Iced on Aran Read online

  Hero was astounded. “The king didn’t sit for this?”

  The old man gave a curious, brittle little laugh. “No, it was done from memory. My father’s skill was great!”

  Hero scuffed at a flat, snow-layered area next to the ice-carved king. It was empty, just a flat space cut out of Aran’s ice. “Well, if Kuranes ever does come up here,” he said, “and if he sits here, why, then he’ll be beside himself!” He grinned.

  “That was a joke,” Eldin drily explained, but the old ice cutter only narrowed his eyes. The Wanderer had meanwhile cleared away snow from half a dozen ice-carvings. In doing so, he’d brought a curious thing to light. While Kuranes figure was carved only once, the rest—and the slope, as far as the eye could see, was literally covered with snow-humped shapes—appeared all to be duplicated. They sat, kneeled or reclined, or occasionally stood there on the slopes of Aran, in perfect pairs like glassy twins cut from the mountain. Two of each, almost exactly identical, strange twinned stalagmites of ice in human form.

  Eldin uncovered more figures, Hero too. “I recognize a few of them,” the Wanderer mused. “Here’s old Cuff the fisherman. He never married, stayed alone all his days. Most people keep young in Celephais, but Cuff grew old. Toward the end he didn’t even speak to people, stopped fishing, just sat around on the wharves staring out to sea. People said he was tired of life.”

  The cold was starting to get into Hero’s bones. “I don’t know how you can work up here,” he told the old man. “It’s so cold here even Zura’s zombies would last forever!” Snow was beginning to fall: light flakes like confetti cut from finest white gossamer drifting down near-vertically out of the sky. “As for your work,” Hero went on, “I can’t fault it. But don’t your fingers freeze up? These things must take days in the carving! And there are thousands of them …”

  The old man smiled his thin, cold smile. “I wrap up warm,” he said, “as you can see. Also, I’m used to the cold. What’s more I work very quickly and accurately. It’s in my blood, come down from my grandfather, through my father to me. And sometimes I have advanced knowledge. I get to know that someone else desires to be carved in ice. Come over here and I’ll show you something.” He led the way nimbly across the snow-slope, knowing every step intimately. Hero and Eldin followed.

  As they went, Hero asked the Wanderer: “So what happened to old Cuff the fisherman? Did he die?”

  Eldin shrugged. “Drowned, they say. After a storm they found his boat wrecked on Kuranes’ Cornish rocks. They didn’t find Cuff, though, and he was never washed up. The sea keeps its secrets. Actually, I’d forgotten all about him till I saw him—both of him—up here.”

  “How about that?” Hero asked the old ice-cutter. “Why do you carve two likenesses of your subjects? And why, pray, only one of Kuranes?”

  “Here we are,” the old man might not have heard him. “There—what do you think of that?”

  “Why, I … I’m floored!” Hero gasped.

  “Or, maybe, ‘flowed’?” said Eldin. “You know: ice-flowed?”

  Hero groaned and rolled his eyes, but the old man said, “Flawed, yes! Kuranes, I mean. You asked why only one of him. Because the ice was flawed. When my father set to work on the second image, it shattered. And so there’s only an empty space beside him.”

  The questers said nothing, merely gazed in astonishment at ice-sculptures—of themselves! The carvings were far from complete; indeed, they were the crudest of representations, the merest gouges and slashes in blocks of ice; but just as a great artist captures the essence of his subject with the first strokes of his brush, so were the essences of Hero and Eldin here caught. Perhaps in more ways than one …

  Hero’s gape turned to a frown, then an expression of some puzzlement. “Two things,” he said. “Yet again you’ve only represented us once apiece. But weirder far, why are we here at all? We didn’t ask to be sculpted in Aran’s ice; and as for your being forewarned about our coming, why, you couldn’t have been! We only decided that last night, and even then we weren’t sure.”

  By way of answer, the old man asked questions of his own. “I’d like to be certain on that point,” he said. “About your coming up here, I mean. You told me you climbed Aran ‘because it was here.’ By that do you mean that you automatically do things you should not? Which in this case is to say, because the climbing of Aran is forbidden? Or was it simply that you were bored, tired of mundane dreaming?”

