The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  A shoal of clouds, faintly violet on their undersides, swam slowly up the fjord behind us as we walked back to the seter. At this time of year I didn’t know if that meant rain.

  Over a lunch of salad and cold cuts, Julia asked me what my name meant.

  “Haven’t a clue. But I was named after Aud the Deep-minded, who was born not far from here, in Sogn, in the ninth century.”

  “Oh, good, another story.”

  The phone rang. We looked at each other blankly. There had never been a phone at the family seter. The noise was so alien it took me a moment to identify, and then another moment to find the phone. It was up in the loft, in my jacket pocket. I answered it.

  “It’s for you,” I called to Julia, then walked it down and handed it over. “Edvard Borlaug. He sounds rather agitated—for Edvard.”

  She took it. “Edvard, how are y—Slow down, slow down, I don’t understand. Wednesday? But—No, of course I can be there. Of course I understand.” What day is it? she mouthed at me. Monday, I mouthed back. “It will be—Edvard, take a deep breath, please. I’ll talk to them, I’ll be more than happy to talk to them. Once they understand the general concept I’m sure everything will be fine. I’ll drive in tomorrow and we’ll cook up a plan of action. Tomorrow. Yes. Oh, about two o’clock. Yes, I’ll come and see you then. Yes. Don’t worry, Edvard. Tomorrow at two. You’re more than welcome.”

  She clicked off. “He was practically hysterical.”

  “For Edvard.”

  “For Edvard. The board met yesterday and he’s heard that his proposal might not get approval.”

  “So I gather we’ll be going back to Oslo for a day or two for some hand holding.”

  “You don’t have to come. I’ll drive down, see Borlaug tomorrow afternoon, stay at the hotel, have an informal meeting with one or two of the board in the morning, and be back early afternoon Wednesday.” She slid onto my lap. “Will you miss me?”

  “No. I’m coming with you.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s an easy drive. I know the route, know the city and hotel, know my way to Olsen Glass, know my way back. I’ll be busy the whole time and all you’d do is sit around in waiting rooms. You’d be crazy to do that when you could be here. If you come with me I’ll feel selfish, spoiling your vacation.” She hugged me, then held me at arm’s length. “Is that okay?”

  She was my hawk, built to soar above it all. You don’t chain hawks. At some point you let them go and watch them rise, and stand there with your fist out hoping they came back, that they don’t run into a keeper’s gun, or a bigger hawk, or a vast shadowy hand stretching across the ocean from Atlanta. No. A hawk’s job is to fly, not be afraid. I made my face smile. “I’ll just have to walk that glacier on my own tomorrow.”

  “I’d forgotten about that. We could call Gudrun—”

  “No need. I’ll go on my own, and when you get back, I’ll be able to show you the wonders of the ice. Just…come back quickly. And take the phone with you, just in case.” She felt so light on my lap. So precious.

  “If I take the phone, I can’t call you.”

  “Very true.” I kissed the side of her neck where the pulse fluttered. Skin was so thin, so fragile. One nick and her heart would pump that thick red blood all over the floor.

  She arched and the pulse under my lips thudded. “Just think of the reunion,” she whispered, and outside the grass began to bend under fat raindrops.

  Julia wore a grey-blue cotton dress and tucked her rich hair up behind a matching bandeau. I wanted to tear it off, let her hair fall over my hands, and carry her inside to bed. Instead, I held the door of the Audi while she climbed in, and closed it behind her. She poked her head through the window, kissed me on the cheek and started the engine. In two minutes, all that was left was a curling trail of dust up the track.

  I shouldered my backpack and walked down to the farm. The veal calves in their wooden pens were fractious, and Gudrun when she appeared was distracted.

  “I didn’t hear the car,” she said.

  “No. Julia’s taken it to Oslo until tomorrow.”

  “You’re still going to the glacier.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if I have the time to drive you—”

  “I can walk to Nigardsbreen. It’s a lovely day.”

