Presently her way began to narrow. There was a gap in the mountains, through which the wind howled, and on the odier side the V-gaps between the black pentagonal slabs were filled by hanging glaciers. At diis spot was a stony rise, down which flowed many milky streams which Freydis must
now cross. Thrusting her staff into the water for balance, she strode from stone to stone, grunting like a bear as she shifted her weight.
She slept in a wretched spot, a sandy hollow surrounded by dark tombstonelike boulders, behind which was an icefall. There were bear-prints in the sand. At night the sand hissed in the wind, blowing in her face, and the sun glared at her from atop a row of black mountains. As the skin-tent fluttered, so her heart beat in the wind. - In the morning it was very cold. Mica sparkled in the sand. The sky was clear, but a white cloud hung over every icefall that she could see. As she prepared to go on her way she heard a rumbling noise, and then the steady deliberate rhythm of something heavy walking dovm the mountainside on boulders. Her heart pounded. But she could see nothing. She searched behind the boulders and found a cave formed by a pile of grim black rocks. In front of this lay the vertebrae and ribs of some small animal, dislocated from the carcass and left immaculate.
Whiteness andWind-Voices
As the valley continued to slope upward, the greenish-white streams between the gravel-bars became wider and wider. Litde white points of foam danced in them where they struck rock, but this whiteness was not of the same character as the whiteness of the icefalls and tumble-block glaciers on the cliflfs around her, for while the stream-foam had about it the lightness of motion and seemed less chilly than it was, the ice was dirty, blue-white, massive and very still. At some time it, too, might well move, but that Freydis did not want to see. - Mount Blauserk reared ahead, an ominous blue tower of ice. - Now she must traverse steep sand dunes overlooking the river, and sometimes the sand was beset with funnel-holes down to the melting ice beneath, and the wind ruflOled the water on the big green river and chilled her as she walked. It often seemed to her that she heard voices in the wind: - sometimes the laughing talk of two women, other times a man's whisded tune, but the melody proved always to be the cries of birds, and where the women's voices came from she could never tell. The crumpled icefalls were motionless and blue.
Next she had to ford waist-deep rivers, which task she did not love at all, but even though her likeness was uncarved in her father's bench-boards she was well aware that she could not change her fate. The water refreshed her feet at first, but by degrees those went numb, and so also her legs, until she could no longer feel the bottom beneath her save as a ship's mast in
Gore-Month knows the ice that girdles it. Therefore she grabbed widi her pole for hidden pits of stumbling; she hen-stepped along with locked knees; but her pole bent and trembled and the current forced her knees apart and turned her downstream. She knew that if she were pulled down she would likely be killed, so at last she had to back out and stand on die bank shivering, rest a moment, and then go upriver or downriver, to a wider place or a place where there were whitecaps, which meant boulders that she might be able to step on. When she forded one braid, there was always a rise of loose boulders, and then many more braids all green and silver in die sun. All around her she heard the loud and steady buzzing of the rivers, the rocks grinding together into sand, the humming starting and stopping abrupdy, changing pitch inexplicably. (In the clear creeks she often saw, caught between colored stones, the crescent of a leaf, which gleamed silver like a Skraeling's ulu blade, or blue like a mussel shell.) - Sometimes the rivers were green and sunny, and then she liked them, particularly when she was thirsty. They seemed calm, like grief smoothed away with gold. But in the evenings, when the runoff increased, the rivers whined and she could hear the boulders sing with the voices of drowned people, in a dim gravelly underwater chorus. Then poor Freydis was as scared as a child.
Again she slept, crowded by black dreams. The next morning was so cold that she dreaded to put on her damp shoes, which had become half-frozen overnight. The river gleamed golden in the sun, the mudflats orange. The great scarps, bastioned by piles of their own jagged debris, were softened by the snow upon them which rounded their peaks into shapes almost within the calculus of mercy. But ahead were other towers too steep for even ice to cling to. The landscape became one blue and orange jaggedness, scarcely reUeved by the few stretches of grass, moss, even flowers which Blue-Shirt contemptuously permitted to grow. And every meadow was blasted by grey lichen-frost.
