The Barsoom Project

Chapter Seven

Eviane stumbled down the bank of snow, caught her balance for an exhilarating moment, then tumbled again. She wiped ice from her hair and snorted it from her nose as she came back to her feet.

The other refugees plowed furrows in the snow as they plunged down. Some rolled like pill bugs, whooping. Max and the National Guardsman. both kept their balance all the way down. At the last instant Max lost his battle with momentum and plowed face-first to the bottom.

Charlene walked down fully upright, slowly, like an aged elvish queen, with Hippogryph alongside her as a dwarfish attendant.

Eviane’s amusement vanished almost as quickly as it bubbled up. What was happening here? They had left the violence of the cities behind… and now this!

Something deep within her was untouched by the cold and the fear. Some voice whispered that it was all a dream, only a recurrent nightmare. Eviane shook her head violently. Such thoughts were dangerous.

She approached the burning lodge, cautiously avoiding the bodies of the dead.

Eviane had seen corpses before. A few more meant little. One of the dead men was heartbreakingly young. His eyes stared sightless, freezing in the terrible cold. His arms were outstretched as if begging for mercy, or trying to provide some small measure of protection for his people inside.

Charlene crunched through the snow behind her, whispered close in her ear. “Be careful?”

“Why?” Eviane asked, surprised with how damned reasonable her voice sounded. “We can handle it or we can’t. If we can’t, we’re probably dead anyway. Let’s go.”

Charlene looked at her with what could only have been amazement.. but Charlene hailed from an earlier, more benign world. Here the ice ruled, and only the strong would survive. Somehow Eviane would keep her friend alive until the tall girl had a chance to adapt to reality.

The National Guardsman jogged up beside them. Eviane scanned him appraisingly. He looked young and hard, jaw square and tight-curled hair cropped short. Good. An asset. There were bad times ahead.

Max Sands… she could trust Max. Despite the run, he wasn’t really breathing hard. Hippogryph was no weakling either. But Bowles was bent over, hands on knees, panting. Stith-Wood was massaging her knee. Orson and Kevin were still back on the slope. Johnny Welsh hadn’t told a joke in an hour.

Kevin of the pipestem legs: his padded clothing hung on him like a deflated balloon. He was puffing a little, but his smile was intact. The rest could survive a day or two of starvation, though they’d whine, but for Kevin they’d better find food. He’d build muscle-meat on this trip or die trying.

Smoke belched out of the front door as it creaked open. Fingers scrabbled on the inside, pulling weakly.

A man emerged. His broad Eskimo face was all planes and angles, the face of a man who has known starvation or terrible illness. His hands were lines and knobs. Only the eyes were alive. They were piercing, frozen blue, like chips of flaming ice.

He gasped for breath, and stretched the door wider so that a young woman could squeeze her way out. The girl fell to her knees in the snow, threw her arms around the young man’s corpse. “Wood Owl,” she sobbed hysterically. “Oh, you fool. Oh, my dear.”

She was rounded, solid beneath her furs. So: it wasn’t starvation which had stolen the fat from the old man’s face. Years of illness might do that.

As the old man stumbled from the doorframe, the roof gave a sigh and collapsed.

His voice was as timeless as the howling wind. “We must find shelter. Come with me to the prayer lodge. Ahk-lut dares not violate that sacred place.”

Eviane nodded as if she understood, and helped the girl to her feet.

The air grew even colder as they marched. The wind drove the snow until it was almost a solid curtain. The refugees stumbled on blindly, following the old man. He bent into the storm, pushing on step after painful step. Who could tell what the old man was following? Instinct or memory or the distant outline of white knife-edged mountains momentarily visible through the terrible gale. Except for those brief moments, they were in an endless, impenetrable shell of white, until Eviane could see only the stunned shadow of Johnny Welsh struggling ahead of her. One moment’s lapse of attention, a single misplaced footstep, and she would be lost.

After a time the storm’s fury diminished, and she could distinguish the alien landscape around her. There were no trees, although the snow was clotted in irregular lumps that might have been trees shrouded and drowned in white. There was no sign of life save for the line of silent travelers. Now that the wind was dying, she heard their gasping.

Charlene tapped her shoulder, whispered down from her enormous height. “How do they do this? It looks as if we can see for miles.”

Eviane frowned. “We’re on a hill. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”

Charlene stared, caught without a reply.

Eviane withdrew to a deeper, cooler place inside her mind. Charlene had already begun to crack. Snow madness. Shock. it was to be expected. in a group this size they might lose half simply to fear and despair. Eviane must be strong for all.

Eviane snapped out of her reverie as they approached a large, regular mound of snow.

