Iced

by Gustavo Bondoni

in Issue 93, October 2019

A toe in the ribs, viciously applied, brought Sangr awake.  He was about to snap at the owner of the foot when some memory of the night before came back to him and self-preservation kicked in.  Lunk was a big man, and he’d been kind enough to share his seaweed ale and keep him out of the night and its freezing cold. He might be offended at being called a bastard son of a sea-elephant.

“My head,” he said.

Lunk laughed at him.  “Can’t hold your ale, can you?  Listen.”

Off in the distance, a shout broke through the silence, bringing Sangr fully awake.

“Lunk,” he began, but his friend held up a hand and looked out onto the ice.

The shout came again, allowing both men to identify the source: the docks.

They moved instantly.  A problem with the boats was never a good sign.  They were the lifeblood of the village, but at the same time, they were a constant source of dread.  Any man who fell overboard was almost certainly lost to the cold of the water or the even colder wind on the surface after he was pulled out.  This was not a calm, peaceful sea.

They ran recklessly down the path to the docks, then down a thin staircase carved into the glacier towards the waterfront.  The steps were regularly covered in sand, but treacherous all the same. Sangr, rapier-thin and athletic, reached the docks well before his corpulent friend, and froze at the sight that met him.

All four of the village’s fishing boats were present and accounted for, tied to their moorings – simple iron rings embedded into the ice near the staircase.  But among them, and towering over them, floated an unfamiliar vessel, a ship similar to those whose wreckage sometimes washed up on their shores, and whose wood was used to warm the village.

The foreign ship had once had two masts, but the mainmast, with a trunk twice as wide as Sangr’s torso, had broken off about ten feet above the deck.  The paint on the hull was peeled, faded and, in some areas, charred by some long-extinguished fire. To Sangr’s eye, the vessel was afloat only by the slimmest of margins.

A group of eight people huddled on the deck, mainly women and older children, the oldest maybe fourteen years of age.  A single grown man, short and thin with long blond hair and a bushy beard, stood before the group, sword drawn, eyeing the fishermen with distrust.

Sangr immediately grasped the nature of the situation.  The fishing boats had evidently run into this wreck drifting out at sea and towed it in.  Even if the wreck had been empty, the wood alone was an incalculable treasure for the village, representing a year’s supply at the usual, frugal rate of consumption.  The people had probably been waiting in ambush below decks in case they were boarded, but they’d been smart enough to realize that it might be their best chance of ever seeing land again, so they’d hidden and waited.

Now that they were safely back on dry land, however, they saw no choice but to come up and find out what was happening.  The shouting they’d heard had been produced by the fishermen realizing that they weren’t alone and calling for backup.

“Hello,” Sangr called.

The blond man turned to look at him.  So did the fishermen, who, concentrating on their unexpected guests, hadn’t seen him coming.  They looked relieved that someone was taking the matter out of their hands. Despite Sangr’s youth, the whole village respected his practical, sometimes ruthless, intelligence.

The man on the ship said nothing.

“My name is Sangr, welcome to Nev.”  It occurred to him that these people might not speak the same language, but there was nothing he could do about that if it were indeed the case.  He kept talking, “we mean you no harm. Come, don’t be afraid.”

Still the man said nothing.  Sangr had, by that time, reached the fishing boat nearest the stranger’s ship.  With Lunk’s help, he picked up a boarding plank and placed it on the edge of the larger ship, making a bridge between the two.  He walked calmly up the incline.

The blond man met him at the side, curved sword at the ready, eyes blazing.

Sangr stopped, about an arm’s length from the man and held out his hand, palm upwards, in a gesture as unthreatening as possible.

“My name is Sangr,” he repeated.

The man’s eyes flashed for an instant, causing Sangr to think that he would strike, but the man suddenly seemed to make a decision.  Moving quickly with his free hand, he grasped Sangr’s arm.

“I am called Shtarel,” he said.

He pulled Sangr aboard.


***


That night, the whole village came together in the Roundhouse, to celebrate the coming of the strangers.  The feast was enlivened by the exotic food from the ship, strange salted meats and spiced wines, as well as the fact that one of the fishing boats had trapped a seal, which was duly roasted.  All told, between villagers and newcomers, forty people were present.

