MIRROR OF LOP NOR

by

George Guthridge

--REFLECTION--

I

hear

your

hooves

above me,

cold as the

soul of the Khan.

Young, wild horses

brown as the land I

loved, manes the hair

of graves. Do not enter

here in search of Umber

or pasture, young horses.

The afterlife is a lie. I know: I am dead, yet have no Khan to serve, no ghost horses to ride, not even the memory of women lamenting me. No one knows where I died except dust; and only wind wails for me, whistling in mockery at my stupidity and despair. Umber, who captured the Lin and witnessed the whinnying of the Lung-Ta! In whose arms do you lie forever?

Such voices fill the desert.

In my silence I scream for them to stop, but they do not stop, the wind never stops shrieking. My only hope lies in salty waters: that Lake Lop Nor will crawl across the desert, engulf my bones, evaporate my soul, rain it down on the grasslands of my beloved Mongolia, so far, far away.

Do you love me? Bragda asked. Taste my blood.

I lie in terror of dark desert.

Taste my blood, Umber, she said.

So hard do I yearn for the lake that sometimes I hear it spill slowly southwest toward my release, the wind scalloping the edge, its waters filling the created cavity. Then I realize it is only the wind, always only the wind, and I rail as I remember how I scoffed at water while I lived, reminding me as it did of my father's pathetic prayers for summer rains for his sickly winter wheat.

"He who prefers water over kumiss should seek an oasis and sell pottery," I would say to Bragda after I became a Mongol. Was I not one of the Khan's Lightning Messengers, able to ride for days without stopping, riding even while asleep, the rhythm of the horse like Bragda in her abandon, breathy but never moaning? On long rides, when the water in the goatskin gave out, had I not tasted the hot sweet suck of horseblood?

My pride brash as brass in morning sunlight.

Like flies on a dead man's face.

Do you love me, Umber? she asked. Taste my blood. The Mongols say it holds the soul.

Now my pride is sand searing a throat whose flesh has shriveled to parchment. Wind exposes a skull, pelts my jawbone with sand, a million stinging insults. Such is the final field of the farmer's son who fancied himself Mongol, the wretch who lassoed the Lin, the husband who loved his wife but never told her so.

Instead, I left her among Mongols while I rode in joy across empire, my love seemingly only for danger and distance. Alone, she waited for my return or word of my death, surely always fearful, her face framed by a traditional headdress whose braids and bangles were strange to her, cooking mutton instead of meals of summer cabbage and winter wheat, everything foreign to her stomach and soul.

Not room enough in this great grave for so many regrets.

Come Lake Lop Nor.

Breech my bones.

Send me home to Bragda.

Taste my blood, she said.

How many days and dreams have passed since that late-winter night when last I slept beside her, warm against her flesh, warm beneath the sheepskin? Even now I see her silhouetted against the wall of the ger as the oil-lamp flickers and the squatty burkan gods watch from near the door. She disrobes: taut breasts, belly that sadly never stored a child, buttocks like mounds of black bread. I have returned from a thirty-day ride, so exhausted I want to sob like a weak woman, giddy from the pitching and yawing of the pony and the endless hours without real rest. Naked, she bows and places the small fruit offering I have brought home into the spirit house we keep in honor of our original heritage.

Then she kneels beside me, opens the boogda bag, the marmot kettled in its own skin, and with forefinger and thumb brings meat to my mouth. I am too exhausted to chew. I down the meal with marmot-grease broth, reach for her.

"A bad time," she whispers. "I am sorry. . . ."

I ignore her protest and take her roughly, stuporous with desire, thankful to be between someone else's legs rather than the horse between mine. After, she squeezes a drop of semen from me, touches it to her tongue.

"You are my lord . . . Umber."

She has never grown accustomed to my new name, for I have been Umber only since my twentieth year, son of a farmer whose name I have not spoken since that day I welcomed the enemy. He lost a son and I an ancestry the instant I took an assassin's arrow meant for Otogai, the Khan's third son--and lived to become Mongol.

I put my arm around her waist.

"It did not bother you that I am bloodied?" she asks.

I say nothing. It bothers me, but I say nothing.

Her eyes are lowered. A sign of respect. In her, a sign, I sometimes imagine, almost of reverence. It frightens me, her faith in me, and I remember again that day she stood with me when the Mongols came.

How happy I was when the army of the Khan breeched the Great Wall and overran the lands of my former ancestry with its barren, barefoot fields of sickly winter wheat! It seemed that only Bragda and I did not flee before the invaders. My neighbors shook their heads at my foolishness as they herded toward the cities. "You would stay and fight for this land that yielded so little?" Father begged as he bundled our family possessions in his cart. "The Mongols have no love for farming. They will not remain. Soon we will return, my son. Do not sacrifice yourself."

Sacrifice? I stay to see the land trampled.

"You will die quickly, uselessly," he said. "A sword-slash, and I will have lost my only child. And do you know what they will do to your beautiful bride?"

Why did you remain beside me amid that desolation, Bragda? You would never say.

I draw my fingers along her silken back. She shivers--quietly smiles--then touches herself between her legs and holds two fingers close to my lips. "Taste my blood, Umber," she says. "The Mongols say it holds the soul. Know me as no other man ever has--or ever will."

No woman should dare ask a man such a thing. Yet her fingers remain extended, and her eyes plead.

Her words shake me not only for what she asks but for the memory they instill. Not virginal when we wed, which was why my father, a poor farmer, was able to buy me such a beauty, her face round as the moon, soft as moonlight among lillies in bloom, feet so small you would have thought them bound, toes flexible enough that she sometimes uses them to massage my manhood, and she giggling. She has never hinted about who took her before I did.

Time ticks, her heart beating against my chest, and I sense fear emanate from her like warmth from a candle.

She lifts her eyes--moist with love, as the rest of her has so often been for me. Demean myself this way for her, I sense, and I will never lose her love no matter how many rides I might require--of her, away from her. I know not why it is important to her, yet I sense a gateway of our lives hinges on this moment. Just as it did that sun-scorched afternoon when we stood together--she behind me, trembling; I could sense her trembling--and watched the Khan's calvary march a hundred abreast across the fallow, hallowed ground on which my ancestors toiled and dreamed and died.

I lift my head toward her fingers.

Am interrupted by the tent's wood-framed flap slapping open.

Bragda jerks her hand away, desperate to squirm beneath the sheepskin as Jailspur enters without knocking. There is no need for the formality of knocking. Commander of the Messengers, the warrior to whom Otogai himself gave the task of teaching me how to ride, Jailspur has treated me as the son he never had, and in return I have accorded him the respect my real father deserved. As usual he is impatient, suspicious, his scant mustache and beard seeming to give his aged, weathered face a perpetual sneer, but beneath that demeanor dwells the man who not only showed me how to handle a horse and how to survive, but also lovingly drilled into me tales of honor and of the yasak, the Khan's code of laws.

He glances around the ger as if expecting treachery, then haughtily peers down on us, the wrinkled folds of his eyelids like hoods. "You ride," he says.

"But I just returned."

"You would disobey me?"

"Of course not." Already I am rising, pulling myself into sheepskin cloak and felt socks, my joints sore and stiff. "Where would you have me go?"

"Khwarezm. You will tell Temujin that we have captured an Uighur monk who ciphers symbols."

To bring such a message to the Khan himself? My heart should skip as joyfully as a flat stone. Not only is it the highest honor to serve him personally, he rewards Messengers regardless of their message--one reason for his warfare success--rather than adopting the Chinese custom of executing bearers of bad fortune. The news will delight him. For has he not said that those who read and write hold the power of gods? Find a scribe who can pen our history, he has declared, and our glory will live forever.

Instead of skipping, the stone sinks.

At least another three months without Bragda, who now pokes her head from under the covers, staring in horror from me to Jailspur. He looks away, abruptly ill at ease, and in that instant she briefly shakes her head at me in terror. Fear emanates from her in even greater waves.

When he eyes her again, his gaze registers contempt, as though he sees her nakedness despite the sheepskin cover.

And suddenly I know.

He has had her, against her will, while I was away.

He who taught me that warriors guilty of murder or adultery or urinating on water so respect the yasak that they will announce their transgression and expect to be put to death without ever having been accused.

My Mongol father.

