by Peter Tonkin
‘En avant!’ called Henri suddenly. The merry, indomitable, human cry echoed off the icy walls around them and Ann caught the excitement in his voice. With a great surge of freedom, as though she were escaping the humdrum and entering a world of infinite possibilities, she struck forward, northwards up the new slope. As soon as she did so, the great ship’s bow of the ice bluff hid Atropos and everyone aboard her from her sight.
As she moved, she felt the freedom buoy her up. Away from Atropos, all of her worries and wondering were put into some kind of perspective. The roller-coaster which her emotions had ridden recently now seemed to be a relatively paltry thing. Jamie Curtis’s thoughtless words about Nico and Robin, followed so quickly by Nico’s apparent death had set a worm of suspicion gnawing painfully within her. But Nico’s rebirth and Robin’s almost girlish glee at Richard’s arrival had made her suspicions seem so childish. And now this new environment, the simple distance from the claustrophobic little world of Atropos, made all of her worries seem like a storm in a teacup. Something more to do with exhaustion and paranoia than reality. As she strove to catch up with Henri, she was actually laughing at herself.
She would not have been laughing had she had any idea what effect the same pressure of claustrophobia, exhaustion and paranoia were having on her massive companion.
On this side of the ice bluff, the slope was steeper and clearly led upwards to the top of an ice cliff which stretched away to the left like the edge of Conan Doyle’s Lost World. Where that great tectonic mountain had been fringed with overhanging foliage, this one was edged with massive icicles. Where those black cliffs had been scalable only from a rocky point nearby, these blindingly white ones were easy to reach up the slope Ann and Henri were now following. As they climbed, however, it soon became obvious that they would have to keep the west-facing cliff of the bluff ever closer to their right shoulders as the outer reaches of the slope on their left fell away more and more steeply. After half an hour they were effectively on a ledge, albeit one which was wide enough for them still to be climbing side by side. Ahead of them, the slope was steepening, like a child’s slide made of sugar icing, up to the hard edge of the cliffs against the dark blue sky.
‘One last push,’ called Henri, his voice breathy with the exercise, but still exultant.
‘Are you sure it isn’t too steep?’
‘No. It’ll be easy!’
He pulled ahead and she was content to follow him. Looking up past his hunched shoulder, she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. At the high groin where the bluff joined the main cliff, there was a cleft. It looked a little strange, as though an arm did not quite join the shoulder after all.
After that one glance up past him, she looked down and concentrated on keeping her skis in his tracks. She was an accomplished skier, but soon found that her work at Aspen and Cortina d’A was not quite the preparation needed for this. Soon the parallel tramline markings of Henri’s ski tracks in the ice drift became herringbone markings. Soon after that, she paused again, her legs threatening to cramp as the muscles down their outer curves cried out, unused to this duck-like form of locomotion. She was breathless and covered in perspiration. Her light-sensitive goggles were beginning to fog up and it suddenly seemed to her that the last of the daylight was fading with unnatural rapidity. On looking up, however, she was given renewed strength by the nearness of their goal and she realised that while she had been concentrating on fitting her skis into his tracks, they had scaled the final section of the slope. The gathering darkness was in fact a shadow from the cliff top above them. Just before her, just above her, Henri was standing, looking ahead. As though wearing leg irons, she moved forward to his side.
If anything, the slope eased off. On their right, very close at hand, the southward reach of west-facing cliff was reduced to little more than a hillock and she saw at once that what she had taken for a cleft was a simple undulation in the snow slope. Ahead, and still above them, the south-facing cliff which reached far away to the west on their left hand was the crest of a low hill, but it still held the skyline as though there was nothing more of the iceberg beyond it. Abruptly, the hard edge of the horizon wavered. Tendrils of smoke reached out towards them only to whisper past just above their heads. The effect was extremely sinister, as though they were being summoned by ghosts. For a moment, the whole of the slope before them seemed to go out of focus and Ann found herself squinting as though she were suddenly short-sighted.
