The Snow Queen Read online

  Didn’t matter? He looked down at the heavy strength of his arms, his body still hard and youthful, thanks to privilege. And the butchering of mers ... No, the slaughter didn’t matter at all, as an end it was only the means to a greater end. But the source, yes, that mattered. She mattered—Arienrhod. All the things that had the power to move him were hers—beauty, wealth, absolute control ... eternal youth. In the first moment he had seen her at audience in the palace, with her former Starbuck at her side, he had known that he would kill to possess her, to be possessed by her. He imagined her body moving against his own, the bridal veil of her hair, the red jewel of her bitter mouth ... tasting power and privilege and passion incarnate.

  And so it did not strike him as incongruous that he moved unthinkingly from the bed to his knee, as the door opened and made the vision reality.

  - 3 -

  “... The time of Change is upon us! The Summer Star lights our way to salvation ...”

  Moon stood hugging herself on the dock in the shrouded dawn, shivering with a chill born of cold mist and misery. The breath she had held in until she ached puffed white as she exhaled, dissipated into the gray fog breath of the sea like a spirit, like an escaping soul. I will not cry. She wiped at her cheek.

  “We must prepare for the End, and the new Beginning!”

  She turned, looking back past Gran along the fog-wrapped tunnel of the pier as the insane old man’s roaring broke like a wave over the sand castle of her self-control. “Oh, shut up, you crazy old ...” She muttered it, her voice quivering with the helpless frustration that made her want to scream it. Gran glanced over at her, sharp sympathy etched on her weather-worn face. Moon looked away, ashamed at feeling resentful, resentful at having to feel ashamed. A sibyl didn’t say those things; a sibyl was wisdom and strength and compassion. She frowned. I’m not a sibyl yet.

  “We must cast out the Evil Ones from among us—we must throw their idols into the Sea.” Daft Naimy threw his arms up, shaking fists at the smothered sky; she watched the ragged sleeves of his stained robe tumble back. Dogs barked and bayed around him, keeping a cautious distance. He called himself the Summer Prophet, and he roamed from island to island across the sea, preaching the word of the Lady as he heard it, distorted by the echoing of divine madness. When she was a child she had feared him, until her mother had told her not to; and laughed at him, until her grandmother had told her not to; and been embarrassed by him, until her own growing understanding had taught her to endure him. Only today her endurance was already tried beyond all reason ... and I’m not a sibyl yet!

  She had heard that Daft Naimy had been born a Winter. She had heard that he had once been a tech-loving unbeliever ... that he had scorned natural law by shedding the blood of a sibyl. That he had been driven mad by the Lady as punishment; that this was how he served his penance. The trefoil symbol the sibyls wore was a warning against defilement, against trepass on sacred ground. They said it was death to kill a sibyl, death to love a sibyl, death to be a sibyl ... and they meant a living death. Death to kill a sibyl ...

  “There is the Sinner who worships false gods! See him!” The gnarled hand flew out like an accusing arrow.

  Sparks’s face rose up past the end of the pier into its line of flight as he climbed the laddered gangway. His face hardened over with hateful resolution as his eyes focused on the old man in the distance, and then on her own face. Death to love a sibyl ...

  Moon shook her head in denial, answering another unspoken accusation. But his eyes were gone from her again, looking at Gran instead; showing her with that look all the things she had loved, and was losing. At last she understood what they meant when they said that it was death to be a sibyl.

  “But I’m not a sibyl yet.” The whisper caught on her teeth.

  Someone called up to Sparks from below; he threw back an answer before he came toward them, tall and pale and determined. The tide was ebbing; the water of the bay lay far below the pier. All she could see from here of the Winter trader’s ship that would take him away was the tip of its mast, like a beckoning finger. “Well, I guess that’s about it. All my things are on board; they’re ready to sail.” He looked down at his feet as he stopped before them, suddenly awkward. He spoke only to Gran. “I guess—I guess I’m saying goodbye.”

  “Prepare for the End!”

  “Sparks ...” Gran put out a hand, reached up to brush his cheek. “Must you go now? At least wait until your Aunt Lelark gets back from sea.”