Turning, he stalks into the night, me stumbling behind, pulling on boots. Wanting to kill him but knowing I cannot accuse, much less condemn. He is a commander. And I, after all, a foreigner.

Above us the Eternal Blue Heaven, ear to so many Mongol prayers, is but a black bowl crusted with icy stars that twinkle in mockery.

He reaches his tent, pauses, walks on. Perhaps he knows I am aware of what he has done but fears to involve his family. Perhaps he seeks a place where he can quietly murder me. If so, it would be a favor.

We wend through camp, he not acknowledging me behind him. The air, filled with the smell of smoke and butter and mutton, crackles with the cold. Snow snaps beneath our footfalls. I hear a woman humming, and I wonder what Bragda must be thinking. I wonder if she has snuffed the lamp and sits in darkness, humiliation emanating from her like heat.

When Jailspur reaches the edge of the huge camp, the clouds uncover the moon. It is as if he has ordered a curtain pulled back, nature acquiescing to his wishes. How many times in these five years since Bragda tugged the arrow shaft from my back and nursed me again to health have I witnessed Earth and Heaven side with the Mongols? I could kill him, but I cannot kill them all, and I have no power to fight the world.

On the grasslands, white-muzzled horses mill uneasily, many nervously pawing frozen ground, as if the renewed light has found out some conspiracy among them. There are five hundred of them--half the herd that was among the bounty from Kara Khitai, the enormous kingdom that once I called home. The rest are with the Khan. Rallying symbols as the Mongols march against Bukhara and Balkh.

Jailspur removes his caftan, tosses it onto the ground and, bare-chested despite the cold, spreads his arms, as if expecting the horses to come. They shy away, moving as with one mind.

"The finest steeds this side of eternity," he says, picking up his jacket and holding it in the crook of his arm as he gazes across the grasslands. "Were you or I born like the Khan, clutching a blood clot in our fist, then perhaps we too would own such an animal, eh Umber? Perhaps the Blue Heaven would smile on us as well."

I neither answer nor step up beside him as an equal. I remain behind, as a woman might. As an assassin might.

"I have delivered few messages these past years," he says. "I kept turning my responsibilities over to you. People have been laughing. I hear them say old behind their lips. What did you expect of me, Umber?"

"And yet you would have me go again."

This time it is his turn to be silent. He puts the caftan across his shoulder and, hunched as though burdened by the weight of the moonlight, saunters off toward a distant hill, the horses slowly scattering.

I watch him until he disappears into darkness, and when I turn to go back to my tent I am surprised to find Bragda behind me. She holds my leather armor and peaked metal helmet--my proudest possession other than the wife a poor, wise farmer chose for me--and I find myself trembling as I recall how she stood behind a husband branded a fool by his neighbors and insolent by his father, while the Khan's terrible calvary came on. I tremble not from the fear I felt then but the love I feel now. Tremble so much that my teeth chatter. I clamp my lips shut.

She waits, eyes downcast, until I follow her cue and put on the armor and helmet. When she looks up at it there is a sad smile in her gaze. Perhaps she remembers how, when Jailspur gave me the helmet after a year's horsemanship instruction, she said I was a Ki, the horned horse of Chinese legend.

From beside her feet--bare toes curled upon the snow--she lifts my saddlebags and leather drinking pouch. "I tucked a cabbage amid the dried meat and milk curds," she says. "I traded for it during," the eyes again downcast, "during the time you were gone. It was to be your breakfast, after you were rested."

When she gives me the things our hands touch. The edges of her eyes tighten, a look of pain. "Go now, " she says.

"Bragda."

"Go. And do not look back, my love. The spirits will think you're not watching the trail, and will steal your eyes."

She backs away--hesitantly; now turning, hurrying off. I think I hear her crying, but it is only a mother humming a child asleep.

"I'll come back for you," I call out. "I will come back."

A dog barks. Smoke from a thousand tents rises into moonlight. I stand there until the day dawns violet against the hill toward which Jailspur walked, before I trudge to where the Lightning Mounts are hobbled and select the dapple-gray I often use for the first and last legs of journeys. I let the horse trot from camp, she seeming happy to be moving. Without nodding I pass women gathering dung for fires and boys tending horses and sheep. They eye me curiously. The ugly Chinese.

For three days I do not look back--not until I crest the summit of the eastern pass through the Heavenly Mountains and see Lung-Ta prayer-flags snapping in the wind, one color for each realm of the universe. All point back toward the northeast, the land of Khan. An odd, ill omen; winter winds usually blow south.

Rather than invoking the traditional prayer to the passes, I murmur to the Wind Horse, guardian of the elements of self-control: body, speech, mind. "Be a steed for the spirits, Lung-Ta," I beg him. "Carry them to watch over my wife."

I switch ponies at Barkol, the dapple-gray about to drop. I have long since worked past exhaustion; hatred drives me on. I suck my anger like a pebble in a parched mouth.

Days wing by like the birds that sometimes come squawling out of the infinite blue, angry with the intruder. Their cries shake me awake; for the first time since I learned to ride long distances, I have given myself over to the horse's rhythm out of frustration rather than love. A golden-brown mare, she trots along as though unaware she carries anyone, much less a Chinese.

At Hami we cross the Silk Road, the ruts of a thousand years and myriad caravans etched into the desert, and continue southwest toward Lop Nor and the southern route--faster but more hazardous than going west through Kashgar, where camel drivers and shopkeepers might see the pain behind my scowl. I break into a gallop when I see the great salt lake shining like a coin beneath the sun, and pretend I am in an even greater hurry than I am when I change horses at the outpost on the northern shore. The two men stationed there raise eyebrows in hope of news or kind words, but I offer neither, dismounting and sending the next steed, a piebald, galloping as I run and leap on, the animal wild-eyed at my insistence, splashing through the salt marsh.

Dusk has oranged the horizon when we come to the southern end of the lake, where I pull up so abruptly that I yank both reins and mane.

Drinking from the salt waters is a Lin.

Reddish and shaggy, the mare has muscular shoulders, a swayed back, and huge haunches, as if built for fertility. She does not look up as I slide from my horse and approach, but watches me coolly, only a slight shake of her head indicating she is aware of me. Her horn--except for its fleshy tip, translucent as an icicle--catches the waning light. I squat, knees cracking, as if a lowered level will power blood to my brain and enable me to see that she is merely mirage. Or hallucination.

Now she lifts her head, a bundle of rushes between her teeth, her jaw working, water falling from her muzzle and splashing, disturbing the stillness. Bragda, I realize, was right. The Ki and Lin, male and female of the species, are real. As real as my dreams were false.

She canters away across the desert, the land flat and nondescript here, not the wind-tortured landforms deep within the Takla Makan, the desert from which no living thing returns. As if Eternal Heaven, angry over the uncaring and ugliness of the people below, slammed a fist between the Heavenly Mountains to the north and the Himalayas to the south, then twisted knuckles in despair. Such is the wretched land of the Takla Makan.

I jump onto the piebald and ride after her.

For days I follow her into the desert, my heart racing faster the more my mount continues to tire. It has become apparent that the Lin is leading me rather than being followed, for she never lets me closer than the length of my father's field, speeding up each time I kick the piebald into a panting gallop but slowing should I fall behind.

Why, I wonder, has she led me into the desert? To keep her pursuer from returning to alert others that she exists?

The brown expanse tufted with brush gives way to land knobbed with sandstone forms so grotesque they look like evil idols. It is as if I have entered a supernatural world. Calcite is crusted like opium, and shale set on edge curves up like talons or scimiters waiting to slice open the unwary. The piebald limps along, head and tail drooping, legs nicked in a dozen places.

When the Lin pauses at a tall stickery bush jutting like a flame amid between two ragged hills, I also halt. I spear my helmet into the soil, line it with hide torn from my saddlebag, pour precious water within, again pull myself onto the horse, ride away and wait. The Lin stops cropping the bush and slowly serpentines toward the offering. Knowing I cannot catch her unawares, I hope to win her trust, so that--against all logic: sun, exhaustion, and desperation having warped my reasoning--she will come to me of her own will.

She examines the helmet but does not drink. Then she snorts as if in disgust and wanders away, her gait less certain now.

When at last, disheartened, I go back to the helmet she is again a farmer's field away. I drop to the ground and consider the water instead of replacing it in the bag. Sunlight reflects off the liquid as though off a coin. I remember the gleam of Lop Nor, the lake that moves, its marsh-rushes like lashes around a glassy eye staring up from the desert as if scrutinizing God.