Once again the pass narrowed, and its walls steepened until she was forced to descend into the wilderness of rocks just above the river-cliff, and the river breathed its chilly spray-breath and fog-breath on her until she was soaked to the skin. The boulder-edges she clung to cut her hands. The roar of the river was maddeningly loud. It pressed upon her like die weight of diat cold grey water, which would sweep her away with it if she were to fall. But she must go where her dreams led her. Her hand-holds were icy-wet from waterfalls. A cataract drenched her, and the cold made her ache to the bone. Meanwhile, though the sky was mild, a thin white mist of cloud covered it. The white roofs of the mountains now gleamed all the more splendidly. In the sand.
litde mica-grains shone more brightly now that they need not compete with the sun. White falls of water spilled down the cliff-rims from overhanging glaciers, to be lost in shadowy crevices from which no rainbow came, and then presently to reappear lower down, much stronger and wider as they rushed into the river that coursed so ruthlessly down toward the far-off Ice Sea, sliding around the sharp grey polygons of rocks, falling and leaping and making its sinister whitecaps; freezing, drowning and crushing all but the strongest who sought to cross it, killing even with its mist, chilling those who remained too long beside it; and yet it had no malice. - But Freydis thought that it did, because she saw others as she saw herself - In fact the river's only desire was to release itself from everything, rushing away and away and away, growing stronger and more fulfilled in itself the farther it went, until at last it was satiated in the loving coldness of the sea.
Presently a cruel rock rose in front of her, wet and icy. Freydis could not climb over it. Heartbreaking as it was, she must turn back through the jumble of frozen boulders, clinging to them with bleeding hands with the river grinding in her ears, until at last she found a way to climb a hill of dangerously unstable scree, and then, trembling a little (but only a little, because Freydis remained an exceedingly single-minded woman), to traverse a steep wall of sand which crumbled beneath her feet, with the river a good distance below, and always the crack of falling rock and ice about her; and the higher she got the more voices she could hear in the wind; and after clambering up a jumble of boulders she found herself upon a plateau at the foot of a single mountain that rose in many mad black columns, with the sun very white behind it, and the grey lichen now looked soft and welcoming to her, because it was the only thing that grew. Black boulders burst out of the earth with fractures like downtumed mouths. There was music in the wind. Hard cruel women were singing, women much harder and crueler than she. Their lyre was made of mountain-teeth. In their song she could hear only a few words - something about white witches over the sea. Beyond rose Blue-Shirt's peak, and it was shining hurtfully with the Ice-Lights.*
* "Some hold," says the Speculum Regale, "that fire circles about the ocean and all the bodies of water that stream about on the outer sides of the globe; and since Greenland lies on the outermost edge of the earth to the north, they think it possible that these lights shine forth fi-om the fires that encircle the outer ocean. Others have suggested that during the hours of night, when the sun's course is beneath the earth, an occasional gleam of its light may shoot up into the sky; for they insist that Greenland lies so far out on the earth's edge that the curved surface which shuts out the sunlight must be less prominent there. But there are still others who believe (and it seems to me not unlikely) that the fi-ost and the glaciers have become so powerful there that
they are able to radiate forth these flames" (xiX.150-1).
In the evening a wild hare, snow-colored, saw her from across a stream and was not afraid. Blue-Shirt Glacier was a pillar to mark her way. The sun wheeled round and round the mountains, making each snow-tip orange in turn, while the rocks fell and the ice shattered, instantaneously swelling the roar of waterfalls, and the creeks trickled and die tundra meadows moved scarcely a muscle in the wind. It was all unspeakably grand and beautiful. The world was still being created here.
Love-Song for Amortortak
Picking her way up a moraine of white boulders, through which a creek flowed, Freydis Eiriksdaughter clambered from stone to stone as if ascending stairs, and they endured her weight, though giving forth grating sounds. The sun was hot on her knees; the wind blew her hair in her face. Ahead of her the hillside steepened, and the glacier trough was littered with huge slabs resting on the river of smaller boulders, ready sometime to continue their tumble to the valley floor, as other rocks and ice-rocks did every few moments; and Freydis was a little daunted; but greed was her bravery, so she clambered along upon the slabs, and so continued. Mount Blauserk dancingly vanished and reappeared before her shining eyes. There were little hummocks of green grass and ankle-high trees on either side of her. Presently she came to the end of the slabs, at which the mountain steepened still fiirther, and she had her choice of a smooth inclined wall of stone streaked with black tracks of rockslides, or the scree of those slides, and after some thought she chose the scree because on it her feet were less likely to slip. The peak rose sharply ahead of her. It was in the shape of an «/«, and was called Ulu Peak by the Skraelings, although Freydis knew neither of these things. To the south of it was a sort of saddle joining it to another mountain; this saddle formed a steep hollow that glittered with stone and ice. Another stream was bom here, and made its cold and silvery way to the icebound river below.
