A tale by Madhuri
In the ancient times there was a band of people, three-score refugees who had fled a devastating war in their homeland and travelled far, over desert and icy waste, until they came to a high mountain range. There they thought that they might be safe; and so with great labor and in much danger of slipping down the steepy gradients, they climbed deeper and deeper into the fastnesses, in search of a sheltered valley in which they might make their home.
They were weary beyond bearing, those people – bent from fighting through the wind, clothes torn, bones sticking out beneath their wasted flesh. They had been living on rodents, and snakes, and, once, down in the icy wastes, a mammoth they had killed – but that was long ago, and only a memory now. Their barley was finished, their spelt long gone – the dried fruits some had managed to cram into their pockets as they fled were eaten months before.
They must needs stop, or die.
If they could but find a bit of land, they could build themselves shelters, and warm themselves, and send their hunters up into the crags for mountain goats, and perchance trap a shaggy bear. And, when they’d recovered strength, they would see what they could see.
But it turned out that every cleft and vale in that place was steep as steep – scouts went out far and wide while the people crouched, holding onto trees – but all came back talking of the inhospitable slopes – no place flat enough to build a single shelter. At last one scout said he’d found a small plain – two miles wide, he thought, and two miles long – a generous size for a settlement, and plenty of room to grow what hardy crops they might, as well. And no enemy would ever find them there.
But, said the scout, the land was under ice – a glacier owned it, every inch. And beyond the glacier, nothing but rocks and more ice – though at its southern and eastern edges trees grew, again on slopes too sheer for cultivation.
Craving by now the comfort of flat land, the people climbed there, over a ridge and down and up again – and saw before them a vast white expanse, bumpy and crevassed, studded with stanchions of ice. At least, thought they, there would be water there – for so far in these hills they had found no river and no spring, but had drunk from icicles sun-touched on a tree.
And so they struck a fire on a rock and fed it pine-boughs, and melted water in a vessel, and all could drink, and drank their fill. Their number was no longer three score by this time; some had lain themselves down along the way and not risen up again – and so it took too long, but not absolutely too long, to see the many hard thirsts quenched. And then they set about trying to make a temporary home.
There were those who liked to see the biggest view they could of things – and a small group of these, both elders and a few select folks of middle years, sat up on a rock and gazed at the glacier, and discussed how it might be used to further their survival; they looked at sky and earth, at stars and portents; and then they called for a Ritual – all should come together, dance upon the ice, and ask the gods for game, and warmer weather, to melt the ice – or enough of it so that they could build and plant upon the flat. And they thought too that if they pulled together, and every man and woman and child worked to build a fire and melt a little section of the ice, perhaps they could make inroads there.
So this was done – they had a dance, with much shouting and stamping, and their feet so cold, but much exhilaration too, as all stamped in unison, and the rattles shook and the drum made its sometimes-flat, sometimes-bouncing sound.
And then all, as ordered, went to the glacier’s edge and began to try to melt it. It was a deep glacier – they did not know how deep – for a glacier has a way of stamping on the earth beneath it, and depressing it mightily – but they did not know that then. And so they tried and tried; and meanwhile they built rough houses in the trees themselves, five or six feet above the ground – and in this way found some rest at night, though when the wind blew everything shook, and shook some more.
By and by they became more accustomed to this place, and the difficult life they lived there. They had found certain broad stones on which they built fires, and gathered together, and cooked and ate. There were many birds in the woods, and the people dug hibernating creatures from their burrows, and roasted them in the creature’s own fat. And the people all grew older; the children became parents themselves, and their babies played on the rocks with toys carved of bone.
As their numbers grew, young braves splintered off from the group and, each taking a wife, left with a few friends to start a new tribe elsewhere round the glacier’s rim. For it is in some men to be a King; and there wasn’t room for so many kings in that initial group. Eventually there were several monarchs around that glistening white table – and each had his courtiers, his hunters, his foragers, his advisors. And sometimes, when these different factions met upon the ice – for now they had games there, and sledded on animal skins, and the like – they would embrace and have a party, and share what food they had. But sometimes they would fight – about a woman, or a fox one group was chasing, and the other group as well. And then the hot blood would stain that cold white field, and that night many were the tears the women shed, in that camp or in this.
They bartered with each other too – pine-nuts, or mushrooms, or carven implements – and celebrated or fought about these deals, as people will. And always the elders would say, “It’s like this – it’s like that – it should be this way – in our old country, it was like that.” And sometimes the people listened; and sometimes they did not. But they liked, at times, to be reminded of how big the sky was, and full of how many stars; and the names of the galaxies, and how far the people had wandered from their homeland so long before, and what gardens had been there, and what the King had worn, and what feasts had been prepared, and for how many days a revel might have lasted. As they went about their near-thankless task of trying to cultivate the poor soil that emerged in tiny plots where ice had been melted, as they sharpened dense wood into tools, and tried to keep their tree-houses aloft with whittled pegs pushed into the trunks of the pines, or the occasional deciduous trees that grew here and there among them – as they foraged, and hunted, and were sometimes hungry – it gave them a sense of comfort to hear about what their place in the universe might be, and what it had once been.
