I do not know how many hours I lay there, alternatively feeling anger and despair, sometimes commending myself to my Lord and Savior, for I expected to die before nightfall, sometimes railing against the men who had so cruelly abandoned me. At last, I lost consciousness from cold, fatigue, and hunger. I had no voice left with which to curse my fate or beg for mercy. My last memory is of the bright northern sky above, the glittering plains of ice around, and two word descending from the heavens as though spoken by God himself. I clearly remember that they were You fool!
When next I woke, I found myself in a room—not the cabin of a ship, but a proper room, although somewhat rough, with thick beams overhead. I could feel that I was lying down, and that I was warm. Indeed, I soon found, when I sat up a little, that I was in a bed under a wool blanket, and that the room was spacious, with dark wood furniture and a wide hearth on which a hearty fire was burning.
Where was I? What good angel had brought me here? Whoever he was, he had saved me from certain death.
For some minutes I lay still, wondering, then attempted to rise—but I could not. My head immediately began to spin, and my limbs to tingle as though I were a pincushion, with a thousand pins stuck into me. Indeed, the pain was so great that I once again lost consciousness, but before I did, it seemed to me that an angel came into the room, with a halo of black hair braided around her head, and eyes as gentle and kind as your own, Margaret, although brown rather than gray. She looked down upon me and said something I could not understand, then held a cup to my mouth, from which I drank—and remembered no more.
When I woke again, she was sitting in a chair beside the fireplace, reading a book of some sort. She heard me stir and looked up. By her dress, she was a servant—it was a simple red tunic over loose trousers, such as peasant women sometimes wear in Russia, embroidered at the neck and on the cuffs and hem.
“How are you feeling today?” she asked. To my astonishment, she spoke in English—heavily accented, but nevertheless English! She walked to my bedside and looked down at me—hers were the eyes I remembered from my dream, hers the braid of black hair. This woman, young and beautiful, was my good angel.
“Well, thank you,” I said. I was startled by the sound of my own voice, which emerged as a hoarse whisper, as though I had not used it in a long time. I had a fit of coughing then, and she held my head while I drank from the cup that had been placed on a table at my bedside. Her hands were gentle, although they held me firmly, and I felt that she was an angel indeed. She did not look like our English notion of an angel—her complexion was what we call olive and associate with the classically Greek, while her eyes turned upward at the corners, like those of a Turkish houri. Nevertheless, I divined it was she who had nursed me through my illness. But who had rescued me from the ice and brought me to this house? It could not have been this delicate maiden. Such a rescue must have taken a team of intrepid men. I must find out to whom I owed my gratitude.
“If you will take me to your master,” I said, “or perhaps your mistress, I will express my thanks for the care that has been taken of me. I do not know how I got here or how long I have been your patient, but someone has saved me from a dreadful fate, and I would like—”
“I am the only mistress here,” she said, smiling with what seemed like amusement. “And at present, the only master. My father, who rescued you from the ice, is not expected back for some weeks. You may express your gratitude when he returns. You have been here a month, mostly under the influence of laudanum, my own formulation of it, while you recovered from exposure and dehydration. You will not remember most of that time. And there is no possibility of you getting out of bed, not today or anytime soon. No, don’t try to get up—” for I had been in the process of attempting to rise, not aware that I was dressed only in a nightshirt. “I just gave you another dose of the drug. You will be asleep within a few minutes.”
That is how I first met Aila, although I did not know her name until later. I was under the influence of the drug for some weeks after—there are days I remember only from moments or perhaps an hour of lucidity. Even now, I blush to think of how she must have cared for me during that time, bathing me, attending to the needs of my body—I vaguely recollect a chamber pot under the bed. And the conversations we had, in which she listened with interest to my accounts of England and my voyages, although she often had to depart before I was finished to perform her household duties. Is it any wonder that I grew to love her, that sweet maid whom I shall never see again? She told me that I had almost lost both legs and one hand to the terrible cold. It was only her ministrations, I am convinced, that kept me a whole man—except two toes on my left foot and my right pinky finger, which could not be saved. You have likely noticed that my handwriting is even more of a scrawl than when Mr. Parsons used to lecture me about it. Do you remember that we called him Parsley-face? You are fortunate, dear sister, that you did not have to listen to the lectures of a tutor, and were put under the guidance of Miss Elliott instead. What a pretty singing voice she had, although a rather large nose, and how nicely she danced! But no woman is a match for my lost angel, my beautiful Aila.
As the days went by, from her answers to my questions, for she never spoke much but answered with amused tolerance, I pieced together her history. She lived in that house with her father, but had not always lived there. The master of the house, who had rescued me from my terrible predicament, was a European, cast out from society for some sin or crime she did not specify. By her account, he was a great explorer, and had performed inhuman feats—climbing mountains no man had climbed, venturing into the inhospitable North farther than any man has yet ventured. At the time, I assumed these exaggerated claims arose from her evident love for her father, which I found admirable. In his journeys through the wilderness, he had encountered the reindeer herders of Lappland, who lived all year in their tents and wander here and there over the high tundra. There he met and fell in love with a woman, the chieftess of her people. By Aila’s account, she was as strong and courageous as her father, but more steady of character. One day, when I was more lucid than usual, because I was beginning to heal and she had lowered my daily dose of the drug, I begged her to tell me more.
