PROLOGUE
White Bear
EVEN THOUGH THE
temperature had not risen above freezing in nine months, the bear
carcass was not frozen. When Sadaluk, the Listener of the Ice
Trappers, poked it with the narwhal tusk he used as a walking
stick, the flesh rippled beneath the coarse white pelt. It was a
full-grown male, past its prime, with battle scars denting its
snout and a ragged strip of cartilage in place of its left ear.
Dead for at least thirty days, Sadaluk
decided, squatting by the creature’s head. The eyes and soft tissue
around the muzzle had mummified in the dry air, and drift snow had
compacted in the Y of its splayed rear legs.
You did not need to
be a listener to know it for an ill omen.
It was Nolo who had
found the bear. Nolo’s dogs had sniffed out the carcass—most
unluckily for Nolo as they were leashed to his sled at the time. In
their excitement, the dogs capsized the sled and scattered Nolo’s
load of willow cords and blocks of frozen whale oil. Nolo was
thrown from the runner, landing hard on the river ice. By the time
he got to his feet, the dogs and the empty sled had reached the
carcass a quarter league downstream. Straightaway Nolo knew
something was wrong. Hungry dogs didn’t stand three feet away from
a potential meal and howl like half-crazed wolves. Hungry dogs ate.
Nolo was young and still distracted by the pleasures of his new
wife, but even he knew that.
Glancing at the
rising sun, Sadaluk drew himself upright. His elbow joints
creaked—a recent development that both bothered and delighted him.
Age was his stock-in-trade, and it did not hurt a listener to have
a body that snapped as it moved. Reminding the young of their youth
was one of his tasks. Still, it did not mean that he liked lying
within his sleeping skins every morning, waiting for his body to
start acting like something that might actually take his
weight.
Sadaluk drilled his
stick into the snow, cleaning. Behind him he was aware that Nolo
and the other five hunters were waiting for him to speak. As was
proper, they stood in a half circle facing into the sun. All knew
better than to cast a shadow on a dead bear.
When he was ready
Sadaluk turned to look at them. The river’s slip-stream riffled
their caribou pelts and auk feathers, and blew their exhaled breath
against their faces. All were winter-lean and strong-bodied. Kill
notches on their spears told of varying degrees of bravery and
luck. Nolo was the youngest, but none of the six were over thirty.
Their faces were still, but Sadaluk could see through the holes in
their eyes to the fear that slid between their
thoughts.
“Nolo. Retrieve your
dog whip.” Sadaluk pointed to the strip of salt-cured sealskin that
lay curled in the hackled ice at the river shore. It had been left
behind yesterday in the excitement of finding the
bear.
Crouching to control
the length of his shadow, Nolo shuffled upriver. For some reason he
was wearing his formal dance coat, sewn from thin late-summer
hides. Sadaluk could see the tooth marks around the cuffs where
Nolo’s wife had chewed the hide into softness. As the young hunter
knelt to retrieve the dog whip, the Listener addressed the
remaining five men.
With a backward flick
of his stick, he said, “I name this bear Saddlebag. He was
delivered by the gods. Inside him lies a message. Shura. Puncture
the hide.”
The Listener glared
at the hunters. The bear scared them, and that meant he, Sadaluk,
had to scare them more. When Shura hesitated to do his bidding, the
Listener spider-jumped toward him. It was a small trick, and
doubtless all gathered on the river this day had seen it before,
yet five grown men stepped back in astonishment and fear.
Old man, eh? Sadaluk thought with a
small nod of satisfaction. Old and bold.
Sneaky and creaky.
Scared and unprepared.
But he could not let
them know it.
“Prick the belly,” he
commanded.
The morning sun
washed the river channel with silver light. Snow, sucked dry of
moisture by half a year of glacial winds, drifted in the air like
goosedown. The village lay three hours by dogsled to the west. To
the east loomed the towering mountains that clansmen named the
Coastal Ranges, but Ice Trappers called by their real name, the
Steps to God. Underfoot, the river ice was frozen to a depth of
five feet. Water flowed darkly beneath the surface, fed by deep and
unknowable springs. Tracks scored lightly into the surface ice told
of dozens of journeys to and from the village. Winter was long, and
sometimes a man or woman simply loaded a sled, harnessed their
dogs, and took off. Sometimes the sledders never came back . . .
but Sadaluk would not think about that now.
His thoughts must be
with the bear.
