The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  When he is dressed, Crozier collapses onto one elbow and pants. “Are you taking me back to my people now?” he asks.

  Silence pulls mittens over his hands, flips his hood with its white-bear fur trim up over his head, firmly grips the bearskin beneath him, and drags him outside through the tent flaps.

  The cold air hits Crozier’s lungs and makes him cough, but after a moment he realizes how warm the rest of his body feels. He can feel his own body heat flowing up and around him within the roomy confines of this obviously nonporous garment. Silence bustles around him for a minute — pulling him up into a sitting position on a pile of folded furs. He guesses that she does not want him lying on the ice, even on the bearskin, since it feels warmer in these strange Esquimaux clothes when one sits up and lets air warmed by one’s own body heat circulate against the skin.

  As if to confirm this theory, Silence whisks away the bearskin on the ice and folds it, adding it to the stack next to the one he’s sitting on. Astonishingly — Crozier’s feet have been cold every time he has ever gone up on deck or out onto the ice in the past three years, and have been wet and cold for every minute since he left Terror — neither the cold of the ice here nor moisture seems to penetrate the thick hide-soles and grass booties he’s wearing now.

  As Silence begins taking down the tent with a few sure movements, Crozier looks around him.

  It is night. Why has she brought me out here at night? Is there some emergency? The caribou tent quickly being dismantled is, as he guessed from the noises, out on the pack ice, set amid seracs and icebergs and pressure ridges that reflect the little starlight thrown by the few stars peeking between low clouds. Crozier sees the dark water of a polynya not thirty feet from where he’d been lying in the tent, and his heart beats faster. We’ve not left the area where Hickey ambushed us, not two miles from Rescue Camp. I know the way back from here.

  Then he realizes that this polynya is far smaller than the one Robert Golding had led them to — this patch of open, black water is less than eight feet long and only half that wide. Nor do the surrounding icebergs frozen into the pack ice here look right. They are much taller and more numerous than those near Hickey’s ambush site. And the pressure ridges are taller.

  Crozier squints at the sky, catching only glimpses of stars. If the clouds would part and if he had his sextant and tables and a chart, he might be able to fix his position.

  If … if … might.

  The only recognizable patch of stars he catches sight of look more like a winter constellation than one that should be in that part of the arctic sky in mid- or late August. He knows that he was shot on the night of 17 August — he had already made his daily log entry before Robert Golding had come running into camp — and he cannot imagine that more than a few days have passed since the ambush.

  He looks wildly around the ice-jumbled horizons, trying to find a twilight glow that would hint of a recent sunset or imminent sunrise in the south. There is only the night and the howling wind and the clouds and a few trembling stars.

  Dear Christ … where is the sun?

  Crozier is still not cold, but he is trembling and shaking so badly that he has to use what little strength he has to grip the pile of folded furs to keep from toppling over.

  Lady Silence is doing a very strange thing.

  She has collapsed the hide-and-bone tent in a few efficient motions — even in the dim light, Crozier can see that the outer tent covers are made of sealskins — and now kneels on one of the sealskin tent covers and uses her half-moon blade to slice it down the middle.

  Then she hauls the two halves of the sealskin to the polynya and, using a curved stick to lower the pieces into the water, thoroughly wets them. Returning to the site where the tent stood only moments ago, she pulls frozen fish from the storage area that had been cut into the ice in her half of the tent and briskly lays a line of fish, head to tail, along one side of each half of the quickly freezing tent cover.

  Crozier has not the slightest clue as to what the wench is up to. It is as if she is performing some insane heathenish religious ritual out here in the rising night wind under the stars. But the problem is, Crozier sees, she has cut up their sealskin tent cover. Even if she rebuilds the tent from hides stretched over the scattered curved sticks and ribs and bones, it will no longer hold out the wind and cold.

  Ignoring him, Silence rolls both halves of the sealskin tent cover tightly around the two lines of fish, pulling and tugging the wet sealskin to make it even tighter. It amuses Crozier that she has left half of one fish protuding from one end of both lengths of rolled sealskin, and now she concentrates on bending upward the head end of each fish ever so slightly.

