Iced On Aran Read Free Page B

his real elbow on the empty knee, adopted the same pose more or less, and stared into the statue’s roughly-angled face. “You keep asking us our reason for climbing Aran,” he said. “Because we shouldn’t, you ask, or because we were bored? Well, actually—if it’s that important to you—it was a bit of both. See, we’ve been a little out of sorts, Hero and I.”
    â€œNo, no!” cried the sculptor at once. “Don’t sit there, but here, right alongside. That’s right. Good! Good!” Similarly, he positioned Hero beside his carving, which sat straight-armed, hands on knees, staring bleakly ahead. Then he took out tools from his pockets, began to chip away. First at Eldin’s unfinished sculpture, then at Hero’s, and so on, back and forth.
    â€œYou didn’t answer my questions,” said Hero, watching him out of the corner of his eye. “How come you’ve already started work on us? And why only one piece apiece?”
    â€œMy friends,” said the old man, “you see the work of long, lonely years here. Here are represented years before I was born, and years before my father was born. There are a number of celebrities carved here—like Lord Kuranes himself—but mainly the works are of ordinary men. Now, the carving of ordinary men is all very well, but it is unrewarding. I mean, in another century or so, who will know or remember them, eh? But
men such as you two, destined to become legends in the dreamlands …”
    â€œYou carved us because we’re famous!” cried Eldin, beaming.
    â€œOr infamous!” Hero’s frown persisted.
    â€œWhat better reason?” Again the old man smiled his thin, cold smile.
    â€œSomething here,” said Hero, hearing warning bells in the back of his head (or maybe the tinkling of warning ice-crystals), “isn’t quite right. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s wrong.” And talking of fingers, the old man had just put the finishing touch to Hero’s right hand—which even now promptly fell asleep upon his knee, as dead as if hard-bitten by frost. Hero made to rise, stir himself up, but—
    â€œNo, no, no !” the old man chided. “Now that you are here, at least do me the courtesy of sitting still. Fifteen or twenty minutes at most, and the job’s done. And while I work, so I’ll tell you my story.”
    â€œStory?” Eldin repeated him, watching how he carefully molded his boot from ice—and feeling his real foot go suddenly cold inside the real boot, with a numbness that gradually climbed into his calf. “Is there a story, then?”
    â€œOoth-Nargai”—the sculptor appeared to ignore him, his fingers and tools alive with activity—“is said to be timeless. For most people it is, but for some it isn’t. If all a man wants is a place that never changes, then Celephais in Ooth-Nargai’s the spot. But there are those who want more than that, who must have change; restless souls whose hearts forever reach beyond the horizons we know. Alas, not all are fortunate enough to be far-traveled questers such as you two.”
    â€œDon’t get to believing that all quests are fun and
games, old man,” Hero cautioned. “Me, sometimes I get heartily sick of them!”
    â€œAnd me!” said Eldin. “Sometimes I think: wouldn’t it be grand just to sit absolutely still for a thousand years?”
    â€œExactly!” said the iceman. “And if such as you can become bored, jaded, dissatisfied, how then the little fisherman—”
    â€œLike Cuff?” said Hero.
    â€œâ€”and the potter and the quarrier, who’ve never seen beyond a patch of ocean or the hot walls of a kiln or the steep sides of a hole in the ground? And so, in the far dim olden times, every now and then a man would climb Aran.” He fell silent, concentrated on his work, shaped