Wild Magic (70 page)

They walked and walked like mechanical men, one foot in front of the other, over and over and over. This long, monotonous exercise rendered them exhausted and thirsty; they rested only for short intervals, ate and drank and carried on, giving little thought to eking out their supplies. And all the while, the Navigator’s Star winked overhead, urging them northwards.

On the third day, a long black lead opened up, splitting the floe apart in front of them. They chose to follow the righthand branch and for what seemed an age trudged along beside the dark water.

On the fourth day, they ran out of the meat they had brought with them from the
Long Serpent
. They had seen no signs of life till now, but Aran Aranson refused to be downhearted. He sat beside the lead for hours, harpoon poised, watching for bubbles which never came. They moved on; again he made himself a fishing stance, where he sat far into the night like a statue made of ice; but no luck came to him and they were reduced to resorting to the remains of their hard bread, which they soaked in meltwater puddles in order to render it chewable.

On the fifth day the lead narrowed and finally closed up again without offering the sight of a single seal or fish and Aran threw the harpoon down in a fit of temper and walked off, leaving it in the snow. A cunning look crept over Fent’s face. He darted forward, picked the weapon up and clutched it to his chest; but equally swiftly Urse One-Ear stepped into his path, eased the harpoon away from him with sure, slow hands and slung it over his own back. Later that day they found the frozen corpse of an arctic fox, a tiny thing barely larger than a Westman Isle hare, with a mangy white coat and a round, obdurate skull. Something had gnawed off one of its hind legs and then, disturbed or bored, had abandoned the remainder. Urse drew out of his jacket a pair of flints and a precious bundle of dried moss and they made a small and shabby fire which gave off just enough heat to unfreeze the scraps of meat left adhered to the pathetic bundle of bones, and this little sustained them through another night’s walk.

At the end of the sixth day, their water ran out.

Salt had formed uneven crusts around the edges of some puddles amidst the sea-ice, as if it had been leached out of the meltwater. Aran and Pol sipped a little liquid from the pools while the others looked on, licking dry lips. After a time, it seemed that Aran and Pol had suffered no ill effects, so they all refilled their waterskins and trudged on.

On their eighth night beneath the pivot of the stars Fall Ranson, who seemed such a rugged man, dropped in his tracks. Urse turned him over, his face haggard with dread.

‘He is stone dead,’ he announced.

Pol Garson lifted his anchor-pendant to chapped lips and whispered the words of Sur’s blessing. ‘Lord of Oceans, take this man, Fall son of Ran, son of Grett the Black, to your deep howe and there let him feast with heroes.’ But was this forsaken place land or sea, or some limbo in between? They could only hope that Sur would make a fair decision.

Aran took from the body the dead man’s knives and flints, and his pack. Then they mounded snow over him as best they could and carried on.

The next day, just a few hours past sunrise, Pol sat down on the ice. ‘I can go no further,’ he said indistinctly, for his tongue was swollen and his face was numb with cold.

Without a word, the giant picked him up and slung him over his shoulder, and this was how they continued for the rest of the day.

That night as sun and moon hung uncertainly in the balance they set up camp and made themselves as comfortable as they possibly could without shelter, food or a fire. It was hard to sleep. Even though they were in the midst of a wilderness, they were surrounded by strange sounds which seemed louder with every second of falling darkness. The ice cracked and sighed all around them, and beneath it they could sometimes hear the susurrus of the sea, a constant reminder that the floe on which they lived and walked floated bare inches above thousands of feet of freezing black water. Far off, bergs roared and calved like monsters out of myth; and once they heard a thin cry like the noise a rabbit makes when taken by a fox. Each sound was unnerving in its own right; in concert they set the nerves and teeth on edge, making the men jumpy and anxious.

‘This is a daunting place.’ Urse spoke softly but it seemed as though his voice boomed out into the emptiness.

‘This is not somewhere men should be,’ Pol said. ‘I sense we are not wanted here.’

Fent laughed hollowly. ‘Ah, but we are, we are!’ He rubbed his gloved hands together excitedly. ‘And we are nearly there.’

His father regarded him curiously. ‘How can you know that?’

But Fent’s eyes hooded themselves again and he did not reply.

Just before what passed as dawn in this region, Aran sat bolt upright. Beside him, Urse stirred sleepily. ‘What?’ he whispered. ‘What is it?’

