Mattias Berg - The Carrier

“You could set the stars by Sixten, the entire universe, the course of the world…” she muttered.

00.51. As it turned 01.00, Ingrid straightened her face, became our Alpha again.

“O.K. Improvisation,” she said tonelessly and lifted her pack onto her back. “It’s not safe to stay here any longer.”

We moved up to the surface in silence. Everything in reverse, although it was much tougher going in this direction: up the steep tunnel, the layers of stones over the hatch. But we were soon above ground and heading into driving snow. By 02.14 we were back at the ramshackle hut.

The night passed relatively painlessly, despite the cold. Our sleeping bags were meant to be able to cope with negative thirteen, according to military regulations—and after burning a fire for about an hour in the open fireplace, the temperature at the hut’s southern gable had risen to approximately that. When I finished my shift keeping an eye on the fire, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, as if drugged.

At 08.30 Ingrid tapped my shoulder. Still pale, resolute, controlled.

“Niklas should be here soon. We said at dawn , whatever that may mean in this weather and on the first day of twenty-four hour darkness. But I didn’t think it was so important to agree an exact time. The plan was for Sixten to take us away from here, by snowmobile, before Niklas returned.”

Half an hour later the dogs and Niklas came into view through the cracked windows. They were at most thirty feet away, the visibility cannot have been much more than that.

“Wonderful night?” Niklas said once he had managed to force open the frozen door and the rolled-up fabric Jesús María had used to seal cracks.

“Divine. Definitely one for the memories,” Ingrid said.

“Yes, it’s been fantastic to experience the northern Scandinavian climate like this, full on,” I said.

Niklas just shook his head as he led us to the dogs. And even their impatient barking had not been enough for me to find them on my own: it was brutally hard to manage the driving snow, despite all our winter training. The special goggles had no chance against these extreme conditions, which seemed to have got heavier rather than moved on.

“And you said Jukkas… are you absolutely sure, Inko? You know that I won’t set foot inside that pile of colonial kitsch,” Niklas said somewhere in front of me in the white-out.

“You can drop us off wherever you want within walking distance, Niklas. But Bob and Mercedes would never forgive me if I didn’t give them the chance to stay at the Ice Hotel.”

We took up the same positions in the sled. Niklas and Ingrid back on the runners, Jesús María closest to the dogs and me behind her. Despite the dogs’ silence once they were allowed to start pulling—how willingly they heaved and hauled at the harness, just like me—the wind stopped me from hearing a word of what Niklas and Ingrid were saying. Whatever lies she was telling him now.

The snow covered our tracks, both sled and dogs. The landscape was like one enormous blanket. Some kind of light nevertheless seeped through low on the horizon, the world went from gray-white to white-gray while “dawn” broke and the Polar Night approached its brightest moment.

When the main road was a few feet away—and we were level with yet another wooden church which we could make out on the other side, still in the shelter of the trees—Niklas stopped the sled.

“And you don’t want us to go in there first, Inko? The priest is normally around until lunchtime. Just get it done?”

Ingrid fell silent for a moment, for once had no ready answer.

“Another time,” she said.

“O.K., give me a call when… But it should have been us, right?”

Ingrid got out of the sled, put the pack on her back and gave him a quick peck on the cheek.

“Yes, Niklas. It should have been us.”

Then both he and the sled and dogs were swallowed whole by the whirling snow, while we labored toward the Ice Hotel. Even though it was only a regular weekday, just before lunch on Wednesday, December 11, 2013, long lines straggled to the reception desk. Ingrid still managed to find a way to the front—getting hold of the last three tickets to the daily showing.

Edelweiss used to say that there were only two ways in which to hide away effectively. Either in isolation: underground, alone on an island, in the middle of the desert. Or right in the middle of the throng.

It was for that reason that Ingrid and Sixten had chosen this commotion as an alternate meeting place. When the guide arrived, fifteen minutes after the specified time, there was hardly any elbow-room left in the hotel lobby. The tourists were glaring in irritation at our enormous packs that Ingrid had secured, against the odds, permission for us to bring them in.

Even the guide cast a troubled look at the backpacks—before deciding that this group was so large, and he was himself already so late, that it was hardly worthwhile sending us to the left luggage area.

And one would think that in our current situation, nothing else would matter. Just the escape, the briefcase in the hybrid, the assignment. That the rest of our existence would fall away. But instead I was hyper-sensitive, keyed up to the maximum. Every word from our guide registered with me, everything I saw. The Main Hall reminded me of the most beautiful and terrifying stories of my childhood—the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, Narnia , The Lord of the Rings . And later the Harry Potter stories, which I had read one after the other with the kids.

At the same time I tried to keep an eye on the other two. Ingrid seemed above all to be awaiting the signal from Sixten: usually looking in a different direction from the one the guide was pointing in. Jesús María had already left the group and begun to wander around on her own. When she thought that nobody was looking, she ran her hand over the wishing well of ice in the middle of the hall, furtively dropping a coin into the water.

Then she moved on to the mighty unicorn which dominated the far end of the hall, at least ten feet long from head to tail. When the rest of the group arrived at the sculpture—and Jesús María had already walked some distance away—the guide explained that it was made of snice . A specially balanced mixture of snow and ice for creating frozen works of art.

I came to think of the remarkable Gobelin tapestry which Ingrid devoted one of her many thought-provoking lectures to. One of the most enigmatic masterpieces of the Middle Ages, she had said, clicking slowly forward, slide after slide. Through the series which showed in the harshest detail how the unicorn was first lured and then killed. The blood flowing from its wounds, all the spears in one single body, the wild looks of the huntsmen: that beautiful white creature being sacrificed like Christ himself.

After a number of historic twists and turns, the tapestry—seven mysterious pictures in the most precious textiles—ended up at the Cloisters in New York, where my mother and I used to end our long walks.

How we then used to sit in their wonderful café under the arches, my mother with her black coffee and I with an enormous cup of hot chocolate with so much whipped cream so that it spilled over: she always insisted that it should be too much . Spoke to me animatedly about those strange paintings—with their depictions of primitive bloodthirstiness, the white unicorn being hunted and speared like any bull in an arena—ever since I had been far too young.

The final and most complex scene was called “The Unicorn in Captivity”. Which was also the title of this mighty snice statue, here in Jukkasjärvi’s Ice Hotel.

Before the Ice Bar opened, we were allowed to walk around on our own in the hotel rooms and the artistically decorated ice suites, which all had English names for the benefit of the tourists. Everything appeared frightening and incomprehensible to me, put me on edge. In the “Narcissus” suite a gigantic head of ice and snow was reflected in a huge frosty mirror. “Future Ancestors” was a labyrinth of allusions to religious rites which had not yet found their shape.