Not a very good recommendation for a shaman, thought Aningan as he reached the eastern bank of the Alatna and began picking his way across the jammed ice floes that covered its surface. But how is one supposed to predict game migration when there is no game to migrate?
The shaman gained a relatively-secure foothold at the center of the floe and looked upstream. Nothing. He looked downstream. Nothing. He looked to either bank, squinting through eyes lined with age and experience, and he sighed. There was not so much as a scavenging weasel within the range of his vision. Disappointed, he lowered his eyes—and his heart thudded against his chest as if trying desperately to get out!
For in the ice directly below his feet, there was a man.
Overcoming his initial shock, Aningan lowered himself to his knees, brushing away the patina of dry snow that partially obscured the wonderful thing he had found. Yes, it was a man, a caucasian. He was blond, with blue eyes, and he wore some sort of dark green outer garment that had been tattered, revealing a strange red-white-and-blue costume beneath. And there was something odd about this man, something about the open eyes . . .
Quickly, Aningan reached inside his parka and withdrew his runes bag—a small poke made from the bladder of an elk killed on the third day of the third month—and cast its contents onto the ice. Then, carefully containing his excitement, he strove to interpret the relationships between the tiny, decorated bones that had fallen from the bag. As he concentrated, he had no way of knowing that the man in the ice was Steve Rogers, a patriot who had served as a human guinea pig for an experimental super-soldier serum in World War II. He couldn’t know that Rogers, having gained extraordinary strength and agility as a result of that experiment, had taken the name of “Captain America” to wage his own daring campaign against the Axis powers. Nor could he know that Captain America, caught in a sabotage blast in the last days of the war, had sunk deep into the frigid waters off Newfoundland, where he was quickly frozen into a cake of ice and left to drift in a state of suspended animation until he ended up in a jammed ice floe on the Alatna River.
No, Aningan Kenojuak could know nothing of these complicated matters. But as he finished reading the last of his primitive runes, he came surprisingly close in his interpretation of exactly what the man in the ice floe was.
A miracle.
“He . . . he’s alive!” Fairly leaping to his feet, falling, clambering back up, Aningan ran, slid, and scrambled to the near bank, calling out in his wonder, “Haida! Potlak! Come quickly! I’ve found a man frozen in the ice—and he’s alive!”
Fearing their shaman to be in some danger, the rest of the hunting party was quick to answer the high-pitched cries. And soon, all were standing around the frozen figure in the ice.
“But, what can it mean?” one asked, obviously impressed.
“There can be but one explanation,” replied Aningan, his excitement undiminished. “No mere man could live while embedded in solid ice. So this being beneath us now must be something more than a man. He must be . . . a god!
“Yes, a god! Sent to us in our time of need to bring us good fortune. I know not why he takes the form of a white man, but the signs are unmistakable. Come, use your axes to free him—but don’t remove the ice entirely. He chose the frozen waters for his home, and we will not take that home from him.”
To say that the rest of the Bantu hunters were somewhat skeptical would be to set new standards for understatement. Nevertheless, Aningan was their shaman and, considering the success of the hunt so far, they had little better to do, anyway.
So, for the next hour, the resigned tribesmen used flaked stone axes—augmented by one or two metal blades from the frowned-upon trading post—to cut deep channels completely around the unfeeling Captain America, finally removing a single block of ice some three feet thick by seven feet tall. Then, binding the block securely in lengths of braided hide rope, they set about the arduous task of dragging their cumbersome prize the many miles back to their village.
Their reception when they arrived, more than a week later, was about what they had expected. Wives and children were happy to see husbands and fathers, but smiles were strained, faces gaunt. Even Aningan’s exultation over their astounding find could not mask the fact that their game sacks were empty. Some even queried, in mock seriousness, as to the best way to cook a god in a block of ice.
But Aningan Kenojuak was undaunted. For three days and three nights he kneeled in prayer before the frozen deity. Through sun and storm and withering wind, he prayed. While rumors that the tribe would soon disband and disperse ran rampant, he prayed. When all but the kindest elders considered him mad, he prayed.
