Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
Next book on the shelf is another short story collection – this one called Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
I love this story!! Like all fairy tales, it transports you into another world – it’s a wonderful story – but then – like all good fairy tales, it potentially shows you, the reader, something about yourself. It’s an extended metaphor for an aspect of the human condition. But it’s not didactic! I’ve been reading The Arabian Nights – and while all of those stories have morals (and, er, most of the morals have something to do with: “All women are salacious and evil so beware!” – so forgive me if I don’t take the moral part of the venture seriously!) the real potency and magic (God, they’re magical – I love them!) lies in the stories themselves. Like, you can’t stop reading. Byatt has cited The Arabian Nights as a major influence on her work (that and George Eliot. Uhm, I love AS Byatt??) and it shows in tales like “Cold”.
A princess is born “in a temperate kingdom”. Her name is Fiammarosa. She is the 13th in a long line of children. She is loved by everybody. And yet there seems to be something wrong with her. She is fragile. She “seems breakable”. She lies on grassy fields, watching other people play and frolic. She can’t seem to get any energy. Her tutor commits to her education – although Princesses don’t need TOO much education – and so she goes along in her life, unremarkable, except for her weakness, her almost transparent fragility. Then – one snowy night – she stares outside at the icy landscape and feels an overwhleming desire to be out there in the snow. It is not so much a desire – as a NEED. Some need sunlight. We all need food and water. She NEEDS the cold. She tries to sneak outside to walk around in the snow, but finds she cannot get outside – the doors are all locked, and she runs into a sentry, who gently informs her it’s too cold, she can’t go outside, she might get sick. Defeated, Fiammarosa goes back to bed, but she lies there, imagining in her mind, over and over and over – herself out there in the snow – naked – rolling around – submerging herself – walking on a frozen pond in bare feet – Her body yearns for the ice.
And so begins her transformation.
And, of course, because it is a fairy tale – she encounters many (often deadly) obstacles along the way.
The story is wonderful – I’ve read it often.
It reminds me of this heart-breaking line from Summer and Smoke – in the killer last scene of the play. Miss Alma says to John Buchanan, “It wasn’t the physical you I wanted” – He responds, “You didn’t have that to give me.” She says, “Not at the time.” He says, “You had something else to give.” She asks, “What?”
And John responds, with words that have such resonance for me, personally – that it’s hard for me to even express it:
You couldn’t name it and I couldn’t recognize it. I thought it was just a Puritanical ice that glittered like flame. But now I believe it was flame, mistaken for ice. I still don’t understand it, but I know it was there, just as I know that your eyes and your voice are the two most beautiful things I’ve ever known — and also the warmest, although they don’t seem to be in your body at all …
I guess I want to say that my flame has been mistaken for ice. And there is nothing more devastating in all the world.
Something like that is going on in AS Byatt’s story – as you can see from the excerpt below.
Excerpt from Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
The next night she reconnoitred the corridors and cupboards, and the night after that she went down in the small hours, and took a small key from a hook, a key that unlocked a minor side-door that led to the kitchen-garden, which was now, like everywhere else, under deep snow, the taller herbs stiffly draggled, the tufted ones humped under white, the black branches brittle with the white coating frozen along their upper edges. It was full moon. Everything was black and white and silver. The princess crept in her slippers between the beds of herbs, and then bent down impulsively and pulled off the slippers. The cold snow on the soles of her feet gave her the sense of bliss that most humans associate with warm frills of water at the edge of summer seas, with sifted sand, with sunny stone. She ran faster. Her blood hummed. Her pale hair floated in the wind of her own movement in the still night. She went under an arch and out through a long ride, running lightly under dark, white-encrusted boughs, into what in summer was a meadow. She did not know why she did what she did next. She had always been decorous and docile. Her body was full of an electric charge, a thrill, from an intense cold. She threw off her silk wrap, and her creamy woollen nightgown, and lay for a moment, as she had imagined lying, with her naked skin on the cold white sheet. She did not sink, the crust was icy and solid. All along her body, in her knees, her thighs, her small round belly, her pointed breasts, the soft inner skin of her arms, she felt an intense version of that paradoxical burn she had received from the touch of the frosted window. The snow did not numb Fiammarosa; it pricked and hummed and brought her, intensely, to life. When her front was quite chilled, she turned over on her back, and lay there, safe inside the form of her own faint impression on the untouched surface. She stared up, at the great moon with its slaty shadows on its white-gold disc, and the huge fields of scattered, clustered, far-flung glittering wheeling stars in the deep darkness, white on midnight, and she was, for the first time in her life, happy. This is who I am, the cold princess thought to herself, wriggling for sheer pleasure in the snow-dust, this is what I want. And when she was quite cold, and completely alive and crackling with energy, she rose to her feet, and began a strange, leaping dance, pointing sharp fingers at the moon, tossing her long mane of silver hair, sparkling with ice-crystals, circling and bending and finally turning cartwheels under the wheeling sky. She could feel the cold penetrating her surfaces, all over, insistent and relentless. She even thought that some people might have thought that this was painful. But for her, it was bliss. She went in with the dawn, and lived through the day in an alert, suspended, dreaming state, waiting for the deep dark, and another excursion into the cold.
