Aurorarama (31 page)

That would have been unfair, really. Trouble was as much in front of him as it was behind. Passing under the narrow archway that cut through the ramparts of the glacial fringe and heading toward Mushroom Point, he was now entering the hard, hummocky, hillocky stretch of his trip and he could feel the
Kinngait
snort and vibrate unpleasantly on the uneven ice. The carbon-arc searchlight at the bow showed nothing but a
landscape that was about as easy to skate upon as the broken lumps of a gigantic sugar bowl.

But Brentford had a secret weapon upon his nose: Second Sight goggles. They allowed him, through some cutting of their Iceland-spar lenses, to foresee obstacles before he arrived at them. It only worked, however, if a few bothersome conditions were met: continuous scanning of the surrounding area (hence the half-circular windshield of the ship and the serious risk of a stiff neck), as steady a speed as possible (no mean feat in itself), and, the most mysterious and exacting of them all, possession of at least one quarter Highland Scottish blood.

Brentford Orsini had plenty of that fluid, being related through his mother (though he had inherited from her more insight than Second Sight) to the Mackays of Anticosti Island, the very house of the Nova Scotia baronetcy. By some fold in the fabric of things, Anticosti had always been known to the native Innu as Notiskuan, “the place where bears are hunted,” and this was where his mother had indeed met and made herself bearable to a polar Orsini. His mother’s mother was a Matheson of Cape Breton, and Matheson meant “son of the bear,” exactly what the Orsini heir apparent, then, was to the second power. There was some transcendence in such coincidences, no doubt, and Brentford liked to think about them, or would have liked to, if he had not had to steer, “by his strong arm,” as the Mackay motto boasted, the ship away from the ice boulders that jumped up in the searchlight. The Matheson motto was
Fac et Spere
, “Do and Hope,” and seemed good advice for the time being.

The Second Sight goggles were useful but exhausting to use. After hours of searching and finding roundabout ways through the messy maze, Brentford often had to slow down, stop, and take a few minutes of nauseated rest in total darkness, or cup his head in his hands and slowly turn it from left to right, trying
to alleviate the ache in his crackling cervical discs. He could hear all around him the ice crunching like splintered bones and the assassin cold mindlessly whistling a tuneless song as it tried to get inside the cabin. But soon Brentford had to get up and shuffle back to the helm, his shoulders and his eyes still painful from the strain.

He did not go as fast as he had expected to, but it was the number one rule of any arctic trip that expectations were worthless and that everything that could go wrong would eventually do so. He had now about five days to get to the pole, which could be done, depending on the ice, and provided he lost no time. A full day of sailing, if it could be called that, had taken him only fifty miles closer to his target, but these had been, he hoped, the hardest miles.

He tried to sleep for a few hours, but he could not find the switch to turn off the lamp in his head that was called Sybil. He remained seated and shivering in the cabin, with only his breath for company, making out through the thick blurry windshield the rough unfinished shapes of angry, growling, roaring ice sculptures mutely howling at the moon. This was pure Phobetor territory, here, a nightmarish wilderness with none of Phantasus’ creatures to animate it, the true kingdom of Icelus, as Phobetor was known among the Gods. If Brentford peered into the landscape long enough, he could see, like many explorers before him, something like the outlines of a city emerging from the icy pandemonium: buildings out of ice blocks, domelike hillocks, razor-sharp spires of crystal, the dark canals of water leads. It occurred to him that the icescape tried to imitate New Venice, unless New Venice, in its moonlit marble whiteness, was but one more dream mirage from the mind of Icelus. Maybe there was a message in this metamorphosis about how useless or impossible it was to go away, or about how badly he already missed the place. For a while, he was tempted to go
back, but somehow that demanded even more fuss than continuing on. He knew well that he was, quite literally, pursuing a dream, but this did not make it any easier to call it quits, when everything else seemed to be lost.

He was half asleep when the dawn caught him by surprise, a drowned pale sun that rolled slowly on the horizon like a coin about to fall. Mumbling about losing precious time, he shook off sleep and went out to do the chores, defrosting the windshield, scrubbing the runners and greasing the cast-iron shoes with a mixture of tar, tallow, and stearine, checking that the hulls and the rudder-skate had not suffered any damage beyond a few scrapes and minor blows. The air was so clear that he could see for miles a landscape as precise as a painted miniature, with distant sheets of ice flashing like planted mirror shards, and breathing it turned his lungs inside out. But that felt good, somehow.

He took out the sextant and theodolite to try to take his bearings, because the constant search for a passage and the effect of the drift were likely to have made him stray off course. Under these latitudes, the compass indicated a stubborn southwestern direction, and even travelling at night, the stars could not be depended upon with Polaris too high overhead to be seen. If he was right, he had been carried away to the east, but not to an extent that rendered his trip more absurd that it already was. So he kept on.

On this second day, the going was getting somehow smoother, with less steering around and more sastruga snow. At some point, the
Kinngait
even picked up speed, and the landscape jolted past in a blur of blue. Under the whirr of the fan blades, Brentford could hear the crackling and ringing of the runners, the spraying of crushed gems they spurted in their wake. In front of him, under the bow, the faint shadow of the ship, the rows and rows of swallowed rollers, the complicated lines of
cracks quickly tangling and unravelling themselves wove a moving web that lulled and mesmerized him. The
Kinngait
went on steadily enough, except for some unexpected bumps that woke Brentford up as he dozed off at the helm. This was where he saw her for the first time.

