Gerda sat up, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, in the pre-dawn gloom. “What time is it?” she muttered crossly. For a moment or two, in the bewilderment of first waking, she thought she was at home in her own goosedown bed, under her clean white counterpane. But then she heard the cooing of the pigeons, smelled dung and woodsmoke, felt a rough hand shaking her by the shoulder. With a now-familiar clenching of her stomach, she remembered where she was.
“Get up,” hissed Ritva. “Make haste. It’s time to go. We must saddle Ba before my mother wakes.”
Through all the months of her captivity Gerda had been desperate to resume her journey, regardless of its perils. Now, on the morning of departure, she felt her courage and her stubborn resolve wavering. Already the trees were turning red and gold; before long the first fierce squalls of autumn would sweep down over the hills. And yet it was the best time to travel. The roads were dry, the skies clear; the mosquitoes were gone, and the blackflies yet to come. These were the weeks when rich folk travelled north to their hunting lodges, and the pickings were good for Ritva’s father and his men. This last week the camp had been empty but for the women and children, and a few boys and old men left to guard their chieftain’s crumbling domain.
“Get up, little rabbit.” Ritva tossed a much-mended woollen tunic into Gerda’s lap. “Are you maybe changing your mind? Well, it’s too late for that.”
Gerda fumbled with the tunic lacings. “Ritva, are you sure you know the way?”
“We follow the Northern Lights, little rabbit — north to the edge of the Frozen Sea. My spirit flew on ahead to find the path, remember, and a long cold hungry journey it was.”
While Ritva went to fetch Ba, Gerda groped in the straw under the bed until she found the pieces of her crucifix. Though they were beyond repair, the wood gone soft and spongy with damp-rot, she wrapped them carefully in a scrap of deerskin and put them away in her pack.
Old Ba gave them a sad, resigned glance when they laid a folded blanket and wooden pack-saddle over his bony spine, and laced on his saddle baskets. His muzzle was worn smooth with years of browsing for moss in the winter snows; his eyes had a tired, heavy, half-blind look.
Gerda watched as Ritva stuffed the saddle baskets full of warm clothes and stealthily gathered provisions — dried meat-strips, coffee, fur mittens, fur-trimmed caps, rain-capes to wear over their tunics when the weather turned wet and cold. As well, she strapped on two pairs of skis, woollen blankets to serve as bed-covers or tent-cloths, and two heavy, pungent wolf-skin coats. Finally, she bound the tent poles up into two bundles and attached them to either side of the saddle so that they trailed behind like the tail of a bird. Hanging from the saddle pommels were various bits of cooking equipment — a coffee grinder and kettle, a battered pot. With plenty of small game, and fish in the streams, they would not go hungry.
That first morning, as they crept out of the camp, they could feel the cold breath of approaching winter; but when the sun came up, the sky was a deep unbroken blue. The golden leaves of the birches shimmered in the slanting autumn light. Gerda’s heart pounded; she felt dizzy and light-headed. She was like a caged bird, suddenly released into the wide, bright air.
At first the day’s marches left Gerda bone-weary, aching in every joint, but now, as her appetite returned, so did her endurance. It was as though she were recovering from a long, exhausting illness. Striding along beside Ba and Ritva in her grass-lined Saami boots, she was filled with a nervous energy that lightened her steps and made her heart beat faster. She felt, now, that she could face whatever hardships lay ahead.
They spoke little as they travelled, but from time to time, in a burst of high spirits, Ritva would start to sing in a husky, tuneless voice. Most of her songs were rude soldiers’ ditties that made Gerda blush and cover her ears; but sometimes, in a meditative mood, she sang snatches of old rune songs, or hummed and improvised her way through a Saami joik.
Thus Gerda learned of Stalo the Giant and his wife Lutakis the Treacherous; and of the Ulda who lived at the bottoms of lakes and rode on sleds drawn by white reindeer a-jingle with a thousand silver bells. Or sometimes the words were Ritva’s own invention: “Who is the hero who will journey behind the Cave of the North Wind?” she would chant exuberantly, keeping time to her loping stride. “Who is the hero who will break the spell of the Terrible Enchantress?”
