clicked on the green arrows and saw what he expected – Asian cargo ships on the new TransPolar route. He clicked a couple at random: the Hao Puren: Rotterdam to Shanghai. The Zheng He, going the other way, Dalian to Algiers. A couple of others – everything moving smoothly.
Then he studied the dotted blue arrows of the cruise ships. Now the ice-free and liquid North Pole was just another bit of sea and offered no photo opportunities, Svalbard’s stunning coastline was clogged in the summer. All captains tried to stagger their route to minimise bottlenecks, but because of the rarity of animal sightings, the tour operators had an agreement to share the information with each other on Channel 16 – despite this leading to what amounted to a cruise ship race to be second at the kill. The coastguard policed what it could, and was glad of Midgard Lodge’s ability to offer search and rescue – but both knew that would be a last resort.
There: he saw it. The tiny blue cursor which had crossed into Midgard’s unofficially restricted area. He clicked. Passenger cruise ship Vanir, he knew it. High staff-to-passenger ratio, regular circuit – except today. Probably after a bear. There was a huge male passing through, he’d seen it standing in silhouette on the fjord’s bone.
He would report the ship’s transgression later, but for now the protocol was to ensure front-of-house was neat and clean, everything quiet. Keeping an eye on the Vanir’s position, he hit a speed-dial on the iridium phone never far from his hand. A moment later, the phone flashed back at him. Message received, they would stay out until further notice. Then Long called down to reception and was pleased to hear everything was in hand. He returned to the screen, watching the little blue cursor slowly blinking around the headland, coming closer.
When the bear was young and the snow fell clean and white, his fur showed creamy, even pale yellow at times. Now the snow had a greyish tinge, causing him to shine even brighter against it. He had grown long yellow guard hairs on his massive forelegs, increasing his appearance of power, and when the sun shone through them it gave him a gold aura. He was following the scented track of a female in oestrus who had passed by, but paused to watch the ship heaving into the narrow mouth of the fjord, its engine thundering the water, its fuel stinking the air.
The deck was crowded with people, bare-skinned faces with shiny black insect eyes turned towards him. Their human body smells mingled with the smell of food from the ship, and metal, and fuel. The engine sound died down and the vibrations slowed then stopped. The voices faded.
The black walls of the fjord held the Arctic silence, until the bear lifted his white anvil of a head, black nostrils flaring for more information. His every move drew clicks and whirrs from the ship, becoming a frenzy as a curl of wind tickled him with a clue, and he lay down and rolled in the female’s trail.
On the bridge with the captain, the tour leader looked down at the entranced passengers, and relaxed. The bear was massive by any standards and on the most photogenic blue side of the Midgardbreen glacier, where the ice terminus formed a cliff above the water. On the other side of the black bone of rock, the glacier was younger white ice and debouched in a relatively gentle slope down to the cobbled beach. With a start, the tour operator noticed the silver-grey wood cabin, extending back into the mountain.
‘Is this the British guy’s place? I heard it’d been sold – what goes on here?’ Neither the Norwegian captain nor ice-pilot replied. They had crossed a line to find her passengers their bear. Svalbard had many enigmatic structures. No comment.
Crowded at the rail, excited as schoolchildren and all thoughts of class actions gone from their minds, the passengers of the Vanir were busy changing lenses and exclaiming in wonder. The bear was as huge and charismatic a celebrity as they could dream of, they guessed him at eleven or twelve feet, nearly a ton, maybe more. Through powerful telephoto lenses they saw his duelling scars, and the way he stood up on his hind legs, the edge of his pelt shining gold around him. He stared straight back with knowing black eyes, and they felt a euphoric jolt of fear. He could kill them.
Without warning the white god dropped to all fours and changed into a frightened animal, running for the edge of the glacier. In consternation the passengers watched him stagger and clamber into the shadows, where he vanished. They groaned in disappointment, they scanned around for what had scared their bear, but though their hi-mag lenses probed the darkness of the lower crags and pored across the bright rock striations, nothing moved. They stared at the layers of colour and tried to appreciate the earth’s history laid bare. But they felt angry and tiny.
Someone shouted out: there! that puff of snow higher up the glacier – surely too far and they had not seen him run – but they focused in hope. They gasped in wonder as a hundred hidden chimneys below the surface puffed out more sparkling ice-smoke. The air clenched and the sea sighed. The Vanir lifted as a great pressure wave passed through the water.
And then it started. First a distant boom, a detonation deep inside the glacier. Nothing, for a few long seconds, then a huge tearing, cracking sound that shook the air, before time stretched and the blue snout of the glacier, sliding belly down from the ice cap, moaned and pushed out over the water – and then with thunderous bangs like car-crashes it exploded all along its front, hurling shards of ice into the air and seismic bursts into the water so that the reinforced steel hull of the Vanir vibrated with the charge.
Wraiths of glittering ice-dust drifted over the sea. The passengers gripped each other as the Vanir lifted and fell again, and the shards of ice so small as they splashed, rolled out into the fjord as icebergs tall as the ship.
And then, as they watched, something happened that made no sense at all.
In front of the still-shuddering glacier, an invisible hand pinched a fold of sea like cloth then pulled it high into the air in a fistful of waterfalls. Out of the dazzling torrent emerged a great sapphire castle with turrets and minarets, throwing sparkling foam and mist as it cleared the water for one long stupendous second.
The passengers on the Vanir screamed and shouted as their eyes brimmed with wonders – some saw the streak of gold glowing deep within the frozen blue, some the detail of the minarets, some saw gargoyles’ faces in the ice – but their voices were lost in the roaring sound as the vision leaned and fell, making a great bowl of the sea in which it twisted and rolled over, completely inverting itself.
All they saw now was a dark blue ice floe the size of an ice-rink, its pinnacles and spires forever hidden. Like a sentient thing, it glided towards the Vanir, a peculiar ridge of water pushing the ship aside as if to clear its way. Unearthly and real, the great floe followed the other icebergs out towards the mouth of Midgardfjorden, and the open sea beyond.
The passengers of the Vanir had no more words, but one, a woman, was making a convulsive, almost sexual sound. Oh, she kept whispering, still filming everything, the calving ongoing within her. Her lens followed the newborn icebergs, the whirling eddies in the water, and back to the glacier face. She filmed the water slapping and rocking at its base, and the cave of deepening blue ice where the water surged and circled. Something swirled at its centre, making the current waver. Something that had not been there a moment ago.
Without taking her eye from the viewfinder, she reached out a hand for her husband. She pulled him towards her and gave him the camera, still recording. She pointed to the red shape rocking just below the surface.
‘My god,’ she said softly, ‘is that a body?’
There is one place on the coast of which they stood in some dread – the great glacier of Puisortok. Travelling in early summer in their umiaks, they necessarily hug the coast, and utilize the narrow leads that exist between the pack-ice and the glacier. The literal meaning of the name is “the thing that comes
