East

Neddy

MY FAVORITE PLACE in the old monastery was the reading room. It was located in what had once been the chapel, and tall arched windows of stained glass lined the walls. There were ornate bookcases filled with handsome gilt-titled volumes, though the majority of books and manuscripts were housed in other rooms of the building. In the center of the room were several long tables at which one or two people usually were seated on wooden chairs.

Hours passed by like minutes in the reading room. Blurred shapes of ruby red, emerald green, and rich sapphire blue from the stained glass would dapple the pages as I read the old manuscripts. And I feasted on the words handwritten by men who had lived hundreds of years before me.

It was on a sunlit morning in late winter when a curious thing happened. I had already finished my assigned work for the day and, for pleasure, was reading an account of a sea voyage undertaken by a Viking called Orm. This Orm was an explorer of sorts, and he had told his tales of discovery to a monk back in the days when the old Viking ways were beginning to fade and the church was becoming more and more the center of life in Njord. The monk had written down the Viking's stories, apparently just as Orm had told them, and I read the stories with deep interest.

Perhaps because of my ancestors, I had always been drawn to accounts of journeys of exploration. Unlike my grandfather and great-grandfather, however, my interest had never been in the actual exploring, and unlike my father, I had only a passing interest in charting the world. Instead I was interested in the history of exploration—who went where, when they went, and why they had gone at all. And I had always been particularly intrigued by tales of northern exploration, because of that time in my life when I had taken it upon myself to learn all I could of white bears.

As I sat in the reading room that morning, poring over the long-ago Viking foray into the frozen waters well beyond the northern tip of Njord, I turned a page to find a drawing that made me catch my breath. It was a simple line drawing, apparently done by the monk from a description by Orm the Viking. The drawing depicted a large white bear standing on its four paws facing a man (or I suppose it could have been a woman—the figure was too swathed in fur-skins to tell anything about it but that it was human). The two figures were virtually nose-to-nose, with only a hand's length between them, and they looked, for all the world, as if they were conversing.

My eyes eagerly sought the text that explained the drawing:

Driven off course, in a northwesterly direction me-thinks, we are pressed on all sides by ice. My men clamor to turn south. They fear being trapped in ice for the long winter. Nevertheless, I press onward.

The ice comes and we are hemmed in. My men are afraid. It is the full moon and one night, unable to sleep, I wake and walk the deck. The moon is bright and there before me, on the land, is an extraordinary sight. As clear as if it were day, I see them. A small man in fur and a white bear. They stand on the ice facing each other. I felt a thrill of terror; the bear was surely about to devour the man. I have hunted white bear and there is no fiercer foe. But, most strange and awesome, the white bear did not eat the man. Indeed, they seemed to be gazing into each other's eyes, with the look of blood brothers, or father and child. The hair on my neck stood up and I called to my men so that I should not be the only one to see such a sight. But the sound of my voice must have carried over the sea and ice, for bear and man turned toward me, as one, and then they turned back, as though annoyed at the interruption, and moved quickly away over the ice, side by side. By the time any of my men were awake enough to heed my words, the man and bear were lost to sight.

The narrative ended abruptly, with a sentence stating that only Orm and two of his men survived the voyage.

I stared down at a band of blue across the parchment, caused by the sun shining through the stained glass. My heart thudded in my chest, and I was suddenly aware of someone standing beside me. Except that when I turned my head to see who it was, there was no one there. And yet there was. Rose. I felt as sure of this as of my own name. I could smell her. And I could even feel the soft touch of her hand on my arm. She was wearing fur mittens.

I closed my eyes.

"Rose?" I whispered.

And, clearly, I heard Rose say, "Neddy."

I was not sure of her tone. It might have held fear, but I did not know. And then I could "see" her, with my eyes closed, though her features were indistinct and blurred.

"Rose?" I said again. I wanted her to tell me where she was, that she was safe and had done as she wanted, but most of all, when she was coming home. I closed my eyes, concentrating all my thoughts on the soft feel of her hand on my arm, willing her to speak.

"Neddy," she said again, and that time I was sure there was fear in her voice. And then I felt the touch of her hand leave me.

"Rose!" I shouted, leaping to my feet. The few other people in the room looked up, startled. They must have thought me mad, watching as I groped like a blind man at the space beside me.

But it was no use. She was gone.