But there’s nothing I can do about all this. Winter has closed in, and Tirkiluk and I are stuck together like Siamese twins in this hut. Just hope she can find a better life with some other tribe in the spring—although she says she’ll have to travel what she regards as impossibly far to reach any of her people who will take her. Have to see if I can’t wrangle her a passage down to one of the southern ports on the supply boat when it finally comes in the spring, although I saw enough of “westernised” Eskimo life around the docks at Neimaagen not to wish it on anyone. Least of all Tirkiluk.
December 19
Have looked in all the reference books I’ve been provided with, and wasn’t surprised to find that there was no guidance about childbirth. Can’t bring myself to radio Godalming for advice. Not sure whether that’s pride, or the certainty that they wouldn’t respond.
Christmas day—
and I’ve opened the bottle of rum that I’ve been saving until now. Tirkiluk spluttered and spat out the first sip, but then a wide grin spread across her broad face, and she held out her cup and asked for more. Eskimos are obviously used to drink. Think, in fact, that she’s holding it better than I am.
Did my best this morning to tell the Nativity story—very appropriate in the circumstances. Tirkiluk knows all about Christian heaven and hell. She thinks hell is a warm place where only whiteman is allowed to go. Can think of worse places than hell. Even now, in the cheery glow that comes from the drink and the light of the stove and the lanterns, the cold penetrates easily through the triple insulated walls of this hut, and a sense of damp chill slides like an embrace around your back and into your bones. You can never escape it. As far as I can tell from talking to Tirkiluk and re-reading the books, the Inuit don’t believe in an afterlife. The spirits just drift and return, drift and return.
Even today, the war must go on. Both trekked up to Point B to take measurements from the few instruments that haven’t frozen solid. The wind was biting, driven with gravel-like ice, but I taught her Once In Royal David’s City as we felt our way in the wild grey darkness. Somehow managed to sing, even though had to turn our heads away from the wind just to breathe.
Could stand my frozen beaverskin coat up on its own like a suit or armour when we returned to the hut, and somehow it made an odd, dark presence. I think of that line about “the other that walks beside you” in The Waste Land, and Shackleton’s account of that terrible final climb over the mountains of South Georgia. Tirkiluk’s matted and moulting furs work far better, although that’s probably simply because it’s her that’s wearing them.
Lost the blood from my right foot entirely today, and after nearly roasting the dead white flesh on top of the stove, gave in to Tirkiluk and let her hold it and rub it against her hard round belly, clicking the odd-shaped stones and polar bear teeth that she has strung around her neck. For the first time in my life—and in the oddest imaginable circumstances—I felt a baby kick. But, as usual, she muttered some incantation, and as usual, it seemed to work.
I’ve just radioed Godalming. Was rather hoping for more than the usual Message Received code I got in return.
Godalming no transmission stopped No ship for months Must live with this pa
Leave my possessions to my beloved Mother in the ho
Strong enough to keep record now. Important if things turn for worst. No excuse for it. My clumsiness. Not Tirkiluk. Stupid accident. I was drunk. The lantern went over. Should have gone out. But lid was loose. My fault. Idiot. Flaming oil. Everywhere.
Tirkiluk and I are sheltering by a wall of rock and of drift-ice, with what remains of one wall of the supply hut for a roof. The fire was terrible. Much worse in this cold place. The wind so strong. It and the flames fuelling each other. Supply hut went up too. Gas canisters. The oil drums. The lanterns. Explosions. Nearly killed. Everything.
Easier to list what we do have. Thought to drag out our clothing before too late. Some of the bedding. Some canvas. Managed to get back in and save some food, not enough to last the winter. Tirkiluk breaks the cans open with her knife. Contents are ice. No way of warming them. Eskimos carry fire with them through the winter. A tribe’s greatest treasure.
Beam of roof fell. Hit my legs. Tirkiluk’s alright but can hardly walk and there’s the baby. Haven’t moved for don’t know how. Cold incredible to start with there’s no pain no cold now. Fever, then this. Can’t feel my legs. Graphite breaks and paper is brittle, but if I’m slow writing is easy.