  Hero looked at him a little askance. “Mundane dreamers? Us? Hardly!”

  Eldin’s ice-statue sat, elbow on knee, chin in palm, gazing frostily on Celephais. The Wanderer got down beside it, put his real elbow on the empty knee, adopted the same pose more or less, and stared into the statue’s roughly-angled face. “You keep asking us our reason for climbing Aran,” he said. “Because we shouldn’t, you ask, or because we were bored? Well, actually—if it’s that important to you—it was a bit of both. See, we’ve been a little out of sorts, Hero and I.”

  “No, no!” cried the sculptor at once. “Don’t sit there, but here, right alongside. That’s right. Good! Good!” Similarly, he positioned Hero beside his carving, which sat straight-armed, hands on knees, staring bleakly ahead. Then he took out tools from his pockets, began to chip away. First at Eldin’s unfinished sculpture, then at Hero’s, and so on, back and forth.

  “You didn’t answer my questions,” said Hero, watching him out of the corner of his eye. “How come you’ve already started work on us? And why only one piece apiece?”

  “My friends,” said the old man, “you see the work of long, lonely years here. Here are represented years before I was born, and years before my father was born. There are a number of celebrities carved here—like Lord Kuranes himself—but mainly the works are of ordinary men. Now, the carving of ordinary men is all very well, but it is unrewarding. I mean, in another century or so, who will know or remember them, eh? But men such as you two, destined to become legends in the dreamlands …”

  “You carved us because we’re famous!” cried Eldin, beaming.

  “Or infamous!” Hero’s frown persisted.

  “What better reason?” Again the old man smiled his thin, cold smile.

  “Something here,” said Hero, hearing warning bells in the back of his head (or maybe the tinkling of warning ice-crystals), “isn’t quite right. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s wrong.” And talking of fingers, the old man had just put the finishing touch to Hero’s right hand—which even now promptly fell asleep upon his knee, as dead as if hard-bitten by frost. Hero made to rise, stir himself up, but—

  “No, no, no!” the old man chided. “Now that you are here, at least do me the courtesy of sitting still. Fifteen or twenty minutes at most, and the job’s done. And while I work, so I’ll tell you my story.”

  “Story?” Eldin repeated him, watching how he carefully molded his boot from ice—and feeling his real foot go suddenly cold inside the real boot, with a numbness that gradually climbed into his calf. “Is there a story, then?”

  “Ooth-Nargai”—the sculptor appeared to ignore him, his fingers and tools alive with activity—“is said to be timeless. For most people it is, but for some it isn’t. If all a man wants is a place that never changes, then Celephais in Ooth-Nargai’s the spot. But there are those who want more than that, who must have change; restless souls whose hearts forever reach beyond the horizons we know. Alas, not all are fortunate enough to be far-traveled questers such as you two.”

  “Don’t get to believing that all quests are fun and games, old man,” Hero cautioned. “Me, sometimes I get heartily sick of them!”

  “And me!” said Eldin. “Sometimes I think: wouldn’t it be grand just to sit absolutely still for a thousand years?”

  “Exactly!” said the iceman. “And if such as you can become bored, jaded, dissatisfied, how then the little fisherman—”

  “Like Cuff?” said Hero.

  “—and the potter and the quarrier, who’ve never seen beyond a
patch of ocean or the hot walls of a kiln or the steep sides of a hole in the ground? And so, in the far dim olden times, every now and then a man would climb Aran.” He fell silent, concentrated on his work, shaped Eldin’s elbow where it joined his knee.

  “Eh?” said the Wanderer at length. “I don’t think I follow.” He felt an unaccustomed stiffness in his arm, the one that propped up his chin, and grunted his discomfort. But other than that he kept still.

