by Sandra Clark
Now the shaman was saying something to her, and Barron leaned across and touched her arm. 'He wants you to show him how the tape recorder works.'
By the time Belinda had been entertained by the couple, and had spent a couple of hours recording and playing back their voices on the recorder to enormous roars of laughter, it was late in the afternoon. From the air of excitement which seemed to pervade the camp she guessed something special was about to happen. Barron led her outside to look, and she was amazed to see the finishing touches being put to a large snow house, so high that the men were standing on oil drums in order to put the finishing blocks in the roof.
'Our palais de danse,' said Barron with a grin. 'Don't forget we have a date tonight.'
Without thinking Belinda slipped her arm in his. 'But I've got nothing to wear,' she teased.
He gave her a strange look. 'I think it'll be come-as-you-are,' he told her, taking her hand tightly in his for a moment.
Night came at last. The children were put quickly to bed, and it was time for the drum dance. Everyone by now was in a good mood as they crowded together in the snow house. Barron explained as best he could in the babble of voices that the point of the drum dance lay not in the beating of the drum but in the words of the songs.
'When somebody sings they sing their own personal song, and it's always the story of some true happening in their life, something important from their own experience. A man's wife may sing his song, but no one else can unless he gives them permission, though two men may become song partners and exchange songs so that they sing about each other's exploits. That way they can overcome their modesty about their own exploits.'
'Do you have a song partner as well?' asked Belinda curiously. But before he could answer a man suddenly leapt into an empty space in the middle of the crowd and started to beat a drum like a huge tambourine, swinging it from side to side, beating out the rhythm, jumping and turning in the beginnings of a primitive dance.
Soon everyone was joining in, shouting encouragement, leaping to their feet to keep time with the heady insistence of the rhythm being pounded out without a break. When one man tired another would snatch up the tambourine and continue with his own song or that of his partner, so that the crowd was kept continually dancing and clapping out the beat. The drummer started to sing the words of his song in a weird, piercing, primitive voice, choosing a woman he had had his eye on to direct it to.
Belinda struggled to set up her tape recorder, but the dance was really getting going now, the temperature was rising and people, already having stripped off their heavy deerskin outer garments, were beginning to strip to their waists.
At first Belinda averted her eyes when she saw the first woman taking off her soft leather tunic, but in the excited crush of bodies she soon found that all her attention was needed to hang on to the tape recorder. It seemed pointless to bother about sound levels and she simply pointed the microphone into the middle of the throng. Barron eyed her struggles with one eyebrow raised sardonically, but had offered no help until a man, snatching the drum from one of his wildly spinning companions, began to dance provocatively in front of Belinda, directing the words of his song at her. She raised helpless eyes to Barron, but he had his handsome face thrown back in a broad smile. His only response had been to press the off-switch of the recorder, pushing her forward into the crowd with the words: 'Go on, let your hair down for once. Get up and dance with him.'
Everyone was so excited and caught up in the music that she was soon dancing as uninhibitedly as the rest of them. It was as if some spirit of the dance had caught hold of her and she had become enslaved by it. Vaguely she remembered seeing Barron take the drum and his strong, masculine voice had rung out with the strangely primitive sounds of his paean. Briefly she wondered what event they commemorated, but she soon lost him in the crowd as her partner led her into the fray.
It seemed as if they danced for hours, locked in the intensity of the primitive drumbeats. Belinda's hair was sticking to the nape of her neck and she knew her cheeks were flushed with a new and bewitching excitement. She thought Barron was lost for good when her partner started to lead her off through the crush to the side where piles of discarded garments were strewn near the door, but at once Barron was beside her, singing his words, now plaintively and caressingly, now shouting them out in triumph as he reached the climax, exulting in the event they recorded, in the secret which lay in the primitive sound.
Almost before he had finished he had thrust the drum into the hands of Belinda's partner so that the man became the focus for the excitement of the dancers. With the beat of the drum throbbing out in such frenzy it seemed that the words themselves didn't matter much any more.
