The Emerald Circus Read online

  The perfect time for prayers, the boy thought, and he climbed off the settle bed, slipping on his wooden shoes for warmth. Sinking down on his knees, he began to pray—not to God, who Mama said had done little enough for the family, but to the Ice Maiden. Mama had told him all about the Ice Maiden, with her white hair and snowy skin and eyes the faded blue of the sky in winter. Mama might not be able to read like Papa, but she knew all about these things.

  “The Ice Maiden can grant wishes,” Mama had said just that morning. “Three of them.” She’d held up three fingers. “But be careful what you wish for. If she thinks the wishes are foolish, she can also carry you away to her cold ice palace, where there are only polar bears and seals.”

  “Is it colder than here in Odense?” the boy had asked.

  “Much colder,” Mama answered. “So cold, your nose turns black with the bite of the frost and tears freeze upon your cheeks till they are hard as jewels.”

  The boy liked seals. And polar bears. Though he wasn’t so sure about the cold. Odense was cold enough in the winter for him. He couldn’t imagine colder. But how the Ice Maiden could get him to her palace was a puzzle. Would they walk? Or fly? Perhaps she had a sledge pulled by reindeer. He liked reindeer.

  “Is she a witch, then?” The boy was wary of witches, knowing that they promised to feed you but shoved you in an oven instead.

  “Ice maidens are not witches,” Mama said. “It’s a very different thing.” Then she smiled and patted him on the head. He could smell the schnapps on her breath. She was always happier after her glass of schnapps. “But they do expect payment. Just like witches do.”

  “I have no money,” the boy said. Though not usually so sensible, he did have some sense, especially where money was concerned. Or the lack of it.

  “She has all the money she needs already,” his mother answered. “After all, she has a castle.”

  “But don’t castles need a lot of money to maintain them? For the chairs and the jewels and the big beds?” the boy asked. “And the wars?”

  “The icicles are her jewels, she has all the chairs and beds she needs, and she makes no wars.” His mother’s smile was broad. The schnapps were making her very happy.

  “Then how shall I pay her?” The boy had really needed to know this.

  But Mama had gone from his side, back to the schnapps bottle waiting on the table even though it was not yet lunch and Papa said drinking was for nighttime and for fools.

  The boy knew he couldn’t ask Papa about the Ice Maiden. After all, Papa didn’t believe in Mama’s stories, not about the Ice Maiden or the trolls or the mermaids or any of the other fairy creatures she talked about. Often Papa read books aloud to him, books with hard words in them and no pictures.

  The boy couldn’t ask Grandfather, either, for Grandfather was off again, into the snowy woods, to sing and dance under the trees and wear beech leaves in his hair till the policeman brought him back: “Keep old Crazy Anders at home, please.”

  His half sister, Karen Marie, would be no help, either, for she was away with her gentlemen callers.

  And while Grandmother often took care of him, she didn’t like to talk about what she called wicked things, which meant—as far as the boy could ascertain—anything even slightly interesting or amusing.

  And surely, the boy thought, there is something wicked about the Ice Maiden if she takes people away. Which was something witches did as well. So he was still confused on that point.

  But the Ice Maiden granted wishes. Both the boy and his mother believed that. And if there was one thing the boy knew the family needed, it was for wishes to come true. Which is why—even without knowing what payment would be exacted—he got down on his knees and prayed. He was five years old. Perhaps old enough to know better.

  “Ice Maiden,” he called, hoping she would come to him. Three wishes was all he would get. This was so in every story he’d ever heard. He unlaced his fingers from their prayer grip and counted the three. A new, bigger bed, to begin with. And for Papa to feel better and be able to make more money. And then the other thing. The most important thing. The thing he could hardly admit to wanting, even to himself. Three wishes. What payment was to be exacted, he would discuss with the Ice Maiden only if she first promised to grant him all three.

  Slipping back into the settle bed and pulling the covers up to his nose, the boy waited to warm up, but instead he only got colder. He glanced up at the little window and finally saw a single star in the sky. At first the star was quite distant, which was proper for a star.

