Loon had intended to make himself invisible to the northers, to be a captive beneath notice. Now some of the northers might be aware of him. And he had hidden a sheep shank in the corner of the cold trap, and on every new moon scored its edge with a pebble to mark how many months had passed, and one night it wasn’t there anymore. Whether whoever took it had noticed the marks, or knew the bone was his, he could not be sure. There was no overt sign from Kaktak or Elhu or any of the rest of the ice people that they were watching him. But he felt that the men going out earliest and farthest on the day’s affairs were calling for him more often. And during their days out, checking traps, or hunting on the sea ice, or foraging for firewood, they gave him as much to eat and drink as they took themselves, and treated him almost like they did each other, except when it came time to pull the sleds home. And of course he was never allowed to have anything to do with the captive wolves they sometimes took with them. They talked among themselves, and Loon only caught part of that, but he was understanding more than he had at first. The northers were content in their life by the great salt sea. It was always cold, and mostly dark in the winter, but they took a good living from the sea and the hills. They never went hungry. They laughed at bad luck. They faced up to Narsook.
One morning Loon left his house and there was Elga right there before him. He said-Hello! but she ignored him, looked away, and then he was cuffed in the back: Kaktak had been behind him, coming into the house from around the corner.
Kaktak glared at him as he regained his footing.-Why did you say anything to her? he said in his tongue, perfectly comprehensible to Loon.-You know you aren’t to speak to the women.
Loon nodded, looking down.-She was just there. Sorry.
Kaktak kept staring at him.-Why did you go back for that other captive? That was none of your affair. You leave the other captives to us, understand?
— Yes.
— Good. Because I want to take you out with me. You pull hard. But we’ll leave you in the house if you do anything more like this.
— I understand, Loon said, still looking down, his cheeks burning.
Kaktak went into the house, taking a last look at Elga, who had kept walking toward the women’s house.
Loon resolved to keep a stone face and do what he was told and nothing more.
Late in the third month of the new year, Kaktak and some of the other northers instructed Loon to haul a sled loaded with firewood and bags and follow them as they climbed up the nearest valley onto the ice wall itself. Now we go up in the wind, they told Loon as they left camp.
To get up the steep side of the ice wall, they ascended one of the hilltops flanking their valley, and followed a ridge from that hilltop north and higher, until they were overlooking the ravines on each side. This ridge ran right up into the massive wall of ice, which stood above them tilted back a bit, gray with rubble and dirt and dust, and riven by cracks and melt lines that were blue in their depths. As high as they were on the ridge, the ice still bulked over their heads, and they could not see the high plateau that must be up there. But here they could see that the ice sloped steeply down into the ravines to each side of them, making fat tongues of ice that the jende called glaciers. These ice slopes ended either in clean walls of ice, like the one east of their camp, or in curving bars of rubble and milky gray ponds.
Now the jende making this ascent led the way in a traverse up the side of the glacier to the east of the ridge, moving up on ice intermixed with rocks of all sizes. It was possible to find good footing on rock after rock, as most of the stones were more than half-buried in the ice; they must have warmed up enough by day to melt the ice under them enough to sink into it a little, and then at night they froze in place, and eventually they sank too deep in the ice to warm up in the sun anymore and stayed stuck where they were. So the men could traverse up the ice slope easily on these rock steps, and after a while, as they got higher, the slope lay back.
Hauling a loaded sled up this traverse after them proved difficult, and the jende came back once to help Loon drag it up an ice channel between two rocks, then lift it up over some others. But soon enough they were all on top of the glacier, where they headed north up a slight rise onto the ice wall proper, with Loon hauling the sled behind them.
When they came onto the ice plateau at the top of the wall, they stopped and looked back south, down to the hills and the steppe and the big snowy valley, and the frozen curve at the edge of the great salt sea, the whitest white of all, with the blue of its water beyond. Loon had never seen the great salt sea look anything like so big, it was stunning to see it from this high up, extending west and south with no sign at all of any shore to the west. The world was huge.
The ice on top of the plateau rose and fell somewhat like the moors north of their home camp. As they walked north over this ice, Loon could hear the ice shift and breathe. Ah: it was alive. A white cold thing of the north, devouring the world. It spoke in low heavy creaks, also cracks, also shuddering booms, as low as any sound he had ever heard.
The ice plateau was not at all like land covered by a winter blanket of snow. The ice was almost all bare ice, mostly white, but in some places blue, in others clear. It undulated in ways that ground never did, nor the great salt sea; the rises and dips were something between hills and waves, but neither. In a few places it was perfectly flat, but mostly it was rounded up or down. Here and there it shattered to a rubble that resembled a close-packed array of smooth-edged ice blades. Little creeks of water cut the ice now and then, and these flowed downward, of course, but curving in ways that creeks on land would never have thought to go. When the jende wanted to cross these streams but they were too wide to jump over, they followed them downstream rather than upstream, because soon enough they always disappeared down a hole in the ice, the creek’s water swirling down into icy blue depths with a fearful clatter. The men kept a good distance from these round holes, and spoke apologies to the talkative ice for bothering it with their passing. They also avoided the areas of shattered ice, which came in patches.