  “Nigardsbreen?” She gave me a dubious look. “Walking tours have been postponed until June, because of the late spring.” When spring came late, so did the thaw, when the ice is at its most unpredictable. The small tongue of the great Jostedalsbreen glacier would be less stable and so more dangerous than its more massive parent. I just waited. Eventually she waved a hand towards the south sheds. “The equipment’s in the usual place. I looked it over.”

  “My thanks. Don’t let me keep you from the work.”

  She gave me a quick nod and disappeared in the direction of the feed sheds.

  The south sheds were cool and dry. Skis, boots, ropes, ice picks, skates and a jumble of other equipment took up the whole of the north wall. I selected a coil of blue nylon rope—it smelled of must but was essentially sound—an ice pick with a bound handle, gloves, a folding ice probe, and crampons, and stowed them next to the water, cheese, chocolate, flask, and thermal compresses in my pack.

  The rains of the night before had washed the whole fjell clean. Flowers poked through the glistening grass: bright gold, vivid red and lush purple; birds twittered happily from clean-scented aspen and birch as though it didn’t matter about the washed-out nests; even the stones that began to litter my path seemed fresh and new again, even though for some it had been tens or even hundreds of years since they were plucked from their beds and scoured clean by the glacier. I crunched over the silt and gravel of till washed out by recent melt and began to kick my way through the bare, fist-sized rocks still unclothed by moss, enjoying the solid chunk against my boots. Julia would still be bumping along the track towards the one-lane road that would take her to another track, and then the highway.

  There were no trees now, no flowers, just hectares of sliding scree, the glacial moraine, a jumble of pebbles and stones and boulders; unsorted, unstratified rock of every colour and age, but all round, all smoothed by the action of ancient ice. Here and there moss clung bravely, and insects whirred over puddles formed in rock dimples that would be gone by late afternoon, but the barrenness overshadowed the life around it. I imagined the moors of Yorkshire when the Roman engineers first arrived: the heather and gorse, the pheasant, grouse and harebells flattened by the road builders who lay down a straight arrow of crushed stone in a straight path that sliced from one camp to another, the stonemasons following with the carefully cut limestone blocks, building so well that even today if you walk up to Goathland you can see a line in the turf stretching to the horizon, where nothing bigger than buttercups and daisies grow. Foss Way, the locals call it.

  These stones had not been here that long. Most of them only dated back to the Little Ice Age, the deterioration in climatic conditions that had made Jostedalsbreen grow, sending its tongues, like Nigardsbreen, thrusting down the valleys, licking up farm and field and fjell. The Little Ice Age had culminated 250 years ago, and when the tongues shrank back, they had left behind ridges of the moraine deposited at the tips and sides of the ice. Every year the moss crept farther up the old path of the tongue; every year the tongue shrank back even farther. But now I had passed the moss and was among stone deposited thousands of years ago by the ice sheet that had covered the whole country, the ice sheet that had gouged out the fjords connected by the North Way, the sea path that made life possible in this part of the world, that had created Norway.

  I could smell it now, the bite of green ice, sharp as the cut a blade of grass can make across an unwary tongue. The sun was bright. I took off my sweater, folded it into my pack, and scrambled up and farther up the scree.

  Julia would have run the twelve kilometers of real road and be turning right to drive south and east along another track, passing the
massive Skagastølstindane, one of the highest peaks of Jotunheimen. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and kept climbing.

  Now my boots rang on bedrock, raw, bare, the colour of pâté, and there it was: the side of the glacier tongue.

  Old ice looks like meringue, folded and layered by a giant’s wooden spoon over air pockets; fluffed egg white standing ten meters over my head and tinged here and there by different berries. But these weren’t the beautiful, true ice colours, just a surface layer of pollution, a grey pretending to be pink in the late morning sun, brought by last winter’s snowfalls.

