North Child

by Edith Pattou

  My beautiful ice palace, splitting.

  Then the ice crack opened up, yawning wide into nothingness. Immense, thundering sound filled my ears.

  My palace, my glorious ice palace… Splintering, breaking apart…

  Myk!

  It was like the end of the world. The noise was massive, crashing, ear pounding, as the ice palace broke apart.

  I saw it in only an instant. A scorching burst of heat, then the enormous crack in a moment spiderwebbing outwards where Tuki had once stood. And the Troll Queen herself, teetering on the edge, only to be swallowed by the monstrous, gaping fissure.

  I looked up. Saw the sheer windows shattering, turrets bending, toppling. I knew I was going to die.

  As knife-like slivers of ice rained down, I ran. A large chunk of something slammed into my shoulder. I staggered, falling to my knees. More ice fell on me. I crouched, trying to protect my head with my hands, but ice continued to strike me, causing staccato bursts of pain. My head swam. Where was the man who had been a white bear? I had to find him – but I could not move.

  Screams echoed all around. Balconies teeming with trolls fell through the air. Death was everywhere.

  A strong arm grabbed my waist and dragged me out from under the ice. I was pulled along until I found myself in a tiny cavelike space. And the man who had been a white bear held me tightly. He was looking into my eyes. “Rose,” he said urgently.

  “Yes,” I said groggily. Relief showed in his face.

  We were lodged under a great slab of ice, part of the ceiling that had fallen at an angle, knifing sideways into the floor like an immense white sword. It was so thick and strong that it protected us as the ice palace crashed down around us.

  I knew as I huddled there, the arms of the man who had been a white bear tight around me, that I would never forget the sound. It went on a long, long time – the cracking, grinding, slamming of fallen ice, and the screams of the dying.

  I must have lost consciousness, for I suddenly became aware of his voice again saying, “Rose,” in that same urgent tone, as if he was afraid I would not answer.

  “Yes?” I said weakly.

  “It’s over, I think,” he said.

  We were crammed into a tiny space, only slightly bigger than our two bodies. And everything was silent except for an occasional cracking sound. The entire wreckage of the ice palace lay on top of us. I clutched at his purple waistcoat.

  Then I remembered my mother’s words as she’d told me the prophecy of the skjebne-soke. “Any north child I had would die – crushed by an avalanche of snow and ice.”

  The ship called Rose was a fine one, the crew excellent. Father and I were kept busy learning all aspects of navigating the high seas. And Soren bustled about, consulting sea charts, an astrolabe, and cross-staff, and other familiar instruments of navigation. But he was most excited about a brand-new compass he’d gotten for the journey. It was a splendid instrument using an iron needle suspended in a small box, with a wind rose beneath the needle to indicate direction. He was as happy as I’d ever seen him, and I hoped Sara was prepared for a husband with an advanced case of wanderlust. (Surely Mother would have found out if he were a north-born!)

  We had good luck with the weather, and the winds were favourable. It was early spring and we had more hours of daylight, even though we were heading north. And yet despite all the good omens, I was restless and uneasy.

  On the seventh night of our voyage, I felt Rose again, beside me. I was by myself, on deck, gazing out at the sea, and again she laid her hand on my arm. All I could see around her was white. Immense and frozen, the whiteness seemed to be pressing down on her. She looked terrified.

  I prayed that we would reach her in time.

  Somehow he dug us out. I don’t know how. I helped as much as I could, but it was his strength and his will that saved us. I wondered if he still had a little of the power of a white bear in his body.

  He had had a knife in his pocket and, when the ice palace had collapsed, had grabbed up his flauto. We used both to tunnel out. (The flauto was badly damaged, but he did not seem to care.) The ice slab we had sheltered under had fallen near the doorway from the banquet hall to the kitchen, and once we had dug our way to the kitchen, we found a clear passage. Then came more digging, upwards, towards a faint light. Finally we broke through the ice above us and climbed up onto the roof of the kitchen.

  Around us was a scene of utter devastation. The glittering, magnificent ice palace had collapsed in on itself and onto many of the buildings adjoining it. We were surrounded by an immense jagged pile of icy rubble. As I peered outwards I saw that some outlying buildings, mostly servants’ quarters, had escaped with only slight damage. And the stables, being the farthest from the palace, hadn’t been affected at all.

  We could not stop to gaze long, for neither of us wore any outer clothing and the freezing wind chilled us to the bone. I grabbed his hand and ran towards the building where my quarters had been. We entered without difficulty and I led the way to my room, where I retrieved my coat, boots, and other belongings. I gave him several fur-skins to wrap himself with. He looked around silently at the small place where I had lived for the past few months.

  After leaving my room, we found a storage area with extra fur-skins and coats. He picked out a coat of thick white fur. As he bundled into it, he gave me a lopsided smile. And I was struck by the fact that the man before me, with his gold hair and sad eyes, was still a white bear to me. I knew of nothing else to call him. He could not be “Myk”, for that had been the pale queen’s name for him. White bear was mine, and so in my head, anyway, I continued to call him white bear. We dug around and eventually found mittens, boots, and other necessary items.

