Baal

VIRGA STIRRED. Something was jabbing him sharply and repeatedly in the ribs.

He rolled over from his curled-up position on the dirty floor and after a few seconds recognized Zark standing over him. He had been nudging Virga in the side with the toe of his boot. Zark bent down and put a mug of steaming dark liquid in Virga's hand. "Here," he said, "this'll wake you up."

Michael was already awake, drinking from a mug and taking his clothes off a rack above the stove where he had hung them to dry the night before. Virga sipped at the beverage, finding it to be a brackish black beer, and saw that the Eskimo girl was gone. He'd barely been able to sleep for the noise they had made, rolling and thrashing on the sleeping rack like a couple of wild beasts. But he was grateful in one respect for having been able to find out something about Zark: before the man had lowered the kerosene flame to join the girl in the bearskins Virga had caught a glimpse of his broad naked back. Across it was a beautiful tattoo of the head of a Chinese ancient, done with such clarity and grace that it would have made Virga envious if he were an advocate of tattooing.

"Where's the girl?" he asked.

"Her husband came for her," said Zark, cutting pieces of meat off a larger black slab he'd taken from an ice-packed oil drum at the rear of the hut. "They're always a little jealous the morning after. You ever try walrus meat?"

"No."

"You'd better get used to it."

Virga and Michael took the pieces of black, tough-grained meat that Zark had cut for them. Michael ate his wholeheartedly, but the taste of it coupled with the beer was almost more than Virga could take: it was oily with a strong smell of fermentation. Nevertheless, he was glad to get something in his stomach. When he swallowed the last hunk without gagging he felt pretty damned proud of himself, but shook his head when Zark offered him a second piece.

Zark shrugged and tore into it himself. He said, "What's that you brought along covered with canvas? Prefab materials in a crate?"

"No," Michael said. "It's some of my belongings."

"Christ. You must have brought along everything you own. I walked out there and took a look at that junk the Eskimo cut off his sledge. You didn't plan to move very fast, did you?"

"We carried what was necessary."

"Necessary, hell. All a man needs is a good solid sledge and eight strong dogs and he can go to the Pole and back, living off the land. You can forget about the prefabs and build ice shelters like the old hunters did. But you're kraslunas and you don't even know what I'm talking about." He looked over at Virga. "What kind of doctor are you?"

"A professor. Of theology."

"What's that?"

"Religious concepts."

"You live by the Book, huh?"

"I suppose I do," Virga said, "in a manner of speaking."

Zark nodded. "Yeah, there's always more room in the world for another holy man." He took the leftover walrus meat back to the oil drum. "Perverting everything, talking about things you don't even understand yourselves. You look at something and say it's bad in the name of God because you don't like it." He took the drum lid off and wrapped the meat in newspaper before putting it in the ice amid other bundles. "You use God as an excuse." He snapped the lid shut.

Virga felt that this man was trying to pick an argument. He said irritably, "Some people do."

The other man grunted and shifted his attention to Michael. He said, "And I suppose you use God as an excuse too, huh?"

"No," said Michael, his eyes glittering in the dim kerosene-lamp glow. "I only blame men."

Zark stood looking into his face as if he were not quite certain of what he was seeing. His nostrils flared briefly, catching a scent. Then he smiled slightly and said, "You ever killed anyone, boy?"

"Not to my knowledge,"

"You look like you could. You look like you could shoot a man down and never even wince. Killing a man is not so different from killing any other kind of animal, not really. Especially if he's about to kill you. Does talk about killing a man bother you, Holy Man?"

"I'm very broadminded," Virga said.

"Good," Zark said. "That's good."

Michael said, "You won't reconsider about taking us into the Northeast from Sagitak?"

"No. I won't reconsider. Now I'll go harness the team; you be ready to help me lift that gear of yours up onto the sledge when I get back." He went through the doorway, admitting a blast of icy air, and momentarily Virga and Michael could hear him shouting to his dogs as he worked with them.

