East (28 page)

After almost a day and a half of travel, ice made it impossible to go any farther into Tatke Fjord. We pulled the
kyak
up onto land and took out all our gear. Anchoring the small boat in the snow, Malmo said, "I will come back for it on my return journey."

And so we set off on foot, carrying our gear in packs on our backs, the skis lashed to them. At first I felt unbalanced and top heavy, as if the smallest puff of wind would knock me over. But as I walked I grew used to the load and gradually felt steadier.

Slowly we ascended to the top of an ice cliff, following a trail that hugged the side. It was a hard climb, the pack heavier than a dead sheep on my back, and my breath came out in great puffs of silver smoke as I trudged upward. In all that whiteness I never would have seen a path, but Malmo followed it unerringly. When we reached the top, we donned our skis.

The farther north we went, the colder it got. Before then I had thought I knew about cold. But the winters in Njord were springlike compared to the bitter, lancing cold of that frozen land. It was like a predatory, hovering beast, bent on sucking every bit of heat and life out of a body.

I am certain that had I not had Malmo as guide and companion, I would have died.

"It is a good thing you are shaped the way you are, you know," Malmo said. "Good for the cold."

According to Malmo my short, sturdy body was Inuit-like, well designed for enduring very cold temperatures, its compactness conserving heat. Even my dark eyes, though not as dark as an Inuit's, gave more protection from the glare on the snow than lighter eyes. It seemed ironic to me that if I had had the willowy form and sky blue eyes of my sisters, features I had always deeply envied, I may well have been doomed in the unforgiving land.

The surface stayed relatively smooth and we made good progress on skis. We spoke little, concentrating all our energies on moving forward. The ivory goggles I wore were continually iced up, but I grew used to that, as well as to looking out at the world through the row of miniature icicles that had formed on my eyelashes. I tried rubbing them away but found that in doing so I had broken off some lashes. Having once been told that my eyelashes were one of my best features, I stopped trying to get rid of the icicles, though I laughed at myself for such vanity. I would be lucky to survive at all, much less with my eyelashes intact.

One morning when we emerged from our tent, we found the land covered in a dense white mist. As we set out, Malmo warned me that things were not always as they appeared in a snow fog.

It was a completely white world, with no edges or contrast by which to measure things. At one point I saw a huge iceberg looming toward us and I cried out to Malmo, who looked as if she was about to ski right into it. It turned out to be a small hillock of snow that Malmo guessed to be several leagues ahead.

That night, as we huddled in our tent, Malmo told me stories of hunters in a snow fog stalking what they took to be a huge animal and finding it to be merely a small white hare. "And once," she said, "there was a hunter, one of my people, who came upon a small white bear cub. He reached out his hand to touch its fur and discovered that it was a full-grown white bear, ready to attack."

I gaped at her, unbelieving.

"It is true," she responded serenely.

The snow fog stayed with us for several days. And then, on its heels, came the blizzard.

T
HE PREPARATIONS FOR
the wedding banquet have been going well, but I grow impatient. I had not realized how elaborate and complicated the many traditions of a Huldre royal wedding are. I am considering doing away with all of it and performing a simple ceremony of my own creation. That way Myk and I can be joined together when I wish. Tomorrow perhaps.

It is vexing that there are other matters to be taken into account. For example, if I move up the ceremony, then the southern trolls will not arrive in time. The wedding is to symbolize a historic meeting of our two lands, and to change the plan now would mean a loss of prestige—and could possibly cause a diplomatic rupture between us.

Furthermore, my people would wonder why I am not following Huldre tradition. Not that that matters.

Fah. I shall do as I please.

M
ALMO HAD READ THE
blizzard's approach in the clouds and wind, and with a calm sort of urgency that was typical of her, she began to direct me on the making of a snowhouse. Using the snow knife I had gotten back in Neyak, I followed Malmo's lead in fashioning blocks of snow that we then piled on top of one another in a set pattern. Malmo's snow blocks were perfectly shaped into solid rectangles, while mine looked like messy blobs, but by the time we heaved the last block into place, mine were at least recognizable as a squarish shape. Malmo made about four blocks to every one I came up with, though with experience I got a little faster.

