Power to Burn (14 page)

We'd only gone a little way along the road when we saw a figure crouched on a corner. It had its back to us and as we approached we saw that it was hunched over a small fire. I felt a tingle of dread and I took Angelica's arm, trying to turn her away. But she pulled me on.

It was a woman, dressed in a long cloak and hood. She was sitting on a wooden stool, roasting chestnuts.

‘Chestnuts,' she said. ‘Chestnuts for sale.'

When she looked up at us the hood fell back and we saw her eyes. Young, dark eyes in an old face. One eye was fringed at the edge with white lashes.

‘She must be frozen,' I whispered to Angelica. ‘How can she sit out in the snow in these temperatures?'

‘I don't think she's real,' Angelica whispered back. ‘This is what we've been waiting for.'

She took a step forward and said, ‘We don't need chestnuts,
signora
. Do you have anything else for us?'

The eyes stared back. And now, as I looked, I saw that the pupils, huge in the black iris, were transparent like glass, and I realised that through them I could see the white snow behind and the stone of the village. Nausea rose up into my throat and I had to swallow quickly and look away.

‘I have lemons,' croaked the lady. ‘Only three left. For your Nonno,
signorina
. Tell him he must come.'

Angelica looked at me. She was pale, too, and I saw that her hands were trembling.

The air seemed very still. It was as if the scene was fixed in a time bubble, the black sky, the white snow greyed with slush at the side of the road, the old lady with the empty eyes. Nothing moved, and we were like characters in a fairy tale, waiting for the right question to be asked. When I was nine I thought I knew what to ask the leprechaun if I ever found one. I wished to God I could find the right one now.

‘Who grows the lemons?' Angelica asked.

The old lady twisted around and pointed a dirty finger to the mountain behind us, beyond the village.

‘Up there,
signorina
,' she said, ‘on top of the mountain. The woman lives up there, near the big chestnut tree, and the grave, in a villa of ice.'

Angelica thanked her, but already I saw that the snow behind her pupils was bleeding out, filling her eyes and her features were smudging. The outline of her cloak and hood was blurring in the heavy air. I pulled at Angelica's hand and we walked away, down the road. When I looked back there was just the wooden stool, lying on its side. The old woman had gone.

We dried off our skis and boots and stacked them in the lobby of the apartment block. We climbed up the stairs and opened the door to our flat, and Nonna ran toward us, as if we were Scott and his party returning from the Antarctic.

‘
Dio, che freddo
, you two are blocks of ice! Why did you stay out so long? We've been worried sick!'

I looked beyond her to see Nonno starting up from his chair. He had a blanket over his legs, and his eyes were red and watery. He looked old.

‘There's a blizzard coming, the radio just sent a warning,' he said in a harsh, brusque voice. ‘You children were mad to stay out this long. We'll have to pack our bags tonight, and leave first thing in the morning.' His lips pursed and he frowned. ‘This wasn't one of your better ideas, Angelica. You both should have had more consideration than to stay out and worry your Nonna. I'm very disappointed in you.'

A coughing fit shook him and he closed his eyes. We were dismissed. The coldness of his disapproval chilled the room.

Dinner that night was subdued. No one talked much, and Nonno wouldn't even look at us. When I spoke to him he just raised his eyebrows as if he were hard of hearing. He went to bed straight after dessert.

I looked at his empty chair. It was strange how the withdrawal of his warmth could be so devastating. If
I
felt like this, over such a tiny thing, and only knowing him such a short while, I couldn't begin to imagine how Lucrezia felt. Nonno's own daughter.

But I stopped thinking about Nonno or anything else when Angelica came up to our room. I could tell by her face that she'd decided something. Her jaw was tight and her forehead had two tiny creases running between her eyes. They deepened when she spoke.

‘We'll have to go tonight, Roberto,' she said. ‘There's no more time. We'll have to leave when the grandparents are asleep.'

‘You're joking,' I said. I know it was inadequate, and that's how I felt. ‘You mean, scale up the mountain at
night
, in this temperature, to find Lucrezia? We'd freeze before we got there. Besides, you heard the message. She wants to see Nonno.'