  Then we set out to search for survivors. Gazing at the wreckage, I knew it was impossible that Tuki was alive. And yet I could not accept that. Tears freezing on my face, I began digging blindly into the icy ruins, but the white bear gently pulled me back.

  “It’s no use,” he said.

  And I knew he was right.

  We circled the wreckage and looked for signs of life. We did not find a single living troll. If any had survived the destruction, they had long since fled.

  We did find some forty or fifty humans in the outlying servants’ quarters. They were all in their small rooms, passively waiting for their morning slank. Several had been injured by the collapsing palace. I’m not sure if either the white bear or I spoke it out loud; it just became a given that, somehow, we would take them with us, all of them, out of Niflheim.

  The humans were, for the most part, dazed and unresponsive, but they were as docile as always and followed our pantomimed instructions without question or protest. First we made sure they were all outfitted with warm clothing, then we led them to the stables.

  We rounded up eight sleighs, hitching five reindeer to each. Vaettur was in my sleigh’s team. We set free those reindeer that we did not need, and they immediately galloped off. We stocked the sleighs with as much in the way of provisions as we were able to salvage. The kitchen had been completely destroyed, but we did find a cache of undoctored slank that we took with us. And we set out before the sun went down that night.

  The white bear and I each commanded a sleigh, and we selected several of the most alert of the surviving humans to drive the remaining sleighs, telling them to follow our lead. The reindeer did the rest.

  More than twenty-five of the humans perished on the journey out of Niflheim. Some succumbed to the cold, a few to their injuries, but most died because of the slank – or, I should say, of withdrawal from the slank doctored with rauha. Those who had been at the palace for years and had been fed a daily diet of it were not able to adjust to life without slank. The withdrawal was a terrible thing, causing a violent trembling of the entire body, vomiting, and eventually an abrupt halt of breathing. We left the dead in shallow, unmarked graves, and even that cost us valuable time and energy. Our only hope to survive was to keep moving.

  By th
e time we reached the ice bridge, we were down to three sleighs. I had been dreading the bridge, thinking pessimistically that it mattered little if we survived getting there because we would be unlikely to be able to cross the cursed thing. But it turned out I needn’t have worried. The reindeer navigated it with ease (I still don’t know how), though there was a heart-stopping moment when one of the sleighs swayed dangerously close to the edge.

  It was an enormous relief to be out of Niflheim, away from that unceasing wind. The sun shone in an icy-blue cloudless sky. The survivors of troll servitude were coming out of their stupor with a dazed sense of wonder; they had the blurry, blank-eyed look of newborn calves. Most had little or no memory of their life in the ice palace and were completely bewildered as to why they were in sleighs travelling through a frozen land.

  At night we would upend the sleighs and huddle under them, kindling a small fire for warmth. Because we drove separate sleighs, the white bear and I were never together during the journey. Except once.

  One night, after all the people in my sleigh were asleep, I crawled over to the white bear’s sleigh. I found him awake, tending the fire.

  “What is your name?” I asked abruptly. It didn’t seem right to go on calling him white bear.

  “I do not know,” he replied with a small twisted smile that did not reach his eyes.

  I nodded, not certain what to say. I looked sideways at him, then away. His face was pale and haggard, but it was a good face, a kind face, and I realized I knew nothing about what lay beneath the strained smile.

  He had saved my life back in the ice palace. I knew I should thank him, but I couldn’t speak. I was overwhelmed by the thought that this man before me – this stranger, really – had no name, no home, no life to return to. He’d told me the last time he had been a person was when he was a boy. He was going to need a world of time to discover his place in the world, I thought. I could not assume, should not assume, that that place would be with me. But I would be lost if it was not.

  She looked stricken, almost frightened. Of me? Did she see me as a burden, a great weight on her? I wanted to ask, to say something reassuring, but words were still difficult to find; they formed so slowly in my head.

  She had journeyed all this way to find me. Surely…

  But she held herself away. And she stared into the glowing embers of the fire, not at me.

  Perhaps I would need to find my own way. Perhaps I should. I remembered so little of who I was. Only a boy, unformed.

  But I was eager, hungry to live a normal life. To walk on two legs, to play the flauto, to eat with a spoon. Crack an egg with my fingers and cook it in a pan, an omelette with fresh herbs, brown at the edges… Drink a mug of good ale. I was free, after a very, very long time.

  And to do these things with her, with Rose.

  But, I told myself, I must be prepared to do them alone.

  I turned to speak to her, but she was gone, returned to her sleigh.

  Once we were out of Niflheim, I thought everything would be all right. But I was wrong.

  There was no Malmo to guide us. And spring had come. Which didn’t mean green grass and flowers and birdcall, as it did in Njord. It meant meltwater and thin ice and the surface under our sleighs breaking apart.

  That didn’t happen right away, though, and I was able to lead us back to the frozen sea Malmo and I had crossed. At the edge of the sea was the ice forest in all its deadly beauty, the ice forest where I had faced the other white bear. The cracks in the surface of the ice I had seen before were larger and wider, and the groaning, creaking sounds were louder and more frequent. The sleighs were too heavy and we had to abandon them. The reindeer were eager to go their own way when we set them loose but three, including Vaettur, stayed with us.

