Giant Cold Page 3

  When you peep out, you see, for miles on either side, the lines of birds riding the same good wind. On the first day you pass a huge country to your left, and remember that somewhere there, far out of sight, is a forest by a southern sea, with a cottage in the middle and a path trampled through the trees to the shoreline. By dusk that country has ended in a ragged coast and a scatter of islands, and next day there is only sea. The day after, the same, and the days after that. One empty ocean, wrinkled with waves.

  Only the colour changes, pales, brightens. Grey becomes green becomes blue. Grimness begins to glitter, glitter to sparkle. The air, which when you started smelt of winter on the way, is now soft and warm. In this warmth the looby starts to moult.

  At night, lying between sleep and waking, listening to the drumbeat of the wings, you begin to think with dread of what you are going to find at Apple Island. The scholar’s book said it did not know with what ruin the giant would come there, but you can begin to guess. You have seen how his frost scorched the summer trees. You have seen how he made a wall of ice in the water. If he could do that by passing by, what will he do when he stays?

  And how will you face the huge cold of his presence? You have only the warmth of your own life, less than a spark, with which to fight that.

  So, as the down loosens from the looby’s skin, you gather it feather by feather. You unravel your blanket into threads, tying one to each feather-stem in a loop which will fit over your head and hang there, layer upon layer, many feathers thick, a cloak of down, your armour against the arrows of cold. That done, you make two slippers of down, and a hat—three dozen feathers tied at the topknot. You store all these among the still firm layers of the looby’s outer plumage.

  On the sixth dawn you are woken by the loobies’ excited honking, only a few voices at first but then, all along the lines, a long wild clamour.

  Peer out to see the cause.

  There! Can it be that, straight ahead on the far horizon, that glittering spark?

  It might be only the night’s last star, setting as the world rolls east, but for a while it seems to grow stronger as the sun rises, and then it goes out. It must be an island, reflecting the sunrise.

  The whoop of the birds dies into silence and you worm your way back into shelter, not to rest but to do what you can to get ready, looping your cloak into place, as much of it as you have room for in the narrow space, and gathering the rest into two ordered piles which you can snatch up in a moment. Then wait.

  Now the crying breaks out, but with a different note. “Alarm, fear,” cry the voices, clear as speaking. Peer out again as the birds bank wide to spiral down.

  There it is, the island, the mountain soaring like a vast white sail from the ice-floes around it, one glaring pinnacle, furious white in the sun, ice-blue in the shadows of ravines and cliffs. Blinding snow down to the shoreline and then, miles out into the blue southern sea, the flat and crackled floes lying white with winter.

  Yes, Giant Cold has come with ruin to Apple Island.

  Honking amazement, squawking terror, the loobies spiral down to settle along the line where once the soft waves lapped the beaches. They stalk to and fro. They crane and peer and try to peck as though the food they need was lying there, invisible. Their necks rise into a forest and jerk up and down, red, but becoming purple, becoming blue with cold. They cannot stay here or they will die.

  But wait! Stay still! If you jump down now, one of those gobbling beaks will grab you. Crouch, ready, breathing the bitter air.

  Along the old shoreline rises the wail of loss. Grief echoes from ice-hung crags. Tired wings stretch for flight. Wait.

  Now! As they rise, leap through the buffeted air. Trust to your lightness, your smallness, to the buoying feathers of your cloak. Drift slowly down until you land light as snow back on the ice. Not one bird has stayed, but a storm of their moulted down floats past you on the gusty wind.

  Quick, before the cold grips you too tight to move, put on the rest of your cloak, slipping loop after loop over your head, layer above layer of feathers, wall yourself in with their softness and whiteness, hold your spark of heat close, your life safe. Step into your slippers of down, pull the hat down over your head, and now stand, shuddering but safe, fluffed like a winter bird, nursing your tiny flame, the only living warmth in this winter island.

