Aurorarama (34 page)

This provoked a subdued ripple of approval through the company, the way an old joke does.

“But maybe we can aim at a little pity. For once, sir,
we were like you,”
the voice said with an accent of sincerity that moved Brentford in spite of himself.

The man indicated a direction behind himself, which Brentford thought might be north.

“Once, as you seem to be doing, we regarded a certain spot as the noblest place a man could tread upon, and we prided ourselves in being such men, or the faithful companions of such a man. We thought that there was no sacrifice we would not consent to in order to fulfil that ambition. And now, please, look at us, unpleasant as it is. Look at the way our pride has been punished.”

The Patrol now faced Brentford, looking solemn and attentive. The doctor took a step forward.

“For, sooner or later, there comes that special moment, that
very
special moment, if you can imagine it, when that very man who deemed himself a hero suddenly decides that he will go out, dig up the grave of his friend, and with a rusty knife help himself to a slab of that half-rigid, half-rotten flesh and chew it raw, sir, as he is reflected in his dead mate’s glassy, unbelieving eyes. At that moment, this man’s will to reach his Farthest North has been fulfilled beyond his wildest dreams and fears. This is how God humbles some of us, sir. Those he loves, he reserves as flesh for others, as he did with his own Son.”

A long silence ensued.

“There is nothing God hates as much as the pride of Man. This we have learned the hard way. It is a strong malediction, but also our noble mission to roam this land eternally so that we can protect it against Man, and protect Man against it.”

Brentford released his grip on his gun, but it was then that the Patrol slowly began moving toward him.

T
he voice, Gabriel thought, came with a rather bad breath. Bad enough to bring him back to life. Half opening his eyes, he could make out, in the dim light, the face of an Inuk bending over him. The Inuk said something Gabriel did not understand, and then started rubbing Gabriel’s nose with a fistful of ice. This woke him up completely, protesting and sputtering, while someone laughed not far from him.

His eyes were now wide open. He was lying in a dark igloo, surrounded by four Inuit who threw huge shadows on the curved glazed walls. It took a while to recognize them as the men he had seen in the Inuit People’s Ice Palace. One of them, the tallest, spoke a little English.

“How are you?” he asked, his brow knitted in a way Gabriel did not find especially benevolent.

“How am I?” Gabriel repeated, returning the question. He could not feel his hands or feet and felt in his stomach the sudden fear that they had been frozen.

“It happened that the poor Inuit found you at the foot of a big rock. Lying in the snow. But the
qallunaq
is safe,” said the tall Inuk.

Gabriel struggled to sit up. He was on an
iglerk
, wrapped in furs, his clothes drying on a rack over the oil lamp that also lit a scene that he found rather dismal. The igloo had been put up rather quickly, and was not very warm, with draughts swirling around. A pile of foul-smelling food lay in a corner, and the moss wick from the lamp spluttered a little, so that the surrounding Inuit flickered like the pictures of a finishing dream.

“I can’t feel my hands,” said Gabriel, with some anguish in his voice.

The tall man, turning toward the others, translated, eliciting a chuckle from one of them—the uncouth thief Gabriel had seen eloping with a knife. The one who had rubbed Gabriel’s nose, and who wore the paraphernalia of a shaman, now looked at him moodily, then spoke to the tall one, who in turn translated to Gabriel.

“They’re frozen. But it will come back.”

He then took Gabriel’s red, slightly swollen hand and shook it in the exaggerated Inuk fashion, the smelly man’s chuckle turning to laughter this time. Gabriel had the strange, scary sensation of having a wooden limb attached to his wrist, as if he’d slept on his arm.

“My name is Tuluk,” said the tall one.

“I’m Gabriel.”

They repeated the name, passing it around amongst one another as if it were some sort of strange absurd object they did
not know what to do with. The oldest of the four eventually came to Gabriel and bowed, introducing himself in a broken English that had been fixed the Eskimo way: improbably but dependably.

“My name Uitayok. I am very sad this poor igloo offer.”

“I thank you for saving my life,” said Gabriel, bowing back.

“This one Ajuakangilak. Very powerful
angakoq,”
Uitayok kept on, pointing toward the brooding shaman, who barely nodded to Gabriel.

“This one here my son Tiblit,” Uitayok continued, in a tone that was almost more sincerely apologetic than when he had excused himself about the igloo.

Tiblit came closer to Gabriel and gave him another of those Five-on-the-Rossi-Forel-scale handshakes that seemed to amuse him no end. Gabriel wondered if Tiblit were not playing the classic part of the Eskimo Clown, knowing it would always work with the
qallunaat
and meet their expectations. There was always a bit of
commedia dell’arctic
to such occasions.

However, thanks to the violent handshake, the blood was starting to flow back into Gabriel’s right hand, and rather painfully so, like a spring river break-up carrying cutting slabs of ice down along his veins. His left fist, however, was still clenched and remained insensitive. But as he slowly pried open his fingers, he saw in his palm the Polar Kangaroo amulet that he had found at the I.P.I.P. He did not know how long he had been holding that.

The
angakoq
froze, while the others looked at each other.

“Kiggertarpok!” the shaman exclaimed, before casting a look at Gabriel that he interpreted as rather malevolent.

They had a confabulation between them that seemed to last forever. They spoke too quickly for Gabriel to make sense of the very few words that he happened to grasp. He
overheard
qavaq
, though, the word Inuit used to refer to southerners and idiots.

“Where you get it?” eventually asked Tuluk.

“I found it at the Inuit People’s Ice Palace.”