By the time the storm hit full force, we had fashioned a sturdy, fairly large snowhouse. We were just putting on the finishing touches when I saw the wall of blowing snow coming at us. Before I could move, it knocked me to my knees, and barely able to breathe, I tried crawling toward the snowhouse. But I could not see it. Panic rising, I flailed about, stretching out my mittened hands to feel my way to it. Then Malmo's hand locked around my arm and she dragged me inside. I lay there on my back, breathing hard.

I had no idea just how long I would have to remain in that hut made of snow.

Malmo knew. She told me that this was Negea, the wind that began at the very top of the world, from even beyond Niflheim, and Negea could flay the skin off a human in just a few seconds. She said Negea had been known to blow for weeks at a time. I thought she was exaggerating.

The days crawled along in that small white world, with the sound of howling wind forever in my ears. I could see how people lose their wits. Luckily, Malmo was wise in the ways of surviving such long spells of confinement.

Our second night in the snowhouse Malmo brought out her story knife. At first I didn't know what it was, thinking it another snow knife. It was also made of ivory but was smaller, with a different shape. And unlike the snow knife, the story knife had beautiful carvings on the blade, decorative pictures of fish and seals and sea and sun.

She gestured for me to sit beside her, and using the blunt side of the blade to smooth the snow in front of us, she then used the tip to sketch a picture into the smooth surface.

The designs were simple—stick figures to represent people and crude symbols for other elements, such as the sun, a tree, and a river. But oddly, I could recognize each thing she drew right away. She spoke as she drew, identifying and naming the figures and their surroundings.

The first tale she told was about a mother seal that cared for an Inuit girl after the girl's parents were lost at sea in a hunting accident. Malmo was a gifted storyteller and I sat enthralled, watching die knife deftly etch out the pictures that told the story. The characters she drew came alive like performers on a stage.

As the days passed, the story knife made the boredom bearable. Malmo even taught me how to use the story knife myself. I used it to memorize her stories, telling them back to her, as well as to tell her stories of Njord—the old stories of Freya and Thor and Odin. Some were the same stories that I had told the white bear back in the castle, and the memory of that time came rushing back. At such moments I would hand the story knife to Malmo, unable to continue. She understood.

Day followed day in the snowhouse, the storm howling around us. Even telling tales with the story knife began to seem tedious. But finally, just as we were reaching the end of our food supply (and I, the end of my wits), the blizzard ceased. I was lying on my back, staring listlessly up at the white ceiling, when I suddenly realized that the sound of the wind had stopped. I looked over at Malmo. She nodded at me. "Negea is done," she said simply.

The snowhouse had gotten buried under several feet of snow during the storm, so we had to dig our way out. Putting on our skis, we resumed our journey.

After several more weeks we came to the end of Gronland and the beginning of a large expanse of frozen sea. Malmo removed her skis and calmly explained that we would cross the sea of ice. The shoreline was too rough for skis, she said, adding that we should be able to use them again farther out. Looking at the broken, jumbled mass of ice lining the shore, I could see that what she said was true, and I bent to remove my own skis.

"The sea ice is thick?" I asked a little nervously.

"It will hold us," she answered with a smile.

Following Malmo I gingerly stepped from land to sea. I could hear the ice groaning and creaking under my feet as swift currents moved beneath it.

I grew used to that sound and eventually stopped worrying about the ice cracking or giving way beneath me. We threaded our way through the jagged ice of the shoreline, and as Malmo had predicted, the ice smoothed out, with only small ridges that our skis could navigate.

It took us more than a week to cross the frozen sea. One afternoon we stopped to hunt seal. Malmo found a breathing hole in the ice, and pitching our tent we began a patient vigil. She had set on the surface of the water a thin rod made of antler, which she told me would bob up and down at the slightest disturbance. We were stationed downwind of the breathing hole so our scent wouldn't reach the sensitive noses of any seals nearby. Hours passed. Then the antler rod gently bobbed on the surface of the water. Malmo moved with a calm but amazing speed, grabbing her harpoon and striking down into the breathing hole with all her force. She held fast until the seal grew tired, its struggle lessening. Handing me a knife she told me to enlarge the hole so we could bring the seal up. I worked as quickly as I could, and finally Malmo was able to drag the seal up onto the ice. It was still alive, barely, and she used a club to finish it off.