Sangr was seated among the bachelors with Lunk on his left and the other man of marrying age, Breed, on his right.  Breed was the apprentice Ale-Maker, a soft job that involved little or no work in Sangr’s opinion. But that might have been influenced by his dislike for the man who, with his shoulder-length, dark, greasy hair and darting eyes seemed to have more than a little of the rat in him.

They were celebrating that the strangers had agreed to settle in the village and allow their ship to be mined for its wood and for their supplies to be distributed among the villagers.  While celebrating the disaster suffered by others might seem heartless in the extreme, there was little room for sentimentality on the ice.

The seal course was complete when Shtarel rose to speak.  He was immediately rewarded with silence as thunderous as the previous merrymaking had been.  Even Sangr, who had already heard the man’s tale, gave him his undivided attention. This was the most interesting event to happen in his lifetime, and the first time that a surprise turned out to be a good thing.

“People of Nev,” he began in his deep voice.  His speech was slightly accented, with rolled r’s, but easily understood.  “In the first place I would like to thank the brave men of the fishing fleet for saving our lives.  We had been drifting for weeks on the northbound current, headed for certain death in the icy wastelands.  We wouldn’t have survived many more nights. Quite a few of us didn’t survive the nights that came before.”  He raised his cup towards the fishermen, and everyone cheered, clapping them on the back, raising their own flagons in salute.

Shtarel began to tell of their voyage.  Of how they had once been part of a noble house in a kingdom far to the southwest, across the vast expanse of the Stormbound Sea.  Of how treachery had forced them to retreat before the enraged Duke’s army. Of how Shtarel’s father and brothers had been killed in battle outside their last bastion, the tiny walled seaside town of Mulsanne.  And, finally, of the painful goodbye to their nation, boarding the ship with his surviving sisters and a few loyal retainers, most untrained in the science of seamanship.

Sangr, having heard the tale already, allowed his mind to wander.  He entertained himself by observing the reaction of his fellow villagers.  Most of them sat rapt, clinging to every word. Their icebound existence had no room for glorious battles, tragic escapes or heinous betrayal.  They were too busy trying to scratch out an existence, caught between the implacable ice and the bountiful but cruel sea.

They often dreamed of escape, of seeing the world beyond the Banshee Plateau but knew it for what it was: an impossible fancy.  Listening to the story, Sangr could almost feel the icy walls of the valley sheltered the village from the wind closing in on him.

At the very front of the audience, no doubt placed there by her mother, sat Rita.  Rita was the most eligible of the unmarried women in the village because not only was she the chief’s daughter, but she was also stunningly beautiful.  Her dark skin and straight black hair were offset by sparkling blue eyes. It was common knowledge in the village that Breed had already proposed to her on several occasions, and had been turned down each time.  The excuse given was her age, but most people believed she was waiting for the interest of one of the two other bachelors: the brilliant, mercurial Sangr or the solid, dependable Lunk.

Even so, common wisdom saw her eventually marrying Breed.  They expected Sangr to die in some misguided attempt to explore beyond the neighboring villages.  And Lunk – well, who knew what Lunk felt? Getting him to talk about his feelings was like trying to get a wall, or a door, to open its heart.

But the arrival of this new, dashing addition to the village had changed everything, and one look at her told Sangr that Breed’s was a lost cause.  She sat with a longing expression, eyes fixed on Shtarel, and gasped loudly at each dramatic or suspenseful moment in his tale.
Shatrel couldn’t help but notice.  Very soon, he began to look directly at her whenever he related a daring maneuver or harrowing escape.  He began to exaggerate his own part in the action before finally beginning to summarize in order to finish quickly and talk about himself.

“The reason we were betrayed, the reason our neighbors were jealous,” Shtarel announced, “is that our family is composed of sorcerers.  We all have the gift. Some of us could control earth magic, others wind. I can call up unquenchable fire.”

This was met by silence, his audience torn between awed fear and complete disbelief.

“Bollocks!” shouted an inebriated fisherman from the depths of the roundhouse.

“Show us!” called another.

