He immediately reached his arms back down into the hole to help the next person. Ani and Shveta came through first, then Lady Barrett. Nindemann had been helping them all up. When Nindemann was out of the water, he helped Aadesh and Aadarsh through. Bren was so cold and so weak he felt sick, but seeing the brothers come through the seal hole made him laugh. It was lucky for them the hole had been made by an animal even bigger than they were.
“Is that our rescuer?” said Lady Barrett.
She was looking now at a large brown seal lounging on the ice, staring with curiosity at the strange creatures that had just popped out of its hole. It twitched its whiskers and opened a mouth full of sharp teeth, but more in a playful than a threatening manner. Then Bren could have sworn it looked directly at him with its glassy black eyes, before turning and lurching off across the ice, to do whatever it was seals did.
CHAPTER
28
PARADISE FOUND
“Change out of your wet clothes and into your dry ones, quickly,” said Nindemann, and he didn’t have to tell Bren twice. It already felt like his wet underclothes were freezing to his body, and stripping them off was like peeling away his own skin. Fortunately the lard had done its job, both protecting him and making it easier to get undressed and redressed. His “dry” clothes hadn’t stayed completely dry in their oilskin bags, but they were better than nothing, and when he wrapped his furs around him again, he just wanted to lie down and get warm.
“Up, up!” said Nindemann. “We start walking now, get the blood flowing. We’ve all had a shock.”
They all had to fight to get their legs moving again after four days of being in the sub, except for Shveta, who seemed to glide along, her furs pooling around her feet. Bren came up to Ani and said, “Why don’t you change into the cat? Wouldn’t you be warmer? Stronger?”
The question seemed to irritate her, the way Bren had irritated Mouse whenever he suggested she use her gifts.
“You don’t know anything about anything,” she snapped. “I can’t just change into the cat whenever I want. It takes enormous concentration and will. And it . . . it hurts me.”
“Hurts you?” said Bren. “What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t explain it to a dum-dum like you,” she said. “But you’re welcome for saving your life underwater.”
“Thank you,” said Bren. “I thought I had said that.”
“You had not,” said Ani.
He didn’t try to talk to her again after that, until it came time to make camp. They were down to their bare possessions, which meant sleeping without freezing was going to be a far greater challenge—they didn’t have the extra furs, or the polar bear hide, to cover themselves. Nindemann had one piece of canvas, cut from an old sail, to cover the ground. Otherwise they had their own furs and body heat to survive.
“Any idea where we are?” Lady Barrett asked.
Nindemann stared out toward the horizon. “I believe we’re a great deal farther north than when we began, if I’m reading the sun right,” he said.
“What sort of time are we making on foot?” said Bren. There had been no storms since they resurfaced, and even the winds seemed less severe. Maybe they really were close to a warm polar ocean.
“Good time, considering,” said Nindemann. “But . . .”
“But what?” said Shveta. She was on a mission and had no time for wavering.
“But say we reach the Pole in a fortnight, or even less. We’re approaching the fall solstice. We have no chance to get there and back without overwintering in the Arctic. Permanent darkness. Unimaginable cold.”
“Bah!” said Shveta. “There will be no permanent darkness in Paradise. Or cold. There can’t be.”
“The good Lord made the night and the moon, and winter too,” said Nindemann.
“We worship different gods,” said Shveta, as if that was supposed to comfort the engineer.
“Do we have a choice?” said Lady Barrett. “Even if we turned back now . . .”
“No one is turning back,” said Shveta.
“What do you care what we do?” said Lady Barrett.
“Because we might need to cut you open and use your carcass for a sleeping bag,” said Shveta.
“I hope bickering is keeping you all warm,” said Nindemann. “As for me, I’d like a little extra protection, and a decent meal.” He turned to the brothers. “You two up for a hunt?”
“With what?” said Aadesh. “We left the harpoon.”
Nindemann drew out a large knife. Then Ani surprised them all by producing a katar and three chakram. Aadesh took the push dagger; Aadarsh took the throwing rings.