  “Maybe,” the sculptor continued, “in the beginning, they came to broaden their horizons, to gaze across the dreamlands on lands afar, which they’d never see except from up here. Anyway, that’s how it started …

  “Now, my grandfather was no ordinary ice-cutter. He was a passionate man with a passionate skill. And yet he was compassionate, too. And he knew his talent was magical. He could not bear the loneliness, the boredom, the utter ennui of certain of his fellow men, men who grew old and withered despite the timelessness of Ooth-Nargai. Aye, and he could spot such men at once, for sooner or later they’d invariably enquire of him: ‘What’s it like, up on Aran?’”

  “Is there a point to this story?” Hero suddenly asked, his teeth beginning to chatter. “Lord, I’m freezing! Are we daft, sitting here in the snow like this?”

  The old man, working on Hero’s sculpture, put a final touch to the jaw—and at once Hero’s teeth grew still, almost as if they were frozen in position. “A point? Of course! For when he was asked about Aran, my grandfather would say: ‘Aran is forbidden! Don’t ask about it. It’s not for you to know. No one climbs Aran except me, to cut the ice.’”

  “Ah!” said Eldin. “It was him started the myth, then?”

  “Because of his consuming compassion,” answered the sculptor, “yes. He must be sure, you see, that only the most bitter men climbed Aran—only the ones in whom life’s animation was dying! The ones without ambition, without aspiration, in whom nothing was left worth dreaming! Those for whom timelessness and changelessness had fused into one vast and dull and slothlike anathema! What matter to them if Aran were forbidden? What matter anything? They’d climb anyway, and damn the consequences! But did you say myth? No myth, my friends. Aran is forbidden—except to such as you!”

  Eldon’s feet and legs were finished, his thighs, too, also the arm and hand which cupped his chin. The Wanderer would now extend a finger to scratch an itch on his cheek, made so to do—discovered he could not! It seemed the blood had run out of his hand and arm, leaving only a cold numbness there.

  The old man now returned to working on Hero, rapidly finished arms and shoulders and neck, also hands where they clasped knees. Following which Hero could only watch him from swiveling eyes, for his neck had suddenly stiffened into a cramp, doubtless from holding the same position too long. Except that now … now the alarm bells were clamoring that much louder and faster in the younger quester’s mind. He’d seen, heard and felt much here, so that what he’d begun to suspect must at least be better than a guess.

  He made a real effort to stand up then, and couldn’t; only odd parts of him had feeling, remained in his control at all. And even those parts were rapidly succumbing to a cold, unfeeling rigidity. Here he sat beside his image, twinned, one of him carved in ice and the other human—for the moment!

  And it was then, like a bright flash of lightning in his mind, that all became known to him. “You’re making a big mistake.” He started to blurt the words out, but stiffly, from one side of his half-frozen mouth. “Eldin and I, we’re not bored with anything! Why, we’ve got more go in us than …”

  But what they had more go in them than remained unboasted, for the iceman quickly touched Hero’s statue on the lips and brought them to a perfect image of life—and simultaneously froze his actual mouth into complete immobility!

  Eldin had been watching from the corner of his eye; he’d recognized the panic, now shut off, in Hero’s voice. “What is going on?” he demanded, thoroughly alarmed. “What in the name of all that’s—?”

  The sculptor touched the Wanderer’s statue’s hair, Hero’s statue, too, and etched their locks into icy replicas of life. And oh, the cold that seeped down from the roots of their hair into their brains then, and what sudden, frozen horror as they knew for a certainty their fate!

  Tears flowed freely from the old man’s eyes, freezing like pearls and rolling from his cheeks as hail. He knew they had not come here like the others, tired of an endless, changeless existence and more than ready to accept any alternative. But he also knew he couldn’t let them go down again. Only turn these two loose, with tales of fabulous ice sculptures on the slopes of Aran, and tomorrow the people would come in their thousands! Of course, that would be the end of it: the selfless services of three generations of master icemen terminated. Services, yes—for surely it were better—

  “Hero!” came a distant cry, soft on the tingly, downy air, startling the sculptor like the crack of a whip. “Eldin!”

