For three days they both fast. They eat nothing, drinking water in an attempt to quell their belly’s rumblings; they leave the tent for long hours each day, even when the snow comes, to exercise and relieve tension.

Crozier takes turns throwing both harpoons and both lances at a large snow-and-ice block; Silence had recovered them from her dead family members at the massacre site and prepared one heavy harpoon with its long cord and one lighter throwing lance for each of them months ago.

Now he throws the harpoon with such force that it buries itself ten inches into the block of ice.

Silence walks closer and removes her hood, peering at him in the shifting light from the aurora.

He shakes his head and tries to smile.

He has no signs for Isn’t this what you do to your enemy? Instead, he reassures her with a clumsy hug that he is not leaving or planning to use the harpoon on anything or anyone anytime soon.

He has never seen the aurora like this.

All day and night the cascading curtains of color dance from horizon to horizon with the center of the displays directly overhead. Not in all of his years of expedition near the north or south poles has Crozier seen anything remotely resembling this explosion of light. The hour or so of wan daylight does almost nothing to lessen the intensity of the aerial display.

And there is ample acoustical accompaniment to the visual fireworks.

All around them, the ice groans, cracks, moans, and grinds from pressure, while long series of explosions under the ice begin like scattered artillery fire and quickly move to an unceasing cannonade.

Already unnerved by anticipation, Crozier is more deeply shaken by the noise and movement of the ice pack under them. He sleeps now in his parka – perspiration be damned – and is out of the tent and onto the ice a half dozen times each sleeping period, sure that their broad floe is breaking up.

It never does, although cracks open here and there within fifty yards of their tent and send fissures racing faster than a man could run through seemingly solid ice. Then the cracks close and disappear. But the explosions continue, as does the violence in the sky.

In his last night in this life, Crozier sleeps fitfully – his fasting-hunger makes him cold in a way that even Silence’s body heat cannot compensate for – and he dreams that Silence is singing.

The ice explosions resolve themselves into steady drumbeats that serve as background for her high, sweet, sad, lost voice:

Ayaa, yaa, yapape!

Ayaa, yaa, yapape!

Ajâ-jâ, ajâ-jâ-jâ…

Aji, jai, jâ…

Tell me, was life so beautiful on earth?

Here I am filled with joy

Whene’er the dawn comes up above the earth

And the great sun

Glides up into the sky.

But there where you are

I lie in fear and trembling

Of maggots and teeming vermin

Or sea creatures with no souls

That eat into the hollow of my collar bone

And bore out my eyes.

Aji, jai, jâ…

Ajâ-jâ, ajâ-jâ-jâ…

Ayaa, yaa, yapape!

Ayaa, yaa, yapape!

Crozier awakes trembling. He sees that Silence is already awake, staring at him with her dark, unblinking eyes, and in a moment of pure terror deeper than terror, he realizes that it was not her voice that he has just heard singing this dead man’s song to him – literally a song from a dead man to his previous living self – but the voice of his unborn son.

Crozier and his wife rise and dress in mutual ceremonial silence. Outside, though perhaps morning, it is still night, but a night of a thousand thrusting colors laid over the shaking stars.

The shattering ice still sounds like a drumbeat.

66

The only paths left now are surrender or death. Or both.

All of his life, the boy and man he was and has been for fifty years would rather die than surrender. The man he is now would rather die than surrender.

But what is death itself other than the ultimate surrender? The blue flame in his chest will accept neither choice.

In their snow-house the past weeks, under their sleeping robes, he has learned about another type of surrender. A sort of death. A change from being one to being something else that is neither self nor not-self.

If two such different people who have no words at all in common can dream the same dreams, then perhaps – even with all dreams set aside and all other beliefs ignored – other realities can merge as well.

He is very frightened.

They leave the tent wearing only their boots, shorts, leggings, and the thin caribou-skin shirts they sometimes wear under their parkas. It is very cold tonight, but the wind has died down since the day’s brief glimpse of midday sun.

He has no idea what time it is. The sun has been set for many hours, and they have not slept yet.

The ice breaks under pressure with the steady beat of drums. New leads are opening nearby.

The aurora casts curtains of light from the starry zenith to the white-ice horizon, sending shimmers to the north, to the east, to the south, and to the west. All things, including the white man and brown woman, are tinted alternately in crimson, violet, yellow, and blue.

He goes to his knees and raises his face.

She stands over him, bending slightly as if watching a breathing hole for a seal.

As taught, he keeps his arms at his side, but she grips him firmly by his upper arms. Her hands are bare in the cold.

She lowers her head and opens her mouth wide. He opens his. Their lips are almost touching.

She inhales deeply, seals her mouth over his, and begins blowing into his open mouth, down his throat.

This is where – in their practice during the long winter darkness – he had so much trouble. Breathing in another person’s breath is like drowning.

His body tense, he concentrates fiercely on not gagging, on not pulling away. He thinks – surrender.

Kattajjaq. Pirkusirtuk. Nipaquhiit. All clack-clack names he half remembers from his dreams. All names the Real People around the world’s circle of northern ice have for what they are doing now.

She begins with a short rhythmic series of notes.

She is playing his vocal cords like a bank of woodwinds’ reeds.

The low notes rise out over the ice and blend with the pressure-cracking and the pulsing aurora light.

She repeats the rhythmic motif but this time leaves a short gap of silence between the notes.

He takes her breath from his lungs, adds his own, and blows back into her open mouth.

She has no tongue, but her vocal cords are intact. The notes they produce with his breath fluttering them are high and pure.

She blows music from his throat. He brings music from hers. The opening rhythmic motif quickens, overlaps, hurries itself. The range of notes becomes more complex – as much flute as oboe, as distinctly human as any voice, the throat-song can be heard for miles across the aurora-painted ice.

Every three minutes or so in the first half hour, they pause and gasp for breath. Many times in practice they have broken up in laughter here – he understands through her string-signs that this was part of the fun when it was only a woman’s game, making the other throat-singer laugh – but there can be no laughter tonight.

The notes begin again.

The song takes on the quality of a single human voice singing, simultaneously bass-deep and flute-high. They can shape words by breathing through each other’s vocal cords like this and now she does – speaking words in song through the night; she plays his throat and vocal cords like a complex instrument and the words take shape.