Shura Broken Nose was
the hunter with the most respect in the village. The kill notches
on his spear stretched from the seal gut bindings that held the
obsidian point in its socket all the way down to the bear foot
grip. Normally at this time of year Shura and the other men would
be out on the sea ice, hunting seal. Hunting had been bad this
year, though, and the sea ice had formed early and grown as wide as
a new country: the Land of Missing Seals.
Leveling the spear at
shoulder height, Shura sprang toward the bear. Hoops of bone and
mica charms suspended from the hem of his coat chinked like shells.
One of the four remaining hunters inhaled sharply. Mananu, the
eldest, pressed his thumb pads into his eyelids, sealing them
closed in prayer. The spear shot forward. Air thucked as the point
punctured the hide.
A sickening squelch
was followed by the hiss of escaping gas. As Shura yanked back the
spear, black liquid fountained from the wound. It stank like
gangrene and fuel. Someone gagged. All save Sadaluk stepped back.
Downriver, Nolo loosened his grip on the dog whip, letting the hard
black leather spool onto the ice.
“Mananu,” commanded
the Listener. “Give me your horn cup.”
The bear carcass
deflated as Mananu raked beneath his caribou skins, locating his
treasured drinking cup. Gusting wind failed to blow away the
stench. Sadaluk imagined that if a man were to strike a flame at
this moment the entire river trench would ignite. He watched as the
black fluid rolled down matted fur and onto the river. It was
steaming faintly, melting the top ice as it moved.
Mananu pulled out the
fist-sized cup and handed it to the Listener without looking him in
the eye. Age had yellowed the horn. Mananu’s grandfather, Tunnu Fat
Man, had spent three days belly-down on the sea ice, pushing
himself forward with his toes to get close enough to slay the great
tusked walrus whose horn the cup was carved from. King Walrus was
the creature’s name. It weighed over two tons and provided enough
meat and blubber to feed the village during the last and hardest
month of winter. The tusks were four feet long. As was fitting they
were Tunnu’s to claim and own. Tunnu had offered the right tusk to
the Ice God, and a week later the sea ice had begun to break. The
second tusk, the left one, he kept for himself. The cup in
Sadaluk’s hand was carved from its diamond-hard base.
Closing bare fingers
around the horn, Sadaluk approached the carcass. He was a listener,
and that meant he stayed still while others moved. You can hear
what others cannot only when you make no noise yourself. Mostly he
listened to his dreams as they whispered of the future and the past
and the invisible fibers that bound both states into one. But on
days like this he listened for the heartbeat of the being that
created the world.
The Ice Trappers had
many gods—gods of ice and sky, sea and seals, fire and rain, smoke
and flies. They held power in their jurisdictions, but nowhere
else. One force beyond the realm of nature held power in all states
and territories. This force had birthed the gods. Whether it was a
god itself or something else was a question Sadaluk had no time
for. He was a man, and therefore unfit to probe the mysteries of
creation.
He could, however,
hear them.
Kneeling by the
bear’s sleek white head, Sadaluk let the sounds of the river drift
from his mind. The squeak of ice beneath the hunters’ boots, the
tinkle of charms, and the shuss of the wind faded. All grew quiet.
Black liquid trickled from the wound. This close, Sadaluk could
smell its true nature.
Drink.
The Listener of the
Ice Trappers leaned forward and pressed the cup into the bear’s
coarse underfur, just below the wound. With his free hand he
massaged the belly. Liquid flowed. Oily green streaks flashed on
its surface as it rolled into the cup. A gobbet of soft black blood
plopped into the tusk, splashing Sadaluk’s hand. The substance was
warm. It tingled as its fluids evaporated.
It was alcohol, but
it was not pure. The bear had died a month earlier, from
what—starvation, disease, old age—Sadaluk did not know. Nothing had
attacked it. Beneath its fur the black hide was intact. It had died
whole; its torso sealed. Dense fur had insulated the internal
organs from the cold, and soft tissue had not frozen. Heart muscle,
kidney fat, lung tissue, sinew, offal, gristle had liquefied. And
then fermented. It started in the stomach, in the curdled mix of
bile and partially digested food that was known as chyme. Acids
continued working after death, releasing heat. Usually the heat
dissipated—most carcasses were too small or their pelts too thin to
retain heat—but occasionally with caribou and white bears, the heat
did not escape. It built.
Sadaluk had come
across only two such carcasses before. The first was when he was
apprenticed to Lootavek, the one who had listened before him.
Lootavek had ordered hunters to drag the bloated caribou carcass
onto the sea ice and thrust it through a seal hole. That way the
two most powerful gods—the gods of ice and sea—might annul the bad
omen. All, including Sadaluk, agreed the strategy worked, for a
week later the tribe’s second best hunter died after stepping on
grease ice that was masquerading as shorefast ice with a covering
of new snow. To lose one man, however valuable, to such an ill omen
meant the tribe had escaped lightly.