‘Yes, we've got a lot of preparation to do.' Angelica ignored my comments. She was looking around the room, and her eyes were narrowed and intense as if she were checking things off in her mind. She began opening wardrobe doors, burrowing between blankets and hats and shoes. She moved fast, a little wildly, and the old panic began rising up my chest. Suddenly I wondered what on earth I was doing, about to trust my life, my
life
, for God's sake, to this girl who seemed stranger and more out of control with every moment.

‘We'll use the summer track to go up the mountain,' she said from inside the wardrobe.

‘But it'll be buried in snow!'

‘In parts, maybe, so we'll need these
racchette da neve
.' She held up an oval wooden frame, netted inside like a tennis racket without the handle.

‘You know, how are they called? Snow shoes.' She waved the thing around as if she'd just discovered gold.

‘That's a
shoe
?' I said.

‘
Sì, sì
, you tie them on under your shoe with these laces and they help spread your weight so that your feet don't sink into the snow. I calculate it will take about three hours, going steadily.'

‘Great,' I said. ‘Can't wait.'

‘Oh, come on, Roberto, you're my partner in adventure, aren't you?'

‘Partner in crime is how the saying goes, Angelica. And that's what it'll be if we both die out there.'

But she threw me a snow shoe and it seemed as if I had no alternative but to put it on.

T
here is nothing as silent as snow. It muffles sounds – the crunch of wheels, an owl hooting – pulling the sound into itself, flattening it until you wonder whether you really heard it.

We didn't talk as we trudged along. I watched the clouds of our breath puffing out as thick as smoke in the stinging air. Angelica was right about the snow shoes. It was incredible how the light, netted things diffused our weight, fanning across the deep snow. And with all those clothes, we must have been heavy.

I wore a thermal singlet and three jumpers, with long johns under woollen trousers. And over all that bulk we wore our overcoats. Angelica brought balaclavas for us too, and we had woollen beanies on top. We looked like cold, overweight bank robbers.

Even so, after only a few minutes, our eyes were streaming. We had to keep wiping them, or ice would form. The cold was like a wall, solid and deadly, and we had to just keep on walking through it.

I carried the bundle of rope wound around my shoulder. And Angelica had brought a torch and a miner's light to fix around her head. Even so, the line of light on the path ahead seemed so feeble, the dark so huge. I hoped Angelica had brought lots of batteries.

We were going up now, and I could feel my breathing getting thinner. It was hard to reach the bottom of my lungs with a big breath, so I just breathed quickly in short pants. It made me smile, that – it was the first joke I ever remembered hearing – breath coming in ‘short pants'. I glanced over at Angelica to share it with her, but her face was so concentrated, staring down at the snow, and anyway, the joke would get lost in the translation.
Pantaloni corti
just didn't have the same ring.

I kept trying to think about other things, silly things; I didn't want to think about the end of our journey.

I looked at my watch: 11 pm. We'd been walking for an hour. It seemed like ten.

I remembered going for trips in the car with Mum and Dad, driving for hours up the coast. I couldn't wait to get to the beach and hop on my surfboard. The driving always seemed so useless, this boring space in between the real things in life. ‘How long till we get there?' I'd ask every few minutes.

Now, the journey was everything. I was aware of every movement, how the path cleared for a moment, becoming stony and hard, and then it would slope and soften with a mattress of snow. The air was still, the wind had dropped, and clouds hung motionless in the sky like great frozen snowballs. There were no stars.

Later, the moon rose. The snowy ground broke and scattered into a million cells of light. I saw ice hanging in long frozen teardrops from the leaves of trees.

The climb was growing steeper and ahead of us was a small hill of snow.

‘We'll go across, climbing sideways,' Angelica panted, and she spread out her feet. I followed, but I had to go on all fours some of the way and the snow bit through my gloves, stinging my hands.

I looked up and saw Angelica stop. She stood still on the crest of the hill. Her body was rigid. Alarm shot through me.

And then, as I climbed to the top, I saw it. Only a metre away, shaggy in the moonlight, stood a wolf. Its yellow eyes were fixed wide in the torchlight. I could see a strand of saliva dangling from its open jaws, hardening into frost before it hit the ground.