Salt. That is what drew her to Lop Nor! Salt--together with water: symbols of life and immortality. Elixir for a horned horse.

Salt fringed a dry watercourse along what is now the horizon, I remember. Heart thudding, I leap onto the piebald and race him so urgently, backtracking, that twice he nearly falls. When we arrive he is lathered and gasping. I wrench off a boot, scoop in salt and dirt, the Lin again, insanely, a field away, and gallop back to the helmet, holding the boot like a chalice. The Lin, once more cropping the spike bush, eyes me as I filter salt from sand, my fingers a sad sieve. I have witnessed her look before.

"Bragda," I utter through parched lips.

The sound so startles me that I cease working, pour half the boot-sand into the helmet. If the lake has a sandy bottom, why not my capful? I mount the piebald and, watching one another, the Lin and I ascribe a circle, she to the helmet, I to the bush. Up close I see its main branches, white as poplar, are long and strong and straight. With my knife I whittle off the greatest length I can find as the Lin drinks, neighing her satisfaction, shaking her head, again drinking. From my saddlebag thongs I fashion a lasso, attach it to one end of the branch and at the other make a loop for my hand, reviewing with a kind of exultant anxiety the lessons Jailspur taught. How to ride upside-down, dangling from a stirrup; or on my head, a shoulder snugged in the saddle; above all how to lasso a takhi--a wild pony. My sorriest skill. As though I had captured myself one sun-scorched afternoon as the Khan's cavalry rode toward me, and I had not the heart to capture anything else.

"Bragda," I repeat, under my breath. The Lin whinnies as if in answer.

I pat the piebald. He is spent. What horseman am I, using him up like this? I resolve to make his anguish up to him should we capture the Lin. Give him the remaining water and curds, walk before him rather than ride as we return to the Lop Nor station, and there order him rubbed down and fed, then set free. Even now the men would obey me, but report me to be punished. With the Lin in tow they will obey instantly, report me with pride. I will own the finest horse beneath Blue Heaven.

"Soon," I whisper in the piebald's ear, and mount him, he stumbling to hold me.

I kick him and ride down on the Lin like a thunder, the piebald struggling to respond. The mare seems reluctant to move from the salt water, as if it has drugged her senses. This time she eyes me in fear, not condescension.

Then, as though breaking from a spell, she jerks up her head and starts to bolt, tension rolling the length of her, power gathered in her hind legs.

"Bragda!" I shriek in a cracked, croaky voice as the piebald's hooves pound and dust boils up around me. The Lin hesitates--an instant too long before she lurches left. I am now so near I can see the sheen of sweat upon her flanks. I thrust the lasso forward. The noose dangles in the sun.

Then it is around her neck. She swivels on all fours, facing me, straining against the leash, legs spread, like a dog worrying a rag. Her snorts are desperate, high-pitched; she jousts at the branch with her horn, twisting her head from side to side.

"I've come for you!" I yell at her. "You see I came back!"

She kicks the helmet, sending it catapulting end over end, water wheeling into the air. I am jerked off balance. The piebald lurches, trying to adjust himself to the rider, and in his exhaustion, stumbles. The mare lunges back--too late. The piebald pierces its neck on the mare's horn--and instantly rears, screaming. I tumble from the saddle, unsuccessfully fighting to keep my feet in the stirrups, hit the ground so hard my breath exits in a whoosh. As I lie trying to suck in air, the Lin watches as if in horror as the piebald collapses. Then the mare flees, pulling me with her.

Dirt covers my face, choking me, rocks rumble against my back and buttocks. I hang on whether I want to or not, my hand trapped in the loop. Far behind me the piebald is on the ground, kicking spastically, crying its pain and terror. Shadows slant like ribs across my face and then I am pulled through the bush, branches and brambles raking my skin and eyes. She drags me onward, and I know I would not let go even if I could. The mare, like Bragda, is all I have. Other than delusion.

I will die this way, I decide, here in a realm rendered evil by the elements. Not that death much matters, except for my not seeing Bragda again. What was I thinking when I shirked my duty as Messenger and followed the mare? That she would make me so respected my position would be elevated above Jailspur's? That he would be forced to dissemble before me and fear for his life?

Suddenly the Lin stops.

And lies down.

I clamber to my feet, spitting dirt, wiping grime from my eyes in an effort to see. Her back is toward me, chest heaving. Surely the sojourn in the desert could not have weakened her so much!

She turns her head toward me, nostrils flared, her gaze more that of victim than victor. In her eyes I see darkness spreading. The wind has picked up, whining past my ears. As I peer at the sky, fear twists my insides like rope. Black clouds drive across the desert, sand furling before them. Takla Makan storms, infamous for their severity, arise so quickly that the only warning experienced caravaners have is when the older camels abruptly halt and thrust their mouths into the sand.

I claw at the loop, squinting around anxiously for shelter. As if taunting me for my travail, the sandstone idols waver and and disappear behind the onslaught of sand. It assaults my face like needles. I cry out in pain--unable to hear my voice above the wind--and clutch my jacket's felt liner against my cheeks. I collapse to my knees, nuzzle my head against the mare. She does not resist.

The sand beats a furious percussion against my leather armor while I huddle, as concerned now for the plummeting cold as for the sand. I wriggle my right hand, still attached to the loop, beneath her head, and snuggle ever closer against her flanks, not unlike how I used to lie with Bragda, my groin cupping her buttocks, my left arm around her torso, hand on a breast, my right hand pillowing her head.

Though my eyes are clenched shut, the insides of the lids seem coated with dirt. As I struggle for breath, the mare's heat is a heaven I can almost taste but not touch with my lips, separated as it is from me by felt. I wonder if the sky is also felt, behind which lives the warmth and heart of God.

Bragda, my mind moils, and I wonder if Jailspur is upon her, absorbing her heat--never her heart. Why did I not plunge my knife into his back!

As abruptly as it began, the storm subsides. Here in the Takla Makan it is not like in the Gobi, where storms rage for days, sand browning the sky yet leaving the land unchanged. Here, storms slash like a Mongol sword, delivering death, carving up the world.

When I look up, coughing against the grit in my mouth and shoving away at the sand cloaked to my shoulders, I seem to have arisen in some other world. The idol-shaped sandstone formations are aproned with dirt, as though their essence has been pulled out of them.

I stand, shaking off the sand and fear. The mare also gains her feet, weak-kneed and unsure on the impermanent earth, neighing her dismay, softly tossing her head. I start to unloop the thong from around my wrist but decide against it; she seems resigned to the fate of the pole and noose. We trudge through sand together, awkwardly, my right arm across my chest; I am on the wrong side of her.

We crest the rise.

No sign of the piebald. A dune has avalanched, its alluvial fans spread across the depression in which the animal died--if indeed I am facing the right direction.

Needing a focal point, I search for the bush from which I cut the pole. The bush is also gone, as though the wind uprooted it and sent it flying like the arrow of an assassin. I dig among the alluvial for my goatskin bag, but to no avail. We will have to reach the Lop Nor station without water.

I do not, dare not, let go of the loop. We head off in what I hope is the right direction. Above, as if in contradiction to the cold, the sun blazes. I have the ugly sense that the desert is how the sun wants the world: scoured clean of life, reduced to sandscape. Beneath the glare, everything looks white, the color of mourning. Not even the most hardened Mongol would enjoy such austerity. There is a greater feeling of death here than I have ever known. Temujin's bloodbaths pale beside it.

The mare and I stumble on, she perhaps as physically and spiritually lost as I, keeping close to me as we move across the barrenness. The cold continues to deepen. Plumes of breath hang momentarily from her nostrils like fine feathers, and in her horn, sunlight coalesces like warmth congealed. I am tempted to take hold of it, but I would no more touch it than I would a fellow Buddhist's head, highest point of the body and thus residence of the soul. For me, the highest point was not head but helmet, which I had thrust into dirt. Perhaps wisely, perhaps an insult to ancestors.

We crest another hill; beyond lies the sharpened shale, which seems to stretch forever. Was it such an expanse when we came? How obsessed was I with the Lin!

We start forward, though I know I will never survive the crossing. The shale will slice my boots, pierce my feet. The mare balks: from fear, I think at first, but when she tilts her head and then lowers it, throatily snorting, I grasp her intent.

