by Claire North
The first part of the journey was easy, ground hard, stone underneath, what little snow there was undisturbed. Then they scrambled uphill, over black rocks bleached with millennia of bird shit from the migrating creatures that sometimes nested in the crags, and Charlie’s chest had ached in the bitter air and his lungs had dragged and he’d had to ask that they stop at the top of the hill, and Sven had looked at him with something that might have been pity.
Charlie swore to himself that he wouldn’t ask to rest again, and looked down and saw, on the other side of the ridge they’d been climbing, the ice. Not snow, not yet—it wasn’t moist enough for much snow to have fallen in recent weeks—but the packed ice that filled the fjord, not a smooth rolling thing but rather a razored desert of dunes and towers, of juts and spikes pushed up and compressed and shattered and re-formed by the constant shifting of the glacier in the valley. He thought perhaps he stood on a valley wall, but couldn’t tell—the shape of the land had been ground away, so that what lay hidden and underneath was lost to him. He listened, and heard the noise of thunder, and thought it might be a storm, and saw no clouds, and realised it was the glacier, moving, moving, destroying itself and being reborn.
He looked at Sven, mute, unsure, hoping for a walk that didn’t take them into that pincushion of white and blue. Sven looked up at the sun, as if seeking a similar inspiration, then back at Charlie. “Well?” he said. “Do you know where to go?”
“I just have to find Professor Ule—I wasn’t told how.”
The tea tin, a ridiculous encumbrance strapped to his bag. Two pairs of gloves, the taste of dried meat in his mouth.
Sven nodded again, without surprise, then stared down at the fjord, almost glowering into its depths. “I think I know where to look.”
White in the heavens, white on the earth. Perhaps they flew a little while; perhaps they were white seagulls, or no, white worms, wriggling through the snow. There was a kind of worm, Charlie vaguely recalled as his mind drifted through pale nothingness, that lived in the snow and dissolved in the sun, its body melting away with summer.
They skirted the edge of the fjord, walking a few feet away from that dividing line between ice and rock, staying on the rock side, the sounds now of grinding, cracking, tearing, shaking, thumping growing great enough to drown out any pretence at speaking, even if they’d had anything to say. Once, something cracked in the ice flow, a mountain falling, and Charlie jumped, thinking a bomb, a volcano—but as he looked out, he couldn’t see the thing that had collapsed, and Sven seemed utterly unperturbed.
He had a watch on, somewhere beneath the layers of sleeve and glove that covered his skin, but the idea of looking at it seemed quaintly obscene. Once, he thought he was sweating, and was instantly afraid, imagining that the sweat would freeze on the back of his neck and that would be it, death in an instant, but he lived, and if it was sweat, it did not freeze. Another time, they stopped, to drink and eat dry meat and a couple of loose, tasteless bars wrapped in foil, and he realised that he was cold, shivering, shuddering, and looked at Sven to see if this was all right, and it seemed to be, so he let his teeth chatter and they kept on walking until his teeth chattered no more.
When the sun was low—but not setting, not that—Sven declared, “We make camp here.”
A mist was rising, turning into fog; it came fast, just a greyness above the ground that quickly spread upwards, blocking out the endless sun.
Charlie took his bag off, and nearly fell over.
Beneath the ice, vanishing fast into the grey, industries churned, slaves of crystal died and were turned to water, factories were built and cathedrals destroyed, shaking through the earth.
“Here,” Sven said firmly. “Don’t take your boots off. If you need to piss, leave your bag here, tie a rope to the bag. Don’t wander; don’t go onto the ice. A man died last year ten yards from his front door, because he couldn’t find it in the fog.”
Charlie did not take his boots off, and for the rest of the yellow-white night continually jerked awake, certain that he had not been asleep to wake at all.
Chapter 19
On the second day of walking, Charlie looked at his watch, and was astonished to see that it was only six a.m. The fog had burned away as he not-slept, and if he concentrated, he seemed to remember waking from his not-sleep to notice that it had gone, but perhaps that was a lie, perhaps he was only imagining that he’d woken to that experience, now that he was moving again, in the light of day.
