Loon nodded, looking around. Out here one could see that the great ice wall looming over the hills extended to the west as far as they could see, covering the great salt sea as it did the land, although on the ocean it did not stand as high. Possibly it rested on the sea floor, like the sea ice nearest shore did; or perhaps it too was floating, like the sea ice farther offshore. One could see where the waves of summer had struck the ice wall to the west and frozen to it in a frolic embroidery of white curlicues and icicles. This white tangle somewhat resembled broken water and spray, but as everything was frozen, the scene was strangely still.
Loon was always scared out on the ice, and he saw the northers were nervous as well, as alert as deer who smell wolves, so that he knew he was right to be scared. The ice under them sometimes bowed down, especially under the sleds, you could feel it behind you. When that happened the jende altered their course and turned in easy curves, never stopping, and one shouted to the slowing Loon not to stop, never to stop: Oma! Oma! Apparently stopping was exactly wrong, as the norther’s quick mime of crashing through made clear.
Staying safe was apparently a matter of staying on the whitest ice. New ice was nearly black, and the northers called those areas beltz, and kept away from them. As the new ice thickened it turned gray, and at its thickest, white. The line where gray turned to white would hold a man and a sled. They stayed well away from any open water, no matter how white the ice next to it was. They had with them a long pole with a bone point at one end and a bone hook at the other; this was called an una, and was lighter and longer than any javelin, and used to poke suspect ice ahead, to see if it could be broken enough to let sea water up. Drifts of snow lying on the ice were also probed, to see if there was in fact any ice under them; apparently the winter’s sea water was so cold that snow could float on it without melting, looking solid when it wasn’t. This slush was called pogaza, and if it had frozen into a solid mass, it was called igini. Igini would hold a man and even a sled, but it was almost impossible to haul a sled over it, or even to walk on it without falling. Also, there was no visible difference between igini and pogaza, so they had to avoid both whenever possible, and treat igini as a great danger if they had to cross it to get to better ice. With gusto they mimed what would happen if you fell into pogaza; nothing to climb out onto, nothing to hold to, so you would quickly freeze and die. They seemed to enjoy miming death’s arrival.
One day out there, a short day in the middle of the second month, Loon was hiding behind a snow wall near a hole in the ice, and a jende named Kaktak, along with Elhu and another friend, were killing the seals that emerged from the hole, when suddenly there was a loud crack to landward. The northers immediately ran off in that direction, leaving their captives to follow or not. By the time Loon and the other two captives had caught up to them, they were standing still, looking at an unjumpable width of open black water. No miming anything now. They were on a floating chunk of ice, sliding out to sea.
The northers conferred briefly among themselves, then returned to the seal hole and made a shelter out of their snow wall, the sleds, and some hides from the sleds. Each of them used a hide to sit on, and the flat rock they carried on the sled for a hearth was placed at their center. They quickly spun up a fat fire, not hugely warm but better than nothing. After that there was nothing to do but sit and wait, and hope that an onshore wind would eventually come out of the west and blow them back to the sea ice still attached to the shore. Meanwhile they were on a raft made of ice, drifting on the great salt sea. One of the jende stood and shouted a prayer to the winds, or a curse; then they huddled in their furs and sat, waiting to either live or die.
Night fell in the middle of the afternoon, and the temperature plummeted. The fat fire’s warmth was palpable then, though it was little more than a big lamp, and they blocked the entry to their low shelter with snow and hides, and huddled together around the little flame, pressing against each other in a tight circle to share what warmth they could through the sides of their bodies, and holding hands out to the fire from time to time to warm them a bit before tucking them back into their underarms.
Loon was too cold to think. He sat hunched, pinching his toes, feeling in him a deep sadness that he would be unable to rescue Elga, that it all would end for him so soon. He hadn’t felt anything so strongly in a long time.
But sometime in the night the wind seemed to change, and in any case picked up. Though they couldn’t be sure of it in the dark, when a gray light crept over the eastern horizon, and they took a look outside the shelter, the wind was clearly coming from the west. They stirred a little under the hides, ate a little frozen fish to give them strength for whatever the day might bring.
With the sun blinking over the horizon, they left their shelter to have a quick look around. In the distance they could see the hills behind their camp, and the ice wall looming over the hills. Their floating island slopped in the great salt sea, getting wet around its edges. Happily it was big enough that they stayed dry in the middle, even though it was getting windier, and broken waves sloshed onto the west side of the ice, throwing up little bursts of spray.
They went back inside to stay as warm as they could. For a long time they sat there in the gloom of their shelter. Finally the raft came to a grinding halt, and they rushed out to find they were well to the south of where they had broken off, and had been blown up against new black sea ice, very thin.—Bad luck! the jende exclaimed, laughing mirthlessly.
The northers walked quickly around their little island, then had a long discussion. Crossing the black ice was going to be hard; the possibility of falling through it was all too obvious.
