Girl in Ice(81)

If only he could speak to us.

I climbed out of the machine, lifting the child to her feet. She swayed, unsteady.

“Sigrid, help me understand…” What are we doing here?

She reached her arms up to me; I carried her to the beast. Sapphire scarves of ice draped the length of its shoulder and pelvis stones, while a comical rounded cap of ice rested on its head. The cairn blocked the wind, and I was thankful for that; it had been a while since I could feel my toes or fingers.

Sigrid leaned out of my arms. Grabbing on to the ledge that was the shoulder stone, she pulled us closer to it, speaking a few words lost to the wind. I stumbled along where she led me, up close to the thing, my face almost touching its icy skin. It felt sentient in a quiet, slow way, like a tree.

Sigrid pointed to my eye, then toward a triangle-shaped hole created by the two shoulder rocks.

She said, “Eye. See.”

I huffed her up higher in my arms, squinting through the fist-sized hole. Perfectly framed, perhaps miles away, there it was. Another blocky, vaguely man-shaped form.

The second cairn.





thirty-six


Increasingly reckless, I gunned the machine across ridges of snow and ice to the next rock man. This one stood even taller, but cockeyed, one massive leg a bit shorter than the other, pelvis and shoulder slabs tilted, one rock arm jauntily pointing skyward, the other down, like it was disco dancing. Four stacked oblong blocks made up its torso; the one placed where the belly might be looked like it’d been rescued from the sea. Waves had worn away a long shallow groove and a hole, like a belly button. It curled inward like the fossil of a snail shell or an ammonite, breaking through to the other side in a perfect quarter-sized peephole. Someone had had fun building these stone beings. I peered through the hole and sighted the third cairn, again perfectly framed by the contours of the opening. We were off.

We flew across rough, tumbled ice. The next cairn seemed to reach a rocky, beseeching hand to us. Up and over a shining blue hillock we sailed—I wasn’t looking down—and landed hard, my brain banging against my skull. I comforted Sigrid as we thudded along, but I knew it was bad. Belching out an ugly blast of diesel, the motor breathed its last. We coasted across the slick surface in silence, until we stopped.

Were we one, five, ten miles away?

Impossible to tell.

Sigrid barely stirred.

I jerked the key from the ignition, cursed, jammed it back in, and turned. It made a clicking sound; clearly some crucial connection had been severed. I propped my forehead on the wheel, tried to calm my breathing. Lifted it up. The wind cuffed me. I smacked the side of the machine, kicked at the pedals, screamed into the void. Tried the key again: tick, tick, tick…

Silence.

Or was it?

A motor. Faint, but real. The snowcat. I would know it anywhere. How long has it been tailing us? Our own motor had deafened us to any other sound—they could have been following us since the second cairn.

“Sigrid.” I shook her. “Do you hear? They’re coming.”

Her eyes glimmered open, and she nodded, exhausted, sad.

“We have to move, okay? We have to walk.”

She closed her eyes and melted into me.

I got out of the machine. Set her down on the windswept ice. She listed, staggering a few paces, but remained upright. I ransacked the snowmobile in vain for anything we might use. By the time I raised my head from the guts of the machine, she had already commenced a stumbling walk in the direction of the cairn. Blowing snow revealed a blip of red, then obliterated her with a pure white canvas.

“Sigrid, wait!” I ran toward her, sick at heart to leave the machine even though it was useless.

We were really in it now. Alone in an astonishing country of snow and ice that was simply not of human scale. We pitched forward on the flat expanse. My heart beat weakly in the chilled rigid box of my body; I walked on feet I no longer felt. Looming in the incalculable distance, the last cairn cut a jagged black hole into a velvet sky matted with stars. I no longer felt the wind.

Sigrid tripped, fell forward, and didn’t get up. I dropped down over her, lifted her, held my ear to her mouth—Are you breathing?

Her eyes were closed, her breath a weak heat against my cheek. Snow crystals gathered between her fine straight lashes, in her half-open mouth. A flash of the baby thawing; I pushed the thought away.

She didn’t have enough life in her to hold on to my back, so I carried her in my arms. I don’t know how far I walked. The whine of the motor grew neither louder nor fainter, but stayed a steady buzz in my head… Have I lost my mind? Is it just the wind?

But if it is them, can they see us?

I turned, scouring the circle of mile-high peaks, the pewter-gray glacial pass that led to the frozen lake. Nothing moved. I whipped back around, terrified to lose sight of the cairn. My breath raked across my throat. I thrust my limbs forward, robotic. We were freezing to death.

I spoke to Sigrid using all the words I knew in her language, about a hundred by then, to try to keep her awake and with me, but there was no answer. How useless was all this—was I—if I lost her. I can’t lose her. But the Enormity didn’t care what I wanted; it just stretched out and out, beyond all human understanding, its brutal blue jaws stretching ever wider. It would take her dear breath, her faint heartbeat, then mine, and we would become human statues, rock-hard in the snow, not even as useful as a cairn.