Against the Day (24 page)

“Wasn’t that a paradise!” cried Darby
Suckling.

After the ship had landed and tied
up, the boys barged ashore, eager to spend their pay on anything at all.

“Is this turquoise?”

“We call it Blue Ivory. Preserved
bones of real prehistoric mammoths, not the tinted bonzoline you see further
south.”

“This one—”

“
This is a miniature copy of an
inukshuk that actually stands up on a ridgeline far away in the interior, rocks
piled in roughly the shape of a human, not to threaten the stranger but to
guide him in country where landmarks are either too few or too many to keep
straight.”

“Sounds like my average day.”

“Perhaps why these copies are sold in
such numbers. For any day, even in the cities of the South, can turn in a
moment to wilderness.”

From time to time in the difficult
days ahead, each of the boys was to gaze at the enigmatic miniature he had
purchased, representing a faraway disposition of rocks he would probably never
get to see, and try to glimpse, even at this degree of indirectness, some
expression of a truth beyond the secular.

The
ÉtienneLouis
Malus
was named for the Napoleonic army
engineer and physicist who, in late 1808, looking though a piece of Iceland
spar at the sunset reflected from a window of the Luxembourg Palace, discovered
polarized light. She was built of oak and iron, 376 feet, 6 inches long, with
shelter and boat decks, two masts, two cargo booms, and a single tall black
smokestack. The guy wires of dozens of transmitting and receiving antennas
descended to fittings everywhere around the weather decks. Her prow was raked
back from the waterline a little aft of vertical, as if she were expecting to
cut through ice.

As she sailed north on her long
voyage to the coasts of “Iceland,” to the inhabited cliffs of ice, those not
actually on watch or asleep sat out on the fantail, watching the lower
latitudes drop away from them, and played mandolins and little mahogany
concertinas, and sang,

No more girls,

But the girls of Iceland,

No more nights,

But the nights of cold
. . .

For we sail

With no sure returning,

Into winds

That will freeze the soul
. . . .

They passed around rumors—the
Captain was insane again, icepirates were hunting the
Malus
like
whalers and if caught,
her crew would be shown even less mercy—some believed they were on an
expedition to find a new source of Iceland spar pure as the legendary crystals
of Helgustaðir, purer than anything being pulled these days out of Missouri
or Guanajuato
. . .
but that was only
one suspicion among many. It might not be about Iceland spar after all.

One day walls of green ice, nearly
invisible off in the Northern dusk, began to slide by. The ship approached a
green headland, sheer green walls of ice, the greenness nearest the water
figuring also as a
scent,
a seasmell of deep decay and reproduction.

From her ancestral home on an island
just the other side of the promontory from town, Constance Penhallow, now
passed into legend, though not herself ambitious for even local respect,
watched the arrival of the
Malus.
When required she could pose with the
noblest here against the luminous iceblink, as if leaning anxiously out of some
portraitframe, eyes asking not for help but understanding, cords of her neck
edged in titanium white, a threequarters view from behind, showing the face
only just crescent, the umbra of brushed hair and skullheft, the brass shadow
amiably turned toward an open shelf of books with no glass cover there arranged
to throw back images of a face, only this dorsal finality. So had her grandson
Hunter painted her, standing in a loose, simple dress in a thousandflower print
in green and yellow, viewed as through dust, dust of another remembered country
observed late in the day, risen by way of wind or horses from a lane beyond a walled
garden
. . .
in the background a
halftimbered house, steep gabling of many angles, running back into lizard
imbrication of gray slatework, shining as with rain
. . .
wilds of rooftops, unexplored reaches, stretching as to
sunset
. . . .

Tales survived here from the first
millennium, the first small pack of outlaws on the run, not yet come to be
haunted by any promise of Christ’s return, thinking only of the axbearing
avengers at their backs, setting off westward, suicidally cheerful, almost
careless
. . .
tales of Harald the
Ruthless, son of King Sigurd, sailing north, drawn by inexplicable desire,
farther away each sunset from all comfort, all kindness, to the awful brink,
scant oarstrokes away from falling into Ginnungagap the lightless abyss,
glimpsed through the Northern obscurities and reported on over the years by
lost fisherfolk, marauders, Godpossessed fugitives
. . . .
Harald threw over his tiller, the men backed their oars,
the fateful circumference wheeling past them through the fog, and Harald Hårdråde,
having come about just in time, understood, from that moment of unsought mercy,
with the end of the world now at his back, more than perhaps he cared to about
desire, and the forsaking of desire in submission to one’s duties to history
and blood. Something had called to him out of that vaporous immensity, and he
had answered, in a dream, and at the last instant had awakened, and turned. For
in the ancient Northmen’s language,
“
Gap
”
meant not only this particular chasm, the icechaos from which arose,
through the giant Ymir, the Earth and everything in it, but also a wideopen
human mouth, mortal, crying, screaming, calling out, calling back.

So relates Adam of Bremen in the
Historia
Hammaburgensis Ecclesiæ.

And this current expedition, if not
by its official remit bound all the way to Ginnungagap, must nonetheless
acknowledge its presence up there ahead in the fog, in the possible darkening
of some day’s watersky to the reflection of a mythical Interior, the chance, in
this day and age, of sailing off the surface of the World, drawn into another,
toroidal dispensation, more uptodate topologically than any simple disk or
spheroid.

Already, by the time of Harald
Hårdråde, the once terrible void was scarcely a remnant, a vaporous residue of
the world’s creation and the high drama of the YmirAudumla era, no longer the
intersection of Niflheim’s ice and Muspellheim’s fire but the debris from a
calamitous birth.