This was like all the fairy tales I'd ever read – the snow, the cold, the wolf.

The creature took a step forward. I could hear Angelica breathe. The wolf was huge. Its great head blocked out the moon, cutting off the light.

Any minute now my whole life would flash before me. If only we had known about the wolf, I wouldn't have needed to struggle and dream and remember. I only need to be faced with death, and I wake up. Completely.

Why do I have all these useless thoughts when I'm in danger? I thought of Pig Rogers, and how I'd just stood there spouting fairy tale guff at him. And then I remembered the fire.

Flames could scare wolves.

But Angelica was inching forward. Closer to the wolf.

‘Angelica,' I hissed. ‘
Wait
.'

‘
Stai zitto
, be quiet!' she hissed back. The moonlight hit her face for a second and I saw her eyes glittering.

She took another step, and the wolf stayed still. Its eyes were locked on her. I could hear her crooning something, her voice was soft and low like a lullaby and she took another step. Now she was moving fluidly, barely perceptibly, nearer to the wolf. She was only a few centimetres away when she stretched out her hand and touched its nose. Her hand glided, unchecked, as if through air and the rest of her body walked into the wolf and past it, and the shaggy shape with the jaws and the yellow eyes dissolved into the dark like a cloud being swept away by wind.

I scrambled up to meet Angelica. We hugged, trembling.

‘How did you know?'

‘I didn't.' She stepped back. Her eyes smiled. ‘I guessed. Another Lucrezia illusion, no? Perhaps she's showing us what she can do before we meet her.'

‘And
then
she'll kill us.'

Angelica shrugged. ‘Let's get going. We'll freeze standing still.' She looked at her watch. ‘I think, roughly, we've only got another forty-five minutes to walk.' She shone the torch onto the ground. There was a slight clearing to our left, stretching up the slope.

‘There's the path, come on.'

Angelica looked about as fazed as if we'd only made a road stop for coffee. Her eyes were still glittering, as if she had some kind of tropical fever, but we certainly weren't in the tropics. It's amazing how panic only takes a second to build up, like a fire igniting dry kindling, but it takes hours to wind down. My heart was still thumping away, and as I watched Angelica stalking swiftly over the snow, a new uneasiness – like a seeping puddle under the panic – grew and spread.

Angelica had that curious energy again, you could see it in the overly wide steps she took, the way she swung her arms as she walked. She couldn't wait to get there, she was like me on those long car trips to the surf. Only we weren't going to the beach. Wolves didn't worry her, attempted assassinations were no cause for concern: her whole being was focused on arrival and she was so excited she was like a kettle about to sing.

I didn't like it. I could feel my own steps slowing down, heavy with dread. The chestnut tree, the villa, the grave. We were headed toward them, and Angelica was out of control. It was a quick, guilty thought, brief as a wind gust. She dealt with the wolf, didn't she? Yes, but it was a lucky guess, and she was brave; brave like madmen who think they are gods.

Suddenly, I heard a scream. It was long and low, and it seemed to hollow out as it faded, like something dropping down from a cliff. I looked up. Angelica and the torchlight were gone.

The sudden dark was total. It was like being swallowed up. A tidal wave of panic hit me and I started to shake. I ran toward the sound and then I stopped and practically took on roots. As far as I could make out in the moonlight the ground fell away a few centimetres from my feet. If I'd taken two more steps I'd have fallen. There was a deep crevasse directly below and at the bottom, shining the torch weakly up toward me, was the dim shape of Angelica.

‘Are you all right?' I shouted.

‘Ssh!' she hissed back. ‘Don't scream, there could be an avalanche.'

If possible, my panic worsened. I remembered one of Virginia Westhead's miserable newsflashes. ‘The worst avalanches occur in powder snow, where the slightest movement, a gust of wind or even a voice, can set off the rolling tumbling clouds of snow that cover villages in minutes.' Thanks, Virginia.

If we couldn't even shout, how were we going to get Angelica out of there? I crouched down and carefully leant over the edge. Clumps of snow crumbled near my feet and drifted silently down into the darkness.