“That’s what you feel like,” said Amos. “Not what you look like. I want to know how I would recognize you if I saw you walking quietly down the street toward me when you were not working.”
“I’m freezing and I’m icy and I’m chilling—”
“Again, that’s not what you look like; it’s what you feel like.”
The North Wind rumbled to herself for a while and at last confessed: “But no one has seen the wind.”
“So I had heard,” said Amos. “But haven’t you ever looked into a mirror?”
“Alas,” sighed the North Wind, “mirrors are always kept inside people’s houses where I am never invited. So I never had a chance to look in one. Besides, I have been too busy.”
“Well,” said Amos, “if you help get us to the top of the mountain, we will let you look into the fragment of the mirror.” Then he added, “Which is more than your friend the wizard did, apparently.” Jack gave Amos a little kick, for it is not a good thing to insult a wizard so great and so old and so terrible as all that, even if you or I don’t have to worry about him.
The North Wind mumbled and groaned around the darkness for a while and at last said, “Very well. Climb on my shoulders, and I shall carry you up to the highest peak of this mountain. When I have looked into your mirror, I will carry you down again to where you may descend the rest of the way by yourselves.”
Amos and Jack were happy as they had ever been, and the North Wind roared to the edge of the ledge, and they climbed on her back, one on each shoulder. They held themselves tight by her long, thick hair, and the Wind’s great wings filled the cave with such a roaring that the fires, had they not been maintained by magic, would have been blown out. The sound of the great wing feathers clashing against one another was like steel against bronze.
The North Wind rose up in her cave and sped toward the opening that was so high they could not see the top and so wide they could not see the far wall, and her leaf-matted hair brushed the ceiling, and her long, ragged toenails scraped the floor, and the tips of her wings sent boulders crashing from either side as she leapt into the black. They circled so high they cleared the clouds, and once again the stars were like diamonds dusting the velvet night. She flew so long that at last the sun began to shoot spears of gold across the horizon; and when the ball of the sun had rolled halfway over the edge of the sea, she settled one foot on a crag to the left, her other foot on the pinnacle to the right, and bent down and set them on the tallest peak in the middle.
“Now where is the mirror?” asked Amos, looking around.
The dawning sun splashed the snow and ice with silver.
“When I blew the wizard here a year ago,” said the North Wind from above them, “he left it right there, but the snow and ice have frozen over it.”
Amos and the prince began to brush the snow from a lump on the ground, and beneath the white covering was pure and glittering ice. It was a very large lump, nearly as large as the black trunk of the skinny grey man.
“It must be in the center of this chunk of ice,” said Jack. As they stared at the shiny, frozen hunk, something moved inside it, and they saw it was the form of lovely Lea, who had appeared to them in the pool.
She smiled at them and said, “I am glad you have come for the second piece of the mirror, but it is buried in this frozen shard of ice. Once, when I was a girl, I chopped through a chunk of ice to get to an earring my mother had dropped the night before in a winter dance. That block of ice was the coldest and hardest ice any man or woman had ever seen. This block is ten degrees colder. Can you chop through it?”
“I can try,” said Jack, “or perhaps die trying. But I can do no more and no less.” And he took the small pickax they had used to help them climb the mountain.
“Will you be finished before breakfast time?” asked Amos, glancing at the sun.
“Of course before breakfast,” said the prince, and fell to chopping. The ice chips flew around him, and he worked up such a sweat that in all the cold he still had to take off his shirt. He worked so hard that in one hour he had laid open the chunk, and there, sticking out, was the broken fragment of mirror. Tired but smiling, the prince lifted it from the ice and handed it to Amos. Then he went to pick up his shirt and coat.
“All right, North Wind,” cried Amos. “Take a look at yourself.”
“Stand so that the sun is in your eyes,” said the North Wind, towering over Amos, “because I do not want anyone else to see before I have.”
So Amos and Jack stood with the sun in their eyes, and the great blustering North Wind squatted down to look at herself in the mirror. She must have been pleased with what she saw, because she gave a long, loud laugh that nearly blew them from the peak. Then she leapt a mile into the air, turned over three times, then swooped down upon them, grabbing them up and setting them on her shoulders. Amos and Jack clung to her long, thick hair as the Wind began to fly down the mountain. The Wind cried out in a windy voice: “Now I shall tell all the leaves and whisper to all the waves who I am and what I look like, so they can chatter about it among themselves in autumn and rise and doff their caps to me before a winter storm.” The North Wind was happier than she had ever been since the wizard first made her cave.
It gets light on the top of a mountain well before it does at the foot, and this mountain was so high that when they reached the bottom the sun was nowhere in sight, and they had a good half hour until breakfast time.
“You run and get back in your cell,” said Amos, “and when I have given you enough time, I shall return and eat my eggs and sausages.”
So the prince ran down the rocks to the shore and snuck onto the ship, and Amos waited for the sun to come up. When it did, he started back. SIX
But, at the boat, all had not gone according to Amos’s plan during the night. The grey man, still puzzling over Amos’s wet clothes—and at last he began to inquire whom Amos had solicited from the sailors to go with him—had gone to the brig himself.
In the brig he saw immediately that there was no jailer and then that there was no prisoner. Furious, he rushed into the cell and began to tear apart the bundle of blankets in the corner. And out of the blankets rolled the jailer, bound and gagged and dressed in the colorful costume of the Prince of the Far Rainbow. For it was the jailer’s clothes that Jack had worn when he had gone with Amos to the mountain.
When the gag came off, the story came out, and the part of the story the jailer had slept through, the grey man could guess for himself. So he untied the jailer and called the sailors and made plans for Amos’s and the prince’s return. The last thing the grey man did was take the beautiful costume back to his cabin where the black trunk was waiting.
When Amos came up to the ship with the mirror under his arm, he called, “Here’s your mirror. Where are my eggs and sausages?”
“Sizzling hot and waiting,” said the grey man, lifting his sunglasses. “Where is the sailor you took to help you?”
“Alas,” said Amos, “he was blown away in the wind.” He climbed up the ladder and handed the grey man the mirror. “Now we only have a third to go, if I remember right. When do I start looking for that?”
“This afternoon when the sun is its highest and hottest,” said the grey man.
“Don’t I get a chance to rest?” asked Amos. “I have been climbing up and down mountains all night.”
“You may take a nap,” said the grey man. “But come and have breakfast first.” The grey man put his arm around Amos’s shoulder and took him down to his cabin where the cook brought them a big, steaming platter of sausages and eggs.
“You have done very well,” said the grey man, pointing to the wall where he had hung the first two pieces of mirror together. Now they could make out what the shape of the third would be. “And if you get the last one, you will have done very well indeed.”