by Joshi, S. T
Occasionally, when such children disappeared, mysterious footprints in the snow were found, neither human nor ursine. Such footprints had been followed many times, always leading into mazy ice-caves within the glacier, but all such searches had eventually been abandoned, partly because they were hopeless and partly because the searchers feared that the footsteps were mere lures and the vanished children bait, intended to lead them all to their doom.
The Greenlanders were, however, Norsemen, who had honored their founder, Erik the Red, with a saga to commemorate his name and glorify his deeds, and they fancied themselves the stuff of heroes. It was, therefore, perhaps inevitable that there would one day be found among them a searcher who would not recoil, even if he had to follow the trail all the way to Hell, and do it alone. His name was Magnus Eriksson, although that hardly served to mark him out unduly, since the Greenlanders had a drastic shortage of names, inherited from ancient Norway, and even in 1140, when the Eastern settlement numbered more than 4000 souls, there were a hundred Magnuses and more than a hundred Erikssons, and at least a dozen men who combined the two names.
The Magnus of this story, being a true hero, was not an unduly reckless man. He had berserker blood in him, it is true, but that only made him more respectful of the ancient traditions that predated the Christian conversion of his people, and he knew that a hero is always better equipped for battle when he has knowledge, and perhaps a little magic, on his side. For that reason, when he decided to follow the footprints of the monster that seemed to have carried off a girl-child, not yet two years old, from his village while the winter snow lay deep upon the ground, determined to follow those prints as far as humanly possible, he went to see the village skald.
Any skald of that period would gladly have sworn on the Bible that he was a good Christian, and a mere bard—a singer of songs and sagas and a guardian of tradition—and he would not necessarily have been perjuring himself in doing so; but the superstitious knew that skalds has once been magicians and seers, and that even those who contented themselves with singing still had arcane knowledge contained in the secret recesses of the traditions they guarded. Their neighbors knew, too, that skalds were indefatigably curious men, who often trafficked with the Inuit for more than seal-oil and walrus ivory.
The skald consulted by Magnus Eriksson was named Gudmund. His first impulse was to try to talk Magnus out of his quest.
“The potential reward is not worth the risk,” he said. “I do not say that children are not precious, but consider how many of them perish of disease, or merely from the cold. Of every three that are born, only one eventually grows up to become a sturdy warrior or a fecund child-bearer. The number stolen by demons—if that is really what happens to the ones whose disappearance is never explained—is tiny compared with the number of those who perish naturally and visibly. Is this one really worth risking the life of a fine and virtuous warrior like yourself, who will doubtless sire half a dozen strong children if he is prudent enough to choose a robust wife?”
“Cowards calculate,” Magnus replied. “Brave men act. What can you tell me about these mysterious creatures that leave unhuman footprints in the snow, leading into the ice-caves in the great glacier.”
“Very little, for certain,” Gudmund said, sadly. “Clearly, they have mass, or they could not leave footprints, but equally clearly, they do their work invisibly, for no one has ever seen one carry off a child, as would surely have been inevitable had they been as fully material as you or I. Invisible monsters are notoriously difficult to defeat, even with the aid of such standard fighting tricks as throwing flour over them to mark them out. Our eyes, of course, are limited, and I have met Inuit shamans who claim to be able to make lenses out of the transparent bodies of strange sea-creatures, which allow humans to see the spawn of Tsathoggua, but I believe that the Inuit sometimes make these tales up in order to make fun of us.”
“Do you have such a lens?” asked Magnus Eriksson.
“Indeed. In fact, I have two, and a system of sealskin straps that enables them to be fitted to the head—but I have put them on a dozen times, and have never seen anything untoward. Their only effect is to make me look like a human toad myself.”
“Will you lend me the lenses?” Magnus asked.
“Lend implies that you will be able to return them,” the skald pointed out.
“Will you sell me the lenses, then?” asked Magnus.
Gudmund hesitated, obviously weighing the matter up, but in the end, he said. “You may take them. I’m a skald; it’s my duty as a storyteller not to place obstacles in the way of heroic quests. If you can bring them back, you’ll doubtless have a tale to tell worthy of their hire … and if not, I’ll invent one.”
“Thank you,” said Magnus.
When Gudmund came back with the lenses, fitted into their ingenious sealskin helmet, however, he said: “Two words of warning. To begin with, if, by any remote chance, this contraption does allow you to perceive your invisible monster—and I can offer you no guarantee of that—that will surely not be the only thing you see in Tsathoggua’s lair.”
“And secondly?” Magnus promoted, when the skald hesitated.
“Personally,” Gudmund said, “I have never had any difficulty taking the lenses off—but I have never seen anything through them that I could not see with my naked eyes. The shaman who sold them to me told me that if I were to see something through them that humans ought not to see, it might not be as easy to take them off as it had been to put them on. It was probably bargaining talk, improvised as an enticement, but in passing on the lenses, I’m bound to pass on the warning. I’m a skald, after all.”
Magnus took the lenses and went back to the village church, where the village elders had gathered to discuss the situation. Magnus did not tell them about the lenses, because it did not seem appropriate to mention pagan magic in a church, but he told the elders what he planned to do.
