Iced On Aran Read Free

here and there it went up in uniform ripples, almost
like steps, with only a thin, crisp covering of snow to round off their sharp angular shapes. Eldin scuffed at some of these flat, regular surfaces with his boots; saw that in fact they were steps, cut with infinite care into the ice of Aran. And, narrowing his eyes toward the peak, the Wanderer saw that indeed the steps would seem to go all the way to the top.
    â€œSteps!” said Hero, following Eldin’s gaze, and at once felt foolish. Of course they were steps.
    The old man nodded. “To make the climbing of Aran easier, aye.”
    â€œBut who’d want to make the climbing of a forbidden mountain easy?” Eldin was puzzled.
    The old man laughed. “An icemonger, of course! My grandfather first cut steps on Aran’s frozen slopes, and after him my father, and now I cut them. You see, the mountain is not forbidden to me. But ice-steps are not the carvings I was talking about, Wanderer. You brushed snow from the wrong place.”
    The questers looked again.
    Flanking the rippling stairway they had ascended, large expanses of the slope showed columnar, lumpy, or nodal structures beneath a thin snow sheath. Eldin got down on his knees to one edge of the steps and brushed away snow with his hands. Hero likewise on the opposite side of the steps. And now an amazing thing, for beneath the snow—
    â€œWonderful!” said Hero, his voice full of admiration.
    A figure reclined there, laid bare by the quester’s hands: the figure of a man carved in ice. He sat (or seemed to) on the slope, his back against an ice boulder, hands in his lap, and gazed out through ice eyes far across all the lands of dream. He was middling old, yet looked ages-weary, and his downward sloping shoulders seemed to bear all the weight of entire worlds. His ice-robes
were those of a king, which the ice-crown upon his head confirmed beyond a doubt. But even without the royal robes and ice-jewelled headgear, still the figure was unmistakable.
    â€œKuranes!” Hero whispered, seeing in the ice an image almost of life itself, yet at the same time a Kuranes utterly unknown to him.
    â€œThe Lord of Ooth-Nargai, aye,” the old ice carver whispered. “My father sculpted this in a time when Kuranes dwelled in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights, before he dreamed himself his manor-house and built his Cornish village on the coast. As you can see, the king was weary in those days, and jaded on the dreamlands; see how clearly it shows in his mien? But once he’d builded a little bit of Cornwall here”—he shrugged—“his weariness fell off him. My father had thought he might visit this place, come up and see himself shaped in ice, but he never came. Still, time yet …”
    Hero was astounded. “The king didn’t sit for this?”
    The old man gave a curious, brittle little laugh. “No, it was done from memory. My father’s skill was great!”
    Hero scuffed at a flat, snow-layered area next to the ice-carved king. It was empty, just a flat space cut out of Aran’s ice. “Well, if Kuranes ever does come up here,” he said, “and if he sits here, why, then he’ll be beside himself!” He grinned.
    â€œThat was a joke,” Eldin drily explained, but the old ice cutter only narrowed his eyes. The Wanderer had meanwhile cleared away snow from half a dozen ice-carvings. In doing so, he’d brought a curious thing to light. While Kuranes figure was carved only once, the rest—and the slope, as far as the eye could see, was literally covered with snow-humped shapes—appeared all to be duplicated. They sat, kneeled or reclined, or occasionally
stood there on the slopes of Aran, in perfect pairs like glassy twins cut from the mountain. Two of each, almost exactly identical, strange twinned stalagmites of ice in human form.
    Eldin uncovered more figures, Hero too. “I recognize a