Though Penhallow forebears might have
undertaken some similar expedition, all, until now, had found reasons not to.
There was even some suggestion of a conspiracy of ancestors, against the
future, certainly against this voyage
. . . .
The Penhallow money came from Iceland spar—they owned extensive
deposits all over the Arctic, having been crystal tycoons since the first
Penhallows arrived in Iceland late in the seventeenth century as part of a
calcite rush set off by the famous arrival of the doublerefracting mineral in
Copenhagen by way of a sailor who’d discovered some near the Bay of Röerford.

When the Vormance Expedition arrived,
Constance’s grandson, Hunter Penhallow, was off on the ferry to the mainland
every day in delirious truancy, abandoning his easel and brushes, working
whatever odd quayside jobs he could for these scientific folk with their strange
lowereighties accents. His parents, one day too early in his life for him to
remember, had “withdrawn” southward to that region of sailors’ yarns and
oddities unconfirmed, and Constance—headlong, unable to withhold, even
knowing, in the oracular way expected of her, that as soon as he could he would
follow their example if not their exact tracks—had become all his home.
Of course he would leave—that was only fortunetelling—it could not
interfere with her love. He would stow away on the
Malus,
sail off to
sea with the Vormance Expedition, as Constance had known and feared that one
day, on some ship, he must. No one in the crew or among the scientists tried to
prevent him—hadn’t it become a custom on these expeditions for
trustworthy natives to tag along, often in just some mascotte capacity? When he
finally did go round the Point and out to sea, it was to bear away with him,
first northward and then back down into the lower latitudes, the curse of the
great silent struggle which was the ground for the history of this place, since
at least the discovery of the first crystalchoked cave.

Built only a few
years before
, in
clapboard siding of a vivid cream color, roofed in gray shakes a shade or two
lighter than the outcroppings and stone walls that surrounded it, the Hotel
Borealis, where the Expedition had set up headquarters, presented at one corner
a curious sort of open turret, whose slender white columns supported
semicircular balconies on the first and second floors, and above them held up a
conical roof, almost a steeple, with a high finial that carried a weather vane
and some wireless antennas as well. In back of the hotel rose a steep green
mountainside. Mist seethed and glided everywhere. At the end of the lane began
the fjord, sudden and deep.

Hunter set up his easel outside
across the road and began to try to paint the place, though microscopic
droplets of salt fog inevitably got folded though not mixed in with the Payne’s
gray and Naples yellow, and in years to come, as the small canvases from this period
traveled the world increasing in value, this introduced modelings, shadows,
redefinitions of space, which, though they were physically there, Hunter had
not seen at the time—would have to wait for his later “Venice” and
“London” phases even to recognize.

All night, out in the great fjord,
they heard the ice, they woke, they dozed again, the voices of the ice entered
their dreams, dictated what they would see, what would happen to each dreaming
eye as, helpless, it gazed. Just to the north loomed a farspreading glacier,
the only one in this entire domain of ice that had never been named, as if in
fearful acknowledgment of its ancient nobility, its seemingly conscious pursuit
of a project
. . . .

“We can’t afford to winter here,
we’ll have to move while we can still get out to sea.”

“Fine with me. I’m not sure I can
take even another week here. The food—”

“Not a Meat Olaf fancier, I gather.”

“Can anything be done?”

“Well, it’s supposed to be for
emergencies, but I guess this qualifies as one.” Unlocking a black valise and
gazing inside for a moment. “Here you go,” handing over an ancient handblown
bottle whose label, carefully engraved and printed in an unfaded spectrum of
tropical colors, showed an erupting volcano, a parrot with a disdainful smile
and the legend
¡Cuidado Cabrón! Salsa Explosiva La Original.
“Couple of
drops is all you’ll need really to light that Meat Olaf right up, not that I’m
being stingy, understand. My father handed this on to me, as did his father to
him, and it isn’t down by even a quarter of an inch yet, so do exercise
caution’s all I’m saying.”

As expected, this advice was ignored,
and next mealtime the bottle got passed around and everybody slopped on the
salsa. The evening that resulted was notable for hysteria and recrimination.

The luxuriant world of the parrot on
the label, though seemingly as remote from this severe icescape as could be
imagined, in fact was separated from it by only the thinnest of membranes. To
get from one to the other one had only to fill one’s attention unremittingly
with the bird’s image, abasing oneself meantime before his contempt, and repeat
“
¡Cuidado cabrón!
”
preferably
with a parrot accent, until the phrase no longer had meaning—though in
practice, of course, the number of repetitions was known to run into the
millions, even as it ran listeners’ forbearance into the ground. In thus
acquiring some of the force of a Tibetan prayerwheel, the practice was thought
to serve as an opensesame to the TsangpoBrahmaputra country as well, a point
which old Expedition hands were not reluctant to bring up.

At first glance a roomful merely of
bearded gentlemen in dark suits and matching waistcoats, these scientists
actually made up an international spectrum of motive and eccentricity. Dr.
Vormance was on sabbatical from Candlebrow University, where he ordinarily
headed the Department of Mineralogy. The noted Quaternionist Dr. V. Ganesh Rao
of Calcutta University was seeking a gateway to the Ulterior, as he liked to
phrase it, having come to recognize the wisdom of simply finding silence and
allowing Mathematics and History to proceed as they would. The American
bucketshop desperado Dodge Flannelette, on the other hand, was chiefly up here
for the practical uses any discoveries could be put to, having been privately informed,
for instance, that Iceland spar was central to the development of means to send
moving images thousands of miles, if not in fact everywhere in the world. And
young Mr. Fleetwood Vibe was here at the behest of his father, Wall Street
eminence Scarsdale Vibe, who was effectively bankrolling the Expedition. One of
Fleetwood’s chores was to observe and write down instances of money recklessly
spent, enabling the elder Vibe someday to exact an appropriate revenge.