The Snow Queen by Eileen Kernaghan Page A

remains.”

    â€œIt looks like you’re in luck,” said the blonde sailor. “The Captain says we can spare a couple of hammocks in the fo’c’sle, and you can earn your passage by fetching and carrying for the cook.”
    â€œAnd our reindeer?”
    The sailor gave a snort of laughter. “What, that old bag of bones? Turn him loose and let him forage.”
    Gerda was glad that Ritva understood so little Danish. “He’s too old and too tame to fend for himself,” she said. “We can’t leave him behind.”
    â€œWell, we’ll see what the Captain says about that,” said the sailor.
    The Captain, who luckily had a sense of humour, let them tie Ba up in the Cecilie’s cargo hold. “Better hope we don’t run into pack ice,” he told Gerda. “If we get trapped, he’ll go in the stewpot.”
    â€œI understand,” said Gerda unhappily. Ritva blew in Ba’s ear and tweaked his nose to show her affection; then they left the old beast with a handful of reindeer moss, and settled themselves on deck among the crates and barrels. For Gerda there was a comforting familiarity in the seacoast smells of tar and hemp and brine.
    â€œWhat’s a walrus?” Ritva wanted to know. “Can you eat it?”
    â€œI dare say,” replied Gerda, “if you were hungry enough. But I think they are hunting them for their ivory. I’ve seen a picture of one — it’s a huge creature, big as an ox, with two great long tusks like an elephant’s, and it lives in the sea.”
    â€œElephant?” said Ritva blankly.
    â€œOh dear,” sighed Gerda. She launched into a description of an elephant, from illustrations she remembered studying in her natural history books.
    â€œDon’t be so stupid,” said Ritva. “You know there’s no such beast. There’s no such thing as a walrus, either.” She leaned back against a barrel of salt beef, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

    Of the first day of the voyage, they remembered little. A stiff wind came up and set the vessel to pitching and heaving.
    Too wretched with seasickness to move or talk, they lay in their hammocks in the dark airless fo’c’sle, half-choked by the reek of their own garments and the pungent stench of whale-oil lamps.
    When they woke next day the wild tossing of the ship had subsided. They climbed out onto the deck into a fierce blaze of sunshine. The sea was calm, and green as meadow grass, a shimmering light-drenched expanse upon which a few huge ice floes floated gracefully as lily pads. In the distance they could see icebergs looming like mountains of blue-white glass.
    â€œSo you’ve found your sea legs, have you?” said the first mate. “Get below, the pair of you — the cook wants to know where you’ve been hiding.”
    In the galley, the cook kept them busy stoking the fire, scrubbing pots, stirring porridge, chopping vegetables for the stew.
    â€œMight as well have stayed home,” grumbled Ritva, peering queasily into a kettle of salt cod. Her face still had a faintly greenish look.
    As they sailed northwest towards the coast of Spitzbergen, the sky darkened again, and the wind rose. Soon the surface of the sea was littered with thousands of ice floes, like huge white platters that collided and crunched together with a ceaseless noise of scraping and grinding, piling one on top of the other and up-ending and congealing into walls and towers and parapets. By next morning they were surrounded by a pitching, growling, churning immensity of ice.
    As the wind grew stronger, the current battered their ship against the whirling floes. The Cecilie feinted and tacked, scurrying after corridors of open water, which narrowed and closed as they approached. Meanwhile the air grew misty, and the cold drizzle that had been falling throughout the day turned suddenly to snow.
    All night Gerda lay awake in her