By
Min
I met a traveller from a snowy land,
Knocking on my door one night.
Trampling snow at the door,
He threw his cold-stiffened hood back.
His brows were rimmed with hoarfrost
And his lips a wrinkled parchment of dried blood.
His voice was like rasping shards of crockery
Asking for wine.
But I gave what was asked;
A man who asked, never went unrewarded.
The moon was bright;
A luminary scythe carved against the fabric of the night.
The sky was barren and in the brittle air,
Floated a blanket of frost.
The stranger drank deeply and sighed.
Walking over, I sat by his side;
There was an unspoken rule that guests had to comply.
He looked up, his face now ruddy in the firelight
And his blue eyes holding me mesmerised.
"I have a tale to tell and I cannot rest
Until it is given voice.
Let it be payment for your hospitality;
It is something I must do in any case.
A little rest is all I need and then I
Would be on my way."
I frowned. A bitter wind was rising outside,
promising the advent of another numbing night.
"Stranger, you would do me wrong.
Snow will soon fall,
A blanket of death that spares none and all.
A journey is never too long.
Morning is not far off.
You will find company to share your road."
He waved away my offers of help
And settled down to tell his tale.
A hush fell on my lips and the fire died;
The cackles and spits subsided and slumbered.
"Set off some forty furlongs from here,"
his hand swept towards the endless ice.
"Lies the remains of a kingdom
Whose magnificence once rivalled Byzantium of the East.
Its name has now since
Slipped from the minds of mortals
Since its demise a thousand years ago.
Journey there and you will see a
Hinterland of ice.
Water is not an element
In this landscape. It is the landscape;
A landscape of frozen motion,
Never to run in a river or
Fall from a sky. Landlocked,
It is held in jealous possession by a
Blizzard that has blown there for a thousand years
And will blow for several thousand more.
From afar, you will see precipices of rocks jutting out,
Like steep ramparts blown awry by the wind.
Walk nearer and you will
Recognise the rocks for what they are.
It was a City;
Soaring towers,
Minarets,
Bridges and arches.
These now toppled against each other like
Chess-pieces on a gigantic chessboard.
Haunted by the voice of the wind,
The City lies in a frozen death throe,
Dying but never truly dead.
Tread your way among the broken pillars.
Enter a city square that stretches
Farther than an eye can see.
Finally, let your eyes settle on the six stone monoliths
That populate this emptiness.
Each was a human face,
Each one exquisite sculpted.
Six young men and women in the prime of their youth.
The only sign to tell you that there had been
Humans living in the desolation you now walk on.
The sculptor understood well
The idea of beauty when he wrought his work.
Each brow is animated with human thought
And every pair of eyes holds a sense of human wonder.
But he knew the need to create
The person behind life as well.
On this one, a worried frown that
Speaks of earnestness. On another,
A defiant purse of the lips.
But now, they are pieces
Strewn across the icy floor.
Composites of eyes, brows, lips and noses.
The wind is brazen here.
It is as if the source of its lament
Lies among these shattered monoliths,
Discarded like toys in a celestial child's playroom.
Step nearer still, and you will see
That something or someone has tried
To piece the parts together.
A chin has been matched with a mouth
And several yards away, lies an aborted attempt
To drag a nose nearer.
Who or what tried to rebuild these monoliths?
This cannot be the work of a single hand,
You tell yourself,
For even the smallest Grecian nose
Stands taller than a six-foot man.
A scrabbling sound and you whip around.
Only to laugh.
A white hare,
No taller than the top of your boots
Sits on one of the pieces.
You wipe your gloved hand
Across your mouth and smile.
It is a short-lived expression when you
Look into the eyes of the animal.
And realise belatedly that you have not
Seen a living creature for twenty miles.
Its eyes are blue,
A blue that speaks of days and nights that go on forever.
The animal's fur blends perfectly against the snow.
It surveys you calmly, an intruder to its domain,
Itself, a lord in its throne room.
You blink, willing the spell to break.
You turn to retrace your steps.
