The Snow Queen (16 page)
Gerda glanced at Ritva, who answered with a shrug. Gerda said, “And then can I take Kai home?”
The Snow Queen looked at her with her cold eyes, her thin-lipped, humourless smile. “Home? This is his home now, little Gerda. But if you perform my three tasks, then if he wishes it, I will let him go.”
She reached beneath her cloak and drew out a small chased-silver jewel-case. Lifting the lid to show the white velvet lining, she held it out to Gerda. “This is the first and easiest task. You must capture the cold light of a star, and bring it to me in this box.”
W
ith that the Snow Queen turned and glided away, her wide skirts making a silken whisper on the marble floors. In the silence that followed, Ritva and Gerda stared at one another.
“You're a shaman's daughter,” said Gerda, not very hopefully. “Do you know how to catch a star and put it in a box?”
Ritva snorted. “I heard of a shaman once, who tried to steal the Pole Star, which pins the heavens in place. If he had succeeded, the whole sky would have tumbled down upon the earth.”
“That's just a story,” Gerda said. “If you tried to fly up above the sky, where the stars are, you would die because there is no air to breathe.”
Ritva scratched thoughtfully under the hem of her coat; gazed up at the frosty ceiling; spat.
“Well,” said Gerda finally, “if it can't be done with magic, then it must be done with science.”
“Science?” said Ritva, looking baffled.
“If I tell you what I mean to do,” said Gerda, “you might give the trick away.”
“Ah,” said Ritva. Her face cleared. “Trickery.” She repeated the word, as though relishing the taste of it on her tongue.
“I have captured a star for you,” Gerda told the Snow Queen. She held out the silver box.
“Impossible,” said the Baroness Aurore. “Don't waste my time.” She waved away the box with an impatient hand.
“No, really. But you must look at it in a dark room, because you can only see stars at night.”
“Very well, then,” said the Snow Queen. “I suppose I must go along with the joke.”
She clapped her hands, and the chandeliers winked out all at once, plunging the room into polar night.
“Watch,” said Gerda. In the darkness she could feel Ritva's warm, eager breath on her cheek. She held her own breath, praying that her ruse would work. Slowly, she lifted the lid of the box. Inside on the white velvet nestled a broken arm of her wooden crucifix. It glimmered, as the air reached it, with the cold white luminescence of decay. “Look,” murmured Gerda, “you can touch it, it is star-fire, that burns without heat.”
“A trick,” said the Snow Queen. “Did you think to fool me with a bit of rotting wood?” She clapped her hands again, and the lamps flared up.
“I've brought you what you asked for,” said Gerda, calmly. “Cold fire, fox-fire. Star-fire.”
“Indeed! And is this how you mean to accomplish all my tasks, by deceit and guile?”
“It's not deceit,” said Gerda, meeting the Snow Queen's frigid gaze. “I have done exactly as you asked. I have captured cold fire and put it in a box. And I've practised no more guile than you did, when you ensorcelled Kai.”
“Indeed,” said the Snow Queen. Her eyes glittered, flat and hard as a serpent's. “Then here is your second task. Let us see if you can accomplish this with your tricks and subterfuges. North of my palace walls is a frozen lake, and beneath the ice swims a silver pike. I fancy that fish for my dinner, and you must catch him for me.”
“We have no net,” said Ritva.
“Then you must find a way to make one,” the Snow Queen said. And she stalked away in a dazzle of spangled silk and diamond-frosted hair.
Gerda turned a glum face to Ritva. “What shall we do? If only we had rescued our fishing gear from the ship . . . ”
“If only, if only . . . ” mocked Ritva. “If only wishes were fishes, as my mother used to say. If only your Kai had not taken it into his head to run off with a witch . . .There are more ways to catch a fish than with a net,” she said. “And more hooks than the ones you stick on the end of a pole. Do you know the story of how the shaman Väinö killed a giant pike with his sword, and made a harp from its jawbones?”
Gerda shook her head.
“Well, that's what he did. And nobody else could play it, but in the shaman's hands all the animals of the forest, all the birds of the air, and all the fish in the rivers came to listen.” Her breath puffed out in a white fog as she began to sing, in her hoarse, throaty voice:
All the pikes came swimming,
through the reeds they came to listen,
straightway to the shore they hastened,
there to hear the songs of Väinö . . .
“Come on,” she said. “Let's see if we can find any fishbones in the Terrible Enchantress's midden-heap.”