  “Star bright,” he whispered, and watched as it suddenly fell precipitously in a downward arc. The longer he looked at the star, the closer it seemed to get, until it came right through his window and settled, icy and shimmering, by his bedside.

  “Oh,” he said. He hadn’t any other words for it. Pulling his long legs in, knees to chin, and shivering in the cold, he stared at the star as it slowly resolved into the figure of a tall, beautiful woman with long white hair and eyes the color of a winter sky. Oddly, he could see her clearly through the darkness of the room.

  “Are you . . . are you the Ice Maiden?” the boy asked.

  She smiled, though the smile did not reach her eyes. “Of course, Hans. Didn’t you just ask me to come?”

  He nodded and pulled the covers closer, all the while wondering how she knew his name. But, of course, a witch would know.

  “Are you afraid of me?” That strange smile again.

  He shrugged. What good would it do to be afraid now? Heroes were not afraid. They were . . . heroes. He would be a hero.

  “You knew enough to call me.” She ran a hand through her hair, and little sparkles of cold fire winked on and off, like stars.

  “Mama told me.”

  “Mamas always do.”

  Hans was so cold now, he could no longer feel his toes, his fingers, his ears. Even his teeth were cold. It was as if he were already in the Ice Maiden’s palace, his nose turning black and the tears freezing like ice jewels on his cheeks. He wished he had some matches to strike to help him keep warm, but they were on the other side of room by the fireplace and he was afraid to get off his bed, because that would mean he’d have to go past the Ice Maiden, go too close to her. Not perhaps how a hero would think, but he was really only a little boy.

  “I will grant your wishes, but you will have to tell them to me aloud.” She folded her hands together, lacing the fingers, as if she herself were praying.

  “Why?” asked Hans.

  “Because,” she said, just as all grown-ups do when they are waiting for you to do what they say or give a proper answer.

  Hans was never good at giving proper answers. He always had different answers in his head, odd answers, answers that his teachers and his parents and his grandmother and even his crazy grandfather seemed to think were wrong. But they weren’t wrong answers, they were just his answers. He wondered suddenly what the Ice Maiden would do if he gave her a wrong answer. And, thinking this, he found he couldn’t open his mouth at all.

  “I’m waiting,” the Ice Maiden said. And then again, “I’m waiting, Hans. I do not like to wait.”

  Hans took a deep breath. He could feel the cold air rush down into his throat, down into his chest, almost stopping his heart. And then he said all in a rush, “I want a new bed long enough for my stork legs, I want Papa to get well enough to make lots of money, and I want to be a digter, a poet, and make even more money for the family.” There, it was done. Three wishes spoken aloud.

  The Snow Queen’s hands unlaced and she sketched a little sign in the air before her. As if etched in ice, a picture appeared. It was of a tall, thin, ungainly man, with a big nose and squinty eyes. His clothes looked quite fine. Hans had never seen a tailcoat up close before, or such a high hat. The man seemed to be writing in a notebook.

  “This could be you,” the Ice Maiden said.

  “He is not very handsome,” said Hans, wondering if that was the payment due.

  “A digter needs to write beautifully,” the Ice Maiden said, “not be beautiful.”

  Hans nodded. It was true. He looked again at the icy picture. The man did not look happy, just hard at work. “Is he sad?”

  “Did you wish for happiness?”

  Hans shook his head.

  Suddenly he worried that he’d have to have much more schooling to become a digter, and he hated school, where everybody bullied him, even the masters. It occurred to him that being a digter might not be a good a way of earning a living, not even as good as being a shoemaker like Papa or a washerwoman like Mama.

  “You worry about the payment,” the Ice Maiden said as, with a single movement of her hand, she erased the picture in the air.

  How did she know what was in his mind? A witch! He was sure of it now. Afraid to speak further, afraid to get more cold air down inside him, he became silent. He started to fade. But mostly he was afraid that this was just a dream and so there would be no wishes fulfilled.

