Dan Simmons - The Terror

When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw. The white bears will have no ice for a home, so their cubs will die. The whales and walruses will have nowhere to feed. The birds will wheel in circles and cry to the Raven for help, their breeding grounds gone.

This is the future they saw.

The sixam ieua knew that as terrible as the Tuunbaq was, this future without it – and without their cold world – would be worse.

But in the times before this should come to pass, and because the young clairvoyant men and women who were the spirit-governors-of-the-sky spoke to the Tuunbaq as only Sedna and the other spirits could – never with voices but always directly, mind to mind – the still-living God Who Walks Like a Man listened to their propositions and their promises.

The Tuunbaq , who – like all the greater inuat spirits – loves to be pampered, agreed. He would eat their offerings rather than their souls.

Over the generations, the sixam ieua clairvoyants continued to breed only with other human beings with the same skill. At an early age, each sixam ieua child gave up his or her ability to speak with his or her fellow human beings to show the God Who Walks Like a Man that they were devoted to speaking only to him, to the Tuunbaq .

Over the generations, the small families of the sixam ieua who live so much farther north than the other villages of Real People (who are still terrified of the Tuunbaq ), always making their homes on the permanently snow-and-glacier-covered earth and ice pack, became known as the God-Walking People, and even their speaking-families’ language became a strange blend of the other Real People’s tongues.

Of course, the sixam ieua themselves can speak no language – except for the clairvoyant speech of qaumaniq and angakkua , thought-sending and thought-receiving. But they are still human beings, they still love their families and belong to their larger family groups, so to speak to the other Real People, the sixam ieua men use a special sign language and the sixam ieua women tend to use the string-shape games that their mothers taught them.

Before leaving our village,

and going out onto the ice

to find the man I must marry,

the man my father and I dreamt of,

back when the paddles were clean,

my father took a dark stone, aumaa ,

and he marked each paddle.

he knew that he would not return

alive from the ice

we had both seen in our sixam ieua dreams,

the only dreams that are true,

that he, my beloved Aja,

would die out there,

at the hands of a pale-person.

since coming off the ice,

I’ve looked for that stone

in the hills

and on the river-beds,

but I have never found it.

upon my return to my people

I will find the paddle on which the aumaa

made its grey mark.

birth was a short line

at the blade tip.

but longer and above this,

death was drawn parallel.

come again! shouts the Raven.

Crozier awakes with one hell of a splitting headache.

He wakes most mornings these days with a splitting headache. One would think that with his back and chest and arms and shoulders peppered by shotgun blasts and with no fewer than three bullet wounds in his body, he’d have other pains to notice upon awakening, and while those agonies descend on him quickly enough, it’s the terrible headaches he notices first.

It reminds Crozier of all the years he drank whiskey every night and regretted it every morning after.

Sometimes he wakes, as he did this morning, with nonsense syllables and strings of meaningless words echoing in his aching skull. The words are all clickety-clack-sounding, like children making up vowel-heavy clucking noises just to find the right number of syllables for a jumping-rope song, but they seem to mean something in those few painful seconds before he comes fully awake. Crozier feels mentally tired all the time these days, as if he’s spent his nights reading Homer in Greek. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier has never in his life attempted to read Greek. Nor wanted to. He’s always left that to scholars and to poor book-obsessed souls like the old steward, Peglar’s friend, Bridgens.

This dark morning he’s awakened in their snow-house by Silence, who is using the string shapes shifting between her fingers to tell him that it is time to go seal hunting again. She is already dressed in her parka and disappears out the entrance tunnel as soon as she’s finished communicating with him.

Grumpy that there is to be no breakfast – not even some cold seal blubber from last night’s dinner – Crozier dresses himself, pulling on his parka and mittens last, and crawls downhill out through the entrance passage that faces south, away from the wind.

Outside in the dark, Crozier gets carefully to his feet – his left leg still sometimes refuses to accept his weight in the morning – and looks around. Their snow-house glows slightly from the blubber lamp that is left burning to keep the temperature up inside even while they are away. Crozier clearly remembers the long sledge voyage that brought them to this place. He remembers watching, fur-bundled on his sledge and as helpless as he had been those many weeks ago, with something like awe as Silence had spent hours digging out and then constructing this snow-house.

Since then, the mathematician in Crozier had spent hours lying beneath his robes in the snug little space and admiring the catenary curve of the thing and the absolute and seemingly effortless precision that went into the woman’s cutting of the snow blocks – in starlight – and the near perfection of the rising, inward-tilting walls made from those snow blocks.

Even as he watched from beneath his furs that long night or dark day – I’m as useless as tits on a boar , had been his thought – he’d also thought, This thing should fall . The upper blocks were almost horizontal. The last blocks she’d cut had been trapezoidal, and she’d actually shoved that final block – the key block – out from the inside and then trimmed the edges and tugged it into position from within the new snow-house. Finally Silence had come out and climbed onto the catenary-curve almost-dome of snow blocks, scrambled to the top, jumped up and down, and actually slid down its sides.

At first Crozier thought she was just acting like the child she sometimes looked to be, but then he realized that she was testing the strength and stability of their new home.

By the next day – another day without sunlight – the Esquimaux woman had used her oil lamp to melt the inside surface of the snow-house, then let the walls freeze again, coating it with a thin but very hard glaze of ice. She then thawed the sealskins that had been used first for the tent and then for the sledge and rigged them with sinew cords punched through the walls and ceilings of the snow-house, hanging the skins a few inches from the inside walls to provide an inner lining. Crozier had seen immediately that this protected them from dripping even while raising the temperature inside their living space.

Crozier was astonished at how warm their snow-house seemed: always, he guessed, at least fifty degrees warmer than the outside temperature and frequently warm enough that neither of them wore anything but their caribou-skin shorts when out from under the robes. There was a cooking area on the snow ledge to the right of the entrance, and the antler-and-wood frame there not only suspended their various cooking pots over seal-oil flames but was used as a clothes-drying frame as well. As soon as Crozier was able to crawl and go outside with her, Silence explained through her string-language and gestures that it was imperative that they always dry out their outer clothing upon coming back into the snow-house.