Priests of Ferris

by Maurice Gee

  ‘Have you told her?’

  ‘She knows.’

  The other Varg came close, herding Nick and Limpy. Dawn finished working on the wound. She went to the river and washed her hands. ‘Now,’ she said, coming back, ‘you must talk to her, Susan. They know you are human, that is all. They don’t like humans.’

  Susan looked at the wounded bear. Even lying down the creature came up to her shoulder. She said, ‘I am Susan Ferris,’ but the Varg watched her with its eyes unblinking and showed no sign of understanding.

  ‘Speak in pictures,’ Dawn said.

  ‘And you’d better be quick,’ Nick said. ‘I think they’re going to eat us.’ The Varg behind him was making a low continuous hungry grumble.

  Susan wondered where to start. She thought the best thing to do was show she was an enemy of the priests, so she imagined one, dressed in white, holding dogs on a leash. She meant to put herself in the picture, running away, but had no time. The wounded Varg gave a roar of anger and rose to her feet. Those behind towered on their hind legs, with claws extended and lips drawn back from their teeth. Dawn ran in front of them, holding up her arms. Susan had an impression of images flashing from the Woodlander’s mind, but the Varg towered higher. ‘I can’t stop them. Show them Jimmy Jaspers,’ Dawn cried.

  Susan did not know what picture to think of. The four great beasts seemed to blot out the sky. ‘Jimmy,’ she cried; and at once a picture came – Jimmy standing by the bridge, with his axe in his hands, taunting Odo Cling, daring him to cross. And a second picture fitted in beside it: Jimmy saying goodbye, accepting the feather. ‘Keep it, Jimmy. Wear it for me.’ ‘I will. I will, Susie.’ Nick was there too, and Brand and Breeze, standing on the plateau in the midday sun. She concentrated on keeping the picture clear, then added to it. She saw the old man placing the feather carefully round his neck, and her affection for him, her grief at losing him, made tears trickle on her cheeks.

  ‘Susan,’ Dawn’s voice said, ‘open your eyes. You’re safe now.’

  She opened them and blinked the tears away. The Varg had dropped back on all fours and were looking at her in a thoughtful way, although a rumble of uncertainty came from one. She turned to the leader and found she had sunk to the ground. Dawn slipped by and looked at the wound. It was bleeding again. She busied herself, squeezing more juice in. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘start again, Susan. Go very slowly. And be careful.’

  So Susan told her story. Soon it seemed natural to speak in pictures not words. She slipped them into her mind like slides into a viewer. And slowly she told their adventures. She showed the struggle against the Halfmen – and how Jimmy Jaspers had saved them twice. She placed the Halves on the Motherstone. Otis Claw died. And she said goodbye to Jimmy. The bears ‘listened’, nodding now and then. They gave an impression of sagaciousness.

  Then Susan told about her return to O. Carefully she showed priests hunting with their dogs, and though the bears rumbled they made no move. She showed their flight, and their rescue by Seeker. Then she brought them to Shady Home. She did not think the bears would understand writing, but she imagined Jimmy writing his letter while the great blue bear lay at the door. She showed the opening of the box, and herself reading, and then the journey south, the flight with the Birdfolk. The bears stirred at the image, and Dawn made pictures, showing it was true.

  It was dark when they finished. Only the blunt crest of Mount Nicholas stood in the light. Susan was exhausted. She sat down in front of the wounded Varg and rested her head in her arms. Then she found an image slowly forming in her mind. It was a picture of herself and Jimmy. She wondered where it came from, she had not thought of it. They stood facing each other in a place she could not recognize. There was ice all around, shining blue. The picture grew sharper and made her head ache.

  ‘Answer,’ Dawn whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She wants to know why you want Jimmy Jaspers.’

  ‘To destroy the Temple.’

  ‘Tell her then.’

  All Susan could do was make a picture of the old man in her head. Then, with great effort, she placed herself beside him. She imagined Deven’s Leap, with a temple of white marble built on it – a temple she had never seen. Priests swarmed in it like wasps, and the High Priest sat on his throne, with painted face, with yellow eyes, and Ferris bones hanging on his chest. Jimmy raised his axe and banged on the gates, and they swung open. She walked in, Jimmy at her side, and faced the Priest. And then somehow, in a way she could not reverse, Jimmy faded, he was gone, and only she was there, standing alone, as in Soona’s dream.