Chuckling under your breath,
You return from where you come from,
Eager to find civilisation before nightfall.
Oh traveller, if only you dare...
Night finally falls.
The whole landscape turns grey as ice,
powdered, come flying through the air.
The wind's low moan is now a banshee's shriek,
Wailing unnatural life. The distant towers,
The Broken chess pieces are gone,
Swallowed into the whiteness of the storm.
Tonight's storm is a small storm.
Put your hand in front of you
And you will find you can see it.
A rare sight indeed;
Only a handful of such nights in a year.
And so tonight, she ventures out.
A moving figure in the snowfield,
A spot of greater whiteness against the fabric of white.
She sets hands on the Grecian nose
And toils to bring it near the mouth and chin.
She began this specific task eighty years ago.
A few inches closer every year.
She can wait, she has already
Waited a thousand years."
The stranger sighed.
As upon a cue, the flames leapt up,
To chase the cold and the shadows out.
They danced and whirled,
A movement the falling snow outside
Mimicked to the smallest swirl.
He wet his lips and continued.
A spell had been woven and must resume.
"This land was not the icy waste it is now.
It was a temperate land, of cool
Summers and warm winters.
Of animals that sang their songs
Of birthing, living and dying.
Human songs added to the harmony;
Of industry and play,
Of sowing and reaping,
the ways of nature and man combined.
The queen of the realm was a
Woman of surpassing beauty and intelligence.
She had six children,
Sons and daughters whose loyalty was sworn
To help their mother protect the kingdom.
Under her rule, the land prospered. Neither wars,
Nor famine ravaged its villages, fields and forests.
Beside her, stood her children, generals and
Commanders of her army. She trained each one of them
To put their lives to the service of their country
And she trained them well.
Even if it meant to their death.
It was only a matter of time that this
Greatest test of their loyalty came about.
A kingdom that thrived the way theirs did
Had no lack of enemies. War came.
The queen won that war but with a great price.
One by one, she saw her children fall,
Cut down in battles led by enemy generals
Whose might far surpassed theirs.
Upon every death, the queen's heart died a little more,
A snowstorm that rose began to freeze her heartstrings.
Little by little, she lost her capacity to feel.
Finally, she could care no longer.
She locked herself up in her tower.
She blamed herself for the deaths of her children.
If only she had taught them to be more selfish,
She told herself. Let the rest of the world go by,
Let her subjects died as they would. Maybe then,
The balance would be righted and
The redress for her children's sacrifice complete.
Her last order had been to build
Six monoliths to their memory.
Six faces that adorn the city square.
Each visage carved in life-likeness
Of every prince and princess before they died.
Then, she removed herself
Completely from the rest of the kingdom.
The land fell into shambles. Bandits encroached
Around the borders. Neighbouring kingdoms
Threatened to invade.
The people cried out for her intervention.
Steepled in her grief, the queen ignored them.
But the ice that had imprisoned her heart
Did not stop there.
It spread into the rest of the kingdom.
The endgame had arrived.
Winter began to encroach further
And further into spring's domain.
The land fought hard to shake off the
Mantle of ice and snow
that covered it for three months of the year.
That time stretched to become four months,
Half a year, and finally the whole year.
The land was locked in the grip of perpetual winter.
People suffered and lives grew hard.
Deep frosts set in. Snowdrifts blocked
All passes. Life stopped.
The streets grew empty.
Those who could run, ran.
Those who could not, perished.
One by one, the buildings crystallised.
The blizzard began to blow.
It waxed and gathered in strength.
It swept over the kingdom
Till it became the voice of the land.
One by one, the buildings toppled and shattered,
Checkmated into oblivion by the relentless wind.
Until a single chess piece stood,
A white tower that wore a crown of
Crenelated walls. This was the queen's
Only sanctuary against the blizzard.
Within its walls, she slept an unnatural sleep.
Around her, the land changed its face,
Discarding a mask of life
To don a white one of death.
A hundred years came and passed.
The queen woke up to a land of mist and snow.