  I studied the ice. I wouldn’t need crampons yet. I put on gloves and began to climb. It was almost midday and I was sweating lightly, but when I bent low to the ice for handholds, my breath plumed. As I spidered diagonally up the side of the tongue, the only sounds were the crunch of snow like spilt sugar under my boots and the rush of air in and out of my lungs. Most years at this time there would be small parties of expert climbers training the less expert to be guides for the tourists who would arrive in droves at the end of the month, and the ice would be dotted with figures in bright red Gore-Tex and Day-Glo orange nylon, figures who sported lime-green and hot-pink plastic logos on boots and gloves as they planted flags to show safe paths; crisscrossed with ropes in designer colours, like brilliant, unnatural snakes. Today when I reached the top I was alone with the sky, the rock, and the ice stretching ahead of me like a photographic negative of a giant’s broken twelve-lane freeway.

  Glaciers start from the snow that falls above the snowline and collects in depressions in the rock. Some of the snow melts and refreezes, recrystallizing to form a granular aggregate called névé. More snowfalls compact the névé to ice. The ice builds. Eventually the weight of the ice squeezes the lowest level out of the depression and gravity forces it downhill. It takes the path of least resistance, following valleys if there are any, forming them if there are not: gouging wide U-shapes from the rock, smoothing the huge chunks to vast round boulders, or crushing the softer sedimentary rock to sand that is washed out at the tip and edges, spilling out nutrients and fertilizing the lower valley, leaving behind strange rocks sometimes balanced precariously one atop the other. But the rock over which they grind is not uniform, and some parts rip out more easily than others. Over time, the moving glacier falls into pits it has dug itself and deep cracks form in the ice. These crevasses or sprekker are often hidden by recent snowfalls and most people who die on the ice fall down one of these cracks, especially in spring before the snow has melted. But the sprekker are why I come here, the sprekker and the ice caves and the lake.

  Before the end of the Little Ice Age, the snow that fell would have been pristine, not like today, but if you find a fresh sprekk and the sun is at the right angle, you can look down through time and see the glacier as it used to be, the clean, brilliant colours deep in the ice.

  Sunlight bounced off a thousand white and almost-white surfaces. I took off my pack, found my sun goggles, ice pick, a small bottle of water, a banana, and the ice probe. I put on the goggles, drank the water, ate the banana, put the peel inside the empty bottle and the bottle back in my pack, and shouldered it, then snapped out the probe. Probe in left hand and pick in right, I started walking. It had been nearly three years, but the automatic step, diagonal probe, two step, probe came back easily. It wasn’t foolproof, of course. That’s what the pick was for: if I started to fall, I would twist and swing it back at the ice and pray it held.

  Sometimes the walking was easy, sometimes I had to put away the probe and use the pick to scale ice cliffs and, once, a sheet of ice like a frozen waterfall. When I started to step up the slope diagonally I sat down in the snow and clipped crampons to my boots. Judging by the sun, it was about one in the afternoon. Julia would be on E16, driving above the speed limit by the grey-green waters of Sperillen not far from the junction with E7, and Oslo, windows open and the radio on, slapping the steering wheel with her right hand in time to the music. I stood up and kicked myself another foothold on the glacier.

  thirteen

  As they are heated, most molecules become less dense and expand so that the solid that barely fills half a cup will, as it melts to form a liquid, overflow that cup. If heated enough to vaporize, the gas will take up half a room. Water is different. For one thing—unlike, say, nitrogen—it has different names for all its states: water when liquid; steam when a vapour; ice when solid. And when water freezes, it doesn’t contract but expands. Against all reason, ice will float upon water. Ice has always fascinated us.