“If I do not return within two days,” he told them, “I shall almost certainly have frozen to death, and the child will undoubtedly be dead too. No one should attempt to search for us. God willing, though, I shall came back with the invisible monster’s severed head, covered in frost to render it visible, and the little girl too.”
The elders were, of course, very pleased with this instruction, which saved them from the possibility of having to justify inevitable but slightly embarrassing decisions, now and in two days’ time.
Magnus selected his most reliable lantern and put a jar of seal-oil in a bag slung over his shoulder, which ought to be enough to refuel its reservoir for at least two days. His sword was neither the longest nor the best-kept in the village, but he was a proud warrior, and its blade ought to be good enough to slay anything mortal, provided that he could deliver a solid thrust. He strapped its sheath to his left-hand side, securing his knife to the right-hand side as a gesture of symmetry. He packed a little salted fish in the shoulder-bag as well and balanced it with a water-skin, even though he did not expect to be away long enough to suffer unduly from hunger pangs.
Then he set out, following the strange footsteps into the ice-cave.
To begin with, the walls of the tunnel through the glacier were smooth, dressed with fresh ice that had only recently refrozen. It reflected the yellow light of his lamp in an even manner, like a pane of glass, without overmuch glitter. As he went deeper into the glacier, however, he soon came into the region of ancient and permanent ice, which was far murkier and far more extensively prey to eerie glints and ominous gleams.
Once, Magnus presumed, there must have been a briny river flowing here, which had hollowed out the tunnel before its source was diverted, just as there were hundreds of similar rivers that still plowed furrows through the shifting glaciers of the east and west alike, but there was no sign of any recent liquid movement. The branchless tunnel might have been empty for a decade or a thousand years; Magnus had no way to tell.
After he had taken fifty or sixty paces into the realm of ancient i
ce, Magnus took out the lenses that the skald had given him and fitted the helmet to his head. That was not so much because of the glints and gleams in the walls as because he thought he might be able to recover sight of the monster’s footprints—which had, of course, disappeared almost as soon as he had come into the cave, for lack of snow to carry them.
His optimistic hope was unjustified. He could no more see any further signs of the monster’s progress with the aid of the lenses than he could with his naked eyes; nor could he see anything else that he had not been able to see before. He reached up to take them off again, and then shrugged his shoulders.
What harm can they do? he asked himself—and left the helmet on. Oddly enough, even though it was a mere tangle of sealskin thongs, it seemed to give his cheeks and ears some protection against the biting cold.
Magnus had lived with that cold all his life and was now a veteran of more than twenty winters. Like all Norsemen, he prided himself on his ability to withstand cold—although his pride was not so foolish as to prevent him from wearing exceptionally well-tailored furs or extremely well-lined boots. There were, however, degrees of cold, and the cold inside the ancient ice was worse than the cold beneath the stars, even when the wind blew from the north. If the wind were Tsathoggua’s breath, he thought, then the depths of the glacier were Tsathoggua’s bowels, even more intense in their bitterness.
As he walked on, the ice walls became murkier still, and the glints and gleams within began to seem more remote and more peculiar. Sometimes, it was as if silver fish were gliding through the ice, or cephalopods waving tentacles—but he knew that the appearances were mere illusions, to which the lenses added no authority. Perhaps there were living things that could exist in ice, oozing through it in some subtle fashion, but what he saw as he glanced from side to side while following the tunnel was nothing so strange, consisting entirely of tricks of light.
As he went further into the glacier, however, he began to pick up suggestions of other kinds of life, which seemed more reptilian—or, at least, amphibian—than piscine. The strange flashes generated by the play of his lantern and his forward movement became more reminiscent of slithering newts or fluttering tadpoles.
“That’s my imagination,” Magnus said aloud—as if speaking them aloud could add to the words’ conviction.
He reached up again to take off the lenses, but paused again.
“No,” he said, still formulating his thoughts aloud. “In this quest, the imagination is my ally; if the lenses are assisting it, let them. If the time comes for them to show me something real, I’d rather know it immediately than have to hesitate and fumble to put them on.”
And he kept on moving, deeper into the mountain of ice.
The glacier, he knew, never stopped moving. As it moved, it scoured the ground over which it oozed, crushing any relics of nature or human endeavor as it went, leaving no trace behind, although it sometimes picked up curiously formed fragments of stone that might have once been shaped for building. If there ever had been a human civilization here, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, in a warm interim before the invasion of the ice, the glaciers would have removed every trace of it by now, wiping the bedrock clean of any polluting artifice. That did not, however, prevent Magnus from wondering, as he looked into the ice surrounding him, whether there might still be relics of some sort wedged into crevices in the underlying rock, which must surely be very close at now.
Indeed, there were a great many shadows visible within the ice, which might have been outcrops of rock, or boulders picked up by the glacier—but the ice was so murky now that they might simply be stains. Either way, they gradually constituted a gathering gloom that robbed the surface ice of all its glister. It still reflected the lantern-light, but in a dull and jaundiced fashion. The walls still seemed to be soaking up a fraction of the light as well as reflecting a fraction, but seemed to be doing so viscously and sullenly.
