Fallowblade

by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Sailors told grim yarns about these cold-blooded wights but, unafraid, Arran lifted her in his arms and carried her down to the water’s edge. As soon as he touched her he discovered that he could understand her talk. When he laid her down gently in the foam she crowed with delight, saying, ‘Now I can return to my water kingdom and, man, thou mayst come with me! Never fear, for thou wouldst not drown; in sooth, thou canst not die, methinks. Come and be a king under the sea! Rule over a fair realm of exotic delights, pampered by concubines who are immortal, like thee. Never know sorrow or loss!’ But Arran would not accept the invitation, though she asked three times. ‘Very well,’ said the sea-girl, ‘Instead I will give thee a gift in return for thy kind deed. What wouldst thou like?’

  He said, ‘A cure. A cure for my wife, who sleeps in a coma.’

  With a splash the mermaid darted away. Arran waited, but when she did not return he thought that was the last he had seen of her. Just as he was about to walk away she reappeared, gliding in to shore on the next great comber, and tossed him a glass phial containing a green substance.

  ‘This is cneadhìoc, wound-heal—a poultice made from a rare seaweed that doth grow on a single seashore,’ she told him. ‘It will not cure all things, but it will heal any wound and draw out any splinter. Once long ago,’ she said, ‘I gave another gift to a human being, and it was a shirt of fishes’ mail.’ Then, with a flick of her iridescent tail, the grateful mermaid was gone.

  ‘What use is a drawer-out of splinters?’ Fridayweed grumbled softly from beneath his ear. ‘What profit is there in healing the wounds of one who cannot be wakened?’

  Ignoring the wight, Arran spoke next of discovering a land of ice and snow so cold he named it ‘Midwinter’. For years he had travelled along the coast to find this country, because he had overheard a band of spriggans talking about certain ancient bubbles of air trapped in ice and guarded by frost elves. These airs, the spriggans said, being from a time when the world was new-birthed and pure, sometimes possessed phenomenal properties.

  Warmly wrapped in rags that he had bartered from trows along the way, Arran eventually arrived at a region that jutted into polar seas; a peninsula whose hilly spine resembled, in his hungry opinion, a row of gigantic puddings dripping with white sauce and dusted with sugar. In these latitudes the wind was piercing; the cold penetrated to the deepest recess of mind and body. The wind, with its millions of little knives, scraped away the clouds. From clear skies, stars as brilliant as cut jewels shone down upon the landscape, creating a shimmering twilight. Like glass rods breaking, the air cracked and snapped.

  The weathermage had reached the summit of a ridge above the shore when he encountered the first snow troll he had ever seen in his life; a great, hairy fellow some seven or eight feet high, with skin like brownstone, all gnarled and whorled with warts, an outlandishly long nose, jutting brows like snowy cliffs and sad eyes that drooped down at the outer corners. He was clad in a robe of white hides, dripping with icicles, and carried a knopped club. The most astonishing thing about him was his headgear, for he wore a kind of coronet that appeared to be made from shifting radiance of many hues, in threads and banners, as if fashioned from the northern lights. The wight challenged the weathermaster, accusing him of trespass, but Arran protested that he was just a peaceful traveller passing through.

  ‘Toll you pay,’ grunted the troll, eyeing the weathermage from beneath beetling brows.

  ‘What shall I pay you with?’

  ‘Coin.’

  ‘I have no money.’

  ‘Food.’

  ‘I have no provisions. I have nothing I can give you as toll price, unless you’ll accept a song.’

  ‘Blood,’ said the troll, and it rushed at Arran.

  Arran carried no weapon save weathermastery and his own wits. He fought the troll, there in the snow, and the wight was as strong as an avalanche, but Arran was fast. Notwithstanding, the impetus of an avalanche is formidable, and the weather-master was making heavy work of it when the impet Fridayweed popped out of Arran’s pocket and jumped across to his antagonist’s shoulder. While the slow-witted troll was twisting its knotty boulder of a head to see what was shrieking in its ear, Arran seized the opportunity to trip the creature up and push it off balance. Down the hill tumbled the troll, gathering layers of fleecy mantle, becoming a massive snowball. It rolled down to the foot of the slope and into the sea with a tremendous splash.

  ‘Oh well done, Fridayweed!’ Avalloc said approvingly at this point in the story, and Asrăthiel applauded.