Shtarel looked them over gravely.  “Very well.” He pulled the sleeve of his shirt back, exposing his arm to the elbow and closed his eyes.  Gradually, a glow developed around his outstretched fingers, eventually surrounding the entire exposed portion of flesh.  Finally, the glow became a crackling flame and he waved his arm, showing the crowd that the fire wouldn’t go out.

The crowd acknowledged this with a roar of approval.  Rita laughed nervously and clapped her hands.

“I can create the fire along my whole body, but to demonstrate, I would have to disrobe, which I prefer not to do right now.  There are ladies present, and some of them are very beautiful.” He looked straight at Rita as he said this, causing her to laugh and blush.

“This also means that only people I choose to tolerate can touch my person,” he concluded.  “I would like to thank you for listening to our sad tale, and for your generous hospitality.  We shall remain here, if we are welcome, for as long as you will have us.”

The crowd stood, roared, applauded and stamped its feet.  But Sangr, who was watching Breed, noticed hate-filled eyes, a clenched jaw and an early exit before the applause had even died down.

For this reason, Sangr was probably the only innocent person in the village who was not surprised when Shtarel’s murdered body appeared in the icy village square the following morning.


***


The body was being kept in a cave while Breed, the obvious suspect, was locked in his own house, a small, round bachelor’s hut built on the ice at the foot of the rocky outcroppings that were the village’s only protection against the murderous winds.

The elders had already looked at the body, as was their prerogative.  They had then discussed the murder, trying to explain how it had been done.  There was no doubt in their minds that Breed had to be the killer, because the elders were always careful to keep abreast of the latest gossip.  After knowing your peers for forty years, the gossip of the young was the only thing likely to bring up any interesting news.

Had the man been murdered with a knife in the back, they wouldn’t have hesitated.  Breed would have been summoned, tried and summarily exiled on the spot.

But there was a problem.  Breed had taken one look at the body and had said: “How in the world am I supposed to have done that without touching him?”

The council had been understandably stumped.  They couldn’t really convict him unless they explained what had happened.  The chief ordered that Sangr be called in to investigate.

As always, when the council summoned him for help, he was supervised closely.  Two grey-haired elders accompanied him: Tiana the fishwife and Keller, the chief’s equally grizzled brother.  Any progress he made would be claimed by the council.

If he failed, of course, he was on his own.

“Let me look at the body,” he told them.
  
Keller nodded and led him towards the cave, actually a shallow cleft in the ice with a bend about ten feet in that hid the contents from anyone looking in from the village common.

The reason for the concealment became apparent as soon as he saw the corpse.  Shtarel’s body was encased in a rough block of ice. His clothes were tattered and charred, revealing the pale, dead flesh beneath in many spots.  A hollow wooden tube protruded from his mouth, five inches below the surface of the ice. Shtarel’s hands were frozen in place at his side, red marks clearly visible around each wrist.  His blue eyes were wide open, even in death.

Besides the body itself, there were other items frozen into the block.  A dozen metal rods protruded from the front of the ice, surrounding Shtarel’s form but not touching it at all.  Sangr touched his finger to the exposed side of one rod. The metal was numbingly cold, and it cost him a small patch of skin when he quickly moved his hand away.

He looked at Tiana and Keller.

“Where did you find him?”

“In the old trough.  Someone had filled it with water and dumped him inside.  We had Lunk pull the body out, ice and all.”

“But what killed him?”

Kenner looked unhappy.  “What do you mean?”

“There doesn’t seem to be a single mark on him, other than the wrists, and all that water would have taken at least an hour to freeze, so he must have been dead when he went in.  What killed him?”

“We don’t know.”

Typical.  They wanted him to find out.

“All right.  The first thing we have to do is get the body out.  Maybe his neck was broken and we’ll see it once we get him free.  Maybe he was poisoned and his tongue will be black and swollen.” Sangr felt that anything of the sort would be much too lucky for it to happen to him, but he was an optimist by nature.

“How do you propose to do that?”  Tiana asked, raising an eyebrow.

“We’ll melt the ice.  Just leaving it next to Lunk’s forge for a few hours should do the trick.”

Tiana nodded, signaling that Keller should take care of it and looked back at Sangr as if expecting him to do something else, and not necessarily something pleasant.  Sangr endured the look for a few moments, trying to solve the crime in one blow. But the facts he had so far pointed him in a direction that he preferred not to explore for the moment.

