I. Visions and Revisions.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.
- Samuel Coleridge, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'.
White, white, all and everything is white. Nothingness be not black but never-ending light.
Mutters fell into one another; the world communicable only through snatched half-rhymes.
The girl's head felt weightless and drawn earthward all at once. Her ears stung with a perpetual tinnitus and the slitted ivory visor she wore did little to hush the outward glare.
Brights of pack-ice swam behind her eyes, endless and sifting.
The deck she curled upon (like a clenched fist or small child) was of weathered and silvery wood; bleached almost to bone by the cold sun. The sea, for once, was still and calm. Vast and flinty. The sky above was as light as the skiff.
The man who captained the little vessel was also pale in dress, cloaked in bright seal skins.
'Snow sickness,' he remarked, conversationally. 'Never have I seen a case as bad as yours, young one. Shivering and shaking… clinging to my boat as if you wish you were the very bark that bears you… Well, never have I seen a one that was as struck as you.'
The girl, rocking herself under rough blankets, moaned.
'Thank you, Alasie. You do remind me ever so often. Every hour it seems… although I no longer know one minute from the next thanks to this infernal daylight.' She keened again and banged her knuckles on the deck, hard enough to draw blood.
'That may be so. But as you refuse to tell me of yourself and we have seen nothing for days but the Svalfærn and her bergs there is little else to note but note your declining condition.'
Alasie's voice was forever even, his steadiness a constant amidst a shifting ocean. He refused to be rushed and gave equal weight and pause to each phrase – time the girl was no longer sure she believed in. The absence of night for weeks on end, the ineluctable day, had a seeping, delirious affect. She already felt unmoored from any tangible reality.
'You're right. I'm sorry,' she murmured. 'I have forgotten what it is to be in the company of a friend.'
Alasie said nothing for a while and the girl resumed her methodical rocking, trying to lose herself in the rhythm, anything to assuage the pounding nausea.
'You know, child, it will stop if you do.'
'Hmmm.'
'The North only poisons those who resist it. Take off your mask and look her in the eye.'
'If it were that easy, I would have been cured days ago. Ever since I left his…' She broke off, but stilled in her regular motion.
Her ferryman would not move to fill the silence. It hung, another blankness in the white air.
She found she could not stop herself.
'Nothing grows here, Alasie,' began her outburst.
'Where I am from, we have plants and herbs in abundance, though it can be hard to seek them. You said to me before that one desert was much like another, that you could not understand how the red heat of my plains was not as cruel as your white wastes. But here is a different kind of scarcity.
The fish you pull from the water are silent and dark, they seem almost resigned to the hook. I've never caught one in a struggle – by the time they're up from the depths they're already glassy and dead. Even your great whales seem reluctant to surface for breath, as if they live only in anticipation of their fall to the harpoon.
In my land, the fauna is frantic and hard. Green things cling to the smallest of places. Witsia plants have underground systems miles long, and it is only through guile – by pouring water near their heads and waiting with a knife at the ready – that you can harvest their roots.
What I wouldn't give to chew one now and stop this sickness.'
(The girl did not recognise the rising passion of her tone, her quickening breath and words.)
'Further toward the grass plains there is a pack of brindled dogs. I ran with them once. They know only movement, an ecstatic plunge toward the next kill. It is said that their hearts never stop beating, even in death.
Yet here…' she paused to gesture at her surroundings, 'Nothing.'
'That is the longest I have heard you speak, child.'
The girl flushed slightly and turned away, interred again in her silence.
Alasie sighed. 'It was not always this way. The Panar tundra was much like your desert and your plains. Things grew, evering things which stood for centuries and regreened even in the harshest winter. In the old pine forests, sap flowed like amber. Bears and wolves, elk and aurok, firecat and eagle were many.
The seas were other, too. The Svalfærn was once full of lithe seal, whale and shark. To fish it was to dance with death and wave, to take plenty but leave more. To pay tithes to our great mother and be rewarded.
But now…'
'He took it all, didn't he?' asked the girl. 'The Mad King sickened the North. It is why everything is still or dying. Why everything is colder than before.'
'And that is why he wants you.'