  Arran did not wait to see how the wight fared in the ocean with the chunks of brash ice floating and clashing about its lugs, but hastened on his way. Before he passed out of earshot he thought he heard a deep voice shout out, ‘Stora Snötrollet you pass, but reck-you Ice Goblins!’

  ‘Ice Goblins!’ exclaimed Asrăthiel, squeezing her father’s hand. ‘I have heard some talk of them.’ With a pang of desolate longing she pictured the Argenkindë riding across a wintry landscape to rendezvous with their long-lost kindred. ‘But pray, go on,’ she added quickly, banishing the vision.

  That night the entire sky became congested with dark and heavy cloud. As Arran plodded through thick drifts he looked up and saw, atop a hummock and outlined against the lowering sky, a pinnacled, throne-like chair carved from a solid block of white ice. Snow had fallen on it, and clung in glistening masses here and there. Seated on this extraordinary piece of furniture was a slim youth clad in shimmering raiment and adorned with sharp diamonds. At his feet sat an arctic wolf and a snow goose. The weathermage guessed at once that this was one of the frost elves of whom the spriggans had spoken, for the youth wore a spiky coronet of icicles, and all his diamonds were, on closer inspection, ice crystals. He was like no other being Arran had ever beheld, with his angular cheekbones, sharply pointed nose, and thin, pale lips. His eyes were the same eerie shade of blue as the bergs the weathermaster had seen floating in polar seas; pieces shorn off the feet of mountain glaciers, once pressed beneath stupendous weight, from which all trapped air had been expelled, so that they took on the luminous blueness of tropical twilight. The elf’s skin was like rime; white with a faint sheen. Clouds of miniature eye-stabbing lights hovered around him like prisms of moonlight.

  ‘You should know fear. Vy come-you here?’ asked the wight, rising from his seat and stepping lightly towards the visitor as the bird and beast looked on. He left no footprints in the snow.

  ‘For the air,’ Arran answered. ‘The ancient air from the morning of the world, trapped in ice.’

  ‘Ne,’ said the elf. ‘Our statutes are precise; no man may haf our ice.’

  With that he set upon Arran, wielding an ice dagger in each hand. The elf moved as swiftly as the man who, being unarmed, could only dodge and weave, and the weathermage was also hampered by the snow, into which he sank with every step. He was not, however, completely unprepared, for while he had been trudging along he had been putting forth his brí-senses to gauge the state of the elements, and marshalling local patterns in such a way that he could call on them in time of need. And call he did. A sudden blizzard swirled around the duellists, so violent that the snowflakes bucketing from the skies were blown sideways.

  The blizzard blew the frost elf sideways, too. He was bowled over, but immediately jumped to his feet. Arran, panting from the exertion, used the pause to catch his breath. He expected the wight to resume the onslaught, but the elf put away his daggers, saying, ‘Valiant are you, and more dan man, too. Dat vill suffice; you may haf ice.’ Without delay, lest the elf should change his mind, Arran struck out on his journey again, but the wight left him with a parting shot: ‘You passed Stora Snötrollet, you passed Hrim’s chair, but of da Ice Goblins, bevare!’

  Asrăthiel, who had shivered at every mention of Ice Goblins, interrupted her father’s narrative with a question. ‘How did you know the way to the place where this ancient ice exists?’

  ‘I did not know at all!’ he answered. ‘The sp
riggans appeared to think it was in the far north, so I merely kept heading in that direction. At length I came to a bay shaped like a crescent moon, which was in fact the partly sunken caldera of a live volcano.’

  There he had rested, looking out across the water to an island whose long row of snowy peaks seemed to be on fire, white clouds pouring up like smoke from the summits. At his back rose the sweep of the volcano, its slopes streaked with grey rocks, rust-red oxidised iron, alabaster snow and silver slicks of water. Steam was rising along the shore, where cold ocean currents touched the warm black gravel of the volcanic beach. ‘This is not the place,’ he had said to Fridayweed. ‘There is no ancient ice here.’