Can watch the stars turn. Everything freezing. Ice drifts through gaps in canvas and roof like smoke. Place stinks of us and the flames. Remember Tirkiluk now. How she healed me. Chanting, salt ice on my lips, teeth chattering. The hard cold holding me in white bony arms. Lights in the sky. Other lights. Could feel the spirits. Whispering, gathering round. Smoke and ice. Cold breath. Their names tumbling on the wind. So many, so old. Wizened faces. The spirits don’t mind the cold. This is their home. I don’t belong. I leave my bones in a quite place where the wolves can’t get them.
Scratches of light. January meteors. The Quadrantids. Izar a dark binary. I’m freezing. I don’t feel cold. Dreamed that Tirkiluk had lost her fingers. Snapped off like icicles. She was Inua, fingerless hag, muttering under dark ice in the depths of the ocean.
Tirkiluk is near to her term. Tells me everything in her own language, and now I understand. Our lips are frozen as we speak, but perhaps the truth of it is in our minds. She tells me that she can’t move now and that the bleeding is coming and that she and the baby will die.
The tins are useless. Need proper food. Water too. Must make the effort. Foolish kaboola whiteman with my own bare hands. Must try.
Small victory today, but think we now have a chance.
Went out onto the ice with a spear fashioned from hooked and sharpened transmitter strut, aeriel cable for a line. No bleeding. Legs gave way once, but otherwise no problem. Knelt down and licked and scraped the new ice with my bared teeth, tasting the salt that is still in it. Thickness impossible to judge by sight alone, but taste is a clue. At the thinnest point lies a clear circle of water, and a tiny ridge of ice around it that seal-breath has made. The ridge tells who and when and how many have used it.
Crouched down. Waited. Time froze over. Just me and the hole in the ice and the cold stiffening my clothes and the mountains like the shoulders of gods behind me and stars turning in the endless glowing darkness. Silence was incredible. Silence is the thing that’s struck me most since the burning of the hut. Always associated fear with noise. But fear is silence, and if you face the silence and listen to it and go through it, you eventually come to a dark place of deeper peace, like diving into that black circle of water as I wait for the seal, becoming part of everything. Found I could stop my breathing, and the slow ragged thump of my heart. Felt I was no longer real yet knew I would snap back into existence when the seal surfaced to breathe.
Over in an instant. Thought of Tirkiluk. Felt no hesitation, no pity. The grunt and gust of salt air, a face like a dog’s. Drove the spear down hard, and felt the shock of it strike back into my body. It began to thrash and pull, but the line held, and the sea turned foamy red. Felt the ice cracking and the ocean bubbling up as I heaved it out. Frozen splashes. Somehow found the energy to haul the seal back to Tirkiluk, the heat of it sliding in my hands. She sliced and bit and tore. The way she had before, when I was so disgusted. She offered it to me. I took a little, and the taste of it was good. But all hunger seems to have left me, and even the fresh water she lifted from the grey sack in the seal’s belly slaked a thirst I didn’t feel.
She made me take the bladder back to the bloodied hole. Dragged it there somehow, partly on hands and knees. It floated, a wounded sack, then was drawn down by a rippling current. Suddenly alive, swam away into the darkness. Tirkiluk tells me the spirit has returned. There will now be seal to hunt again.
Such terrible guilt about the stupidity of the accident. Not just my own life and Tirkiluk’s I’ve endangered. The weather
has turned even more against us now, as though it knows, and we’ve packed the snow around to make walls—a rudimentary kind of igloo, although Tirkiluk didn’t even know the word. The wind bites though, threatening to excavate or bury us. Can feel the great anticyclone the icecap inland like a presence, a ghostly conjurer drawing gales out of the Arctic waters. And I think of the lonely men in huts like the one I destroyed, or in the convoys in the Atlantic, and rounding the terrible North Cape towards Murmansk.
Cold here is quite incredible, yet Tirkiluk feels it more than me. Almost a blessing. Looked at my legs today, cut back leggings that snapped like stiff card. Black skin, a section of dirty white where bone is showing through. Never thought to see my own bone. Wounds that should have gone gangrenous long ago. Think only the cold keeps me alive. A kind of sterility.