Kaktak spoke and mimed to Loon and the other captives, in a way that Loon did not find completely clear. It looked like he was mimicking the big white bears who lived out on the sea ice. When confronted with black ice, these ice bears lowered themselves and shoved forward on their chests and bellies, toeing their way forward as fast as possible without kicking downward. Toe pushes and finger sweeps were the most that could be risked when it came to pressure on the ice. The only thing that differed for the humans compared to the ice bears, Kaktak indicated, was that they would also hold an una in each hand, lengthwise right next to their bodies, and would push down on them to help spread their weight over a bigger patch of ice as they slithered forward.
Kaktak spoke briefly to Elhu and the other man, and then with a graceful kneel and dive, he slid onto the black ice and squiggled forward like a big lizard, always moving the unas close to him on both sides. When he had made it to gray ice he quickly stood up, and immediately began to finger water down the fur of his jacket and pants, sweeping it onto the snow under him. He shouted to the rest of them happily.—Omoo! he called, and then slid the poles back over the black ice to them. It goes!
So it would, if you were good. But knowing it could work was the main thing, and Kaktak having tested it, the rest of the stranded jende were quickly across, one at a time, over slightly different places on the ice, trying to stay close to Kaktak’s route without repeating it exactly.
When it was Loon’s turn, he banished from his mind a vision of the way loons slapped the water when taking off across a lake, and recalled instead a red water lizard he had once seen slither away from an overturned rock in a stream, looking like a live root and quickly disappearing. He crouched and cast himself forward as smoothly as he could, smacking the ice right away with his nose and mouth, so that the salty tang of the coat of water on the ice was in him as he slithered forward on knees and toes and the two clutched unas. It was an awkward kind of crawling, but soon the ice was dirty white under him, and he pushed up to his knees and got to his feet, and began to squeeze the water down and off the front of his clothes before it froze there in the fur. Even though the air was very cold, there was some kind of wetness on the new ice, made of water saltier than the great salt sea itself.—Gatzi! Kaktak said when he saw Loon’s face. Salty!
The northers were very pleased at their
return to land and their escape from death, so pleased that Loon suddenly realized they had not expected to survive. He had not been able to see that in them during their time at sea, and was impressed at the way they had fronted the situation.
The other captives slithered over to the gray ice and imitated the jende, drying out their furs with their fingers as completely as possible, which left their hands pink and wet and throbbing with cold. Then the jende pulled the sleds off their ice raft by throwing ropes in loops over them, and when they caught them, tugging them over the new ice to them as gently and smoothly as they could. The black ice bowed under them, but did not break.
When they had recovered the sleds, the jende took off toward camp faster than Loon had ever seen the northers move. He soon realized it was because their clothes were damp, despite their best efforts to dry them; the chill was so numbing that they had to run to be warm enough to move at all. The captives followed as best they could. After the running created some warmth in them, they slowed to a walk and caught their breath, but soon chilled and were forced to run again. So it went, run then walk, run then walk, but mostly run, huffing and puffing so hard that their blood should have been burning inside them, though it wasn’t; the best they could do was to keep just warm enough to move.
Loon followed the jende, and made no attempt to help the other two captives falling behind him. Surely that was the northers’ job. But the northers did not help, did not even look back, and when Loon looked over his shoulder he saw the last man, named Bron, was falling and struggling back to his feet. Loon waited, and when Bron caught up to him, he tied the man’s sled to his own, freeing Bron up to make his way back without pulling a sled.
Except a little while after that, he looked back again and saw that Bron had collapsed onto the snow. He circled back and left Bron’s sled behind, pulled the man up onto his own sled, then took up his rope again and heaved forward to start. He pulled and pulled on the loop on the end of the rope, and got going at last with his legs burning hot, while the rest of him burned cold; the hot pushed from inside out, the cold from outside in, but both painful. And yet somehow the two together would be enough to see him home. He began to sing one of Thorn’s running songs as he approached the northers’ camp, and he only stopped singing when he arrived at the tunnel entrance to the big house’s cold trap and went in to get help for Bron, still lying on the sled. He was not sure what the northers would make of his rescue of a fellow captive, and he was irritated with himself for standing out to them in any way. He went to his corner of the ground level and stripped to his leggings and stood right over the captive’s lamp fire to get warm and dry. Thawing out caused some of the fiercest burning of all, as usual, but it was all on the surface, simply the burn of feeling coming back into his numbed hands, then his face and ears, and, after he had eaten a lot of fish dipped in marmot fat, even his feet. Meanwhile the northers carried Bron up to the middle platform in the house and put him by the fire there, and only when he was coherent did they send him back down to the captives’ level to spend the night. Once down there again, he squeezed Loon’s arm with a look that Loon did not want to see on any captive’s face; he did not want to think of himself as one of them, or as a helpful stranger. But in the nights that followed, Loon sometimes woke to find Bron draped against his back, making of himself a living blanket in the coldest part of the nights. They did not know any words in the same language except for the northers’ words, and those words none of them spoke aloud. The ground floor under the big house was a quiet place.