  You have crossed the huge ocean. You have cheated Giant Cold. And just like the sailor, the looby who helped you do these things never knew.

  Well begun is half done, or so they say. Could you ever have come so far, by such strange accidents, if something had not been helping you, something that did know, something that is calling you, louder and clearer, saying “Come”?

  It calls from the mountain. Turn and stare at that rearing height. Do not be afraid. A week ago, Apple Island was impossibly far, but today you stand on its shore. Now the mountain is impossibly high, but you are going there. Somehow.

  THE MOUNTAIN

  The wind knows nothing at all. It simply blows, steady along the warm ocean. Reaching the bitter floes, it shudders and hesitates, but it can’t stop blowing. So now it comes on in eddies, sudden gusts and lulls, this way and that, whipping across the ice, not knowing that it does so. As you stand gazing at the mountain, a gust slashes in, picks you up, tumbles, bundles, buffets, whirls, hurls, twirls, spins you weightless as thistle-seed up and inland, and then drops you dizzy and gasping somewhere else.

  Where?

  In a street, in a winter city.

  Inside the big gateway. These houses were never built for such a season. There are no eaves on the roofs, no gutters from which the icicles might hang. But the icicles are there, glittering where they dangle from the white loops of trellised vines, from awnings, from verandahs and porches and arcades which were built to screen these people from the steady sun.

  Yes, there are people. A sentry under the gateway arch stands frozen at his place. On the gate turret five soldiers and a bugler stand frozen by the flagpole, and the flag they were raising hangs halfway up, too stiff for the wind to flutter. Inside the gateway stand frozen citizens, with baskets and hoes, and a donkey frozen between the shafts of a cart, all ready to go out to the fields when the trumpet blew and the gates opened. But Giant Cold came first, marching out of the sea, and struck them to stillness.

  He froze the prince of this city in his palace, still asleep, and the sleeping courtiers, and their servants lounging, yawning to start the day, and the merchants at their breakfasts, and the farmers and peasants at work among the orchards. He sucked their warmth from them and froze them fast, fixed all in their places until the sun goes out and time ends. What power can fight such power? What fire can melt such cold, when even the sun—the year-long summer sun of Apple Island—cannot make a single drop of water fall from any icicle that hangs along these roofs? What can your faint warmth do?

  Well, it is all you have. You must begin.

  How? Where?

  Not here. There is no help here, from this prince or these people.

  How? By going on.

  Where? Somewhere high on the mountain.

  The white peak soars above the walls, above the turret, above the frozen soldiers and their frozen flag. Somehow with your inchling steps, you must climb that height.

  Across the blue snow-shadow under the gateway lies a glaring bar of white, where the sun dazzles in beneath the closed gate. Walk past the sentry, past the guardhouse. You are so small you need not even duck beneath the timber of the gate. Walk out of gloom into brilliance.

  The wind has been waiting. A gust snatches you up like a forgotten toy, juggles you between invisible paws, whirls you on its thoughtless way, which for the moment is your way too.

  But you cannot leave it all to the wind. You must learn to ride it, use it, learn how to shape yourself so that it lets you fall whenever it starts to drive in the wrong direction. Then learn how
to climb to some good place and cling there until the wind changes its mindless mind and the right gust comes to pick you up, play with you, toss you head over heels, this way and that, while you shape yourself to make the best of it, so that bit by bit it carries you on and up, up and on, the way you have chosen. Ride the good wind, whirl with it. Go.

  On and up until the city seems a small white toy by the shore, and far out across the floes you can see the blue curve where the ice ends and the tropic sea takes over. That is the frontier of Giant Cold’s empire, and you are going to its centre, its throne, the heart of its power. You are going to find and face Giant Cold himself.

  For now, sometimes, wind-lifted, you glimpse far up ahead, a black gash in the white peak. There, you know. In there.