  What? The old iceman looked down the slope, saw a king’s courier waving his arms at the edge of the ice. Looking up here, he’d see nothing of the ice statues, just snow and dazzle and the pair of seated questers, dark figures against a glaring background. He would not see the sculptor, not unless he stepped on to the ice—and he was not likely to do that, because the snow-slopes of Aran were forbidden.

  Gaping, the old man turned back to the questers. But too late, they were stirring! And anyway, the courier had seen them, for as yet they were not turned to ice. Not quite. Another touch here, a stroke there … it had been that close! But too late now, too late …

  And: Too late!: the old man’s thoughts were imaged in Hero’s mind, for he also had heard the courier’s cry. Through ears of cold crystal he’d heard it, and his brittle brain had taken it in, and his faltering, freezing heart had given a lurch. Part of him said: Go away, whoever you are. I’ve done with all that. I’m ice now, part of the permafrost, a glassy pimple on Aran’s frosty face. I’m at peace with everything.

  But another part had been galvanized into a great start, had gasped and drawn air, had shouted (however silently): No! I am NOT ice! I’m David Hero—Hero of Dreams! And that part of him had won.

  The snow went out of Hero’s eyes, Eldin’s too, and they creakingly lowered their heads and their gaze, staring down the slope. There the courier capered and waved.

  “Hero! Eldin! Are you two going to sit around all day? My master has a mission for you. You’re to report to him at once.”

  Hero stood up. Or rather, he slowly straightened his knees until his backside lifted and his body tilted forward, then straightened his waist until his hands slid from his knees along his thighs. Thin sheaths of ice cracked and fell from various joints and limbs as he moved them, and the first tinglings of returning life told him all would be well.

  “I said—” the courier shouted.

  “We heard what you said!” Hero shouted back, which came out as a series of croaks.

  “Eh?” the courier cocked his head on one side.

  Hero cleared his throat, tried again. “You go on ahead. Tell him we’re coming.” And as the courier shrugged and turned back down toward the tree line: “How’d you know we were here, anyway?”

  “I’ve been looking for you all morning,” the messenger called over his shoulder. “Tatter Nees told me where you’d be. But I don’t think I’d better report that to my master!”

  “Thanks!” Hero yelled.

  “Good old Tatter!” Eldin grunted. He’d struggled to his feet and clumsily brushed himself down, sending thin splinters of ice flying as he shook his massive frame. This proved effective, but not a little painful, too. “Ow!” said the Wanderer, and several other things which don’t need recording. Then he glanced down the slope at the courier. “Do you know what the king wants with us?” he shouted.

  “Something about a job in Inquanok. You’d better hurry …” And with that the courier departed, scrambling away down the slope.

  The echoes of their shouting slowly trembled i
nto silence; it stopped snowing; the questers looked first at each other, then all about at the frozen humps under the snow.

  “Inquanok?” said the Wanderer presently. “That’s a drab, bleak sort of place to go a-questing, isn’t it?”

  “You’ll hear no complaint from me,” said Hero. “Not this time. But first—”

  It took them only a few minutes to find what they were looking for. The other statues on the slope were under an inch or so of snow; this one, however, carried only the finest dusting. They clambered over the slope toward him, and saw that he was three.

  Then, when they’d brushed snow from the other two, they understood. The three were dressed all alike, and they were obviously blood-related, but there were differences which made each one an individual. Grandfather, father, and son. “Son” was the one with only a film of snow. There’d been no time for any more.

  Eldin growled in his throat, began to draw his straight sword—and Hero stopped him. “Vandal!” the younger quester softly accused. “What? You’d deface a work of art such as this?”

  “Deface?” the Wanderer glared. “I’d destroy ’em, all three! Especially him. Why, he looks halfway pleased with himself!”

  “No need, old friend.” Hero shook his head. “He’s destroyed himself. His time had come, and he knew it. He’d probably wanted to do it for a long time, and we were the one small push he needed to send him over the edge. He must have known we weren’t right for this place. When he sensed we were coming, he tried to carve our images and got only the roughest outlines; but he’d done much better with Kuranes, which shows how close the king came at one time!”