The Snow Queen

by Joan D. Vinge

  Laughter. Clavally crouched down beside Danaquil Lu, rubbing his shoulders with absentminded tenderness; his necklace of shell beads rattled musically. The damp cold at night in these stone rooms left him stiff and aching, but he never complained. Maybe this is why ... Moon’s hands tightened over her knees as she watched them together.

  “Your control is fine, Moon.” Danaquil Lu smiled, half at her, half at Clavally’s hands. “You improve with every Transfer—you have a very strong will.”

  Moon pushed herself to her feet, “I guess I need some air,” her voice suddenly sounding feeble and thin even to her. She went quickly out the doorway, knowing air wasn’t really what she needed.

  She half ran down the path that led toward the inlet where their boats were; took the branching track that rose along the blue-green, windy headland above the blue-green sea. Breathing hard, she threw herself down in the long, matted salt grass, pulling her feet in as she looked back toward the south-facing cliff where she had lived like a bird in an aerie the past months. She gazed out over the sea again, seeing in the blue-clouded distance the ragged spine of the Choosing Island, whose small sister this was ... remembering with all the vividness of a Transfer dream the moment of the Lady’s decision that had torn her life and Sparks’s apart. I’m not sorry! Her fist struck hard on the damp grass; opened, strengthless.

  She lifted her arm to look at the thin white line along her wrist where Clavally had cut it, as she had cut her own, with a metal crescent long months ago. Danaquil Lu had pressed their wrists together as their blood mingled and dripped down, while he sang a hymn to the Sea Mother here on this very spot. Here, overlooking the Sea, she had been consecrated as they hung the barbed trefoil around her neck; welcomed into a new life as they all sipped in turn from a cup of brine; inita ted with that bond of blood into this holy fellowship. Shaking with fear, she had grown suddenly hot and cold and dizzy as she felt the Lady’s presence come over her ... collapsed in a faint between them, waking the next day still weak and feverish, filled with awe. She had become one of the chosen few: From the scars on their wrists, it was clear that Clavally and Danaquil Lu had initiated only half a dozen others before her. She cupped the trefoil in her hand, remembering Sparks holding his own symbol of the distance between them; cupping hers warily, for its barbed points. Death to love a sibyl ... to be a sibyl ...

  But not to love, and be, a sibyl: She looked back at the cliffs jealousy, imagined Clavally and Danaquil Lu sharing love in her absence. Sparks’s bitter words at parting were only a thin white line on the surface of her mind now, like the white line along her wrist. Time and the memories of a lifetime had swept away her hurt like a wave sweeping footprints from the sand, leaving a bright mirror, a reflection of love and need. She had always loved him, she would always need him. She could never give him up.

  Clavally and Danaquil Lu were pledged, and the knowledge was like a small demon trapped inside her chest. To islanders sex was a thing as natural as growing up, but they were private about their private lives; so she had spent many hours in dutiful, solitary meditation, that too easily bled into daydreams of envious longing. And one of the things she had learned about sibyls was that they were not more than human: Sorrow and anger and all the petty frustrations of life still grew from the seeds of her dedication, wrong still came out of the best intentions. She still laughed, and cried, and ached for the touch of him ...

  “Moon?”

  She twisted guiltily at Clavally’s voice behind her.

  “Are you all right?” Clavally settled beside her on the grass, putting a hand on her arm.

  Moon felt a sudden surge of emotion, beyond the surge of energy any question set free in her mind now—misery craving company. She controlled it, barely. “Yes,” gulping, “but sometimes I ... miss Sparks.”

  “Sparks? Your cousin.” Clavally nodded. “Now I remember. I saw you together. You said you wanted to be together forever. But he didn’t come with you?”

  “He did! But the Lady—turned him away. All our lives we planned to do this together ... and then She turned him away.”

  “But you still came here.”

