Giant Cold

by Peter Dickinson

  It is calling no longer. Now you have come, it is afraid. And now you see it, you understand. You know what, and who, and why.

  “I’ve come.”

  It does not move. Are you too late? Is the shell grown too hard?

  No, it is soft still, like the skin of a great fruit. The thing inside shudders at the ice of your touch. Your hand is too numb to flinch from the heat.

  “Look at me. I’ve come. Look at me.”

  It moans in its shell. How can you be sorry for it? It yearned to be warm, to possess the live heat for its own, alone, private, secret, safe till the world’s end. For that, the forest was smashed and the sailors wrecked and Apple Island locked into the death of ice. You cannot be sorry for it, any more than for yourself.

  “Look at me, or I will tear your shell.”

  A moan, a groan, and the head rises from between the knees. Eyes open, blink in the gold light.

  It looks at you. You look at it. …

  No, that is wrong.

  You look at you.

  Self sees self. Giver sees taker, hoper sees fearer, love sees longing.

  You, both you. You calling, you coming. You toiling across land and ocean, you still in this gold cell.

  Hand comes up to push hand away.

  Push back, push through the elastic skin, grasp, hold, cold palm into fiery palm. Pull.

  Both pull. Which is stronger? Which can pull which?

  Down to become the still egg, huddled, clutching its hoard of heat to itself, but never quite melting the chip of ice at its heart—will that be it?

  Up to walk freezing through the passages of ice, but never quite quenching the inward ember of love—will that be it?

  Pull then, oh, pull.

  One has the strength of taking, of fearing, of longing. One has the strength of giving, of hoping, of loving. Both pull with all that strength.

  Through the joined hands flows heat, flows cold. Ice into fire, fire into ice, mixing and changing. Life flows, love flows. Two become one.

  One alone, standing in the heart of the ice mountain, whole again after many days. You.

  Is the gold light fading? Do the pale walls seem to quiver, to begin to change? Is the giant ending his dream, waking?

  Quick!

  Quick through the corridors of ice, through the ice-pale dark, run, gasping the bitter air. No need to melt your feather-arrows free with your breath—they are already loosening from the walls—you can snatch them as you pass, as the ice melts, as the walls change, move. …

  From behind, from the place where the gold light glowed, comes a sound, a soft, strong boom like a drumbeat, and another, and another as the heart of the giant beats back into life.

  Air sighs along the tunnels, the giant’s first breath, indrawn. Struggle against it, don’t let it force you back, clutch and cling to the ribby, slippery, melting wall while the gale of it hurls past … and now, as the gale returns, let go, loose yourself, trust again to your thistledown lightness and softness, ride the giant’s breath as you rode the wind up the mountain, whirl through the narrowing tube.

  No time to catch your feather-arrows now. The tunnels are changing, closing as the mountain of ice undoes its nature and returns to the nature of muscle and sinew and bone, alive. As the change takes place, the ice-light dies to darkness and the breath of the living creature is your only guide, hurtling you on. Cling, resist, hold fast as it comes, give yourself to it as it goes, until suddenly you are blown free, in a snort, in a sneeze, in a storm of loosened down, to float for a moment and then land.

  Land on the slope of flesh by the man’s collar-bone. Not Giant Cold anymore. The icy hugeness which filled the cavern is gone, and a man lies on the rock floor asleep, breathing quietly, a living creature.

  From this strange angle, in the cave’s dimness, and with the face half hidden by the beard, you cannot see to recognise the face, but you are sure. It is him, known all your life in this world, loved and longed for, asleep on the cave floor.

  Now he stirs. Quick, move, clutch at the darkness of his beard, grip the wiry curls, hold fast. Be still. Wait.

  A corner of wind comes through the mouth of the cave, a soft breeze smelling of summer. With it comes the ripple of tumbling streams.

  He stirs again, grunts, snorts, jerks himself awake to stare around.

  A sigh of wonder, of strangeness. He gets to his feet and wanders with dazed paces to the mouth of the cave. The drifts are all melted, the icicles gone. You hang unnoticed in the strong curls below his mouth as he stands in the sunset light, looking down the mountain.

  Look too. How the world has changed, is changing! The snow melting from the slopes, the ice breaking from the shore to float free, the green of grass spreading like cloud-shadow across the white fields and orchards. Crags flash with silver streaks where loosed streams gush. Bird beyond bird whistles and trills. On the walls of the city, tiny below, a green flag slides down its pole and the notes of a bugle float through the sunset air. Steeple by steeple, the bells begin.

  He yawns, stretches, looks all around and sighs with the wonder of it. Oh, that he should realise that you are there! What you have done! But you dare not even stir in case he should reach up to brush you away or slap you and crush you like a tickling insect. All you can do is dangle and hope as he starts down the mountain.

  There is a path from the cave, deep under snow when you came, but now clear and easy as it winds down the mountain. In the crook of the third bend, a tree grows. When the ice-wind whirled you up here, it must have seemed just another mound of snow, but now it stands all leaf and fruit, fruit golden like huge plums, reeking with sweetness. He reaches out to take one.

  “No! Danger! Don’t!”

