‘I just slipped, that’s all,’ Matthew grunted. He collapsed on the ice ledge and fished out his cigarettes from his jeans pocket. He looked up at Malik. ‘Do you want one?’
Malik nodded and sat down next to him. Matthew took out two cigarettes and lit them both.
‘Jørgen Emil Lyberth,’ Matthew said, blowing smoke into the cold air. ‘He was the speaker of the Inatsisartut for quite a few years, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, he was the longest-serving speaker ever. He served several terms, but he’s been out for a few years now. When Ulrik gets elected, the old man will recapture some of his former glory.’ Malik took a deep drag on his cigarette and pressed his chin towards his chest. ‘I don’t remember where Ulrik is from—one day he was just there. He came from some small village and Lyberth took him in. It’s probably thanks to Lyberth that Ulrik was popular from day one, even though he was so strange and dark.’ He took another deep drag on his cigarette, then tossed what was left of it into the void. ‘And now he’s married to Lyberth’s youngest—would you believe it? Have you seen her?’
Matthew shook his head.
‘She’s seriously hot… He’s done good, he has, the boy without a past.’
‘Thanks,’ Matthew said, and he tossed his glowing cigarette butt after Malik’s. ‘That’ll help when I start writing my story.’
‘That’s kind of my point. Don’t make an enemy of Lyberth—it’s not worth it. Nuuk is a very small town.’
5
The sun was still beating down on the ice cap, and Matthew warmed up the moment he was free of the crevasse. Once again the snow blinded him with its thousands of tiny white mirrors, but his eyes soon adapted to the sharp light. The surface of the ice cap was rippled like a calm sea. Small hollows, mounds and frozen waves spread as far as the eye could see, formed over the years by the snow, the rain and the wind. All around them, steel-blue mountains stretched towards the azure blanket of the sky. At this time of year only a few peaks had any serious snow on them—although the snow had started to fall on the highest ones, it only stayed on the shaded sides, in ravines and crevices. There, however, it had been lying the whole summer. Matthew had yet to go hiking in the mountains, but knew it was only a matter of time. He had gathered that it was one of the things you had to do, if you were a new Dane in Nuuk and wanted to earn a little respect.
‘So did you get some good pictures down there?’ Ulrik asked.
Malik gave him a thumbs-up.
‘Excellent,’ Ulrik said. ‘I’ve been told that you can have a look at him now, and that they’re happy to answer questions.’ He turned to Matthew. ‘After all, we want Greenland’s own media to be first with this news, don’t we?’
‘Absolutely,’ Matthew said with a nod.
Ulrik smiled, possibly at the thought of the many pictures of him that would soon be beamed around the world on the strength of a story about the man they had found in the ice.
The archaeologists and the museum curator had retreated to near the helicopter, where two of them were on their satellite phones while the others were staring at a couple of open laptops.
‘They’ll be flying back shortly,’ Ulrik announced. ‘As far as I can gather, they need to pick up some equipment before setting up a camp out here, so they can examine the entire crevasse right down to the bottom. The police will guard the iceman tonight to make sure nothing happens to him. The archaeologists aren’t allowed to move him until our people have examined him, but they’ve been given permission to put up a protective tent around him. They say he needs stabilising. I don’t know why—he seems perfectly stable to me. When I pulled him out, he was stiff as a board.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘I can’t imagine that lying in the sun will do him much good after all those years down in the cold, but he can’t get any more dead, can he?’
‘So will you be sleeping here?’ Malik teased him. ‘Next to the dead man?’
‘I don’t know if it will be me. Not that it matters.’
Malik gave a light shrug. ‘Rather you than me.’
‘Why?’ Matthew frowned. ‘Could you freeze to death out here?’
‘Easily,’ Malik said. He looked down. ‘But I was thinking more about the spirits. They hate being disturbed. If he’s been lying dead down there for all those centuries, many spirits will be attached to him… And they won’t be the nice ones. They’re from underground.’
Ulrik rolled his eyes. ‘Ignore him. There are as many spirits out here as there are musk oxen.’
‘A stray one might turn up looking for food,’ Malik objected.
Ulrik threw up his hands in disbelief. ‘There are no spirits or musk oxen on the ice cap!’
‘It’s full of spirits and demons underground,’ Malik insisted. ‘I’ve seen them myself.’
‘When you play your drum?’
‘Before I play my drum, obviously.’
‘It’s a part of our culture, and it’s beautiful,’ Ulrik told Matthew. ‘But personally I don’t believe any of that stuff. It makes no sense that the bedrock is full of spirits, and that we can use them against our enemies by carving little tupilak figures—but hey, each to his own.’
‘Well, let’s see if you survive the night,’ Malik said with a broad grin. ‘I could always come out here and play my drum for you, if you want me to? I could be back before it gets dark.’
‘Oh no, I’m not having you getting under my feet out here. And I don’t think I’ll be the one staying anyway.’ Ulrik clapped his hands. ‘Right, why don’t we take a quick look at the discovery before the others decide they’re ready to fly back to Nuuk?’ He nodded towards the group by the helicopter.
It took Malik only seconds to reach the brown bundle on the scarred surface of the ice cap. Matthew approached more slowly with Ulrik. They couldn’t see very much of the dead man, but his face and feet were, as Ulrik had said, free from the stiff brown and yellow fur wrapped around him. It was impossible to tell whether the fur had been rolled around his body or whether he had pulled it tight around himself, but they guessed that he was naked beneath it, given that the feet and lower legs sticking out from it were bare. The fur itself seemed fossilised, almost like bronzed turf, the individual hairs having merged over time into a solid mass. The skin on the man’s face had shrunk around his skull, and his eyes were long gone. All that remained were two deep hollows in the shrivelled, leathery skin, while his beard still bristled over his chin and halfway up the empty pouches of his cheeks. It was impossible to say whether he had been blond or red-haired, but his hair was definitely not black, and his facial features were far more Nordic than Inuit, so the theory that he was a Norseman seemed solid.
Malik bent over the mummified body with his camera, trying to capture every macabre detail. ‘He looks like a tupilak with that demon face.’
The iceman’s lips were nothing but two thin lines that had dried up and then pulled away from his jaw. It looked like he had died while grinning—a hysterical, angry grin, which had bared his teeth and torn his lips free from his face.
‘Does it get dark out here at night?’ Matthew asked.
Ulrik and Malik both looked at him. ‘Not really,’ Ulrik said. ‘The snow lights up everything, and the sun isn’t completely gone for very long at this time of the year.’
Matthew nodded. The snow. He had forgotten about that. Even so, he’d rather not sleep out here next to the dead man, no matter how light the night.
Malik had lain down flat on the ice to get a good shot of the iceman’s shrivelled feet. He glanced over his shoulder. ‘This is pure beef jerky, this is. Yuck, it’s gross.’ Then he smiled at Matthew, a mischievous look on his face. ‘What those feet need is some whale blubber to make them baby-soft again.’