  So on he went, deep into the snowy wastes, and one night, seated beside a little ball of fire he had summoned to keep himself warm, he watched the sun go down. Sunset streaked the snow with subtle colours of pale peach and mauve, and fleecy bars of cloud were cutting off the tops of the mountains. As evening drew in the clouds sank lower, pouring down the slopes until they obscured the feet of the ranges instead of their heads, and the mountains hovered on a raft of mist. He was musing on the notion that mist and cloud seemed to come from some unknown world and to dissolve the barriers between this world and the other, when the ground spoke to him.

  ‘Haf you seen,’ growled a voice so deep it was like soft thunder, ‘a vun-eyed greybeard carrying a shtaff, vis a raven on each shoulder und two volfes at his heels following? Vears-he a broad-brimmed hat und a blue traffelling coat.’

  The hairs rose on the back of Arran’s neck. ‘No,’ he said, for want of a better response. Looking carefully at his surroundings he spied an outsized, ugly face immersed in a long white beard that dripped with icicles. A giant was looking at him from out of the hillside, as if embedded therein. Some fifteen feet in height, this creature made the snow troll look small by comparison. He could only be one of the hrimsthursar, a frost giant, of which the lore-books at High Darioneth recorded very little. The giant appeared to be ruminating on Arran’s rejoinder, which led the weathermage to wonder whether he had just imparted good or bad news. He knew that frost giants could be benign or malign; also that they might be ignorant or wise, and he grew wary. First and foremost, he must show no sign of fear.

  ‘Man,’ said the frost giant, ‘vat know-you of ice?’

  ‘I know,’ Arran said courageously, ‘the ten names of icebergs, the eighteen names of sea ice, the twenty names of coastal ices, the sixteen mountain ices and the three ices of the ground. I know all the ices of the polar plateaux and all six of the atmospheric ices. I know the shapes and colours of ice, and how they were formed, and how they will dissolve; blue ice, black ice, white ice and jade-green ice from glacial shear zones; frazil ice, pancake ice and the intricate ice flowers of the polar seas, brash, firn, rime; ice pipes, ice falls and ice lenses.’

  By good fortune the giant had questioned Arran about a subject he had studied in depth. Few weathermasters had ever frozen an entire lake; Arran was one of those few.

  Between snow-shine and star-twinkle the giant rumbled, ‘I hight Bergelmir, son of Thrudgelmir, son of Thrym. It is vell, man, dat you know some-ting of ice. Yet dere is much you know not.’

  Bergelmir proceeded to tell Arran other names, and secrets of ice previously unknown even to weathermasters. He shared the hrimsthursar’s knowledge of water and air and fire. By all this Arran knew the giant to be wise and benign, so he revealed his own name. All through the night they conversed, and as day dawned Arran asked the wight what he knew about precious bubbles from a bygone era, trapped in ancient crystals.

  The frost giant told him that the air ensnared into that special matrix was scorched by the passage of stars that fell from the sky and created the wells of immortality, thousands of years ago. Winds drew that star-burned air over the frozen plains, and snow fell, which turned to ice and remained thus in the eternal cold. Those antique gases, called skjultånd— hidden-breath—had special properties, but their exact science was unclear.

  ‘Prithee Bergelmir, son of Thrudgelmir,’ said Arran, ‘tell me how to find this skjultånd, so that I may take some home to my wife.’

  ‘Shtay here, Arran son of Avalloc,’ boomed the frost giant. ‘Shtay here und learn da secrets of da universe from da hrimsthursar. Become-you da king off scholars.’

  Arran said, ‘No, I must go on.’

  ‘Then I vill tell you how to find vat you seek,’ said Bergelmir, ‘but it may not a cure be.’ And the giant told Arran how to make his way to a certain nearby shore, where lay an enchanted vessel in which he must voyage if he meant to achieve his goal.

  Just before they parted, Bergelmir said, ‘Und ven you return to your home in da south you vill pass srough lands dat vunce vere varmer. In dose days dere vere human farmshteads, und at dose shteadings da tömte used to dvell. Da human beings haf gone, since da cold south-crept, but some of da tömte remain. If find-you any, tell dem you vere sent by Bergelmir und dey might you-help. If you spy a vun-eyed gammel greybeard along your vay, ’tvould be best to shtay clear of him. One final vord of varning, Arran son of Avalloc; bevare-you of da Ice Goblins.’

