The Fjord of Evil Winds Read online

  Erichsen remembered.

  He wrote.

  And the blubber in the soapstone bowl burnt to a greasy film coating the surface. The lantern flickered – its wick spent, and the sun circled around the peaks, casting a new light of a new day onto Kangamiut, catching the loft roof and warming the tiles, raising the temperature ever so slightly, as Erichsen scratched his last word on the heaths of Jutland. He let the ink dry and then lifted the page to settle it on the stack. The chair creaked as he leaned back in it, closing his eyes for a second, before a soft rap at the loft door turned his head.

  “You’re done?” Rasmussen asked. He walked to the desk, nodding at the stack of Jutland papers as he placed a mug of tea and a wooden bowl of warm oats beside them.

  “All done,” Erichsen said.

  “Just in time.” Rasmussen walked to the window. He wiped at a film of soot and grease with the cuff of his smock. “You can just see him, beyond that iceberg – the one with two spires.”

  “He’s here already?” Erichsen picked up the bowl of oats and joined Rasmussen at the window. He ate, Rasmussen pointed, and the white spot in the deep blue sea, beyond the bergs and the glitter of sunlight, knifed through the water just as Rasmussen had described. “He’s fast,” Erichsen said. He scraped at the bowl, licking the last of the oats from the spoon as Rasmussen nodded.

  “He’ll be here around lunchtime.”

  “Noon?”

  “Distances are deceptive,” Rasmussen said. “He’s still a long way away.”

  Erichsen turned from the window and pointed at the stack of papers. “Then we have time to prepare these for the journey. Any ideas?”

  Rasmussen followed Erichsen to the desk. He pressed his palm on the top page, pushing the air out of the stack, reducing it by half a fist in height.

  “Seal skins,” he said. “Lots of them.”

  “We’ll bind them,” Erichsen said.

  “Tightly.”

  “Several layers.” Erichsen turned for the door, only to stop as Moltke and Bertelsen climbed the stairs and entered the loft. Moltke draped thick tanned skins over the back of the chair, while Bertelsen set a spool of leather cord on the desk.

  “We heard,” Bertelsen said.

  “Bless you, both.”

  “And we’ll send your manuscript with our blessings,” Moltke said. “But I place greater faith in skins, and lots of them. If this was one of my paintings…”

  “It would never fit in a qajaq,” Bertelsen said.

  “A sketch might.”

  “But would you trust it? Would you take that chance?”

  “Gentlemen,” Rasmussen said. He flicked his gaze towards Erichsen, and the men settled, swapping words for work. Erichsen pressed the pages together, Moltke wrapped the first skin around them, and Bertelsen cinched the first cord around the first layer.

  “Tightly now,” Moltke said.

  “Tighter than that,” Rasmussen said.

  “That’s my finger,” said one.

  “And my thumb,” said another.

  “Another skin.”

  “Another layer.”

  “More cord.”

  “Less thumbs.”

  Three skins and enough cord for two dog whips, something they would need as soon as the ice was thick enough to travel north. The men ringed the desk and stared at the thick square of leather.

  “Done,” Moltke said.

  “Yes.” Erichsen plucked at the cord stretched in a cross around the bundle. He nodded as it flicked against the skin with a snap when he let go of it.

  “An address?” Rasmussen asked.

  “The captain will know,” Erichsen said. “I mentioned it before we left for Kangamiut.” He turned to Rasmussen. “But perhaps you could talk with the Greenlander? Give him instructions?”

  “I will.”

  “It is the only copy.”

  “I understand.”

  “There is no other.”

  “Ludvig,” Rasmussen said, and laughed. “I promise. I will give clear instructions.”

  Moltke drummed his fingers on the table, and then pointed at the door. “I think it is time to let Ludvig out of his cage. Come,” he said, “let’s celebrate with fresh bread baked on an open fire.”

  “We have flour?” Erichsen asked.

  “I saved a small sack. But no yeast. We can make flatbread.”