  In two minutes she can lift the two seven-foot-long lengths of sealskin-wrapped fish — each now frozen as solidly as a long, narrow piece of oak with a rising fish head at its tip — and she lays them parallel on the ice.

  Now she sets a small hide under her knees and kneels to use bits of sinew and hide thongs to lash short lengths of caribou antlers and ivory — the former frame to the tent — to connect the two seven-foot-long wrapped-fish lengths.

  “Mother of God,” rasps Francis Crozier. The frozen lengths of fish wrapped in wet sealskin are runners. The antlers are crosspieces. “You’re building a fucking sledge,” he whispers.

  His breath hangs as crystals in the night air as his bemusement turns to a sort of panic. It wasn’t this cold on 17 August and before — nowhere near this cold, even in the middle of the night.

  Crozier guesses that it has taken Silence half an hour or less to make the fish-runner, caribou-antler sledge, but now he sits on his stack of furs for another hour and a half or more — gauging the passage of time is difficult without his pocket watch and because he keeps drifting off into a light sleep even while sitting — as the woman works on the runners of the sledge.

  First she removes something that looks like a mixture of mud and moss from a canvas bag that had come from Terror. Carrying Goldner cans of water from the polynya, she shapes this mud-moss into fist-sized balls and then lays these daubs the length of the ad hoc runners, patting and spreading them evenly with her bare hands. Crozier has no clue why her hands do not freeze solid despite her frequent breaks to stick her hands under her parka against her own bare belly.

  Silence smooths the frozen mud with her knife, trimming it as a sculptor might cut his clay maquette. Then she brings more water from the polynya and pours it over the frozen layer of mud, creating an ice shoeing. Finally, she sprays mouthfuls of water onto a strip of bearskin and rubs that wet fur up and down the frozen mud along the length of each runner until the coating of ice there is absolutely smooth. In the starlight, it looks to Crozier as if the runners along the inverted sledge — just fish and strips of sealskin two hours earlier — are lined with glass.

  Silence rights the sledge, tests the thongs and knots, puts her weight on the firmly lashed caribou antlers and short pieces of wood, and lashes the remaining antlers — two longer curved ones that had been the primary tent supports — up from the rear of the sledge to make rudimentary handles.

  Then she lays several layers of sealskins and bearskins across the cross-antlers and comes to lift Crozier to his feet and help him over to the sledge.

  He shakes off her arm and tries to walk to it by himself.

  He has no memory of collapsing face-first into the snow, but his vision and hearing return as Silence is lifting him onto the sledge, straightening his legs, setting his back firmly against piled furs stacked against the rear antler handles, and setting several thick robes over him.

  He sees that she has tied long strips of leather to the front of the sledge and woven the ends into a sort of harness that goes around her middle. He thinks of her finger-string games and sees what she had been saying — the tent (peaked oval) taken down, the two of them leaving (the walking figures in the sliding bits of string, although Crozier certainly was not walking this night), to another oval dome with no peak. (Another te
nt in the shape of a dome? A snow-house?)

  With everything packed — the extra furs and canvas bags and hide-wrapped pots and seal-oil lamps all lying atop and around Crozier — Silence slips into harness and begins pulling them across the ice.

  The runners glide with a glassy efficiency, far more silently and smoothly than the boat-sledges from Terror and Erebus. Crozier is shocked to discover that he is still warm; two hours or more of just sitting still out on the ice floe has not chilled him, except for the tip of his nose.

  The clouds are solid overhead. There is no hint of sunrise on the horizon in any direction. Francis Crozier has absolutely no hint as to where the woman is taking him — back to King William Island? South to the Adelaide Peninsula? Toward Back’s River? Farther out onto the ice?

  “My men,” he rasps at her. He strains to raise his voice and be heard over the wind sigh, snow hiss, and the groaning of the thick ice beneath them. “I need to get back to my men. They’re looking for me. Miss … ma’am … Lady Silence, please. For the love of God, please take me back to Rescue Camp.”