Dismay struck her as she peered
Upon the shattered ruin of her kingdom.
She realised now,
The price of her negligence.
But she was to be punished in ways much more.
A change overtook her,
A change as immutable
As the death of the seasons.
At the rise of every dawn, She became a snow hare,
An animal with a coat of fur white
As the surrounding snow.
A creature whose mind
Betrayed none of the woman its form concealed.
Come twilight,
She reverted to her human form.
But even as the curse was
Written in her very bones,
The spell to break it was
Branded into her mind as well.
The only way she could break the curse was
If she pieced the six broken monoliths together again.
It would take several life spans
To rebuild those monoliths piece by piece.
It became a senseless ritual.
Even as she herself became
A senseless animal in the day.
The mind freed itself at night
Only to die
With the knowledge of a task never ending.
She was conferred immortality.
An eternity of unrest as long as
She failed to complete her task.
The blizzard began to rage.
Against twilight's dying glow,
It gathered its breath.
It roared and shrieked.
The snow travelling in its voice
Threatened to paint the air white,
In defiance to the face of night.
Such are the calmer moments.
I lack the words to paint
The white beast at the zenith of its fury.
No one has seen the full brunt of its power
And lived.
Not even the queen herself.
At a slightest whim,
It wiped every feature off the land,
Covering every building with snow to the highest pinnacle.
Only the white tower remains
As it sinks deep into the illusionary ground.
The rising sea of whiteness
Cutting its length down by more than half.
These are nights only the tower can shelter.
These are the times when
The queen's torment is the greatest.
She would stand by the window,
Not caring if the wind froze her lips.
Her eyes grafted themselves
Into the remains of the monoliths she could not see.
Sometimes, her lips would move.
Forcing the cracked halves apart,
She mouthed voiceless words no one would hear.
'I spent, I spent;
And can spend no more.'
She finally learnt to despair.
The original transgression
Had been forgotten over the years.
And she could only stare
Into the whiteness as the night wore away.
Until day breaks
And the transformation took her body again.
The blizzard stopped when that happened.
The wind would sigh and die away,
A gentle lament that effaced
The earlier violence of its voice.
In the deafening silence,
A lonely snow hare would venture
Into the newly whitewashed world.
The intent of a never ending task
Lost to its animal mind.
The objects of that task
Buried several fathoms
In the snow sea beneath its paws.
So began the legend.
Of a lone hare
That wandered the white waste by the day.
Of a woman
Who toiled to piece six shattered monoliths
In the blizzard of the night.
Years passed,
One year for each grain of sand
In time's hourglass.
Accumulating to become decades
And finally, centuries.
Civilisations rose and fell,
Fought in the names of
Both war and peace.
The rest of the world went by.
Knowledge of the land
Slipped away from mortal memory.
The passage of time
Had little meaning to the snow hare.
But the journey of years remained in its blood.
The snow hare could wander and it did.
Further and further it ventured afield.
Its passage across the vast snowfields
Began to mirror the endless journey of its human task.
Sometimes it returned only at the death of dusk.
Just in time to seek the sanctuary of the tower
Before the blizzard began."
The storm outside had begun in earnest.
Little eddies of snow danced on the windowpanes.
I heard a crack of an inner door.
My little daughter stood shivering there.
"Papa, it is cold," she whispered.
Averting her eyes from the stranger,
She came to my side.
I held both her hands.
They were chilly to my touch.
I removed my blanket and covered her up.
"Sleep with your mother tonight,"
I whispered back that much.
"Papa has a guest tonight
And will not need his bed."
She nodded, a bright halo in the gloom.
I saw the stranger's eyes mist over
As she finally left the room.
"At the close of nine hundred and ninety years,
It came within the vicinity of a village.
The hamlet had sprung up
On the edge of the snowfields,
Desperate attempts of mortals
Trying to scrape a living off the unforgiving land.
Thirty families lived there,
Driven into the north
By wars and famine in the south.
Times were hard and food was scarce.
So close to perpetual winter they were
That crops could only be grown for a season.