“All right,” she said, putting down her book—when she entered my room, she was generally carrying a book of some sort, or some implement I could not identify, perhaps for cookery. I could not tell what that day’s tome was from the name on the spine, since it was in Hebrew and my education, as you know, stopped at Latin. “I will tell you, if only to stop you from asking interminable questions. I cannot always be attending to you, now that you are getting better. I have my own work. But this once, because I know that otherwise you will not stop asking.”
She sat down on the side of my bed—today her tunic was yellow, with the same embroidered patterns, or similar, but I do not have a woman’s eye for such fine work—paused for a moment, then began.
“I did not know my mother long,” she said. “I was only seven years old when she died, defending our herd from southern hunters. Every year they would come for the sport of hunting the reindeer, from Norway, Sweden, Denmark … Every year our tribe guarded and defended our herd. It was more than our source of milk, meat, fur. It was a part of our tribe, and my mother told me that sometimes a person who had died would return as a reindeer, or the other way around. Her own grandmother, a shaman during her lifetime, had been reborn as a leader of the herd, a large female with antlers that grew each autumn like the spreading branches of a tree.
“I asked her how she had met my father, who was obviously not of our people, with his pale face, his long limbs. Our people are short and compact, to conserve heat in winter, at the latitude where we dwell.
“She told me that one day, she had ridden out upon the tundra to find a pregnant female who had wandered away from the herd. She had given birth during the night in a ditch, and wolves had come—five of them, a small pack. The female was o
bviously sick—that was probably why she had wandered off. She could not care for her calf, who was staggering about, crying for milk. My mother could have fought off the wolves, but she could not do that, and protect the calf, and save the mother at the same time. She did not know what to do. That is when my father appeared at the top of the ditch—he had heard her shouting at the wolves, which often frightens them. But this pack was not frightened off. The three females had begun circling my mother, while the two males approached the calf. My father would have killed the wolves with his bare hands, but she told him to stop and leave them be. He did not understand our language, not then, but her gestures were clear, and he obeyed them. She could see that one of the female wolves had just given birth—her dugs were hanging down. The wolves needed food as much as the reindeer, as much as the tribe itself. The calf’s mother was obviously too sick to survive. She told my father to keep back the wolves and, as gently as she could, she cut the female’s throat, telling her to come back soon and be reborn as a member of the tribe.
“‘Perhaps you are that reindeer, Aila,’ she once said to me. ‘Perhaps she blessed me for saving her child by becoming mine.’”
Aila was silent for a moment, perhaps considering the notion that she was a reindeer reborn—primitive tribes often have these sorts of ideas, which may seem ridiculous to civilized Europeans, but help them understand the world in the absence of science or theology. Then she continued. “They left the mother for the wolves, and my father carried the calf back to our tents. That was their first meeting. You will meet him soon,” she said, glancing at me. “My father. He returns within a few days. Do not be startled when you see him. I used to think that he was ugly because he was European—I thought all of you looked like him. Since I have learned about Europeans from reading their books, I have realized that he would be considered an ugly man anywhere. You are shocked that I speak so of my own father, but you will see—even as a child I knew there was something wrong with his appearance, although his heart is more tender and loving than most.
“But my mother did not consider him ugly. To her, he was beautiful—for his strength, his compassion. She was the chief of our tribe—her father had been chief before her, and his aunt before him. Her brothers and uncles were worried when she chose a foreigner to be her husband, but when they saw how hard he could work, how impervious he was to any hardship, and how quickly he learned our languages, they respected her choice. My parents loved each other with a tenderness that I believe is rare, for any couple.
“For some years, they did not have a child—my father told me that he feared he would never be able to have one. But at last I was born. I spent my first seven years with the tribe, sleeping in our tent, running over the tundra, learning the plants there, the signs that foretold weather, the ways of the reindeer. And I would have remained there all my life, perhaps becoming chief myself someday, or following the path of a shaman. But that summer the southern hunters came early, in larger numbers than usual—a Prussian count and his party wanted game. They paid a high price for the best guides and trackers. My father was away on one of his journeys—he could not keep from wandering in the wilderness, and my mother did not try to stop him. He assumed we would be safe until later in the season.
“I was not there when she was shot—she had left me safely back in our tent. But I was there when my uncles carried her back, still alive although dying from wounds we could not heal. There is no herb that will help against a gunshot.
“‘Aila,’ she said to me. ‘Remember that I will always love you. When you look up at the stars at night, my spirit will be there, watching you, until one day it will be reborn again. I think this time I would like to come back as a wolf … But you, grow up strong and brave, my daughter. And take care of your father. He is strong but he has wounds on the inside, close to his heart—wounds that will never heal. When I die, he will have another one. He will need a reason to continue living. You must be that reason.’