The outcome with the
second carcass had been less fortunate.
Two children had
stumbled upon a dead she-bear while out sledding in the frost slags
south of the Whale Gate. Just as today, when he had been roused in
the dark hour before dawn, Sadaluk had been summoned to view the
carcass. Unlike today, he had been young and untested, and still in
possession of two fine earlobes. Lootavek had died the previous
summer, and Sadaluk had been anxious not to make any
mistakes.
So of course he had
gone right ahead and made some. He had not listened, that was the
thing. When faced with the dead bear—the mummified head and soft,
bloated torso—he had let the sound of his own fear drown out any
message from the gods. Foolishly, he had supposed that because
Lootavek’s solution had worked so well that the best course would
be to duplicate his plan. Sadaluk too had ordered hunters to haul
the bear onto the ice. And then stood by and watched as the seal
hole was enlarged with picks. Only when the hunters began to wedge
the carcass through the opening, did the Listener feel his first
thrill of apprehension.
The hunters had been
lazy and the hole was barely wide enough to take the bear. Pressure
had to be exerted. One of the men clamped his big meaty hand on the
bear’s snout and shoved down with all his might. Something tore.
The hide split open like an overripe fruit and black oily liquid
sprayed the hunters.
Sadaluk never forgot
the smell. Forty-two years later and it still stank the same. If a
god rotted it would give off fuel. And that fuel would smell like
this.
“Nolo,” the Listener
snapped, adressing the young hunter who was still frozen in place
upriver. “Close your mouth and use your feet. Join your
brothers.”
As Nolo tucked the
dog whip into his belt and started down the ice, the Listener used
his stick to lever himself to standing. Tremors passed through the
liquid in the cup as he rose. Forty-two years ago he had made a
mistake. Drink, the gods had whispered,
and in the arrogance of youth he assumed he had misheard
them.
A death occurred in
the family of every man who came in contact with the black liquid
that day. Not just the men who were sprayed, but those who stepped
on the oil slick later and stamped black footprints around the
hole. The deaths occurred over a single season. Newborns did not
take the teat. Scrapes and knife nicks grew gangrene. Grand-mothers
hacked up blood. Hunters ran out of luck on treacherous spring ice.
Seventeen died in all, and the Listener accepted responsibility for
every one of them. The Ice Trappers had not blamed him. People who
lived on the edge of the world, in a land that lay frozen for three
out of four seasons, were not accustomed to laying blame. The
expectation of death was always present. Trust had been lost,
though. Enthusiasm for his ceremonies waned. Journeys were
undertaken in spite of his warnings. Hunters went out on the sea
ice without his talismans. When strangers appeared at the Whale
Gate they were not automatically escorted into the Listener’s
presence for questioning.
Trust had eventually
been regained, but Sadaluk did not fool himself over the reason for
it. The accepted way of regaining trust with an Ice Trapper was to
outlive him. Sadaluk No Ears had excelled at that. All the hunters
who had helped haul the bear to the seal hole were now dead. Many
of their sons and daughters were also dead. To those still living,
the story of the bear had lost its sting. Sadaluk’s youth had been
emphasized. The dangers of not following the guidance of gods had
been lost.
None of the hunters
gathered here today had been alive back then. As Sadaluk raised the
horn to his lips, he looked from man to man. Some were stoic, some
wary, some afraid. Trust was the common thread, steadying each of
them on the ice. The worst kind of luck lay on the frozen river at
their feet, but their wise and crazy Listener would take care of it
for them.
Fools, Sadaluk wanted to cry out. Do you think I have the might to stop the world from
ending?
The Listener glanced
at the bear. Its small eyes were sealed closed. They used you, he told it silently.
Just like they’ll use me.
Sadaluk pushed the
walrus cup against his lower lip and did not breathe. When he was
ready he exhaled . . . and then inhaled. Fumes sucked up his
nostrils by the contraction of his diaphragm entered his brain. It
was as if a giant squid had injected him with ink. The blackness
was instant. Dizzying. It killed all information entering his brain
from his eyes. He had been prepared for something . . . but how
could you prepare for a visitation from the gods?
Drink.
Opening his mouth,
the Listener tilted the cup. As the liquid hit his tongue he had a
sense that everything was tilting—his body, the river ice, the
world as he knew it—sliding out of control and into free
fall.
The Listener fell. He
had lived a lifetime, and now he fell one.