But in these different little tribes, sometimes there was one odd person. This one liked to go off all alone in the morning, carrying some fire-hardened tool – and find his own way, hunting, gathering, cultivating. Most people liked a team for nearly everything; or at least a pair – but some were oddballs, and loved to sidle off alone.
And in fact, one such strange person possessed a golden icepick, long and sharp, with a warm wood handle; carried by an ancestor from the old land, from the Palace of the vanquished King. For in the frigid world, a potentate would have many subjects who must hew and shatter and keep the ice at bay; and then in the short summer, use ice to preserve meats and curds and the like – and confectioners in the kitchens would soak powdered ice with honey, and syrup of flowers, for the Court’s delight. And although gold is a soft metal, and not much use for sheets of ice upon a pond, it is pretty also, and valuable; so that, hung upon the wall along with weaponry, it symbolized the fight between Man and Cruel Nature; and all who looked upon it congratulated themselves on being within the warm confines of the Palace, where fires in sandstone hearths burnt night and day, made of wood brought with much expense and trouble from the forests far away.
Now, in the lost hinterlands of that wide and brooding continent, the inheritor of the golden icepick used to go to some stretch of the glacier’s edge where nobody else was working. Nobody was melting ice, or building anything, or planting seeds, or trying to make a little baby – just the white cliff of pebbly, frozen water, all blue underneath with its strange algae. And there could be caves, and boulders disgorged, and all sorts of things revealed – it changed day by day. And this outsider, this whimsical soul, would use her golden icepick to strike the ice in a way that pleased her – tuneful, random, spontaneous – for no other reason than that she fancied so to do it; for if you have a golden icepick, you must use it! It worked best where the ice was a little soft already; then she’d shatter off enough to melt for her own thirst – and she’d eat a snack she’d brought along – and then go back to poking at the ice, enjoying both the sounds, and the sight of a chunk of ice flying off and suddenly becoming shot through with rainbows as it flew across the wintry sun. And by and by small creatures took courage and came to chat with her, and long were the conversations they had together, those beings of twitch and whisker and fur and paw, with the lady of the glacier.
She simply played…
And when she went back to the tribe at night she was happy. But people grumped at her: “Where have you been? We needed you to cook some soup, and to help buttress that leaning tree-house! Your mother had to go to the other tribe to care for your big brother, who was wounded in a fight! You should have looked after your younger brother! The neighbor had to do it!”
And she felt ashamed; and would work then with the others for several days, until her soul smote her, and she wanted to weep with boredom – and would slip away again to carve the ice, and converse in loving companionship with squirrels, and shuffling porcupines, and butterflies; and watch the pretty rainbows as they flew.
And by and by she married, and her husband too began to scold her for her absences. And she would bow her head – for when she played, out there at the edge of the glacier, she was content… and when she came home at night she was full of little songs she’d been singing to herself all day. But nobody seemed much interested in these.
And then a strange thing happened – foretold, it is true, by the seers: The glacier began to melt. The cold, cold winter, which had lasted all the lifetimes of anyone they’d ever known, and back into history – was turning to a radiant Spring. Brief Summers they had known, but this was beyond that small giving-way of the ice’s grip; the people gazed in wonder at the blue and warming sky, the new flowers pushing up from the leaf-mulch; the blades of grass that looked delicious enough to eat.
And they gazed at the shrinking ice-sheet, at the new rocky depths and canyons revealed when it withdrew… and they knew that they would have to leave here too; for there was no flat land beneath them. The little clearings they had made had been on what was just a border to a vast and wide dark chasm… And, terrifyingly, great blocks of the glacier had begun to crack away with a ferocious roar, and plunge into the canyon’s maw, shaking the earth when they landed far below.
And the people were sore afraid – for where would they go? And what of the customs they had hewn here, and all that they now felt themselves to be? What would become of their traditions, both old and new? And if the ice could melt, and the sky change, and the very ground grow soft beneath their feet – perhaps the stars, too, would alter on their course, and rain fire down upon the people as they fled? And so they speculated, and argued, and chose their theses, and hurled them at each other.
But the golden-icepick woman paid not much heed to all of that. As long as the Tribe still fed her – which, grudgingly, it did, since she sometimes plied her agile bone needle to make a tunic for a hunter, or a soft garment for a newborn babe – and she was after all a kinswoman… she could live. And she could often find berries now, right at the edge of the swelling wood. She was happy simply escaping from the rest and singing to herself as she chipped away the ice – a thing that everyone reminded her was not even necessary anymore.
And the day came that they left that place – all their utensils, tools and clothing packed into bags made of animal hide – moving off in a scattered group to tramp back down to the frozen wastes, hoping that they weren’t so frozen any more. They had to walk a long way around the edge of the glacier, avoiding the new river that rushed off down the steeps; and so they passed the place where the icepick woman had loved to go to be alone. She, picking her way patiently alongside the rest, looked back at the glacier; and a few others looked back too – and saw, carved in a broad sweep into the ice in the cursive script of their language:
i l o v e y o u
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