‘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.
chapter 12
THE JOURNEY
There 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, shinin
g 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.
‘My ankle hurts,’ Angelica whispered loudly. ‘Throw down your rope.’
‘But won’t that set off the avalanche?’
‘How else am I going to climb out of here?’
I slowly stood up and pulled the rope from my shoulder. I shook my arm free. It felt so light suddenly without the heavy coil binding it.
I wound the rope a couple of times around the trunk of a nearby tree and tied a knot. Then I fed the rope down the side of the crevasse. Angelica swung out her hand to grab it. With both hands she pulled herself till she was standing up.
‘I’ve got it,’ she called. ‘Pull now!’
My God, she weighed a tonne. With all the strength in my skinny arms, I heaved. She only rose about ten centimetres. The miner’s light on her head was bobbing around as she tried to get a foothold. But the snow was so loose it was hard to dig in.
She cried out in pain. It must have put pressure on her ankle.
‘Pull!’ she called.
For the second time since I came here I wished to God I’d done weights. The sweat was coming out on my forehead. I could feel it turning to ice as I pulled. I rested five seconds, and pulled again. My arms ached intolerably. I remembered my sports master once saying that you had to cross the pain barrier. The pain ran like a burning liquid up from my wrists into my shoulders. I tried to ignore it. To disown my arms. To think of them as a crane made of metal, not flesh.
It was getting easier now, she must have worked out how to help lift her weight, springing out from against the side of the crevasse.
I could see the top of her head clearly now, the torchlight dancing against the snow. With one knee she clambered over the edge, and crouched on all fours, there on the snow.
I pulled her to her feet. She winced, lifting her left foot off the ground.
‘Can you walk?’ I asked.
‘Not much further,’ she said.
‘We don’t have to go far now. Look.’
She turned to see where I was pointing. A path of yellow light, on the crest of a hill to our right, shone from the shadowy shape of a house.
The branches of a tree moved in a sudden breeze, feathering the light. The path flickered.
‘Can you make it?’
‘Yes.’
I looked at her eyes. They were still big and shining, tremulous almost, but her face was white with pain. We were both shaking uncontrollably. I didn’t know if it was from the strain on our muscles, or fear. It didn’t matter, we were almost there. It seemed inevitable now, the end of our journey, as if it had all been written somewhere.
At the same moment we both turned toward the light. I took a step forward and Angelica leant against my shoulder, using my support to drag her left leg.
We’d gone perhaps three metres when Angelica swung round and pointed her torch behind us.
‘Dio,’ she whispered. ‘It’s gone. The crevasse has disappeared.’
I crept back to look. The deep hole had been filled in, you never would have known it had been there except that the snow in that area, a jagged circle, was slightly whiter, fresher, than the rest.
Without another word we turned and went on, toward the light.
chapter 13
THE POWER
The chestnut tree was an ice sculpture. It stood in front of the house, its ghostly branches glowing in the dim light filtering from the window. At the foot of the tree, sticking up out of the snow, was a wooden cross. The grave.
Angelica reached for my hand. Together, we walked past the tree and the grave, up to the door. It was slightly open, a crack of light shining through. Angelica gave it a push and we were inside.
The floor was slippery underfoot and my right leg shot out ahead. I almost fell. I hung onto the door and we lined up with our backs against it. There was a kerosene lamp making a small yellow halo of light in the square room. Angelica shone her torch down at our feet and we saw that the ground was icy and smooth, like a skating rink. She shone the circle of light round the walls, flashing it onto a wardrobe, a rectangular table, a chest of drawers.
Ice covered everything.
The blue-grey crust shone like mottled glass in the torchlight. On the inside of the window there was a lacy pattern of ice like the complicated pattern of branches.
We heard a sound then, a footstep. A figure emerged from the deep shadows of another room.
My heart leapt. I closed my eyes for a moment, but the after-image burnt into my brain.
She was ice. Her hair hung in thin stalactites onto her shoulders, snapped off at the ends in savage points. But it was her face, her face, that I couldn’t bear. Her features wore a mask of ice, like the walls, the table. A grey-white, flat sheen, roughened at the eyebrows, dripping slightly at the mouth, covering the slide down to her throat. A thin film of grey netted her eyes, but I saw the sudden white, like tears of snow, at the corner of her left eye.