"What should we do?" Virga asked. "Go back to Avatik and pay someone to guide us up? We're going to lose three days."

"Yes, three days. Perhaps too late." He looked directly at the other man. "But if I'm too late here then there will be another place. I'll go on. What will you do?"

"I don't know. I haven't read a newspaper or heard a newscast in two days. I'm afraid to learn what's happening."

"The worst," Michael said softly. "Always prepare for the worst."

"How did you come to be so desperately pursuing Baal?" Virga asked. "How can you, how can we, do anything to stop him short of murder?"

"We must find him first. Then I'll deal with Baal... in my own way."

The door came open again and Zark said, "All right. I need some muscle."

In the bitter darkness the three men heaved together to lift the shrouded crate onto Zark's weather-beaten sledge. He cursed violently and said, "You're going to break the backs of my dogs with this goddamned thing!"

They lashed down the rest of the scattered equipment and then followed Zark back to his hut to gather up a few more things. Zark carefully cleaned his rifle and a rubber-gripped flare gun and stored ammunition and flares in a sealskin bag. Then he tied up a hunk of the walrus meat and checked one of the lamps to make certain the kerosene was brimming. Michael said, "You're taking an ice-axe?"

"Yes," Zark said. "Why?"

Michael gathered his parka hood around his head without answering.

Outside, Zark rubbed snow all along the sledge runners and Virga had an opportunity to appraise his dogs as they stood in the glare of the lamp. They were broad and thick, powerful beasts that even now tugged at their rope leaders. The lead dog was a one-eyed black with numerous scars on his sides; the other dogs gave him a wide berth and, though they snarled menacingly among each other, never bared a tooth in his direction.

Zark checked the lashed-down equipment and cursed at its bulk. He said suddenly, "We're moving," and almost before Virga realized he had called to the dogs, the sledge shuddered and tore away up the incline with Michael running alongside and Zark cracking his whip over the head of the lead animal.

The beasts climbed the incline with a burst of power. They seemed eager and happy to be running in the snow. The sledge passed between the sharp outcroppings of rock and in a few moments they were running out on the open ice plain with the wind howling maddeningly about them.

Virga noted that Zark seemed much more skilled with his team than Migatuk had been. The man only occasionally used his whip or shouted to the team; they seemed to understand his commands even when his broad hands only tightened on the guiding handlebars. The man and the team were at one with each other, Virga thought, through long hard years of companionship. He'd heard stories of the fierceness of Arctic dogs, of their sudden savage attacks on both their own kind and Eskimo children, but here they were part of a beautiful living machine that awed him with its primal grace.

Michael did not seem disturbed at Zark's refusal to take them on, but Virga was downcast. He felt a childish frustration and a simmering resentment at the way Zark had tried to bait him at the hut. Zark didn't understand the importance of their search for Baal; probably he was the kind of stubborn man who would act no differently even if he did understand. But Virga felt useless and afraid. His long travel and the great expense it had incurred was now wasted because one man - one man - refused to show them the way. He cursed. If Baal could not be found how could he, Virga, return to the university and his day-to-day life knowing the full extent of Baal's power, knowing that for a brief instant he had almost been ensnared by that power, knowing that he could possibly still be. What could he say to Judith? What would he feel when he awakened in his Boston apartment in the middle of a restless night, more alone and frightened of the future than he had ever been before?

He glanced over and saw that Michael's sharp features had become a taut, determined mask. Here in this bitter land, traveling under skies as black as the door of death, there was no way to go but forward.

They reached a pressure ridge after a mile or so. Great chunks of ice were scattered in disarray like concrete blocks. Zark lowered his head against the wind and chopped with his ice-axe until he had cleared a narrow place for the dogs to struggle over. Then they were across the rough terrain and moving over smooth ice with the splash of the lantern leading them on. Zark corrected their course by a few degrees from time to time, though Virga could not determine how he sighted the path.

Sometime later, when ice had frozen in Virga's eyebrows and his new beard and he saw nothing but the dark wastes beyond, Zark waved a hand and slowly braked the team with his heels. "We'll rest here for a while," he said against the wind. "This is the halfway point."