They observed him attentively and, he thought, cautiously. Maybe they recognized him, although he doubted that they had paid much attention to him in the heat of that moment. He did not know if it was a good idea to tell them that he had seen them being caught red-handed and then harassed by the guards, as he had no idea of what they would think that made him: a kind of accomplice sharing a secret or a cumbersome witness to their embarrassment. He decided he needed their complicity and he went for it.

“The same day that you were there.”

This triggered another animated discussion. Uitayok said something that quieted everyone, although the
angakoq
kept casting side glances at Gabriel that did not reassure him. Tuluk eventually explained what troubled them.

“It happens that this little Inuit group is just out of
qallunaq
prison. For this little knife. But the
qallunaat
have the little knife back and the Inuit have nothing and they go to prison,” he said, darkly.

Gabriel remembered how difficult it had been for the Inuit to get used to the
qallunaq
idea of justice. The Eskimos were not the teddy bears some well-meaning Whites thought they were. They were about as good savages as any other human beings, that is, they were good as long as they weren’t savage. They knew about violence and retribution, of course, mostly in the ancient, time-honoured way. They had vendetta stories that would shame a nineteenth-century Corsican mountaineer’s, and under the conditions in which they lived, even Jesus Christ would have been liable to jump at some apostle’s throat, knife in hand, sooner or later. But why strangers had to meddle with such personal business as justice remained a mystery to them. They
submitted to it in most cases, surrendering either to strength or to symbolical showmanship, but they seldom seemed to really get the point, or they reacted to it strangely. The first two Inuit murderers who had been sentenced to death in Canada, Gabriel had read somewhere, had carved little figures out of walrus tusk as presents for the executioner’s wife. Gabriel had never understood if this was meant to excuse themselves for the trouble the hangman was taking on their behalf—as the Whites would have liked to think—or as some subtle way to pass on the guilt to others. He was not sure if the four Inuit that surrounded him now had learned any lesson from their prison stay except that the less you deal with those dangerous
qallunaat
bastards the better it is for your fur-wrapped behind. But as Tuluk plodded through their story, it was clear that there was more to it than a simple misunderstanding about the Philosophy of Right. In fact, it smelled even fishier than the igloo did.

“They let these Inuit go yesterday. ‘You’re free,’ they said. ‘Go away.’ Then these Inuit buy a sled and they buy dogs and they buy food. It’s to go home. But they go home and the
qallunaat
follow us. Like hunters. So the Inuit turn and turn, and the
qallunaat
are always behind us and in front of these Inuit. So Uitayok says that these Inuit go through the sea to Kalaallit Nunaat. (“Greenland,” Gabriel translated as he listened.) And it happened that these Inuit find you lying in the snow.”

“I am very thankful that you stopped on your way.”

Tuluk hesitated before he went on.

“It happened that they did not find you on their own …,” he said, obviously struggling with some notion he could not convey to Gabriel, because he either could not or did not really want to.

“Kiggertarpok. He brings these Inuit for you,” Uitayok cut him off.

Tuluk looked uncertain, then continued. “It is like Uitayok says. It is the dogs. These dogs they do not obey well to bad sled drivers like these Inuit. These dogs do not fear the whip
and they have eyes not like the dogs and they listen to another voice in the wind.”

Tuluk was speaking low, now, and the others nodded slowly. Gabriel could feel they were genuinely worried and maybe a little apprehensive as well.

“These dogs see Kiggertarpok in front. These Inuit see Kiggertarpok, too. They are afraid. But the dogs, they want to follow Him. And so these Inuit have to follow, too. And they follow and they follow and they find you. And around you in the snow, we can see the … shapes … of Kiggertarpok. Not from a long time ago. There to warm and save you. But, then, Kiggertarpok is not there anymore.”

Gabriel nodded. He dimly understood why the
angakoq
was looking at him that way. These fugitives had been diverted from their route, which they deemed the way to salvation, by a Spirit who had led them to no better finding than a half-frozen
qallunaq
with nothing to share and unable to help them in any way. And, on top of it, this white wreck had about him the reek of the uncanny, carrying an amulet that had been apparently enough to enrol Kiggertarpok as his
tornaq
, his helping spirit. Gabriel wondered if he should tell them of his little chat with Saana, or Helen, or whoever she was, but somehow he thought that would not sit well with Whatsisname the Sombre Sorcerer, who looked either wary of a possible rival or jealous of a favour bestowed on one more useless
qavaq
. Bringing your own God to the exploration party is one thing, but stealing other people’s helping spirits was certainly as criminal as stealing a knife. Gabriel tried for what he thought was Eskimo politeness.

“I am sorry you had to go out of your way for a person as useless as I am.”

“You
angakoq?”
asked Uitayok bluntly.

Gabriel decided not to make any extravagant claim about his momentary supernatural powers, which he suspected had
everything to do with a typical local cocktail of alcohol, exhaustion, and numbness from the cold. He also knew that Inuit were, generally speaking, more or less uneasy with their own shamans, and still more cautious about those of others. And then there was the matter of the notoriously tense relationships between shamans themselves. He certainly did not want to get into some sort of contest with one well-seasoned, ill-meaning
angakoq
. They would not believe his denial, of course, as
angakut
as a rule always play it cagey with strangers. But at least he would have tried his best to make himself understood.

“It’s only the amulet,” he reassured them. “You want it?” he then asked the
angakoq
as a gesture of goodwill. But the shaman took a step backward, spitting on the floor. This did not necessitate any translation. Judging by the way he had glanced at it, he was obviously interested, but probably did not want to accept anything from the
qallunaq
in front of the others.