Night after night, now, she went and danced in the snowfield. The deep frost held and she began to be able to carry some of her cold energy back into her daily work. At the same time, she began to notice changes in her body. She was growing thinner, rapidly – the milky softness induced by her early regime was replaced with a slender, sharp, bony beauty. And one night, as she moved, she found that her whole body was encased in a transparent, crackling skin of ice that broke into spiderweb-fine veined sheets as she danced and then re-formed. The sensation of this double skin was delicious. She had frozen eyelashes and saw the world through an ice-lens; her tossing hair made a brittle and musical sound, for each hair was coated and frozen. The faint sounds of shivering and splintering and clashing made a kind of whispered music as she danced on. In the daytime now, she could barely keep away, and her night-time skin persisted patchily in odd places, at the nape of her neck, around her wrists, like bracelets. She tried to sit by the window, in her lessons, and also tried surreptitiously to open it, to let in the cold wind, when Hugh, her tutor, was briefly out of the room. And then, one day, she came down, rubbing frost out of her eyelashes with rustling knuckles, and found the window wide open, Hugh wrapped in a furred jacket, and a great book open on the table.
‘Today,’ said Hugh, ‘we are going to read the history of your ancestor, King Beriman, who made an expedition to the kingdoms beyond the mountains, in the frozen North, and came back with an icewoman.’
Fiammarosa considered Hugh.
‘Why?’ she said, putting ehr white head on one side, and looking at him with sharp, pale blue eyes between the stiff lashes.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Hugh, taking her to the open window. ‘Look at the snow on the lawns, in the rose-garden.’
And there, lightly imprinted, preserved by the frost, were the tracks of fine bare feet, running lightly, skipping, eddying, dancing.
Fiammarosa did not blush; her whiteness became whiter, the ice-skin thicker. She was alive in the cold air of the window.
‘Haev you been watching me?’
‘Only from the window,’ said Hugh, ‘to see that you came to no harm. You can see that the only footprints are fine, and elegant, and naked. If I had followed you I should have left tracks.’
‘I see,’ said Fiammarosa.
‘And,’ said Hugh, ‘I have been watching you since you were a little girl, and I recognise happiness and health when I see it.’
‘Tell me about the icewoman.’
‘Her name was Fror. She was given by her father, as a pledge for a truce between the ice-people and King Beriman. The chronicles describe her as wondrously fair and slender, and they say also that King Beriman loved her distractedly, and that she did not return his love. They say she showed an ill will, liked to haunt caverns and rivers and refused to learn the language of the kingdom. They say she danced by moonlight, on the longest night, and that there were those in the kingdom who believed she was a witch, who had enchanted the King. She was seen, dancing naked, with three white hares, which were thought to be creatures of witchcraft, under the moon, and she was imprisoned in the cells under the palace. There she gave birth to a son, who was taken from her, and given to his father. And the priests wanted to burn the icewoman, “to melt her stubbornness and punish her stiffness”, but the King would not allow it.
‘Then one day, three northmen came riding to the gate of the castle, tall men with axes on white horses, and said they had come “to take back our woman to her own air”. No one knew how they had been summoned: the priests said that it was by witchcraft that she had called to them from her stone cell. It may have been. It seems clear that there was a threat of war if the woman was not relinquished. So she was fetched out, and “wrapped in a cloak to cover her thinness and decay” and told she could ride away with her kinsmen. The chronicler says she did not ask to see her husband or her tiny son, but “cold and unfeeling as she had come” mounted behind one of the northmen and they turned and rode away together.
‘And King Beriman died not long after, of a broken heart or of witchcraft, and his brother reigned until Leonin was old enough to be crowned. The chronicler says that Leonin made a “warm-blooded and warm-hearted” ruler, as though the blood of his forefathers ran true in him, and the “frozen lymph” of his maternal stock was melted away to nothing.
‘But I believe that after generations, a lost face, a lost being, can find a form again.’
‘You think I am an icewoman.’
‘I think you carry the inheritance of that northern princess. I think also that her nature was much misunderstood, and that what appeared to be kindness was extreme cruelty – paradoxically, probably her life was preserved by what appeared to be the cruellest act of those who held her here, the imprisonment in cold stone walls, the thin prison dress, the bare diet.’
‘I felt that in my bones, listening to your story.’
‘It is your story, Princess. And you too are framed for cold. You must live – when the thaw comes – in cold places. There are ice-houses in the palace gardens – we must build more, and stock them with blocks of ice, before the snow melts.’
Fiammarosa smiled at Hugh with her sharp mouth. She said:
‘You have read my desires. All through my childhood I was barely alive. I felt constantly that I must collapse, vanish, fall into a faint, stifle. Out there, in the cold, I am a living being.’
‘I know.’
‘You choose your words very tactfully, Hugh. You told me I was “framed for cold”. That is a statement of natural philosophy, and time. It may be that I have ice in my veins, like the icewoman, or something that boils and steams at normal temperatures, and flows busily in deep frost. But you did not tell me I had a cold nature. The icewoman did not look back at her husband and son. Perhaps she was cold in her soul, as well as in her veins?’
‘That is for you to say. It is so long ago, the tale of the icewoman. Maybe she saw King Beriman only as a captor and conqueror? Maybe she loved someone else, in the North, in the snow? Maybe she felt as you feel, on a summer’s day, barely there, yawning for faintness, moving in shadows.’
‘How do you know how I feel, Hugh?’
‘I watch you. I study you. I love you.’
Fiammarosa noticed, in her cool mind, that she did not love Hugh, whatever love was.
She wondered whether this was a loss, or a gain. She was inclined to think, on balance, that it was a gain. She had been so much loved, as a little child, and all that heaping of anxious love had simply made her feel ill and exhausted. There was more life in coldness. In solitude. Inside a crackling skin of protective ice that was also a sensuous delight.
Cold is the most beautiful story I’ve ever read. I’ve reread it many times and become more charmed and entranced each time! Thank you Ms Byatt.