  “I had to. I’ve waited half my life to be a sibyl. To matter in the world.” Moon shifted, hugging her knees, as a cloud abruptly darkened the sun. Below them the sea turned sullen gray in its shadow. “And he couldn’t understand that. He said stupid things, hateful things. He—went away, to Carbuncle! He went away angry. I don’t know if he’ll ever come back.” She looked up, meeting Clavally’s eyes, seeing the sympathy and understanding that she had hidden from for so long, and realizing that she had been wrong to hide—to carry the burden alone. “Why didn’t the Lady choose us both? We’ve always been together! Doesn’t She know that we’re the same?”

  Clavally shook her head. “She knows that you’re not, Moon. That was why She chose only you. There was something inside Sparks that isn’t in you—or the other way around—so that when She struck your hearts there in the cave She heard a false note from his.”

  “No!” Moon looked out across the water toward the Choosing Island. The sky was massing with clouds for another rain squall. “I mean—there’s nothing wrong with Sparks. Is it because his father wasn’t a Summer? Because he likes technology? Maybe the Lady thought he wasn’t a true believer. She doesn’t take Winters to be sibyls.” Moon fingered the lank grass, searching the tangled strands for an explanation.

  “Yes, She does.”

  “She does?”

  “Danaquil Lu is a Winter.”

  “He is?” Moon’s head came up. “But—how? Why? I always heard ... everybody says that they don’t believe. And that they’re not ... like us,” she finished lamely.

  “The Lady works in strange ways. There is a kind of well at the heart of Carbuncle, that opens down to the sea from the Queen’s palace. On his first visit to court, Danaquil Lu crossed over the bridge that spans the well—and the Sea Mother called up to him, and told him that he must become a sibyl.”

  Clavally smiled sorrowfully. “People are sweet and sour fruit together, wherever you find them. The Lady picks the ones that best suit Her tastes, and She doesn’t seem to care whether they worship Her, or anyone.” Her eyes turned distant; she glanced up at the rooms in the cliff face. “But few Winters even try to become sibyls, because they’re taught that it’s madness, or superstitious fakery. They rarely even see sibyls, sibyls are forbidden to enter Carbuncle.

  The off worlders hate them for some reason; and whatever the off worlders hate, the Winters hate too. But they believe in the power of the Lady’s retribution.” Lines deepened in her face. “They have a pole, that ends in a collar of spikes, so that no one is ‘contaminated’ by a sibyl’s blood ...”

  Moon thought of Daft Nairy ... and of Danaquil Lu. Her hand touched the trefoil tattoo at the base of her neck, beneath the ivory wool of her sweater. “Danaquil Lu—”

  “—was punished, driven out of Carbuncle. He can never go back; at least while the Snow Queen rules. I met him during one of my circuits through the islands. I think, since we’ve been together, he’s been happy ... or at least content. And I’ve learned many things from him.” She glanced down—suddenly, unexpectedly, looking like a girl. “I know it’s probably wrong of me, but I’m glad they sent him into exile.”

  “Then you know how I feel.” Clavally nodded, smiling down. She pushed back her parka sleeve, exposing the long-healed scars on her wrist. “I don’t know why we were chosen ... but we weren’t chosen because we’re perfect.”

  “I know.” Moon’s mouth twitched. “But if it’s not because he’s interested in technology, how could Sparks be less perfect than I am—”

  “—when you think there couldn’t be anything more perfect than the lover you remember?”

  A sheepish nod.

  “When I first saw you together, I had a feeling—after a while you do—that if you came here you would be chosen. You felt right to me. But Sparks ... there was an unsettled ness

&n
bsp; “I don’t understand.”

  “You said that he left angry. You think he left as much for the wrong reasons as for the right ones—that he did it to hurt you? That he blamed you for your success, and his failure.”

  “But I would have felt all those things too, if he’d been chosen instead—”

  “Would you?” Clavally looked at her. “Maybe any of us would all the good will in the world can’t keep us from swallowing the fishhook baited with envy. But Sparks blamed you for what happened. You would only have blamed yourself.”

  Moon blinked, frowned; remembered their childhood, and how rarely he had tried to disagree with her. But when they did argue, he would run away and leave her alone. He would hold his anger for hours, even days. And in the lonely space he left behind, she would turn her own anger in on herself. She would go to him every time, and apologize, even when she knew he was wrong. “I guess I would have. Even though it’s nobody’s fault. But that’s wrong, too.”