Zark unpacked the bearskin tent and staked it out with metal anchors, keeping it loose to absorb the wind's force. As the dogs voided themselves in the snow and Zark unceremoniously followed suit, Michael and Virga crawled through the tent opening with Zark's lantern and warmed themselves in its glow.

Inside the tent they were still cold but at least shielded from the harsh wind. Zark crawled in and lit his bone pipe, then checked his exposed flesh for frostbite sores. He held the lamp up to examine the faces of the other men and, satisfied that they had suffered no damage, he set the lamp in the midst of them, where it cast their broad black shadows on the walls.

Virga painfully rubbed the warmth back into his hands. "How cold is it out there?" he asked Zark.

"Warm compared to some I've known. Maybe forty below but not any more than that."

"How can you tell?"

Zark grunted. "When it's forty below your piss freezes as it hits the ground. At fifty below it freezes on the way down. At sixty you try to piss and your dick falls off." He blew a billowing cloud of blue smoke and watched as it rose to the conical top of the tent and hung there.

"You're not a full Eskimo," Michael said after a few moments. "What are you doing here?"

He rubbed his hands around the warmth of the bone pipe as if he hadn't heard the question. There was no indication that he was going to answer. Virga was about to ask him how the dogs withstood the weather when Zark said, "I'm part Eskimo. Enough to feel the ice in my blood; enough to know I belong here."

"You were born in Greenland?"

"Hell, I'm not a Dane. I was born in Gor'kiy. My father was a breed, Eskimo and Russian. My grandfather was an Eskimo and damned if I can remember his name, but he was a powerful hunter, a great leader in his tribe. I don't remember anything about him, but my father once told me he was lost in the bergs hunting narwhal with a bone harpoon. We had a small flat in Gor'kiy and my father was a welder; that place we had, that place was so small we couldn't even wipe our noses. My father couldn't stand it but he wanted to please my mother. He wanted to live on the northern coast and she loved the city."

The smoke whirled around Zark's head. His eyes were cold and blue, glistening, Virga thought, like the ice must glisten beneath a white summer sun.

"He tried to please her," Zark said, "but you can't please women. You can't. And he started drinking and finally lost her. I remember him glaring at her, wide-eyed, in that place. She was leaving, she said, and he could keep the child because they were both alike. Both of them were wild and vicious and didn't belong around people. That was just after I almost killed another boy in a streetfight, but that's another story. And she was right. My father and I were alike; we shared a love of freedom. Inside us the Eskimo wanted a return to the ice."

Zark was quiet for a moment. The north-born wind shook the tent; Zark seemed to be listening to it. He looked warily at the faces of the two men, uncertain as to whether he should continue.

"And so you both came here?" Virga asked, both interested in the man and fearful of returning into that cold blast.

"No," Zark said. "He went from place to place, from job to job, and I followed along. And every place we went was closer to the northern sea. There was where we were headed; he didn't have to say it. I knew it already. But before we reached the coast he took sick, something wrong with his lungs. I worked full-time at whatever I could find, which wasn't much but roadwork and pouring concrete. I fought for a while in men's clubs. That was bare-knuckled fighting and I saw a lot of strong men go down. You ever see a bare-knuckle match?" He looked at Virga.

"No, I haven't."

"I didn't think so. Too brutal for your blood, uh? Some of those men scarred their hands and let the calluses thicken until they might've been wearing brass knucks. They could punch into brick. Those fights would go on until neither of us knew where we were; we'd just stumble around looking for something to hit. The last man standing was the winner and the money was good in those days. But my father became worse. He was always coughing, always pleading with me to get him up to the ice. I found him dead one morning, just like he'd fallen asleep the night before. That was the only night he didn't cough until he'd choked, and I remember thinking that soon maybe he would be well enough to travel. It snowed on the day he was buried. Well," Zark shrugged his shoulders and sucked furiously at the pipe to clear his vision, "I reached the sea. I landed a job on a freighter hauling scrap iron. Holy Man, you ever work on the sea?"