The Master of Rockfall put a finger to his lips. In the grey morning light, he looked as though he had died and been recently disinterred. Black shadows carved themselves into his skin, delineating the skull beneath. His beard was dense, his expression stark. He was not a man for wild imaginings: Urse listened with all his might. Some distance away from them, something was moving. He could hear it – a soft rhythmic crunching muffled almost to silence, wisps of sound exaggerated by the stillness of the air.

Aran Aranson pushed himself slowly to his knees, and stared like a hawk into the crepuscular south. A moment later, his right hand reached for the harpoon . . .

It was vast.

It moved with magisterial grace.

It was the king of its domain.

Aran had seen such pelts spread out for sale in the grand market at Halbo. There, they had seemed gorgeously outlandish; their pale straw-streaked white a rare and elegant contrast to the dark, common skins of the woodbears of mainland Eyra. Those had been larger than the usual pelt, the pawpads as large as platters, the pile as shaggy as the fleece on an eight-year-old ram, the heads solid and massy. But they had not prepared him for the sight of his first live snowbear.

Inexorably, it headed for them, showing no urgency in its rangy stride, its small black eyes fixed unmovingly on their little group. Even as it approached them, time seemed to slow, for the Master of Rockfall was able to take in the most minute of details: the way the front legs swung out in fluid, powerful circles; the way the fur rippled along its flanks like the wind through a wheatfield; how the pelt shaded from a pale cream on its back to a soft lemony yellow further down and a gold as deep as ripe corn in the curve of its haunches; how its head described a brutal wedge of bone; how the fur around its black mouth was stained an ominous dark red.

‘Run!’ cried Pol Garson, hauling himself upright.

‘No!’ cried Urse, who knew bears. ‘Lie down, lie down and cover your head!’ And he fell to the ground as though dropped by an unseen spear, covered his head with his gloved hands and lay as still as a rock.

But Pol was too frightened to heed any advice, good or bad. Feet slipping and scrabbling amidst the snow-covered ice, he bolted.

It was all the bear required to trigger every hunting instinct it had been born with. It broke into a trot, which ate the ground away beneath its feet in a most fearsomely efficient manner. The ice trembled; and so did the men.

‘Pretend you are dead!’ Urse reiterated, and Aran dropped to the snow and lay there, face down, heart pounding, hands curled pointlessly around his head, feeling as though by doing this he was performing the most foolhardy action of his entire life.

He waited. The bear thundered closer, its footfall reverberating in the bones of Aran’s chest and neck, thrumming through the cavern of his skull. He began to mutter the only prayer he knew: the Mariner’s Prayer, for sailors in peril on the ocean:

The snowbear passed right by him and carried on. A moment later, there was a terrible, gurgling cry. Aran raised his head: he could not help it. Fifty yards away – less – the bear was atop Pol Garson, pinning the man to the ice as easily as a cat might pinion a mouse. The man was struggling hard: that much could be seen by the futile flailing of his boots; but the snow around him was turning pinker by the second. Aran doubted a man with both his arms strong and serviceable would be able to fend off such a monster, and Pol’s left arm was still recovering from the dislocation, so he stood little chance. Even so, he still felt responsible for him and could hardly stand by and watch him being eaten alive. Knowing that such an action might herald his own death if he failed to make his mark, he shouldered the harpoon and ran as close to the mauling as he dared. It was not a pleasant sight. Pol Garson had no need to concern himself with the recuperation of his arm any more, for the limb had been torn away at the root, tossed aside by the bear like a discarded tidbit. Fighting down nausea, Aran fired the harpoon. It struck the snowbear fair and true in the crook of the shoulder; but the beast merely roared in outrage. Abandoning its victim, it spun menacingly around, head swinging, blood dripping from its teeth.

Then it charged at Aran Aranson with murder in its pebble-black eyes.

The Master of Rockfall prepared to meet his death.

In the few seconds it took for the creature to eat away the ground between them, two things happened: a knife, tossed end over end, struck the bear harmlessly on its rump and spun off into the snow; and a small, quick, dark, nimble figure slipped in under the bear’s guard, retrieved the knife and with a peel of shrieking laughter struck the monster again and again and again in its unprotected belly.

All at once, mayhem ensued. The bear howled a great howl of agony and terror and reared up so that its blood and entrails poured out onto the snow. Then it crashed back down, its massive paws striking the floe with such impact that the ice shuddered and cracked apart. For a moment, the snowbear hovered, with one paw on either side of the slow fracture, then the ice parted catastrophically and the beast fell down into the night-dark waters, taking its attacker with it.