His mind was a ball
of mercury—heavier than his body and dropping at a greater rate. He
experienced a small wrenching sensation as his thoughts broke away
from his flesh. The blackness intensified. It was absolute and
unbounded. Sadaluk perceived that time was its measure, not
distance. No man with a notched stick could record its depth. It
existed without end, cold and inert: the exhaled breath of
creation.
The Listener fell
through it with no expectation of landing. His senses fled from him
in an order that seemed to make sense: sight, taste, touch, smell.
Before his ears gave out he heard energy crackling as it jumped
between states.
Sadaluk’s thoughts
came in broken spurts. Did I drink poison? Am
I dead? The gods were not benign, he knew that. One man’s
fate was nothing to them. He could fall for an eternity and they
would not blink an eye. Yet there was something turning in the
darkness that was beyond them. Something infinitely old and
massive. Sadaluk remembered a tale Lootavek had told him about the
ships that sailed from the Fortress Isles. Their turning circles
were so large that they would not stop if a man went overboard. By
the time a ship completed a full circle, the man would be long
dead. Sadaluk was struck with the idea that the presence in the
darkness turned for no one. Not even a god.
Yet it was in motion.
Sadaluk could feel the pressure building: a mountain bearing down
on a square foot of earth. The presence had an absoluteness of
purpose: it claimed. Space. Existence. Time. Its outriders might be
evil, cunning, savage, but the thing that moved was
implacable—merciless not because it was cruel but because it was
beyond mercy. It existed outside of nature, on a plane Sadaluk
perceived only as unknowable. He was an old man, possibly a dead
one: it wasn’t hard to accept that his mind was too small to
comprehend all things.
So he listened
instead. For thirty-five years he had listened without earlobes;
how hard could it be to listen without hearing? The habit of
stillness, the assembling of a quiet, habitable space in which to
wait for the sounds to come, was deeply entrenched in him. All he
had to do was exert his will: a relaxation of muscle, a suspension
of thought and it was done.
And Sadaluk No Ears,
son of Odo Many Fish, and Listener of the Ice Trappers, became the
first man, dead or alive, to hear the end of existence. If he’d
possessed ears it would have made them bleed. The sound was vast
and deeply alien, punctured by world-shattering booms and explosive
cracks. Everything was being ground up, sucked in and then
destroyed so completely that nothing, not even the memory of its
smallest part, remained.
Sadaluk feared for
the Ice Trappers; for Nolo and the hunters, for their wives and
children, the sled dogs, the ice bears. Himself. Images lied—you
only had to walk half a league onto the sea ice to know that—but
sound had never failed him. Sound was truth.
The Listener could
speak three languages. None of them had words to describe what
approached him. If pressed he would resort to Sull, for the Sull
were the oldest race still living in the Known Lands and their
language reflected their long association with darkness. They had a
word, mash’xa, which could not be
wholly translated. It described the state of cold oblivion that
existed before Time; the force in perfect opposition to creation.
The Sull believed that mash’xa was the
one true state of being, and that all existence was nothing more
than a struck flame that would burn until it was snuffed. Sadaluk
did not disbelieve the idea of mash’xa,
but he had long ago decided that it had no pertinence to his life.
He existed in the world of seals and men. Ice formed and broke with
the seasons. Gods were tricky, needy, seldom fair. Yet here, moving
through the darkness, was something outside his experience as Ice
Trapper and shaman, something that perhaps only the Sull could
understand. A force of pure annihilation. Mash’xa.
The concussion grew
louder. And closer. The presence, the thing that turned for no one,
was moving on a tangent to intercept him. Not to meet or
acknowledge him—Sadaluk knew better than to flatter himself with
such claims—but simply because he, the Listener of the Ice
Trappers, was falling in its path.
It was the gift of
the white bear.
Or its
curse.
Cold burns. The
Listener fell and burned. He was stripped and scoured, smelted in
the raw black furnace of extinction. A needle of ice punctured his
left eardrum. A second needle raked across his cortex, erasing
memories of winters spent on the sea ice as a boy. Down he
plummeted, screaming without words, learning all the ways a
paralyzed man feels pain.
As he drew closer to
the presence he shrank and hardened. All thoughts were blasted
away. His remaining eardrum imploded under pressure.
The quiet, habitable
space began to fade.
Sadaluk listened as
it diminished. He listened as the force that would bring down the
world passed by on its slow and unstoppable march of oblivion. He
listened. And learned.
When he woke a
lifetime later, irrevocably changed and branded, the first words
from his mouth were, “Nolo, round up the dogs. We have a journey to
begin.”
He could no longer
hear himself speak.