There were whortleberries and lingonberries in the bogs, and the bilberry bushes were heavy with fruit. In the pine forests, in the shade of rotting stumps, huge pale mushrooms sprang up like ghosts. They fished for perch and pike in the streams and ate them with bilberries stewed into a sauce, and they boiled strong, bitter coffee over their small fire.
Beyond the birchwoods and the pine forest lay high bare tundra, rolling endlessly before them like a moss-green meadow. One early evening they came to a lake set into a deep bowl of white-peaked mountains. The near side of the lake was lit by a faint blue glow, while the farther shore was washed in vivid rose-coloured light. A solitary turf-covered, dome-shaped dwelling, a goattieh, stood at the edge of the forest facing the lake. It looked like a small grassy hill with a thread of white smoke curling out of the top.
“We’d better let them know they have guests,” said Ritva, as they drew near. She called loudly through the doorway of the goattieh, “Is anyone there?”
“Only me, and the mice,” said a good-humoured voice.
They ducked in through the narrow entranceway, stepping around a stack of firewood. Every inch of the floor was carpeted with birch branches, except for the hearth in the centre of the room. There, an old woman sat surrounded by pots and pans and cauldrons. She was stirring something in a blackened kettle that hung on a long sooty chain suspended from a roof beam. Further along the beam were rows of dried cod and half-dried laundry. The smell in the goattieh was a rich mixture of smoke, boiled coffee, reindeer hides and fish.
Bright black eyes peered at them from a leathery, high-cheekboned face. “Come in, come in,” the woman said. “I’ve just made a fresh batch of cakes, in case anyone should happen by.”
She poured strong salted coffee for them, and gave them flat bread baked on the hearthstones, and strips of smoked fish, and stewed reindeer meat. Everything, Gerda noticed, was full of reindeer hairs, but nonetheless tasted delicious after their long journey.
“You must stay with me tonight,” the old woman said. “There is a shed behind the goattieh where you can tie up your beast.” When they had devoured the last hearth-cake, the woman gave them reindeer hides to spread over the birch branches for their beds.
“Now then,” she said, settling herself comfortably beside the hearth, “you must tell me what brings you to my humble door.”
Gerda glanced at Ritva. Where to begin?
“I am helping my friend, because a woman has stolen her lover,” said Ritva in a matter-of-fact voice, ignoring Gerda’s indignant glare.
“Ah,” said the old woman, grinning. “A romance. And who is this woman?”
“She is called the Baroness Aurore,” said Gerda. There seemed little point, now, in contradicting Ritva’s version of events.
“That’s what she may call herself,” said Ritva, “but my people know her by another name. My dead grandmother sang me a song about her. She is the Woman of the North, the Terrible Enchantress. She has taken Gerda’s lover away to her kingdom at the northernmost edge of the world, and is holding him captive.”
“And how do you happen to know this?” asked the old woman, pouring herself another cup of coffee.
“I sent my spirit on a journey, riding on the back of a white elk, and I saw him with my own eyes, in her ice palace at the world’s rim, where the earth and sky meet.”
“Ah,” said the old woman, as if this was an entirely reasonable explanation. “Well, if you like I can tell you a story about this woman. It’s only what I have heard, mind, and there are a great many stories in the world — you must decide for yourself which ones you want to believe. They say she was one of the wise ones who dwelt in the northern wastes, who lived in solitude with their books and manuscripts, and practised their wizard’s arts. But you must be strong of spirit to deal with magic — otherwise, where you thought to be its master, instead you become its servant. She was a powerful wizard, but not powerful enough to control her magic, and in the end it possessed her. Now they call her the Drowner of Heroes and Devourer of Souls. Storm and fog and the icy cold of eternal darkness are her weapons. It was she who did battle with the magician Väinö when he tried to share her power. Once, they say, in a fit of spite she ripped the sun and the moon out of the sky and hid them away beneath a mountain.”
Gerda, who had been listening in silence, thought of what Kai — cool, rational, level-headed Kai — would think of all this. “I don’t believe in wizards, and sorceresses,” she told the old woman. “They are tales to frighten children.”