‘It’s the wind,’ called Henri reassuringly. ‘Blowing the ice crystals around. Pretty, huh?’
Ann found herself nodding, but she didn’t really agree. There was something unsettling suddenly about the alien way in which their surroundings were behaving and all at once she realised how dangerously at risk they might be up here. She opened her mouth to say something, but it was too late. Henri was in motion.
At least she could dispense with the duck walk and the herringbone placing of her skis. That fact, and the fact that, like her friend Robin Mariner, she had a habit of challenging fear head on, made her decide to go for it hard. She even pulled out to the side of his tramline tracks and pushed forward forcefully on her poles to make a bit of a race of it. Henri glanced across at her and crouched forward into a racing stance, meeting her challenge with a grin and a flash of teeth. Side by side, they shot across the top of the ice slope and onto the first part of the undulation. They were both experienced ski racers and used the slope perfectly, pushing hard off the crest and tucking their poles under their arms as they shot across the wrinkle in the terrain. It was not until the slope gathered up ahead of her again that Ann freed the poles and pushed really hard. Like Henri, she was moving very quickly now, and concentrating on clearing the slope first.
Then she was tumbling forward in a wild jumble of wood and steel and blocks of ice. Her ankles felt as though they had both been severely twisted and her right wrist felt broken. It was exactly as though the white slope ahead of her, so much like a wave in every other respect, had broken over her and inundated her in solid foam. The sound, too, brought a breaking wave to mind, for behind the overpowering roaring there was a sibilance as of a great slope of sand sliding away off the edge of a cliff.
She hit solid ground, face down, with stunning force. So hard was the impact, indeed, that it was a moment before she realised, horrifyingly, that she could feel nothing below her thighs. The impact, the confusion of what was happening to her was so overwhelming that for an instant she actually supposed that her legs might have come off at the knee somehow. But then reason began to reassert itself and, as it did so, a hand from heaven seemed to reach down and fasten on the scruff of her neck. With one unceremonious heave, like a kitten pulled up out of a dangerous stream, she was wrenched upwards and almost hurled onto level ground.
Suddenly, there was silence so absolute it echoed. Perhaps she had been struck deaf; it seemed as likely as anything else. Certainly, she seemed to have been struck blind. But she appeared to have got her legs back, at least. She began to move gingerly, checking her wrists and ankles, all of which hurt varyingly. This way she discovered that she still had both her skis and both her poles. She sat up, pulling her hands free of the wrist loops and reached up to lift her ice-clogged goggles up off her blinking eyes. In the overpowering glare of the early evening, Henri loomed over her, his face almost devilish with rage. She jerked back, dazzled eyes spilling tears down her cheeks. Because he was looking at her, she assumed the rage was directed at her. ‘What ...’ she began. His expression softened at once. He turned away, she felt him snap her skis free and her ankles felt better at once.
‘We have been a little unlucky, I think,’ he said quietly. ‘Though we are lucky still to be alive.’ As he spoke he turned back to wipe the tears off her cheeks and the ice off her goggles. ‘Look,’ he added when he had finished.
She replaced her goggles and looked down. Such was the magnitude of the shock that she was numbed by it. Coolly, distantly, far too calmly, she looked dow
n at the slope they had just climbed. The top twenty yards of it was gone. The whole of that innocent-looking undulation had collapsed, and she realised that the slight valley in the rolling surface had in fact been a frozen crust covering a deep crevasse.
The top of the bluff of ice whose gently sloping side they had climbed did not join the cliff they were standing on at all. At her feet was a wall of ice which fell to untold depths away on either hand. Then, ten metres distant, as remote as another planet, stood another wall, the rear of the bluff that overlooked Atropos’s anchorage. The slope itself now ended in a tumble of snow blocks so steep that it would be death to jump down onto it. The path by which they had climbed up here so easily was gone. There wasn’t even any evidence that it had ever existed. They were trapped. There was absolutely no way back along the route they had followed to get up here. ‘It was an ice bridge,’ said Henri quietly. ‘I’ve heard of them but I’ve never come across one. I guess we broke it when we skied across it so hard.’
