Salt Water Tears Read online

  “What has someone done to this whale, Seeglook?”

  Without answering, he rose with a popping of frozen joints and turned away. Just before he disappeared from the room, I called after him, spitefully telling him that my father had blown his brains out because of the failure his life had been. It was a partial truth. Yes, Father blamed himself for being unable to turn a profit on the sea, for running Valiant aground in Newfoundland, for mother’s death in Greenland while he was at sea.

  But he’d also done it to stop the nightmares.

  Seeglook hesitated at the doorway, one weathered hand on the jam. He said something in Inupik which I did not understand, and then: “That does not make him less than he was, Erik Karlsefni.” Then he was gone, leaving me with my bottle, my anguish, and my dreams.

  • • •

  But that night the nightmares didn’t come. That night I dreamed of Polmak’s forest, of the pool where Rosendal lay...

  ... of Anastasia.

  The forest was surreal. Everything about it was an overload of the senses: the colors; the smells; the minute texture and intricate detail in every leaf and vine, every budding blossom and undulating strand of grass. It stretched as far as the eye could see, rising up the sides of the grotto where Rosendal’s pool lay in a waterfall-carved basin. Behind that curtain of water slept my Anastasia. But I knew nothing of Rosendal and Anastasia when I first awoke in the verdant grass beside the stream. I knew only that the place was beyond beauty, beyond reality. This was someone’s fantasy.

  Like the stream that trickled down through the towering trees and the hills into the lowlands, the pool was clear and bright, shimmering in sunlight that rippled across its coruscating surface like skaters on ice. Such was its clarity that its depth was a mystery. The bottom’s pebbles might be boulders; the fish might be whales. The surface of the pool held the image of the mountains rising above, from whose bosom the stream must begin many leagues higher. They were snow crested and majestic, their peaks shrouded in downy mantles of vapor and airborne ice.

  Everywhere there was life. In the grass there were rabbits. In the trees, squirrels. I saw a fawn, a bevy of bright exotic birds, a falcon, and a marmoset. The air was alive with Monarch butterflies and Cecropia moths, drifting wisps of dandelions, and a floral fragrance sweet as honeysuckle. Every breath of the place was a delight, warming and soothing to the lungs, as if possessed of some medicinal quality. The sun on my face was like a mother’s caress; the wind, the whisper of a lover. I could feel things growing around me. I could hear the rabbits breathe, taste the stream as the fawn dipped its head to drink, smell the bark of the pines as the squirrels played.

  It was some time before I noticed Polmak.

  He sat beside the pool at the base of the falls where rough stone steps had been cut into the wall of the grotto. He wore a robe which blended, chameleon-like, with the moss and lichens clinging to the stone behind him. He was gray and bearded, darkly hooded, with a gnarled staff and bony hands on which his protracted digits looked just short of skeletal. The quintessential wizard. He waited patiently for me to take it all in, saying nothing, but watching my every move.

  When I finally got up from the grass and walked over to sit beside him, he nodded solemnly and bid me welcome.

  “Where am I?”

  “In a realm of my creation, one of many I’ve woven with the tapestry of my life. I am Polmak. I have summoned you, Erik Karlsefni. I need your help.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” Polmak reached into the breast pocket of my p-coat and withdrew the nearly empty flask. “Watch,” he said and tossed it into the pond.

  “Hey!”

  “Watch!” he thundered, his ancient brow knit with irritation at having to repeat himself.

  That flask had been my grandfather’s, handed down to my father along with the Valiant. When my father died, I’d found the flask in his foot locker. Now I watched it sink, a tumbling rectangle of light, smaller with every turn. Its descent proved the pool to be deep, maybe fifty meters. When the flask came to rest on the bottom, it was smaller than a matchbook. It was easy to judge its size against the length of the arm beside which it lay. I moved closer to the pool’s edge, looking down. The arm led to a torso dressed in dark leather and a mercurial garment that could only be chainmail. There was an empty scabbard at the man’s waist, a dented silver helmet by his side. His long black hair waved like seagrass in some abysmal current, tangling and twisting with a shimmering strip of cloth pinned at the shoulder by what might have been the clasp of a lost cloak.

