The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  67

  TALIRIKTUG

  Lat. 68° 30′ N., Long. 99° W.

  28 May, 1851

  In the spring of the year that their second child was born, a girl, they were visiting Silna’s family in the God-Walking People’s band headed by the old shaman Asiajuk when word came from a visiting hunter named Inupijuk that a band of the Real People far to the south had received aituserk, gifts, of wood, metal, and other precious objects from dead kabloona — white men.

  Taliriktug signed to Asiajuk, who translated the signs into questions for Inupijuk. It sounded as if the treasure might be knives, forks, and other artifacts from Erebus’s and Terror’s ship’s boats.

  Asiajuk whispered to Taliriktug and Silna that Inupijuk was a qavac — literally, “a man from the south,” but also a term in Inuktitut that denoted stupidity. Taliriktug nodded his understanding but continued to sign questions that the sour shaman passed on to the stupidly grinning hunter. Part of Inupijuk’s social discomfort, Taliriktug knew, was that the hunter from the south had never been in the presence of sixam ieua spirit-governors before and was not quite sure if Taliriktug and Silna were human beings or not.

  It sounded as if the artifacts were real. Taliriktug and his wife went back to their guests’ iglu, where she nursed the baby and he thought about it. When he looked up, she was using string to sign.

  We should go south, said the strings between her fingers. If you want to.

  He nodded.

  In the end, Inupijuk agreed to guide them to the southeastern village and Asiajuk decided to come with them — very unusual, since the old shaman rarely traveled far these days. Asiajuk brought his best wife, Seagull — young Nauja of the amooq big tits — who also carried her scars from the band’s lethal encounter with the kabloona three years earlier. She and the shaman were the only survivors of that massacre, but the girl showed no resentment toward Taliriktug. She was curious about the fates of the final kabloona whom everyone knew had headed south across the ice three summers ago.

  Six hunters of the God-Walking People’s band also wanted to come along — mostly out of curiosity and to hunt along the way, since the ice was breaking up very early in the strait this spring — so eventually they set out in several boats since leads were opening along the coastline.

  Taliriktug, Silna, and their two children chose to travel — as did four of the hunters — in their long double qayaq, but Asiajuk was too old and had too much dignity to paddle a qayaq anymore. He sat with Nauja in the center of a spacious, open umiak as two of the young hunters paddled for him. No one minded waiting for the umiak when there was no wind for its sails since the thirty-foot-long craft carried enough fresh food in it that they rarely had to stop to hunt or fish unless they wanted to. This way they could also bring their own kamatik sledge in case they needed to travel across land. Inupijuk, the southern hunter, rode in the umiak, as did six Qimmiq — dogs.

  Although Asiajuk generously offered to let Silna and her children ride in his now-crowded umiak, she string-messaged her preference for the qayaq. Taliriktug knew that his wife would never want any child of hers — certainly not Kanneyuk, the two-month-old — to be so close to the vicious dogs in such a tight space. Their two-year-old son, Tuugaq — “Raven” — had no fear of dogs, but he also had no choice in the matter. He rode in the niche in the qayaq between Taliriktug and Silna. The baby, Kanneyuk (whose secret sixam ieua name was Arnaaluk), rode in Silna’s amoutiq, an oversized babycarrying hood.

  The morning they left was cold but clear and as they shoved off from the gravel beach the fifteen remaining members of the God-Walking band chanted their farewell-come-back song:

  Ai yei yai ya na

  Ye he ye ye yi yan e ya quana

  Ai ye yi yai yana.

  On their second night, the last before paddling and sailing south through leads from the angilak qikiqtaq, or “biggest island,” that James Ross had named King William Land so long ago, ignoring the fact that the natives who had told him about it had kept calling it qikiqtaq, qikiqtaq, qikiqtak — they camped less than a mile from the site of Rescue Camp.

  Taliriktug walked there alone.