Ann tore her backpack off and ripped it open, reaching in for the walkie-talkie she had been so careful to bring. But it was no longer there. Her hand reached right through and out of a ragged hole in the bottom of the canvas. The walkie-talkie, the primus and the tins of food were gone. Derisively, only the silver thermal blanket was left. Ann looked down at it, stunned; the loss of the equipment brought home to her the full danger of their situation in a way even the sight of the collapsed ice bridge had failed to do.
‘What are we going to do?’ Her voice sounded remote in her own ears, like the voice of a stranger.
‘Look for another way down. I might risk throwing myself over the edge here and onto, the top of that slope way down there but it’d probably kill me. It would certainly kill you. Can you stand?’
‘I guess so.’ She began to pull herself together and climb to her feet. As soon as she was sure her joints were lightly sprained and nothing more, she put her skis back on. Henri switched his emergency beacon on and stuck it in the cliff top at the point where the ice bridge had collapsed. ‘Switch yours on too,’ he directed. ‘That way they’ll be able to find us more easily if we get lost.’
‘Won’t they get confused between the two of them? I mean it’ll be impossible to tell which beacon is us.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘One will be still and the other will be moving. They should be able to tell from that.’
‘As long as we are moving,’ she observed as she pulled the device out of her clothing.
‘Face it,’ he said. ‘If we aren’t moving then it probably won’t make all that much difference. Now, switch it on.’ She obeyed, and they were off.
They struck east to begin with, as this was the direction which should bring them nearer to the ship and their friends. As she moved forward behind Henri, following their long shadows along the cliff top, Ann had some leisure to look around. On their right, the cliff fell away after a safe distance of level ice wide enough to allow for the wandering of fatigued feet and the possibility of dangerous overhangs below them. Beyond the cliff was the lowering slope of the east side of the bluff, wide enough at this end to stand like another skyscraper wall parallel with their own, but plunging as though to a street between. On their left, observed only in nervous glances at first as she kept her attention focused on the untrustworthy ground at her feet, stretched the rest of the berg. They were on the rim of a vast plain which sloped away gently for what looked like many featureless miles before it gathered itself into what seemed to be a range of ice mountains on the far horizon. It was difficult to be absolutely sure, because the light was turning pink and this, combined with the polarisation in her light-sensitive goggle lenses, made it hard to distinguish ice from cloud or to judge distances at all.
The ice mountains, if that was what they were, seemed to come round towards them in a half-circle, the nearer slopes catching a dazzling rose light from the sun, startlingly emphasised by the smoky blue-grey shadows immediately behind them. The whole scene seemed quite unreal. Every time she looked at the mountains they danced like a mirage. Either there was a wind near them, or there was a strange kind of heat haze or the brightness was making her eyes water. The place was so contained, so unique that it seemed to dictate its own sense of scale and it was impossible to tell whether the nearest wavering slopes were one mile away or ten. They seemed to get closer but less real as the two walked on, following their increasingly monstrous shadows along the edge of the cliff.
When Henri stopped, she collided with him. It was fortunate that he had stopped well back or they might both have plunged over. As it was, they staggered forward a step or two and only their skis held them erect. At any other time, in any other circumstance, this would have been a view to treasure. Now it was almost more than she could bear to look at. They stood, as if on a mountain top, overlooking an infinite vista of seascape. The far horizon was black and the sky reaching up above it slowly surrendered, shade by shade, to the rosy light. Here and there on the lower rim and, once, breathtakingly, higher in the dusky ash-pink, stars glimmered like windows to heaven. In from the low black rim heaved the sea, as ashen as the sky, with no trace about it of green or blue. Like an ocean from another planet, made more outlandish by the cracked crust of ice upon it, like a faded silken banner one shade of amethyst above utter colourlessness, the restless water reached in towards them until what slight colour was left to it vanished under the absolute line of blackness which was the shadow of the cliffs they were standing on. On their right hand and at right angles, immediately in front of them, reaching across to the mauve mountains on their left, the cliffs fell away hundreds of feet, sheer and unclimbable, below them.