The old man got down upon his hands and knees. He oriented himself to the mountains, then began digging in the snow. In minutes he uncovered a man-sized oval cave mouth. He disappeared into it like a seal diving into an ice hole.

Others followed. Eviane was sixth in line.

The floor of the passage was compressed and melted into an icy glaze. The tunnel sloped down for the first eight feet, then leveled out. She pushed her pack ahead of her, and nudged herself along with knees and elbows. The tunnel gave her only a foot of clearance to the sides, and if she had suffered from claustrophobia, this would have been sheer terror. Wiggling another ten feet brought her to an upgrade, where the lack of traction became treacherous. Hands grasped her pack from above and pulled. She hung on for the ride.

She emerged from a trapdoor into a kind of lodge. Fifty or a hundred years earlier, the lodge would probably have been constructed from wood and snow, but more modern materials made other options available.

Tubular plastic bladders filled with frozen water formed the rectangular structure of the walls. The ceiling stretched over nine feet high, and a conical sheet of clear plastic capped the roof. The air smelled stale, already warming with the scent of tired human flesh. The old man poked a long spear through a vent hole in the center of the sheet, knocking loose the snow.

In the middle of the room a blackened pit had been filled with branches, chunks of log, and tinder.

One by one the travelers came in out of the cold. Their collective bodies warmed the room. Outer coats were coming off.

The old man looked at them, and Eviane had a better opportunity to examine him in turn. He and the young woman were similarly attired, though the lower cut of her garment was more curved than his. The fur-hooded robe had been sewn together from a variety of animals. Eviane recognized squirrel and mink, and something that was probably muskrat. There were other skins, perhaps not native to Alaska but traded hand to hand from hundreds or thousands of miles away. Was that a poodle skin?

She didn’t see any machine stitching in the older man’s clothing. As the girl peeled off her external clothing, she revealed a pair of Jordache designer ski pants and boots. Girls will be girls. She was cute, in an Eskimo kind of way. Eviane flickered a glance at Max Sands. Yes, he’d noticed.

“Call me Martin Qaterliaraq,” the old man said. “Martin the Arctic Fox. Your Christian missionaries named me Martin, long ago. They were good people, and I pay them the respect of keeping that name. But although my daughter calls herself Candice, to me she is Kanguq, Snow Goose. I serve the old ways.” His face fell. Once more, he seemed impossibly ancient. “It is the old ways that brought you here to this place, and only the old ways can save the world.”

Orson spoke into the silence. “What are you saving, exactly? From what?”

“Wait. We know the way to show you. You have helped us already, but we need more.”

The trapdoor in the ground puffed again, and more people emerged. Some were Eskimos in traditional dress, furs and skins. Some of the frocks looked to have been made of fish skin, and others of waterproof gut. Some wore more modem cold-weather gear, perhaps even some of the plastic adverse-environment gear Bowles had mentioned.

Both men and women wore earrings hanging from pierced earlobes. As one wrinkled Mongol face passed close by, Eviane caught a closer look at his flat, rectangular earrings. Bits of ivory, glass beads, and colored rock were stuck into them.

The women were heavy but withered by time and environment. Many wore jewelry decorated with grotesque faces, grinning demon-shapes, snarling animals. Two had bone needles projecting through their septa.

Eviane counted a dozen men and women. One… two wore bloody bandages. Some were introduced by name, names that made Eviane’s head hurt to hear them: Kitngiq and Pingayunelgen and Tayarut and even less manageable mouthfuls.

All had the characteristic padding of fat, the dark skin and epicanthic folds. There was a kind of vitality to them that made the excess poundage seem appropriate in a way her own never had. They carried it as if it was insulation above hard muscle.

When the room was three-quarters full, they arranged themselves around the fire pit in a circle.

With flint and steel, Martin started the fire. Smoke clouded the air, although it was almost magically drawn up through the roof.

Pouches were opened. Dried fish and meat went around the circle. Orson Sands sneered at what he was holding. “This isn’t even diet food. There was plenty of real food back in the supply store.”

Martin shook his head sadly. “You must learn to see as the Cabal see, if you would best them at their game. We must prepare you for the traditional ways, my friend.”

“He doesn’t mean Eskimo Pies,” Max told his brother.

The pouch reached her hands. What Eviane pulled out had a texture like rough cardboard. She began to chew. It was stringy, with a smoked flavor.

“The Inua of the fish must be respected. They feed us and clothe us, quiver our arrows and seal our boats. Their eggs tan hides and the oil of their bodies lights our homes. Eat, and nourish your bodies, and give reverence to the Inua of the fish. Many of you will die before this is over, and then your spirits will mingle with those beings you have consumed. It would be best to make peace with them now.”

