Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [100]
“You’ll have more chances to speak to him than I will. He also told me you had given him some kind of rendezvous. At the North Pole.”
Helen stood silent, for a while.
“To be quite exact I sent a messenger. Brentford is on his way, I think. And, as you see, I’m not,” she conceded.
Gabriel tried not to sound reproachful.
“You have sent him to his death, then.”
“I sent him away from his death. You did not approve of his marriage any more than I did, did you? He’s worth much better than that … What’s her name? Sybil. She was the last girl who should have been allowed to be called by such a noble first name. Very much the girl-next-stage door, isn’t she?”
Gabriel could not believe it. Women, he thought, nodding his head as if he had hit the mother lode of philosophical truth.
“I hope he will pull it off, though.” said Helen, as if to herself, with an accent of real concern.
“It is not too late to help him.”
“I’ll help him by not helping him. He can do more by himself than he thinks. He only has to find out how much. You, I can help. Or, at least, I can help some people who want to meet you.”
“And who would that be?” asked Gabriel.
She sighed and turned toward him.
“You talk a lot … Maybe you should quit shamanism and become a hairdresser instead,” she said. “In any case, thanks for the combing. I badly needed it. I see fewer and fewer shamans these days. But you seem to have appreciated it as well,” she added in a teasing tone. Goddesses, thought Gabriel, move in mischievous ways.
“Isn’t there a part where my clothes come flying back to me?” he asked, her downward glance reminding him he was naked.
But the voice that answered wasn’t Helen’s.
CHAPTER XXIV
The Phantom Patrol
Wonderfully—really wonderfully—like the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying open and offered to man—but That persistently veiled and ‘forbidden.’ It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: ‘Not here, my child; wheresoever else you will—but not here.’
M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud, 1901
It was the cold that woke Brentford: a sudden revolt of all his shaking flesh. His head hurt from some blow that had knocked him out, but passing his gloved hand over his cropped hair, he felt only a swollen knot at the back of his head, probably from a clomp against the stove. Thank God he’d had his hood on to protect him. Things could have been worse. They were merely catastrophic.
He was lying, he realized, on the ceiling of his ship. The Kinngait was almost upside down, tilting slightly to the side, sustained in that position by the stump of its broken mast. It was dark, as all the lamps had been broken, and freezing, because the stove had gone out. This was better than its having started a fire, but there was little chance, if any, that he could make it work again.
Brentford had no idea of what time it was, or of his bearings. He was lost in the middle of the closest earthly definition of nowhere. Walking back the hundred-odd miles to New Venice in the February night would be nothing short of suicidal, but waiting for help in the overturned ship this far from the city did not make much sense, either, especially as the ice, which he could hear grumbling around him like an empty stomach, could very well crush him at any moment now. Both options seemed equally bleak, but they were still options … Which also meant that a mistake could be made. As the clenched-jaw survivor he was supposed to change into, he would almost have preferred to have no choice at all and instead go for broke without further soul-searching. Being dead was one thing, dead and wrong another.
There were priorities, though. Light and warmth had to be found, or the weather conditions would decide for him. He did not want to end up like the captain of the fabled ship Octavius, found frozen, brittle quill in hand, in front of his logbook after thirteen years of drifting and wintering around the Arctic seas.
He got up and dizzily raised his hands toward the deck hold, struggling to open the latch, his arm across his