THE FROST FAIR

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by an old woman, at the second of the two frost fairs she will ever see.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm.

Once in a life, if you are lucky, and old, and it is very cold, the Great Slough freezes.

Not the skin of it that ices most winters and lets a fool through by breakfast. All of it — down and down, to a hard black glass a cart could cross, a depth of freezing that comes so seldom the parish has to be told it is happening by the very oldest among them, who felt it once as children and have been waiting sixty years to feel it again and mostly died still waiting.

I am one of the ones who did not die waiting. I stood on the bog as a girl, on the ice, where in summer a man is swallowed in the time it takes to shout twice. And now I am old, and it has come again — the once-a- generation cold, the black glass, the bog holding its breath — and I have brought my granddaughter's girl, who is seven, and who will remember this when she is me, and who will bring some child of her own if the cold is kind enough to come round one more time, which it may not, for the winters run down like everything else in this realm.

So. Let me tell you what a frost fair is, and what it is for, before it melts.

Overnight the whole parish came out onto the water that had been trying to kill us since before there were Bastables.

You have never seen anything like it and you never will, unless you are very cold and very lucky. They built a town on the bog. Booths of sailcloth and hurdle, in a double row, a whole crooked street of them laid straight out across the ice where no straight thing has ever been. A pie-man with his oven dragged out on a sledge and lit right there on the frozen mire, the smoke going straight up in the still cold air like a plumb-line. A fiddler. Two fiddlers, who hated each other, playing at opposite ends and pretending not to hear. Chestnuts. Hot spiced ale in leather jacks. And skating — the whole of Mucklecombe and half of Drudgeford skating on bones and blades and the seats of their breeches, on the surface of the thing that eats us, laughing at it, laughing at the bog, which no living soul has ever been able to do before or since, because for these few days it cannot answer.

The children had never seen the bog be anything but the enemy. Now here it was, holding them up. My granddaughter's girl skated out to the middle — the very middle, over the deepest black, where the summer mire has no bottom anybody has ever found — and she stood there, on nothing, on the drowning place, and she was not drowning, and she laughed, and I had to turn away, because I had done exactly that, in exactly that spot, seventy years gone, and my grandmother had turned away too, and I understood at last why.

She was not turning from sorrow. She was turning because it is too much — the sight of your own people, warm and daft and alive, standing careless on the very death of them, for one bright week, by grace of the cold. It is the most Sogmarsh thing there is. It is the whole realm in one picture: dancing on the thing that will have us, while it cannot.

Now. I said I would tell you what a frost fair is for, and it is this, and it is the hard half, and the oldest ones make sure it is taught before the fair is a day old:

A frost fair is for leaving.

The cold does not last. It cannot. The ice is a loan, not a gift — the mire is only holding its breath, and a held breath ends. There comes a day, and the old ones can smell it coming the way my brother could smell rain, when the black glass goes grey at the edges, and the smoke off the pie-oven leans instead of climbing, and a thin dark seam opens along the booth-street like a slow word. And on that day, you strike the fair. You take your sailcloth and your sledge and your fiddle and your children and you come off the ice, all together, while it will still bear you, and you let the bog have its bog back, and you go home, and you are grateful, and you do not go out again, not for anything, not for a dropped coin, not for one more song.

The ones the fair kills are never the careless. It is never the child too far out. The parish watches the children like hawks and no child has been lost to the ice in living memory. The ones the fair kills are the ones who cannot leave a good thing while it is good. The trader with one more cartload to sell. The fiddler who wanted the last word. The greedy, the grasping, the ones who look at a wonder and think not "how glad I am to have seen it" but "how do I make it stay."

The last fair — my first, as a girl — it took a land-agent.

I remember him. A damp, smiling man, not unlike the one who works the inns today, who had spent the whole week doing the single most Sogmarsh thing I have ever witnessed: he was selling the ice.

Plots of it. Deeds and all, drawn up proper, stamped, witnessed. Prime frozen frontage, sir, freehold, hard as a church floor and twice as central — you'll never get bog this solid at this price again. And people bought. That is the maddening truth of it: people bought squares of a frozen bog from a man in a wet coat, because he was so certain, and because when a thing is under your feet and holding you up it is very hard to believe it was ever going to be water.

And when the grey came to the edges, and the old ones cried the fair down, and the whole town began to strike the booths and come in off the black glass — the land-agent would not come.

It was his estate, you see. He stood in the middle of it, on his freehold, on his prime central frontage, and he told us we were fools to run from good solid ground, and he had the deeds to prove it was ground, and the deeds said nothing about a thaw, and a man will believe a stamped paper over his own cold feet right up until the moment the paper is floating.

We called to him from the reeds. We called a long time. He was still explaining the soundness of his title when the seam ran under him, and the bog, which had been holding its breath for a week, let it out.

They never found him. The mire keeps what it takes. But for years after, the story went that on the coldest nights you could hear him, down under, still selling — still certain, still stamped, still explaining to the dark that the ground he was standing on was freehold and central and sound.

(I do not believe that part. The dead do not sell. But I understand why the parish says it: because it is easier to laugh at a ghost than to remember a man who drowned defending a lie he'd talked himself into. We apply a story where the truth is only cold, and greed, and a stamped paper. It is what we do.)

The thaw is coming now, this second time, my last time. I can smell it, the way the old ones could. Tomorrow, or the day after, the grey will reach the edges, and I will cry the fair down with the other ancients, and we will strike the booths, and I will take my granddaughter's girl by her cold hand and lead her off the black glass and home, while it will still bear us, and I will not let her go back for anything.

She will cry. They always cry, the first time, at the leaving — because the fair is the most wonderful thing that will ever happen to them and it is ending and they are being made to help it end. And I will tell her what my grandmother told me, on the reeds, seventy years ago, with a drowned land-agent's story already going round:

The wonder was never yours to keep. It was only ever yours to see. And you saw it. Now come home, and be glad, and let the bog have its bog — for a thing you loved and let go of in time is a thing that never once drowned you, and you will carry this bright cold week down all the years until you are the old woman crying the next one down, and telling some crying child the same.

The moral, from the ice: some wonders come but once in a life, and they come with a thaw already in them, and the whole art of them is the leaving — take the joy entire, all of it, right to the middle of the black glass, and then, while it will still bear you, come off the ice. The bog keeps only the ones who would not go. Be glad you saw it. Take the child's hand. Go home.