Wants me to ride.

She shivers and turns in an uneasy circle as I mount, her eyes full of fear, her whinnying seemingly one of subtle lament, not insult. The storm seems to have scoured me of whatever pride or joy I should feel at mounting such sublimity, and yet a thought occurs: if I gifted the Lin to the Khan, could he not mate her with stallions of the Kara Khitai herd? Might he not elevate me to the top of the empire? Perhaps even make me his fifth son?

But the thought fades, another lone bird squalling above desert only to wing away, and for the first time in my life I feel at peace. The mare starts forward through the ragged rocks without my urging, hooves clinking against stone like the chime of a Buddhist bell. Who shod her, and why? The Eternal Blue Heaven, seeking to keep all creatures bound to the earth?

Around us, shale wavers like fingers of demons or the dead reaching up to protest our passing, and suddenly I know why the region seemed smaller before. Death is not to be denied. Was the area more compact during our first crossing, hoping to draw us into a trap--or wider now, attempting to hold us within?

The Lin provides a path.

Then I can see Lop Nor, shining in the sky and reflecting the ground --a trick not uncommon in the desert--though the lake is still many days away. There, salt water awaits the mare; and, too, a stall. For should we reach the station, I will never release her. I am not strong enough for that. I came for her; I will never let go.

We thread among shale for a day and into darkness. When dawn blooms along the horizon, sand and crusted earth greet us; we have completed the crossing.

The mare does not try to shake off her human weight, as I expected she might. Desire for the elixir of Lop Nor, I suspect, drives her despite the looming loss of freedom. Above us, the lake blinks in and out of existence, as though now and again closing its eye to the world.

"Bragda," I whisper, and pat the mare's neck.

Her head, already hanging, lowers even further as if in acquiescence.

That evening, as the first clouds I have seen since the storm lie like coiled cloth along the horizon, the winking of the lake escalates my thirst. I had thought myself no longer capable of saliva. Even now, though saliva spumes in my cheeks. I cannot swallow, so parched and swollen is my throat. As I lie beside the mare, seeking warmth, I fight the desire that pulses in that throat, that finally pulses up and down my body, like taut nerves struck with a tuning fork. I fight, but my body is too aflame with thirst. Why not? tolls like a bell in my brain. Why not, drink of her, Umber? What harm could come of it!

I pray to the Eternal Blue Heaven, to Bragda, to my father son of a farmer son of a farmer for release from greed; but the day is dark, Bragda is not listening, the prayers to my father and my fathers before him are plaintive laments from beyond a far, far field.

I press tightly against her, trying to commune with her. What is she thinking? How does she think? The desire for water makes my heart race. Even my skin tingles with the craving. Forgive me, my inner voice whispers, but I do not mouth the words, for fear she will hear and, understanding, flee.

I slide my knife from its sheath, quickly cut a tiny slit along the right gaskin, and lower my lips to the wound. She neighs her dismay and starts to rise, but I am up with her, and then the effort seems to expell from her and she lies down again. The drug that is her lifeblood courses through me. My mind feels the emollient; though my limbs heat up, listlessness suffuses me--a reaction the opposite of what I would have believed.

As she gains her feet I easily stand, but the desert appears to slant to and fro, as if my mind is water a child is attempting to hold in a shallow pan. Careless yet careful, I again mount, aware with heightened senses of the world around me. Each grain of sand looms large. Each, a miracle.

How wonderful the elixir that is the blood of the mare!

We will make the station, I know; and I can give the Khan the essence of the Lin without my having to give her up. Sequester the mare, dole out her blood to Temujin a vial at a time. Who then would be the more powerful --he, or Umber?

I could buy my father and neighbors out of their bondage at Jinquan. Again they will have farms and freedom. I will send searchers into the opium dens, whose windows, below street level, look out on the world but see nothing. We will find Bragda's father, and surely with the goodness and grace of the blood of the Lin he will escape his addiction.

And Bragda will love me.

And forgive me for leaving her.

A distant whinny assails us, dissipating my daydreams.

The Lin halts. Together we look around, she seemingly as confused as I over the new sound.

Then we see a stallion, nimbused by the sun, upon a bluff whose stark sides have been rivened by the wind. He lifts, kicking at the air. Fastened to his back, what at first looks like the spiked bush sparkles darkly. Not a bush, I realize, but a triad of wish-fulfilling jewels, elongated and egg-shaped, set as though in a lotus flower saddle.

The Lin whinnies and keeps turning toward the stallion, regardless of how hard I kick her into onward toward Lop Nor. Curiously, I feel no fear; perhaps the blood-drug lodged in my gut has calmed my heart. I blink at the realization of good fortune--who but the dead and dreamers have witnessed the Lung-Ta?--and close my eyes.

Drowsiness descends, and abruptly I am on the ground, gasping and looking up at Lop Nor shimmering in the sky directly above me. My reflection peers down from the lake. I could cry, had I moisture enough for tears.

The Lin lowers her head and nuzzles me as if to assure I am alive. I groan; the sound seems to spill from outside my body, echoing beneath the bowl of Heaven. "Go away," I manage to say.

She nudges my ribs more insistently, attentive even to an enemy.

"Bragda?" I ask, and let the loop fall from my grip.

I know now why Bragda stood behind me that day the Mongols came. Not in support but in hope that together we would run away.

Perhaps she will be better off with Jailspur: among Mongols, stealing another's wife is not so much infamy as tradition. He might not love her as I did but at least he if he leaves her he will say goodbye.

When I stagger to my feet, I see the mare bound up the bluff toward the white stallion. How else but freeing her could I keep her from the Khan?

I walk toward Lop Nor, and when darkness descends I lie down against the cold, my blood chilling, never to warm again. I have the spirit but not the physical skills to go on. In my dreams I see the Lin and Lung-Ta canter across clouds.

I awaken not into daybreak but into death. Sand whistles through my ribcage and fills the cavity of my pelvis. Desert spiders and, once, a hare scuttle across the expanse and find sustenance in my shriveled flesh. The giving makes my jawbones sag open in a smile. I know the karma in that, know it literally in my bones, and when I look up through eyeless sockets at Lop Nor, I am not afraid. Not even of Mongols whose ghosts might ride the wind.

Another storm comes, so ferocious that it sends rocks running. I laugh at its weakness. Sand covers my bones, as though the world is incensed at my insult. I lie awaiting Lop Nor.

Instead of water, I heard hooves. They pass again and again across my grave, gradually revealing my face. The herd is golden-brown, offspring of a silver-white stallion and a russet mare. So fine-limbed and sleek-bodied is the herd that their hooves barely touch the earth as they roam the Takla Makan--now home to mustangs not even a Mongol could ride. I am

happy as I await the lake, for in dying I have learned to live; and by drinking the Lin's blood have learned that, except for escape, there is no

evil.

(space)

--REFRACTION--

I

am

amid

narwhals'

whistles and

terrified wheezes,

like elders coughing;

flukes slapping, kayak

creaking, ice converging

as froth and fear pull me

into waves in whose tangled

hair sea mammals breed and

bear: the world's watery roots.

I do not fight the drowning. It troubles me no more than the failure of the research project. Without sorrow or solace I remember how, before the narwhals collapsed the kayak, this sea and my soul were calm as a mirror, the narwhals mirrors of the world's fragility, their flanks a map of time.

My eyes and lungs bulge, saltwater and bile burst into my mouth, bubbles escape as if seeking a higher lifeform to inhabit. I am oddly at peace despite the pain, as though, like water bending light, the fjord refracts my past. As sea and ice give way to darkness, I imagine the kayak's skirt hugging my waist, thinking there is no life without winter. Moon the color of snow, glaciers lying like predators along the fjord. Whalesong--and spray from the narwhals' spouting. Do only we Eskimos see the value of the white world? Jerac was right: women should hold the animal's legs while their husbands skin. He was wrong about everything else. As I was, about everything.

I imagine myself again paddling in the polynia, the narwhals in a rosette around me, flukes toward the kayak, tusks outward. I barely dip the paddles, awed by what might drive whales to such a geometic. Display of communal well-being, or does an enemy lurk? Will an orca surface or polar bear pad out from among icefall? I lift my paddle in an absurd attempt at defending myself.