  “I can’t.” He shook his head against the touch. “I can’t. I have to go now. I mean, it’s not forever—” as if he were afraid that if he waited, tomorrow could become forever too easily.

  “Oh, my beloved child ... my beloved children.” She stretched her other arm stiffly, brought them both together in her embrace, as she had done since time past remembering. “What will I do without you? You’ve been all my comfort, since your grandfather died ... Must I lose you now, and lose you both at once? I know Moon has to go, but—”

  “Repent, sinner!”

  Moon felt the tightening of Spark’s mouth more than she saw it, as his head came up and he glared at Daft Naimy. “Her destiny’s been calling her all her life—and so’s mine, Gran. I just didn’t know they’d lead us separate ways.” His hand pressed his off world medal like a pledge; he pulled away from them.

  “But to Carbuncle!” more like an oath than a protest. Gran shook her head.

  “It’s only a place.” He grinned, gripped her scarf-wrapped shoulder in reassurance. “My mother went there; and she came back with me. Who knows what I’ll come back with. Or who.”

  Moon turned away, clutching the sleeves of her parka as though she were strangling something. You can’t do this to me! She moved to the edge of the pier, looked over the rail and down along the sheer, sea weedy face of the stone-built jetty, at the trader’s ship rocking patiently far below. She took a long breath of damp-heavy air, and another, sucking in the harbor smells of seaweed and fish and salt-soaked wood ... listening to the murmur of voices below, the creak and slap and whisper of the moorage in the restless tide. So that she wouldn’t hear-

  “Your world is coming to an End!”

  “Good-bye, Gran,” his voice muffled by an embrace.

  Suddenly all that she saw and heard, that was so terribly familiar, took on an overlay of alien ness as though she saw it all for the first time ... knowing that it was not reality, but her own perception that had changed. Two saltwater tears slipped down the sides of her nose, and fell thirty feet into the bay. She heard him pass behind her toward the gangway without slowing.

  “Sparks!” She turned, putting herself in his way. “Without a word ... ?”

  Sparks backed up slightly.

  “It’s all right.” She straightened her face, managed with some pride to speak as though it were. “I’m not a sibyl yet.”

  “No. I know. That wasn’t why—” He broke off, pushing back his knitted cap.

  “But it is why you’re leaving.” She couldn’t tell, herself, whether that was a statement or an accusation.

  “Yeah.” He looked down suddenly. “I guess it is.”

  “Sparks—”

  “But only partly!” He straightened. “You know that it’s true, I’ve always felt this pulling me, Moon.” He faced northward, toward Carbuncle at the back of the wind. “I have to find out what I’m missing.”

  “Or who?” She bit her tongue.

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  She shook her head desperately. “After I come back from my initiation it won’t be different, we can still be together!” I can have both, I can— “It can be like it always was again. Like we always wanted it to be—” not even convincing herself.

  “Hey, boy.” The voice rose from below, breaking into echoes off the jetty wall. “You coming? The tide won’t wait all day!”

  “In a minute!” Sparks frowned. “No, it won’t, Moon. You know that. “Death to love a sibyl ...”“ His voice faded.

&
nbsp; “That’s just superstition!” Their eyes locked. And in that moment she knew that he shared her understanding of the truth; as he had always known, and shared, everything: It would never be the same again.

  “You’ll be changed. In a way that I can never change, now.” His fingers whitened on the rail. “I can’t stay here, stay the way I am now. I have to change, too. I have to grow, and learn ... I have to learn who I really am. All this time I thought I knew. I thought-becoming a sibyl would answer all my questions.” His eyes darkened with the new emotion that she had seen first as she came back to him there in the hidden cave, on the Choosing Island. The thing that envied her, and accused her, and shut her out.

  “Then go, if that’s really why you’re going.” She challenged the darkness, afraid to retreat. “But don’t go out of bitterness, because you’re hurt, or because you’re trying to hurt me. Because if you do you’ll never come back.” Her courage broke. “And I don’t think I could stand that, Sparkie—”

  His hands came up, but as she reached out to him they dropped to his sides again. He turned away, shaking his head, with no forgiveness or understanding or even sorrow. He moved to the gangway, started down the ladder.