They walked, an unchanging world, ice to the left, breaking, stone to the right. Charlie looked at his watch again, and was astounded to discover that it was half past nine—and then, hours later, it was only quarter to ten. After that, checking the time became an obsession. He was startled to discover that only six minutes had gone by since he last checked, since surely he had walked for an hour. Then he was surprised to find that three hours had passed, and he had slumbered while walking and not experienced it. He felt sure that there must be some great meaning in this, some strange way of expressing the concept of time, of answering the child’s irritating question, “Mummy, what is time?”—perhaps by plonking said child out here, with just a woolly hat and a pair of gloves held together with long elastic, and saying, “Here is time, child, here it is, here where nothing changes and the ice down there was formed when Krakatoa blew and you can walk for ever and nothing passes except the white and the noise.”
After a while Sven said, “Give me your fucking watch.”
It was the first thing he’d said all day. Charlie opened his mouth to speak, to object, and looked into Sven’s eyes and wordlessly gave him the watch, and nearly cried with relief to have it taken from him.
On the edge of the ice, as the world cracked and crumbled, Charlie looked up from studying nothing much with great care, from walking, walking, walking, and saw five people on the ridge above, walking the other way. They wore thick, heavy-duty snow boots, and belts with ice picks, crampons and flasks around their waists. They carried large khaki rucksacks, strapped tight across their shoulders and bellies. They wore gloves, and two of the five wore hats. Of the remaining three, two were blonde, one had deep, dark hair. They were wearing nothing else. They waved as they walked by. Charlie waved back, and looked at Sven to see if he too had seen this sight, or if he was indeed hallucinating. Sven raised one hand in greeting to the hikers on the ridge, but politely didn’t stare.
Then they found a bag, discarded on the edge of the ice. It was a rucksack, much like the ones that Charlie and Sven carried. The wiser man squatted down, went through its contents, tutted and said, “This is Ule’s.”
“Why is it here?” Charlie asked.
“He must have dropped it. It has his food, drink, compass …”
Charlie said nothing. His feet felt flattened in his boots. When he took them off, he was confident that they would have no bones left in them, just beaten-out tissue and hard patches of skin. He looked forward to the grinding ice, and back over his shoulder, and as he looked back, he thought he beheld
a pale rider upon a white …
but he blinked and shook his head and clearly he hadn’t, and that was that.
“Come on,” barked Sven, and started walking again, faster, following the frozen fjord. Charlie hesitated, looking down at the abandoned rucksack. For some reason it felt like littering, or a kind of defeat to leave it, but as he went to pick it up—
“Leave it!” snapped Sven, so Charlie left it, and marched on after.
The Greenland man’s pace, previously a confident walk through an empty land, now picked up, leaving Charlie’s face flushing hot, lungs tight against the cold air as they scrambled along the side of the rolling glacier, scuttling through pale dirt and up rocks where sometimes thin white flowers bloomed, and the rest of the year everything died. Once Charlie thought he saw a hunting bird soar overhead, and wondered if it liked its meat fresh or if decayed human would do; once he imagined he saw a polar bear on the flow, and nearly cried out to
Sven look, look—but it was just a curved piece of ice that collapsed even as he watched back down to dust.
He hit a physical wall, and knew that was what it was, had to move each foot deliberately, consciously, willing them to lift and fall. When at last walking became easier, his whole body flooded with light, and he felt as if he might run, laugh and skip round the sluggish Sven like a barking dog. For a moment he knew he was immortal, invincible, and at that same instant it occurred to him that he was in danger, and that too was wonderful. He might fall, he might freeze, starve, slip, become lost in the wild, and he was delighted at the thought, thrilled by it, for he was the Harbinger of Death, the one who went before, and he did not think, could not imagine, that Death would come for him yet, and surely, therefore, his was a charmed life.
Emboldened, he nearly laughed, stood up straighter, shifted his weight and almost immediately lost his footing, slipping and landing hard on his back, breath knocked out of him, neck creaking where it slapped back against his rucksack, and Sven turned and glared, so sheepishly Charlie crawled back to his feet, and walked humbly through the snow.
