the fire. Aki brought us cups of sour wine and a bowl of roasted carrots. I took a sip of the wine, remembering the rush of pleasure I had once taken in drinking—my gin hangovers, my addiction to genepy after my surgery, all the bottles of wine I had taken from the Montebianco cellar. I hadn’t made a decision to stop drinking and yet, since I had arrived in the village, I had no interest in losing myself in that way anymore.
Aki gazed up at cave paintings. I loved the drawings. The Icemen may not have articulated time as we did, but they had recorded the history of their tribe, all the stories of men and women who had struggled to survive in that remote, unknown crevice in the mountains. Aki pointed to a cluster of pictures that showed a man with black hair: Leopold.
“When he arrived,” Aki said, “the Icemen tried to kill him. We had never allowed such a man to enter our village before. We did not want him here. He was beaten and held in one of the caves of the arcade, left without food or water, to die. We were afraid of him, and all his kind. You did not know we existed, but our kind had watched you for hundreds of years. We knew you were more powerful than us. You had developed machines and weapons. We knew you grew food and manufactured clothes. And Leopold looked different from us. He carried objects that we had never seen before. A gun. Books. He spoke a language we could not understand.”
Aki drank his wine down. He looked at my cup, full in my hand. I gave it to him.
“But Zyana, a direct descendant of the Ice Giants, a fearless woman, went to see Leopold. She found that he was not dangerous, as the others had believed. She taught him our language and she learned his. She insisted that this man was not so different from us. With time, she fell in love with this dark man. He began to teach her the ways of your kind. She called him kryschia.
“At first, we did not accept him. But soon, he spoke our language very well and explained himself to us. He was very”—Aki stopped to find the correct word—“critical about your kind. He told us about war. He explained what happened when one group of people dominated another group. With time, we came to understand he was our friend. We freed him. After this, Leopold and Zyana were happy. They had children. Healthy and strong children. This was a great joy for my kind. We were weak in those years. When a child was born, it was often small and sick. Sometimes a baby would live for a few days. Sometimes, it died later, after a year or two. Few grew to be men and women. Our population became smaller every year. Kryschia saw this. He examined all of us and said that we were in danger. He was a wise man. He told us what we needed to do to survive. We had lived too long in isolation, he said. The mountains protected us from outsiders, but such protection would also kill us. We must find others, he said. Find people different from us and mix their blood with our blood. It seemed very strange to us, who had always known only our tribe, but we trusted him. We did as he said. We wanted our children to be strong and healthy, like your children. Leopold taught us to go down the mountain, to the villages. Not only near the castle, but farther away, many days’ walk. We found children and we brought them here.”
“Like Anna?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes, like her.”
It made sense to me that Leopold would suggest such a thing. He had been a student of the earliest writings on heredity and genetics. The books of natural history in the library—Mendel, Huxley, Darwin—attested to his seriousness, and his field notes were filled with observations about mating and sexual habits and the diminishing population. He must have discerned that the tribe was too small and isolated, and that interbreeding over generations had caused infertility and sickness. He understood that bringing Homo sapiens into the tribe would strengthen it. But to suggest that the Icemen steal children was cruel. How many parents had been thrown into Greta’s hell of uncertainty and longing? How many children had longed, like Anna, to go home? The pain