When Mattie asked what they were doing, Berg explained how centuries ago King Jack XII, unhappy that the ice people never aged while he, their king, did and would one day die, had turned to alchemy to right this injustice. One night as Jack worked in his laboratory, Snowbanks Avalanche, Snowmansland’s ambassador, entered by way of a secret entrance the king had provided so plenipotentiaries could approach him privately should the need arise. Jack groaned inwardly. Prosperity had made the snowmen overbearing and haughty. And Avalanche was the worst of all, swaggering around, high-hatting everyone and looking down his carrot nose at everything and being generally much too big for his buttons. When Avalanche started in on another of his pompous insistences that Phrygia repay its substantial debt to Snowmanlandia, Jack lost his temper, grabbed his Viking battleaxe from the wall, and severed the snowman’s head from his body.
Now not even a king can murder an ambassador. To destroy the evidence of his crime, Jack put the head, carrot nose and all, into a pot which he brought to a simmer over a coal fire made from Avalanche’s haughty eyes, superior smile, and pompous buttons, intending to eat up the last trace of his crime. He was about to add the ambassador’s high hat to the fire when he remembered how famous warriors often made drinking mugs from their enemies’ skulls. So when the stew was cooked, Jack poured it into the high hat and ate it down. It was a tasty dish and the salt from the hat’s sweatband cut the carrot sweetness. Afterwards, watching the hat burn up in the fire, Jack felt a sudden lightness throughout his body as though a whole decade of years had been lifted from his shoulders. He ran to the mirror and found the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes had faded almost completely away. King Jack had accidentally found his sought-after potion.
The next day, Phrygia invaded Snowmansland. Hard-packed though it was, gallant General Plowright Winterbottom’s snowman infantry was no match for the ice people’s army. Afterwards Jack looted the battlefield for snowman stew ingredients, which he cooked and put up in kegs so he could prolong his own life and those of his descendants.
When Berg was done Mattie gestured at the bins. “But the snowmen are extinct,” she insisted. “These are only replicas.”
Berg shook his head and told Mattie how, lame and exhausted, the fleeing snowmen reached a large Indian encampment below the tree line where they were received warmly. The Indians even gave them old ishuki sticks to hobble around on.
But when spring came, the snowmen vanished, leaving behind as gifts for their hosts their carrot noses, bits of coal, and high hats — which the Indians particularly treasured. The Indians told stories around the campfire about the Palefaces, as they called the snowmen. Every winter after that, the Indian children built new snowmen who also vanished in the spring. Centuries later, when Commodore Jacques Cartier arrived with French settlers, the Indians thought the Palefaces had returned. They were disappointed when the new arrivals were still there when spring came. By then their children had taught the French children how to build snowmen, too.
Berg ended his story with this simple Phrygian moral. “Nothing’s extinct that lives on in the hearts of children.”
God bless him, thought Mattie with a shake of her head. Then she asked, “If you’re here, then so is Queen Alicia, right?”
Berg’s oath of loyalty to his queen prevented any reply, not even for old time’s sake. So Mattie said goodbye and left the building, not knowing what to do next.
Father Christmas was waiting for her outside. “If you know the rink rats, maybe you know the Dancing Pig lady,” he wondered out loud. When she cocked an eye he explained, “We patrons of the Walsingham Hotel call it the Dancing Pig.” He told her how a couple of nights ago he’d changed out of his clerical garb and gone to the Dancing Pig for a couple of beers. On his way in, he’d noticed these two large types dressed in loose white dusters standing outside in the shadows. Later he asked Sean, a waiter there, who they were. Sean called them rink rats and said they’d first appeared last December when a certain lady took a room there, and she’d just checked in again.
Queen Alicia of Phrygia, a tall, blue-eyed Scandinavian, sported high cheekbones and a large bump of conviviality. Boredom, in fact, first brought her to the North Pole. Her kingdom’s single fireplace was in the palace throne room, where she always had to sit alone, for none of her retainers dared approach so close to the fire. So she taught herself how to run a movie projector and had movies shipped in from Hollywood. When the war interrupted her supply, in need of amusement, she decided to pay a visit to her North Pole neighbors.
Alicia was an immediate hit with Santa and the Elf Council of Elders. They all loved to drink and dance and tell stories. Alicia had wonderful ones to tell about her gloomy kingdom and its gloomier inhabitants. As Alicia’s visits multiplied, Santa and the elder elves grew more captivated, hanging on her every word and following about after her. Was it the woman’s perfume, which Mattie thought smelled of parsnip? The carousing continued long after Mattie went to bed. But the next day the old elves seemed sprier than ever, while Santa’s ho-ho-ho veered more and more toward a teenaged hee-hee-hee.
Anyway, last October the divorce decree finally came through. Invited to stay for the marriage festivities, Mattie chose to leave with her small cadre of loyal elves.
Remembering how Alicia’s cocktail hour came early, Mattie set out that afternoon for the Walsingham’s ladies-and-escorts beverage room. Separate men’s and ladies-and-escorts rooms was a custom Mattie and Al encountered on a stopover in Toronto before their honeymoon visit to the North Pole. (The sub-tundra railroad’s Flying Snowman Express arrived and departed from a platform in a forgotten corner of the basement of Union Station.) The city had decided there’d be much less trouble if men drank beer in one room and ladies and their escorts, if they had them, in another.
Mattie found her rival alone at a corner table reading a Hollywood fan magazine and sat down across from her without ceremony. Alicia looked up in surprise. “How’d you find me?”
“A present from Father Christmas.”
Alicia gave a careless shrug. “No matter. I meant to look you up anyway. Maybe we can do some business. But first I’ll bring you up to date. The Elf Council of Elders, a gaga bunch themselves if I ever saw one, has declared Santa incompetent by reason of acute adolescence.”
“Snowman stew?”
“Clever girl,” said Alicia. “Men and elves love the stuff. Get them started and they’ll do anything to keep it coming. So now I control the Toy Works, the kriskringlite, everything. But I’ve got places to go and I travel light.”
“So?”
“So how’d you like almost everything back and Santa in the bargain?”
“What’s the ‘almost’?”
“We’ll get to that,” said Alicia. “Listen, when I was a teenager I used to do inky-dinky-spider up and under my daddy the King’s chin and he’d crow like a baby and drool and drool. The Fountain of Youth overflowing, that’s drool for you. When he got so he couldn’t handle the antidote anymore I gave him the injections myself right in his royal butt. Then one day I decided it was queen time for Alicia. So I let Daddy drool himself to death.” She paused. “By the by, Santa loves inky-dinky-spider.”
“Antidote?” asked Mattie.