  She could make no more pictures after that.

  Chapter Six

  Nick Whistles a Tune

  They walked on Varg trails in the bush, with the glacier on their right hand, gleaming through the trees. The bear in front flickered in the shadows, white and blue. He rippled like flowing water, and the pad pad of his feet was the only sound. Nick and Susan, Dawn and Limpy, followed silently.

  They had set out in the dawn, leaving the wounded Varg by the river. The bear who led them was an old creature with a shaggy head and bad-tempered eyes. They felt he would just as soon kill them as help them. But two others, younger, came behind and sent reassuring images to Dawn and Susan. They made pictures of the glacier, a cave and a creek, and the sun at its high point in the sky. Jimmy was in the cave, Susan thought, and the sun meant they would get there at midday.

  The bear led them out of the bush and climbed among the weathered ice towers of the glacier. They crossed it at an angle, heading for a valley gouged in the side of Mount Nicholas. The glacier made a groaning, as though huge forces pulled in it. The ice towers leaned with a gravitational weight. Susan looked down the length of its curve through the bush to the wide shingle river. She could not understand why all that ice did not simply tumble down in an avalanche.

  They scrambled over boulders on the other side and stood on Mount Nicholas. A stream from the tops dived under the glacier and boomed away with a sound too loud for it. They went up the valley by its side and wound up a path over a bluff, and there, at the snow-line, found the cave. A giant boulder beetled over it, with a forward thrust that seemed to push them away. The bear led them to it, and faced them, rolling its head as though denying them entry. But the young bears came up and butted him aside in a friendly way. Susan found a picture of Jimmy forming in her mind.

  ‘Is he in there?’

  ‘We’ll need torches,’ Nick said, peering into the cave. ‘How far in do we have to go?’

  The bears made no answer, and Susan guessed they did not know. The cave was probably a forbidden place. She looked at it uncertainly. There was only one way Jimmy might be alive, but now she was so close to him it seemed impossible.

  Dawn and Limpy ran back to the glacier and gathered broken branches from its edge. They managed to get four alight, and holding them high, went into the cave. It was cold inside – as cold as a freezing chamber in a meat works, Nick thought – and the walls and floor were filmed with ice. They climbed, curving left, then right, walking by globes of ice bulging on the walls. The light of their torches struck into them, making them glow with the purity of sapphires, emeralds. Columns of ice stood up from the floor and seemed to play like fountains. They came to a chamber so wide their torches were lost in it, gleaming in a corner, like glow-worms. Boulders lay on the floor, side by side, row after row. They walked among them, lost in wonder, not daring to speak. Hundreds, hundreds, white boulders – white bears.

  ‘This is where they come to die,’ Susan whispered.

  ‘Like the elephants’ graveyard,’ Nick said. His voice came back in an echo. ‘Do you think Jimmy’s here?’

  ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘If they’re all dead then he’s dead too.’ He laid his hand on one of the bears. Its fur was ridged like knife blades. ‘Frozen stiff.’

  Although there was no hope now, they searched among the bodies, their voices growing hollower. It was Dawn, scouting ahe
ad, who found Jimmy Jaspers. They heard her shout of surprise, or shout of fear, and ran towards her torch, far down the hall. She stood before two columns of ice running from the ceiling to the floor. The light shone into them, rainbow-coloured, magnified, and there in the smaller Jimmy stood, with his eyes closed, and his arms folded, and a smile, or grimace of pain, on his lips. They saw his whiskers, his sparse hair, his stained teeth, and his throat – a turkey throat; his chest-hair, grey and tangled, above the rags of a bushman’s singlet. It seemed he might open his eyes and step out and speak to them.

  ‘Jimmy, Jimmy,’ Susan whispered. She put out her hand, but it met only the smooth ice of the column.

  ‘This must be the bear,’ Limpy said. He was at the thicker column, and the bear glittered inside, blue as bird shells. He stood three metres tall, with yellow claws unsheathed, and snout lifted as though testing the wind.