  He’d been back before. Two summers ago, only weeks after Raven was born, he and Silna had come here. That was only a little less than one year after the man Taliriktug used to be had been betrayed and ambushed and shot down like a dog, but already there was little sign that this had been a major campsite for more than sixty Englishmen. Except for a few tatters of canvas frozen into the gravel, the Holland tents had torn and blown away. All that remained were campfire rings and a few stone tent rings.

  And some bones.

  He had found some long bones, bits of chewed vertebrae, only one skull — the lower jaw missing. Holding the skull in his hands two summers ago, he had prayed to God that this was not Dr. Goodsir.

  These scattered and nanuq-gnawed bones he had gathered up and interred with the skull in a simple stone tomb, setting a fork he’d found among the stones atop the heap of rocks the way the Real People, even the God-Walking People he’d spent the summer with, liked to do, sending helpful tools and beloved-by-the-dead possessions to the spirit world with the dead.

  Even as he did this, he’d realized that the Inuit would have thought this an obscene waste of precious metal.

  He’d then tried to think of a silent prayer he could say.

  The prayers in Inuktitut he’d heard in the past three months were not appropriate. But in his awkward attempt to learn the language — even though he would never be able to utter a syllable of it aloud — he’d played a game that summer trying to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Inuktitut.

  That evening, standing by the cairn holding his crewmates’ bones, he’d tried to think the prayer.

  Nâlegauvît kailaule. Pijornajat pinatuale nuname sorlo kilangme …

  Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

  That was as far as he’d been able to get two summers ago, but it felt like enough.

  Now, almost two years later, walking back to his wife from a Rescue Camp that was even emptier — the fork was gone and the cairn had been opened and plundered by Real People from the south, even the bones scattered where he could not find them — Taliriktug had to smile at his dawning realization that even if he were granted his biblical threescore and ten years, he was never going to master this language of the Real People.

  Every word — even the simple nouns — seemed to have a score of variants, and the subtleties of the syntax were far beyond a middle-aged man who’d gone to sea as a boy and never learned even his Latin. Thank God he would never have to speak this language aloud. Straining to understand the click-clack flow of it gave him the kind of headaches he used to have when Silna first shared her dreams with him.

  The Great Bear, for instance. The simple white bear. The God-Walking People and the other Real People he’d encountered in the past two years called it nanuq, which was simple enough, but he also heard variants that might be written down — in English, since the Real People had no written language — as nanoq, nänuvak, nannuraluk, takoaq, pisugtooq, and ayualunaq. And now, from Inupijuk, this hunter from the south (who, he now knew, was not as stupid as Asiajuk insisted), he had learned that the Great Bear was also called Tôrnârssuk by many of the southern bands of the Real People.

  For a period of a few painful months — he was still healing then and learning how to eat and swallow all over again — he had been perfectly satisfied to have no name at all. When Asiajuk’s band began calling him Taliriktug — “Strong Arm” — after an incident during a white-bear hunt that first summer when he had single-handedly hauled the carcass of the dead bear out of the water when a team of dogs and three hunters had failed (it had not been his superhuman strength, he knew, just that he’d been the only one to see where they’d snarled their harpoon line on a projection of ice), he hadn’t minded the new name even though he had been happier without one. Asiajuk told him that he now carried the soul-memory
of an earlier “Strong Arm” who had died by the hand of the kabloona.

  Months earlier, when he and Silence had come to the iglu village so that she could have the help of the women during the birth of Raven, he had not been surprised to learn that the Real People Inuktitut name of his wife was Silna. He could see how she embodied the spirit of both Sila, the goddess of the air, and Sedna, the goddess of the sea. Of her secret sixam ieua spirit-governor name, she would not or could not share it with him through her string-signing or dreams.

  He knew his own secret name. On that first night of great misery after the Tuunbaq had taken his tongue and older life away, he had dreamt his secret name. But he would never tell anyone, even Silna, whom he still called Silence in his sent-thoughts during their lovemaking and in their dreams.

  The village was named Taloyoak and consisted of about sixty people and a scattering of more tents than snow-houses. There were even some snow-covered sod homes projecting out from the cliffs that would have grassy roofs come summer.