The girl-Snow Goose-said, “Sedna is already gravely ill. Too ill to-” Martin glared at her and she was silent.

Eviane took Martin at his word, eating slowly, chewing until each mouthful was almost a liquid. (Sedna?) The atmosphere in the lodge was close, growing warmer. Her companions were having little trouble eating the peculiar food. Most of them must have tried stranger diets than this, from the look of them. (Did she know that name?)

When she stopped eating, she wasn’t full, but the edge was off her hunger. She felt in a state of readiness, eager to hear the next of it.

Several of the older men and one of the younger went to the fire and threw on crumbled handfuls of powder. When they burned, they made a smell like tobacco and dust. The smoke grew thicker, the flame hotter.

The Eskimos were peeling off their external clothing. Soon they were all in underwear or twisted loincloths. The refugees looked at each other, in speculation or embarrassment or panic. Martin the Arctic Fox seemed half-starved, bones showing, concave belly… no navel. Qaterliaraq had no navel. Orson nudged Max, whispered.

The air grew thicker, warmer. Eviane was perspiring. No help for it. She stripped, and didn’t stop until she was down to bra and panties. She folded her clothes into a careful bundle. The Eskimos weren’t hiding themselves, and she wouldn’t either.

Bowles and Stith-Wood wore their near nudity with ease, but Orson Sands held his shirt and jacket nervously in front of himself, trying to cover as much flab as he could. Kevin spread his thin arms before the fire. His eyes were half-closed in bliss, and his ribs were prominent.

Hippogryph, sweating freely, had kept his clothes on until he couldn’t take the heat. Now he was undressing in some haste. He kept the bundled clothes in front of him, blushing furiously.

Max had stripped down to shorts without a tremor, but many of Eviane’s fleshy companions were embarrassed. They shifted their considerable weight nervously from side to side like guilty children. Charlene tried to shrink into herself, shoulders hunched, arms hugging her knees, guilty grin… but she was relaxing even as Eviane watched. She was watching Hippogryph.

Hippogryph would not meet anyone’s eyes. His ears were quite red. He was hunched as Charlene had been, yet he had little to hide. Beneath his quite Eskimo-like fat layer the muscle was solid. And what did Charlene think she was hiding? Elvish alien beauty, if she would only straighten up.

Behind her, Johnny Welsh whispered, perhaps to himself, “I wish there wasn’t so much light…”

Bowles chuckled. “Steam bath scene, Take One.”

Johnny relaxed; he smiled; his voice rose. “Gosh, Charles, wasn’t it nice of the cannibal king to let us use their bathhouse?”

“We should hurry, Johnny. There must be a dozen tribes outside waiting for us to finish.”

“They’re probably here for the feast the king promised-”

Martin Qaterliaraq spoke again. “This is the sweat lodge, the qasgiq of my people. Mph.” The old man pronounced the word kuzz-a-gick. “Here we dream our dreams and see into the world beyond. But Ahk-lut has t-t-torn the veil between matter and spirit. He would bring the chaos of his greed and fear into the world-mph-and destroy everything.”

The other Eskimos nodded assent. But Martin’s lips were twitching, and some others were having trouble keeping their faces solemn.

The trapdoor in the floor flapped open again. More Eskimos brought in handfuls of brittle driftwood and loaded them into the central fire pit.

Smoke curled up from the crackling wood and twisted through the ceiling. Watching it lulled Eviane into an almost hypnotic reverie.

The relaxation became dismay a few minutes later, when the air grew so close as to be almost unbreathable. Several of the refugees were choking and gasping for breath.

Then the smoke lightened. Pictures floated in a gray, misty ocean that merged into a gray, misty sky. Martin’s voice was strong once again. “It was the beginning, and there were not yet people upon the Earth,” he said. “For four days the first man lay coiled in the pod of a beach pea. On the fifth he burst forth and stood full-grown.”

A man, a proto-Eskimo, stood naked in the mist.

A black shape emerged from the sky, grew wings and a head, became a gigantic Raven. In Eviane’s mind the words of the ancient shaman and the images in the air melded together. The room around her receded from her awareness. She stood on an ancient beach, could see the oily gray sky, smell the protosurf.

The Raven covered a sizable patch of sky. It shrank as it glided to earth: perspective in reverse. It was man-sized when it touched the sand. It stared at the man, cocking its head to the side, and finally said: “What are you?”

The man stuttered in fear and confusion. The great Raven pushed its beak aside, and its feathers away, revealing smooth brown skin beneath. It became very like the man, not fearsome at all.