  His ears cannot hear your thin, high shriek. If any leaf rings warning, the sound is lost in birdsong and the rush of streams. The fruit is so plump with stored juices that it squirts at the first touch of his teeth, and the big gold droplets glisten by you on his beard. He laughs and bites again. All the good smells of summer breathe from the droplets. You remember hunger, remember thirst. Reach, leaning across the curls to taste that juice.

  Sudden as a cry of welcome the world alters.

  Soar without leaping, rush without moving, cry without sound …

  And he holds you, safe.

  Just as you tasted, just as that sweetness thrilled on your lips, he must have noticed your movement and put up an unthinking hand to see what it was. And then the change was too sudden for him to do more than catch you as you fell, steady you by the shoulders and help you stand, dizzy with the rush of size-shift.

  Stand swaying but safe, his firm hand holding your shoulders, until the dizziness goes and you can open your eyes and look round you, back in your natural size—never again to creep beneath doors, never to live in a bottle, never to ride the loobies, never to ride the wind again.

  AFTER

  Sunset, a holiday island. People walking down the mountain, a child and two parents. All three have tired legs and blistered feet, but happy faces. They have done it. They have climbed to the very peak. Just below the peak, they found a gang of workmen building the top end of the cable-car system which will take tourists up the mountain next year without any need to spend a whole day climbing. Poor tourists, it won’t be the same thing.

  By the path is a sweetfruit orchard. You don’t have to pay. The farmers are pleased if you try their fruit when you pass and hurt if you don’t. So the three rest in the golden evening light and eat. Suddenly the man reaches out to steady the child, who is swaying, eyes closed.

  “Are you all right, darling?”

  “Just a bit dizzy. The fruit’s so sweet.”

  “A bit tired, I should think. No wonder. That was one hell of a climb. Worth it?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Below them the holiday town spreads out along the dark beache
s. Sailboards dance on the gold-flecked waves still, and beach umbrellas blob the sands, but the coloured lights are already shining in loops and trails between the tall hotels. Red tiles and white walls make a scaly pattern, like a snake basking in the last of the sun. All the others are down there. None of them has climbed the mountain today. They’re all waiting till next year, when the cable cars will be running.

  The three people prepare to climb on down. They ease sweat-sticky T-shirts across their shoulders and try to wriggle their feet into shapes where their shoes don’t rub their blisters.

  “Oh, look!” says the child, pointing.

  They stare.

  All along the eastern sky, just above the water, a wavering line of dark dots has appeared, so far off that it is hard to see whether they are moving. Child and father talk.

  “Birds?”

  “The loobies.”

  “There must be millions of them!”

  “Tens of thousands, anyway. You know what that means?”

  “Winter soon, back home. Brrr.”

  “I wonder how they do it. Nobody really knows about migration, you know.”

  “The island calls them.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Whatever the scientists say, that must be how it feels if you’re a looby.”

  “It’s how it is.”

  “If you say so.”

  The mother has not been listening. Now, absent-mindedly, not noticing she is doing it, she picks a few bits of something soft and white—it might be thistle-seed, or small feathers—from the child’s shoulder and lets them float away on the evening breeze.

  They limp on, down the mountain.

  A Biography of Peter Dickinson

  Peter Dickinson is a tall, elderly, bony, beaky, wrinkled sort of fellow, with a lot of untidy gray hair and a weird, hooting voice—in fact, he looks and sounds a bit like Gandalf’s crazy twin, but he’s just rather absentminded, thinking about something else, or daydreaming.

  He was born in the middle of Africa, within earshot of the Victoria Falls. Baboons sometimes came into the school playground. When people went swimming in the Zambezi they did it in a big wooden cage let down into the water so that the crocs couldn’t get at them. For the hot weather the family went south to his grandfather’s sheep and ostrich farm in South Africa.

  When Peter was seven the family came back to England so that he and his brothers could go to English schools, where they taught him mostly Latin and Greek. He didn’t have an English lesson after he was twelve, and nobody ever told him to write a story. He was fairly good at games.

  He’s led an ordinary kind of life—not much by way of adventures, but some silly things. Such as? Well, when he had to join the army just after World War II, they managed to turn him into two people, so he was bashing away at infantry training at a camp in Northern Ireland when two seasick military policemen showed up and tried to arrest him for being a deserter from a different camp in the South of England, where his other self was supposed to be bashing away.

  He was tutoring a boy in a huge old castle in Scotland when the butler (it was that sort of household) said to him at breakfast one day, “Ah, sir, it’s a long time since we heard screams coming from the West Wing!” (Peter’s screams, not the boy’s.)

  And he was knocked down by a tram on his way to the interview for his first job with the magazine Punch and arrived all covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job because he was the only candidate. He stayed there seventeen years.

  He and his first wife had two daughters and two sons, and he now has six grandchildren. He and his second wife, the American writer Robin McKinley, live in an almost-too-pretty country town in the South of England.

  Peter says he didn’t become a writer. He just is one and always has been, ever since he can remember, the way a goldfish is a goldfish and can’t be anything else. Go to a zoo and look at one of the big birds, a condor, say, a creature made to soar above the Andes. They’ve probably clipped one of its wings so that it can’t hurt itself trying to fly around its cage, but it’s still a creature made to soar above the Andes. If you somehow stopped Peter writing, he’d still be a writer.