  As we made our way on foot through the maze of ice towers, fissures would narrow and widen unexpectedly, inches from our feet. It became a nightmarish dance as we darted and swerved and leaped to avoid the freezing water below. No one fell in, but by the time we got through the ice forest, we were all exhausted and wrung out. We encountered no white bears.

  Crossing the flat expanse of frozen sea, I tried to remember what Malmo had taught me about melting – that you should pay attention to the puddles on the surface of the ice. Light blue water meant the underlying ice was thick enough to walk on; dark blue meant it was too thin. There were many dark blue pools of water.

  But the man who had been a white bear knew how to live in a frozen world, in all its seasons, and he helped us to survive. He showed us how to walk like a white bear – legs spread out wide, sliding our feet quickly, never stopping.

  When we reached the other side of the sea, we again came upon ice that was breaking apart. But the white bear led us across the ice floes and we made it safely to shore.

  We had been travelling on land for a few days when an ice fog settled around us. At first it was beautiful. The sun was shining, and the sunlight reflected by the ice crystals created a shimmering golden curtain that enfolded us in its brilliance. It reminded me of the golden dress I had made in the castle in the mountain. But then the sun disappeared under clouds, and the golden curtain faded into a dense white fog. We could not see an inch in front of our faces.

  We huddled together, thinking to wait it out, but the time stretched on and some grew restless. So we set out, moving slowly, feeling our way forwards. This went on for what seemed days, until I thought I would go mad.

  The fog finally lifted, but the sky was still overcast. I had no idea what direction we were heading. One of the women we had taken out of Niflheim slipped and fell, and she did not get up. We did all we could for her, but by the next morning she was dead. We slid her corpse into an ice crevasse and watched silently as it disappeared from sight. Then we resumed our journey, though there was still no sun to guide us. I began to picture us wandering endlessly through a frozen landscape, dying off one by one. The white bear came up beside me.

  “We are lost,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “I wish I still had the senses of a white bear,” he said. “Then I could lead us.”

  I nodded dully. Suddenly I remembered Thor’s leidarstein. I fumbled in my pack and found the dull brown stone. Scooping up some meltwater in a cup, I rubbed one end of a needle with the leidarstein and floated it in the water. Lazily the needle swung back and forth, finally stopping.

  “South,” I said, pointing. The white bear nodded, relief in his eyes.

  We had been heading due west, so we changed course. Knowing the direction helped, but I had no idea how far off course we had gotten. The slank was long gone and we were all starved and exhausted. There were several among us who were near death, and I didn’t know how much longer any of us could keep going.

  But we kept struggling on, and then one afternoon, as we crested an icy peak, I looked down and there was the impossible, unforgettable sight of Tatke Fjord. And anchored at the end of it was a ship.

  I shall never forget as long as I live the sight of those huddled figures silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky. One of the sailors spotted them at the top of an icy cliff and called out to us below decks. We had just dropped anchor not an hour earlier and were organizing an expedition to go overland in search of Rose.

  And there she was.

  A party of us went ahead to meet her group as they descended. There looked to be about twenty, as well as three white reindeer, and even at a distance I could see that most of the people were barely able to set one foot in front of the other.

  When I got to her I took Rose in my arms and did not want to let go. But then Father came up to us and I finally unloosed my grasp. Tears in his eyes, Father enfolded Rose, saying her name over and over.

  When Rose introduced me to her father and brother, she stumbled over the words, for she had no name to use. And I did not remind her that I had already met them before, under very different circumstances.

  The ship was a fine one, and I saw how
happy Rose’s father and brother were to be reunited with her. I did not want to remember that it was I who had taken her away from them.

  But it felt good to be warm again; I can’t remember the last time I had been truly warm. And the food – good human food that I ate with human fingers and lips and teeth.

  I should have been relieved that the journey was done, but I was not. For I did not know what was to become of me.

  I have nothing to offer her. I do not even have a name.

  The story that Rose told was extraordinary. If I had not known Rose and known that she does not lie, I simply would not have believed her. Trolls, “softskins”, shattering ice palaces, and something called kentta murha. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

  The man who used to be a white bear was quiet and pale, and though clearly he was happy to be freed of his long imprisonment, there was still a lost look about him, as if he was not sure where he fitted. He and Rose were awkward with each other, though I could tell there was much feeling between them.

  On our way south we stopped at the village of Neyak. Malmo and a delegation of her people were waiting for us on the shore. It had been Malmo who had told us where to seek Rose.

  We had found Malmo – or rather she had found us – as we were making our way north along the coast of Gronland. She and several of her people came out in small two-person boats and gestured at us until we understood that we were to follow them. When we had dropped anchor and gone ashore, Malmo went directly up to Father and told him where to look for Rose.

  I had no idea how Malmo knew we had come in search of Rose, or how she knew where to find her, but it did not occur to me to doubt her. She gave us “maps”, carved out of walrus tusks, of the coastline. (Father later remarked that they were extraordinarily accurate, some of the best mapping work he had ever seen.) Malmo also indicated we should turn inland at something called Tatke Fjord. Which is where we found Rose.