  “Of course there will be a payment. I do not give wishes for nothing.” The Ice Maiden’s voice was suddenly as cranky as Mama’s. “But you do not have to make the payment until much, much later. We will discuss it when you are earning your way, the greatest poet and storyteller Denmark will ever have.”

  “The greatest in Denmark?” Hans breathed. All of a sudden it was like breathing fire and smoke, not ice. He began to cough a deep chesty cough, sounding like Papa. Then without giving it further thought, he burst out with, “Why not the greatest in the world?”

  To his astonishment, the Ice Maiden laughed, short, sharp sounds, like glass breaking.

  “That’s okay, then,” he said, relieved. Everything would be all right. Wishes would be granted. He would be the hero. Like a fairy tale. Happily e
ver after. “I will pay. Gladly.”

  “Lie back down, then, little swamp plant,” the Ice Maiden told him, and as he did so she placed her ice-cold hand over the blanket covering his chest.

  Hans felt something like a little sliver of ice pierce his heart, and he fell into a sleep that was so deep, his mama found him in the morning and thought he had died in the night. After all, in Odense, such a thing was not unheard of. She was sobbing uncontrollably.

  He sat up. “Mama, Mama, why are you crying?”

  His mother looked at him. “I thought you were gone, little one, and so who would take care of me in my old age?”

  If he thought that an odd thing to say, he didn’t mention it. He was only five years old, after all. Instead he said, “I have gone nowhere, Mama. I am right here in Odense. I will take care of you.” All thoughts of becoming a digter disappeared, and he was only a little boy with his weeping mama, whom he would care for, and that was enough.

  It would be another fifty years, when Hans was writing his memoirs, before he remembered clearly what had happened that night with the Ice Maiden, but already the payments had begun. Yes, he’d gotten a new bed within a fortnight, long enough for his stork legs, made for him as soon as Papa was no longer ill. But then Papa chose to go off into the army because he could make more money fighting a war than fixing shoes. He came home from Holstein a broken man and was dead before Hans was eleven. His mother took religiously to the bottle and, no longer having her husband to abuse, turned her flaying tongue on Hans.

  To escape this hard life, Hans would walk about with his eyes closed so as not to see all the sadness around him. But of course he could still hear it. So he took himself more and more often to Monk Mill, watching the great splash of water over the mill wheel, happy that it drowned out the sound of everything else. Except . . . except he could still hear stories in his head, and so he lived more and more in them. In his mind’s eye he could see the lovely curling turrets of the Empire of China, which he was certain lay beneath the millrace. He believed it was an empire whose prince would someday take Hans to his palace.

  And so Hans’s childhood passed by in a farrago of dreams, though eventually he understood that Odense could not offer him the Ice Maiden’s last promise, not even with the magic of the mill wheel. Just as Papa had to do the actual building of the bigger bed, just as Papa had given his life to make more money for the family, now it was Hans’s turn to grab up the final wish with both hands. After all, Odense was too small a place for a boy who’d been promised that he would become Denmark’s most famous digter.

  So he ran off to Copenhagen with his mother’s drunken blessing, to do the actual work of writing his books.

  Years went by, lonely, hard, amazing years. Everyone from his old life was dead—father, mother, grandparents, half sister. But as the Ice Maiden had promised, Hans prospered.

  Did he remember the childhood bargain? Hardly. It was only a fairy story he’d told himself as a child when everyone around him was failing. He knew how hard he’d worked to write, how hard it was to do readings at town halls and great houses. Hard work—not a child’s wishes—had made him a great man.

  However, sixty-five years after his bargain with the Ice Maiden, lying on his deathbed at a friend’s house just outside Copenhagen, Hans sat up after a fright-filled dream. It had been about the ice witch, whom he hadn’t thought of in half a century or more. His hands and face were ice cold with fear of the dream, though the cancer in his liver seemed white hot. He was sweating and shivering at the same time.