The sun skimmed the edge of the horizon—didn’t that mean something here?—and began to rise again.
Strength, heat and thought ebbed away, and Charlie forgot that he was immortal, and remembered only that he was walking again. The quality of the ice was changing, fewer pyramids and spires, but rather tight little waves crystalled over with old snow, the fjord expanding, growing wider and deeper, until suddenly Sven stopped again, and knelt on the edge of the snow and said, “There!”
Charlie looked, legs shaking, arms shaking, shoulders beginning to wear thin where his backpack was digging through, and saw a footstep, only one, barely visible where the snow was just thick enough to retain its memory. “He’s gone onto the ice,” whispered Sven, horror blooming behind his thick mirrored glasses. “Damn him.”
Charlie followed Sven’s gaze across the frozen fjord. Here, in this place, it seemed that a gentle sea had frozen on the glacier’s surface mid-ripple, and the ice was a deeper blue, not the hard grey-white of the shattered flows they’d seen before. But still beneath, the noise, the grinding, crunching roar—and all around the sharpened cracks and torn-down gulleys of ice, creating valleys and cliffs, tunnels and falls where the structure was breaking apart. Thin rivulets of water flowed over the smoother shapes on the surface, following a gradient he couldn’t perceive, trickling in busy quiet against the industrial roar. The glacier was melting. The cold sun was hot on his skin, hot on the ground, and the world was melting.
Then Sven stepped onto the ice, and began to walk towards a horizon that Charlie couldn’t begin to perceive, white on blue on white.
Charlie staggered, nearly fell, caught his balance badly, stood with his hands on his hips, drawing heavy breaths, and didn’t move. His sense of invincibility tottered; the chemicals that had pleasurably filled his system faded.
Sven looked back at him, and for the first time, there was a flicker of sympathy in his voice. “You can go back,” he said. “There is a GPS phone in my bag. You don’t have to go on.”
After all, it’s only a job.
Only a job.
Charlie looked down, and saw that his footprint had obscured the other man’s, the man whose foot had gone before. He moved his feet quickly to one side, feeling he’d somehow sullied something sacred, and looked up at Sven, and thought he saw
who the hell knew what it was he thought he saw?
And with a shudder, not of cold, he stepped onto the ice.
Some time later
in a place where there was no time
Charlie fell over, and didn’t get back up.
He was aware that Sven pitched a tent, wrapped him in his sleeping bag, gave him tepid tea, made him eat, and, when the worst of the wind was off his face, crawled into the sleeping bag with him, and held him tight, until his shivering subsided.
Charlie probably slept, it was hard to tell, and when he woke, Sven was asleep in the bag with him, and the sun was still spinning through the sky.
Sven said, “Can you go on?”
Charlie said, “Yes,” and meant it. In his dreams he had seen the end of the world, and knew when he woke that only he could prevent it. “Yes,” he repeated, shaking off this madness of sleep. “I want to finish it.”
They walked.
Chapter 20
On what might have been the third day, they descended a spire of ice, crampons and rope, axe and spike.
Charlie supposed that in another time, he might have been afraid, but he wasn’t now, he was just passing through, a man passing through his own body, his own experience, and so he obeyed Sven’s every command, and made it to the bottom of the spire to where a smoother line of ice ran, and Sven looked at him with an expression that might have been impressed, and was perhaps a little afraid, and murmured, “Charlie, are you okay?”
“I’m good,” Charlie replied, and found that whoever had spoken these words was not lying. “Let’s keep going.”
They walked.
The horizon—is it a horizon?
Is that a place where the ice stops, the edge of the glacier, where ice meets earth, a frozen waterfall, a plummet down into nothing?
Or is it just a trick of the eye, perspective gone mad, nothing to measure the flatness by, nothing to say this is high and that is low, no near or far, no colour, just
whiteness.
Walking.
Once in the distance Charlie thought he saw …
… but of course he didn’t.
Then again in the distance he looked and he thought he saw …
… and this time, like the walkers on the ridge or the pale figure he had absolutely not seen at the edge of the fjord, he looked to Sven to see if Sven had seen it too, and at that moment Sven did, because with a sudden shout he dropped his bag, gave a cry, and started to run towards it.
