Excerpts from
Prince
By Ib Michael
In Which the Ship Comes to Light
It begins in mist. Far up on the top of the world, where no one sees, the ice splits with a crack that rings out over white fjords. The sea shows blue between the floes; the night that has lasted half the year, with the sun lying below the horizon, is over. The ice-foot creaks and groans, fissure chases fissure, as a mountain of glass - the size of the palace of fairy-tale, with turrets and crenellations and windows long hidden by the snow - breaks off and puts out to sea.
The long day has returned.
It rocks on seas that are running south, is tossed by storms which wash its sides smooth once more while its turrets taper into awls and drip under a sun that ascends the heavens, climbing a little higher with each day.
The palace is buoyed up by a bed of aquamarine shadows. Little by little, as the heat makes itself felt, the ice grows brittle. The water starts to undermine it, outside and in, small lacunae appear, drop by drip it is whittled away. In certain lights it resembles a cathedral with stained-glass windows, round and tall, as the ice forms prisms and splits the light. Or it twirls gently in the current to reveal a mosque with onion domes.
Everything is floating and the sun turns in its course. The cracks cut right through; with an echo of the fjord which, after more than half a century"s slumber set the iceberg free, it, too, calves. A shape comes to light at the heart of it, a darker pattern, suggestive of tattered cobwebs in the palace halls.
Relentlessly the process of erosion continues. The salt of the sea, days of sunlight, the temperature steadily rising. As with other fairy-tale palaces this one is, in fact, porous; ever so slowly, as it nears human habitation, it is trickling away of its own accord. But the structure at its heart is still there, the cobwebs hanging now from beams; the palace has shifted shape and turrets no longer pierce the sky.
By the time it leaves the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic winds take over it has become a shadow of itself; a crystal formation, all sharp edges.
These are the next to go. From cathedral to village church - from palace to ruin - the transformation progresses into more rounded contours. The iceberg bobs on the waves like a message in a bottle from wildernesses where men and dogs perish. Within the confines of the glass the image is starting to develop. It looks like a ship with a hundred masts.
Ninety-seven of these disappear; they were but reflections in crystal, refractions of the light, particles, impurities within the fabric. But three are left, and three are enough for a ship. A wooden craft with broken masts which have collapsed onto the deck to lie there in a welter of savagely ripped sails and ropes from the rigging.
Still it lies behind glass, but the glass is dripping wet, eaten away to a thinner pane with each day that passes. Details stand revealed.
The ship appears to have been caught in a gale. The galley has been smashed to pieces, the cabin lies stove in beneath the mizzen mast, the blades of oars stick out all over the place from lifeboats which no living soul had time to launch. Spars and cleats have come adrift, davits have been twisted out of shape and ventilator cowlings crushed beneath the shrouds.
There are no dead to be seen. Only the shambles in which they have left their erstwhile surroundings.
Under the hatches, emptiness and ivory hold sway; in the hold a coffin lies lashed to the foot of the mast. I hear the hooting of a ship in the fog, wake, stretch and give a great yawn in the poky room so reminiscent of a berth. We are approaching a foreign coastline. One by one, foghorn answers foghorn.
Translated by Barbara Haveland
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