Elementals - A. S. Byatt [32]
‘Today,’ said Hugh, ‘we are going to read the history of your ancestor, King Beriman, who made an expedition to the kingdoms beyond the mountains, in the frozen North, and came back with an icewoman.’
Fiammarosa considered Hugh.
‘Why?’ she said, putting her white head on one side, and looking at him with sharp, pale blue eyes between the stiff lashes.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Hugh, taking her to the open window. ‘Look at the snow on the lawns, in the rose-garden.’
And there, lightly imprinted, preserved by the frost, were the tracks of fine bare feet, running lightly, skipping, eddying, dancing.
Fiammarosa did not blush; her whiteness became whiter, the ice-skin thicker. She was alive in the cold air of the window.
‘Have you been watching me?’
‘Only from the window,’ said Hugh, ‘to see that you came to no harm. You can see that the only footprints are fine, and elegant, and naked. If I had followed you I should have left tracks.’
‘I see,’ said Fiammarosa.
‘And,’ said Hugh, ‘I have been watching you since you were a little girl, and I recognise happiness and health when I see it.’
‘Tell me about the icewoman.’
‘Her name was Fror. She was given by her father, as a pledge for a truce between the ice-people and King Beriman. The chronicles describe her as wondrously fair and slender, and they say also that King Beriman loved her distractedly, and that she did not return his love. They say she showed an ill will, liked to haunt caverns and rivers and refused to learn the language of this kingdom. They say she danced by moonlight, on the longest night, and that there were those in the kingdom who believed she was a witch, who had enchanted the King. She was seen, dancing naked, with three white hares, which were thought to be creatures of witchcraft, under the moon, and she was imprisoned in the cells under the palace. There she gave birth to a son, who was taken from her, and given to his father. And the priests wanted to burn the icewoman, “to melt her stubbornness and punish her stiffness”, but the King would not allow it.
‘Then one day, three northmen came riding to the gate of the castle, tall men with axes on white horses, and said they had come “to take back our woman to her own air”. No one knew how they had been summoned: the priests said that it was by witchcraft that she had called to them from her stone cell. It may have been. It seems clear that there was a threat of war if the woman was not relinquished. So she was fetched out, and “wrapped in a cloak to cover her thinness and decay” and told she could ride away with her kinsmen. The chronicler says she did not ask to see her husband or her tiny son, but “cold and unfeeling as she had come” mounted behind one of the northmen and they turned and rode away together.
‘And King Beriman died not long after, of a broken heart or of witchcraft, and his brother reigned until Leonin was old enough to be crowned. The chronicler says that Leonin made a “warm-blooded and warm-hearted” ruler, as though the blood of his forefathers ran true in him, and the “frozen lymph” of his maternal stock was melted away to nothing.
‘But I believe that after generations, a lost face, a lost being, can find a form again.’
‘You think I am an icewoman.’
‘I think you carry the inheritance of that northern princess. I think also that her nature was much