  You know, but the wind does not. It is always forgetting, eddying, trying to dash off in some new direction, and you have to make it drop you. You need to be lucky to find good landing places. The mountain is not smooth. It is cliffs, it is crags, it is glaciers and dark ravines and crevasses. You need to be lucky, you need to be clever, how you fall, where you cling, when you let go. If the wind blew smooth, it would float you out to sea, and no amount of luck or cleverness would save you. But Giant Cold himself is your helper now, though he does not know it. It is his power that rumples the wind where it meets the frontier of ice, roughens it, forces it into swirls and eddies as it comes on, so that you can choose your moment, wait out the wrong gusts, go with the right ones, never quite straight, this way and that, but in the end not the wind’s way, yours.

  Ride up the mountain then. By luck and trust and cunning, climb that impossible height.

  At last, past noon, when the sun is beginning to swing down the western sky, you let the wind drop you before the strange black slit you glimpsed from below. It is the mouth of a cave. Huge. Even at your proper size, you would shiver and feel small in front of its vastness. The piled snowdrifts at its entrance do not begin to close it. Icicles tall as ten men spear down from its arch. Inside, total dark.

  Inch up the long drifts till you stand at their summit, on the border between whiteness and blackness. Outside the white mountain, the white city, tiny with distance, the white floes and the far blue sea and sky. Inside, night and no stars. Inch down into that night.

  No dark is ever as black within as it seemed when you stood and looked at it from the light. Brightness streams over your shoulders, glimmers off the snow slope at your feet, reflects in faint glitters from crystal and icicle deep inside the cave. But there is something else. Far ahead across the black rock floor stretches a vast pale dimness. At first it seems like more snowdrifts, blown somehow all that distance in. It is hummocked and rounded like drifts, but its paleness seems to glow from itself, very faint, like moonlight from behind clouds.

  What is it? A shape too enormous to understand, gleaming faintly like the dimmest moonlight, vaguer and larger as you creep across the rock towards it. Not snowdrift.

  And cold! Before you reach it, you feel the chill beaming out from it, colder than anything even in this frozen island, piercing almost through your layer on layer of down, rays of frost, trying to shrivel your small warmth away, whispering, “Be still. Die the death of ice. Be nothing. Forever.”

  Hard to your touch too. Smooth. Pale as palest stone, as marble. Not stone.

  Pace down beside its length, beside the long, smooth, faint-glowing curved surface. At last the smoothness changes, is shaped into hummocks and wrinkles, is gashed sideways with three deep clefts which end between four smooth and gleaming ovals, one above the other, made of some other stuff you seem never to have seen before. Beyond the ovals, further into the cave, another paleness, a cliff of the first stuff stretches away, endless. Stare at the ovals and wrinkles. You have seen … where … when …

  A hand! In a blink of the mind, you know what you are seeing. The ovals are fingernails; the clefts, the spaces between the fingers; the wrinkles and hummocks, knuckles. A hand the size of a castle wall. What you came to first was the forearm. The pale cliff beyond is a thigh. The limbs of a naked giant, lying on his back in the cave at the heart of the mountain, dreaming his dream of ice. You have found him. What now?

  Remembering your own dream (if it was a dream) long ago in the cottage, you walk back up beside the arm. You count the paces. Four of yours make up an inch. Fifty about a foot. Twelve hundred take you to the crook of the elbow, and the same to the inward curve that marks the shoulder. The wind in the cavern mouth whistles between the icicles, a lullaby of frost, and the great head lies dreaming before you, too huge to know, to compare with any head you may have known and loved in this world and life, or any other world and life, distant and different. But in the dream, a gold thing crept across a pillow and you knew it was going towards the ear.

  There the ear hangs, house-high above you, gleaming with ice-light among the stiff curls of hair and beard. That is your gateway, where the gold invader came and you must follow. If you wished to turn back now, you could not, the calling is so strong. “Come. Come soon. Come now.”