And on the fourth day, providence answered.
Caribou! The word spread through the village like water through a sponge. A returning hunting party had found a large herd less than a mile from the village, and a great kill had been made. Most thought the herd had wandered south looking for food, or else had been driven into their territory by a neighboring tribe. No one believed that the crazy old shaman and his Popsicle god could have had anything to do with it.
That is, until the salmon started running out of season in the Koyukuk.
Being a people educated by experience, the Bantu knew nothing of temperature influxes, of how freak tropical currents sometimes made their way far north, triggering sporadic and unusual activity in sea life. All they knew was that instead of starvation, there would now be feasting and celebration.
Needless to say, Aningan Kenojuak had little trouble gaining converts for his frozen god.
The next few years were good ones for the Bantu. Weather was mild, and game was so plentiful that for the first time in memory there was excess enough to trade with the white man. Aningan’s realm of power and influence grew, and regular prayer sessions were held in honor of the ice god he worshiped, and to the era of prosperity that god had brought them. As increased trade brought increased affluence, fewer people left the tribe. Aningan didn’t really approve of the expanding interdependence between Eskimo and white man, but generally he was happier than he had ever been in his life.
And then, on one portentously dark day in March, came the god-stealer.
It was early morning, and the Bantu had all come to kneel in reverence before the ice god. Next to the god, facing his people, stood Aningan Kenojuak, arms upraised. He began speaking, quietly, thanking the god for a mild winter and entreating him to fill the spring with an abundance of game, when suddenly the air was cracked by a voice as deep as doomsday thunder.
“Foolish humans! Your gods are worthless!”
As one, the Bantu turned to the sky, searching for the source of the terrible words. When they found it, many wished that they hadn’t; though the speaker looked like a man, an incredibly muscular man, he was obviously much more than that. For in the chill of an early March, he wore only a pair of green, skintight trunks as protection from the cold he apparently didn’t feel. And, even more bizarre, he flew through the air by way of small, powerful wings that sprouted from each ankle.
Looping in midair, the winged intruder swooped down to land in front of the ice god, scattering the frightened Eskimos who had the misfortune to block his path.
“You worship idols, stupid icons!” he called, his voice reverberating in the stillness. “You use them as excuses for your wars, your oppression, and then blame them for your failures! Yours is a race of gutless otters!”
The awesome apparition then turned, bent low and lifted the half-ton block of ice in one hand. Returning to face the cowering Bantu, he sneered. “I am Namor, Prince of Atlantis—and I challenge your false god!”
So saying, Namor heaved the ice block like a huge javelin, sending it sailing in a high arc to come crashing down into the chill waters of the Koyukuk miles away. For a tense moment, there was nothing but silence. And then Namor spoke, deprecation dripping from his words.
“Bah. Your courage is as worthless as your gods.”
With a flap of tiny wings, th
e Sub-Mariner was airborne, and in seconds was but a vanishing spot on the horizon. Aningan Kenojuak watched him sail off, eyes wide with wonder at why his god—a World War II hero who had been frozen solid for years—had not brought down lightning to strike the heretic dead. Apparently, that was a thought shared by most of the Bantu. For when Aningan turned to face them, they were already dispersing.
Three months later, Aningan Kenojuak left his tribe. Perhaps it was because he had proven ineffective against the single, winged interloper, or perhaps it was merely because the hunting had gone bad again. But whatever the reason, the Bantu seemed to have little use for gods or shamans anymore.
Retreating into self-exile, Aningan built an igloo as far from human habitations as he could. There he spent every available moment in prayer; he prayed to the ice god, he prayed to the bear god, he prayed to any god he thought might listen. And always he asked for but a single boon—the power to take revenge on the god-stealer and restore faith to his people.
Fifteen years later, that prayer was answered.
“There, My Lord. Now things are just as they were.”
