Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [99]
The tunnel seemed to go on forever but eventually opened onto the inside of the igloo, which was much wider that it had seemed from the outside. Its roof, in a way Gabriel could not comprehend, was transparent, and from where he was he could see not only the starry skies but also a wide expanse of land. New Venice was on his left, not so far away, its lights visible from below, as if the ground it stood upon were made out of dark ice or glass. It made his head dizzy. Then he saw her.
A long-haired woman. Sitting near a huge circular well. Saana, thought Gabriel. The Inuk Goddess of the Sea.
“Oh. You can call me Helen,” said the woman, turning toward him, her face half-lit by the flame that danced from a lamp in the ceiling. It was Helen Kartagener all right, but in the trembling chiaroscuro light, Gabriel thought she also looked a little like Lilian Lenton. He stood up, and noticing her amused downward glimpse, he covered with his hands his penis, which the cold had shrivelled into a shrimp.
“How are you, Mr. d’Allier?” asked Helen, the amusement now in her voice.
Gabriel tried not to look impressed.
“Very well. Thank you. I’ve just fallen down a crevasse and been devoured by wolves.”
“Rather classical part of the initiation. How do you feel right now?”
He thought about it for a moment.
“To speak frankly, like I’ve fallen asleep during my anthropology class.”
Helen chuckled gently and indicated the surroundings.
“It’s not so bad, though. I’ll give you an A for this project. And a diploma for the crash course in shamanism. The underground trip toward me wasn’t bad either. You may have confused or conflated one or two things, but after all, it has to remain an individual experience, your own version of it.”
“As an angakoq, I may disappoint you when it comes to ventriloquism and sleight-of-hand. I may not be very entertaining during the long winter nights.”
“I know. Things have been rushed a bit. But you already have the modesty of a true Inuk and you also have a very powerful helping spirit.”
“The Polar Kangaroo, you mean?”
“We know him as Kiggertarpok here,” she said. “You could not have chosen, or been chosen by, a better ally. He protects the city much better than I could do. Now, if you will …”
She showed him a comb made of narwhal tusk at the edge of the well. “I suppose you did not sleep through that part of the class.”
Gabriel advanced and took the comb. The well was so deep the eyes could not fathom it. It was full of seals and walruses gliding around in a complicated choreography, and it stank atrociously, he thought. As he drew closer to Helen, he could see that she looked tired and sick, her skin waxen and wrinkled, the hands on her lap awfully maimed, with all the upper phalanxes neatly cut away, as if devoured by some wild animal. But for someone he had seen dead a few months before, she was not so bad.
As the ritual demanded, he started unravelling and combing her long tangled hair, slowly, carefully, hoping she would not notice that his penis was slowly metamorphosing back into some bigger, harder-shelled crustacean. For a man who thought a few hours (years? centuries?) earlier that Stella would be the very last woman he would ever desire, this was nothing short of a miracle. Such was the power of the Sea Goddess.
She sighed with pleasure, her eyes half-closed.
“So what brings you here?” she eventually asked.
“I supposed it was you.”
“No. You brought me here. If I can be of any use.”
“I have no idea. People usually come to find you about food, don’t they? But that would be Brentford’s business, not mine.”
“Yes. I have heard, through the grapevine, so to speak, that he’s been running the Greenhouse. I’d be curious to see the kind of crooked vegetables he grows. It’s not my line, however. As you know, I specialize in animals. I was quite a huntress in my youth.”
“I seem to remember Brentford was having a problem about hunting quotas. But I could not tell you what the problem was, exactly.”
“I know and I’m taking care of it. Just pass the message along, if