I sigh at my naiveté, put down the paddle; the whalesong is not one of fear. I let the kayak drift as I admire the tusks. Slender and spiraled, brittle and exquisite. Small wonder why Medieval Europeans used them as scepters and believed them imbued with Grace: capable of curing impotency or ague, able to detect and neutralize poison. Symbols of imperial power, they brought a king's ransom.

Today, for as little as three thousand krøner, you can hang one in your den; for only fools believe in unicorns. The educated pontificate about rhinos being the basis of the myth, while the real unicorns go on dying--harvested for horns, or their tusks caught in cod and salmon nets.

The wind comes up as if to chill my anger, reminding me that the world of ice-pack and ice-cap, though filled with retribution, is without remorse. The living cannot retrieve the dead.

I am chilled despite my polypropylene, sweater, down coat, anorak. My perspiration has begun to freeze. As usual I am overdressed--as I was at Copenhagen's Polytekniske except for my freshman year. After Jerac left school, I discarded my jeans for skirts and pressed slacks. I became the Eskimo who had discarded her culture. Jerac and the Arctic taught me nothing, nothing; but I learned less at the university. Heat, not cold, kills earliest on the ice; I know that much. It is opposite in academe.

Maybe as a grad student I should have attempted to radio-tag Jerac instead of narwhals. Perhaps I could have kept track of him. And he, me.

We met at Polytekniste as freshmen, both never out of Greenland before. Right off the ice, as they say. He was gorgeous: skin like moist terra cotta, physique that brought him the gold in the knuckle-hop at the Eskimo Olympics, eyes so dark our heritage could not account for their depth. "A magician in bed," my dormmates told me. "Makes your inhibitions disappear."

We became lovers back home the following summer, while working at the cannery in Godthåb. Rather, he worked--on the slime line sixteen hours a day--and I was paid for delivering coffee and bad jokes. "Happy slimers are safe slimers," I had convinced the corporation, proving to myself, and any worker I could browbeat into listening, that the fishing industry's executives had the brains of beat-up humpies seeking to spawn.

Perhaps if he were not always giving up precious sleep to sleep with me, our weekend on the tundra would have gone differently. Jerac packed the basics, I brought my usual: Walkman with mini-speakers, freeze-dried kung pao chicken, leather flask filled with chablis. And mushrooms, this time.

An experimenter back then, I was anxious to try some, but only if Jerac joined me. At first he shook his head. I delayed asking again until after we made love to exhaustion--my exhaustion, anyway--in that endless light while the summer wind sighed against our tent. At last he lay with his head on my belly as we talked and snacked on pickled mangtuk. "About the mushrooms," I asked again, and he became silent; lay looking at the ceiling.

"They say that's what caused her problem," he said bitterly.

"I thought you said she'd eaten too much stink flipper. Or was drunk."

"She couldn't have been drunk."

His face hardened, but it was I who was annoyed--he invoking her again. For someone who never existed, the woman from Qingmiuneqarfik often came between us. For Jerac she existed.

He took the last piece of whaleskin from his mouth, replaced it in the Tupperware. He had temporarily lost his taste for its flavor of hazelnut and cloves. "Only if we do it the old way," he said.

"God, Jerac."

I was not so town-Eskimo that I did not know the tradition. The woman injested the mushrooms, her liver filtering out toxins but not the hallucinogens. The man drank her urine.

It was crazy. It was also culture.

I hesitated. I realized there were boundaries to what I'd try. That, more than the danger and attendant humiliation, gave me pause. I felt old. But not like Eskimos are supposed to feel old.

"Never mind," he said. After a moment he added, in an awkward attempt at levity, "If the sexism bothers you we could switch roles."

I laughed, but it was forced, reluctant. I sighed, lay down alongside him, head to toe. I gathered my courage and foolishness. "Would you fill a cup, or would I have to drink from the faucet?"

"You're certain."

I wavered: finally shut my eyes.

"It's too gross."

I waited to be caressed and cajoled. But Jerac misunderstood; silence filled the tent. He slowly sat up, put the film canister containing the mushrooms back into the side pouch of my pack, and crawled from the tent. Head, shoulders, bare butt, bare feet, gone.

"God, Jerac," I said, to the ceiling.

There were tears in my eyes.

I wouldn't cry, I never cried. Not for a man, anyway. When my father died I was stone. Stone when my brothers and uncle died. As the boys in my high school at Godthåb dropped like dominoes--suicide and accident, accident and suicide; and how do you classify Russian roulette?-- I had stonehood polished to perfection. The gleam in my eyes at graveside reflected my heart. It was not caused by tears.

I refused to follow Jerac outside. I crossed my arms as though to keep my will in place, and tightly shut my eyes.

Sleep slowly enveloped me. Not exactly sleep, but not daydreaming. I lay in the stupor of considerable sex and too little empathy. For the first time I could recall, I dreamed of deserts.

He lies on the ground while sand skirls in the wind, his tattered jacket and puffy pants billowing, the goatskin boots full of holes, his toes and hands and face shriveled to parchment. The lips are gnarled, eye sockets empty. Sand builds along the windward side of his legs, spreads over the knees and thighs, angles across the jacket. Only the feet and face remain uncovered. When the wind abates, a bird lands on his chest, and after walking around as though nervously testing the stability beneath its feet, tears off the upper lip as if pulling up a worm. The bird flies toward a lake lying on the horizon like a shiny coin. The ravage has unhinged the jaw; it sags open. The man appears to be desperately grinning. Dusk brings the wind. Shadows and sand fill the mouth.

When I awakened I felt a sense of loss, whether only from Jerac's absence I wasn't sure. I pulled on my things and crawled outside.

As if unmindful of the chill, he lay naked and seemingly asleep on the lichen-covered slope beyond the tundra marsh. I slogged over, padded up the hill, nudged his foot with my boot.

"Good way to get hypothermia."

He turned his face toward the ice-cap along the horizon. The moon was silver-blue, the sun pale and distant. My watch buzzed. Midnight.

"You going too play shrug?" I demanded.

He would sometimes go silent and rigid, in the way Eskimo men often do, infuriating everyone with their silent fury, communication reduced to slight shoulder movements.

He shrugged.

I returned to the tent, lay remembering the discussions my girlfriends and I sometimes had. Many Eskimo men were dysfunctional. Was it wise to marry or have children by one? But there were voices that blew down from the ice-cap, whispering for the good of the culture.

He returned an hour later. We shared the tent, but we might as well have slept on opposite sides of Greenland, the ice-cap between us.

The wind lulled my anger away.

The man staggers against sand blowing across the desert, his cheeks so puffy with sunburn that his eyes are slits. A lake seems to shine in the sky, winking as he stumbles. He passes a swollen tongue across his lips. "Bragda," he utters, and collapses to his knees.

He crawls on, hands turned in, shoulders bowed like those of a lizard. Then his elbows give way; abruptly, his face is on the ground. When he lifts his face, sand covers his left eye, clinging to the mucous. He brushes desperately, again collapses. "Bragda." He clutches at sand.

I awoke to an ATV stuttering across the tundra. Outside, I found Jerac watching as the machine pitched and yawed across the niggerheads. His eyes were hard and narrow.

Jailspur was at the throttle, face burnished by the midnight sun. He shut off the machine and slapped his gloves down among the gas cans strapped to the rear luggage rack.

"Brought you something," he told Jerac.

He grinned, held up a baggie filled with fish strips. He was unshaven, his teeth green with grime, a front one missing.

"You came ten miles to bring smoked sheefish," I said suspiciously.

"Breakfast ready?" he asked Jerac.

Icily: "Tea and pilot bread."

"Sounds fine to me."

We ate sitting on rocks, not speaking. The slabs of snow and ice that dotted the summer camp seemed appropriate. Jerac stared at the bag of fish strips, holding it by the ends as if it were evidence. He ate nothing.

"You have the papers," he said finally, not looking at the older man.

Jailspur took a folded sheaf from his jacket and held it toward Jerac, arms' length, between forefinger and thumb. Jerac looked at the papers as if appraising their weight, the way he looked at the bar during gymnastic meets. He lowered his eyes and reached for the papers.

Jailspur pulled them back, Jerac's fingers closing on air.

The Dane laughed. Jerac seized the papers, held them before Jailspur's face as though to slap him with them, then walked to the edge of camp, where he clutched the papers against his stomach and stood looking across the tundra. A fulmar circled, screeching, angry at having humans near her nest. Jerac did not look up.