“Godspeed,” said Lady Barrett. “Don’t take on a bear.”
“You want me to go?” said Ani.
Shveta put her hand on her shoulder. “You stay here and protect us.”
Bren didn’t want to admit it, but he was relieved to have Shveta and Ani to protect him. He had seen what Ani was capable of. And perhaps Shveta’s “magic” was illusion, but surely snakes raining from the sky would scare off a predator? The hunting party came back after only a few hours, dragging something behind them. It appeared to be a very large seal, and Nindemann and the brothers appeared to have attached something to the top of its head in order to drag it. No, it wasn’t a seal—it was a narwhal.
Bren’s sudden excitement confused the others.
“What’s a nar-wall, and why are you excited to eat one?” said Shveta.
“It’s a type of whale!” said Bren. “With a horn. Actually, it’s a tusk, but that’s not the point!”
“It doesn’t come and go from holes in the ice, like a seal, does it?” said Lady Barrett.
“No,” said Bren. “We must be near open water. Which could mean . . .”
“We didn’t catch it,” Nindemann said. “We found it on the ice, dead. And no, we didn’t see where it came from or how it got there.”
Disappointed, no one said anything at first, but Shveta tried to remain confident. “There must be ocean nearby. It didn’t just walk to wherever you found it.”
“True,” said Nindemann. “Doesn’t mean it’s a warm ocean, like the legends say. The narwhal could’ve just been unlucky, wandered into a break in the floes. Whales strand themselves all the time. For now, let’s just be thankful we have food.”
They gutted the narwhal, separated what they could eat, and kept the hide intact for shelter. Before long the ice was a smear of blood and fluids, with steaks and organs stacked to one side and the narwhal’s body a sagging, leathery tent.
That night, huddled together inside the carcass, Bren had another dream. He was lying on his stomach on the ice, watching three men approach from the distance. As they came closer, he turned and dragged himself along the ice, away from them. He knew instinctively where he was going, and he found it—water, a gulf of it, off the edge of the ice. And in the distance, two towering mountains of ice, like gateposts to the entrance of a third mountain, farther away and shrouded with fog.
Bren surged forward and plunged into the water. He assumed it was freezing, but he didn’t feel cold. He swam effortlessly, with strength and confidence. It felt good. He felt accomplished in a way he had never felt in his life. And there were sounds underwater . . . conversation, and music. He could tell there were walruses a few hundred yards to his right, near the surface. Seals were playing below him, and below the seals were whales.
He dove deeper, where the whale song came to him more clearly, and then an alarm—a pair of orcas had been spotted a few miles away. Schools of fish swept over his head.
Even deeper, there was the pull of something dark and dangerous. Some solitary beast that the others feared.
Bren rose closer to the surface, passing through the two mountains he had seen, then breached for a closer look at the third mountain. It wasn’t there. He dove again, looking for it below but finding nothing. When he came back up to look again, everything was dark.
It took him a minute to real
ize he was awake. He was used to waking to the sharp, clear light of the sun that never set, but it was dark. That’s when he remembered he was inside the narwhal.
Nindemann and Lady Barrett were already up. He was stoking a fire of leather and blubber, and she was cooking breakfast. “Are you all right?” she asked when Bren emerged.
“I’m not sure,” he said, shivering even next to the fire. “I had another strange dream. I think . . . I think I was the narwhal. I saw something.”
They both looked at him expectantly.
“Shveta may want to hear this,” he said.
They got everyone else up, and Bren told all of them about his “swim.” He could have sworn Shveta’s ruby glowed when he told her about the three mountains.
“Just like the mandala,” she said. “Was the ocean warm? Was the mountain green?”
“It was covered by fog,” said Bren. “And I can’t be sure about the ocean. I wasn’t cold, but I wasn’t me.”
“And you alone saw it,” said Shveta, ignoring Bren’s uncertainty. “Do you wonder still why I had to bring you?”
“Take him, you mean,” said Lady Barrett.