  “Rosendal,” Polmak dubbed him. “It’s his magic that keeps us trapped here.”

  “Us?” For a moment I thought he meant me.

  “My daughter Anastasia is here as well.” He pointed up. “There, behind the falls. She sleeps—has slept for an eternity. Placed there by Rosendal before I killed him.”

  “Wait a minute. Who are you people? Where is this place? I—”

  He struck me sharply with the staff. “Listen! You are in a garden created from my love for my daughter. I made this place. It exists outside the flow of time, outside any dimension known to you. Look.” He pointed at the sun. “It hasn’t moved, Erik Karlsefni. Not in all the centuries I’ve been trapped here. Nor will it. Time does not exist here.

  “This is Rosendal’s magic. I have brought you here to break it.”

  I waved my arms to indicate the pool, the forest, the mountains and sky above. “You expect me to believe you made this place?”

  “No,” he replied softly. “I expect you to insist that I prove it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You will not like this.”

  “I don’t like it already.”

  He nodded. “Very well. I told you that this realm was born of my love for my daughter, of my hopes and desires for her as she grew from a small child, of my wish that she have all that was beautiful and pure in the world. We make these places, Erik Karlsefni. All of us. We borrow from our very soul, from who and what we are in life, and we make these places real. So long as we live, so long as we believe, these places exist. The only way I can prove this to you, is to show you that such a place exists in your own heart. But I must warn you:

  “Once I have opened the door into this place which you’ve built, it can never be closed.”

  Sudden terror squeezed at my heart. Somewhere in the shadows of my mind, my nightmares began to laugh, to gather round where they could watch.

  “Wouldn’t you rather take my word?” Polmak asked.

  Call me a fool. “Show me,” I whispered.

  He touched my forehead with the staff. Just that. There were no incantations, no grand gestures or flashes of sorcerous light. One minute I was standing beside the pond; the next I was waist deep in blood.

  The first thing to hit me was the stench. My nightmares had been bad. My own memories worse. But nothing had prepared me for this onslaught. The place reeked like a slaughterhouse, like a flensing ramp that hadn’t been washed down—ever. The air was so thick with it, that I could taste it in my mouth. Eyes watering, it was some time before I could even take stock of where I was. The overpowering stench alone defined the place. When I could see through the tears, it was worse.

  The sky, pressing down with a weight almost as tangible as the stench, was a crumpled black, as if someone had covered the world with crepe paper. Yet this black somehow managed to light the arterial red waves slapping about my waist, set them off with an eerie bioluminescence. It reminded me of a red tide at twilight, of that brief moment when every crest and curl is caught in the last rays of sunlight. The difference lay in the wash of these waves. They were thick and slow, congealing at the surface. There were scraps floating in the bloody wash, pestilent chunks of blubber and meat, white strips of baleen, and unidentifiable organs in multi-hued slicks of spermaceti and oil.

  The rim of this grotto was piled high with gleaming white bones, a jagged rampart that looked impossible to cross. Beyond i
t, I could see nothing but black. Except at the very curve of the horizon; there it appeared that a great fire was burning. It looked as if the world were eclipsing hell itself. This crescent of flame lit the bones from behind, casting skeletal shadows across the surface of the blood. They were whale shadows, all too familiar because I had seen them on the flensing ramps, carcasses stripped of flesh waiting for men with chainsaws to dismantle them.

  The jawbones of a blue whale formed an arch high over my head, casting a scythe-like shadow. It was Death’s scythe, and it held me within the poised length of its radius, as if it were straining to cut me down.

  Though I appeared to be the only living thing, there were sounds slipping stealthily through the bone piles. These too were familiar. The wheezing whistle from the blowhole as the dying whale is dragged out of the water. The great huff of expulsion as my flensing knife punctures a lung. The futile slapping of flukes. The ripping sound of hide being stripped from the underlying muscle. The splash of blood. The clatter of bones. I put my hands over my ears, but it did not block the sounds.