He sighed. “Take me to where Breed is being held.”

Breed was being watched over by two of the council members.  How anyone expected the toothless white-haired men to hold him if he decided to make a run for it was anybody’s guess.  Most likely, they wouldn’t even try, secretly hoping that the man would escape, thereby proving his guilt and saving everyone a great deal of hassle.

But Breed, true to form, had refused to cooperate even in this.  He just sat there, occasionally exchanging a few words with one guard or the other until Sangr arrived to question him.

A sneer greeted his entrance.  “So, now they’re bringing you in to make up a story about me.  I should have known.”
  
“Nobody is going to make up any stories.  We just want to find out what happened.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Breed spat.  “I went home after the feast. You saw me, I left early.  The last thing I wanted was to see that bastard anymore.”

“I think what everyone believes is that you left early to lay the groundwork for your ambush.”

“Yeah, right.  Not only am I a superhuman who can attack a fire-sorcerer with his bare hands, but now I’m a ghost, too.  I thought he’d walk back with the chief and the women,” his face contorted as he said this. “What was I supposed to gain by killing him in front of half the village?”

That was something that had been bothering Sangr quite a lot.  What had Shtarel been doing out on his own in the middle of the night?  Might there be someone else who’d seen what happened? Maybe one of the strangers, who, having seen their last protector brutally cut down was too afraid to come forward?

Then another thought struck him, and he turned to face Breed.

“So you were asleep the whole night?” he asked the rat-faced man.

“Not asleep.  I was too angry to be asleep.  But I didn’t leave my house.”

Sangr turned to Tiana, who’d accompanied him to the interrogation.  “Let him go,” he told her. “There’s no use in keeping him confined.  If he was going to run, he’d just be saving us the effort, and if not, well, why waste other people’s time with him?”

Breed looked surprised, and almost even grateful.  He tried to hide it, since he knew that Sangr didn’t like him, but it showed through, “So you can tell I didn’t do it?”

“If it had been a knife in the back, nobody would have doubted it for a second.”

Breed snickered mirthlessly. “And you’d probably have been right, too.”

“But I there’s no way you could have managed this one.  Not on your own, at least.”

Sangr walked out of the hut with a rather unhappy Tiana on his heels.  “So who did it?” she asked.

“I need to think about it,” he replied.  “Could you give me a couple of hours? I’ll find you as soon as I have an answer.”


***


As a matter of fact, Sangr had no intention of going off to a secluded spot and giving the thing a good think-through.  He wanted the time to speak to a couple of people in private, without the council’s meddling.

First off, he needed to talk to Rita, so, making certain that Tiana had gone the other way, he walked in that direction.  The walk from Breed’s hut to the larger house occupied by Rita’s mother and the two sisters was not long, and led him past the house where the surviving strangers were quartered.  He almost stopped to speak to them, but held up when he considered their likely state. They would be frightened, mourning and probably desperate to escape this strange, forbidding place.  No, if his suspicions did not pan out, he would speak to them later.

He also passed the forge, and waved at Lunk, who was beating something energetically with a large hammer.  His friend smiled and gestured with the hammer at something on the floor, which Sangr quickly recognized as the block containing Shtarel’s corpse.  It had shrunk considerably since he’d last seen it, but there was still some melting to be done before the body could be examined.

Rita was speaking to her six-year-old sister outside the house.  Sangr asked if he might be allowed a word with her, and she nodded.  One look at her red-rimmed eyes told him that here was a person who, having been shown a brighter future, had had it snatched away forever.

“Rita, I’m really sorry,” he said, taking her hands in his.  Despite the fact that he had no interest in marrying her, they’d been friends since childhood, and he wanted to help her if he could.
  
But he suspected that he wouldn’t, and that his questions would only make her sad.  And he suspected that the resolution of the matter would most likely make her even more unhappy and generate more questions than it answered.
  
The worst part of the whole thing was that he really only had one question for her.

“Did he come see you last night?” he asked her.

Tears welled in her eyes again, and Sangr immediately knew that he’d just discovered the key to the whole affair.  Probably only Rita and her mother knew of this, and they would not have said anything. They had no man to protect them against repercussions.