  Erichsen tucked the manuscript under his arm and followed the painter and the doctor out of the loft. Rasmussen took a last look out of the window, smiling as he spotted the qajaq, and then followed the expedition leader down the spindly stairs and onto the front lawn as they had dubbed the spiky grass in front of the house. Erichsen placed the manuscript on the ground beside him as Moltke and Bertelsen fiddled with the fire. A group of Greenlanders drifted towards them. They spoke with Rasmussen, pointed out to sea, and then glanced at the sealskin package bound at Erichsen’s feet.

  “What do they say?” Erichsen asked.

  “That it looks heavy. It won’t fit inside the qajaq. He will have to strap it to the deck.”

  “Then it will get wet.”

  “He has a sack.”

  “A sack?”

  “Made of skin. Watertight.”

  “I hope so.”

  Erichsen walked away from the fire, picking his way between the rocks to the narrow beach ringing the coast around the settlement. He looked for the qajaq, spotted him, judged him to be at least an hour away, and then inspected the qajaqs on a driftwood rack fifty feet from the beach. Nothing of value was left on the beach or within a stone’s throw of the water. Erichsen knew that the wave from a rolling or calving iceberg could swamp the beach area, and several feet further up the shore. A large berg might swamp the settlement. He pushed the thought from his mind and studied the qajaqs.

  Two of the three qajaqs were covered with a tight skin, stitched together with thick sinews in a line that ran along the centre of the deck. Like scar tissue, the stitches were raised and dark, bruised perhaps, sealed against the sea and rain with fat and oil. The skin was like a drum. Erichsen flicked it with a cracked nail. He smiled at the resounding percussive tremor echoing inside the qajaq. The qajaq in the centre of the rack was skinless, a skeleton of driftwood, grey and flaked, it was old, the sinew used to tie the parts together was dry, it splintered at his touch. But, even in death this qajaq husk revealed the skill of the Greenlanders. The carved pieces fit together just like the cogs of a timepiece, with nary a gap or a wedge of space between them. Unlike a ship, the qajaq would flex, absorbing the power of the wave, rather than crashing into it. The frames of such craft, Erichsen mused, were fragile and light, the skins thin. He could see light passing through the hulls of the qajaqs to either side when he ducked beneath the rack for a closer look at the frame. Rasmussen said the light weight and the taut skin made them fast. The power to absorb waves gave them an uncanny strength in the water, but surely the wind could blow them off course, and the ice – those jagged edges and flint-like blades that littered the water after a calving – surely the ice would split the hull of such a craft like a knife through soft fruit?

  A shout tugged Erichsen away from the qajaq rack, and he hurried to join the throng of Greenlanders waiting on the beach, pointing, calling, and soft-shrieking the approach of the paddler, the so-called kajakpost – mail delivered by qajaq. The paddler drifted the last few feet from the shore, bumping the hull of the qajaq against the thighs of the men who waded into the water to greet him. The paddler slipped the blade of his paddle under a length of seal cord tied to the deck and untied the skin skirt cinched around the circular cockpit. He looped an arm around the nearest man. He let the man drag him out of the qajaq as another man grabbed a small leather sack of letters, and another sack belonging to the paddler. A third man lifted the qajaq out of the water and carried it to the grass above the beach.

  “They won’t beach them on the sand,” Rasmussen whispered into Erichsen’s ear. “They won’t risk a rock slicing through the hull.
”

  Erichsen nodded once, and then turned his attention to the paddler wobbling on his legs as the man helped him onto the beach.

  “He’s weak,” Erichsen said.

  “He has come far.”

  “He can hardly stand.”

  “He’s probably been in the cockpit for a whole day. He surely paddled some of the night too.”

  “He must be exhausted.”

  “Yes.”

  The paddler collapsed onto the grass and nodded at the man carrying the sack of mail. He watched as the man took out each letter and parcel, placing them on the grass beside the sack. There was a stack of envelopes bound with string for the Royal Greenland Trading Co. and an assortment of small packages, one of which was seized by the woman closest to the sack. She whooped, eyes dancing, as she pressed the package to her nose, and sniffed at the contents hidden within layers of greased paper. Erichsen never saw what was inside, but he would always remember her face, captured as it was in a quick sketch made by Moltke.

  Erichsen turned to look at the paddler. “Introduce me,” he said to Rasmussen.