Barron swung Belinda back into the thick of the crowd, his arms strong about her waist, his face pressing up against her hair. She had time to notice that one or two couples were discreetly leaving the dancing and making their way outside, but only when Barron, his body taut against her own, started to propel her too in the direction of the door did she look up at him in alarm.
Instead of letting her speak he pressed his lips roughly against her own and with the heat of the dancers and the excitement of the throbbing drumbeat she felt her resistance to him seeping away. He half carried, half walked her towards the door, but she wasn't so deeply bewitched by the music of the last few hours that she didn't notice that people moved aside deferentially for him and that the smiles which passed from face to face were indulgent, even if knowing.
'Please, Barron, no!' she whispered weakly as she felt his hard body pressing against her own. His lips once again searched hungrily for hers as they had done that time near the store shed in the settlement. This time, though, no memories came to rescue her from the sea of emotion which was flooding over her and it was with a sense of dazed shock that she found herself wrapped in his arms, and being led, stumbling across the snow, towards their own snow house. It was now surrounded by other houses from some of which subdued laughter and the murmuring of the newcomers were clearly audible. Once inside Belinda felt herself being pushed gently down on to the silky furs heaped on the sleeping platform and in a daze she could feel their sensuous luxury against her bare skin. Although it was pitch dark she could sense that Barron had taken off some of his own clothing, and her hands sought for contact with the smooth muscularity of his body. His own hands imperiously explored her as she began to moan in ecstasy beneath his touch. It was as she clung to him, begging him to take her, to do what he wanted with her, that all the pent-up misery of loving a man who could never be hers began to well up inside her, and the hot tears of her despair began to course uncontrollably down her cheeks. Desperately she clung to him, locks of blonde hair wetly sticking to her tear-stained face as she struggled beneath the kisses he showered on her face and neck. Gently he cupped her breasts in his hands, bringing his head down again and again to massage the soft flesh with his lips. The tears were coursing now without cease down her face and little by little she started to try to free herself from his urgent embrace. She felt herself torn in an agony of wanting and fearing that left her struggling breathlessly against the yearning of his body. When he started to unfasten her boots so that he could slip her pants off she managed to pull herself up into a sitting position and tried in vain to push his hands away, but his mouth came down again, seeking some answering passion, and again and again she tried to beat ineffectually against his broad back, but her fists seemed like toys against the contained power of his muscles.
In a frenzy now of despair and confusion, yearning for him, yet in anguish at the knowledge that she was a mere plaything to him, she began to bite and scratch, twisting and turning in her efforts to escape. Barron seemed to think it was some sort of game, for his kisses became even more passionate and it was only when she called out that he recognised the genuine anguish in her voice.
For a moment he fell back as if stunned, but it was enough. With one bound she was across to the door and, snatching up her parka, s
he was running outside into the cold night air before he could even bring her name to his lips.
She was already half-way across the encampment before he managed to get outside, and then it was a mad race across the snow.
She had no idea where she was running to, she simply knew that she had to get away, she had to flee, she had to escape the dreadful pain that the night would bring if she remained with him. Feverishly she darted behind a snow house, but he saw her and came running after her, calling her name in bewilderment and with a rising note of anger in it.
She forced herself on, twisting among the houses until she came to the edge of the camp, then there was just the open desolation of the snowy landscape ahead. It seemed to echo the desolation in her heart and mind. She ran on into it, gulping in great sobbing breaths of the thin Arctic air.
Soon the sound of her breathing and the steady crunch of her boots on the ice were the only sounds she could hear.
CHAPTER NINE
'My darling, please speak to me…' The anguish and concern in his face was not something that could be imitated without the presence of genuine emotion. Belinda looked at him in wonder, her face tracing the lines at the corners of his mouth, her fingers touching briefly the lock of dark hair which fell over his forehead. Without anger she idly wondered how he could look at her with eyes so filled with love when his own wife was about to bear him a child. She contemplated his face with the detachment which comes from taking a heavy sleeping draught and, bewildered, she let her glance slide past him to the neat, bright room, with its hospital trolley, its vases of flowers, and its clinical apparatus gleamingly arrayed against the plainly painted wall. She felt so tired, so unreal, but when her glance came back to rest on the face of the man sitting so anxiously by her side, she let one word like a small sigh of contentment escape her lips.
