Dan Simmons: The Terror

Surrendering only to the human being he wants to be with and to the human being he wants to become – never to the Tuunbaq or to the universe that would extinguish the blue flame in his chest – he closes his eyes again, tilts back his head, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue exactly as Memo Moira taught him to do for Holy Communion.

In the spring of the year that their second child was born, a girl, they were visiting Silna’s family in the God-Walking People’s band headed by the old shaman Asiajuk when word came from a visiting hunter named Inupijuk that a band of the Real People far to the south had received aituserk , gifts, of wood, metal, and other precious objects from dead kabloona – white men.

Taliriktug signed to Asiajuk, who translated the signs into questions for Inupijuk. It sounded as if the treasure might be knives, forks, and other artifacts from Erebus ’s and Terror ’s ship’s boats.

Asiajuk whispered to Taliriktug and Silna that Inupijuk was a qavac – literally, “a man from the south,” but also a term in Inuktitut that denoted stupidity. Taliriktug nodded his understanding but continued to sign questions that the sour shaman passed on to the stupidly grinning hunter. Part of Inupijuk’s social discomfort, Taliriktug knew, was that the hunter from the south had never been in the presence of sixam ieua spirit-governors before and was not quite sure if Taliriktug and Silna were human beings or not.

It sounded as if the artifacts were real. Taliriktug and his wife went back to their guests’ iglu , where she nursed the baby and he thought about it. When he looked up, she was using string to sign.

We should go south , said the strings between her fingers. If you want to .

He nodded.

In the end, Inupijuk agreed to guide them to the southeastern village and Asiajuk decided to come with them – very unusual, since the old shaman rarely traveled far these days. Asiajuk brought his best wife, Seagull – young Nauja of the amooq big tits – who also carried her scars from the band’s lethal encounter with the kabloona three years earlier. She and the shaman were the only survivors of that massacre, but the girl showed no resentment toward Taliriktug. She was curious about the fates of the final kabloona whom everyone knew had headed south across the ice three summers ago.

Six hunters of the God-Walking People’s band also wanted to come along – mostly out of curiosity and to hunt along the way, since the ice was breaking up very early in the strait this spring – so eventually they set out in several boats since leads were opening along the coastline.

Taliriktug, Silna, and their two children chose to travel – as did four of the hunters – in their long double qayaq , but Asiajuk was too old and had too much dignity to paddle a qayaq anymore. He sat with Nauja in the center of a spacious, open umiak as two of the young hunters paddled for him. No one minded waiting for the umiak when there was no wind for its sails since the thirty-foot-long craft carried enough fresh food in it that they rarely had to stop to hunt or fish unless they wanted to. This way they could also bring their own kamatik sledge in case they needed to travel across land. Inupijuk, the southern hunter, rode in the umiak , as did six Qimmiq – dogs.

Although Asiajuk generously offered to let Silna and her children ride in his now-crowded umiak , she string-messaged her preference for the qayaq . Taliriktug knew that his wife would never want any child of hers – certainly not Kanneyuk, the two-month-old – to be so close to the vicious dogs in such a tight space. Their two-year-old son, Tuugaq – “Raven” – had no fear of dogs, but he also had no choice in the matter. He rode in the niche in the qayaq between Taliriktug and Silna. The baby, Kanneyuk (whose secret sixam ieua name was Arnaaluk), rode in Silna’s amoutiq , an oversized babycarrying hood.

The morning they left was cold but clear and as they shoved off from the gravel beach the fifteen remaining members of the God-Walking band chanted their farewell-come-back song:

On their second night, the last before paddling and sailing south through leads from the angilak qikiqtaq , or “biggest island,” that James Ross had named King William Land so long ago, ignoring the fact that the natives who had told him about it had kept calling it qikiqtaq, qikiqtaq, qikiqtak – they camped less than a mile from the site of Rescue Camp.

Taliriktug walked there alone.

He’d been back before. Two summers ago, only weeks after Raven was born, he and Silna had come here. That was only a little less than one year after the man Taliriktug used to be had been betrayed and ambushed and shot down like a dog, but already there was little sign that this had been a major campsite for more than sixty Englishmen. Except for a few tatters of canvas frozen into the gravel, the Holland tents had torn and blown away. All that remained were campfire rings and a few stone tent rings.

And some bones.

He had found some long bones, bits of chewed vertebrae, only one skull – the lower jaw missing. Holding the skull in his hands two summers ago, he had prayed to God that this was not Dr. Goodsir.

These scattered and nanuq -gnawed bones he had gathered up and interred with the skull in a simple stone tomb, setting a fork he’d found among the stones atop the heap of rocks the way the Real People, even the God-Walking People he’d spent the summer with, liked to do, sending helpful tools and beloved-by-the-dead possessions to the spirit world with the dead.

Even as he did this, he’d realized that the Inuit would have thought this an obscene waste of precious metal.

He’d then tried to think of a silent prayer he could say.

The prayers in Inuktitut he’d heard in the past three months were not appropriate. But in his awkward attempt to learn the language – even though he would never be able to utter a syllable of it aloud – he’d played a game that summer trying to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Inuktitut.

That evening, standing by the cairn holding his crewmates’ bones, he’d tried to think the prayer.

Nâlegauvît kailaule. Pijornajat pinatuale nuname sorlo kilangme…

Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

That was as far as he’d been able to get two summers ago, but it felt like enough.

Now, almost two years later, walking back to his wife from a Rescue Camp that was even emptier – the fork was gone and the cairn had been opened and plundered by Real People from the south, even the bones scattered where he could not find them – Taliriktug had to smile at his dawning realization that even if he were granted his biblical threescore and ten years, he was never going to master this language of the Real People.

Every word – even the simple nouns – seemed to have a score of variants, and the subtleties of the syntax were far beyond a middle-aged man who’d gone to sea as a boy and never learned even his Latin. Thank God he would never have to speak this language aloud. Straining to understand the click-clack flow of it gave him the kind of headaches he used to have when Silna first shared her dreams with him.

The Great Bear, for instance. The simple white bear. The God-Walking People and the other Real People he’d encountered in the past two years called it nanuq , which was simple enough, but he also heard variants that might be written down – in English, since the Real People had no written language – as nanoq, nänuvak, nannuraluk, takoaq, pisugtooq , and ayualunaq . And now, from Inupijuk, this hunter from the south (who, he now knew, was not as stupid as Asiajuk insisted), he had learned that the Great Bear was also called Tôrnârssuk by many of the southern bands of the Real People.