“Ah, well, little one,” sighed the old woman. “Is it better, or worse, I wonder, to die at the hands of an enemy you don’t believe in?”
“I only meant,” said Gerda, confused, “that she is a woman, like any other — though cleverer, perhaps, and able to seduce people into doing what she wants. But I don’t believe she has magic powers.”
“Oh, don’t you now?” murmured the old woman. “Well, I have no opinion, one way or another. I stoke my fire, and stir my soup, and tend to my own affairs. No doubt that is why I have lived as long as I have. But you’re on the right road — I have heard that she likes to spend the early autumn at her lodge in Finnmark, before she returns to her winter palace.”
“How much farther to Finnmark?” Gerda asked.
“Oh, you have a long way to go yet — a hundred miles or more — but if you hurry, maybe you can catch up with her. There is a woman in Finnmark who can help you more than I — a woman of power. I will give you a letter of introduction. Have you a bit of paper about you?”
Ritva looked blank. Paper and pen were tools as exotic to her as spears and skinning knives were to Gerda. Out of habit, Gerda felt where her skirt pocket would have been, in an earlier existence. She shook her head.
“No? Never mind,” said the old woman. She reached up and unhooked a dried codfish from the beam. “This will do in a pinch.”
Face screwed with concentration, she used the point of a knife to scratch a series of runes on the back of the fish. “Mind you don’t lose this, now,” and she gave it to Ritva to put away in her pack.
Day by day they moved farther out of autumn into winter, trudging northward through a landscape of low hills covered with snow-clad pines, and over frozen marshes dotted with stunted fir. The days were grey and murky, the long nights glittering with starlight. Ba foraged under the powdery new snow for dried lichen and hidden summer greenery, digging down with his hooves and then thrusting his nose into the reindeer-moss beneath. They pitched their tent among tall rocks or clumps of trees — anywhere they could find shelter from the sudden snow-squalls that swept down without warning.
Then one day, in early dusk and driving snow, they came to a little goattieh huddled in the shelter of a cliff. There was no door, only a narrow window covered by a piece of hide, with firelight flickering behind. Ritva knocked boldly at the window, and after a moment someone pushed aside the hide and squinted out at them. “Come in, come in,” a voice croaked. “Be quick, before all the heat gets out.”
“I cannot leave my reindeer out here for the wolves to eat,” said Ritva.
“You can keep one eye on him through the window,” the voice said. Ritva tied Ba’s reins to a stunted tree and clambered through the window, with Gerda following.
The voice belonged to the oldest, smallest woman Gerda had ever seen, a tiny wrinkled, wizened, toothless creature, all nose and chin and bushy white hair like a witch in a fairy tale. And yet there was nothing fearsome about her. Her eyes, as bright as river stones, were clever and kind.
“Why don’t you have a door?” asked Ritva.
“Why would I want a door? My kinfolk bring me whatever I need to live, and hand it through the window. I never go out that way. If I ever leave, it’s by the smoke-hole.”
Gerda glanced up at the roof in puzzlement. It was true, the old woman was almost small enough to escape through the smoke-hole, but were those old bones agile enough for such a leap? Then, catching Ritva’s eye, she understood: it was not the old woman’s body but her spirit that came and went through that narrow hole.
The air in the room was stifling, choking. Gerda felt her whole body bathed in sweat under her heavy coat. The two of them began to peel off their winter garments, layer by layer, until they were down to tunics and trousers.
“Put your boots to dry on the hearthstones,” the woman said.
“We’ve brought you a message,” said Ritva. She looked a trifle foolish, holding out the stiff, smelly fish. But the old woman accepted it gravely, and read the runes with as much attention as if they were written on the finest deckled parchment.
“I see,” said the old woman. She dropped the cod into the soup pot. “Well, my young ladies, I hope you have not bitten off more blubber than you can chew.”
“I beg your pardon?” Gerda said.
“My friend the Saami woman tells me you have come seeking the Enchantress of the North. She and I are old enemies, and knowing her powers, I fear for the souls of two such innocents as yourselves.”