The girl tensed beneath her blankets, her hands instinctively edging toward the knife concealed at her belt.
'It is not me he wants.' She replied, carefully. 'I… took something.'
'Something you do not wish to return?'
'Something I cannot return. At least, I don't yet know how.'
'And if you could, child, would you?'
'Never.'
The girl looked to Alasie then. His eyes did not squint against the glare as hers did, but were hardened granite chips turned ever westwards with their journey. What she could see of his face from beneath his fur hood was ruddy and leathered by the midnight sun.
The North only poisons those who resist it… Look her in the eye.
Gingerly, she slipped off her visor and almost retched at the ensuing brightness. White immediately crowded in, terminal and compassing. She imagined her retinas blazing with it before they turned milky and dull. What use for a blind thief? She would never leave the North then. Perhaps her captor's glorious trick would be this – a facsimile of escape – before she was brought again to centre of his kingdom. She could almost feel the boat heading back, within hours, she was suddenly certain, they would again reach the shore from which they had set off. Perhaps they had never left.
Somewhere far off she thought she heard a peripheral song...snatches of a low and steady melody...
Yet all was still white.
She surprised herself by remembering her mother's hands. A vision of the long lines of her fingers and the ropey veins which she had once loathed in their prominence. Her mother's nailbeds were perpetually red with ochre, the tips of her fingers stained green and brown with old tincture. In places, the latent toxicity of foxglove and tansy had discoloured the skin further until it was akin in hue and texture to the scrolled parchments the girl sometimes spied in the Goblin Market.
Tansy. Digestive tract problems, migraines, nerve and joint pain. Flower-heads like small yellow coins. Best when crushed into an oil. More than ten drops can induce death.
Foxglove. Poisonous also, but when correctly administered can be used to calm an overspent heart.
She tried to recall her mother's words exactly. The mage had worked in vain to teach the girl the property of each and every plant, its uses, its dangers. The girl had only ever half-listened. The magic her mother practiced bored her. How could she not see that her long labour, her brewing and drying, pounding and mixing, yielded only the crudest of results?
The girl preferred to feel the energy skittering through the Labyrinth walls, rangy and fluid. Sometimes, if she focused hard enough, she could feel it spanning out from her like a shock of root systems. The girl momentarily thrummed at the centre of this immense web. The power absorbed her and was absorbed by her in equal turn. She was simultaneously thinned out and full. The Labyrinth knew her intrusion and could have quelled it; many a touched child had succumbed to a sudden rockfall or slipped through a crack into the places far below. This one, though, it let revel in its complexity. The girl could not understand why her mother did not turn to such magic, which required no orality, no botany, no years of memorisation and practice to master. This is how it should be, she thought. Not a compound effort dirt, comixing blood and spit and root to cast a knowledge which had been carefully secreted, stolen and bartered for across generations. Magic, she knew now, should not be this fleshly toil but an intrinsic understanding. An apprehension of that essential pattern which yokes together and shoots through all living things. This was why the Labyrinth's power was bountiful and boundless, it potentiated a beginning beyond the subject which channelled it; like a hand overstretching into eternity. Meanwhile her mother's medicinal concoctions were ends in and of themselves: small, contained things which performed once (sealed a wound, assuaged a fever) then ceased.
The girl rejected their primitivity. She found soon enough that, if only for a little while, she could manipulate parts of the Labyrinth lying miles from her, twisting them into strange and indignant shapes.
Whenever her mother entered its walls with her wares, she was unsettled at her daughter's uncanny ability to navigate the shifting realm, often leading them to the market within mere hours of their arrival.
The Labyrinth began to project a sprawling influence beyond itself. Even when they returned to the plains and then the surrounding villages to provide medicine and collect ingredients, upon trying again to teach the girl magery, her mother's unease ossified. Not only could the child produce both simple and complex curatives in minutes, she did not use her mother's lessons, the old ways, to do so. Her hands worked rapidly, yet almost disinterestedly, as her eyes and mind strayed toward the horizon line. She craved an intensity she had so briefly been privy to. The Labyrinth's magic had left within her a resonance she could not shirk.
When she again entered its walls, now an older child, (her mother could no longer deny their need for the bustling trade of the market at the maze's centre) this craving was abruptly sated.
