A Discovery of Strangers (21 page)

They both contemplate her hand pointed into the knife as it cuts the full curled stomach down from its hanging cords. And she may already be singing, as her mother once sang, cooking, or the song her father sang waiting for this animal to dream its way into his snare, into his patient hunting,

The land around me, everywhere
Is rich with your food,
Such beautiful moss
On the land holding me here,
You will want to set your pointed feet,
Your moist nose
In this delicate moss, you will want to come.
Come to me here!

And in her song, which he cannot recognize, Robert Hood sings as well, the acceptable melancholy of the English manse knit into each cell of his personal, endless longing,

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss within the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise,
Doth ask … a drink…

And here the rhythm of her unintelligibilty becomes strangely tangled for him into

I, said the Fly,
With my little eye
And I saw him…

While beside them, unheeded, in her sleep far beyond anything Robert Hood will find imaginable in the quick, desperate brevity of his life, Birdseye murmurs sounds neither she nor Greenstockings fully comprehend. Though they both hear them into existence syllable by deadly syllable. Her breath brushing the fur raises no fire there that anyone can yet see; the inevitabilities already coming there still invisible, the future still hidden though already born. Like the great north lights flaming in the sky at night: always there but so rarely visible to a human eye.

A figure on a wide cliff where the River of Copperwoman plunges over itself, where the river continues to disappear north into mist. Is it a large animal lying down there, or sitting? Skulls and long bones are scattered on the cliff, human bones. One by one men appear, climbing up, burdened with black hats. And two canoes with six legs each, climbing ponderously. The figure does not move.

Hats and canoes circle, the mist from mouths moving through cloudy mosquitoes. An arm, a hand, and the figure falls over — it is an old woman dead, the braided leather rope that strangled her fear still rigid in her rigid hand. Nothing can be said here, nothing explained, nothing that can possibly advise or guide anyone. Only briefly mosquitoes and moss, and the level tundra sloping away into an openness so long that even eyes taught distance by the sea cannot comprehend its blue dimension from among these skulls big and little. A feud? A raid? A war, a massacre licked clean by wind and animal, hard in the sun and snow and so perfect but for a knife’s gouge, a splintered hollow of clubs? Bones broken and sucked hollow as throats. Enemies. A simple comprehensible word.

Endless enemies. Like the endless sea they have already spent two years searching to reach again over land they have fervently wished, nay, prayed every night, would finally relent and cease to be there — always before them. The hats turn among the skulls, trying to separate various horizons, searching to discover the prayed-for undrinkable sea smashing itself steadily upwards upon the stones of the ocean. Where is the trackless sea where they can, with all their articulated skill, manipulate wind and current to carry them where — in the small words that they carry like a bound sentence everywhere with them — they were so comfortably ordered to go? From there, and only from there, can they permit themselves to try to return to where they came from. Water water, where is the water, will they be forced for ever to look for the great stinking water?

When they have walked far enough, only a little farther, they do discover the sea. Where they recognize, then, it has always been. And also occasional ice. True, when with rejoicing they first discern that Royal Navy blue, which they know instantly belongs to them — it is always theirs everywhere on the immense globe of the earth — they decide that their great ships can sail the channels here between sandbars and shoals and strips of rock pointing north; and they are reasonably ecstatic, as behooves them. They are again at sea, all’s right with the world.

In the perpetual brightness of July arctic night, both north and east ahead of them, what they consider to be the open sea glows from somewhere beyond where they can see, a strange iridescence of white as though the moon were burning like a sun just below and all along the horizon. But those may well be Northern Lights, yes, undoubtedly that is what it is, that must be recorded, another new and fascinating manifestation of the aurora borealis in conjunction with the yet-unsearched Polar Sea. They have been accumulating words about those lights since they left the Orkneys, so write it down, notes on “sea horizon glow” for further analysis, soon, when there will be time next winter.

And once they have named that iridescence, tamed it with a blurted sound, they are again content not to recognize what they can see; to ignore what the wind is breathing over them. And the icepans, small bergs, rotten chunks really, dripping and never flat but often tilted picturesquely on edge in the near water, which is never blue but black, ice always lingering a bit as if waiting for a glimpse of them when they round a cape, and then gone shyly every morning — long ago they saw true icebergs, and these are mere playthings for small animals like seals, toys to anchor terns — neither of which, oddly, they have yet spied anywhere, though they would certainly try to kill any living thing they saw and even more gladly eat if only any appeared.

And then, one morning out of silent fog, comes the Everlasting Ice.

They recognize it instantly, for it does not come to them smooth and flat the way cold would skin over English water. This ice is no skin at all; from out of the fog it is merely, implacably, itself, bristling like an emerging avalanche of jagged stone, a coming cataclysm that everywhere shades into other tinges of something that nevertheless remains grotesquely, featurelessly white, off-white with the grim age of broken bone smashed and crushed down upon itself and re-formed again out of its crushing; which, if a man stumbled into, he would have to twist, clamber, slip, as between blades or spears — no one can walk on teeth, or needles — and surely vanish pronged in three gasps. Or a tall ship to its very mast in as many minutes, shredded into splinters.

This ice does not come silently, without motion. No. Carried by its own particular wind and water destiny, it approaches muttering, or passes them faster than a man can run along the twisted sand. Where it wasn’t yesterday it may be today, or not be tomorrow. In the bright, temporary disorientation of a summer midnight fog they were forced to hear it, but now they see what they heard without comprehension: out of freezing fog they see the ice grinding, crunching, groaning, cracking, eating itself from horizon and water into existence before them. Already there is barely enough open water left to launch the narrow canoes. While they stare, horrified, the ice advances, heaves itself out in long, rending groans, hesitates and backs off and sighs to a tinkle and splash like frozen bells, then heaves forwards again, groaning, gouging up the naked shingle. Already it splinters and falls into cliffs over itself, humping at them and their canoes. It is ramming ridges up under their very tents on the slender beach, black sand and stone avalanches.