  There was a hand at my shoulder. When I turned, I found Polmak and, behind him, the peaceful garden. Polmak’s legacy to his daughter. So much more appealing than my own. The whale graveyard, if such it had been, was gone, but hardly forgotten. It was my legacy and I knew even then that I would carry it with me to the grave.

  “I’m sorry,” Polmak said softly. “I tried to warn you.”

  I shrugged off his hand. “Let me out of here, wizard.” I was breathing deep, using the floral air of Polmak’s forest to clean the stench from my lungs. I realized I was shaking and my legs were weak. I expected to be soaked through with blood from the waist down, but I was clean—physically, if not mentally.

  “In a moment.”

  “Now.”

  “I need your help.”

  “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

  ‘“Yes there is. Every magic has a key with which it can be broken. I need you to bring me the key to break Rosendal’s hold on this realm. If you won’t do it for me, then do it for my daughter.”

  Polmak turned and started up the rough-hewn steps. Because there was nothing else I could do, I followed. The stairs ended against a sheet of cascading water. Here he paused and motioned for me to precede him through the falls.

  I stood my ground. “After you, wizard.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I cannot.” To demonstrate, he reached out and touched the falling water. It instantly froze to prevent the passage of so much as his finger. It wasn’t a crystal barrier of ice, but something else. It had a quality that I can only relate to dyed glass, in this case glass that’s been dyed milk-white. It was smooth and warm to the touch, completely opaque. “More of Rosendal’s magic,” Polmak explained. “I have not seen my daughter since she was sealed behind the falls.” He removed his finger and, instantly, the white sheet became cascading water.

  “But you,” said the wizard, “should be able to pass through.”

  With a gentle push, he urged me forward and I went. Born of snow and springs high in the mountains, the water was incredibly cold, but I was through it in a second. Beyond lay a woman in an opal gown, arms crossed over her breast and a broadsword nearly as long as she was tall.

  How do I describe my Anastasia? How do I recount that first glimpse of my own version of Brynhild the Valkyrie, whom Odin placed in eternal sleep on Hindfell? (For that’s what she seemed to me: no mortal creature this, but rather an offspring of gods. Only gods could create such perfection, such a complete embodiment of beauty.) From the moment I saw her, she owned my heart. From the moment I touched her, my every action was hers to command. And touch her, I did. With reverently hesitant fingers, I touched her golden hair where it spread like a sunset across the cold rock upon which she lay. I touched her face, letting my fingers follow the line of her fine aquiline jaw and lips so full and sensuous as to inspire poetry in the most callous breast. I touched her shoulder where her gown rode low and found her skin to be softer than silk, smoother than the finest sanded teak.

  I sat for some time just staring at her face, searching for some minor flaw with which to dispel the preponderant evidence for perfection. I found nothing. Nor could the figure concealed by the shimmering gown be criticized. Her feet were petite in their pale blue slippers, her legs were long and slender, the ankles between the two, revealed for a provocative two inches below the gown, were coltish and alabaster smooth. She looked like something God had carved and set there as proof that his efforts on Earth had not been in vain. She looked like something worth living for, something worth dying for, something worth devoting ones life to. I found myself wondering how her voice would sound, what color her eyes were, how many sugars she would take in her coffee.

  I wondered what it would be like to have her smile at me.

  When I finally walked back through the falls, Polmak was waiting. When his eyes met mine, I thought I saw amusement and scorn. It didn’t matter. At that moment, having seen her, I could do nothing but whatever it took to awake her.

  “Tell me what I must do,” I told the wizard.

  • • •

  Seen from the sea, there’s no coastline so beautiful as Greenland’s. Kalaallit Nunaat, the world’s largest island, is scored with glaciated fjords and knife-like ridges that spill down from the mountains and into the sea. In the summer these fissures and slopes are a luscious green of birch, willow, and alder, lending the coast the appearance of a squat rain forest trapped beneath an impending and incongruent blizzard. The mountains restrain Greenland’s ice cap to the interior, protecting the habitable coastline from succumbing to glaciers such as the Jacobshavn, which often moves thirty meters a day. With over two million square kilometers, Greenland is the largest land mass outside of Antarctica. Her climate is nearly as ferocious and far more unpredictable.

