their sweet love gone? Was silence all? Their love extinct?
Play with me, he said.
Nyssa said, The face is yours. The spirit has fled.
What are you talking about? Listen to reason. The lifelovingest part of him would no longer lie beside him or play with him.
She looked at him and saw a stranger who would not listen to her. Gently she placed her beloved fiddle on the ground, and raising her brocade boot above it, she stomped down hard. The fine old wood cracked in useless splinters, the tailpiece popped off and the strings sprang tangled and slack. One of the pegs popped out and landed away from the smashed wood like a chopped-off finger. Chipped varnish and silent sheepgut lay murdered between them.
His eyes searched hers and he tried sotto voce, Let’s stop all this. I’ll get you another fiddle. If you love me I will always love you. It doesn’t matter what you do.
In an instant’s compass her heart closed to him.
She said, There is no if in love.
She walked past him and her dead fiddle toward the door.
Nyssa scrambled down the shore and untied the dory. The glow of ice-loom across open water. Swish-ice clinked like chains in thousands of little chunks along the shore. Farther out in the strait were deadly ice floes. She thought, He closes the door and my heart sneaks out the window. He closes the window and it sneaks out the chimney. My bearings and balance are not inside those rooms but out beyond.
She saw wrapped round a tree by the shore a scrap of her own face, the paper torn and blown. Across the chin scribbled in her mother’s hand was the word Missing. Her face torn in two, part of her fiddle tucked under her chin, the rest blown away. The storm was pitching up again in the north. She wanted to get across. She slipped into the middle seat and broke the ice frozen over the oarlocks. She lifted the heavy oars. The old wood was rubbed smooth with the pull of hands and covered in a sheaf of ice. She swung the two long blades against the chunks of ice in the water. The oars sounded like straw thrashed with a stick as they moved heavily through the ice. Facing the direction from which she came, the nose of her boat taking her blindly toward Millstone Nether, she rowed. She was afraid of the swells and of the banquese ice, broken floes drifting down from the north. She tried to make out the stars to keep straight. Night clouds curtained the sky and ocean winds swung her boat around. She pulled and pulled until her own torn face on the shore was a speck. For a long time she pulled, trying to keep the wind at the same angle on her cheek. By midstream, the stars invisible and winds whipping her bow around, she cried out, afraid of the fearsome frozen floes, but the sound reached no ear. She rowed now only to keep her boat from tossing over. I have small chance, she thought. Minutes hours and hours minutes, the time it takes to tend the dying, shrouded with freezing rains she kept pulling only because there was nothing else to do.
After a long time, she felt an opening in the ice floes and the pull of a current as if there were a vessel ahead. She pulled in behind and waked it. She had to trust its pull through the invisible leads and channels. She could make out a dory and in it a figure long-limbed and bony like a shadow puppet moved by thin sticks behind a screen. It pulled her ahead through the darkness. She felt thick shore ice, and she looked over her shoulder and saw the cliffs of Millstone Nether and heard the cracking of tree limbs through the frozen stillness of an island out in the gulf of that great freezing river.
She looked around for the boat she had waked and saw nothing but ice and darkness. She drifted aporetic near the shore, unable to land her dory caught between two icebergs. She brought in her oars and leaned over them, her shoulders aching, and rested her forehead down against the frozen wood. She shed her heavy oilskin. She wanted to lie down and sleep yet roused herself. You can’t sleep in this cold, she thought, unless you want to sleep to death. Her strong mind grasped that and clung to it,