Behold: ice has discovered itself to These English at last. It is seeking them out. Behold: the Everlasting Ice is advancing upon them by land.

Hood tries to feed Greenstockings with the silver spoon he has carried inside his clothes from England, but she ducks her head aside. The thick fall of her hair swings to hide her face.

“Just purse your lips a little,” he says as her face emerges again, “it’s hot, an ‘oo’ like this, then it won’t clink against your beautiful … teeth.”

He is almost laughing at “beautiful”, which he has never said aloud to a woman before, and at his shaky hand, at the metallic weight with which he is offering her own food to her wet, open mouth. Even stranger — the gelatinous food scooped steaming from a cooked or smoked caribou stomach; as if English silver could ever place that savage concoction acceptably on white linen, lift it to perfect teeth and without a thought his mouth blurts aloud, “Haggis — Scots and haggis!”

She raises her face to him to catch the corner of his astonishment at whatever he has said. Laughter pulls her mouth wide at his exploding breath, at this game of eating, together, learning with simple silly laughter what they have both done since
before consciousness. But he seems to think he is teaching her, and she will play anything as easily as parting her lips for him.

“Yes,” he says, “o-o-o … round and pursed, like that, yes,” moving the spoon upwards and not comprehending what he is doing, knowing nothing of how she is shaping his name as round and long between her lips to meet his spoon. Beyond him the capricious fire flares high in a strand of smoke as his hand with the laden spoon, and her eyes tighten with laughter bursting from her, as it trembles towards her — is it the fire or his excitement? — but her mouth opens to accept it for certainly he will feed her, she very nearly touches his hand with hers to slow him down, to breathe him over it slowly.

“Ho-o-o-o-o,” she blows. And he has become so delicate she can touch his hand and the spoon waits for her, entering between her lips into her hollow mouth. “O-o-o-o … d.” Closing around the spoon.

Robert Hood has never fed a child, and certainly never a woman. This spoon slipping along her tongue as if it were his hand has never been in anyone’s mouth but his own. And hers — like his heart bursting, he wants his hand inside her mouth.

“It was given to me…” he says with extreme care, though his heart staggers. “Who fed Cock Robin … who fed … who fed.…” The spoon’s English shape vanishing perfectly in the red firelight of her red mouth. He lifts fingers to her lips, tips moist against her mouth, and a shadow of red along the silver curve withdrawing between her folding lips, which are all he sees, swallowing as he senses her swallow. The spoon lies uplifted between his fingers, with the complete weight of her body beside him in the fiery cone of the lodge. He cannot comprehend what is happening.

He sees himself seated beside her, his hand still up, and in the chimney corner answers his mother so eagerly,

I, said the Fish,
With my little dish,
And I caught his blood.

And he is on the wharf where the frigate H.M.S
Impérieuse
is tied, her massive guns hidden though he will hear and feel them all bellow soon enough when the immense masts shatter over him and a ripping splinter skewers a terrified sailor crouched one instant behind the smoking gun and the next flying over the sea as if he had sprouted slivered wings — but he is mumbling, avoiding something worse than that memory with mumbles, he mumbles like her mother under them, somewhere, among the furs,

“My godfather, eight years ago, on St. Bartholomew’s Day just … before I went to sea … fourteen and I was … see, St. Bartholomew’s knife here on the spoon handle, tradition says he was killed by a knife, it’s … I dreamed a silver wolf … godfathers give you this in my land, a silver spoon and best wishes on your saint’s day, its silver jaw full of long teeth, when you begin your … career, the navy for me, and so I have this … this silver.…”

Her hand lifts the heavy spoon from him, her fingers hide the knife engraved along its handle. She tells him what he must hear and will never understand until it is much too late, a knowledge she already knows with an overwhelming sorrow she can never give him, necessary gift though it is.

“You must eat now,” she tells him, dipping into the stomach she has cut open. “You will not die like that here. I have heard that.”

She concentrates on the spoon and his bent nose, his lips opening soft and full like any woman’s. And tells him further:

“My snow friend, no knife waits for you. My mother is dreaming all your travels, you can hear your journey, there, and you will die. That’s what she’s already said. She has not quite dreamed to your death, not yet, but I tell you your heart will never fold around a knife, not here, you will walk and walk over our land until hunger meets you, but now I feed you, now, and you may never starve either, so eat now, you may not ever be cut, nor starve, no.”

And even as she speaks this, she inevitably sees what she has so far avoided. And her eyes fill with tears until finally she can look into his eyes: blurred as if seen through stony ice. For an instant she believes she recognizes that he will freeze — certainly cold will clutch and devastate him before anything else, the river may tear him apart between the ice teeth of its rapids, and when she walks there beneath her feet she will see his bulging face again, his destroyed eyes — but his eyes are before her, concentrated on her, intensely blue, studying her as he accepts each spoonful she offers him as though he would gladly swallow her too. He has never smelled or tasted anything so moistly delicious; in the officers’ mess all they eat while trying to contain their endless shivering is red meat boiled or roasted by Hepburn out of every recognizability except grey slop or charcoal. He would happily eat here for ever, the Bury manse stone chimneys suddenly as trivial as twigs, if she fed him what she has fermented and cooked of caribou stomach moss and juices, bone marrow, blood, tender bits of nose and muscle and liver, a curdle of fawn’s milk, the fat she has shredded and washed in her own sweet saliva. He has never sensed such texture
in his mouth, this evanescence she offers him slides along his teeth, his throat.