'Amaruq,' she breathed. The name brought a sleepy smile to her face.
It was several hours later when the effects of the drug had worn off that she was at last fully awake to hear the story of her rescue by a search party made up from revellers at the drum dance.
Amaruq, for that was how she now somehow thought of him, had lost sight of her among the maze of snow houses, and by the time he had had time to fasten the laces of his boots in order to give chase, she had managed to escape from the camp altogether. A sudden blizzard, though short-lived, had obliterated all trace of her footprints and men from the camp had been out all night searching for her. It had been the sheer desperate persistence of Amaruq himself in urging the men on that had led them at last to the pathetic form lying huddled in the snow.
Amaruq didn't tell her how he had thrown himself down beside her in a frenzy of despair, convinced that she was dead, frozen to death in that cruel latitude, and how he had flung off his own coat in an effort to warm her and how the other men, forcing him back into it, had carried Belinda between them, wrapped in caribou skins brought from the camp.
'It was touch and go whether you would pull through,' he told her sternly. 'That must surely go down in history as the most stupid thing anybody has ever done.'
No, she thought to herself, suitably chastened by his words, but following a train of thought of her own, the most stupid thing was to fall for a man like you. But she raised contrite eyes to him and let them dwell lovingly on his face.
He was dressed in a black sweater and a plain duffle jacket, his hair, shorter, brushed till it gleamed, and when he came close there was the subtle tang of some aftershave lotion. But his face was pale and drawn.
'What made you do it, darling? I don't understand.' He took her hand gently. 'You seemed to want me so much.' He paused. 'You must have known I wouldn't have taken you against your will. The drum dance had such a powerful effect I was finding it difficult to stop myself. If you hadn't seemed so willing I wouldn't have laid a finger on you.' He paused again and looked searchingly into her face. 'Tell me you wanted it too.'
For a moment Belinda couldn't reply. Her emotions were too mixed up to allow for words. When she finally raised her eyes to his, the answer was plain to read.
'Then why run away in such a panic? As if you were frightened to death of me?'
She took a deep breath.
'Any girl would be frightened of a man called wolf,' she replied, averting her glance, hoping her voice would not falter in its attempted joke.
'There's something else,' said Barron, his face hardening. He made as if to get up.
'You've never bothered to tell me why—why that name,' she demanded.
He looked bored. 'The Eskimos are great ones for names. They believe they have magical properties. When a child is born a string of names are reeled out until it stops crying, then that name becomes its own for life. The only time a name is changed is if there's a brush with death. Then a new name has to be chosen.'
'Yes, but it's you I want to learn about,' she persisted, looking reproachfully at him. 'You never tell me anything about yourself. You always fob me off with sociology. Why, Amaruq? Did you have a brush with death? Is that why you've changed your name?'
He laughed shortly. 'Are you trying to be perceptive, Belinda?'
She looked steadily back at him from the pillow, her eyes brooking no escape this time. He put his hands in his pockets and half turned away to gaze out of the window. 'It's nothing really. I just happened to lay out a bully for the Nasaq. He'd been terrorising them for a long time. He pushed me a bit too far, that's all. I just taught him a lesson. From then on they called me Amaruq.' He grinned, turning back to the bed. 'Satisfied?'
'No,' she regarded him levelly. 'Why are you living this sort of life?'
His face took on a stubborn look. 'I wanted to be left alone. I'd had enough.' He wouldn't look at her. She waited to see if he would elaborate, but he turned away and seemed to become interested in a picture of mountain peaks and waterfalls hanging above the bed. 'But why do you want to be left alone?' she persisted softly.