When Magnus reached out to touch the ice, very gingerly, with his gloved hand, it did not seem slick, and did not moisten the outer sheepskin of the layered glove. Nevertheless, it was ice, not rock; he was sure of that. Even though the gentle downward slope of the tunnel must have brought him close to the surface of the island, he was definitely still moving through ice. In his imagination, he conjured up an ice-filled valley, a cleft in the bedrock leading, if not to Hell, perhaps to some other bizarre and ice-bound underworld.
As he moved forward, the ice seemed to be flowing past him, and the vague dark shapes within it might easily have been mistaken for storm-clouds surging through an electrically charged atmosphere—but they could not turn to rain, let alone spit lightning; any storms whose promise they held were surely impotent. Now, however, he began to catch glimpses—surely imaginary—of trees and flowers as well as amphibians, and vast swamps in which sheets of stagnant water alternated with lush islands.
Again, he reached up to take off the lenses, certain this time that they must be playing tricks with him, and that he could not possibly have imagined such follies with the innocent stare of his own eyes. Again, though, he stayed the gesture.
“What does it matter what else I see, since I was warned that I would,” he said, “so long as I see the monster too. And if my mind is merely playing tricks, then let it, provided that it is honest when the time comes.”
He began to see other creatures in the imaginary swamp: true reptiles, and furry humanoids, and flying creatures gliding through the ice as if through humid air. He was reassured at first, though, when he also made out his own reflection, marching with him to the right and the left, as if there were three of him moving in harmony, with a common purpose.
He looked odd in reflection, to be sure, because the helmet he was wearing, with its two strange lenses covering his eyes, gave the impression that he had monstrous bulging eyes, like those of a toad, but he knew who and what he really was, and knew that he could take the helmet off any time he wished, so that he might look both his other selves in his own blue eyes.
His lamp burned low, and he had to stop in order to fill it; but he was not the kind of man to be so careless as to let a lamp go out while he renewed its fuel, and the yellow light only flickered, making the imaginary creatures within the walls caper and dance.
For a moment, it seemed that the reflection marching to his right broke ranks and acquired the power of independent movement, and even took leave to say to him: “Go back, else we shall perish”—but he knew that it was just the inner voice of caution, to which he had promised to pay no heed.
When he went on, both reflections went within him, falling meekly into step.
There were literal clouds inside the ice-walls now, but they were clouds of dust, not moisture, debris that the glacier had picked up as it moved. What kind of debris, Magnus wondered, and where from? There was no way to tell, for it was mere dust now, whatever its parent forms might have been. Within that material fog, the illusions gradually disappeared: there was no more swamp, no more echoes of living creatures—except for the reflections of his own self, which became more distinct.
He was glad of that for a few moments, but then a new illusion emerged, as some trick of reflection multiplied the other selves who were marching by his side, suggesting that there were no longer only three of him but hundreds—perhaps an infinite number extending as far as the imagination could reach within the realm of dark ice.
This time, it was the image immediately to his left that spoke to him, from the wings of the stage where his soul paraded its inner life.
“This is the truth,” it said, “which we are seeing for the first time, and which few men ever glimpse. Like every man who has ever lived, or ever will, we are an infinite number of potential men, made up of all our hesitations and unmade choices. We are a multitude of images, moving through an ice-bound world like flowing shadows, ordinarily invisible—but now that we have assumed better eyes, in order to see the world as Tsathoggua dreams it, we can know ourselves for what we truly are
, which is so much greater than our petty selves of flesh and blood, and so much stranger.”
“Doubtless you are the man that I might have become had I selected to be a skald rather than a warrior,” said Magnus, “but I have berserker blood in me, and when my wrath is roused words melt away, no matter how poetic. The choice of becoming a warrior was right, for me.”
“Words melt, it is true,” the skald-phantom replied, “just as life flows, always reaching the sea of oblivion in the end, to be lost forever. Only in ice can words be caught and held, like life and time itself—and not in the oozing ice of glaciers, but in the deeper ice, hidden in valleys in the bosom of the earth, where everything is forever still. Pay no heed to the voice of prudence; continue on your way, for that way lies the only kind of immortality of which mind is capable: the ultimate imprisonment.”
Magnus looked back then at the nearest of his right-hand selves, expecting to hear an argument—but his right-hand self seemed voiceless now, all but swallowed up by the fog of dust, the all-embracing shadow.
“I have left caution behind,” he said to himself. “Soon, I shall leave the echo of the skald behind as well. Then I shall confront the monster, and slay him, and save the child.”
It seemed that he was right, for he had not taken another dozen steps when the tunnel of ice widened out and became a vast globe of ice, seemingly enclosing a quasi-spherical space that was probably a hundred paces in diameter, if what he could see of its curvature could be reliably extrapolated. It was difficult to be sure of anything beyond the immediate environs of the entrance, because the space was filled with vapor, and within the vapor there were moving glints like shooting stars. He presumed at first that they were merely catching the light of his lamp and casting it back at him, like all the glints he had seen before, but after a moment’s hesitation on his part, they really did seem to be producing light of their own.