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.