  Silence does not turn. He can see only the back of her hood and the white bear ruff gleaming in the faint starlight. He has no idea how she can see to proceed in this darkness or how such a small girl can pull his weight and the sledge’s weight so easily.

  They glide silently into the darkness of the ice jumble ahead.

  62

  CROZIER

  Sedna at the bottom of the sea decides whether to send the seal up to the surface to face being hunted by other animals and the Real People, but in a real sense, it is the seal himself who decides whether to allow himself to be killed or not.

  In another real sense, there is only one seal.

  Seals are like Real People in that they each have two spirits — a life spirit that dies with the body and a permanent spirit that departs the body at the time of death. This longer-lasting soul, the tarnic, hides in the seal as a tiny bubble of air and blood that a hunter can find in the seal’s gut and is the same shape as the seal itself, only much smaller.

  When a seal dies, its permanent spirit departs and returns in exactly the same form in a baby seal descended from the seal who has decided to allow itself to be taken and eaten.

  The Real People know that a hunter, over his lifetime, will be capturing and killing the same seal or walrus or bear or bird many times over.

  Precisely the same thing happens to the permanent spirit of a member of the Real People when his life spirit dies with the body. The inua — the permanent spirit-soul — travels, with all of its memories and skills intact, only hidden, to a boy or girl in the line of the dead person’s family. This is one of the reasons that the Real People never discipline their children, no matter how rowdy or even impertinent they may become. Besides the child-soul in that child, there resides an adult’s inua — a father, uncle, grandfather, great-grandfather, mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-grandmother, with all its hunter’s and matriarch’s or shaman’s wisdom — and it should not be rebuked.

  The seal will not yield itself up to just any Real People hunter. The hunter must win them over, not just through his guile and stealth and skill but also through the quality of the hunter’s own courage and inua.

  These inua — the spirits of the Real People, seals, walruses, bears, caribou, birds, whales — existed as spirits before the Earth, and the Earth is old.

  During the first period of the universe, the Earth was a floating disk beneath a sky supported by four pillars. Beneath the Earth was a dark place where the spirits lived (and where most live to this day). This early Earth was under water most of the time and without any human beings — the Real People or others — until two men, Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq, crawled out of humps in the earth. These two became the first of the Real People.

  There were no stars in that era, no moon, no sun, and the two men and their descendants had to live and hunt in total darkness. Since there were no shamans to guide the Real People in their behavior, the human beings had very little power and could hunt only the smallest of animals — hares, ptarmigan, the occasional raven — and they did not know how to live properly. Their only decoration was to wear the occasional aanguaq, an amulet made from a sea urchin shell.

  Women had joined the two men on the Earth in this earliest of times (they came from the glaciers much as the men had come from the Earth), but they were barren and spent all their time walking the coastlines staring into the sea or digging into the ground in search of children.

  The Second Cycle of the universe appeared after a long and bitter contest between a fox and a raven. The seasons appeared then, and then life and death itself; shortly after the seasons arrived, a new era began in which the life spirit of human beings would die with the bodies and the inua-spirit would travel elsewhere.

  Shamans learned some of the secrets of the cosmic order then and were able to help the Real People learn how to live properly — creating rules which forbade incest and marrying out of the family or murder or other behavior which goes against the Order of Things. The shamans were also able to see back even into the time before Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq crawled out of the Earth and to explain to the human beings about the origins of the great spirits in the universe — the inuat — such as the Spirit of the Moon, or about Naarjuk, the spirit of consciousness itself, or about Sila, the Spirit of the Air, who is also the most vital of all ancient forces; it is Sila who created and permeates and gives energy to all things and who expresses her wrath through blizzards and storms.

  This is also the time when the Real People learned about Sedna, who is known in other cold places as Uinigumauituq or Nuliajuk. The shamans explained that all human beings — the Real People, the redder-skinned native human beings who lived far south of the Real People, the Ijirait caribou spirits, and even the pale people who appeared so much later — were born after Sedna-Uinigumauituq-Nuliajuk coupled with a dog. This also explains why dogs are allowed to have names and a name-soul and even share their master’s inua.