She said nothing. She was hardly human.
I knew we must not look too long at that face. Like a magnet, it drew us in. I tried to tell Angelica, but her eyes were locked onto the horror. I pulled at her shoulder, but she flicked me off like an insect.
The cold in the room deepened. It was slow, gradual, the currents of cold, swirling dully around the room, almost visible.
I couldn’t believe it could grow any colder. But the time out there on the mountain, walking and puffing, seemed now like a memory of warmth, and life.
The cold dug into my clothes. It crept through my coat and my jumpers, picking past my singlet into my skin. It felt almost personal, like icy fingers burrowing. Behind my eyes, where it hurt most, I began to feel sleepy. It was like a poisonous gas, this cold, it made you want to lie down, stop fighting.
I looked for a moment at Lucrezia. She was motionless. She could have been an ice statue, except for her eyes. Behind the slippery veil they darted from me to Angelica, and back again.
And now I could see the fumes of cold surrounding her like a halo. They grew whiter, thicker, floating out in waves toward us, coating the walls with new frost.
The blurring in my mind deepened. I was so tired. I felt Angelica lean on me like lead. Her weight and the room were like a dream, growing further and further away. Then I felt Angelica slip, her knees folding. She crumpled onto the floor.
I knelt down and lifted up her chin. Her eyes were closed. And over the skin of her face a sheen of ice was forming. Barely perceptible at first, more like dew on morning grass, it began to harden and thicken, particle joining particle, until within minutes she resembled the icy statue before us.
She shouldn’t have looked so long. Oh, Angelica, you thought understanding was everything, but sometimes it’s just not enough. I held her and the pain behind my eyes became a dull ache and the sleepiness, like fog, came down again.
I felt myself drifting into a dream. I knew there was something I should do, but the drowsiness was so soft, such a relief. The pictures in my head grew stronger than the room around me. I saw Angelica at the cafe at San Gimignano. How she made the fish appear in the carafe of water. How she talked about imagination, believing in something so strongly that she pulled its shape out of the air. How she bullied me to remember, to dream, to wake up. And the way she’d held me when I cried.
And with the warmth of those pictures, another i
mage came. There was the burning sun on the waves and me paddling out to sea. I looked back to see Mum sitting on the shore, her hand shading her eyes, her body tense with watching. She always thought I was going to die when I went out surfing. But she still let me.
Poor worried Mum. Always watching, waiting, hovering. Sitting on the bath when we were little, making sure we didn’t drown. I felt a surge of love. It had nothing to do with thoughts, it was like a memory, a way of being, a time when I was safe and warm.
A lid was twisting off inside. The energy ran down my arms into my fingers. The tips began to tingle. Soon, the tingling became unbearable, and small tongues of flame shot out from my fingers.
Angelica’s coat was singed around the waist. I bunched up my fingers into fists and concentrated on drawing the energy back inside. My hands smouldered and blackened a little, but I noticed that the clouds of my breath were thick and warm.
I put my cheek next to Angelica’s and the thin layer of ice on her skin began to move, running and dripping down her hair line, onto her coat. I could see her eyes moving under their lids and then she opened them and looked at me. I went on holding her.
‘Where is your Nonno?’ A harsh voice like ice cracking.
I looked up at Lucrezia. She hadn’t moved. But there was a deep slit in the ice beside her mouth.
I looked away and turned my mind back inside my body, working at the heat. ‘Are you all right?’ I whispered.
‘Better now,’ Angelica murmured. She looked up at Lucrezia. ‘He couldn’t come,’ she said. ‘He’s an old man and he’s ill.’
The ice statue shifted and there was a rent, like a ship tearing slowly through a solid sea.
‘He hasn’t always been ill,’ Lucrezia said. ‘He won’t ever come. He won’t admit the harm he’s done. But I’m not going to die, not yet, without hearing him say that he is sorry. That he did wrong.’
Angelica pulled herself up on me and lurched over to Lucrezia. I saw her eyes beginning to glitter. ‘You’re not the only one who suffered,’ she said.
Power to Burn Page 11