Tirkiluk has shown me how to tame the wind. So simple I should let the boffins at Godalming know. Would have laughed if the fractured skin on my face would allow. Rattled those teeth around her neck, and called on Inua. Tied three knots, and the gale stilled, and a quarter moon brightened over the bay. Says she needs a time of quite now that the baby is near. Says she needs the blood and the liver and the fresh water of the seal.
I re-sharpened the spear. I went out. Me, the pale hunter.
When I hunt, the cold disappears. Silence engulfs me. I love the bright darkness, the glassy emptiness. Can hear the glacier moving, and understand that one day it will eat the mountains. Ice is stronger than heat or rock or even the ocean. Was there at the start of the world, and will close over everything at the end, when the stars blink out. I wait. Then flash of movement, and the blood-heat that burns like a fire from the open body of the seal. I leave the cutting of the flesh to Tirkiluk, who eats and drinks most of it anyway, and buries deep into the warmth. I must keep back. Not out of squeamishness, but because I fear the heat.
Return the bladder to the ocean and let the current draw it away, so that the seal will return for me to hunt again.
The baby came. A boy. A living boy. It’s like the Aurora—there are no words. Leaned on her belly as she pushed. The incredible heat of her flesh, my fingers like cold leather, and fear in eyes through the pain at what I had become. We made a clean space for the child, brought in the fresh falling snow. She cleaned him and lay him on the skin of the seal. Then she gave him his first name. Naigo. Could feel the spirits crowding in, joining with the baby which is at its oldest when born. Filled with the memory of other lives. That’s why a baby cries before it can laugh. Said she wanted to call him Seymour too, when my name floats free.
Tirkiluk fears that the wolves and the polar bear must come soon, drawn by the blood-stink of life and death that surrounds this dreadful place. I do not believe that she and the baby will survive, yet I know that I fight for their lives.
Keeps Naigo against her flesh. Will hardly let me see. Says the spirits will be offended. I know my grip is cold as the glacier now, and that I must look awful, yet still I wish she would relent. The child feels half-mine. Yet I know from the wild fear in Tirkiluk’s eyes that something is wrong. She senses it greatly now that she has Naigo, now that the whispering ancient sprits are gathered around her and the baby. It’s me. Something more than the fire and the cold and this terrible place. I know, yet I cannot bring myself to face it.
Inua was once a young girl just like Tirkiluk, yet she committed some crime, and her parents rowed out with into the ocean in their umiak, and threw her overboard. When she clung to the side, they cut off her fingers, and they tossed a lamp to her as she sank down into the dark water, so that she might find her way.
Think that Inua is still out there, somewhere at the edge of this bay where the ice meets the black water in shattering, half frozen waves. Her long hair streams out in the currents like dark weed, uncombed and verminous because she has no fingers, and her lantern shines up at me as I peer down through the ice waiting for the seal to rise. Or perhaps it’s Aquila I see glittering deep down in the water, which Tirkiluk tells me will soon rise back above the horizon. Or some other drowned star.
I sit outside now, leaving Tirkiluk and Naigo with what little warmth and shelter there is. The breath, the damp, the slight radiance that still comes from her half-frozen body, had become intolerable to me, although I think that she is also happier now that she does not have to see me when then ice cracks from her frozen eyelids and she looks up, and when the baby mews and she draws it out from somewhere inside her.
In starlight, I stand up and I pull back the frozen, useless furs. I can see my hands, my arms, my chest. If I drop the furs now, they skitter across the rocks and ice, shattering like filthy glass. Underneath, there are darkened ropes of chilled muscle, pulled tight by shrivelled skin. My fingernails have peeled back like burned and blackened paint. From what little I can feel of my face with these hands, I have no nose, and my lips are stretched back so that my teeth are permanently bared.
The snow has returned. It gathers on these pages, and the flakes do not melt as I brush them away. It forms drifts, sculpting my body. I settle back into the downy comfort. I lay back as whiteness falls. My jaw creaks and the softness fills my mouth, settles on these eyes that do not blink. Soon, I will be covered, buried.