  The people here were called Oleekataliks, which he thought meant “Men with Capes,” although the outer skins they wore on their shoulders looked more to him like Englishmen’s woolen comforters than real capes. The head man was about Taliriktug’s age and was handsome enough, although he had no teeth left, which made him look older than his years. The man was named Ikpakhuak, which Asiajuk told him meant “the Dirty One,” although as far as Taliriktug could see and smell, Ikpakhuak was no dirtier than the rest of them and cleaner than some.

  Ikpakhuak’s much-younger wife was named Higilak, which Asiajuk smirkingly explained meant “the Ice House.” But Higilak’s manner was not in any way cold toward the strangers; she helped her husband welcome Taliriktug’s band with warmth and an outpouring of hot food and gifts.

  He realized that he would never understand these people.

  Ikpakhuak and Higilak and their family served them umingmak, musk ox steak, as their feast meal, which Taliriktug enjoyed well enough but which Silna, Asiajuk, Nauja, and the rest of his band had to choke down, since they were Netsilik, “People of the Seal.” After all the meeting ceremonies and meals were over, he managed through his interpreted signs to move the conversation to the kabloona gifts.

  Ikpakhuak acknowledged that the People of the Cape had such treasures, but before showing his guests, he asked that Silna and Taliriktug show everyone in the village their magic. The Oleekataliks had not met any sixam ieua in the lifetimes of most of the villagers — although Ikpakhuak had known Silna’s father, Aja, decades ago — and Ikpakhuak politely asked if Silna and Taliriktug would fly around the village a little bit and perhaps turn themselves into seals, not bears, please.

  Silna explained — through her string-signs interpreted by Asiajuk — that the two spirit-governors-of-the-sky chose not to do that, but that they would both show the hospitable Oleekataliks where the Tuunbaqs had taken their tongues, and that her kabloona sixam ieua husband would give them the rare treat of seeing his scars … scars inflicted in a terrible battle with evil spirits years ago.

  This completely satisfied Ikpakhuak and his people.

  After this dog-and-pony cum scar show was over, Taliriktug managed to get Asiajuk to bring the subject back to the kabloona gifts.

  Ikpakhuak instantly nodded, clapped his hands, and sent boys to gather the treasures. They were handed around the circle.

  There were various pieces of wood, one of them split from a well-handled marlin’s spike.

  There were gold buttons bearing the Naval anchor motif of the Discovery Service.

  There was a fragment of a lovingly embroidered man’s undervest.

  There was a gold watch, the chain it may have hung from, and a handful of coins. The initials on the back of the watch, CFDV — Charles Des Voeux.

  There was a silver pencil case with the initals EC on the inside.

  There was a gold-medal citation once presented to Sir John Franklin from the Admiralty.

  There were silver forks and spoons bearing the crests of Franklin’s various officers.

  There was a small china plate with the name SIR JOHN FRANKLIN written out on it in colored enamel.

  There was a surgeon’s knife.

  There was a mahogany portable lap writing desk that the man now holding it recognized because it had been his own.

  Did we really haul all this shit hundreds of miles in our boats? thought Crozier. And before that, thousands of miles from England? What were we thinking? He felt that he might throw up and had to close his eyes until the nausea passed.

  Silence touched his wrist. She had sensed the tilt and shift in him. He looked into her eyes to assure her that he was still there, although he wasn’t. Not really. Not completely.

  They paddled along the coast to the west, toward the mouth of Back’s River.

  Ikpakhuak’s Oleekataliks had been vague, even evasive, about where they had found their kabloona treasures — some said they were from a place called Keenuna, which sounded like one of a series of islets in the strait just south of King William Island — but the majority of hunters said they had come across the riches west of Taloyoak at a place called Kugluktuk, which Asiajuk translated as “Place of Falling Waters.”

  To Crozier, it sounded like the first small waterfall he’d read about that Back had said was just upriver from the mouth of Back’s Great Fish River.