Captain America was now completely covered by the thick ice, and the foggy mist had disappeared. Aningan Kenojuak reached out a hand from his kneeling position and touched the rock-hard block, stroking its blue-white curves affectionately and smiling with trembling lips. Then he rose, his features setting into harder lines as he moved his hand to touch the String Of Stones.
“Come, My Lord. It is time.”
A familiar pink glow began to engulf both shaman and ice block, as each began to waver and fade.
“The Totem provided the power, but it is up to me to restore the faith. And restore it I shall, spreading your glory throughout the entire Bantu territory, until all shall sing your praises. And this time, no wing-footed heathen will defile your splendor.”
The old shaman’s smile grew thinner as his eyes narrowed.
“Brother Bear shall see to that.”
Five
The water was warm, relatively. A steady 54° according to the microgauge just above the left eye slit inside Iron Man’s helmet. Not that the Golden Avenger could actually feel that warmth, of course. For mere seconds before he had plunged down through the smooth surface of the Atlantic, now a good quarter mile above, he had triggered Plexiglass shields to slide down over his mouth and eye slits. Now, he was completely sealed within his steel-mesh armor, cut off from the liquid environment outside, totally dependent on his self-contained air recirculator and the complex network of neurosensors that ran just beneath the refractory coating of his metal shell. And he felt as comfortable as a fish.
Two hours earlier, he had stood alongside the Vision on the rooftop launch pad at Avengers Mansion, watching as a sleek quinjet rose vertically, then angled westward at tremendous speed. The quinjet was a stainless-steel miracle of simplicity and power: five incredibly efficient engines, a cone-shaped cockpit big enough to hold ten passengers with gear, and an acceleration rate that would get that payload to Alaska in under six hours. It was the envy of every aeronautical engineer in the world and was designed, naturally, by Tony Stark.
After the quinjet had faded from view, Iron Man and the Vision had taken to the air themselves, flying south over Brooklyn past Coney Island, then banking eastward to zoom out over the open ocean. There, Iron Man had activated the boosters on his solar-powered boot jets, rapidly increasing his speed to just below that of sound. The Vision had paced him, effortlessly. Some time later, they had arced downward, cleaving the green waters of the Atlantic like twin bullets, and now they skimmed some twenty feet above the coral- and sand-covered ocean bottom.
The terrain was surprisingly light for being so deep, Iron Man thought as his boot jets pushed him along at a swift glide. He had dropped the infrared visors over his eye slits out of habit, but could probably have done equally well with the dim, but adequate, light filtering down through the calm waters overhead. Warmth and light, he considered. No wonder the Atlanteans had chosen this area to establish their undersea kingdom.
Turning his head subtly, Iron Man regarded the scarlet-skinned synthezoid who slid smoothly through the water a double arm’s length to his right. The Vision hadn’t spoken a word since leaving Manhattan, and though taciturn at the best of times, this current silence seemed the product of more than his usual machinelike stoicism.
“Something troubling you, Vizh?” he asked, the hidden speakers in his ear cones transmitting his words clearly through the water. “Or is it my breath?”
“I find it difficult to analyze your oxygen-expiration cycle in this environment, Iron Man,” answered the Vision, serious as stone. “Nevertheless, something does puzzle me. When I first attempted to enter the body of the creature called Brother Bear, I sensed that something was not as it seemed.”
“Hmm, I do seem to recall your saying something to the effect of ‘It isn’t . . .’ on the tape.”
“Precisely. Yet in the ensuing forced systems overload, some of my memory circuits were burned out. The circuits, themselves, have since been repaired, but the information they contained, including what I had learned about Brother Bear, has been lost. It is most annoying.”
Sure, thought Iron Man. A giant supernatural monster tries to torch your insides to a crunchy crisp, succeeds in obliterating an entire section of your memory, and the strongest term you can think of to apply to the situation is “annoying.” Right!
