The Garden of Darkness

“Warm up your hands on my back. Hurry.”


Jem’s hands, Clare thought, well, Jem’s hands were, not surprisingly, like ice. And they were larger than she expected, so that she gasped as he touched her.

“Sorry,” he said.

And then he had turned from her and managed to zip the sleeping bags up. Sarai and Ramah were already in one sleeping bag, and Clare couldn’t help but notice, as they had gotten in, how small and thin Ramah was. Then Mirri was in the other sleeping bag waiting for Clare, and Clare shed her clothes.

The sleeping bag was like a frozen block of fabric, and Mirri was all elbows and knees as she squirmed to get warm. Jem, Abel and Bird Boy were packed together in the double sleeping bag.

“How’re you doing over there?” asked Jem.

“Peachy,” said Clare. She was beginning to warm up. It helped that Bear was lying at the end of the sleeping bag.

“Peachy,” echoed Mirri who, to Clare’s relief, had stopped wriggling.

“Also peachy,” said Sarai.

“I’m warm,” said Ramah.

“I bet this is going to get really boring,” said Mirri. Then she added, “You have bigger boobs than I thought, Clare.”

Jem laughed.

The storm went on for hours. Snow drifted around the wagon’s wheels.

And then, as abruptly as it had started, the storm let up.

Clare felt as if she were in an ice cave. Not just icicles, but thin sheets of ice extended from the wagon to the ground. Beyond the sheets of ice were mounds of snow, so that sound was curiously muffled.

“How many snowflakes make a snow drift?” asked Sarai.

“A million,” said Mirri.

They scrambled into their clothes while still in the sleeping bags. The sun was blinding as it glittered off the blanketed landscape. As they emerged from under the wagon, the snow came up to Clare’s knees. The wagon now looked like part of the landscape, a mound among trees.

“I don’t think we’re on the road anymore,” said Clare.

“We’re lost,” said Abel.

“The road can’t be far,” said Mirri.

“We need Sheba,” said Ramah.

“We need the snow to melt,” said Jem.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Clare asked Bird Boy.

“No.” He shook his head and the frozen feathers in his hair clinked together. They waded through the snow to the trees, where the snow wasn’t so deep, although the sides of the trees were spattered with white. There were no tracks of any kind; if Sheba had been there, it had been before the snow got deep.

They spread out a little and kept walking. Soon the exertion had warmed Clare to the extent that she took off her outer jacket. Then she noticed an odd thing. Jem had his coat off, too. And Bird Boy was in his shirtsleeves.

They weren’t warm solely because of the exertion. They were warm because the day was warm. Clare realized that she could hear the music of a thaw everywhere—the sound of water dripping, trickling, moving, flowing. And then she walked out of the wood and found herself standing on a patch with no snow at all on it, and before her was an open meadow. At the far end of the meadow, cropping the newly exposed grass, was Sheba.

Clare looked over her shoulder at the snowdrifts behind her.

“That was a very local storm,” said Jem.

“It ends here,” said Clare. “Who knows how far the storm reached in the other direction?”

The song of running water continued. Clare could hear snow plopping off the trees behind her.

“We’ll get Sheba,” said Mirri and started pulling Sarai by the hand.

“Well,” said Clare. “Jem said we needed the snow to melt. It’s melting.”

“It’ll take days for this amount of snow to melt,” said Abel. “Weeks.”

But he was wrong. By the time they caught Sheba it was easy to get to the wagon, and the snow that had seemed knee deep was now up to their ankles. By the time they had hitched up Sheba, they were squelching in grass and mud as rivulets of water ran over their shoes.

“It’s magic,” said Mirri.

“It’s a meteorological finger,” said Jem.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a place where the weather is different from anything around it.”

“That definitely sounds like magic.”

They hadn’t strayed far from the road during the storm, and they must have made some forward progress as well, because all the landmarks looked different. Around the stump of a tree, tiny purple flowers were opening. A little way into the wood, Clare saw a bank of snowdrops. There was a slight rise in front of them, but after her rest, Sheba had no trouble pulling the wagon. When they reached the top, the whole countryside was spread out before them.

There were meadows and copses of trees and streams.

“It looks like the chess board in Alice Through the Looking Glass,” said Jem.

“Do you know everything to do with chess, Jem?” asked Mirri.

“I’m a chess bore. I could talk about it for hours and hours and hours.”

“But you don’t,” said Clare.

“I don’t.”