  “Yes ... except that it hurts no one but you. And I think that’s the difference.”

  Two sudden drops of rain pelted Moon’s uncovered head; she looked up, confused and startled. She pulled up her hood as Clavally got to her feet and gestured toward shelter.

  They ducked under a stand of young tree-ferns. The rain smothered all other sound for a space of minutes. They stood silently, blinded by a field of molten gray, until the rain squall moved off across the sea on the back of the wind. Moon stirred away from the fern’s dark, pithy trunk; watched the pattern of droplets stranded like pearls in the fragile lacework of its canopy, watched them fall. She put out a hand. “It’s stopped already.” Her anger at Sparks had passed as swiftly as the rain, and had as little effect on the greater pattern of her life. But when they met again, so much would be different between them .... “I know people have to change. But I wonder if they know when to stop.”

  Clavally shook her head; they began to walk back together along the path, sidestepping the sudden stream that it had become. “Not even the Lady can answer that. I hope you’ll find that Sparks has answered it for himself, when you see him again.”

  Moon turned in the track, walking a few strides backwards as she looked out across the restless sea toward home.

  - 8 -

  “... And then a part of the wealth from the last Festival was put into a new fund for me, so that I could begin work without interruption on the masks for this one ... almost nineteen years ago.

  How time slips past, masked in the rhythm of the days! That’s the rhythm of creation for you—individual creation, universal creation. Red-orange feathers, please.” The mask maker held out her hand.

  Sparks leaned forward on the stoop, reached into one of the trays scattered in the doorway between them and passed her a handful. Malkin, her long-limbed gray cat, poked a surreptitious paw among the feathers still in the holder. Sparks pushed him away, went back to separating strands of beads, dropping them into their appropriate cups. He looked up and down until it made him dizzy, trying to watch her work while he worked himself. “I don’t know how you do it. How can you create so many masks, and every one different? When you can hardly—” He stopped, still unsure of his words in spite of her reassurances.

  “—tell a red feather from a green one?” She smiled, lifting her head to look at him with the dark windows of her eyes, and the light sensor on the band across her forehead. “Well, you know, it wasn’t easy in the beginning. But I had a desire to learn—a need to create something beautiful myself. I couldn’t paint or draw, but this is more like sculpture, really, a creation of touch and texture. And the craft is hereditary in the Ravenglass family, you know; like blindness. Being born blind, and then being given half-sight—sometimes I think that combination creates a heightening of imagination. All forms are vague and wonderful ... you see in them what you want to see. I have two sisters who are both blind too, and who have their own shops here in the city. And many other relatives as well, all doing the same, though not all blind. It takes a lot of creative energy to make certain that there’s a mask for every reveller who will be dancing in these streets at the next Festival time. And you know something?” She smiled, the pride shining through it. “Mine are the best of all. I, Fate Ravenglass Winter, will make the mask of the Summer Queen .... A piece of red velvet, please.”

  Sparks passed her the piece of cloth, letting it slither sensuously between his fingers. “But all this work—half a life’s work—it’s only for one night! And then it’s gone. How can you bear that?”

  “Because it’s so important to Tiamat’s identity as a separate world —our heritage. The rituals of the Change are a tradition that reaches back into the clouded times before the Hegemony and its rulers ever set foot on our world ... some of it into the time when we were off worlders here ourselves—”

  “How do you know?” interrupting. “How do you know what anybody did before the first ships sailed down out of the Great Storm?” He slipped absentmindedly into the language of myth.

  “All I know is what I hear on the threedy She smiled. “The off worlders have archaeologists who study the Old Empire’s records and ruins. They claim we came here as refugees from a world called Trista, after some interstellar war near the end of the Old Empire. These fantasy faces I make began as real creatures; once they were on the standards of the first ship families that ancestored Summer and Winter. You probably recognize some of them—in Summer they still have meaning. Your ship name Dawntreader, is one of the original dozen names—did you know that?” Sparks shook his head. “But when the Hegemony came, they made us ashamed of our ‘primitive’ traditions; so now we only bring them out at the Festival, not really celebrating the Prime Minister’s visit, but our own heritage.”