  Surely a price will be demanded, he thought feverishly. Witches promise you sweets and then shove you in the oven.

  “Sir, shall I call the doctor back again?” asked the manservant his friends had loaned him.

  “A doctor for the digter?” He laughed at his own play on words. Even in a fevered state, he could not stop himself from making word jokes.

  “Sir,” the servant said, his face stern. His entire body radiated concern far beyond what Hans’s friends were paying him.

  “No, no. No doctor. Just help me change out of these wet clothes.” Hans did not feel shame in asking. After all, that’s what a manservant was for.

  When the man came back with a dry nightshirt, Hans shook his head. “No, no, not the nightshirt. I am afraid I have not been clear. I have to dress in my formal clothes. I am expecting a most important visitor.”

  The manservant looked momentarily confused. “There is nothing written in the diary, sir, about a visitor.” In fact, Mrs. Melchior, the mistress of the house where old Hans lay dying, had given the servant specific instructions: No visitors. Wake me if there is a change. Do not be afraid to send for the doctor. And for the Lord’s sake, do not stint on the pain medication.

  “Nevertheless, my visitor is coming today,” Hans told him.

  “Do you want a dose of morphia, sir, to ease the pain?”

  Hans shook his head. “I need to be sharp for this visitor. Pain keeps me sharp.”

  “Pain keeps you . . . in pain,” the serving man said.

  “Please . . . do as I say.”

  Once dressed, even down to his leather shoes—shoes that Papa never would have had the skill to produce—Hans dismissed the man. “Wait in the kitchen till I ring,” he said.

  “But sir—”

  “Do it.”

  The servant went out, for he had to follow orders.

  But as soon as the man left and the red-hot flare in his belly subsided once again, Hans remembered the story of his promise to the Ice Maiden as if it were one of his own tales. He spoke the tale aloud, as if telling it in the royal court, as he had often done in Denmark and in Germany. The tale of an old digter and his bargain with a powerful witch.

  And when he got to the end, he whispered, “Aha, so it is only my death that is the payment. A good bargain after all.”

  But the story did not sit well in his mouth. Death as a payment for a good life lived was not enough of an ending. Everyone dies: the good people and the bad people, the good storytellers and the bad ones. And people who were not storytellers, well, they died, too. Hans knew that his story demanded a different ending. Something stronger. It needed to be revised. Hadn’t his own little mermaid found a way into heaven after her awful bargain with another kind of witch?

  He forced himself to tell the story again, this time his voice as slight and light as a child’s. He didn’t push the story where he willed it, but let it go to its natural end. Inevitable but surprising, he reminded himself.

  “Ha!” he said when he’d finished. Now all would be right. He settled back to wait for his visitor.

  The warm summer’s day closed around him. He let go of his vanity and opened the top button of his shirt, loosened the collar. She would have to take him as she found him. He closed his eyes and, like the swamp plant of old, began to fade.

  A sound like wings called him back to himself. He opened his eyes to a shift in the room, like a curtain blowing. Something white and shimmering floated into his sight, cold and distant as any star.

  “Hello, Ice Maiden,” he said. “You look a great deal older.” It really wasn’t the way to address a woman of a certain age, but Hans was beyond such niceties now.

  “So do you, Hans,” she answered, shaking her hair till it was like falling snow. “A great deal older. As you can see, I am no longer an Ice Maiden but the Snow Queen, thanks to you. My castle, though, is still the same—seals and polar bears.”

  “Ah,” said Hans, “I remember. And the cold.”

  “Yes, of course,” said the Snow Queen, “always the cold. Are you ready to come away with me now?”

  He smiled, maybe more of a grimace, for a sharp pain caught him right before he spoke again. He let it pass through, then said, “Oh, I doubt you’ll want me for your palace, you old witch, for I have beaten you at your game.”

  “No one beats me,” the Snow Queen said, smiling, though still the smile did not reach her eyes. “And no one calls me a witch.” There was a strange tic beating beneath the skin of her right cheek.