  The moon’s inua, Aningat, had incest with and otherwise abused his sister, Siqniq, the inua of the sun. Aningat’s wife, Ulilarnaq, loved to disembowel victims — animal or Real People — and so disliked the shamans’ meddling in spirit matters that she would punish them by making them laugh uncontrollably. To this day, the shamans may be seized by uncontrollable laughter and frequently die from it.

  The Real People enjoy knowing about these three most powerful spirits in the cosmos — the all-pervasive Spirit of the Air, the Spirit of the Sea, who controls all animals who live in the sea or depend upon the sea, and the final member of this trinity, the Spirit of the Moon — but these three original inuat are too powerful to pay much attention to the Real People (or to human beings of any sort) since these ultimate inuat are as far above the many other spirits as those lesser spirits are above human beings, so the Real People do not worship this trinity. Shamans rarely try to contact these most powerful of spirits — such as Sedna — and content themselves with making sure that the Real People do not break taboos that would anger the Spirit of the Sea, the Spirit of the Moon, or the Spirit of the Air.

  But slowly, over many generations, the shamans — known as angakkuit among the Real People — have learned more secrets of the hidden universe and of the lesser inuat spirits. Over many centuries, some of the shamans have acquired the gift that Memo Moira called the Second Sight — clairvoyance. The Real People call these abilities qaumaniq or angakkua, depending upon how they manifest themselves. Just as human beings once tamed their cousin-spirits, the wolves, to become dogs who shared their masters’ inua, so did the angakkuit with the hearing-thoughts or sending-thoughts gifts learn how to tame and domesticate and control the smaller spirits who appeared to them. These helping-spirits were called tuurngait, and they not only helped the shamans see the invisible spirit world and look back to times before human beings, but also allowed them to look into other human beings’ minds to see the faults committed by the Re
al People when they break the rules of the universe’s order. The tuurngait helping-spirits aid the shamans in restoring order and balance. They taught the angakkuit their language, the language of the small spirits, which is called irinaliutit, so that the shamans could address themselves directly to their own ancestors and to the more powerful inuat powers of the universe.

  Once the shamans had learned the irinaliutit language of the spirit-helper tuurngait, the shamans could then help human beings confess their misbehavior and faults so as to cure diseases and to restore order out of the confusion that is human affairs, thus restoring the order of the world itself. This system of rules and taboos passed down by the shamans was as complex as the crisscross string patterns created between the fingers of Real People women to this day.

  The shamans also acted as protectors.

  Some minor evil spirits roam among the Real People, haunting them and bringing bad weather, but the shamans have learned how to create and consecrate a sacred knife and to kill these tupilait.

  To stop the storms themselves, the angakkuit found and handed down a special hook that can cut the silagiksaqtuq, the vein of the wind.

  The shamans can also fly and act as mediators between the Real People and the spirits, but they can — and frequently do — also betray the trust of their own powers and harm human beings by using ilisiiqsiniq, powerful spells they cast which stir up jealousy and rivalry and which can even a create a hatred sufficient to compel a Real Person to kill others for no reason. Frequently a shaman loses control of his tuurngait helping-spirits, and when that happens, if it is not remedied quickly, that incompetent shaman is like a large metallic rock calling down the summer’s lightning and there is little choice except for the Real People either to bind up the shaman and leave him behind or to kill him, cutting off his head and keeping it separate from the body so that the shaman cannot bring himself back to life and pursue them.

  Most shamans with any power at all can fly, heal people, families, and entire villages (actually by helping people heal themselves by finding balance again after confessing their faults), leave their bodies to travel to the moon or to the bottom of the sea (wherever the inuat most powerful of spirits might dwell), and — after the proper irinaliutit shamanic incantions, singing, and beating of drums — turn themselves into animals such as the white bear.