Fent’s mouth opened to scream, but the shock of the immense cold robbed the sound from him so that all that emerged was a violent hiss of air. The snowbear turned to regard him, its expression one of supreme loathing and malevolence. Then, with every iota of strength it could muster, it launched itself at the boy. Fent’s knife-hand rose suddenly out of the water striking down at the great head, the blade a flash of silver in the twilight. The bear roared its contempt and with one swift and merciless bite took the hand off at the wrist, knife and all, then sank into the icy sea beneath the surface of the floe, taking the stolen items with it.

Now Fent began to scream in earnest, his eyes black pits in the wax of his face.

Urse One-Ear flung himself down on the floe, grabbed the boy’s hood and hauled. ‘I have him!’ he called to Aran Aranson, who throughout these few seconds had stood rooted to the ice like a man in a nightmare, unable to move a muscle.

Now, as if released by the big man’s cry, Aran scrambled across the ice and caught his son by the arm. Blood pumped from the stump where Fent’s right hand had been, congealing thickly in the arctic air; sensibility was already beginning to ebb from the boy’s eyes.

By the time they got him out of the freezing water, Fent was unconscious, his breathing slow and shallow. Tremors wracked his body. Aran stared down at him then up at Urse, every line of his face etched with despair. ‘By Sur,’ he sobbed, ‘I cannot bear to lose another son!’

They wrapped him in every warm thing they had; they chafed his skin, they heated what little fresh water they had and poured it drop by precious drop between his blue, unfeeling lips. Even though the bleeding had stopped, Urse burned the end of the stump and bound it, while Aran held his nose and looked away, as appalled by his own squeamishness as by the horror of the situation. Fent did not regain consciousness.

At last Urse said, ‘We must move on. If we stay here we will all die.’

The Master of Rockfall turned dull eyes to him and nodded. The giant slung the limp body of Fent Aranson over his shoulder and together they trudged on.

That night there were strange lights in the northern sky. Pale streams of green and pink shimmered across the far horizon like vast banners of silk furling and unfurling with slow, ethereal grace, as though blown by the softest of summer breezes. The two men stood transfixed by this remarkable sight for several minutes then, without a word exchanged, corrected their course minutely so that they were walking directly towards the bizarre phenomenon as if drawn by some unearthly magnetic power. As they walked, the lights played across their faces, softening harsh planes and lines, masking their pain and despair, and all the while the snow at their feet gradually took on the colours of the sky overhead, so it seemed that they walked in a magical world.

Eventually, however, those wonderful lights faded from the sky and full darkness engulfed all again, and that time was the worst; for they were far adrift from the land of men, isolated beyond recall, with no fare and no hope to sustain them, so that every aspect of their venture seemed doomed to failure.

It was in this most miserable and despairing state that they stumbled upon a great hole in the ice revealing the black waters beneath, and close by that, the unmoving body of a gigantic snowbear. Urse laid Fent gently down on the ice and went to examine the beast. It was unquestionably dead, and without any doubt it was the bear which had attacked them, for its belly, washed clean of blood by the arctic waters in which it had swum or been washed to this place, bore the marks of the puncture wounds dealt out to it by Aran Aranson’s youngest son.

‘By the gods,’ Urse breathed, ‘we may yet survive.’

So it was that they made a small and pathetic fire by sacrificing to it the spare leather pack and the last of Urse One-Ear’s precious moss, and set about butchering the carcass of the beast. As Aran gutted the monster and laid open the odiferous walls of its stomach, out tumbled a collection of fishbones and foxbones; flesh and foods in varying states of digestion; and a most unnerving artefact. The Master of Rockfall extracted this last with dubious care and held it away from him with his brow furrowed and his nose wrinkled in disgust. Then he leant forward and dipped the item into the chilly water. Where before it had been encrusted with globules of matter and viscous fluids, now it emerged bright and shining. It was an object made from the worked metals of the Northern Isles, an item owned by the seafaring men of most families. This particular artefact was rather more distinctive and familiar than most: Aran Aranson had taken especial note of the detail which adorned it: had hardly been able to avoid doing so when its owner had waved it before his face and declared his trust in the god whose symbol it was, rather than in his own. It was Flint Hakason’s pendant, the silver-worked Sur’s hammer he had always worn about his neck.