  The two men crouched beside the paddler and Erichsen took his hand, wrinkled, white and crusted with salt around the knuckles and in the soft curve between finger and thumb. The salt traced the lines in the man’s skin like powder in the veins.

  “My name is Ludvig.”

  “Taatsiaq,” said the paddler.

  Erichsen tested the man’s name on his tongue, as Taatsiaq’s fingers slipped through his hand. The paddler shrank onto the grass, eyes closed, chest rising and falling to the rhythm of the sea lapping the beach.

  Part 3

  ________________________________

  But for the rise and fall of his chest, the little man at Erichsen’s feet could have been dead. He was clearly dead tired, exhausted no doubt from his speedy crossing through the fjords and along the coast buffeted by the waves of the Labrador Sea. Despite the winds and the waves, Taatsiaq had made good time, but Erichsen was perturbed, nonetheless.

  “He is spent. He has wasted himself on the outward journey, when surely the return is more important,” Erichsen said. He turned into a sudden gust of wind, thrusting his hands into the deep pockets of his wool trousers, as he scowled at the whitecaps blistering across the surface of the sea. There was smoke on the water, a flux in the temperature. “Damn this weather,” he said, and looked again at the exhausted paddler at his feet.

  Taatsiaq wore a skin suit, cinched tight around his face, revealing a small oval of nutty skin. Sea salt crusted Taatsiaq’s eyebrows, filling the young man’s crows’ feet splayed in slow lines from his eyes. His wispy beard, oriental in style and thickness, was wet and a closer inspection revealed pearls of seawater between the hairs. Together with the man’s salt-shrivelled hands, the wet skin suit that stretched to a wide bell-bottom with a cord to tie around the cockpit made him look like an over-sized prune; a seal pup at the very least.

  “He’s not fit to paddle.”

  “He just needs to rest,” Rasmussen said. He took a step towards the house.

  “We can’t leave him here.”

  Rasmussen pointed at a group of three young women hovering nearby. The wind flicked at their hair, turning their cheeks with a rose glow. Erichsen noted that their eyes were the blackest of browns he had ever seen, something Moltke was keen to highlight in his portraits. Fresh from a failed affair, Erichsen had recently sworn off women other than his wife, whom he had entreated to take him back, just prior to sailing for Greenland. The heat of humiliation steeled his heart to the beauty of the young Greenlanders, and he could not fathom the looks the smallest of the three cast at the paddler sleeping at his feet. It was Rasmussen that took him gently by the arm.

  “They’ll take care of him,” he said. “Come, Ludvig. Let’s find something to eat.”

  Erichsen collected his manuscript from where he had left it close to the fire and carried it into the house. It was heavier than before, tugging at his conscience as he imagined the last ship for Denmark sailing out of the harbour in Sukkertoppen. A further thought brought the director at Gyldendal, Jacob Hegel, sharply into focus, thumping his desk with his fist, and cursing the name of Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen all the way back to the fjords, where he could fish for eel the rest of his life for all he cared, for never would he see another word printed with this publisher. Even Erichsen knew that the melodrama playing out in his mind was just that – a drama, nothing more, and not half as sinister as promised. But the manuscript was still in his possession, and now on the table as Moltke lit a lantern, and Bertelsen reported that he was forced to throw out most of the flour.

  “Throw it out?” Rasmussen said. “But why?”

  “There were mites in it. Tiny light grey things.”

  “But we don’t have anything else. Not before we resupply in town.”

  “Exactly,” Bertelsen said. “The last ship to leave Greenland, is also the last ship to arrive. The store will be brimming with flour,” he said. “And besides, we have been invited to dinner this evening. We’re to dine with the Greenlanders. They have prepared a feast, no doubt to revitalise that young fellow from the sea.”

  “Taatsiaq,” Erichsen said.

  “Is that his name?”

  “Yes.”

  “I should like to make a sketch of him,” Moltke said.

  “Then be quick, before the girls drag him into their hut,” Rasmussen said, and winked at Moltke.

  “But he’s exhausted.”

  “And a stranger. New blood for the community.”

  “Savages,” Erichsen said.

