* * *
With the snow came bitter cold, and by week’s end Viator was resplendent in a glittering drag of ice and snow, an old battered queen overdressed for a ball, wearing every bit of gaud in her closet, ice sheathing the rails, plating the decks, icicles descending from the toppled winch, from every protruding edge, and the forest, too, was shrouded in white—although during even the worst of the weather, a blizzard lasting for almost two days, the fir trunks and sprays of blackish green needles showed amid the whiteness like splotches of dark metal on a wall from which the paint was flaking—and as the snow continued, Wilander would glimpse flashes of corruscant light emitted by an indeterminate source in the middle distance and hear the complaint of tortured metal, a display he associated not with Viator’s penetration of the Kaliaskan shore twenty years previously, but with a new penetration, one just begun, made by a ghostly prow. Though he alternated between fear and disbelief in regard to what appeared be happening to Viator, he had given up the thought of abandoning the ship. For one thing, Arlene’s manner made it plain there was nothing for him in town, and for another, the forest was alive with surreptitious movement, with the cries of the qwazil, with other, unfamiliar cries, and something large had taken up residence in the linden tree (against logic, it had retained its leaves, although they had gone brown and papery and were now beginning to fall), shaking down snow showers whenever it moved, and he had on several occasions spotted what appeared to be multiple tracks on the shingle. But the most telling reason behind his reluctance to leave was a vacant, unstudied disaffection with the idea, a non-reason that eventually translated into a sense that he was better off where he was, that life in a fantasy of his design, albeit one whose existence he did not wholly credit, was preferable to anything he might encounter elsewhere. And once he embraced this passive choice, a spark of certainty was kindled by his every smaller choice, as if by staying he had come to terms with all life’s problems; and perhaps Halmus and Arnsparger and Nygaard had achieved a similar peace of mind, for the atmosphere aboard ship was cordial by contrast to what had gone before, with pleasantries and nods and brief, cheerful dialogues exchanged in passing; and, after the storm blew off, the diamond weather that followed seemed an additional validation that a sea change had taken place—long perfect days of white sunbursts in pale blue skies; hushed, enduring twilights that washed the snow lavender; blue nights with haloed moons and hard bright stars when Wilander, alone with his maps, felt like a magus imprisoned in a crystal, laboring over a casting that would set him free, detailing the coastlines of the Six Tears, adding a notch to the tip of the peninsula that bordered the lagoon, putting the finishing touches on the city of Cape Lorraine, adding marginalia beside portions of the forests, noting a concentration of whistlers or some other imaginary creature, not quite believing the fantasy, playing with it, obsessive in the way of a hobbyist or a gamer, and yet telling himself maybe, perhaps, what if, supposing it were real, tempted to belief. Sometimes he would walk out into the forest (not far; he remained uneasy with the environment) in order to gain a perspective on the ship, to think whatever thoughts the sight of it would generate, contemplating it as might a connoisseur in a gallery, the moonstruck superstructure, so pristine looking, a clean light spilling from ports and doors, here and there a refracted crystalline glint, and the sharp black prow lifting from between hills and boulders as if cleaving a swell, a far cry from the brooding image it had once presented, resembling a stranded luxury craft wherein a party of minor dukes and their be-gemmed ladies, confident of rescue, quietly celebrated the moment with the roast flesh of mythical beasts and wine fermented centuries before by eunuch saints in a Serbian castle; and one night, returning from a walk, as he clambered over the aft rail, having shinnied up the frozen rope from the shingle, he saw a shadow drop to the deck from the linden tree. At that distance, he could determine only that the shadow was human. He crept closer, keeping low to the rail, more intrigued than frightened, imagining that it must be someone from town. The shadow flattened against the outer wall of the officers’ mess and had a peek in through the port. Wilander would not have sworn to it, but the face that flared for an instant in the light from the port appeared to be that of a woman with extremely long hair. Then, as he crept closer yet, placing his feet carefully so as not to crunch patches of ice, she opened the door of the mess and stepped into the light, proving to be a slender young girl, dirty blonde hair falling over her shoulders and down her back; utterly naked, her skin onion pale, small-breasted, her crotch all but hairless; and then she darted inside, leaving the door ajar. Easing forward again, Wilander found an angle that allowed him to peer into the mess. The girl moved with furtive quickness about the table, and perhaps, he thought, she was no girl—although her body exhibited the immature development of a fourteen-year-old, her face was exotic, womanly, a beautiful, sensual face with high cheekbones and a mouth that was a little too wide and full for her narrow jaw. She pawed at the maps, stopped and tipped back her head as if catching a scent on the air; she picked up a colored pencil, bit it, tossed it aside, sniffed the air again, and then sped through the door leading to interior of the ship. Dumbfounded, Wilander held his position. Rather than pursuing her through the darkened maze of the ship, he thought it would be easier to intercept her when she returned to the mess; but as he debated whether it would be more effective to wait inside the mess, she sprinted back onto the deck, carrying a loaf of bread, leaped to the rail without breaking stride and vaulted up into the linden, bringing down a shower of snow and dead leaves. An air of unreality settled over Wilander. That a beautiful woman might be inhabiting the linden tree, existing in freezing temperatures without the benefit of clothing, failed to meet even his lowered standards of what was credible. Unless she were a whistler, in which case the very concept of judgment would take a hit. Shy; slender; physically alluring. Driven to steal food when winter made game scarce. She fit the description. He started for the larder, curious as to how she had negotiated the lock, and then recalled that he had bread, peanut butter, and tinned sardines in his cabin. The sardines and peanut butter, he discovered, were still on the shelf above his bunk. The bread, however, was gone.