Loon had intended to make himself invisible to the northers, to be a captive beneath notice. Now some of the northers might be aware of him. And he had hidden a sheep shank in the corner of the cold trap, and on every new moon scored its edge with a pebble to mark how many months had passed, and one night it wasn’t there anymore. Whether whoever took it had noticed the marks, or knew the bone was his, he could not be sure. There was no overt sign from Kaktak or Elhu or any of the rest of the ice people that they were watching him. But he felt that the men going out earliest and farthest on the day’s affairs were calling for him more often. And during their days out, checking traps, or hunting on the sea ice, or foraging for firewood, they gave him as much to eat and drink as they took themselves, and treated him almost like they did each other, except when it came time to pull the sleds home. And of course he was never allowed to have anything to do with the captive wolves they sometimes took with them. They talked among themselves, and Loon only caught part of that, but he was understanding more than he had at first. The northers were content in their life by the great salt sea. It was always cold, and mostly dark in the winter, but they took a good living from the sea and the hills. They never went hungry. They laughed at bad luck. They faced up to Narsook.
One morning Loon left his house and there was Elga right there before him. He said—Hello! but she ignored him, looked away, and then he was cuffed in the back: Kaktak had been behind him, coming into the house from around the corner.
Kaktak glared at him as he regained his footing.—Why did you say anything to her? he said in his tongue, perfectly comprehensible to Loon.—You know you aren’t to speak to the women.
Loon nodded, looking down.—She was just there. Sorry.
Kaktak kept staring at him.—Why did you go back for that other captive? That was none of your affair. You leave the other captives to us, understand?
—Yes.
—Good. Because I want to take you out with me. You pull hard. But we’ll leave you in the house if you do anything more like this.
—I understand, Loon said, still looking down, his cheeks burning.
Kaktak went into the house, taking a last look at Elga, who had kept walking toward the women’s house.
Loon resolved to keep a stone face and do what he was told and nothing more.
Late in the third month of the new year, Kaktak and some of the other northers instructed Loon to haul a sled loaded with firewood and bags and follow them as they climbed up the nearest valley onto the ice wall itself. Now we go up in the wind, they told Loon as they left camp.
To get up the steep side of the ice wall, they ascended one of the hilltops flanking their valley, and followed a ridge from that hilltop north and higher, until they were overlooking the ravines on each side. This ridge ran right up into the massive wall of ice, which stood above them tilted back a bit, gray with rubble and dirt and dust, and riven by cracks and melt lines that were blue in their depths. As high as they were on the ridge, the ice still bulked over their heads, and they could not see the high plateau that must be up there. But here they could see that the ice sloped steeply down into the ravines to each side of them, making fat tongues of ice that the jende called glaciers. These ice slopes ended either in clean walls of ice, like the one east of their camp, or in curving bars of rubble and milky gray ponds.
Now the jende making this ascent led the way in a traverse up the side of the glacier to the east of the ridge, moving up on ice intermixed with rocks of all sizes. It was possible to find good footing on rock after rock, as most of the stones were more than half-buried in the ice; they must have warmed up enough by day to melt the ice under them enough to sink into it a little, and then at night they froze in place, and eventually they sank too deep in the ice to warm up in the sun anymore and stayed stuck where they were. So the men could traverse up the ice slope easily on these rock steps, and after a while, as they got higher, the slope lay back.
Hauling a loaded sled up this traverse after them proved difficult, and the jende came back once to help Loon drag it up an ice channel between two rocks, then lift it up over some others. But soon enough they were all on top of the glacier, where they headed north up a slight rise onto the ice wall proper, with Loon hauling the sled behind them.
When they came onto the ice plateau at the top of the wall, they stopped and looked back south, down to the hills and the steppe and the big snowy valley, and the frozen curve at the edge of the great sa
lt sea, the whitest white of all, with the blue of its water beyond. Loon had never seen the great salt sea look anything like so big, it was stunning to see it from this high up, extending west and south with no sign at all of any shore to the west. The world was huge.
The ice on top of the plateau rose and fell somewhat like the moors north of their home camp. As they walked north over this ice, Loon could hear the ice shift and breathe. Ah: it was alive. A white cold thing of the north, devouring the world. It spoke in low heavy creaks, also cracks, also shuddering booms, as low as any sound he had ever heard.
The ice plateau was not at all like land covered by a winter blanket of snow. The ice was almost all bare ice, mostly white, but in some places blue, in others clear. It undulated in ways that ground never did, nor the great salt sea; the rises and dips were something between hills and waves, but neither. In a few places it was perfectly flat, but mostly it was rounded up or down. Here and there it shattered to a rubble that resembled a close-packed array of smooth-edged ice blades. Little creeks of water cut the ice now and then, and these flowed downward, of course, but curving in ways that creeks on land would never have thought to go. When the jende wanted to cross these streams but they were too wide to jump over, they followed them downstream rather than upstream, because soon enough they always disappeared down a hole in the ice, the creek’s water swirling down into icy blue depths with a fearful clatter. The men kept a good distance from these round holes, and spoke apologies to the talkative ice for bothering it with their passing. They also avoided the areas of shattered ice, which came in patches.