Not sure what to do in this circumstance, Charlie lumbered after, dragging Sven’s bag along behind.
A man lay on the ice.
He lay like one sleeping, a peaceful child, his knees tucked in, his head resting on his hands, his eyes closed. He was, Charlie felt absolutely certain, dead. His skin was white, his lips were grey, there was no rising or falling in his chest. Sven was already kneeling at the man’s side, gloves off, fumbling at his throat, his face, listening, feeling for any sign of life. Charlie stood by and watched, mute, in a dream. What was this man doing here? Why had the whiteness not taken him, as surely it had taken them? Had he also died looking for the Professor?
Then Sven snapped, “Don’t just stand there—help me!”
And it turned out that the man wasn’t dead after all.
They pitched a tent, Sven slamming the poles into the ice as if each were his enemy, while Charlie manhandled the frozen man into his sleeping bag, half expecting his knees to snap, his arms to tear away in his hands as he moved him, so stiff and heavy was every limb. The end of his nose was turning black; Charlie didn’t speculate what might be happening to his fingers and toes. One side of his body had melted the ice with its heat, and then, as flesh cooled, the meltwater had begun to refreeze, so they had to pull him from his frozen jacket and top, stripping him down to bare, bloodless skin, before Sven pulled his own jacket free and clambered into the sleeping bag too.
Charlie sat on his rucksack and watched in silence as Sven held the man tight, warming him with his heat, sometimes feeling for a pulse, checking for breath, whispering, now in Danish, now in Kalaallisut, “Don’t die you fucking idiot don’t you fucking die …”
Charlie realised that this was it, the end, that they had walked across the ice and they had found their target, and this man was it, this sack of frozen flesh, what a disappointment, just a man after all, not a figure waiting for them at the end of the world.
He realised that he was more tired than he had ever known, and that the world was dead to him, washed out with white, and that his blood had never been s
o hot and alive inside his skin, and that humanity was the most beautiful, precious thing in the universe, and that all life was insignificant and the destruction of it would not matter a jot, and that all these things were true, all at once.
He realised that he was crying, and only noticed because of the searing, skin-bursting salty heat of it on his face. He tried to wipe away the salt with his sleeve, but it just burned more, so he let the tears roll, without feeling really sad, and chewed on dry meat, and waited.
He wondered whether he should be sitting here at all, all things considered. Should he have helped put the man in the sleeping bag? He was, after all, the Harbinger of Death, the messenger who went before the …
He drank water warmed by his body, and dismissed the thought. Jobs were a thing that happened in another place; the past had melted with the glacier, gone for ever.
The sun turned overhead, and Sven held the old man tight, and Charlie dozed.
Thunder, roaring, the end of the world come at last. Charlie started awake from where he had slumbered, still sitting on his rucksack, and saw the world collapsing. The horizon tore away, shrinking, crawling nearer, the earth shook, the ice cracked, he scrambled on his hands and knees to the tent and started tearing the sheets away, shouting over the roar, “Ice! The ice is collapsing! The ice is collapsing!”
Sven, waking groggy, crawled from the sleeping bag to see the glacier’s edge, a few hundred metres away, coming closer, a solid waterfall plummeting into the depths below, clouds of crystals spiralling upwards from the impact, the ground shaking as in an earthquake, the world cracking, crazy snakes of meltwater bouncing, splitting, rippling along the ice.
“Help me!” Sven roared over the din, grabbing the sleeping bag in which the still-slumbering man lay and pulling it away, back from the edge, Charlie slung his sack across his back, grabbed the other corner and heaved too, falling over his own feet, dragging the man across the shuddering ice by the corners of the bag, bouncing, banging, surely the bag would tear, surely they would fall, running as the world fell behind them, the ground beneath their feet stabbing and bucking, pools of slush breaking to the surface in great bubbling bursts like frozen lava, the melting surface giving way so they fell and crawled on hands and knees, and then climbed to their feet again, then fell again, and finally both of them wriggling along the ground, dragging the man in the bag behind them until at last