“We talked for about two hours, inside the house.  My mother was good enough to let us use the main room and watched us only occasionally.  He is,” she sobbed and Sangr held her as she got herself together. “He was a wonderful man.  Brave, dashing, articulate. And then he walked back, and that must have been when…”

She broke down completely. Sangr he ushered her inside and handed her to her mother, who thanked him with a look.  He walked back out, infinitely sadder than he’d ever been, but also somewhat relieved to have had the choice he’d been postponing for so long taken from his hands.  He stood outside Rita’s house, knowing he would need a few minutes to gather his wits and to push down the emotions before moving into the final phase of his investigation.


***


Once composed, he walked back to the forge, stepping over the rapidly melting block of ice, and stood in front of his friend.

“So,” he said, “you were working late last night, I gather.”

Lunk shrugged, not taking his eyes from the red-hot piece of iron he was beating, “The fishermen asked me to make them some new grappling hooks, since they’d broken a few trying to secure the stranger’s ship.  They needed them by morning.”

Sangr said nothing, listening to the clanging of hammer on metal, and, in the ringing silence between blows, the dripping of water as the ice melted from Shtarel’s icy coffin.

“Are you going to ask her to marry you?” he said, finally.

Now Lunk looked at him, straight in the eyes.  “That depends on what you tell them, doesn’t it?”

Sangr looked around, eyes falling briefly on his enormous friend, big enough to hold an ox with one arm, on the assorted tongs that could be used to hold large pieces of white-hot metal in the fire of the forge, and the thick leather apron and gloves that would protect the wearer from accidental contact with his materials.

“There are only two things I don’t understand,” Sangr said, “Why the tube in his mouth, and why the metal bars?”

Lunk immersed the piece he was working on in a barrel of water and stared at his friend through the steam.  “I used the tube to make sure the bastard could breathe. I wanted him to *freeze*, not drown.  Drowning would have been too quick.  And he made the freezing even slower with that damnable fire of his.  He managed to keep it on for nearly a minute before the water defeated it. I had to place the metal bars in there to radiate heat out of the water so it would freeze once and for all.  Not easy to do while holding him in there with one hand. Fortunately, I’d come prepared.” He smiled weakly.

“Anyhow, the real giveaway was the fact that there was water in the trough in the middle of the night, and not ice.  That’s what got me thinking about it. The distance from the forge was short enough that you could have dumped warm water in and waited for him, adding another bucket if it looked like it would freeze.”

The silence between them was longer this time.  They just stood and looked at one another.

“Goodbye, Lunk,” Sangr said after an eternity.

Lunk’s head dropped.  “So you’re going to tell them?” he asked.

“No.  You’re going to tell them.  Tell them I came by to say goodbye, and that I was leaving.  Forever.”

Lunk, understanding, came over and embraced him, crushing his back.

“Thank you,” he whispered hoarsely.

“But make her happy,” Sangr said.

“I will.  It’s all I ever wanted since we were four years old.”

Sangr laughed. “You sure have a funny way of showing it.”  He gave his friend’s arm one last squeeze. “Give me half an hour before you tell them,” he said.

Walking towards his own bachelor’s hut, Sangr planned what he would take with him as he wondered whether anyone would really believe that he’d been the murderer. But with no other explanation, they’d just have to accept it.

The only other question was where he would go.  He knew of the villages to the north and south, along the sea, and, of course the sea itself made it difficult to go west – he would never endanger the village’s survival by stealing a boat.

That really only left him one interesting choice:  he would go east.

Into the ice.

©October 2019, Gustavo Bondoni

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer who writes primarily in English.  His debut novel, Siege was published in 2016, while two others, Outside and Incursion, were published in 2017. On the short fiction side, he has over two hundred short stories published in fourteen countries.  They have been translated into seven languages.  his writing has appeared in Pearson’s Texas STAAR English Test cycle, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Perihelion SF, The Best of Every Day Fiction and many others. He placed second in the 2019 Been Memorial Contest and received a Judges Commendation in The James White Award. His work has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery.

Other recent work includes an ebook novella entitled Branch, published in 2014. He has also published two reprint collections, Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010) and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011). The Curse of El Bastardo  (2010) is a short fantasy novel.  His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com.