Iced On Aran Read Free Page A

few of them,” the Wanderer mused. “Here’s old Cuff the fisherman. He never married, stayed alone all his days. Most people keep young in Celephais, but Cuff grew old. Toward the end he didn’t even speak to people, stopped fishing, just sat around on the wharves staring out to sea. People said he was tired of life.”
    The cold was starting to get into Hero’s bones. “I don’t know how you can work up here,” he told the old man. “It’s so cold here even Zura’s zombies would last forever!” Snow was beginning to fall: light flakes like confetti cut from finest white gossamer drifting down near-vertically out of the sky. “As for your work,” Hero went on, “I can’t fault it. But don’t your fingers freeze up? These things must take days in the carving! And there are thousands of them …”
    The old man smiled his thin, cold smile. “I wrap up warm,” he said, “as you can see. Also, I’m used to the cold. What’s more I work very quickly and accurately. It’s in my blood, come down from my grandfather, through my father to me. And sometimes I have advanced knowledge. I get to know that someone else desires to be carved in ice. Come over here and I’ll show you something.” He led the way nimbly across the snow-slope, knowing every step intimately. Hero and Eldin followed.
    As they went, Hero asked the Wanderer: “So what happened to old Cuff the fisherman? Did he die?”
    Eldin shrugged. “Drowned, they say. After a storm they found his boat wrecked on Kuranes’ Cornish rocks. They didn’t find Cuff, though, and he was never
washed up. The sea keeps its secrets. Actually, I’d forgotten all about him till I saw him—both of him—up here.”
    â€œHow about that?” Hero asked the old ice-cutter. “Why do you carve two likenesses of your subjects? And why, pray, only one of Kuranes?”
    â€œHere we are,” the old man might not have heard him. “There—what do you think of that?”
    â€œWhy, I … I’m floored!” Hero gasped.
    â€œOr, maybe, ‘flowed’?” said Eldin. “You know: ice-flowed?”
    Hero groaned and rolled his eyes, but the old man said, “Flawed, yes! Kuranes, I mean. You asked why only one of him. Because the ice was flawed. When my father set to work on the second image, it shattered. And so there’s only an empty space beside him.”
    The questers said nothing, merely gazed in astonishment at ice-sculptures—of themselves! The carvings were far from complete; indeed, they were the crudest of representations, the merest gouges and slashes in blocks of ice; but just as a great artist captures the essence of his subject with the first strokes of his brush, so were the essences of Hero and Eldin here caught. Perhaps in more ways than one …
    Hero’s gape turned to a frown, then an expression of some puzzlement. “Two things,” he said. “Yet again you’ve only represented us once apiece. But weirder far, why are we here at all? We didn’t ask to be sculpted in Aran’s ice; and as for your being forewarned about our coming, why, you couldn’t have been! We only decided that last night, and even then we weren’t sure.”
    By way of answer, the old man asked questions of his own. “I’d like to be certain on that point,” he said. “About your coming up here, I mean. You told me you climbed Aran ‘because it was here.’ By that do you
mean that you automatically do things you should not? Which in this case is to say, because the climbing of Aran is forbidden? Or was it simply that you were bored, tired of mundane dreaming?”
    Hero looked at him a little askance. “Mundane dreamers? Us? Hardly!”
    Eldin’s ice-statue sat, elbow on knee, chin in palm, gazing frostily on Celephais. The Wanderer got down beside it, put