  They spent a week searching there. Asiajuk and his wife and three of the hunters stayed with the umiak at the mouth of the river, but Crozier and Silence with their children, the still-curious hunter Inupijuk, and the other hunters paddled their qayaqs upriver the three miles or so to the first low falls.

  He found some barrel staves there. A leather boot sole with holes where screws had been driven through. Buried in the sand and mud of the riverbank, he uncovered an eight-foot length of curved and once-polished oak that might have been from the gunwale of one of the cutters. (It would have been pure treasure to the Oleekataliks.) Nothing else.

  They were leaving in defeat, paddling downstream to the coast, when they came upon an older man, his three wives, and their four runny-nosed children. Their tent and caribou skins were on the wives’ backs and they had come to the river, so the man said, to fish. He had never seen a kabloona before, much less two sixam ieua spirit-governors without tongues and was very frightened, but one of the hunters with Crozier calmed his fears. The old man was named Puhtoorak and was a member of the Qikiqtarqjuaq band of the Real People.

  After food and pleasantries had been exchanged, the old man asked what they were doing so far from the God-Walking People’s northern lands, and when one of the hunters explained that they were looking for living or dead kabloona who might have come this way — or their treasures — Puhtoorak said that he hadn’t heard of kabloona on this river but mentioned between large bites of their gift of seal meat, “Last winter I saw a big kabloona boat — as large as an iceberg — with three sticks coming up out of it, stuck in the ice just off Utjulik. I think there were dead kabloona in its stomach. Some of our younger men went into the thing — they had to use their star-shit stone axes to chop a hole in its side — but they left all the wood and metal treasures where they were because they said the three-sticks house was haunted.”

  Crozier looked at Silence. Did I understand him correctly?

  Yes. She nodded. Kanneyuk began to cry, and Silna parted her summer parka and gave the baby her breast.

  Crozier stood on a cliff and looked out at the ship in the ice. It was HMS Terror.

  It had taken them eight days of travel from the mouth of the Back River west to this part of the coast of Utjulik. Through the God-Walking People hunters who understood his signs, Crozier had offered bribes to Puhtoorak if the old man would agree to bring his family with him and come along to show them the way to the kabloona boat with the three sticks rising from its roof, but the old Qikiqtarqjuaq wanted nothing more to do with the haunted kabloona three-stick house. Even though he had not gone in with the young men l
ast winter, he had seen that the thing was tainted with piifixaaq — the kind of unhealthy ghost-spirits that haunted a bad place.

  Utjulik was an Inuit name for what Crozier had known from maps as the west coast of the Adelaide Peninsula. The open-water leads had ended not very far west of the inlet leading south to Back’s River — the narrowing strait there was solid ice pack — so they’d had to beach and hide the qayaqs and Asiajuk’s umiak and continue on with the six dogs pulling the heavily solid thirteen-foot kamatik. Using the kind of inland dead reckoning that Crozier knew he would never master, Silence led them the twenty-five miles or so straight across the interior neck of the peninsula to the area of the west coast where Puhtoorak had said he’d seen the ship … even, he confessed, stood on its deck.

  Asiajuk had not wanted to leave his comfortable boat when it came time to head cross-country. If Silna, one of the God-Walking People’s most revered spirit-governors, had not signed her sincere request that he join them — a request from a sixam ieua was a command to even the surliest of shamans — Asiajuk would have ordered his hunters to take him home. As it was, he rode in style under furs in the kamatik and even helped from time to time by throwing pebbles at the straining dogs and shouting, “Haw! Haw! Haw!” when he wanted them to go left and “Gee! Gee! Gee!” when he wanted them to go right. Crozier wondered if the old shaman was rediscovering the youthful pleasures of sledge travel by dog team.

  Now it was late afternoon of their eighth day and they were looking down at HMS Terror. Even Asiajuk seemed intimidated and subdued.

  Puhtoorak’s best description of the precise location had been that the three-stick house “was frozen in the ice near an island about five miles due west” of a certain point and that he and his hunting party “then had to walk about three miles north across smooth ice to reach the ship after crossing several islands on their walk from the point. They could see the ship from a cliff at the north end of the large island.”