The Snow Queen (10 page)

Ritva stopped splashing. Covered with gooseflesh, she stood knee-deep in the frigid stream and stared at Gerda. How could she have failed to notice? Through the winter, all Gerda's childish plumpness had vanished. Her face, once round and flushed with health, was wan, her eyes dark-circled. Her limbs were white and thin as birch-saplings, her skin taut-stretched over flaring ribs and jutting hip-bones.

Ritva's belly tightened with dread. She knew all too well that when you lost flesh like that, sooner or later you died. She had seen it happen often enough with pigeons and rabbits. No matter how she coaxed them with crumbs or leaves they would turn their heads away, and before long she would find them lying cold and stiff in the straw.

Ritva clambered up onto the bank. “It's too cold,” Gerda whispered through chattering teeth. Her arms were wrapped around her narrow chest.

“You're cold because you've no fat on your bones.” Fear sharpened Ritva's tongue. “Go on, put your clothes on. Why are you so skinny? We feed you, don't we?”

“I suppose.” Gerda's lower lip trembled.

“Then why are you not eating?”

“How can I eat when I'm so miserable?”

“Miserable? You have a warm bed to sleep in. You have plenty of food to eat, and no work to do. Why should
you
be miserable?”

“Because,” said Gerda, with weary patience, “I am not one of your pets, to be tied up with a rope and tormented for your amusement. I came here to find Kai. At night I dream that he is calling to me, pleading for my help. And you've kept me here, month after month, locked up like a rabbit in a cage.”

“What do you mean, locked up?” Ritva was enraged by the injustice of this. “The door is open. If you hate it here so much, why don't you leave?”

Now it was Gerda's turn to be indignant. She snatched up a petticoat and yanked it angrily over her head. “Well, for one thing, you promised to cut my throat if I tried to run away.”

“Yes, well,” said Ritva. “Maybe I said that. I didn't think you'd believe me.”

“The little one is sick,” said Ritva's mother. She spoke with interest, but without much concern. “Her spirit has wandered halfway to the Land of the Dead.”

“Do you think I cannot see for myself?” snapped Ritva. “Old woman, you must go and fetch it back.”

“Huh!” said her mother, showing wide gaps in her bottom teeth. “You ask that of me, you who never speaks a word of kindness to me? Can't you see I am a tired old woman, who is hanging on to her soul by a thread? Such a journey would be the finish of me, for certain.”

“Then I will go myself,” said Ritva.

Shrewd black eyes peered out from their nests of wrinkles. “You? You think yourself a shaman, girl? You have much to suffer, before you can wear these robes, or ride this drum.”

“The power is in me,” Ritva said. “I have seen visions. My guardian animal has come to me in the night.”

“Easy enough, to let your soul go free,” said her mother. “But have you the power to call it back? I have seen others, who banged on a drum and thought they were ready for the journey. They are wandering yet, on the road to the Dead Lands, and their bodies have withered away to a bundle of hair and bones.”

“I want to heal her,” Ritva said.

“Then let her go. It's her heart that is sick, not her body. She pines like a wild thing kept on a chain.”

“That's what
she
said,” Ritva muttered.

“Then listen, for once. What use is she here, to anybody? Not even Henrik will want such a sad, skinny stick of a thing. Let her go now, before another winter sets in. Before she dies in this house, and her wandering spirit haunts our doorsill.”

Ritva woke in some nameless hour of the night. Even the pigeons slept; there was no sound in the great hall but the faint snap of embers on the hearth. Her forehead felt sticky with sweat; her bones ached and it was hard to draw her breath. The thick stagnant air of the hall was like a blanket against her face. At last she got up, pulled on her boots and crept out into the luminous summer night.

She walked for a long time, wandering aimlessly along forest paths, filling her lungs with clean, pine-scented air, letting the night wind cool the fever that burned inside her. She felt dazed and disoriented, scarcely aware of her surroundings; she had no idea how far she might have strayed from the castle. Something was drawing her deeper and deeper into the trees, something that would not let her rest or turn back.

Near morning, she found herself in a small mossy clearing in a birch wood. The sun cast long blue shadows under the trees, where snow still lay in rotting patches. Never had she felt such bone-deep exhaustion. She sighed, and sat down on the damp ground, resting her head on her knees.

It could have been minutes, or days, that she huddled there. And then, as though her name had been spoken, she looked up.

The bear reared on his hind legs, an immense and terrifying shape, black as shadow againt the silvery wall of birches. Ritva could smell the pungent wet odour of his pelt, feel his rank breath on her face. He lashed at her with one of his enormous paws. She felt his claws peel the flesh from her face and the scalp from her head, shred the clothes from her body. She shrieked in pain and terror as muscle and fat and tendons were ripped away. And then she stood shuddering in her naked bones. Her ribs clattered together; she looked down at her feet, saw the delicate framework of white twigs, the polished white knobs where her ankles joined her feet. She began to count all the bones in her body, giving each one a name — not in the Saami tongue, or in Finnish, or in any other human speech, but in the secret language of the animals. When she had finished, she felt no more pain, nor was she conscious of the whistling of the night wind between her ribs, the gnawing of the pre-dawn chill on naked vertebrae. She was flooded with calm, and lightness, and power; freed of everything that was transient, unessential; pared down to the hard imperishable bone.

