The Ice Fair

Chapter 3 Loki

From its vantage point on the roof of Warr and Pinkle a raven watched the resolute figure of Old Father Time sharpening his scythe in the churchyard opposite. He worked steadfastly, running his sharpening stone to and fro across the dazzling blade which cried out the visceral wail of a tortured rat. Squeak, scrape, squeak, scrape.

A winter's breeze sprang up, ruffled the bird's feathers and tried to topple it from its perch, giving it the queer aspect of a porcupine desperately clinging to the ridge of the gable of the old vicarage. The wind dropped allowing it to bounce along the slippery roof tiles and jabber loudly at the crows sitting on the headstones watching the old man about his work.

The crows scattered like the innards of a discharged blunderbuss, iron shot racing up high into the sky. For a few moments they circled like tumbling rags, showering the raven with irritated cawing and then made their way off into the horizon and dissolved into black pepper dust.

Father Time stopped his ministrations and looked up, long and hard at the raven. Then, obviously irritated by its presence waved a petulant hand at it and shouted something the Raven did not hear (or chose not to). Turning shakily on its clawed feet, the bird inspected the landscape. He tipped his head this way and then that, his black bead eyes blinking away the almond bitter air.

The long lane coming up to the house was undisturbed aside from a double set of footprints, one outward, one inward, made earlier by a small boy who'd the raven had seen trudging to and fro from the house. The building stood alone on a larger plot on the end of the lane. Past the apple orchard at the back of the house lay a small copse hiding a flock of starlings to afraid to fly over the house since the raven had taken residence

Opposite stood the church of St Stephens, beak and taciturn, a relic from the Doomsday book. Past the church, over a field decorated with a glistening layer of snow was a world laid out in miniature. The tiny ice laden houses of Snowfields, cradled a fresh fall of snow giving way to the sparklingly black ice of the River Thames.

The raven leapt from it precarious perch, swept down into the graveyard and landed in front of Father Time.

Father Time placed his sharpening stone in his pocket, rested his hands on the top of his scythe and inspected the bird as it hopped erratically to and fro before him and performed an elaborate dance in the snow. 

It walked to and fro, backward and forward, occasionally stopping to check its bird footed creation in the soft white surface. When it was finished and a pattern filled with a geometric design littered with runic marks had arisen, it jumped to its centre and laid down flat as if it had just fallen from the sky. Then with wings outspread like an injured animal it did three rotations clockwise and three anticlockwise. And then it bounced up on its tiny haunches and waited.

A small flurry of snow twisted up over the runes. Leaving the circle it raced through the graveyard, twisting and turning amongst the gravestones it gathered pace, growing as it did so into a spiral of whirling ice. When it returned it swept over the runes and suddenly the raven, seemingly ignorant of its presence was consumed by the torrent. The shape wavered, spun and grew, until something much larger occupied the space where the bird had lain just moments before.

Father Time watched impassively, his beard flapping, his robes torn sideways by the force of the tumultuous tornado.

The unnatural disturbance died away, revealing within a block of ice a head taller than Time himself, as misty as a pillar of salt. Within the column the skeleton of a man began to form. Legs, arms, rib cage and thick cranium propagated from a pulpy liquid, engorging the fame, that swiftly turned to pumice and thence to solid bone. Fleshy muscles appeared and glued themselves to the cadaver to create an anatomical curiosity of the sort found in in physicians or lecturers in the medical sciences. The transparent carcass trembled momentarily, then gurgling and coughing like a headless spectre, filled up with a gooey liquid, thick and sticky as strawberry jam.