone, his family separated?'

I couldn't believe I was arguing for the old tyrant. But I couldn't stop myself now. I wanted to rant and bellow. ‘Look at you,' I went on. ‘You're the one who's ruined your life. No one made you hole up here, infesting the place with cold, magicking up this frozen hell.'

‘What would you know?' Lucrezia jeered. ‘What could you know about my life? And don't think I'm the only one. What about all those other women down through history, destroyed by men like Papà!'

‘But you were prepared to kill with this cold, to kill
us
, your own sister's children! What kind of a monster are
you
?'

‘I don't know,' she said.

At least I
think
that's what she said. But her voice was so quiet that I could hardly hear. The halo of cold around her was fading, and the tips of her hair were dripping.

The scene had shifted suddenly, as if we were three characters in a play and our parts had been changed. I didn't know who the enemy was anymore, or who was to blame, and I wasn't sure that Lucrezia knew either. It was bigger than any of us, bigger than this room, or the mountain outside, and I saw us all as small beads in Nonno's chain of history. An almighty shove from destiny, all those years ago, pushed us along, one by one, our shoulders relentlessly shoving the next over the abyss.

But that is how my mother would see it. What about change, the future, the next minute? Couldn't a lousy bead make some kind of decision on its own?