  After expressing his gratitude without directly thanking the giant—for he was well aware of eldritch protocol—Arran went to the designated shore. There he found an elegant shell-like boat, just as Bergelmir had said he would. The boat sailed by itself, carrying Arran out onto the sea, where lumps of clear ice floated amidst the brash. Leaning over the side the weather-mage scooped up a lump of this clear ice, noting with delight the masses of tiny bubbles crammed therein, like a paralysed fizz of sparkling wine. He chipped off a small piece as the boat took him back to land, stowed it in one of the phials he carried and kept it frozen by means of weathermastery.

  That night, with Fridayweed snuggled into his hair, Arran lay down to sleep in the snow, as usual murmuring a heat-summoning to keep them both warm, though he had no victuals to nourish him. But he was excited about finding the skjultånd and slept fitfully, half waking from time to time. Once, when he raised his head, he fancied he saw a cavalcade of extraordinary knights and ladies riding by in the distance, lit by moonlight and snowlight or perhaps by a brilliance of their own. He thought he heard them speaking; he could not understand their language but he received the strong impression that they were recalling persons they once had known, persons they yearned to see again. A sprinkling of glitter rained from their hands and garments as they rode by, and lay upon the snow. It might have been a dream, for he felt afraid without knowing why.

  The weathermaster woke in the morning to see the colours of sunrise tinting the drifts, and presently he came across a scatter of crystals as pure and bright as diamonds. When the sun’s first rays struck these prisms they reflected a series of images. He gazed at them in wonderment; the faces of a crowd of strangers, all comely beyond compare, yet with a cruel look; and one, a masculine countenance, whose beauty outshone the others as a comet to fireflies. In the sunlight the visions melted away, and with the two outlandish remedies in his possession Arran turned at last for home.

  For months he tramped, but he never forgot the frost giant’s advice. As soon as he saw the misty peaks of the Northern Ramparts on the horizon, which indicated that he had re-entered the lands that had once been home to human farmers, Arran began to look for a tömte. Tömtes were, he knew from his studies, farmyard helpers; a kind of northern version of brownies. He had spied no such wights on his outbound journey through this windswept country, where clumps of wiry grasses and thistles clung to iron-hard ground between patches of snow; and he saw none on his return. Still hoping, he took to boldly calling out, ‘Tömte! Tömte! Come to me!’ though the only things that came to him were the croakings of crows, windborne motes, cold breezes and grit that lodged in his worn-out boots to make him even more footsore.

  He was passing amongst the first foothills of the Ramparts when a white hare started up from the grasses and loped away. It stopped and turned to look at him, and he could have sworn
that it was inviting him to follow, so he took off after it. The hare led him a merry chase through the sedges, while in his pocket Fridayweed wailed in protest against the jolting. Before Arran knew what was happening he had tripped and fallen flat on his belly, and a rope net was pinning him down. Bruised and aching he looked up and saw someone observing him with a wry air.

  ‘Why have you done this to me?’ the weathermage demanded indignantly. ‘Let me up!’

  ‘Ouch,’ Fridayweed said in muffled tones, squeezed somewhere in Arran’s ragged clothing.

  ‘Man, man, catch me if you can, why call-you the tömte tiptoe tasty treat?’ the someone said in a high-pitched voice.

  Arran rolled his eyes and sighed. He felt glad that the tömte was fluent in the common tongue, but evidently it had its own whimsical way of expressing itself, like many eldritch wights. He hoped the fellow would keep rhetorical questions to a minimum and be sparing with phrases such as ‘If you asked me on a Moon’s Day I’d say yes, but if you asked me on a War’s Day my answer would be no.’

  ‘Bergelmir sent me,’ he said.

  Up went the net of rope, and Arran was free. Fridayweed poked out his head, glanced about, grimaced and withdrew.

  ‘What said the jotun, slow one ice-pale as a whale, that Bergelmir yesteryear?’

  ‘He said you might help me. My name is Arran, son of Avalloc.’ Sitting up, the weathermaster came face to face with a wiry little chap who had a weatherbeaten face, a pale, bushy beard and twinkling eyes. He was wearing a conical red hat that drooped down one side of his head, a long coat of polar-bear fur with a high collar, mittens, green trousers and reindeer-hide shoes with turned-up toes. The tömte was stowing the entire net—obviously a magickal one—in his sleeve. White tufts of pointed ears, like a hare’s, jutted from beneath the furry brim of his cap.