Over the next few weeks, Wilander devoted considerable thought and energy toward the woman in the linden tree, putting aside his maps (they were more or less complete) and his concerns relating to the white lights and the noises and the increasingly active, albeit still-invisible population of the forest. Since a normal woman could never withstand such cold, and since her behavior suggested an animal intelligence, he was persuaded that she must be a whistler, and he set himself to capture her, leaving food out to lure her down from the tree, hoping to habituate her to the process and eventually trap her in the mess; but the next night, watching from hiding as she secured the block of cheese he had provided, he became aroused by the play of muscles in her thighs and abdomen, by facial features whose delicacy seemed evidence of a sensitivity belied by her primitive actions. It troubled him that he could feel desire for anyone other than Arlene, whom he loved despite the breach between them. The whistler was unquestionably a beautiful creature, but first and foremost she was a creature; it dismayed him to suspect that he might be engaged in so prurient a self-deception, but what purpose apart from the sexual would trapping her serve? The phrase with which Halmus had insulted him, the husband of the linden tree: It returned to Wilander now and he wondered if—given Mortensen’s theories—he had summoned the whistler from the uncreate to fulfill the odd promise of that phrase. He decided that he would befriend her, not attempt a capture, and he placed food at the end of the table nearest the outer door and sat at the opposite end, waiting to see what would happen. For three successive nights, he heard her tread on the deck, yet she declined to enter. On the fourth night, however, she slipped into the mess, snatched the food and, as she darted away, in a panic, she smacked into the edge of the door, causing it to slam shut, trapping her. She whirled about, pursed her lips; he felt a pinprick of
pain behind his forehead, but it faded, amounting to nothing. He made soothing noises, urging her to calm, and stood, intending to close the interior door (he didn’t want her loose in the ship) and then open the outer door, allowing her to escape; but as he moved to accomplish this, she dropped to her hands and knees, presenting him her hindquarters, plainly a sexual offering. A second later, he smelled a sweetly complex scent, reminiscent of the sachets his mother had strewn about their home, seeking to mask odors that only she detected (the taint of a failing marriage, the residue of his father’s affairs) with tiny cloth bundles containing dried flowers, and he was struck by the thought that although he and his parents had never gotten along, though they had not even liked each other, it was weird how infrequently they sprang to mind…The scent, more cloying than those remembered scents, dizzied him. He gazed at the whistler’s pale buttocks. What would be wrong, he asked himself, if he were to fuck this consenting animal childwoman, this fantasy figure who he had dialed up from his subconscious? What possible significance could morality and conscience have when everything he imagined was coming true? Sufficient, it seemed, to restrain him. Still dizzy, he sat down again. The whistler got to one knee, staring at him, her torso partly concealed beneath tangles of hair. Wilander gestured at the door. You opened it before, he said. Go. She came slowly into a half-crouch, reached behind her, groping for the door, keeping her eyes on him. He told her once more to go, his tone peremptory, and, with a lunge, shouldering the door as she wrestled with the bar, she flung herself out onto the deck and, judging by the furious rustling that ensued, scrambled high into the linden tree.
