Since this happened in the time when animals still had voices which the People understood, a bird flies over the opening ice and woos Sedna with its song. “Come with me to the land of the birds where all things are as beautiful as my song,” sings the bird. “Come with me to the land of the birds where there is no hunger, where your tent will always be made of the most beautiful caribou skins, where you shall lie on only the finest and softest bearskins and caribou skins, and where your lamp will always be filled with oil. My friends and I will bring you anything your heart may desire, and you shall be clothed from that day forth in our finest and brightest feathers.”
Sedna believes the bird-suitor, weds him in the tradition of the Real People, and travels with him many leagues over sea and ice to the land of the bird people.
But the bird had lied.
Their home is not made of the finest caribou skins but is a patched, sad place thrown together with rotting fish skins. The cold wind blows in freely and laughs at her for her gullible innocence.
She sleeps not on the finest bearskins but on miserable walrus hides. There is no oil for her lamp. The other bird people ignore her and she has to wear the same clothes she was wed in. Her new husband brings her only cold fish for her meals.
Sedna keeps insisting to her indifferent bird-husband that she misses her father, so finally the bird allows her father to come visit. To do so, the old man has to travel for many weeks in his frail boat.
When her father arrives, Sedna feigns joy until they are alone in the dark, fish-stinking tent, and then she weeps and tells her father of how her husband abuses her and of all she has lost – youth, beauty, happiness – by marrying the bird rather than one of the young males of the Real People.
The father is horrified to hear this story and helps Sedna devise a plan to kill her husband. That next morning, when the bird-husband returns with Sedna’s cold fish for breakfast, the father and the girl fall upon the bird with the harpoon and paddle from the father’s kayak and kill him. Then the father and daughter flee the land of the bird people.
For days they sail south toward the land of the Real People, but when the bird-husband’s family and friends find him dead, they are filled with anger and fly south with a beating of wings so loud that it can be heard by the Real People a thousand leagues away.
The sea distance that took Sedna and her father a week to sail is covered by the thousands of flying birds in a few minutes. They descend upon the little boat like a dark and angry cloud made up of beaks and talons and feathers. The beating of their wings calls up a terrible storm that raises the waves and threatens to swamp the little boat.
The father decides to give his daughter back to the birds as an offering and throws her overboard.
Sedna clings to the boat for dear life. Her grip is strong.
The father takes his knife and cuts off the first joints of her fingers. As they fall into the sea, these finger joints are turned into the first whales. The fingernails become the white whalebone found on beaches.
Still Sedna clings. The father cuts off her fingers at the second joint.
These parts of her fingers fall into the sea and become the seals.
Still Sedna clings. When the terrified father cuts off the final stumps of her fingers, these fall onto the passing floes and into the water and become the walruses.
With no fingers left, only curved bone stumps like her dead bird-husband’s talons where her hands had been, Sedna finally falls into the sea and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. She resides there until this day.
It is Sedna who is the mistress of all whales, walruses, and seals. If the Real People please her, she sends the animals to them and tells the seals, walruses, and whales to allow themselves to be caught and killed. If the Real People displease her, she keeps the whales, walruses, and seals with her down in the dark depths and the Real People suffer and starve.
What in the God-damned hell? thinks Francis Crozier. It is his self-voice that interrupts the slow no-self flow of the dream-listening.
As if summoned, the pain rushes in.
61 CROZIER
My men! he shouts. But he is too weak to shout it. He is too weak to say it out loud. He is too weak even to remember what the two syllables mean. My men! he cries again. It emerges as a moan.
She is torturing him.
Crozier does not awaken all at once but rather comes awake through a series of painful attempts to open his eyes, stitching together separate tatters of attempted awareness stretching over hours and even days, always propelled up out of death-sleep by pain and by the two empty syllables – my men! – until he is, at last, conscious enough to remember who he is and to see where he is and to realize who he is with.
She is torturing him.
The Esquimaux girl-woman he had known as Lady Silence keeps cutting into his chest, arms, side, back, and leg with a sharp, heated knife. The pain is incessant and intolerable.
He is lying near her in a small space – not a snow-house as John Irving had described to Crozier, but some sort of tent made of skins stretched over curved sticks or bones – with flickering light from several small oil lamps illuminating the girl’s bare upper body and, when he looks down, Crozier’s own bare and torn and bleeding chest and arms and belly. He thinks she must be slicing him into small strips.
Crozier tries to scream but finds again that he is too weak to scream. He tries to bat her torturing arm and knife-hand away, but he is too weak to lift his own arm much less stop hers.
Her brown eyes stare into his, acknowledging that he is alive again, and then return to studying the damage her knife is doing as she cuts and slashes and tortures him.
Crozier manages the weakest of moans. Then he falls away into darkness, but not back into dream-listening and the pleasant no-self which he now only half remembers, but only into black wave-surges in a sea of pain.
She feeds him some sort of broth from one of the emptied Goldner tins she must have stolen from Terror. The broth tastes of some sea animal’s blood. She then cuts strips of seal meat and blubber using a strange curved blade with an ivory handle, holding the slab of seal in her teeth and slicing dangerously close to her lips as she cuts downward, then chews the pieces well, finally pressing them between Crozier’s chapped and torn lips. He tries to spit them out – he does not want to be fed like some baby bird – but she retrieves each fatty blob and presses it back into his mouth. Defeated, unable to fight her, he finds the energy to chew and swallow.
Then he falls back to sleep to the lullaby of howling wind but is soon awakened. He realizes that he is naked between furred sleeping robes – his clothes, all his many layers, are not in the little tent space – and that she has rolled him onto his belly now, setting some sort of smooth sealskin beneath him to keep the blood from his lacerated chest from soiling the soft hides and furs that cover the tent floor. She is cutting and probing his back with a long, straight blade.
Too weak to resist or roll over, all Crozier can do is moan. He imagines her slicing him to pieces and then cooking and eating the pieces. He feels her pressing strands of something moist and slimy onto and into the many wounds in his back.
At some point in the torture, he falls asleep again.
My men!
It is only after several days of this pain and of slipping constantly into and out of consciousness and of thinking that Silence is slicing him to pieces that Crozier remembers being shot.