The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(16)
To provide an example; Dr Finbar Hardy, a rather portly climatology professor from Dublin, didn’t go out to collect samples or measurements if he deemed it ‘too cold’. As a consequence, he had not left the building since November.
“Little Miss Way is just too bloody enthusiastic.” was Dr Tom Crowe’s chief complaint about the diligent and energetic young intern. “She’s just bloody infuriating.” he stirred his porridge. He was running low on oats and it was another two weeks before the supply plane dropped in.
“I call her Tigger.” Dr Finbar Hardy confessed, eating his powdered egg which he had prepared in a style that might be called scrambled.
“I’d tap that.” said Dr Craig Bale. As he lifted his spoon of Shreddies to his mouth a Sabatier knife sliced past his ear and landed with a thwonk in the surface of the table. It twanged back and forth a little, giving some idea of the velocity at which it had been thrown.
“If you so much as look at her too long Bale, that is the knife I will use to cut off your balls.” was Dr Angela Byrne’s farewell.
“Someone’s got a crush.” Bale muttered.
“I heard that.” shouted Angela from some way down the corridor.
Today the two colleagues were travelling up the frozen lake to take pillar samples from the permafrost in a narrow inlet that reached out from the lake, into the forest that edged it. The two had worked well together and amassed more data and samples in the two months since Vanessa’s arrival, than the male members of the research team had in almost a year. Dr Byrne meant to make up for all the lost and wasted time. Where before she had been tired out with the effort of being such a one-man band, Vanessa’s arrival and skill had given Dr Byrne renewed energy. She had determined, in fact, that she was going to offer Vanessa Way a position in her department at the university.
Today, if the pillar sampling went according to plan, they were also going to work through a grid they had mapped of the lakeside forest area and log all the flora and possible fauna that was out there. Already Vanessa had shown a wide ranging knowledge of lichen and they had begun a detailed record of the local forest nearest to the centre and the species present within.
As they skimmed across the frozen lake on the snowcats, the sky gunmetal above them, Angela thought that as soon as they all returned to civilisation she would like to introduce Vanessa to her youngest brother, Mottram.
They had been working on a section of the lake several miles to the east and their track along the shoreline now led them into a small inlet that poked its icy finger deeper into the forest so that the trees formed a dense horseshoe around the narrow point of frozen lake. They had grid marked the area into square metre boxes on their maps.
“If you work your way down the first row of grids we’ve marked on this eastern side and I will work down the west and we can meet up in three hours?” Dr Byrne suggested. Vanessa nodded agreement and, unloading their kitbags, they left the snowcats at the edge of the inlet and walked inward. It was a satisfying walk of less than half a mile, the trees closing in on three sides, spiking the air with their needle scent and what had been a bright blue Arctic sky clouded over, the air growing colder and heavier.
At the apex of the inlet they began working their separate grids and moving apart from each other. Vanessa was quickly lost in her task, noting the tree species and working her way through their task sheet of scrapings and sampling. Each lichen that she found she could name, lichens had been a favourite since her childhood, she loved the colours and the idea of the symbiosis of the two lifeforms helping each other to survive. Teamwork. That was how she had described their existence to her mother. The lichen were neither one thing nor another and yet they could survive almost any habitat.
She was prickled for a moment by a memory of her mother, just a smile on a lakeside day and yet the sorrow she felt was like ice freezing through her. She took a moment, a deep breath, looked about her. She could see Dr Byrne in the near distance.
As she stepped back into her task her eye was caught by the sight of a lichen patched onto some bark litter that was half embedded in a nearby bank of snow. It was a particularly beautiful shade of green and as she lifted a small piece up with her clumsy gloves it seemed like lace, the light caught and angled inside it so that it looked bejewelled. Vanessa stared at it for a long time, her hand moving this way and that to trap the light in all the ways she could. Fierce little shafts of light. Diamond white. Snow white. She looked up and as she did so, the forest before her seemed suddenly sprinkled with light, the bark and needle litter glittered, the light travelled impossibly. It must be bouncing off the snow. Vanessa looked for reasons for the effect, but there was something awry about this light. There was no source for a start. The sunlight that had accompanied them on their journey from the research huts had long since been clouded over. She took a few steps out of her grid, as she did so her eye was drawn further into the wood by a patch of lichen mapped onto the trunk of a tree.
It was roughly the size of a good quality dinner plate and it ranged and clung to the bark of the tree showing three shades of green dependent upon how deep into the gnarls of the bark it had reached. Such a beautiful green. She sketched quickly, her gloves not hampering her quick pencil movements. There was a sound. Animal. She looked up. Something moved between the trees at some distance. A horse grazing the reindeer moss except it lifted its head and was taller than any horse she’d ever seen. The hide, a pale storm grey speckled darker here and there and swashed by the silver grey mane. She took a few steps closer. Should there be a horse here? She stumbled forward, her foot catching on a fallen branch. She lurched, catching herself, her arm reaching for the nearest tree. When she looked up there was nothing but trees. No horse. And she had wandered badly.