The papers, I was sure, were his long-awaited boat title and commercial permit. He could now sell fish on the open market. But Jailspur's unsubtle choreography with the fingers was not lost on me. Prohibitively expensive in our world of limited-entry cod and salmon openings, the papers had come at a price beyond the percentage of profits Jerac would owe his benefactor.

When Jerac was a boy, Jailspur briefly was his foster parent--until the courts decided Jailspur was not fit to be anyone's parent.

The Dane was back in Jerac's life.

Jailspur zippered his jacket, put on his gloves, slipped a leg over the machine with the exaggerated extension of someone mounting a Harley, yanked the starter cord. The ancient Honda roared into life.

I pulled the key from the ignition, the tundra again still except for the fulmar's cawing. "This could have waited," I told him. "He hasn't finished school. Tend to your fucking boat yourself. Leave him alone."

He held out his hand for the key, his body language insolent. I cocked my arm, ready to throw the key out into the tundra muck.

"Go back to Copenhagen--Bunnuq," he said, using my Eskimo name.

"Jerac goes with me," I answered.

"He knows where he's from. That's where he belongs."

Jerac had grown up in Qingmiuneqarik--the village in which, it was said, a woman mated with dogs and produced the white race, nearly human outside but monstrous within. Only non-Eskimos would fail to understand such shame. Jerac's accomplishments paled by comparison.

"They should have locked you up," I said. "Jerac told me what you did."

Jailspur looked up at me from the tops of his sockets, brows pulled down.

"Never did nothing. The court said so. So did Jerac."

"Not anything anyone could prove. Or would testify to."

He smiled. It was haunting, and I sensed it would go with me when I returned to the university, even if Jerac did not.

I pitched the key as far as I could.

His face reddened even more. I thought he would hit me. I had been in a few fights, growing up in Godthåb, but they were mostly scratch-and-hair affairs, few fists. I never had been punched by a man. I wasn't ready, but in a way I wished it would happen.

Instead he sneered, reached into his rubber coveralls, withdrew a wallet, took out another key. He started the machine. "Jerac's a big boy."

He roared away, spewing mud and exhaust. The machine listed like a dog raising a leg as he traversed the nearest niggerhead. He raised a middle finger.

I looked for a rock or stick, but ended up throwing insults.

"He's not a boy! And he never was your boy!"

The finger remained up like a flag. I strode toward Jerac, thinking that perhaps I had eaten mushrooms, that the world was unreal. I wanted him to do something--tear up the papers, tear off Jailspur's finger.

His back to me, he was looking at the sun, red and diamond-shaped. "Only a share of the profits," he said. "That's all he'll want."

I looked around his shoulder--withdrew to keep from embarrassing him and having him walk away from me again. His eyes were so moist I half expected a tear to form upon his lashes. I put my cheek against his shoulder blade. "That's all he'll want," he said. He was quivering.

"You needn't accept what he's offering."

His body shook convulsively. "Even if I get a degree--how long before I raise enough cash for another chance like this?"

"You can always subsistence-fish."

"And my children?"

"You don't have children."

"But I will! And they will!"

He was talking crazy.

"You're sounding like a white man--always worried about the future."

"What am I, but a white man!--masquerading. What am I, anymore."

He walked away, and I couldn't have gone to him even had he wanted me to.

What were we--any of us--all of us.

When he returned to the tent, his reticence was more profound than before--he did not even shrug when I spoke to him. I ran my tongue along the length of his palm; he did not respond. Finally I eased his sweatpants down.

He was the only man I'd slept with who hated having orgasms. In bed he had an obsessive desire to please. I think Jailspur had taught him too well.

When he came, he gripped my hair.

"Leah," he said. "Leah."

It was my Christian name, and he hated it.

When I slept, the warmth and salt of him still in my mouth, I was again transported from the tundra to a hotter and far more foreign desert.

The man faces the wind, cheek crusted with sand, eyes and lips tight, arms out. His hands are fisted. Between him and the lake, amid the furling sand, rears a muscular reddish unicorn, forelegs kicking, its tusk translucent as an icicle. The man rocks as though inebriated and sits down in the sand, shoulders slumped, arms sagged, hands listless in his lap. "Everything I had," he mutters. "You ruined it all."

His eyes close as of their own accord. Sand peppers his face, but he seems not to notice. "If I get back to Mongolia . . . I'll kill you with my bare hands."

Back at the cannery, Jerac took to wearing mirror-like sunglasses, a baseball cap on backwards, jeans with holes in the knees; things he'd seen on TV. He no longer laughed at my jokes or invented horrible similes to describe my coffee, and everyone on the line was faster with a fillet knife. We slept separately. When we were together we ate salmon instead of anything special, and didn't talk much.

We flew back to Copenhagen, but he stayed less than a quarter. He skipped practices, and his grades slipped. None of my girlfriends asked about him anymore.

The night he left for Greenland, the Berlin Wall was officially coming down. Everyone who was anyone flocked to Germany, as though some Teutonic migration had begun. The flight to Reykjavik, where he'd change planes, was nearly empty. "I'll stay if you beg me," he said. "I'll do anything you want if you beg me."

I reached to remove his sunglasses before he kissed me, but he backed away, hands up defensively, then compounded the slight by bowing and attempting to kiss my hand like some stupid European.

That night, Woman Without Face came to me for the first time.

The man staggers into the wind, snow, not sand, billowing around him. "Kill you," he mutters. At the edge of the lake in the distance stands a figure in a thick hooded coat, spear raised. The figure motions him forward. As he stumbles closer, he sees that the beckoning hand is the color of mourning. White as a fish's belly. He squints against the sun, trying to discern the figure's face, but except for a curve of slitted wood where the eyes should have been, the face is lost in the hood's darkness.

The figure points toward the lake--rimmed and chocked with huge ice chunks that float in a surface that mirrors the sun. Great fish-like creatures break the surface, noisily spouting, their geysers forming rainbows.

Jerac's promised letter-a-month became postcard-a-season, then ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. The next summer I remained in Denmark, on a work-study stint that, appropriately, considering the omnipresence of Hans Christian Anderson, had me counting swans. That the other researchers called me Ugly Duckling did not stop several married ones from asking me out. I slept alone, and badly, and studied so much that I found myself with a galloping GPA I ultimately rode into grad school.

My proposed dissertation, Echolocation: Acoustical Analogues in the Narwhal (Monodon monoceros), was my undoing. The day my committee approved the topic I stood amid tanks that reeked of formaldahyde, and in concert before a hundred watchful specimens remembered with trembling clarity my last afternoon with Jerac, beneath the down comforter in my dorm room. The moment just prior to climax, I had told myself he's only another partner only a partner until I accidentally willed my orgasm away.

"You all right?" my committee head asked as she scrawled her signature.

Momentarily speechless, I pointed to the title, which I realized I had unintentionally typed in boldface. The subtext implied I would be returning to Greenland, for research. Straining against the weakness the memory instilled, I said, "I'll need money."

She stifled a smile at my non-sequitor and glanced at her colleagues.

"Of course you do. All grad students do. Goes with the territory."

"What you're really here to learn," the second smiled at his own incisive humor, "is how to live with being poor. Then we watch you jump through research hoops."

The third, balding except for gray around his ego, had spent much of his research the past year trying to determine how to get into my pants. "You're Eskimo," he said. "Apply for Northern Studies Institute funding. Americans love to throw money at anything Native. They think it assuages some collective guilt."

My non-sequitors. My youthful enthusiasm. My culture. Ultima Thule, the world they called Grønland. Such were the amusements in the mausoleum of higher education.

Under their tutelage and titles, I was to beg funding from some government, oil or Arctic shipping company, or environmental group. There was little difference, for money fueled them all; all knew the value of priming the pump with research. I would do most of the fieldwork, with one or more committee member occasionally visiting the research site. It would be a late-spring operation, when the ice-pack had broken up enough to allow Zodiac launches but before the summer thaw made it difficult to locate the animals. I'd submerge hydrophones to record their songs, then put a year in the lab: decipher signals, check frequencies, search out correlations between songs, write the dissertation. Finally a journal article, my name bylined last.

Unless I proved exceptionally worthy, and a committee member fucked me not only intellectually but actually. Rather than my merely being the research assistant, the article then would be co-authored. Which meant my name would still be bylined last.

