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We were numb most of the time. I say numb, and you will think that we were merely cold. I mean numb, devoid of feeling; numb, beyond feeling; numb, having passed through sufficient shocks to have nothing left to answer new ones.
And cold, too.
My body was frozen and heavy. My clothes were full of water and froze only to thaw, to freeze again, to thaw once more until we learned to use seal grease to kept some of it out. That took some time. But time was the only thing we had abundance of, so we learned.
What was it like? You tell me you can’t imagine it, and you say that in such a pained way. You mean that you don’t want to. Well, I believe it of you! I’m sure it brings you no joy to imagine us on the Helcaraxë, freezing and dying; caught between two fires, as it were, and perishing of cold. You say it tore at your heart to imagine, and I’m sure it did. You say you never wanted it to happen, and I believe that, too.
Thousands wouldn’t. Thousands don’t.
But I do.
I don’t think you really want to know what it was like, though. It’s easier for me. I do know what it was like for you: I saw with my own eyes your agony on the mountain, and if it was like a knife in my heart, it let the poison out, too, whatever was left of it inside me. There can’t have been much, or I would never have come to you at all, but I told myself there was, all the way over the ice. I told myself I hated you, and I tried to believe it.
I used that hate on myself like a whip, and it kept me alive. The ones who kept moving lived, you see. The ones that stopped died. They died in their sleep, or they went to their knees during the march and refused to rise again, or they simply stopped noticing where they put their feet and fell into ravines and into deep still water. Some of them were even quieter about it. They slipped away in the – I can’t call it night – when we stopped to rest, and we never saw them again. Perhaps they didn’t mean to die, and only fell trying to relieve themselves, or got turned around in the dark. I don’t know.
But I was angry, and that kept me sharp.
I loved you, and you left Tirion for twelve years to go and sulk by your father’s side. I loved you, and you stood in that square and swore an oath that may yet bind you in invisible chains to the end of the world. I loved you, and I leaped to your aid with my sword in hand to stop that Telerin fisherman taking your head off.
That was really the moment when I married you, I think. When I put you before everything else, and I was wrong. You were wrong. When the rest of my father’s people arrived, to find the mess. They saw the wounded and the dead and me at your side. We learned only then why you’d been fighting the poor Teler in the first place, and I understood what I’d done. Everyone looked at me, at the blood on my hands and my sword and my face, and what they saw was my heedless love for you, like a stain that had risen to the surface, visible at last. I was yours.
You hate that idea, don’t you? It’s nicer to think that we were wed in secret in Hithlum, in the days after I brought you down from the mountain. After I kissed you, very carefully, and you looked at me like I was a dear dream you weren’t sure of. I think you half-thought you were still there, hanging, and I would dissolve as soon as you let yourself believe in me.
I understood that. I dreamed of you on the ice. Often it was sweet. But sometimes I had my hands around your throat, and sometimes I had a sword at it, and sometimes you were on your knees, begging my pardon. You’d tell me how you had never meant to leave with the ships in the night like a sneak-thief. You hadn’t meant to strand me for the rest of time in one world and gone to seek another. You hadn’t left me behind with clotted blood still under my nails, without a word. No: you told me it had been a terrible mistake, and you were sorry, and it was what I wanted to hear, and it wasn’t enough.
Sometimes you were in chains.
I felt like I’d done it to you when I saw you on Thangorodrim. I realised then that I hadn’t really wanted you punished at all.
But thinking I did kept me alive.
See, I told you that you didn’t really want to know.
You insist?
It was always dark, the white-blackness of the polar night. I would say that we were blind in the dark, but there were still stars. We learned to see by them. Most of the time we could see the difference between ice that was stable and ice that wasn't. The water was black as a burned-out flame, but sometimes there was wind, and it would quicken into hammered silver. Sometimes I would lie down on the ice and know that deep underneath me there swam ancient things that lived in the darkness and had no eyes. Sometimes I dreamed that I could make the water boil. I dreamed of warmth. I dreamed of light.
I dreamed of you.
It wasn’t as quiet as you’d think. We sang. We whispered. We wept. All around us the ice groaned, and ground, and cracked, and split. Pack ice accordioned, glaciers calved. Rotten towers of ice would collapse with a sound like rocks falling.
It was cold.
Hating you kept me warm. It was the metal-tongued teeth of the whip I flogged myself with, raking my mind with flame. It was a red light drawing me on over the ice to a far shore, more real than the distant balefire of the ships burning.
I knew that when I was cold inside all the way, when I was numb at last, I would die. And still, as we walked, it grew harder and harder to coax the last embers of my hate into life.
I was forgiving you. What wrong of yours could my heart not rise to cover, at last? What wrong could you do that I would not love you? After Alqualondë. After Losgar. It’s difficult to imagine with your head in my lap, looking up at me like this. They say in song that your eyes are like cold stars, but to me they are grey sky, heavy and warm with rain.
When I woke on the last morning I felt nothing at all.
I was used to seeing things in the dark; a snow house appearing, dissolving. Whole cities of ice: a string of mountains, indistinct in the darkness under the stars, all slipping away. That morning the imagined mountains did not disappear. Their distant outlines only grew stronger.
And then there was light. We saw the moon rising for the first time. I watched, numb, as it began to rise over the cliffs at the end of the fjord and brightened, suddenly reddening. It looked like it had been cut out of ice and thrown up into the air. It rose so slowly that it seemed about to wobble and crash back down at any moment, but then the distant peaks we could all see now caught light like the poisoned tip of an arrow, and the cliffs that had given birth to the moon turned pink, crimson, gold. Over the sound of the ice creaking, we could hear the shrieks of arctic gulls.
And I knew that somewhere, over the mountains, was you.
And I was still yours, and I was coming for you.