And now she could hear all the voices of the forest calling to her.

“Hurry, hurry,” howled the wind-spirit. “Would you spend another winter shut up in your father's house?” And the river-spirit joined in with her murmurous, insistent voice, “Go quickly, Ritva. This is the adventure you've dreamed of.” The grasses, sly and insistent, whispered, “Life is short, Ritva. Tomorrow will be too late.”

Only the rock-spirits, stolid and earthbound, said “Stay, Ritva, stay. You must listen to us, for we are the oldest and wisest. What is this southern girl to you, that you would risk your life for her? She prays to the Christian god, who burned your drums and drove your mother's people into hiding. Let her go alone into the winter lands. Let her god save her from the wolf's jaws.”

But the trees called out to her with all their voices joined, like a great chanting. “We are wiser than the rocks, for we are the children of the World-Tree. Our trunks join under earth with air; our branches hold the sky up. Go, Ritva. Travel our hidden paths. We will protect you.”

The light had changed. Her throat was parched, her bladder ached, her belly churned with hunger; she guessed that she had slept the day away, and it was evening again.

When she reached her father's hall she found Gerda hovering anxiously in the forecourt.

“Thank goodness,” Gerda said. “No one knew where you'd gone — I was sure the wolves had eaten you.”

“Not wolves,” said Ritva. She felt light-headed and weak, but unaccountably cheerful. “A bear.”

Gerda's eyes widened, but before she could open her mouth to speak Ritva had seized her by the elbows and was dancing her madly through the gate and into the hall. “We'll rescue your Kai, little rabbit,” panted Ritva, half out of breath. “I have made up my mind to it.” The evening stew was simmering on the hearth. Ritva dipped out a ladle-full of broth, blew on it, and gulped it down. Then she began spearing chunks of meat and vegetables straight out of the kettle on the point of her knife. “Where's my mother?” she asked, with her mouth full.

“Gone gathering mushrooms,” said one of the women.

“Ah,” said Ritva. “She'll be out in the forest, then. All night, did she say?”

The woman shrugged. “Most like.”

“Good,” said Ritva, and as the women of the camp watched in horrified delight, she stepped over the invisible line that marked the boundary of her mother's
boasso
, her sacred space.

She lifted the shaman's robe from its hook, and settled it over her shoulders. It had a pungent, sweetish smell of medicinal herbs, and cured skins, and sweat. Then she picked up her mother's drum of bent wood and reindeer hide. Never before had she held it in her hands, or looked so closely at it. It was decorated with all kinds of signs and pictures — gods, humans, magic animals, hunting scenes, runic symbols — drawn in the red juice of alder bark. When her mother put a piece of wood on the tight-stretched drumskin, it danced about over these magic signs and foretold the future.

Ritva squatted in front of the drum. She drew a long breath, then picked up the reindeer horn prong and began the ritual that for so many years had disturbed her dreams. All through that night she chanted, and beat upon the drum. The world slipped away from her. Her flesh dissolved; her bones turned to air. She felt herself rising like smoke through the hole in the roof over the
boasso
. Above her was the Pole Star, that pinned in place the vast tent of the sky; below her, the shattered roof of her father's hall; and beyond, the winding ribbon of river and the dark sea of pines, spreading out to the world's rim. Her mind was flooded with a white fire that burned through darkness like the arctic sun. She thought of the far-seeing that her mother's people called
sjarat
, when the air was so clear that distances seemed to shrink, and the far seemed close at hand. But this was a gift of seeing infinitely stranger and more powerful than
sjarat
. Nothing was hidden from her gaze. She could see through solid earth and rock to the hidden world of the dead, where her mother had so often journeyed; but she knew that Gerda had no desire to travel in that grim land. Instead, she must chart her a path over forest and swamp and snowfield to the farthest, unknown edges of the world.

She was clinging to the back of a white elk, her guardian spirit, and the land moved like water beneath her. The air was alive with the crackling, whispering music of the stars. She flew through forests of larch and pine locked fast in the jaws of winter, a universe of trees unbroken by any path, where the eyes of wolves gleamed like yellow lanterns through the falling snow. She crossed vast swamps and treeless mossy wastes. She soared over fields of moon-white ice under a sky as black as a raven's wing. She saw glittering cliffs of ice rising out of an iron-dark sea. All across the sky the northern lights rippled and danced like a luminous curtain of silk. Snowflakes with the shapes of nameless animals devoured the breath upon her lips. Ice-daggers pierced her lungs. And at last, at the edge of the heavens, where earth and sky joined, she glimpsed the white windswept palace of the Woman of the North.