  There are no roads to speak of. Travel is typically by sea or air. A man afoot is a desperate man indeed. Such had I been for the last eight years, ever since spending my savings to have some disreputable Newfies patch and tow the Valiant home. She’d arrived in worse shape than when we’d left her. I had enough money left to get her dry-docked at Prudhoe Landing, and there she’d sat until Seeglook’s money bought her back the sea.

  For crew I took on Davies, an elderly seal hunter whose golden years consisted of drinking on the docks. We’d shared bottles over the years, commiserating over our misfortune and the lack of jobs. Davies was a complex mix of Eskimo and European, not uncommon for Greenland. Davies was not his real name, and I suspected there were reasons for this. He was old and bent, and hardly worth the ten kroner a day I agreed to pay him, but his eyes were good and he could hold a wheel steady enough to allow me to place a harpoon. One man was hardly crew enough if our search took long, but I hesitated to take on anyone else. Violating the whaling ordinances wouldn’t be a problem for Davies; he’d been on that side of the law before.

  With the Valiant at sea, the problem was as simple as finding the right whale. Which is to say, not very simple at all. Seeglook helped by giving me the locations for the other dead whales they’d found, pressing a map into my hands with the money for Valiant’s repairs. Even assuming the dead whales marked the rogue’s range, I was left with a vast span of water to cover, and I’d nothing to indicate that there weren’t other dead whales further south, ones which Seeglook’s people hadn’t found. The Inuit, for all their hunting experience, had no suggestions.

  But they had a warning.

  As I was climbing back into the decrepit Inuit boat, Seeglook caught my shoulder and said, “Don’t trust him, Karlsefni.”

  “What? Don’t trust who?”

  Ignoring my questions, he turned and started back toward his snow mobile, leaving me half in the boat with water washing in over the top of my boot. Though he hadn’t said, I knew who he meant. Seeglook had seen Polmak, had perhaps refused to do his bidding. I could only guess, but I believed that Seeglook’s belief in the teleological or
der of things wouldn’t allow him to become involved in what he must see as a battle between gods. Mysticism. Distrust. Fear. The Inuit knew a white man would do it, so they came to me.

  Or perhaps Seeglook, with his Inuit foundation and inbred sense of loyalty to family and tribe, had merely been impervious to Anastasia’s spell. After all, it wasn’t Polrnak’s words that convinced me to help. It was Anastasia’s beauty. Perhaps Polmak knew how I would react. Perhaps Polmak, who knew my name from the very start, had requested that they send for me. Why would the Inuit comply? Their superstition would be their weakness again. If you fail me, he might have said, I will wipe the animals upon which your life depends from the face of the earth. The narwhal is but a warning. They would have believed him. Polmak might not have asked for me specifically, but Seeglook had known my father, had known what we Karlsefni were experts at. Seeglook might have recommended me.

  I’d tried asking Polmak. “Why me?”

  “Why not you?” he replied.

  “You have these powers, this magic—you brought me here. Why not go and get what you need yourself?”

  “I told you that I am trapped here.”

  “Why not summon it directly?”

  “That isn’t possible. I can pull you here through your dreams, but I cannot move an inanimate object between the realms. You must bring me the horn. With the horn, we can reach the sword and the sword is the nexus that binds all worlds. Its magic will open this garden and set my daughter and me free.”

  “But why a horn,” I pressed, “a unicorn horn no less, when you’ve already said there’s no such thing as a unicorn?”

  “Only Rosendal could answer that question, and he’s dead. It’s Rosendal’s magic that binds Anastasia; his the choosing of a key to terminate that spell. Why he chose the horn of a mythological beast is anyone’s guess. I could tell you of the years I spent studying the essence of his spell in order to determine the key, but what would be the point? You wouldn’t understand the machinations of either the periapt or the terminating key. If you did, you wouldn’t ask such questions now. The main thing you need to know is that, after centuries of searching the known realms for unicorns, the closest thing I’ve found is your narwhal.”