  But he was a poet and a journalist before he started on books. He tried a murder story first, but got stuck halfway through. Then he had a science fiction–y kind of nightmare and decided to turn it into a children’s story, mainly to see if writing it would unstick the other book. (It did. That book won a prize for the best murder story of the year, and the children’s book was made into a TV series.)

  Since then Peter has written almost sixty books, most of them on a little old portable typewriter—one draft to see what he’s got and what else he needs to know and so on, then a bit of research, then a complete rewrite, beginning to end, and then, if all’s well, only a bit more tinkering. Sometimes it used to take a few months, sometimes a year or more. A few years back he moved over to a PC. It makes writing seem a very different kind of process—easier in some ways, harder in others.

  The ideas come from all over the place—daydreams, sometimes, or a kid on a long car trip saying, “Tell us a new story, Dad.” Or something he’s heard or read—a voice on the radio saying, “Even a hardened government soldier may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” For the best of them it feels as if the book had knocked on the door of Peter’s mind and said, “Write me.” Then he’ll spend half a year or more letting the stranger in and finding out who or what it is.

  Peter has written all sorts of books—crime mainly for adults, though some of these are almost straight literary novels. For children, he has written fantasies, historical fiction, modern adventure, science fiction, and so on. There won’t be many more. They used to come gushing out of the hillside like a mountain stream. Then he had to lift them up bucket by bucket from deeper and deeper wells, but now the wells are empty. He says.

  Peter Dickinson was the second of four sons of a British colonial civil servant and a South African farmer’s daughter, born December 16, 1927, in the middle of Africa, in Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

  Here are Peter and his brother Richard as children in Africa, where many of Peter’s books take place. In fact, he used this photo as a pivotal clue in Perfect Gallows.

  The family came “home” in 1935 so that the boys could go to British boarding schools, but within a few months, when Peter was seven, their father died suddenly of a strangulated gut, leaving their mother with very little money. Their British relations were close knit and supportive, and in 1936 Peter was sent to Saint Ronan’s, a prep school in Worthing with a charismatic headmaster named Dick Harris. Pictured here are Peter (in the red jersey), age eight, with his mother, elder brother, Richard, and younger brother Hugh.

  This is a photo taken in 1936 during a family holiday at Stutton. The Fisons had been very good friends with Peter’s father and stayed close to his family after his death. They invited the Dickinsons to stay with them for several vacations at their house on one of the Suffolk inlets. They would spend most of the day in boats on a local pond or on the nearby beach. Here you can see the kids lined up on the beach from tallest to shortest. From left to right: Elizabeth Fison, Peter’s brother Richard, Peter, Gay Fison, and Peter’s youngest brother, David. Peter doesn’t remember why his brother Hugh is not in this picture. Perhaps he was taking the photo.

  Here’s a picture from 1937. One of Peter’s aunts had a home on the Sussex coast at Littlestone, and Peter’s family used to go there during school vacations. Peter remembers that they used to play a lot of games there, including a family version of hide-and-seek. Here you can see them taking a break for some ice cream. From left to right: Peter’s cousin Anthony Butterwick, Richard, Peter, and Hugh. David was too young then to play these sorts of games.

  When the German invasion of England looked imminent, St. Ronan’s was evacuated to Bicton Park, a great red-brick Georgian house in the
idyllic setting of a large deer park in Devon. Peter’s novel Hindsight is based on his time here. The curriculum was mainly Latin, Greek, and math, with some French, history, and geography, and only one English class a week. Peter was never asked to write a story, either while at St. Ronan’s or later.

  In 1941 Peter took the scholarship exam for Eton against the advice of Dick Harris, who thought he wasn’t up to it. But his math score saved him, even though he was the bottom scholar in a bad year, just as his father had been, and he was accepted. After an uncertain start at Eton, Peter enjoyed his time there. He turned out to be fairly good at the bizarre versions of soccer they played, and was elected to Pop, the equally bizarre society of school prefects chosen not by the authorities but by the students themselves.

  In 1948 Peter went to King’s College, Cambridge, on a closed exhibition (a minor sort of scholarship, exclusive to Etonians). He feels he wasted his time there and worked ineffectually, having taken little part in the many extracurricular activities on offer. After a year he switched from classics to English studies. He failed to get the hoped-for first in his finals, but the college gave him a bursary to study for a PhD. Halfway through this, he walked into the dean’s office. The dean looked up from the letter he was reading and asked, “Would you like a job on Punch?”

  Peter Dickinson at an editorial meeting at Punch in the early 1950s. (Photo credit: Picture Post, Bert Hardy)

  Peter and Mary Rose Barnard (1926–1988) were married at Bramdean, Hampshire, on April 26, 1953. She was the daughter of a naval officer who was senior enough to ride a white horse along with the other Lords of the Admiralty in the coronation procession for Queen Elizabeth. Peter and Mary set up house in an apartment in Pimlico, he continuing at Punch and she working in the display department of Heal’s furniture store.