Behind the Snow Queen's palace was a winter garden. No green plants grew beside the snowy paths, only trees and fountains and statuary carved from solid ice. Willow trees with silver-frosted trunks and glittering transparent leaves drooped gracefully over frozen streams. Crystal deer, like blown-glass ornaments, grazed on the snowy lawns. At the end of the garden, beyond an orchard of ice-pears hanging like translucent white bells from glassy branches, was a kitchen-midden where all the palace refuse had been thrown. The topmost layer was still fresh and steaming from the midday meal.
Ritva crouched on the frozen ground and began to scrabble though the heap. “Ha!” she said, as she uncovered first the head and then the fleshless spine and tail of an enormous fish. Triumphantly she dragged it out, and began to pick it clean of egg shells and vegetable peelings.
Gerda wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Surely you can't mean to use
that
!”
“Why not? Am I not a shaman, and the daughter of a shaman? What old Väinö could do, I can do.” As she worked, Ritva sang cheerfully to herself,
As he played upon the pike-teeth
and he lifted up the fish tail
the horsehair sounded sweetly
and the horsehair sounded clearly . . .
“We haven't any horsehair,” Gerda said.
For answer Ritva pulled off her cap and shook out her mane of black hair, grown lank and long in the months of their journeying. “Here, use my knife,” she said.
For an hour or more she squatted patiently at her task, her strong, skilful fingers bending bone and fastening almost invisible hairs with tiny knots. At last, with a satisfied grunt, she held up a strange, misshapen instrument â a fishbone harp.
“Let me hear you play it,” said Gerda, through chattering teeth. She felt as though her very bones had turned to ice. If anyone were to touch her, she thought, she would shatter into fragments, like the Snow Queen's mirror.
“Not yet,” said Ritva. “First I must sing the rune-magic into it. Then we will go and find this pike, and I will sing the magic out of it again.”
It was not a song that Ritva sang, but a queer rising and falling, wailing chant. It was a sound like the storm wind in the forest, like the wolf's howl, and it went on and on, while Gerda shivered and stamped her feet and slapped her arms against her sides.
“I told the harp how I had made it, how we had come to this place, and where I found the bones to fashion it. And now the harp has knowledge of its origins and its true nature, and you will see, though I am no musician, still it will sing sweetly for me.”
Ba, who had been lodged all this while in the Snow Queen's stables, looked rested and well-fed. Even his rheumy old eyes seemed brighter as he nuzzled Ritva's neck and thrust his nose inquiringly into Gerda's coat pocket.
“This weather suits you, doesn't it, my poor old bag of bones,” said Ritva fondly, as they set out over the trackless white fields. Snow was falling softly through the perpetual silvery half-light of the Snow Queen's kingdom.
The lake spread before them, milk-white and mirror-smooth, fringed by frozen clumps of rushes thrusting up out of a blanket of fresh snow.
Ritva took a rug from Ba's saddlebag, spread it over a flat rock, and sat down on it, her fishbone harp in her hands. The snow had stopped, the air was clear and brittle with cold; the magical lights of the aurora darted and flickered across the sky.
And then the high pure notes rippled forth. In the music of Ritva's harp Gerda could hear all the rainbow colours of the Northern Lights, the sighing of wind, the singing of reeds, the rush and glitter of glacial streams.
On and on Ritva played, in that vast, eternal silence. Beneath the ice Gerda glimpsed a dark shape moving.
Come to me, my great fish,
fish of the broad shoulders and the terrible jaws,
come from the river's cold embrace
to my knife's warm kiss . . .
And suddenly the huge head of the pike burst through the ice. As the harp played on â faster and sweeter, the notes shimmering in the air like pearls, like silver bubblesâ a moon-white, silvery-scaled body writhed up through the shattered ice and floundered its way to shore.
The music ended, in a shiver of silvery notes, and in Ritva's hand, now, was the cold gleam of iron.
“M
agic,” asked the Enchantress of the North, “or more trickery?”
“With Ba's help they had dragged the great body of the fish across the snowfields to the palace gates. Now Ritva stood over it, grinning in triumph. “Magic,” she said. “This was a wise old fish â not even I could lure him out of his den, except by sorcery.”
She plucked a few lively notes on the fishbone harp. Gerda recognized the bawdy soldiers' tune and clapped a hand to her mouth to hide her smile.
“When we've stabled Ba,” said Ritva cheerfully, “and you've moved this fish off your doorstep, you can tell us what else you have in mind.”