“Be smug all you want,” said Shveta. “You’re no stranger to putting yourself first, from what I understand.”
Shveta seemed to have made a direct hit. She turned from Lady Barrett to Bren. “Besides, Bren wants this, too. I can tell.”
Bren could tell Lady Barrett was looking at him, and despite his best efforts, he knew the truth was written all over his face. Shveta was right, and Bren was beginning to believe he was meant to help her.
“There’s just one problem,” said Nindemann. “Assuming this gulf does lie beyond where we found the narwhal, we can’t swim it.”
“We’ll figure it out,” said Shveta, who was already gathering her things. “Eat up. The sooner we go, the sooner we get there.”
CHAPTER
29
THROUGH THE GATES OF ICE
Nindemann, Aadesh, and Aadarsh led the way to where they had found the narwhal. Snowfall and windstorms had erased any traces of their previous trek, but they knew how long it had taken them. The problem was, Bren had no idea how far in his dream, or his vision, he had gone from there. They would just have to use what food and supplies they had left as conservatively as possible.
“Have you figured out how to fly yet?” Lady Barrett asked, on the fourth day of their journey.
“I beg your pardon?” said Shveta.
“This gulf of polar sea we’re supposed to cross, without a boat, or without all of us becoming marine mammals.”
“You could become a fish if you prefer,” said Shveta. “You’ve got the face for it.”
“I’d be warmer as a fish,” said Nindemann, whose beard was so often covered with ice that it might as well have been grey.
“Did you hear that?” said Bren.
Everyone stopped walking and listened. It was almost impossible to hear anything over the wind, but Bren could have sworn he heard . . . barking?
“I think it’s just a seal,” said Nindemann, but before he could get the words out, Bren was running away from them. Confused, the others followed, and then they saw what Bren saw—the two huskies, lashed to one of the sleds, barking and barking at nothing they could see.
“It’s Caesar!” cried Bren, running toward one of them. He was almost there when he noticed that the sled wasn’t piled with supplies, it was a man, curled up and not moving, under a pile of furs.
“Who is it?” said Lady Barrett as Nindemann turned the man over to see if he was still alive.
“Duval,” said Nindemann. “He’s breathing, barely.”
They did what they could to revive the navigator. He seemed to have plenty of supplies with him on the sled, though his fingers and nose and lips showed signs of extreme frostbite. It wasn’t until they had examined him more closely that they realized he was wounded. Claw marks on his neck, left arm, and across his body. They gave him water and a little food, and fed the dogs, too, since they could figure no reason for their barking except that Duval had not been able to feed them himself of late.
“It was a bear,” he said, when he could finally talk.
“It killed everyone but you?” said Nindemann.
Duval wearily shook his head. “A few. We finally chased it away. A group of us decided there was no hope but to turn back, pray for a miracle. That left me and six others to keep going, hoping to find this open sea. All but me died over the past two weeks; exposure, dysentery, sepsis. May as well count me too. I’m done for.”
“Come on, now,” said Nindemann, trying to rally him. “We’re here now. You’re with us.”
Duval didn’t seem to hear him. “I just lashed the sled to the mutts and told ’em to keep going. Not sure when I passed out.”
They tried to get his strength up, and they sheltered him during the night, but Duval died two days later. Nindemann, hard and practical man that he was, wept. Perhaps because he realized he might be the last crew member of the Sea Lion still standing. But when he recovered, he tried to remain positive.
“We have two dogs and a sled now,” he said. “We can go faster, and all of us don’t have to walk.”
“We’ve got a sight more than that, bub,” said Shveta.
“She’s right,” said Lady Barrett, putting one foot against the sled. “I bow to your conviction, Queen Shveta. Assuming we do find this gulf, we now have a raft to cross it.”
Thereafter, Nindemann followed. Shveta was their leader now, driven by a religious determination to find the source of a power she had, up to now, merely tasted. Bren wondered exactly how she planned to remake the world, if she could. Was it just to right a wrong in her home state of Cashmere? Or to defeat the Mogul Empire completely? He found it impossible to believe that anyone with unlimited power would limit themselves. Wasn’t that what Mouse had tried to make him understand?