  ‘Ben,’ Dawn said softly. ‘The Vargs told me about him. He roamed further than any bear before him. And came home with a human friend. They entered the cave, but not to die.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ Limpy said. ‘A hundred turns in ice. They must be dead.’

  ‘I thought we’d find them hibernating, not set in ice,’ Susan said.

  ‘You can’t hibernate for a hundred years,’ Nick said. ‘Not even bears.’

  ‘So it was all for nothing. Poor Jimmy.’ She laid her forehead on the ice column. That was as close as she could come to him.

  ‘We’re not giving up yet,’ Nick said. ‘We’ve got to get him out.’

  ‘Let him be at peace.’

  ‘Don’t be wet.’ He pushed her away from the column. ‘Jimmy said come, and here we are. He doesn’t look dead to me. This could be some sort of suspended animation. Deep freeze. They’re experimenting with it on Earth. So maybe the bears know how to do it.’

  Susan looked into the column again. There was no doubt Jimmy seemed unchanged. He looked as cunning and greedy as ever; and his colour was healthy. There was no feeling of death about him. If it weren’t for the ice encasing him he looked as if he might stretch and yawn. And suddenly she wanted to get him out. She thought of him suffocating in there. She wanted to get him into the air, into sunlight.

  ‘His axe,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’

  They found it lying at his feet, as though he had placed it there. But it was set in ice and Nick could not get it free. He sent Dawn and Limpy outside for stones and chipped at the ice with them until he had freed a sheet with the axe in it. They carried it outside and broke it free and thawed it in the stream and in the sun. Then they made new torches. The bears watched, and Dawn told them what they meant to do.

  ‘They say we can bring Jimmy Jaspers out but not Ben.’

  ‘We’ll leave Ben to Jimmy – if he wakes up.’

  Back in the cave Nick stood on a pile of stones and attacked the column above Jimmy’s head. He chopped it like a tree. The ice was almost as hard as iron, jarring his hands, making him frightened the axe would break. But Jimmy had made the handle from a thorn branch and tempered the blade, and slowly the ice was eaten through. Then Nick hacked a circle round Jimmy’s feet and drove wedges of stone under the ice. The column leaned and fell and the others caught it and lowered it to the ground. Jimmy lay there on his back as though it was all no business of his. There was only one way to get him outside. Nick trimmed the ragged base and they rolled the ice column like a tree trunk. When they came to the downward slope they let it slide, but it got away from them, running like a sled. It burst from the cave, scattering bears, and charged down the hill, throwing up a bow wave of earth. It came to a halt standing upright, with Jimmy on his head.

  ‘It’s his sense of humour,’ Nick said. They dug the column out and rolled it to the stream. Then Nick and Susan worked on it through the evening and into the night. Nick chipped with the axe and Susan with a stone and the water of the stream also made inroads on the ice, melting it slowly. Limpy and Dawn built a fire on the bank and made Nick and Susan sit by it from time to time and warm themselves. But always they crept back to where the column lay beached like a driftwood log. Susan chipped round Jimmy’s face and throat, striking delicately. Tiny splinters broke away. Nick hacked with short blows down the length of his body, sending little hail storms of crushed ice into the stream. The bears watched. The wounded female had struggled up from the river and she lay by the fire, with Dawn close by her side, and kept her pale unblinking eyes on Jimmy. Once she limped to the stream and licked the ice on his face with a sand-papery tongue. It seemed to Susan an act of homage.

  At last they were done. Jimmy’s back was still encased in ice but only a paper-thin sheet covered his front. Already the toes of his boots were free, and the knot of his belt. Susan washed handfuls of water over his face, smoothing the ice, and she watched as Nick struck gently, at knee and hip, with the heel of the axe, and lifted sheets of ice away like a mould. Then she tapped around Jimmy’s skull and along his jaw. Cracks showed in the ice. She chipped, and got her fingers in, and lifted the glassy mask away. She knelt looking at Jimmy in the light of a torch Dawn held close. Plugs of ice filled his mouth and nose. She felt his hair. It was as sharp as needles. And his cheeks and throat were iron-hard.

  ‘What do we do? He’s still not alive.’

  ‘And he’s not dead,’ Nick said.

  ‘The Vargs say bring him to the fire,’ Dawn said.