The man relaxed. “I know not who I am. I know that I hunger and thirst.”

The Raven opened his hand. The flesh of his palm melted and ran, and formed beads which darkened to berries. The man took them and ate.

With the sweep of an arm that was also a wing, the Raven transformed the sea into a creek running at the base of a snowcapped mountain. The Raven scooped clay from the bank of the river and molded it lovingly. He set two blobs on the earth, and waved his feathered arms again.

Two mountain sheep stood inanimate for a few moments, then opened their eyes, shuddered, and ran off to the mountains.

“The Raven made everything that lives,” Martin’s voice whispered behind her ear. Shapes were flowing from the Raven’s wing: reindeer, caribou, rabbits. The other wing swept out, square miles of glossy black shadow, and seals and whales and a thousand shapes of fish rained into the ocean.

The Raven was studying the man again in that odd, avian manner. He molded clay into another man-shape with a slightly different symmetry. He took long grass from the bank of the stream to cover the new creature’s head. Its eyes opened, and it was woman. She stretched her hand out for the man’s.

They walked away. As they passed over the land it blossomed, the stream ran with fish, and birds filled the sky.

Eviane snorted at the smell of smoke and was back in the qasgiq. Martin, half-visible in the smoke, was hunched over, talking as if to himself. “The Raven gave all sea life into the care of Sedna. All land life into the hands of her lover Torngarsoak. When these two are well, all creatures are fruitful and multiply…” And within the murk Eviane found herself deep underwater. Schools of fish streamed past a kneeling Eskimo woman with long, floating hair and a face not unlike that of Snow Goose. Playfully, she brushed her hands through a school of fish Her hands! Her fingers were stubs, chopped off just below the first knuckle.

Orson was whispering to Max: “-pretty typical myth pattern.

Sedna was a beautiful Eskimo girl who tried to escape an arranged marriage. Her father cut off her fingers. The joints fell into the ocean, became whales, seals, and so on.”

And yet there was no sense of tragedy or regret in Sedna’s beautiful face. Her eyes met Eviane’s; her lips twitched in a smile. Eviane was warmed by the beauty.

Smoke swirled. Land again: ice melting, green sprouting. She watched men multiplying, expanding across the land. The land filled with children, laughing, growing, mating, spreading their villages and hunting lands out beyond the horizon.

The seas swelled, and suddenly Eviane was in the prow of a small, shallow boat, skimming across the waves behind a flashing seal. The seal was speared, pulled aboard. The hunters rattled quick memorized words, and for a moment Eviane was back underwater, and the woman with the stubby fingers cocked her head to hear the voices.

Eviane was on the ice, belly flat against the floe, as a walrus rose through a hole to take a precious mouthful of air. A spear flashed past her viewpoint She ran with her companions beside a river, stretching their nets. Nets heavy with salmon were pulled to land. Voices were raised in happy song She was surrounded by dancing children in the midst of a communal hall, a qasgiq. Naked bodies bent and twisted to the rhythms of a hundred unfamiliar percussion instruments She stood on the shore, and watched a strange and alien vessel approach across the water. It was large, larger than a whale, large enough to hold whales. Gigantic white billowing wings caught the wind and breathed the thing in toward the land. Men sprang out, hairy men with pale skin.

As she watched, with impossible, magical speed, they began to build. Suddenly houses of wood-more wood than her people had ever seen-began to sprout in tight clusters. The new men killed whales and seals until their corpses littered the beach like poisoned ants.

And when there were no more whales and seals, they dug the hills, pulling out the yellow metal.

And when that slackened, they drilled into the ground, and pumped out thick black fluid.

The quickly shifting views of white intruders spilling across the land were becoming blurred. Behind them Eviane could see the woman beneath the water, the Eskimo woman with mutilated hands. Sedna was sick. A pale mass with white, veinlike threads, a fungus or parasite, was spreading through her hair, across her cheeks and neck, down her shoulders. She hunched her shoulders and hid her face in misery.

“The people of the Raven watched the destruction of their land.” She heard Martin’s voice dimly in her mind. “The people learned the ways of the intruders and forgot their own. Sedna was ill with their sins. And the Raven circling overhead, watching his people seduced from the way of their ancestors, was not happy.”

The Raven was a monstrous black shape, diving like a hawk. The earth’s surface tore like paper. The Raven ripped his way deep into the world’s heart. He emerged with claws filled with sticky orange-glowing magma. From that he made new shapes: children, boys and girls who glowed with force, whose faces were filled with wisdom and knowledge. They-uh-huh! — they had no navels.