For the rest of the year,
The villagers hunted to feed their families.
Driven by the need to escape
And drawn to the human contact it promised,
The snow hare ventured nearer and nearer to the hamlet.
It pricked its ears at the sound of laughter.
Its blue eyes stared in wonder at children
Who could find joy at playing with snow,
The element of its life and its captivity.
Nearer and nearer it came.
Till the smell of human life
Stung piquantly but oh, so tangibly in its nostrils.
But one day, it approached too close.
A snap of metal.
The jaws of a steel trap clamped around its foot.
The snow hare squealed,
A sound that echoed frustration and
...betrayal.
Blood from the wound stained the white ground red.
It laid unmoving,
Panting from the pain.
There was a flurry of snow in the distance.
The hunter ran towards his catch,
His attention caught by the sound.
He pried the jaws apart and
Hoisted his prey by the ears above his head.
Amazement lighted in his eyes.
Game was hard to come by.
Voles and mice were the villagers' staple food
But in his hand, he held a hare.
Abandoning his traps,
He left for home to show his family the precious catch.
The hare was looked at
And admired by his family and neighbours alike.
He threw it into a cage.
The children prodded at it with sticks.
Men and women of the village gathered together
And spoke about the promise of better days.
All the while,
The animal stared at its captors,
Monsters in their base delight.
Its blue eyes filmed over
With a veneer of pain and puzzlement.
It did not understand
How an emotional sojourn could
Somehow turn into a nightmare of hurt.
The excitement died down
As the villagers returned to their chores.
Threading through the cage with a rope,
The hunter hung the snow hare up beside his house.
It was a prize to be displayed.
Until a knife was put to its throat
And its body destined for the cooking pot.
The wind moaned long and low,
A lament that finally
Gave thought to the soul it tormented.
The snow hare whimpered,
A sound that was lost in the wind.
Bereaved of the heat that movement gave,
It began to tremble.
Drawing its wounded leg close,
The hare tried to snuggle up against the wooden bars.
It tried to lick the injury
But the blood was frozen by the cold.
Inexpressibly tired,
It closed its eyes.
The lashes fluttered
And became still.
The dropping of a veil
Promising finally
To sever its ties to this world.
It had been too long.
But this was not to be the time.
A shuffling sound woke the hare.
It looked up in weariness.
Perhaps another child
Who wished to test its life against a stick?
Or was it a villager
Who had heard the news late?
The cage was lowered gently
And the animal found itself
Staring into eyes as blue as its own.
It was the hunter's daughter,
A strange girl born with a birth defect.
Kept away from human sight because of her strangeness,
She slipped out only when she would not be seen.
Her skin was nut-hard,
With scales like a pinecone.
The fingers that slipped
Through the bars to stroke the soft fur
Were long and slender
And in the failing light of the afternoon,
Sharp of edge.
But they were gentle
Where their sire's human fingers
Were rough and callous.
The loneliness in one pair of eyes
Was mirrored in the other.
The senses of one
Imagined the pain of the other.
The girl began to croon.
A soft sound that touched
The hare's heart in a way nothing had.
With a flick of her wrist,
She severed the cords that bound the cage.
The door swung opened.
The snow hare stared at freedom with dazed eyes.
The girl uttered little sounds of encouragement,
Coaxing it to leave and run.
The day was ending.
There was a long journey
For the hare to go before night fell.
Finally, the animal rose
And began limping out of the cage,
Dragging its wounded foot along.
As it entered the snowfields,
It cast several looks back.
The girl's face was indelibly branded in the hare's mind.
The image will remain fresh forever.
But she was already gone.
Night fell.
Every fireplace in the village
Threw light and warmth into houses.
Little islands of human places that fought
Against being overwhelmed by the darkness of the night.
The sound of shattered crockery issued from the hunter's house.
The transgression had been found out.
His wife pleaded with the hunter
To spare the child
But the man ignored her.
This daughter was the last of his seven children.
He and his wife had buried the other six
Before they finally settled up here in the north.