He looked at her sardonically, one eyebrow raised. 'Did,' he said. 'Did… past tense.' A shadow passed momentarily across his face. 'Look, I've got to go. I'm getting a plane out to the post this morning, then I shall be travelling by sled to my traplines—they've been neglected too long. The nursing staff tell me you're going to be on your feet in a few days.' He looked critically at her. 'You'll have to behave yourself and do as they say. I don't know what your plans are. All your recording equipment is back at the trading post with Mac. If you need any help of any kind, get in touch with the shaman Nuallataq. He knows a little of the Nasaq speech patterns.' He paused and seemed to push his hands deeper into his jacket pockets. 'I guess this is it.'
The breath suddenly stopped in Belinda's throat. Before she could say anything he had moved swiftly over to the bed, kissed her lightly on the forehead and had headed swiftly out of the door. It closed behind him with a definitive click.
'Wait!' she called out, sitting up abruptly as if jerked into sudden life, but already the echo of his footsteps was fading down the corridor. In the silence left by his departure a million thoughts and emotions came crowding in upon her, but underneath it all an overpowering desolation seemed to take hold of her heart, and she knew, with a shudder of certainty, that there would be no forgetting.
Within a few days she was given a clean bill of health, and it wasn't long before she was stepping on to the tarmac at Invik airport to board the air charter company's snow-plane back to Two Rivers. Chuck had been at her bedside constantly over the last couple of days, and when she chidingly said she thought he was supposed to be taking some leave about now, he teasingly told her that it had always been his ambition to holiday in a hospital—as a visitor, he hastened to add. They had one or two laughs while she was there and he had helped to speed her on the road to recovery and take her mind off some of the heartache she was suffering at the suddenness and finality of Amaruq's goodbye. But it had not escaped the pilot that Belinda had been unusually remote, not her old self at all, and he had pondered over this in the privacy of
his thoughts throughout several long nights of broken sleep.
Meeting the trapper, Barron, charging down the hospital steps one morning had not helped to put Chuck's mind at ease, and he had continued to brood on the change in Belinda. In the little airport waiting-room just now he had tactlessly seized the opportunity he had been waiting for while they were briefly alone together to ask her what was wrong. She had pleaded tiredness, but the wan look she had given him had increased his suspicions. He had taken her almost roughly by the shoulders as she had stepped on ahead, and swinging her round to face him he had put the question again.
'Something happened out there with Barron, didn't it?' he demanded. Belinda had looked at him with startled eyes, but the same remote expression as before had quickly followed, and a sad smile briefly played across her face.
'I'm sorry, Chuck, I'm sorry.' Without explanation she had disengaged herself from his grasp.
'If it was anything to do with that man…' He paused, jealousy twisting his face into a momentarily unpleasant mask.
'It's to do with me, and me alone,' she told him gently. 'Don't blame anyone else.' She turned wearily to pick up her things. 'Are we going?'
Together they had flown in silence over the now glistening white terrain which lay between Invik and the trading post. Its beauty would not so very long ago have moved Belinda to cries of delight, but now she looked dully at the frozen beauty of the landscape, with a similar ice around her heart. Along with her love for Amaruq had grown a quite firm and surprising love for the harsh contours of this landscape, and although she told herself that it was an unforgiving country, the kind of place that seldom gives man or woman a second chance, she knew it would be a special kind of heartbreak to leave it.
When the plane landed at Two Rivers there was quite a reception committee. Apart from the permanent staff on the settlement there were still several families who had stayed on to see Belinda again. The awkwardness between her and Chuck at first passed unnoticed, and it was only when he had told the Macs that he had to be getting back that Mrs Mac's face had grown suddenly perturbed. 'Why, Chuck,' she protested, 'I'd hoped you were going to be able to stay overnight at least. I know you're still on leave.' She gave the boy's unhappy face a searching glance, and it told her everything. She took him to one side. 'She's been through quite an ordeal,' she told him with compassion. 'Give her time, she'll be her old self soon enough.'