  Moon felt Gran come up beside her, watch with her as Sparks dropped to the boat’s cross-deck where it rose on the water to meet him. He disappeared into the cabin on the broad platform that joined the double hulls, and though she kept watching he did not come out on deck again. The deckhands cast off the mooring ropes, the crab-claw sails fell jingling down the masts and filled with moist wind.

  The fog was lifting as the world brightened. Moon could see as far as the channel leading to the open sea, and she watched the trader’s catamaran grow smaller as it angled out into the bay, reaching for the gap. She heard its engines start, once it was well away from the Summer docks. At last it reached the channel entrance and merged with the wall of fog, snuffed out in an instant, like a ghost ship. Moon rubbed at her eyes, her face, wetting her hands with mist and tears. Like a sleeper waking, she turned to look at her grandmother, small and stooped with sorrow beside her. She looked beyond her at the silhouetted nets and winches along the dockside; the ancient, sea worn storage house at the foot of the steep village street. Somewhere further on was their own cottage ... and her outrigger lying on the beach, waiting to carry her away from all that she had left in the world. “Gran?”

  Her grandmother patted her hand firmly; she saw a determination to keep hope and belief foremost fill the deep-set gray eyes. “Well, child, he’s gone. We can only say a prayer that he finds his way home to us again. Now the Lady’s waiting for you, too. The sooner you go, the sooner you’ll come back to me!”

  She took Moon’s arm and started along the pier. “At least that mother lorn old crackbrain won’t be around to see you off.” Moon glanced up, realizing with some relief that Daft Naimy had gone his way. Gran remembered herself and made the triad sign, “Poor soul that he is.”

  Moon’s mouth twitched up briefly, made a firm line as she felt her strength come back. Sparks had gone to Carbuncle to spite her ... damned if shed drift with the tide. She had her own destiny lying across the water, one shed waited half a lifetime for; the calling beauty of it filled her again. She began to walk faster, hurrying her grandmother along.

  - 4 -

  Sparks stood on the deck, pressed against the mast by the force of the frigid wind from behind him, listening to the ship’s engines strain against the heavy seas. Gazing straight ahead, he saw Carbuncle lying at the sea’s edge like the incredible fragment of a dream. They had been approaching it for an eternity across the white-flecked sea, as they had sailed north forever along the boundary of this endless island’s shores. He had watched the city grow from the size of a fingertip into something beyond the range of his comprehension. Now it seemed to spread like a stain across the sky, filling his awareness until there was nothing else in the world.

  “Hey, there, Summer.” The trader’s voice broke open his reverie; a gloved hand cuffed his shoulder lightly. “Damned if I need another mast. If you can’t find anything useful to do on deck, get inside before you freeze.” Sparks heard the high laughter of a deckhand; turned to see the smile on the trader’s heavy face that took the smart out of the words.

  He pulled back from the mast, felt the crackle of resistance as his gloves broke away from the ice film. “Sorry.” His breath rose up in a cloud, half blinding him. He was bundled in heavy clothes until he could barely bend his arms, but still the northern wind cut him to the bone. Carbuncle was protected from being totally ice locked only by the presence of a warm sea current following this western coastline. There was no feeling left in his face; he couldn’t tell whether his own smile still worked or not. “But by’r Lady, it’s all one piece! How could anyone even imagine a thing like that!”

  “Your Lady had nothing to do with it, boy. And She’s had nothing to do with the people who live there, ever since. Always keep that in mind while you’re there.” The trader shook his head, looking at the city, and pressed his wind-chapped lips into a line. “No ... nobody really knows how Carbuncle came to be. Or why. Not even the off worlders I think—not that they’d tell us, even if they did.”

  “Why not?” Sparks glanced around.

  The trader shrugged. “Why should they tell us their secrets? They come here to trade their machines for what we have. We wouldn’t want them if we knew how to make our own.”