Once more, Iron Man observed the Vision from the corner of his eye, and for maybe the million-and-twelfth time considered the differences between them. Inside Iron Man’s artificial exterior, there was a man; while inside the Vision’s artificial exterior, there was an equally artificial interior. Yet there was much more to it than that. Because the Vision’s brain patterns had originally been taken from a human being, from Simon Williams who, as the super-strong Wonder Man, had once fought the Avengers, only later to turn to the cause of justice and join them. Thus, somewhere within that mass of plastic relays and wired organs, there was trapped the partial persona of a man. A man who constantly had to cope with a world in which the only warmth he knew was the occasional spark of an electric circuit, where feelings were filtered through neurosensors to a brain that analyzed them in the cold light of logic and suggested coded responses that were at times difficult to override. When Iron Man grew weary of the trying life of a superhero, he discarded his metal shell and escaped into the playboy world of millionaire Tony Stark; when the Vision grew weary of the trying life of a superhero, he remained the Vision. And the Vision never slept.
Inside his gold-and-crimson armor, Tony Stark shuddered a bit, derailing the rather morbid train of thought he had been riding. As he turned his concentration back to the seascape before him, he found that his respect for the Vision had jumped up a notch. And that his respect for the Scarlet Witch had jumped up two.
Banking slightly to the right and rising a few feet higher above the ocean floor, the two Avengers continued their journey, passing through a narrow, V-shaped valley between two steep ranges of undersea mountains. So intent were they on their own private musings that neither noticed the blue-skinned warrior who crouched behind a coral outcropping as they passed, speaking low into a slender, hand-held transmitting device.
Moments later, Iron Man and the Vision approached the end of the valley, beginning an angle of descent that would bring them to the virtual doorstep of fabled Atlantis. Then, rounding a last jutting pillar of rock and coral, they came face-to-face with that legendary kingdom—and the results of its blue-skinned sentry’s transmission. For standing directly between the Avengers and the high-spired, pastel-hued city of Atlantis were fully half a hundred armed and armored Atlantean soldiers. Some sat at the controls of treaded, tanklike war machines; others held an incongruous gallimaufry of hand weapons, from spears to sleek blaster rifles. All looked deadly. Some several yards before their point line, hovering astride a gigantic, green-gray sea horse and holding an impressive gold scepter, rod
e their majestic monarch and commander in chief.
The Savage Sub-Mariner.
Iron Man started to speak, but stopped as he turned in reaction to sounds from behind. There, streaming from either side of the mountain-rimmed valley, were the other half of the hundred soldiers. Moving swiftly, they had soon joined ranks with their fellows, forming a circle that effectively cut off all escape routes save for the rather dubious security of a sprint straight up to the surface.
Iron Man turned back to face the Prince of Atlantis. “It seems, Namor,” he said, making an effort to keep his voice even, “that you have an advantage over us.”
“That I have,” answered the Sea Prince. “And it is an advantage that I intend to keep. You are unwelcome here, as are all those who dwell above the Earth’s waters. If you have business, state it—then begone.”
The speech was terse, definitive, and echoed through the water in tones that fairly crackled with regality and command. But even silent, the Sub-Mariner was an imposing entity. He stood a full six and a half feet tall, with shoulders that would rival an Olympic weight lifter’s, yet had a waist that would make the average nine-to-five executive groan with envy. Below that waist he wore his only garment, a pair of dark-green trunks woven in a fish-scale pattern. Unlike his light blue subjects, his skin was cream colored, giving evidence of his half-breed heritage. And on either side of each ankle grew small, white wings, lying flush to the calf when not employed to propel their master through water or air. At Namor’s opposite end was a head that was almost triangular, topped with straight, jet-black hair that ended in a widow’s peak an inch or so above the bridge of his aquiline nose. That head also sported a pair of slate-gray eyes that presently glared at Iron Man and the Vision, fixing them with an uncomfortable combination of contempt, caution, and fading patience.
“Well?” Namor’s lips curled downward, as if the single word had been a maggot crawling from his mouth.
Marvel Novel Series 10 - The Avengers - The Man Who Stole Tomorrow Page 5