At this spot Freydis took a stone in her hand and struck it against a boulder three times, calling on AMORTORTAK as she had seen the Skraelings do, for she knew that AMORTORTAK and Blue-Shirt were one and the same. - Nothing happened. - Crying loudly, ''AMORTORTAKr she struck the boulder again, this time with all her strength so diat the stone cut into her hand and a white flake chipped off the boulder and there was the smell of sulfur and ice fell from the rim of the western cliff and smashed upon a boulder with a terrifying sound, and then a drumming began from behind the hills which did not stop, day or night, until she found Him.
At the Foot of the Ice-Mountain
Now there was nothing but Blue-Shirt, Blue-Shirt, drumming in her blood; every beat of her heart was for Him because she had not possessed Him yet and coveted Him so badly that she was sick; and she rushed upward among the mountains faster than prudence would have advised, but was certain that she climbed charmed stairs of rocks that would not fall because He had called her in the Dream of Ice as He had called her father; so Freydis had faith. Now Mount Blauserk rose so high and close that it was like the sky. Boulders were heaped up against its ice-walls, and it was among these that she now wound her way. - Sometimes the rocksHdes were so old it seemed the very rocks were moldy, being covered with mounds of white lichen; occasionally even the Hchen was overgrown with moss and crowberries. - The drumming sounded fiercely in her ears. Whenever she stopped for a moment to lean gasping on her polestaff, the drumming grew louder still and then a boulder would roll past her down the mountainside. This made her uneasy. For awhile, therefore, she turned from the stream and walked upon the meadow, stepping from mound to mound of moss. Halfway up she came to a stone like a canted pyramid. It had an up-grinning mouth, so she knew that she was going in the right direction. - Here and there the turf was ripped up from rockslides. Huge boulders were sunken into the moss, and the earth around them was raw and wet. Ahead was the great blue Ice-Mountain, which became more vertical the closer she got to it. Little white chips of stone lay upon the moss. The Mountain was a busy place, and none of its business was for Freydis's good.
The sun lurked behind the western ridge, so that the valley was in shadow. The water had advanced considerably across the mud in the last day. Litde chunks of ice floated in it. Soon the bottom of the valley would be one vast riverbed. To the south she could still see the ice-sheet, but it was cracked and contracted now. Freydis felt so lonely that even that creaking waste of frozen ocean would have been as home to her now. - Ahead of her, the Mountain glowed in the sun that was too high to reach her. It was golden and magnificent and terrifying. (Most frightening would be if AMORTORTAK were not there; if No One were there.)
SfeuXCs and clouds
Now Freydis could see the way she must take if she would go on to her master. Above her, sky-high over Ulu Peak, the glaciers were cloud-roads.
hanging over the edges of mountains just far enough to tempt her, but to walk such a road (which she knew she would have to do) she must first climb a mountain of dirt and gravel, slipping as she went, the dirt crumbling away beneath her every step and hissing down to the river far below; and sometimes the rocks she stepped on slid away as well, making landslides as they rolled down to the river; and after this ordeal came the brittle glacier-edge that projected into space, wet beneath with icy stream-heads, and if Freydis were to go under it a piece might break off and fall on her, but if she went onto it it might break off beneath her weight and then she would fall down the cliff, down to the sunny green river to be shattered and drowned; so she must walk among the loose boulders alongside the glacier until she judged it solid to walk on; and even after that she must watch for soft spots and crevasses. But she had to do it. Blue-Shirt was all around her. - Freydis combed her hair, she fastened on her fur-lined woman's cloak, which had a hood of costly felt. She secured the cloak-ends at her right shoulder, with a fibula of gold. Then she bent her knee (to Whom you well can guess). - "At all events," thought she, "I have done what I can to succeed in my ends." - Sucking on this conclusion with satisfaction, she strode along until she saw a likely glacier that would take her past the grey slab-mountains rising above gravel-shoulders, and then, her resolution squared by a breath, she began to ascend. A shy half-moon was in the southern sky. The sun was in the west. Cloud-wisps supplicated the moon behind ridges. Because the sun was riding the top of the slab-wall, that cUff was in shadow, while the river was still sunny and green.