  Climbers, when asked why they want to climb, say, Everest, reply: Because it’s there. A more true answer might be: Because it’s got ice on it. Ice is alluring, mysterious, alien. In the Western world, ice and science are regarded in the same light: cold and clear, ordered and deeply rational, apparently plain yet ultimately unknowable. I doubt that it’s a coincidence that the very first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, mixes both: the monster is brought forth in cosmic fire and marooned on ice. Ice cannot bring forth life but, used properly, it can preserve it. Think of all the food in our freezers. Think of all those kidneys and livers and hearts thrown in coolers and helicoptered out to save the lives of transplant patients. Anyone knows that if you happen to cut your finger off when peeling potatoes, you should keep the finger cool—but not frozen, because then water molecules inside the cells of skin and connective tissue and blood will begin to form tiny ice crystals that will expand and expand and eventually rupture the cell membrane, spilling protoplasm to the wind, destroying it. Those who believe in cryogenics are dreaming. They have seen too many rump steaks come out of the freezer as solid as hoary planks and yet two hours later sit luscious and red and mouthwatering on the countertop; but when something living is frozen, it dies. Only those organisms frozen before they are fully formed—gametes and embryos—can be brought back to life by thawing.

  Ice is dangerous, but people keep climbing those mountains and walking the glaciers because, beyond all else, it is beautiful.

  The sprekk lay open at my feet, exposing jewels unseen for thousands of years. I put my sweater back on, went down on my stomach, and squirmed to the edge. The Grand Canyon carved from ice. Inches from my nose, the top layer, sooty with hydrocarbons, gave way to one of dirty yellow, then one of heavy cream. These layers glistened, slick and icy, melted and refrozen several times by the spring sun. Below that, beyond the reach of both my arms and direct sunlight, the true colours began. The crevasse was over fifteen meters deep, and further down the light was milky and subtle, shaded and heightened in strange places by irregular outcroppings from the ice walls. Here, a bulge glittered blinding white, while the edge of the shadow it cast shimmered pale mauve, and the deeper shadow dusky indigo. Down, and down, and now the colours lost all hint of the organic and the crevasse became stern and ordered, a cathedral of ice. Striations of amethyst and aquamarine, deep, deep strata of pale emerald. My body heat and the slanting afternoon sun ricocheting down warmed the ice and lifted the biting, mineral scent of water that had fallen as snow eighteen thousand years ago, when mammoths still walked and breathed and scooped aside drifts with their tusks, millennia before human beings even set foot upon the land that would be Norway. That water would not be good to drink. Every year, there was always some stupid tourist who decided to drink from the lake or dip themself a handful of meltwater and came down with violent diarrhea, and mouth sores that lasted for ten days. But there was nothing wrong with smelling it, and for a while I lay lost in the scents and interplay of light and colour.

  I had to get up when my thighs got so cold I could no longer feel them. Too long, I’d been lying down too long. Careless. My pants and sweater were damp, but they were made of wool and beneath that I wore silk, which, unlike cotton, dries fast and still traps heat while wet. Where the snow was level, I did some katas, slowly at first, then faster, and faster still, until the movements were mere lightning sketches of killing blows and someone watching from a distance w
ould have thought there was a whirling dervish on the ice. When I stopped, I was warm, but I sat on my pack and poured myself a cup of hot, sweet coffee and ate some cheese and nuts. Staying safe was a matter of prevention.

  I munched peacefully. The sun warmed my back and the sweater began to steam. It was about three o’clock. Julia would be in Oslo now, being very American with poor Edvard Borlaug. I got out my map. It was not a good idea to stay on the ice once the sun was slanting enough to send strange shadows stretching out from even small hillocks of snow. There was no longer time for the ice cave, but if I planned a careful route I could still spend a few minutes by the lake.

  It was a fair hike north to the lake, but it was along the edge of the glacier, where in some places the moraine was almost nonexistent or so old that it had long since been invaded by moss and lichens, then grasses and the nodding heads of the rare pale Pasquale flower and the delicate cinnamon rose, by birch and aspen and pine and all that flew and hopped and crawled in and on them. The transition from white to full colour would have been impossibly abrupt but for the silvery trunks of birch and carpets of white-petalled mountain avons.

  The lake, its surface brilliant with long, late afternoon sunshine, lay in a vast basin carved by the glacier ten thousand years ago. Nigardsbreen now lay at a tangent to the irregular circle of tarn, and its moraine formed the pebble and rock shore on which I stood. On the other side lay sedge and moss freckled with purple saxifrage and, behind that, woodland. Birds sang, an endless weave of bright trill and warble.