“And then she died. Three days later, my father returned, in time to place her body on the funeral pyre. ‘Aila,’ he said to me after her funeral, ‘there is something I must do. I will return soon.’ It was three months before he returned again.”
“Where did he go?” I asked, for she had paused in her narrative. I thought she might have forgotten I was there altogether—she seems so lost in her own story.
She looked up, as though mentally returning to my sickroom. Then, she smiled. “Even in England, you must have heard of the death of Count von Schmetterling. It was notorious for its gruesome and inexplicable nature—the count was found both drowned and strangled, at the top of a tower that had not been entered since medieval times. He was found only because his horse was tied to an iron ring at its base. The key to the tower had been lost long ago, and it was evident that the door had not been opened for centuries—its hinges were so rusted that it had to be removed entirely before the local magistrate could enter. Under those circumstances, no suspicion could attach to anyone—a supernatural agency was clearly indicated, and rumors circulated of a family curse. His window inherited his estate and is, I have heard, very happy with her second husband.” She seemed amused by this terrible account, which made the hairs on my neck stand up and sent shivers down my spine.
Something was beginning to stir in my mind, a memory and a supposition. Perhaps if I had not spent weeks in the Lethe of laudanum, I would have put it all together sooner—perhaps, Margaret, you have guessed where my letter is leading already. You were always good at puzzles and parlor games. But I merely stared at Aila, uncertain what to do with this information.
“Finally, my father returned,” she said. “He told me that he could no longer stay with the tribe. There were too many sad memories for him there, too many painful recollections. But I could, if I wished it. I could stay with my mother’s people, my aunts and uncles and cousins, learning the ways of the tribe and the reindeer. Or I could go with him, to a house he had built long ago on the coast of Spitsbergen. There he would teach me as best he could, as he had taught himself. But it was my choice to make.
“I remembered my mother’s words—that he would need a reason to continue living, and I could be that reason. ‘I will go with you, father,’ I said. So he brought me here, where I have grown and learned, alone except for him, when he is here. There is a village where we go for supplies, but it is three days from here by cart in summer or sleigh in winter, so I do not go often.”
I took her hand. “You do not have to be alone any longer, lovely Aila. In these weeks I have grown to love you dearly. You are my sweet angel, a natural gentlewoman to match any in Europe. Come back to England and be my wife. I know my sister, Margaret, will welcome you into her household. And I will make a good husband for you. I will love and care for you as you deserve.”
She looked at me with astonishment, then burst out laughing. “You take care of me? You cannot even take care of yourself. What would I do with a husband who goes off on useless and impractical journeys into the northern snows, who cannot wipe his own behind for a month at a time? You are not the husband for me, Robert Walton.”
“Well, that is good to hear!”
Whose voice was that? It echoed through the room and into the depths of my consciousness. And then I knew what voice—not God’s but the devil’s—had said You fool! on the ice.
It was he, the fiend and murderer of my friend Victor, his nameless creation—the monster.
“You!” I shouted. I believe I would have launched myself at him, despite his superior size and strength, if I were capable of doing so. But in my weakened state, all I could do was glare at his hideous countenance—still crossed by scars, still the pale yellow of a corpse. How could any woman, even one from a primitive tribe, who had never learned the refinements of civilization, find beauty in such features? How could anyone love that?
“Hello, Papa,” said Aila, going to him and kissing him on the cheek. I shudde
red. My love for her did not die, would never die—not even such a gesture would kill it. But I could not bear the sight.
“Yes, it is I,” he said, with an expression of lurid glee—or so I supposed, for what else could that embodiment of malice be feeling? He was my rescuer—and now my tormentor! As he had been to Victor himself.
“I thought you had determined to destroy yourself in a conflagration at the North Pole,” I said, with contempt.
“That was my intention,” he said, with a smile—a ghastly smile, I should say, although it also seemed somehow sorrowful. “But there are few materials with which to conflagrate, at that cold and remote location, and in the end, I wanted to live. Life itself remained precious to me, even after all I had suffered—and I still retained the desire to experience the natural world, to understand mankind. So I lived and traveled, to see sights upon this Earth that you, with your frail mortal body, shall never witness, Walton. To marry the best and most courageous woman who ever walked this Earth, and father a child that even you, with your limited, provincial mind, cannot help admiring, although you understand only a small portion of her worth. But she is not for you. It’s time for you to return to your home in England. And God help me, if you ever set foot above latitude sixty degrees north again, I will strangle you myself, which is better than you deserve for all the trouble you cause. As soon as I heard in Archangel that you were back for another of your foolish voyages, I knew where it would end—and in truth, perhaps I should have left you there! I am only glad that the rest of your crew managed to make it back safely, once the ice broke. Aila, can he be ready to travel tomorrow?”
Miscreations Page 30