Eviane watched as the Raven swept the magical children into his claws and swooped up, up until the entire globe of the earth was a hazy white arc beneath her, and her heart was in her throat. Then the Great Bird swooped down, and left pairs of children around the rim of the Arctic Circle. She saw them swiftly gather together the tribes of the People, and teach them to make fire with the fire drill, to skin and tan, to build houses of wood and stone and ice. The old ways. Sedna showed in double exposure: her hair was coming clean. Her head lifted, she sighed, she waved a languid stub-fingered hand that streamed flocks of seals…

Gone.

Eviane blinked her eyes, rousing slowly from the spell. The pictures were gone, and Martin the Arctic Fox was speaking again.

“The Great Raven made the new men to teach the old knowledge to our people, to give us back the spirit world we had lost. He dispersed us around the great circle of ice. I came here, to this land you call Alaska. My son is called Ahk-lut, and together we were powerful guardians of the Old Ways. For half a century we used the power to help my people. Then Sedna became sick again, and Ahk-lut formed other plans, other ideas.

“Through dreams, through chanting, he reached our children, the children of the children of the Raven. Gathering them from tribes scattered around the ice, around the world, he formed the Cabal. The Cabal seduced more than half of our children. They kept their secrets from their parents, and together they worked their magic.”

An ocean of mist boiled away, and when it cleared Eviane was in a sweat lodge much like Martin’s qasgiq, but larger, darker. Eight young men formed a circle around a smoky fire. They were naked but for leather pouches slung on thongs around their necks. Their skins were burnt dark red by the heat. Perspiration drooled down their faces and slicked their bodies.

An alien, evil sound coursed through the air, one she finally recognized as a chorus of low mutterings, malignant human voices joined in dark harmony.

One stood. His face was very like Martin’s, leaner than a normal Eskimo face, with indented cheekbones and sunken eyes, as if he had not only Martin’s genes but the old shaman’s suggestion of deep sickness. He was shaven-headed. The dark eyes squinted in old hatred; the corneas looked milky. He reached into the pouch that hung from his neck, fumbling, and for a moment Eviane saw a tiny, withered pair of human legs in the pouch, and the rounded suggestion of a head. Then it vanished again, and Ahk-lut (who else could it be?) drew out a bar of chewing tobacco.

With dark, stained teeth Ahk-lut tore an enormous plug from the bar, masticated it, then spat a long, brownish stream into the fire. The flames leapt, and the smoke became a pillar of fetid dark green, masking and noxious.

“The young ones. Our children,” Martin said. “They were trying to heal a great wrong, but they were impatient. They wanted it quick and easy. They’ve done a dreadful thing…”

The Cabal passed the tobacco from hand to hand. One at a time every man in the lodge spat tobacco juice into the fire, until at last the smoke within the lodge was so deep that she could barely see faces at all.

Ahk-lut turned, picked up a robe, and swept it aside. The lump beneath glowed faintly blue. Ahk-lut picked it up-it was heavy-swung himself around, and set it in the center of the fire. Sparks sprayed outward.

Firelight masked the blue glow, but set the irregular mass gleaming. It was polished metal, with shattered edges like curved daggers, and thick tubing twisted and torn.

Above the fire, a huge face looked briefly through the smoke. It was part bird, part man: enough of man to show its astonishment.

Each man reached into the pouch hung around his neck, and from it drew a handful of powders and bone fragments.

With each handful there was a brief flash of a shape that roiled within the smoke and then vanished again, like a walrus rolling at the water’s surface before disappearing back into the depths. Here was a monstrous caterpillar, a writhing, multiarmed abomination. Smoke churned and became a killer whale with stubby human arms. It changed again, into the malformed corpse of a fetus pushing its flattened head against its amniotic membrane. A dead man clothed against bitter cold, face hooded, clothing and torso ripped open and empty. There were other, darker, bloodier images.

Higher within the pillar of smoke, the bird-face showed again. Its beak opened wide; it screamed silently, and faded, and then the shrill cry of a bird burst through the illusory smokehouse. The Cabal bellowed in triumph.

… When had they become nine?

Ahk-lut stepped into the circle, set his hands on a man’s shoulders, and pulled him to his feet. Eviane saw that the man’s arms and ankles were bound. He screamed like a bird. She saw, now, the suggestion of a beak in his pointed face.

Quite suddenly, the fire was out. An angular metal shape gleamed harsh blue within it. Shapes moved in the dark. A shadow occluded the glow, and fell into it-man-shaped, a bound man, writhing-and he was gone, and the blue glow was gone, and the firelight was the light of Martin’s qasgiq.