  “I guess not.” Sparks shrugged, flexing his fingers inside his mittens. The Winter trader and his crew ate, talked, and slept trade, as they sailed from island to island; it had worn thin very quickly. The only thing that had impressed him—until now—during this interminable voyage was the fact that they dealt as freely with Summers as with Winters, as though the differences between the two were unimportant. “Where are all the starships?”

  “The what?” Laughter shook the trader. “Don’t—don’t tell me you were expecting a skyful? By all the gods! Did you think there was one for every star? And after all the tech stories you’ve wormed out of me over the years. You Summers really must be as thick headed as everyone claims!”

  “No!” Sparks frowned, humiliation prickling his numb face. “I just—I just wanted to know where the star port was, that’s all.”

  “Sure you did,” the trader wheezed. “It’s inland, and forbidden territory to us.” He sobered abruptly. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Sparks, going to Carbuncle? Are you sure you understand what you’re getting into?”

  Sparks hesitated, glanced out over the water. Moon’s face at parting drove the distance out of focus; he heard her voice in the calling of seabirds, in the air. Death to love a sibyl. Cold pain lodged suddenly in his chest, like a dagger of ice. He shut his eyes, shivering; the voice, the vision were gone. “I know what I’m doing.”

  The trader shrugged and turned away.

  The trader’s ship nudged the floating pier where Sparks stood; a skater on the calm, dark water. It was dwarfed on every side by larger, taller, longer ships, dwarfed in turn by the expanse of the moorage like a mat of floating weed. And reducing it all to insignificance, Carbuncle itself, crouching like a great sheltering beast overhead. Pylons whose girth would swallow a house rose barnacled from the sea, a strange forest crowned by the city’s underbelly, trailing festoons of chain and pulley and incomprehensible appendages. The smell of the sea mingled with stranger and less appealing odors; the city’s underside dripped and oozed unnameable effluence. A broad causeway bristled with more alien shapes, rising from the artificial harbor’s floating docks into the city’s maw .... He thought suddenly of a great beast’s waiting hunger.

  “You stick to the lower levels, boy!” The trader had to shout to make himself heard over the shouting of a hundred others, the clanking and groaning and shifting that reverberated in this strange underworld caught between land and sea. “You look for Gadderfy’s place in the Periwinkle Alley; she’ll rent you a room!”

  Sparks nodde
d absently, lifted his hand. “Thanks.” He swung the sack of his possessions up onto his shoulder, and shuddered as the cold wind off of the water wrapped itself around him.

  “We’ll be here four days, if you change your mind!”

  Sparks shook his head. Turning, he began to walk, and then to climb. The trader watched until the city swallowed him up.

  “Hey, out of the road, you! What’re you, blind?”

  Sparks threw himself aside into a pile of boxes as the house on treads loomed above him at the head of the ramp, then tipped slowly over the lip and down the way he had come. High up in a tiny windowed room he saw the face, too small to belong to the warning voice, with eyes that did not even look back to see whether he had gotten clear. He picked himself up numbly, thinking, It is true ... it’s all true!” suddenly only half-glad.

  Afraid to let his thoughts settle, he began to move, following the main street as it started its long, slow spiral upward; keeping to the edges now, warily. The street went on forever, gently rising, gently circling, tunneling upward through canyon walls of gaping-eyed warehouses and stores, apartment hives hung with railings. There was no sky, only the underside of the next spiral, gleaming dully with a kind of striated phosphorescence. Spurs of alleyway like centipede legs scrabbled at daylight—at the true sky of the world that he had always known, dim and unreachable at the alley-ends beyond the shuttered storm walls.

  He picked his way past piled goods and piled rubbish, the vacant storehouses and the vacant faces of the mob, trying to keep his own face expressionless. There were fisher folk among them, in clothing enough like his own; but there were shopkeepers, laborers, others whose clothing matched their occupations and whose occupations he couldn’t even imagine. And everywhere there were what seemed to be sexless semi human beings doing with mindless precision tasks that no two humans could have done. He had approached one of them timidly; asked, inanely, “How do you do that?” The thing had gone on loading crates, not dignifying the question with an answer.