With her hand unfurled against the red stone, the girl felt the power redoubled. It was when she drew back and found it had not immediately left her that she panicked. All she was – had wanted to be – was a conduit. One who watched and felt. She had never once desired to possess, to take. Yet the Labyrinth, it seemed, had made that decision for her. A wall had shot up between the girl and her mother of its own apparent accord. Neither screamed but the girl knew instinctively that she had done something very wrong.
When she again saw her mother, weeks later on the outside, they would not speak of it. Her mother would not speak to her at all, but bandaged her hands and feet with the bark of the silvet tree. This ward immediately subdued her. The girl sunk the yearning deep inside her and focused instead on the work of her hands and how they ruddied with the plants beneath them.
Although the surge of energy she had felt was gone, weakened even further the longer she was away from the Labyrinth, there lingered something residual. It played at the backs of her eyelids when she tried to sleep, was latent in the root networks of the witsia she tempted from the dry ground. When she followed her mother into a dark wood to harvest maid's finger and hobwort she was overcome by the thrumming of the trees. They sung in immense symbiosis. The girl found she could not move. She felt strands of power all around her, turned through the loam in the bodies of earthworms, spiralling in the rings of stem and leaf and trunk.
Her mother grew wary and resentful of her new sensibility. The girl stayed back now when they travelled to sell and to heal. Buyers – even those from families they had known for years – regarded her oddly. She had been marked in some unutterable yet wholly intolerable way.
Her mother's hair had begun to grey quickly after that, becoming as hoary as the silvet bark her daughter was always wrapped in. Her hands grew knotty and stilled. All her joints were cricked and stopped.
There must have been a point where this change was understood by the girl to be irreversible.
Yet age had taken her mother inchmeal, imperceptibly, like a slow hand reaching for another through water. So it was both vaguely surprising and no surprise at all when it finally overcame her.
If birth was a squalling babe, then her death was a whimper.
A grave could have reified the girl's loss, perhaps brought it in line with the rest of her reality. Yet this, her mother's permanent absence, she could not reconcile with her own continued endurance. It was an emptiness obscured and numinous, as if set behind behind a veil. The girl found, with something of a remote guilt, the world's colours no less saturated than before, its birdsong no less subdued. Fruit tasted just as sweet or sharp or bitter. When she moved through space, she did so unhindered.
And when she did try to think of her mother, she could not find a memory to mourn.
In her mind's-eye she could only conjure her ashes turning through the wind; greying, insubstantial…
Ashy flakes branded and reddened her cheeks.
And with this shock of present cold there sounded a vague and general murmuring.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
A ballad, she realised. Norvyn. It was stressed strangely, like a child lurching but not quite falling. A seaman striding jauntily across a moving deck. An ancient mariner shaking rime from his beard. To make emerald fit the scheme it had to be elongated and refigured. She chewed over the words just heard:
As green as em-er ald.
Alasie carried on in his verse. Its internal propulsion was binding, unbreakable. Like a spell. He was gently cognisant of the girl's awakening. Of her eyes adjusting to the light she had previously shunned. She began to look around anew. The sub-aqueous green of sea ice cast water shadows over her face and hands.
She grinned at him, blearily, revealing a set of strong, off-white teeth.
When his song was finished, he offered proper greeting.
'Welcome back, child. You see now. In days we shall reach the pass and part ways.'
The girl nodded before moving to the side of the boat. She dropped the ivory visor into the sea.
Noiselessly, it disappeared.
A.N.
Yay! A sort of first chapter!
Alasie isn't too stolid for poetry – Norvyn ballads are renowned for their complex lyricism and interesting metre (thank you Coleridge for supplying both of the above). I would defo recommend checking out the whole poem when you have the chance. There's an albatross, biblical symbolism, more ice. I thought its incantatory quality worked well here… Words have power, magic words especially, there are two types of emergent magic… I can say no more.
A little bit of backstory to give you something to mull over. Who is the girl? Where is she going? Why is it so damned cold?
I don't know exactly where the next chapter will take me… closer to the Labyrinth for sure. I'll attempt to get the next chapter up in a few days.
Let the resurrection begin.