Something more than the chill of the arctic night closed its fist round them then, for they began to realise that in this place where even colour seemed forbidden, life could not survive for long.
‘What are we going to do now?’ Ann had absolutely no idea of her own.
‘We’re going to find some shelter, then we’re going to become very good friends indeed,’ answered Henri. He avoided making it sound salacious or schoolboyish because the tone in which he said it was dead and very near defeat. ‘We have to get through the night without food and heat, and with nothing but these outfits to keep us warm.’ And even as he spoke, a wind came gusting past them which made the ice plain ripple as though it was melting and the ice mountains waver like clouds.
As they plodded doggedly northwards towards the mountains — the only promise of any shelter nearby — the last of the colour faded from the evening. Such was the reflective quality of the terrain around them, the last of the light lingered, seemingly multiplied by the glittering surfaces. They seemed to be walking through a magically luminous place even as the sky above them darkened relentlessly into a fathomless, velvet black. The effect was intensified by the wind which lifted the ice crystals into a series of stratified clouds which caught and held the light around them as though they were under glowing water.
It never really became dark. As the last reflected gleams of the long-vanished sun faded from the glassy slopes, so the first glitter of starlight shone out like the heart of a diamond. The nature of the liquid light carried in the deadly breath of the strengthening wind changed slightly. Ann was too weary, hungry and chilled to appreciate the beauty of what was happening around her, or to take even the briefest opportunity to estimate if what she had heard was true in fact — that one could read a newspaper by starlight in this place. Instead she forced her exhausted legs to push her skis forward one after the other, following Henri across the ice. There was no way for her to measure time. Certainly she had no wish to go through the complicated ritual of consulting the watch which was fastened round her wrist under the sleeve of her thermal vest, which was itself beneath her roll-necked pullover, her heavy woollen raglan, her Puffa and her elasticated parka cuff. Her timescale was reduced to the metronomic movement of her legs. Her eyes, fastened on the ground, soon became almost hypnotised by the whirling ice dust which co
ncealed her feet and skis altogether.
This time when Henri stopped, he stepped to one side and reached out to her as she continued past him like a wind-up toy whose clockwork had not yet quite run down. She was so numb that his grip on her shoulder felt more like a force than a touch but it was enough to stop her and to call her back from whatever deep recess she had withdrawn into. She looked around herself with dazed wonder. As though by magic, just as her eyes tried to come to terms with the sharp hills immediately above her, the moon peeped over the horizon to the south-west.
She did not know it, but she shared a vivid childhood memory with her friend Robin Mariner: the story of the Ice Queen. Although her family had been Italian, she had been told a wide range of fairy stories as a child, like any youngster growing in the States at the time, and the works of Andersen and the brothers Grimm had featured largely in her childish imagination. Now she found herself looking up at the glacial ramparts of the Ice Queen’s frozen castle atop the mountain of ice whither she had so feared to be carried from her soft, warm cot. The sight of it chilled her heart until she felt like the Ice Queen herself.
The cold light of the rising moon made the ice bone-white. There was no hint of warmth or softness about the sheer slopes above her. The shadows were stark black and without the hint of velvet in the sky. It was as though they had stepped out of a modern world of warm colour into the steely, gleaming monochrome of a film noir. It was breathtakingly beautiful and utterly, numbingly terrifying at the same time. The slopes stepped up and back like a massive staircase, stark and sheer; and at the front edge of each step, a still cascade of icicles plunged down into great bunches of crystal daggers. It required a shift in her perception so profound that it actually made her head ache to realise that some of those glacial daggers must be twenty feet long.