  “Oh.” He was still confused and disturbed by the Winters’ Ladyless view of history, although he would never admit it.

  “Anyway, some things are more beautiful simply because they are ephemeral. Think of a flower opening, or a song as you play it, or a rainbow ... think of making love.”

  “What if there were no more rainbows ...” Sparks thought of those things, and bit his lip. “I guess it’s stupid to look back and be sorry they’re gone, then.”

  “It’s human.” She tilted her head quizzically, as though she were listening to his thoughts. “But for the artist the real joy is in the creation of the thing. When you feel something growing under your hands, you grow with it. You’re alive, the energy flows. When it’s finished, you stop growing. You stop living. You only live for the next act of creation. Don’t you feel that, when you play your music?”

  “Yes.” He picked up his flute, running his fingers along the hair fine seams left like scars on the wounded shell, where she had put it back together for him. She had done her work so well that even its sound had scarcely been altered. “I guess so. I never thought about it. But I guess I do.”

  “The blue-violet beetle’s wing, please ... thank you. I don’t know how I got along before you came.” Malkin sidled along Fate’s hip and crept up into her lap, kneading the cloth of her loose skirt.

  Sparks laughed; a pinched, self-deprecating sound that told her truth was flowing upstream. In spite of her prediction to him the first time they met, the competition of the Maze’s numberless delights was too much for his fragile island music; he barely earned enough with his street-corner songs to put food in his mouth. He inhaled, breathing in the confusion of exotic smells from the Newhavenese botanery next door and the Samathan restaurant across the alley. If she hadn’t given him the shelter of her back room, instead of sleeping under the watchful gaze of a thousand spirit face masks he would be sleeping in the gutter ... or worse.

  He looked back at her, grateful at last that she had forced him to go to the off worlder police to make his accusation against the slavers. He remembered the surprise on the face of the Blue who had saved his life when she saw him again, and the guilt that had reflected on his own. He sighed. “Are the off worlders really all going to just pa
ck up and leave Tiamat after the next Festival? Abandon everything they have here? It’s hard to believe.”

  “Yes, almost all of them will go.” She twisted a tassel from golden cord. “Their preparations have already begun, just as ours have. You could sense the changes if you’d grown up here. Will that make you sad?”

  He looked up, because it wasn’t the question he had expected. “I—don’t know. Everybody in Summer always said it was a day to look forward to, the Change; that we’d come into our own. And I hate how the off worlders blind Winter with a lot of glory while they take what they want, and then think they can just forget about us.” His hand closed over his medal; he twisted his fingers through the openings. “But—”

  “But you’ve been blinded by the glory, just like all of us Winters.” She broke off her knot tying to stroke Malkin’s silvery, sleeping back.

  “I_

  She smiled, watching him with her third eye. “What’s wrong with that? Nothing. You asked me once whether I resented not being able to leave our world, when I might have my blindness cured somewhere else. You were thinking that I must resent being given these sensors instead—having to settle for half-sight instead of full vision. If I looked at it with perfect eyes, that’s what I might have seen, too. But I looked with blind eyes ... and to me they look wonderful,”

  “Wonder-full.” Sparks leaned back against the wall of the shop, looking away down the alley. “And after the Festival it all ends.”

  “Yes. The last Festival. Then the off worlders will abandon us, and the Summers will have to move north again, and life as I’ve always lived it will cease. This time the choosing of the Queen for a Day will be in earnest ... the Summer Queen’s mask will be my last and best creation.”

  “What will you do after the Festival is over?” He realized suddenly that the question was more than rhetorical.

  “Begin a new life.” She tightened a final knot. “Just like everyone else in Carbuncle. That’s why it’s called the Change, you know.” She held the finished mask up like an offering to the people passing in the alleyway. He saw some of them stare and smile.