To Bren’s surprise, Shveta didn’t ride the sled. She walked behind Aadesh and Aadarsh, her bodyguards now taking their jobs literally, guarding her from the winds. Nindemann and Lady Barrett walked, too, leaving just Bren and Ani to ride the sled. Their weight was really all the two dogs could handle, along with the supplies.
Shveta never doubted they would find this open water Bren had seen in his dream, and though it took several more days of trudging through ice and snow, against ungodly winds, with all their joints and fingers and toes swollen with pain, they found it: a bright-blue sea, rimmed with ice, with two mountainous icebergs standing to the left and right of them as they approached, almost like gateposts.
Bren would have dropped to his knees in gratitude if it wouldn’t have hurt so much. Instead he just stood there, taking in this vista of his mandala come to life. He glanced at Shveta, whose face was still completely covered but whose eyes said everything.
But as they continued to stare at this dream become reality, they realized there was one problem. There was no third mountain framed by the other two, only clouds and drifting pillars of fog.
“It has to be there,” said Shveta, staring into the distance.
“Maybe the clouds are obscuring it,” said Nindemann. And as they watched, the clouds floated by and the fog shifted, and Bren thought he saw it. But just as quickly, it was gone.
“You saw it, too,” said Shveta, turning to Bren. “I can tell by your face.”
“I . . . I thought so,” he admitted. He really hadn’t been sure. He remembered how they had come upon the Vanishing Island, like a vaporous ghost that became real and solid when they finally got close.
“Arctic light plays tricks,” said Nindemann. “We’ve seen it already . . . mirages, false sunsets . . .”
“No,” said Shveta. “Turn the sled into a boat. It’s there.”
“Did you notice this water is freezing?” said Lady Barrett. “We’re hardly in sight of a tropical island.”
Shveta wasn’t listening. She was instructing Ani and the brothers to make a sail from whatever the
y had. Nindemann gave up trying to convince her otherwise and did what he did best—solve problems.
“We don’t have spare wood for a mast,” he said. “Or rigging. And we’d likely get torn apart by the wind anyway.”
“So we row?” said Shveta.
“With what?” said Bren.
“This will be tricky,” said Nindemann, “but I suggest we fashion one large sail, and we hold it. Human masts. That way we can adjust quickly to wind patterns.”
“And hopefully not get carried off into the sky,” said Lady Barrett. “Those birds don’t look friendly.”
Birds. Bren turned to look at the black-and-white birds Lady Barrett had noticed, all flying together toward the same spot—the bank of fog in the distance. Where the third mountain should be.
“It’s there,” said Bren. “Come on.” And he eagerly pitched in on sewing together a large sail they could work manually using the surgeon’s kit, spare clothes, and the canvas they had used to keep themselves dry when sleeping on the ground.
When they were finished, they had the worst-looking sail imaginable, but it caught wind, as they learned when the whole thing nearly blew from their collective grasp. The sled scarcely had room for them all, including the dogs (Bren insisted on taking them), but they got it into the water and all climbed aboard without capsizing. Aadesh and Aadarsh, charged with holding the sail, held it aloft, and off they went.
The sea may not have been warm, but it was remarkably free of floating ice, and as they neared the fog bank, the dogs began barking wildly. Shveta seemed ready to jump off the raft. When a gust of wind caught the brothers off guard, and the raft lurched several feet backward, she wheeled on them as if she were going to cut their throats. They quickly regrouped.
It was all so eerily familiar to Bren—drifting into the fog, surrounded by gauzy mist for several minutes, and then the raft suddenly ground to a halt. Nindemann, who had been standing at the front edge, scouting for land, was nearly thrown off. It wouldn’t have mattered. They had found what they were looking for: a mountain, an island, made not of ice but of earth.
The Sea of the Dead Page 20