“I know who you are,” said Ritva, suddenly. “You are the woman who binds the winds. My mother spoke of you. She said you knew how to tie all the winds of the world together with a bit of twine, and when you choose to let all of them loose at once, forests topple, and the roots of the mountains creak.”
“No offense to your mother,” said the old woman, “but what a lot of nonsense people talk!”
“Can you teach me to bind the winds?” asked Ritva, pretending she had not heard.
“What for?” asked the woman slyly. “Are you planning a sea voyage?”
“No,” said Ritva. “But if I am to rescue Gerda’s friend from the Enchantress, I will need all the weapons I can find.”
“But this is not your battle,” the woman said. “It is Gerda’s.”
Ritva looked at her with startled disbelief. “What, that little one? My little rabbit? How will she fight the Terrible Enchantress? That is a task for heroes, for women of power.”
“Like you? But Ritva, there is more than one kind of power. Never underestimate the power of innocence, of a good and trusting nature.”
Ritva gave a shout of raucous laughter. “A trusting nature? Old woman, how long would I have survived if I had a trusting nature? The quickness of my wits, the knife in my hand, my two swift feet, that’s what I trusted.”
“Gerda trusted you. And you repaid her trust. As did everyone she met. How else has she come so far, survived so much, and remained unharmed? Unlike you, my girl — you will always have to fight for what you want. Maybe you will get it — but never without a struggle, never without cost.”
“She survived because I saved her. My father would have slit her throat, or married her to some drunken lout who’d have beaten her black and blue.”
“And why did you save her?” asked the old woman. “Was it only a whim, because you were bored with tormenting your mother and your poor old reindeer, and wanted a new pet?”
“Yes,” Ritva started to say, and then faltered, staring at the old woman, whose level gaze, in return, seemed to see clear through Ritva’s skull. “No,” she admitted. “At first I thought I wanted her as a pet, someone to come running when I snapped my fingers . . . ”
“But instead . . . ?”
Ritva grinned, half-sheepishly. “Instead, it was me who came running.”
The old woman gave a small, satisfied sigh. “You see. You see what power she has. You will have your part to play, my girl. But if the boy’s soul is to be set free, it is your little rabbit who must do it.”
“But first we must find the Enchantress. They say she has a lodge at the edge of the Frozen Sea.”
“Well, as to that, I fear you have arrived too late. You will need to make that sea-voyage after all. She has left her lodge in Finnmark and returned to her palace, which is somewhere north of Spitzbergen, beyond the Cave of the North Wind, in the midst of the Frozen Sea.”
Gerda’s heart felt like a lump of ice in her chest. To have come so far, to have suffered so much, and then to be told that the worst part of the journey still lay before them . . .
“Where did you learn this, old woman?” Ritva asked.
The woman looked sharply round at her. “And where did you learn your manners, my girl? Maybe the wind told me, whistling through the smoke-hole. Isn’t it enough that I have told you what you wanted to know?”
Ritva stared down at her boots, abashed.
“Just over there, behind my house, is a stream flowing north. Follow its banks until it joins a river. Follow the river north — it will lead you to a fjord where cod fishermen come to mend their nets. And (this with a mocking glance at Ritva) “if you want to know where I learned this, I made the trip with my kinfolk many a springtime, when they took the reindeer to graze on the high tundra above the sea.”
“And then?”
“Follow the cliff path down to the shore. If you are lucky you may find a boat to hire. But you must go quickly, before winter comes to the Frozen Sea and the pack ice closes in.”
“Gerda, help me put up the tent,” said Ritva. “We’ll sleep beside Ba, and leave at first light.”
“Wait,” said the old woman as they were preparing to set out in the morning. She reached through the window and thrust something into Ritva’s hand. It was a small reindeer-skin pouch, with a drawstring of twine. “No, no, you must not open it yet,” she shrilled, as Ritva, curious as always, tried to loosen the three knots that held it closed.
“When?” asked Ritva. She held up the pouch and peered at it. To all appearances it was empty.
“You will know when the time comes,” said the old Finnmark woman.
“Now go with the wind, for time is wasting.”