Woman Without Face had armed me for this moment.

"I have figured out how to radio-tag a narwhal," I said.

No one had succeeded at subjecting narwhals to telemetry.

The three monkeys looked up in unison from behind the lab table, so startled that Mr. Ego rocked on his stool.

Metaphorically I kicked the chairs out from under all of them.

"During winter," I said and, exiting, added, "A lot of money."

That night, Woman Without Face, as I had come to think of her, visited me again. As she had so many nights during the past four years, as mindful of my bedroom needs as Jerac had ultimately proved negligent.

Except for the slitted wooden sunglasses, her face, framed by the hood of wolverine and polar-bear fur, is dark as death, her hands white as mourning. The man from the desert is gone. I am beside her. She shows me an agloo hole, where seals come to breathe, then faces me toward the narwhals, which arc in syncopated water ballet in an ice-free hole in the frozen sea rather than in a lake. Their tusks catch the sunlight.

She points to the dots arrayed along the flanks. "My children have a chance if I'm not their mother," she whispers. As the tails glide beneath the sea, she pushes me forward. "Approach their pain, not their pleasure."

When I awoke I lay looking at the Atlantic Whales poster above my bed. Over the years the picture had sagged on its pins, as if from the sea's weight. I too felt pulled down--by pride. I pushed my hair back and breathed deeply. Stay centered.

My center: into the ice-free polynia, like Alice through the looking glass, into the world where narwhals fed and moaned whalesongs as if in mourning for whatever narwhals mourn. Sometimes, staring at the poster, I imagined myself one of them, ugly duckling turned cetacean swan, jousting lance jutting, the dots along my marbled flanks like points on a map of eternity.

Those dots were what Woman Without Face wanted me to see. She was the woman from Qingmiuneqarfik; I had guessed the identity long ago. I was to look beyond lineage. Perhaps we are not products of our parents, she was telling me. Perhaps parents are merely agloo holes through which our centering spirit flowed--each child not a reincarnation but rather drawing into itself spirits of the dead depending on its capabilities and charisma, like a sculptor freeing a statue from the stone.

"My children have a chance if I'm not their mother."

As Jerac Johnnie would, if I raised enough research capital to buy out Jailspur's interest in the boat. I would give Jerac that chance as much for myself as for him.

I picked up the phone.

That Jerac proved easy to find did not surprise me. Most Eskimos did not drift far from their center unless alcohol absorbed them.

For Jerac, as with many, his center was his boat.

Even though it wasn't his.

Four months later he was showing me around Qingmiuneqarfik; Jailspur had insisted upon the name. An uneasy ebullience had displaced Jerac's depth. His prattled about draft and decking, ship tonnage and salmon poundage, weather along Inglefield Gulf. Jailspur watched us from the wheelhouse. Fishing regs dictated that the permit holder be aboard during the season, but the season was over. Jerac was a glorified deckhand.

"Why is he piloting?" I asked when we were behind the net winch. "That wasn't part of the deal."

"You told me you needed transport to . . . to Kangerlussuaq." He avoided saying "Qingmiuneqarfik," at the fjord's mouth. "You didn't insist on our going alone." He glowered, the ebullience gone like so much bilge, and lit a cigar, smoking Greenland-style: three puffs, put it out with spit, bite off the end of the ashed tobacco, chew. All the men in my family had smoked that way. First came the failure to wipe the tobacco juice at the corner of the mouth, then bathing declined, pants hardened with fish blood and snot went unwashed as each year the drinking extended further into the fishing season. "Why must you go there," he said morosely. "There're polynias . . . other places."

"Not in a fjord with so many narwhal, there's not."

"Fuck it." He glanced toward the wheelhouse as though needing an excuse to get away from me. Jailspur signaled with two fingers. Jerac gave me a hard look, climbed onto the main deck, and went inside.

Exhausted and discouraged, I slept that night in the bow's cramped cubby while the men loaded my equipment. Back in Copenhagen, everything seemed so straightforward. I would arrive in Thule, we would chug off into a bouyant sunrise, and after we reaped the research's rewards and I bought out Jailspur, I would only ask two things of Jerac.

That he rename the boat.

That, if possible, he love me.

My plan regarding the narwhals was simple, but required someone with knowledge of the fjord. Unlike other whales, narwhals do not migrate south during winter, except to journey from their summer range near Canada's Baffin Island to their winter quarters among Greenland's polynias--the never-freezing upwellings along the west coast.

Each year, narwhals entered Kangerlussuaq in search of halibut, their favorite food, but risked being trapped by advancing ice. That some trapped narwhals survived the winter was an enigma no one had studied. The expense, the isolation, and the possibility of not finding trapped narwhals were too great. Perhaps, some theorized, they escaped by ramming through the ice or by piercing it with their tusks. But a meter of ice imprisons a narwhal, and the tusk is too fragile to break anything except itself.

Woman Without Face, doomed by her sin never to enter the watery afterworld, had shown me the answer.

A polynia--usually an oceanic occurrence--existed in Kangerlussuaq Fjord. The animals would be trapped but not desperate, which meant they could be approached. Like other whales, narwhals love being scratched; crustaceans dig hooked legs into cavities not directly exposed to water flowing over the narwhal's body. Vigorous rubbing with a brush or even a hand seems to provide relief from an itching of literally leviathan proportions.

". . . their pain, not their pleasure . . ."

Attempts at telemetry had consisted of placing collar-like radios around the tusk. The narwhals slipped them off in minutes. I would glue a radio tag where the crustaceans thrived. The tag would be better protected, and perhaps the narwhal wouldn't notice it among the general discomfort.

The next day dawned cold and clammy, the stench of diesel so pervasive it seemed to cling to the skin, the engine's droning making my head drum. I peed in the coffee can Jerac had provided, pulled on my anorak, and climbed through the wheelhouse. I nodded to Jerac's grunted hello, stepped out into the stinging air, emptied the can overboard. Jailspur, at the wheel, stared at his reflection in the hole he'd sleeved in the fogged-up front window, never looking at me.

We threaded among ice floes and icebergs, puttering through fog. The temperature continued to drop. Soon my teeth were chattering. Jerac exited the wheelhouse, crossed to my kayak, checked the straps binding it across the stern, stood contemplating the craft for several minutes. The kayak was traditional--walrus stomachs rather than fiberglas. I'd have thought he would examine it with a connoisseur's excited eye, but he just stared. Then he walked back to the wheelhouse. Before entering he gave me an ugly look.

Minutes later, Jailspur was laughing, his hand on Jerac's shoulder. Jerac stared into the windshield. When I went inside, wet and cold to the skin if not the soul, Jailspur stopped laughing and took his hand away. Jerac kept looking at the windshield. I went below. Condensation had formed along the bulkhead nearest my bunk; my bag was damp. I climbed in.

The only way to the rest of the boat was through the wheelhouse, so except for making sandwiches and emptying the can I stayed in bed three days, ice occasionally sliding past the porthole. Woman Without Face brought dreams, and I thought about the man in the desert. Some relation to me, I was sure, but whether a literal or metaphysical one I couldn't tell. I thought about the dots on narwhal flanks.

Perhaps, like lineage, time was not a continuum but rather random acts the mind, seeking the satisfaction we call sanity, coalesced to sustain itself. Like beads threaded on a non-existent string. Accept that the beads were scattered, and the past could lie ahead of us as easily as behind. We could impact not only the future, but the past.

Ibn Khaldun and Mahmoud Al-Hassan had said as much a millenium before, in their appreciation of Allah--an idea only now catching on in the Western world, with its wormholes to parallel worlds whose time-frame might not coordinate with our own. Though I felt little for Islam except scorn, given its excesses and view of women, I had found comfort in parts of its philosophy during the years of having Woman Without Face and not Jerac in my bed. Allah creates and destroys everything at each instant, but perhaps to demonstrate His omnipotence He leaves scattered beads.

The boat stopped, lay bobbing. I went topside.

Qingmiuneqarfik's dozen tarpapered huts lay like crumbs before the fjord's maw, the village usually deserted during winter but now deserted permanently. The only sounds were from guy wires humming in the wind. No dogs came to investigate the boat out in the calm water.

"We'll anchor here," Jailspur told Jerac. "Then you take the skiff and find us a decent shack."