Two nights passed before she entered the mess again, and two nights after that, a particularly cold night, with the temperature hovering near zero, a thousand glittering daggers of ice hung like trophies about Viator’s deck, a half moon whose light at meridian was so strong that a portion of the ice-sheathed railing at the stern looked to be a curve of gemmy fire suspended against the less focused brightness of the sea beyond, it was then that Aralyn—this the name Wilander had given the whistler, the name of a cousin in Goteborg whom he had never met—crouched in a corner of the mess while she ate the chicken breast he had set out for her; and the night after that she balked at returning to the linden tree. Not only was the cold affecting her (she had been trembling when she entered, making her seem even younger, frailer, like the little match girl), but the leaves of the linden had thinned out over the past days to such a degree, it no longer served as an effective hiding place, and this provided a clue to the size of the qwazil, who continued to call from the uppermost branches, secreted behind a smallish spray of leaves, marking itself as a tiny bird with a big voice…or else, like the wiccara, it was invisible. With both gesture and word, Wilander encouraged Aralyn to leave, but she curled up on the floor under the table as if she planned to sleep there; though it was unlikely that any of the crew would have reason to enter the mess during the night, it was nevertheless a possibility, and Wilander did not trust that they would have as protective an attitude toward her as he—she hadn’t filled the hole in his life that Arlene had left, nothing could, but her presence cut the loneliness to a more tolerable level, and he was coming to dote on her, to think of her as something of a cross between a niece and a pet; he made notes on her height and weight (a shade over five feet, slightly less than a hundred pounds) and physical condition (healthily sinewed; skin unmarred except for a pink two-inch-long scar shaped like a smile under her right breast; large eyes with dark irises and clear whites), and also noted how clean she was aside from her snarled hair and wondered if she washed herself like a cat or, as with certain breeds of dog, Samoyeds and Akitas, if she had a naturally pleasing odor. He indulged in a serial daydream in which, after reaching the Iron Shore, leaving Viator to sail unknown seas alone and un-captained, a living ship bent upon her own fulfillment, he became the great protector of the whistlers, a figure part Moses, part Che Guevara, part Martin Luther King, and pictured himself standing with Aralyn at the forefront of a host of whistlers, all dressed in homespun robes, freshly civilized, the forest ranked behind them, gazing with ennobled mien across a vista rife with promise. Okay, he told her. But you can’t stay here. And again with word and gesture, he urged her into the passageway and along it to his cabin, where, after displaying some signs of anxiety, she finally settled on the floor and slept. Wilander lay awake, listening to her breath, recognizing that he was establishing a dangerous precedent—she couldn’t stay in the cabin, or maybe she could, maybe it would be for the best; and if Viator was, indeed, on her way to the ultimate elsewhere, another plane of existence, a world he may have created, then she wouldn’t have to stay for long, no more than a week if the nearness of the lights and the increased volume of the groaning were indicators; and in the midst of these considerations, he fell asleep, a sleep undisturbed by dreams, unless waking to find himself enveloped in sweetness, a complex perfume, and Aralyn’s fingers stroking him, making him hard, unless all that were a dream, and he came up from the fog of sleep, meaning to push her away, but when he touched her, his disgust—a flicker—was subsumed by desire, his hands clamped to her flesh, and then she was rising above him, a shadow in the dark, fitting herself to him, just the way Arlene liked, only Arlene enjoyed sitting astride him and touching herself, whereas this one, Aralyn, was erratic in her movements, clawing at his chest, and that was his last clinical thought until after he had spilled into her and lay stiff with self-loathing, bothered by the weight of her head on his chest, her hand on his stomach, but unwilling now to push her away, to treat her roughly, because it wasn’t her fault, she had merely been trying to protect herself after having wandered into this unfamiliar place through a cosmic rip in the walls of her world made by Viator’s push to survive, acting on instinct…though it was possible, he realized, that he had assumed incorrectly, that he underestimated the whistlers and they were not sub-humans, not creatures of animal instinct, but fully human, a variant form of the species. In an effort to validate this thesis, he managed to teach Aralyn to say Tom and food, but since she banged on the floor with the candy bar he had used to illustrate food (mimicking the frustration he had displayed while teaching her) whenever she said the word, he couldn’t be sure she understood its meaning, nor was he sure—if she understood, if her intellect was more advanced than he had thought—whether this would put him in the clear ethically speaking. He doubted it would. Ethics had not been a strong point of his for many years.
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