I woke in a panic, Isabelle’s cries ringing in my ears. I looked around the hut, ready to comfort her, but I had only imagined the crying. She slept soundly in her wooden box, a finger in her mouth. I pulled a blanket over her to shield her from the cool night air, when I saw that Uma’s and Anna’s beds were empty.
Possible explanations flooded my mind—Anna had been nauseated and Uma had brought her outside for fresh air; Anna had to go to the bathroom and left the hut. But I knew that these scenarios were unlikely. Anna had been too sick to leave her bed. She couldn’t lift an arm, let alone walk. And besides, it was the middle of the night, the sky black and moonless—not the moment for Uma to take Anna outside. A sensation of dread filled my mind. Something terrible had happened.
Carefully, so as not to wake her, I wrapped Isabelle in a blanket and walked outside, wandering through the darkness in search of Uma. But a strange silence met me as I walked through the village. The stone huts were dark and quiet and, as I peered into them, one by one, I saw that they were all empty. In fact, the entire village was empty. Not a voice to be heard. Not a fire burning in the fire pits. Not a person asleep in her bed. I held Isabelle close, feeling her warmth, smelling the sweet odor of her skin, wondering what to do next.
I was on my way back to the hut when I smelled something odd in the air. An acrid scent, like burning pine. Then a noise from above, a low rhythmic humming, half song, half moan. I strained to hear it, half believing it to be the distant bellow of an injured animal. But the more I listened, the more I knew that this strange sound was not an animal. It was not the wind. It was the low, rumbling vibration of human voices. The Icemen had gathered together and they were singing.
Holding the baby close to my body, I climbed the long, steep path to the hot spring, then beyond, to the grotto, its wall of crystals shimmering black in the darkness. The tribe was not there but somewhere above, where the evergreen trees thinned to rock and sky. I had never climbed beyond the grotto, and it took some time to find my way through the tangled branches of trees, but I followed the sound of voices, and soon the air thickened with skeins of gray smoke. Finally, holding Isabelle tight, I hoisted myself over the ledge of a rocky promontory and emerged onto the flat of a stone plateau.
I found the tribe gathered around a bonfire. I had been right. Anna was dead, her body laid out on a pallet near the fire. Dressed in animal skins, with wildflowers woven into her hair, she looked more peaceful in death than she had in the weeks I had known her. I felt overwhelmed by regret and sadness. I had promised to take her away from there, and to reunite her with her family, and now it was too late.
I moved closer to the bonfire, transfixed by the spectacle. Half naked and chanting, dancing and drunk and frantic, the Icemen had worked themselves into a kind of fervor. Even the children—Oryni, Laya, Saba, and Xyra, whose hair I brushed and whose clothes I mended, who had taught me their language and treated me like a sister—were wild with a frightful energy. Perhaps demons inhabited me as well, because I couldn’t turn away.
“Drink this,” Uma said, coming to my side. She gave me a bowl. I took a long sip of a bitter and herbal liquid. A chemical rush moved through me as I finished and gave the bowl back to Uma.
“What are they doing?” I asked, gesturing to the dancing.
“We are calling our ancestors,” she said. “We will ask them to take the child.”
“You’ll bury her up here?”
“After our ancestors accept her,” she said, glancing at the bonfire, “she will burn.”
My gaze returned to Anna, her long, fine hair gleaming in the light. Tears filled my eyes, tears of sadness, but also of anger. Her death was a terrible crime. I thought of what her parents must feel, never knowing what happened to her. I thought of what Greta felt after losing Joseph. Aki and Jabi had killed this child, and I had allowed it to happen.
“You must never take another child from below,” I told Uma. “Speak to the others. Tell them I won’t allow it. Tell them it is wrong. If you promise to stop, I will help you survive. I’ll bring you medicine and supplies. Everything you need. I promise. But you can never bring another child here.”
Uma looked at me, her eyes wide with surprise and, I thought, relief. “I will tell them,” she said.
Just then, Aki saw us from across the fire and approached. He had been dancing, and sweat glistened on his skin in the flickering light. “Give her to me,” he said, gesturing to the baby. A shot of fear spiked through me, an instinctual need to keep her away from the fire.
Isabelle gazed at Aki with her enormous blue eyes, assessing her father.
“He won’t harm her,” Uma said, touching my arm. “It is our custom to welcome a child this way.”
“Be careful,” I said, as Aki scooped her from me. He turned to the others and lifted her into the air, as if making an offering. As they cheered and called out Isabelle’s name, Uma took Isabelle from Aki, twirled her around, then handed her to Oryni, who kissed her and gave her to another pair of hands that passed her to another, then another. In this fashion, Isabelle made her way around the fire, moving from person to person, shared between the tribe like one of the bowls of meat in the grotto.
I watched her rise and fall with their movements, alarmed by her proximity to the fire, ready to pull her away if she was in danger, but also moved by the tenderness with which each member of the tribe held her. They cherished her, this new member of their community, treated her as something precious and rare. I tried to imagine what her life would be like there, among the Icemen, playing in the hot spring with the other children, or feasting in the grotto, but I couldn’t. Isabelle was not my flesh and blood, and Aki and his tribe had more right to raise her than I, and yet I felt a deep, maternal need to save her from them. With Anna lying dead at my feet, and the number of their children who survived into adulthood being so few, the very idea of giving Isabelle over to them seemed, suddenly, a terrible risk.
What happened next seems incredible, and even now, after so much time has passed, I struggle to find the words to explain it. There are evenings, when Isabelle is asleep in her room and I am alone by the fire, that I try to reconstruct the madness of the tribal dance and the chanting, the clapping and stomping, the serenity of Anna’s frozen features bearing down on me, but the memories turn through me like a cyclone, whirling and whirling, so that, try as I might, I cannot see it clearly. I could blame it on the drink Uma had given me, and it is possible that some hallucinogenic herb altered my senses, twisting my vision so that I saw and felt what I did. But if I am honest with myself, I know that what I saw that night was real.
It began as a wisp of smoke from the fire, the slightest tendril of movement. I thought it was the heat distorting the air, or perhaps the wind in my eyes. But then, the smoke coalesced, and a figure stepped from the flames, a man dressed in clothes of another era—a brown suit and a white silk cravat. It was Leopold, his face as saturnine as the picture in the portrait gallery. I stared, awed by this vision, when his parents, Alberta and Amadeo, appeared by his side, and then their parents. The twins, Guillaume and Giovanni, and my great-great-grandparents Eleanor and Ambrose, and then the first Montebiancos, Frederick and Isabelle. My parents appeared from the smoke, and then my grandmother Marta, but when I stepped to them, they slipped through my hands. There were others I didn’t recognize, the ancestors of Aki and Uma and Jabi and Isabelle, the ancient human beings who had lived and died in those mountains, the Ice Giants who banished the Icemen from their palaces. They stood together, joining the circle around Anna. They had come, I understood, to bless us.
And while our reunion was brief, and they faded into the fire as quickly as they had emerged, I knew, as they vanished in the half-light, that they were not gone. I carried them in my body. My ancestors lived in my bones and in my blood, in the connections of my nervous system, and in the unreachable recesses of my consciousness. They would always be with me, even when I was far away from that mountain. From the moment I was born, they had accompanied me through life. And when I died, I would join them again.
With the voices of my ancestors in my ears, and their blessing in my heart, I took Isabelle in my arms and—leaving the others to their delirious dance—held my daughter close and slipped away, gone before anyone knew we had left the village of the Icemen.