Check out your old place, is what he meant.

"The ice is firming up," I said hopefully, pointing toward the fjord's mouth. "Maybe we can get the radio-tags in place sooner than I thought."

Savssats could occur quickly. Shore-fast ice was capable of growing across the mouths of fjords at a furious rate and expanding toward its head. It was not surprising that animals became trapped.

Moments later we were moored, and Jerac stood holding the line of the skiff we'd been pulling. His back was to the village; he was gazing across the fjord, his head hanging. Except for the tiny wake the skiff left, the sea was still, mirroring an orange sun bulbed atop the granite walls.

Jailspur slid open the wheelhouse door with a thud. "What's keeping you! She's paying you to do a job. Paying us."

Jerac let the skiff line go slack. The smaller craft drifted several meters before pulling around and creating another wake. Despite his bulk, Jailspur left the wheelhouse and bounded along the boat edge with a dancer's dexterity. He put a hand on Jerac's shoulder, and for a time the pair looked like father and son, the elder quietly giving advice. Jerac nodded as if in resignation and pulled the skiff alongside. Jailspur's hand trailed down Jerac's jacket to the back of his jeans. Jerac's head jerked up. He glared at the older man, and made a fist. Jailspur backed away. Jerac stepped down onto the bow of the skiff, crossed to the stern, lowered the motor, connected the gas hose, and pulled the starter cord.

He sat hunched, gray as the sea, as he puttered toward the village.

During the next hours I sometimes glanced at the launch sitting on that lonely snow-dusted beach before the empty houses, but mostly I watched the savssat. The ice spreading across the fjord's mouth looked like something created by time-lapse photography. One minute the sea was quiet and gray; seemingly the next it ran thin and shallow, as if a shelf had floated from the depths. Except for a couple of channels, the ice blocked the mouth and was broadening up into the fjord.

Now and again Jailspur emerged from the wheelhouse and watched the village, at first with coffee, then a cigarette, then with thumbs thrust into the sides of his coveralls. He rocked on his heels. "The little fuck. I have to beg him to get anything done right."

The sun had eased around the bowl of sky, never rising more than a few degrees off the horizon. It hung to the west, as clear as the day was cold. "I'll go see what's taking him so long," I said.

"The hell."

I didn't know if that implied agreement, but I unstrapped my kayak. I managed to lower it into the water without his help, climbed down, and climbed in with difficulty. As I pushed away with the paddle, he returned to the wheelhouse and yanked the door shut.

Wandering among the shacks was like being in a world of the dead. I half expected to see people peer from the windows or doors creak open, hands inviting me inside, but the windows just stared blankly and the only activity in the doorways was when a breeze rippled a plastic sack.

Jerac's footprints went from house to house, rarely in a straight line. Meandering. A quarter mile past the village, someone had built a traditional sod house, perhaps a desperate attempt to attract tourists. Such projects were common in remote villages, where even a few visitors a year would boost the economy.

The place was unfinished or, more likely, had fallen in. The whalebone stays looked bleached in the dying light. Seal and caribou hides lay haphazardly on the sides; others had slipped to the ground. The arctic entrance had no door.

Jerac's footprints led to the hut.

White people who hang themselves leave a question behind. Did they change their minds after stepping off the stool--panicking before their neck snapped? Among my people, there is no such issue. We tie twine or thin rope to a chair or door handle--any object--and, on hands and knees, lean forward, the noose around our necks. Change our minds, we stand up.

You have to want to die to die that way.

Jerac used his shoestrings, knotted together and neatly half-hitched around a whalebone. He still had on his tennis shoes, his legs tucked tightly beneath him, hands fisted as though in determination. Only after I untied him and laid the body on its side did I think to uncurl the fingers.

I opened the hands with difficulty. He had a treble fishhook in each fist, the barbs jammed into the flesh.

Until then my nerves had kept me moving, my emotions sealed in stone, but when the barbs tore from the skin I sank to the floor amid hides slick with rot and quietly cried, his head in my lap.

Had I not lowered my head, crying over him, Fric Jailspur would have killed me.

Somehow I never saw him crawl through the arctic entrance. He suddenly was standing over me, swinging a bone sled runner he'd found somewhere. He missed my head, the bone slamming my shoulder. Pain screamed through me but I managed to lurch sideways as he swung again. Again he missed--hit Jerac across the top of the nose. There was a thuuk as bone shattered and blood splattered me.

"Now look what you've done," Jailspur said in a hollow voice, dropping the sled runner and falling to his knees. He lifted Jerac's hand and held it, fishhook and all, against his cheek. "You and your goddamn narwhals. Killed my precious boy."

He picked up the sled runner. I scrambled on hands and knees through the arctic entrance, then raced through the village, the empty houses watching unconcerned.

The Qingmiuneqarfik was moored close to the shore, the skiff beached beside my kayak. I chose the boat that best guaranteed survival, not speed, and pushed off, paddling furiously toward the savssat. Looking back to see Jailspur lumber from between the shacks, I cursed myself for not disabling the skiff. Forget it. Stay centered. I bent into the work.

The kayak hit the shore-fast ice with a bump I thought would crack the ribbing. The boat bellied, then slid into the slush and free-standing water atop the ice shelf. The ice was only a dozen meters wide; I jumped out, kept my weight across the kayak as best I could as I splashed along. I reached open water again just as Jailspur brought the skiff's motor screaming to life and sent the launch flying across the sea, spewing a rooster tail, the bow lifted.

I had thought the fjord would save me, but I was wrong.

Jailspur roared along the ice, found a lead, brought the skiff around in a spraying arc and headed up the channel. In an instant he would clear the savssat. My only hope was that he would run me down, killing me quickly.

Halfway across the ice shelf, the skiff bottomed out in a screech of metal, and Jailspur was abruptly without water. Cursing, he pulled up the motor, climbed from the boat, and shoved the craft forward. It moved easily across the ice, his strength apparent.

Suddenly he was not beside the boat. It sliced into free-standing water and slid forward. Only Jailspur's head and arms were visible. He was thrashing wildly. "Bunnuq! You bitch! Help me!"

I braced myself against my initial reaction and paddled forward. I climbed onto the ice, sloshed to his boat and somehow untied the launch line, then crawled toward him, the coiled rope slapping as I moved.

"That's a girl." He clawed at the ice shelf. "Keep coming."

When I was close enough to assure a good throw, I heaved the lifeline.

For a moment his thrashing stopped. He looked at the shoestring I'd thrown, then at the rope still at my side. I smiled and backed away.

Few people can pull themselves from ice without help. There is nothing to grip. The hands bloody, the thrashing becomes more desperate. Cold inexorably seeps upward--Satan's frigid hand reaching through the torso for the soul thudding in the throat.

Jailspur almost succeeded in climbing out unassisted.

He had dug his nails into a tiny crack in stable ice, and his upper half was out of water when he discovered a new way to die.

There are three ways to kill a man who has fallen through the ice. You can leave him there, haul him out but let him freeze, or, if the weather is extremely cold, you can kick him in the spine and it will snap like a stick.

Fric Jailspur found another way.

I saw a man--or what had been a man--emerge behind him in the sea. The skin was parchment, the eye sockets empty, the upper lip torn off, revealing crooked teeth. Sand was crusted across the cheek, despite the water. He wore a tattered goatskin jacket from which water streamed as he rose--reaching around Jailspur's head, sinking gnarled fingers into Jailspur's eyes, pulling him backward. Jailspur gurgled, clawing at the ice. Then both men were gone, only a small swirl to mark their passing.

Regardless of the thin ice, I retrieved Jerac's shoestring and slipped it into my pocket. Then I returned to my kayak and paddled into the fjord instead of recrossing the shelf.

It was almost dark. I could hear the honking of seals and the narwhals' pulsed whistling and clicks that bespoke social communication rather than the shrieked wheezes associated with fear or feeding. My paddle caressed the fjord's easy current. I was alone among the animals and the stars.

Somehow I knew that the ice would continue advancing. The polynia would not hold. I could return to the gillnetter, but I kept heading east. The Qingmiuneqarfik was home beside the village whose name she bore. There was nothing for me there except legend, nothing anywhere beyond. I was home in Kangerlussuaq. I would drown when the ice closed in and frenzied fear seized the narwhals. But for the first time in my life, I sensed, I would

live.

--for Noi