A woman hurried on the ice in front of him, either guiding or fleeing the ship. He first took her for some eddy of snow, but even without his goggles he could clearly make out her white shape against the bluish ice, the train of her misty dress a hundred yards ahead of him, going as fast as the
Kinngait
, so that it seemed impossible to reduce the distance that separated them. It was of course a hallucination. These were inevitable, but he had not thought that they would occur so early in the trip. He felt lucid enough, though, but lucidity required that, lost in the middle of the paleocrystal sea, you did not trust your own lucidity. The woman slipped behind a boulder and did not reappear.

For a few hours, that is. Twilight soon followed dawn, and his searchlight now etching deeper, ink-black shadows in the icescape as it jumped past and dodged the yacht. At some point, when the night had risen all around him, he caught a glimpse of her again, as she advanced in front of him, almost beyond the reach of the light, straight ahead through the yellowish ice and snow. She was, it seemed, running on her bare feet, but he could not be quite sure of that. He could not see her face beneath her hood, but he figured out this much: if he thought about Sybil, then she would be Sybil; if he thought about Helen, she would be Helen; if he thought of the Ghost Lady, then it would be her as well; it could even be Seraphine, his first love, if his spirits ever went that low. The choice, he felt, was pretty much his, and it was a cruel choice to have to make.

What surprised him most was that—as he lost her for a while, caught another glimpse of her, then lost her again, then found her once more, as if she had been waiting for him—he
had not done anything but follow her, without asking himself any questions. She could well have been leading him to his death, toward some crevice or some rising ridge he would see just at the last moment before crashing into it. The siren of the frozen sea. But still he followed on, not even persuaded that she would lead him somewhere, but just because it was the thing to do. He had come here because a dream had told him to do so, and for all he knew, while he was at it, he might as well chase a ghost, faithful to the feeling of love and longing he felt toward her flight. He did not even want to catch up with her. That was how he understood what William Whale had told him, in his own way, about Peary or Cook not
really
wanting to go to the real pole. Because there is no real pole, or if there is one, it’s only real as long as you don’t get there. You destroy it, and yourself, by reaching it.

As soon as he started to muse on this and lose his focus, he felt his left runner crack against some treacherous hummock, and the ship suddenly spin out of control. He threw himself on the port side to act as a counterweight, but it was too late, the
Kinngait
was capsizing, its right runner sliding as well, the windmill blades toppling and about to crash and break themselves on the ice. His only hope was that they would not burst through the roof and kill him as the ice yacht tumbled liked a rolled die.

The last thing Brentford saw before the searchlight broke was the girl standing on a hillock, slowly turning toward him, her hand pulling her hood backward, and revealing herself as totally faceless.

T
hen the wolves came.
Kajjait
. A pack of a dozen famished-looking silvery beasts that sniffed Gabriel’s beheaded body and started to tear it apart, growling hungrily, their jaws snapping with excitement.

Once the thick clothes had been torn to rags, they started gnawing at the balls. “He who liveth by the sword …,” thought the head, shaken awake from its slumber at the first bite. The head, which dared not call itself Gabriel anymore, could still feel the teeth sinking into the distant body and the flesh tearing off, ripped apart in tattered shreds. It hurt, but in an eerie way, as phantom limbs are said to do, but also, because of the cold, maybe less excruciatingly than the brain would have expected. It was like being operated on while under anaesthesia, when the
numbed body becomes an abstract map of muscles and nerves, reacting unpleasantly to the surgery, in a dull, precise way that sets one’s teeth on edge, more an expectation of suffering than an actual pain. Still, this relative loss of sensation carried with it a certain anxiety, as if the head felt buried alive and was knocking itself repeatedly against a coffin lid made of its own skull bone.

The head did not know whether it should close its eyes or not. The sight was awful but fascinating, as the body was flayed and mangled, the limbs jerking from the tugging of the wolves. One of them ran a few steps away, the left arm between its teeth, the gloved hand tightly curled in a fist. Gabriel’s head could see the shoulder joint protruding out of the trunk, the ribs appearing on the side, even whiter than the snow. The blood on the ground had curdled purple under the northern lights.

One of the wolves, turning toward the head, finally noticed it, half buried in the snow. Their eyes met. But, instead of coming closer for a sniff, the wolf suddenly growled, looking at some point above it. The other wolves moved nervously, casting glances in the same direction, moving in ripples of fur as if grouping to attack. A groan resounded above Gabriel’s head, and a shadow covered it. The brain remembered the story of a dead explorer who’d been eaten by his own pack, except for his head, which was found being watched over by the lead dog, in some token of loyalty, or perhaps it was waiting for the head to give it an ultimate order. Now some animal was protecting Gabriel’s head as well: the wolves retreated and hurried on to finish the rest of their quarry, dragging it a few inches here and there with scraping sounds on the snow, cleaning up the carrion in a messy way that left strips of bloody muscle dangling from broken bones. They looked up from time to time, baring their fangs at the shadow but not daring to move toward it, as it towered above Gabriel’s head. Was it a bear? But a bear
would have attacked, and why would a bear have cared about the head anyway? To reciprocate the pains the Eskimo took to groom and feed the head of a killed
nanuk
, so that the beast would not speak ill of the hunters when it reached its own afterlife? Whatever it was, its looming presence spoiled the party. Sometimes, a few of the wolves tried to get closer to the head, then retreated again, fearing to lose some fine morsel of the half-eaten carcass.

Then, all of sudden, as if they had silently plotted among themselves, they attacked together. Before they could reach it, the shadow jumped over the head, a white furry beast knocking the wolves about with its powerful hind legs or its swinging tail, sending them rolling in the snow before they had a chance to bite. One of them, though, circled and darted at Gabriel’s head, catching it by the earflaps of its hat. The white shape turned around and, with a thunderous roar, scared the wolf so badly it dropped the head, sending it rolling into the nearby crevasse. The head plummeted down, having just enough time to notice that a disarticulated body was lying down in the crack.