The glacier was a wide blue road that became the entire world as she went forth upon it. It was slippery, slit with crevasses and black with dirt. It seemed to fall away from her at every step, curving down into the clouds. Here again she must fasten the skobrodar-spikes to the soles of her shoes. - Moistening her lips, Freydis squinted ahead at the glazed sunny snow. The valleys and mountains below had become very distant. Above her was a slanting wall of icy boulders; below her was the same, all the way down to the river below. She was so high that she could hear the sun launching spear-beams against the ice; she could hear the wind blowing far below her. - Vertigo, vertigo! -The palms sweat, the face sweats, the knees grow weak, and she must look to neither right nor left. - Finally there were only sunny rocks, tightly compacted, each one as brittle as ceramic. They clinked and slipped melodiously as she trod upon them. She was in the middle of a frozen stream of boulders. They were poised above her with their sharp edges. As she followed die glacier's ascending spiral, stones brushed her right elbow and her right cheek, so steep was the mountain here. Presently the way was broken by a steep tongue of
The Ice-Shirt
ice a dozen ells in breadth. It was smooth, glassy and treacherous. Below were clouds and Nothing. Here she longed piteously to return, but her will sent her forward to cut footholds in the ice. She crossed it, she clung to it; it brushed her elbow, her cheek. (Thus Blue-Shirt first caressed her.) There was a rock in the middle of it, and on the rock was a bluish-white spider.
Round and round went her road, and as Freydis struggled up that great blue wall she had the sense not of being watched but of being known, known so well that A
mortortak and His creatures took no trouble to spy on her. When her way seemed especially dangerous, this comforted her, at other times it irked her, but her eager need never abated. - Then the weather began to change. It had nothing to do with her, she was sure; Blue-Shirt could not be bothered to put on his weather for her. - First she felt His wind on the backs of her hands. The cold took her breath away. That wind blew so cruelly! It blew and blew, continually changing its direction. It numbed her face. It wrenched the golden fibula from her cloak and flung it into a crevasse. Then her cloak-ends began beating her in the face, no matter how tightly she crossed her arms, and though at first she relished the stinging in her numb cheeks, the beating went on until the blood came. The wind-scream was so loud in her ears that she could not hear His drumming anymore and
FREYDIS EIRIKSDOTTIR 181
became confused, and staggered on die ice. At die same time die difficulty of going forward increased, so diat at times she must clamber straight up from ledge to ledge of diat night-wall diat imprisoned her no less because she clung to it of her own free will (the wind would gladly have taken her); and how much farther Blauserk might rise into space she could not tell. -But she knew that she towered over die shattered ice-plain of the frozen sea! She could see a dark outline of her reflection gliding with perfect ease just beneadi the surface of die shiny ice; by some freak or witchcraft she could also see her own face retreating as she advanced, so that it seemed that her double was walking unwillingly backwards, giving up the low ground that she seized to take the higher, and her hair was matted and her face was wild; now suddenly she perceived a third, a fourth reflection; there was an image of her in every facet of the great ice-crystal that she climbed; and her face was writ small in every stray snowflake that swdrled in the wind; there were so many of her that she could not be counted! - "I'm an army!" Freydis said aloud. "Fm bringing my army to you, Blue-Shirt, and Fm going to conquer you and take what I want! They'll call you Bare-Back when Fm done with you, do you hear?" - For the height, the cold and the dizziness had crazed her a little. - Now the wind died down, and she heard a ringing of bells in her ears; it sounded like the ringing of a bell called Joy which her stepmother Thjodhild had presented to the church; but the drumming of Amortortak was louder. The bell tolled; she thought she saw it swing; she thought she saw the ice-peaks rocking in the vsdnd. The weather grew worse. Freydis felt as cold as if she were naked. She shivered; she leaped recklessly upward from ledge to ledge to warm herself; she whirled her polestaflf around her head, yet still she could not keep warm. Then the v^nd began to whisrie again; she could hear it coming from far away, from somewhere on the other side of the mountain where the inland ice began (it went on forever). There was a great clamor of rocks falling in that wind. In a panic she ran along her ledge to find some refuge, for she knew how easily the wind could pluck her away when she was hemmed between cliff and abyss. But of course she could find nothing. At that moment she hated Leif for inheriting the family luck. (She did not hate Blue-Shirt because she was already His.) - Again for a space the wind subsided, and she used her grace to spring higher while she could, hoping that the ice-cliff might be somewhere riddled with caves, in one of which she might huddle (it seemed to her conception that Blauserk must be an anthill of ice, extending under the entire world with its rotten passageways and swarming trolls - but this notion was entirely due to her faidi; for she had not seen a single sign of Him: not a single skull, or iron
The Ice-Shirt Page 20