  The men hushed, waiting for the leader to say more. It was Rasmussen that broke the silence.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “You’re disappointed.” Rasmussen pointed at the manuscript on the table. “You’re excited to be finished, and impatient to send it off. You don’t mean what you said.”

  Erichsen pulled out a chair. It creaked as he slumped onto it. “You’re right. I am disappointed. It’s just the thought of him…”

  “Bringing new blood into the community?” Rasmussen laughed. “Wait until morning. He couldn’t paddle tonight anyway.”

  “But that wind…”

  “Will blow all night. And if it blows in the morning too,” Rasmussen said, “then so be it. There’s nothing to be done about that.” He pressed his hand on the skin covering the manuscript. “A strong wind blowing onshore will keep the ship in harbour too.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Dear Ludvig, you are disappointed. You are clearly not yourself,” Moltke said. “Did you not just finish a book about the wild west coast of Denmark?”

  “I did.”

  “And did you not recall a tale or two from the sea, and those unlucky enough to be caught out in rough weather?” Moltke leaned over the table, closer to Erichsen. “In high winds, no less?”

  Erichsen nodded. “I may have mentioned such.”

  “Mentioned? Why, Ludvig, such stories are the lifeblood of your west coast works.”

  “That’s it then,” Bertelsen said. “It’s decided.”

  “What is?”

  “We’re accepting the invitation. Moltke can bring his paints, I’ll carry the easel, and Rasmussen can find you a young woman to lean up against.”

  “I’m married, Alfred.”

  “And I am engaged, no less. But we are not dead, man, nor do we have to be cads. Some lively conversation made even more lively with Rasmussen’s translation. Warm food, a hot fire, stories long and tall told over the coals and embers.” Bertelsen walked around the table and gripped Erichsen by the sleeves. “Arise,” he said, as he pulled Erichsen off the chair and onto his feet. “Think nothing more of Jutland heaths or Greenlandic fjords. Come and join the party instead.”

  The food was spread on thick sheets on the floor, piles of dried capelin were heaped between wooden boards sopping with grease from flanks of whale skin trimmed in
to strips with a sharp knife. Erichsen watched as Taatsiaq gripped a strip of whale skin – mattak – between his teeth and sawed at the strip in front of his face. The creamy blubber dribbled onto his chin, shining in the firelight until he wiped it with the back of his hand, chewing, swallowing until he was ready to clench another bite between his teeth. Seal meat sizzled on a flat stone as one of the women, an older woman with wrinkled cheeks and dark blue lips stained with berry juice, poked at the fire beneath the slab, thrusting a handful of dried twigs onto the fire. She wiped a smudge of ash from her hands on the grass.

  The meat and the blubber warmed the stomach, bringing fire to the faces, sparks to the eyes, winks and cackles to the stories, told in turn by the men, translated by Rasmussen. A hush followed each story as the people of Kangamiut glanced at Taatsiaq, waiting for the right moment, when the meat gave him the energy to speak, but before it made him drowsy. It was Taatsiaq who decided he was ready. He tied a length of seal cord around his head, flattening his hair and parting it from his face and cheeks. He flashed a toothy grin around the circle of Greenlanders and began to speak.

  The expedition members leaned close to Rasmussen as Taatsiaq began with the news from the nearby settlements he had visited on his way to Kangamiut. The elder Greenlanders nodded at reports of whale sightings, the number of seals that had been caught, the mudslide that had tainted the streams, the icebergs that blocked the entrance to one of the smaller fjords.

  “If it doesn’t float out of the fjord on the higher tides, it will be there all winter,” Rasmussen explained.

  There was other news too, family gossip, a funny tale about the hunter that was chased by a hare, followed by the more serious rumour of a man who had gone qivittoq, running away from his village out of shame. He was accused of stealing, more than once. It would not happen again. Heads nodded, looks were exchanged, and Taatsiaq sat down. The girl with the twice-rosy cheeks slipped her hand over his and gripped his fingers.

  The smallest children curled into their mother’s laps, and the babies fed on full breasts before sleeping. The men ate. One of the women made tea, chuckling under her breath as her daughter led Taatsiaq away from the fire.