I had had plenty of experience butchering animals on the farm, but killing the seal was eerie to me, with the vivid red of its blood against the sheer white ice.

By the time the moon was directly overhead, we had fresh seal meat. Before eating, Malmo sang. She did this every time she was about to eat what had been caught in a hunt, and that night, out on the frozen sea, I asked her why she sang.

"It is the way we live in peace with the animals in our world. We are not separate from the animals or the sea or the ice but part of the whole. And so we must treat the animals, the sea, the ice with respect."

"But is it not disrespectful to kill?"'I asked hesitantly, not wishing to offend Malmo.

She smiled as if at a child. "No. Because it is part of the cycle. We must hunt to survive. Disrespect would be to hunt when you are not hungry and then to treat the dead in a wasteful, unclean way. The words I sing are to ask forgiveness for taking the seal's life, and to send its soul safely to the spirit world."

As we reached the other side of the frozen sea, the surface became rough again and we had to take off our skis. The ice looked like it had exploded upward, making a towering forest of white. It was extraordinary. The glassy pinnacles rose as high as ten feet above us, and there were long, deep cracks in the surface. And the groaning, creaking sound was louder as the edges of the ice pack pushed more aggressively against each other. Occasionally there would be a loud cracking sound, like that of an enormous whip, and I would jump, my heart racing. Adding to my nerves was Malmo's warning that she smelled white bear around us and that we should be wary.

"I thought the white bear was
your
animal," I said uneasily.

"That will not protect us from a white bear that has not eaten in several weeks. Or a mother bear with hungry cubs."

We carefully made our way through the mazelike ice forest. My whole body was stiff with tension, my icicle-rimmed eyes darting from side to side as I watched for a white bear around every jutting spire of ice. And the cracks in the ice were widening; I could see black freezing water through some of them. The harsh cracking sounds grew more frequent.

It seemed to go on and on, the ice forest. I got occasional glimpses of what I took to be a shoreline, but it never got any closer.

As I rounded a particularly large tower of ice, my senses numb from constantly being on edge, there was a sudden blur of motion, white on white, and a snarling. I felt a burning line of pain along my jaw and was knocked to the ground, unable to breathe. I saw a spreading pool of red on the snow and realized it was blood—blood leaking from the throbbing on my face. But something was over me, blocking out the light, and I looked up into the face of a white bear, standing on its hind legs, teeth bared.

My breath came back then, ragged and gasping, and the strangest thing of all was that it wasn't the thought that I was going to be killed that frightened me the most but the primitive animal ferocity I saw in those small black eyes. They were nothing like the eyes of my white bear. In fact, there was nothing recognizable there at all, just the staring, voracious eyes of a predator that had found its next meal.

M
Y FAVORITE PLACE
in the old monastery was the reading room. It was located in what had once been the chapel, and tall arched windows of stained glass lined the walls. There were ornate bookcases filled with handsome gilt-titled volumes, though the majority of books and manuscripts were housed in other rooms of the building. In the center of the room were several long tables at which one or two people usually were seated on wooden chairs.

Hours passed by like minutes in the reading room. Blurred shapes of ruby red, emerald green, and rich sapphire blue from the stained glass would dapple the pages as I read the old manuscripts. And I feasted on the words handwritten by men who had lived hundreds of years before me.

It was on a sunlit morning in late winter when a curious thing happened. I had already finished my assigned work for the day and, for pleasure, was reading an account of a sea voyage undertaken by a Viking called Orm. This Orm was an explorer of sorts, and he had told his tales of discovery to a monk back in the days when the old Viking ways were beginning to fade and the church was becoming more and more the center of life in Njord. The monk had written down the Viking's stories, apparently just as Orm had told them, and I read the stories with deep interest.