"No."

"It's tough work. But it teaches you a hell of a lot. It teaches you when to fight and when to lay back, when to plant your feet and when to run like hell. I worked in and out of the freight docks for a few years hauling on old buckets that almost came apart at the rivets out in the Baltic. I like the ways of the sea; it moves at its own pace. Nothing hurries it, nothing weakens that thunder. But then I landed a mate's slot on a tub hauling snowplows from Riga up into the White Sea. I didn't get along with the bosun. He was a lying sonofabitch and a card cheat; I can't even remember what he looked like though God knows I had to look at him enough. He was always picking something, anything at all, to get at me. And damned if he didn't."

Zark laughed suddenly, a hoarse bark that might have issued from the throat of one of the dogs. "Damned if he didn't. I killed that man right on the foredeck under a half-moon. Two blows to the head. Two fine blows I would've been proud of in any ring." He made the motion of a thrust with his huge fist. "He went down like a fucking sack of grain. They were going to put me in the brig and head into Rusanova to give me up. But there were other men who had taken trouble off that bastard, and they were damned grateful to me for cleaning him off. So one night out in the Barents Sea they turned their backs and I lowered myself a lifeboat and headed out into the bergs. They thought I'd died out there, that maybe I was going out to commit suicide or some shit like that. Hell, no. I was getting away as fast as I could row."

He regarded Michael and Virga through his whirling blue smoke curtain. Over the black bush of beard his eyes had become dark and hollow. "You don't know what it's like to be alone in the sea, surrounded by nothing but ice, great huge pieces like frozen cities. Nothing around but the deep water and the bergs that blinded you with their colors: bone-white, deep blue, pale green. You could see the depths of the ocean reflected in that ice. And sometimes you'd likely as not hear a growl as ice crushed against ice and broke off into a smaller berg. Sometimes ice as big as my boat would rise up almost under me. That was maybe what I feared most: ice breaking up in the depths and rising to capsize me in that cold water.

"On the third day," Zark went on, "I was lost. I couldn't smell the wind. And then the bergs against the white sky looked like gray slabs of dirty concrete. I was going in fucking circles; everything looked the same. My food ran out. I went without anything to eat for three more days. There was never anything but the low clouds and the white sea and those berg mountains. And on the seventh day I woke up and saw him."

Zark sat motionless, his pipe clenched between his teeth, his eyes black and brooding.

"Him?" Virga asked. "Who?"

He shrugged abruptly. "I don't know. I don't know who the hell it was but he was off my starboard between two bergs, an Eskimo in a kayak. I started rowing after him but he never let me get near enough to see his face. Never. But it was a man, all right; I could tell by the way he handled that kayak. Even though I grit my teeth and rowed after him until I was almost dead, he paddled Eskimo-style, always ahead of me. I followed that kayak for two days. He never said a word though I shouted and cursed for him to speak; he'd turn to make sure I was following and then he'd go on. He wound me through ice tunnels and bergs as high as buildings in Moscow. He knew those fucking waters, that's for sure. But after three days I lost him. He slipped away into a pocket between two bergs and when I rounded them he was gone. That's when I saw, over my port and far off, a group of Eskimos hunting from kayaks. They took me with them to Edge Island and I got a good meal of broth and walrus meat and slept for two days. When I asked them who had led me out they didn't seem to know. They didn't have any idea; they told me they knew of no hunter who had ever gone that far from land before. So I still have no damned idea who that was. I wonder about him."

Michael was nodding. He said, "The vision of a shaman."

"Huh? Hell with that. Anyway, I followed the nomad Eskimos over the ice plains into Greenland and here I've stayed. The hunting is damned good and a man answers to no one but himself. That's as it should be."

The three men sat for a while without speaking. Tobacco burned in Zark's pipe with a faint crackling sound. After a few moments he stirred and said, "Time to move on. I want to have you at Sagitak in another couple of hours."