  Grasp among the strong curls, climb by those tangled rungs, wrestle your way up, gasping, panting, till you can reach with a long step sideways the first ledge of the ear; stretch and heave up onto the next; and then once more, to stand at the entrance, the tunnel.

  There is no sign to show that it was this way the gold thing came, no footprint, no trail of slime. But the way is certain. Far within the body of the giant, you sense a quiver of waiting. Waiting for you, and no one else.

  You have this last choice. Do you dread? Do you dare?

  You dread, but it is no choice. You must dare.

  Into the tunnel.

  In.

  THE SPARK

  No air stirs.

  No breathing in or out.

  Total cold, too cold for any movement. Only you, creeping on.

  Still the dim glimmer flows from the shadowless walls of the tunnel, lighting your next few steps, a little further, always a little further through the windings. Nothing looks or feels like the flesh of any creature that has ever lived. It is all as if Giant Cold himself is a mountain, one that has lain in its place since the very beginnings, and these tunnels were cut by the fires in which the world was born. All dead now, that fire. Only ice, only your own hoarded warmth to fight it, the unimaginably trivial flame of your life, creeping on.

  Here is a cavern floored with a frozen pool. Three separate darknesses mark three tunnels leaving it, but still your choice is clear, the call you hear certain. “This way,” it says.

  Wait. You will be coming back. Perhaps then you will hear no calling to show you the way out. You will find yourself lost forever in the maze of ice. You must leave a sign. What?

  Ah, yes. You can spare a feather. Unloop it, lay it against the wall, breathe out a moist warm puff of your own breath to freeze it there, a furry arrow, pointing the way back. Now you can go on.

  And on. The maze seems endless. The places of choice come again and again, but always it is no choice because your way is already chosen for you. It seems as if your whole journey has been like this. With all its strange windings, it was still the only way you could come, once you had made that first choice—to come at all. Giant Cold could march straight as a ray of light across forest and ocean, but the only path for you was the crooked one, by way of the scholar’s house, by way of the sailor’s bottle, by way of the looby’s back, by way of the wind. It was all needed. Vast though Giant Cold is, you at your full size could never have walked among these tunnels—you had to be made small. If the sailor had not kept you those months in his bottle, how could you have come to Haskilly and climbed its cliffs on the very morning that the loobies took flight? How could the looby have carried you, how could the wind have whirled you up the mountain, if your weight had been more than a scrap? So it was all fixed and certain, the only way for you to come to this calling.

  The cold
deepens. Hurry, but not so fast, not so eager that you forget to pause at each place of choosing, unloop another feather, and freeze it to the wall with your breath, to point you the path of your return.

  Oh, but the cold!

  As it deepens, as you peel away your armour of down, your guarded warmth begins to leak out. Teeth clatter a rattle of warning as the ice invades. Like an army moving into an enemy city, the soldiers of cold work inward through your streets, taking you over house by house. Feet stumble on beneath, no feeling in them, no signals from them, no longer belonging. Mind’s commands cannot get through. But something still fights there. Though all the city seems lost, something resists the merciless ice soldiers, making the numb feet stumble on. And the citadel—mind, will, soul—is yours.

  No choices anymore, only the calling. All but frozen through, all but locked into the dream of cold like the people of the city, you feel the last ember of warmth in you glow to the breath of that calling, burning away, but giving numb limbs strength to stumble on.

  And when you fall, to crawl …

  And look, you have arrived! You are there! Here!

  This is the place, this cave, this cell, this golden centre.

  This is where all the live warmth of the island has been sucked to, fire stolen from hearths, life stolen from bodies, summer drawn down from leaves and out of sea and air, all stored in this chamber, this hollow place, the heart of the mountain, the heart of the giant.

  A gold thing crouches at its centre, glowing, wrapped and coiled into itself under the shell it is growing. You can see through the shell, it is still so thin, see how the thing huddles into itself, head bent between knees, arms curled close, as it hugs itself into its stolen warmth and waits for the shell to grow round it so that it can be safe forever.