With that grief in mind,
The hunter now wished that it had been this child
Who died and not the rest of his normal children.
He gathered his whip
>From the back of the door
And strode over to his cowering child.
He had learnt long ago
That lashes were the only things
She could feel beneath that strange skin of hers.
He dragged her out of the house.
The noise had already
Attracted the rest of the villagers.
And there,
He commenced his punishment.
The whip came down harder every time
As he felt his face burned red from the shame.
He hit with all his strength,
Putting all the anger into his arms.
Anger at her shaming him in front of all the villagers.
Anger at his flesh and blood betraying him.
And finally, anger at his wife and himself
For having birthed this abomination.
The whip curled as it hit the skin,
Cutting in each time more deeply.
But being mute,
The strange girl could not scream.
The villagers watched silently
As the spectacle play out in their view.
Life was harsh.
Each knew that they could not
Afford to raise a child
Who would betray parents in a similar way.
What more,
A child who looked like the hunter's child
- a changeling, cursed and otherworldly.
Everyone watched,
Eyes unflinching,
Testimony to unwritten judgement.
While the whip continued to lash,
Counting the strokes
By gouges on the girl's strange flesh.
Rivulets of blood began to run,
Pooling around the snow at her feet.
Finally, an unfamiliar voice called out softly.
'Stop.'
Everyone turned around.
It was a woman they had never seen before.
She stood in front of them,
Beautiful and regal in her bearing.
One hand was clothed in a bandage of white.
The crowd parted for her
As the sea when she walked forward.
A hushed awe fell.
Infinite tenderness
Thawed the coldness in her eyes
As they fell upon the body of the girl.
She had remembered that face,
>From another life.
Silently, she lifted up the child.
She did not look or say a word to anyone.
Carrying her burden,
The woman left the village,
Never to be seen again.
But as she walked pass,
The villagers felt a voice whisper something to them.
Riding along the breath of the wind,
It mouthed a single word
again and again.
Penance...penance...penance..."
The stranger repeated that word
Several times to himself.
He bowed his head,
A position akin to saying a prayer.
The fire in the room,
Bereaved of the spell in his voice,
Leapt and flared.
"And so it ends?"
I asked, enraptured yet dismayed.
He lifted his head at my words.
"No. I will say more.
I will speak of my journey
to the heart of that forgotten land.
I will tell you what I saw.
The villagers never saw the three of them,
Both the snow hare,
The queen and the girl again.
But rumours travelled.
Carried by men who dared
To venture into the hinterland.
I was one of them.
Some said that the curse was broken,
That the blizzard finally ceases
To blow after a thousand years.
Others spoke of the strange girl
Serving out a task of fealty,
Piecing the monoliths in the day
When the queen could not.
Still more others believe
That there was now an army of strange children
Who have heard of the tale
And are helping the queen to rebuild her land...
I walked the hinterland.
I saw the broken pillars.
I stepped into the vast city square.
Of the six shattered monoliths and the white tower
- there was nothing.
It was as if they had never existed.
The wind blows still,
The blizzard does not cease
To rage when dusk falls.
But the woman and the child -
They are not there."
I heard the note of finality in his voice.
I frowned.
"Stranger, do you seek to tell me
That your tale was simply woven from thin air?"
He sighed,
A sound that carried
The heaviness of despair.
"If only I could, If only I could."
He stared out of the window.
A glow was in the air,
Morning had arrived.
Draining his drink
To the last drop, he rose to leave.
I remained seated,
Spell-bounded.
There was a key,
I was sure,
That would answer my disbelief.
But search as I did,
I could not find it.
The stranger turned around the last time,
His tormented blue eyes staring deep into mine.
"If only I could.
But I cannot.
I must tell the tale wherever I go,
A confession for every mile.
I must tell it all if I want to remember my child..."
Fin
Much gratitude to Kerrin Watter & Mirage especially, for the help they've given me. Even if you fell asleep reading it, please tell me. It's the first time I've ever written something like that - it would help to know where I went wrong. Thanks!
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