Beyond the Sea of Ice

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1 Something walked within the night--something huge. Something silent. Something terrible. The hunter stopped dead in his tracks, listening, attuned to some inner thrum of warning that caused adrenalin to run hot within his veins as all his senses screamed: Danger! He was a young man, winter lean, graceful even though he stood tense within his multilayered garments of skins and furs. Braced upon strong, heavily clad limbs like a running beast, he was poised and ready to hurl himself from danger. He had felt it stalking him for hours, as relentlessly as death. Twice he had doubled back to check for tracks, but blowing ground snow had mocked his efforts, and he had seen nothing--only the vast, wind-driven distances of snow-covered, perpetually frozen tundra and the endless darkness of the Arctic winter night. As the wind wicked away whorls of dry snow and sent them rivering beneath the shimmering blue patterns of the northern lights, he had seen a ridge that rose out of the broad, flat, tundral face like the broken nose of a long-dead giant. He had made for that veiled, distant refuge at a trot, not looking back, knowing that Alinak and Nap would follow. During the last few days they had tacitly allowed him to lead them. He had not been surprised--for he was Torka, and the blood of many generations of spirit masters flowed within him. It was well known that his hunting instincts never failed him. Alinak and Nap would know that he had sought safety on the high ground of the ridge, which would allow them at least some advantage over whatever it was that was stalking them. Now he looked back, out across the vistas fogged by thick clouds of blowing ground snow. Through these he could see his companions, two figures emerging out of the freezing mists, ascending the spine of the ridge toward him. Hunching against the wind, leaning on their spears for balance, they wore the skins of beasts. Antlers branched outward from their hooded heads. Half-human, half-animal, Alinak and Nap had the look of horned apparitions ripped from the nightmare fabric of a dream. But this was no dream. This was the Age of Ice. At least forty thousand years would pass before hunters of another epoch would call this land Siberia. There would be forests here then, and new races of men and beasts. Now there was only a dark and savage landscape across which the wind wailed and the cries of dire wolves ululated like women keening their dead. Far to the east, above the towering, ice-girdled mountain ranges that encircled the treeless tundral plain, the first glow of dawn was leaching the sky to gold. It was the faintest banding of light, but it would stay long enough to be called morning, to set shadows of mauve and gray upon a land that had not seen sunlight for months. The time of the long dark was ending. The time of light was returning after the longest, cruelest winter that Torka had ever known. His two antlered companions came to stand beside him. Like Torka, they were shielded against the weather in many layers of clothing. Their undergarments were of the supplest skins of caribou fawns. Trousers of dog pelts protected their legs from the subzero bite of the Arctic wind. Within these were stockings of buckskin, chewed by their women to the consistency of velvet, and over the trousers were hairy leggings of bison hide, cross-laced over knee-high boots lined in fur and triple-soled to form a barrier against the cold. Each man wore a tunic of caribou hide and, over this, with the hair facing inward, a coat cut from the skins of the same reindeerlike animal. No skins were warmer than those of winter-killed caribou. Although the caribou was relatively short-haired when compared to the pelage of the shaggy musk ox or the woolly shouldered giant bison, each shaft of caribou hair was an air-filled, insulating cylinder, which kept the warmth of a man in and the death-dealing cold of the Arctic out.