  So they freed Jimmy from his bed of ice and dragged him to the fire and laid him close. Light danced on his face making him wink and leer.

  ‘They say sleep now,’ Dawn said. ‘They will do the rest.’

  ‘What are they going to do?’

  As if in answer the female limped to Jimmy and began licking his face. The others gathered about and fell to licking and the rasp of their tongues filled the air.

  ‘The look as if they’re eating him,’ Nick whispered.

  ‘I trust them. I’m so tired. I’ve got to sleep.’

  They warmed and dried themselves at the fire and wrapped themselves in their Woodlander blankets, warm as mohair, and lay down on beds Limpy had made. The last sounds they heard as they went to sleep were the tongues of the bears.

  Dawn woke them in the morning with herb tea and jungle fruit. The bears were gone – hunting, Dawn said sadly – and Jimmy lay as though sleeping on the other side of the embers. They went around and knelt by him. Susan touched him softly on the forehead.

  ‘Nick, he’s warm.’

  Nick lifted one of the old man’s arms and let it drop. He put his ear to his chest. ‘His heart’s beating. Only just. Is he breathing?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He fetched his Woodlander knife and held it in the stream to make it cold. Then he put the blade by Jimmy’s lips. After a moment a faint misting showed.

  ‘The bears are worried,’ Dawn said. ‘They have made his heart beat and his blood flow, but it must be stronger. He breathes, but not enough. They think he’s waiting for something. Some message that will make him want to live.’

  Nick put his mouth by Jimmy’s ear. ‘Jimmy,’ he yelled, ‘it’s us. Nick and Susan. Wake up.’

  ‘No,’ Susan said. ‘That’s no good.’

  ‘Well, how do we wake him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’ll die if we do the wrong thing.’ She looked at his wicked old face. Wicked or kindly? There was no telling whether Jimmy was bad or good. All she knew was that she could not go on without him. She would never be able to fight the priests by herself. And more than that – she loved him. He was dirty, bad-tempered, dishonest – but she loved him. ‘Jimmy, why didn’t you say how to wake you up?’ Then the old man seemed to wink at her, he seemed to grin. It was only a trick of her mind, but something told her she must trust him. Trust Jimmy. He was cunning. He would never let them get this far and fail.

  ‘Nick,’ she said, ‘it must be in the letter.’ She went over it in her mind, sentence by sentence. And then she came to the end, and she had it. How l
ike Jimmy to put the most important thing in a P.S. She laughed. ‘Dawn’s right, he’s waiting. He told us what to do to wake him up.’

  ‘How…?’ Nick began. He was looking blank.

  ‘ “Wissel me fayvrit tune wen you cum.” ’

  ‘That was just a joke.’

  ‘He was telling us what to do. What could be clearer? The only trouble is I’m no good at whistling.’

  ‘I am. And I know the tune. “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”.’

  ‘Whistle it. He’s been asleep long enough.’

  Nick tried a couple of practice notes. Then he knelt by Jimmy and bent close to his ear. The jaunty little tune rang out in notes sharp and clear. For a moment it had no effect. Then a tremble ran through Jimmy, and grew into a shuddering, a quaking. He sucked in a breath that made his ribs creak. He opened his eyes and stared at the sky. Then he screwed them up like a newborn baby. His mouth opened, trembling, and a bellow of pain came out and made the mountain and the glacier ring.

  ‘Jimmy, Jimmy,’ Susan cried. She tried to hold him, but he threw her off. He stood up, rocking on his feet, raised his blind face to the sky, and howled in agony.

  ‘Jimmy.’

  The bears came over the glacier and galloped up to them. Even the wounded one came as fast as a charging rhino. And Jimmy stopped his noise, perhaps because the ground shook as though in an earthquake. He saw the bears – the firs thing he had seen – and blinked at them without understanding. Then he turned his eyes to Susan and she saw him struggle to know not who she was, but who he was. He seemed like a baby standing there, with his arms hanging. Then his legs gave way and he sat down on the ground and started crying.

  She went to him and put her arms around him.

  ‘Susie?’

  ‘I’m here, Jimmy.’

  ‘I’m gettin’ born again.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It hurts.’

  ‘I know. You’re all right now. Go to sleep, Jimmy.’