I think of Godalming. Of that hut by the tennis courts, and the sagging nets that no one has ever bothered to take in after the last set was played before war and the place was requisitioned. I think of Kay Alexander, her face sprayed with freckles, listening to the hissing seashell silence that drifts down from space.
She looks ragged from worry at the loss of the broadcasts from Weatherbase Logos II as she sits each evening at her receiver, although she knows that there’s a war on and that this and worse will happen on every day until it’s won. She remembers the shy man who was sent there, who sometimes came across the lawns from the main house in the summer, and would sit nearby at the edge of a table and fuss with the cuffs of his uniform or a pencil, barely meeting her eyes, talking about things without somehow ever really saying. Kay’s hair is ragged now. Even in Surrey it is winter and the night comes early and the lanterns glow beyond the blackout blinds, and the stars drift down and leaves are tangled like fish in the rotting tennis nets. Kay’s tresses hang in verminous fronds, and as she lays out the code grid and lifts her headphones from the hook where she keeps them, the chill engulfs her and her fingers snap off one by one.
Nearly covered in forgetful snow now. Cannot see. But Tirkiluk is hungry. She and Naigo need blood, warmth. Must not give way. Must go and hunt the seal again. I know her face now, the mewling of her pain, the hot scent of her death spilling across the ice, the way the warmth of her blood makes my frozen, blackened flesh liquefy and dissolve.
The sun is starting to pearl the horizon, and Aquila will soon return. Tirkiluk’s Aagyuuk. It signals the thaw.
The polar bear came along the frozen beach at midday. He came with the changing wind, just as the sun was rising. I knew that he would have to come, just as the seal always returns, bringing Tirkiluk and Naigo the gift of her life.
A terrible, beautiful scene, the mountains glittering nursery-pink. Then the white pelt, the lumbering flesh. He raised his snout, smelling fire and life and slaughter. He grunted, and howled.
Naigo began to cry in the shelter behind me, and Tirkiluk sang to soothe him, her voice ringing clear over the keening wind, knowing that there was no hiding, knowing that the beast sensed the warm meat that was waiting on their bones. I thought for a moment of the seal, and how death was a kinder thing here than the winter, and that if I could truly finish with dying and return to life, it would be to a warm place with faces and smiles, crying with the grief of ages, hooded in silver drifts of placenta. But the bear had seen me, and smelled the death that my own lungs and mouth no longer have to taste, and smelled that I that I was an enemy.
I grabbed the harpoon as the bear lumbered towards me, driving it hard. It struck near the massive chest, reddening where the wind riffled the pelt. The beast was
slowed, but still he came towards me. I had an odd strength in me—the strength to throw a harpoon harder and faster than the wind—yet I was light, thinly bound by rigoured muscle and spongy ropes of blood. The bear reached me and tumbled me over and his jaw opened and teeth closed over my arm and shoulder. The teeth gave me no pain. It was the carrion-hot breath that terrified me.
Somehow, I pulled away from beneath him, dragged back on the bones of elbows and knees. I think he sensed then that he already had victory. Grey strands of ligament hung from his mouth, and my right collarbone dangled beneath. He shook it away. There was something playful and cat-like about the way he struck out at me with the massive pad of his paw. I was blown back as if by the wind as the claws striped my chest. I struck an outcrop of rock, feeling my left hand snap and roll away, and my leg break where the wound had exposed the bone, raising a pointed femur. The bear leapt at me, coming down, blocking the sky.
My broken femur struck into his belly like a stake. He bellowed and the blood gushed in a salt wave. I knew that I would have to get away before the heat dissolved me entirely.
I didn’t kill the bear. He ran back up the beach, trailing blood. The wound, which seemed so terrible as it broke over me from his belly, will probably heal easily enough. Spring is coming soon, and life will regather itself, and the bear will survive. I wish him luck, and the flesh of the seal when we have finally finished with her. I use the harpoon as a kind of crutch now that I can no longer walk easily. I have lashed the remains of my left arm to it, and struggle along the shore like a broken-winged bird.
I have to keep the harpoon lashed that way even when I hunt, but the seal now comes easily. She has died for us so many times now that she no longer fears death.
Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod Page 33