Finding Fortune 3/?
It was supposed to be a simple excavation. One chaotic storm later, it has become anything but.
“There has to be someone nearby. We’ll just follow the coast until we see a boat.”
When Juri had said this, it had seemed reasonable to Jan, especially as it was what they had been doing for the last hour, just following the coast and hoping to run into rescue. It had been a completely fruitless endeavor, but, with the only other option being staying where they were and risking low body temperatures of the deadly kind (huddling together could only do so much when you were soaked to the skin in arctic conditions), Jan had rolled with it. No one else was complaining, which was a plus in the “this is a good idea” department.
“What boats?” Frank asked, coming out of whatever La la-land he’d been holed up in. Jan hadn’t been able to get a coherent sentence out of him since they’d started out. He’d written it off as shock over nearly getting killed multiple times and left Frank alone.
“Fishing boats,” Linke answered, giving Frank the hairy eye, like it was his fault for not paying attention, which it kind of was. That was kind of mean, though, since Frank was rarely good at paying attention. It wasn’t that he was slow, exactly, just not all there sometimes or most of the times. Some days it wasn’t even any of the times. “You know, locals?”
“What locals?”
Now Juri, who was usually very tolerant of Frank’s spaciness, was looking at him funny.
“We’re looking out for any fishermen,” he said slowly, “or anyone else on the water.”
“Like a nice, Icelandic fisherman,” Jan added, since Frank still seemed bewildered.
“Why? We’re nowhere near Iceland.”
ØØØ
“What?!” three separate voices chorused.
“What do you mean, ‘we’re nowhere near Iceland’?!” Linke asked, voice more than a bit shrill. “How do you even know that?”
“We’re not. We’re several hundred kilometers north.”
Jan felt panic rising within him. The storm had blown them hundreds of kilometers off course? How was that even possible?
“And you know this how?”
“GPS receiver. I brought one.” Frank smiled cheerfully, his face falling when he saw no one else was going along with it. “What’s wrong?”
Juri pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned softly. Linke continued to stare at Frank.
“Can I see it?” Jan asked, holding out his hand. Might as well check if Frank was right.
Frank beamed at him and slipped his right arm out of the strap of his backpack. Unzipping it, he produced a genuine, handheld GPS receiver and a map. He handed the former to Jan and opened the map.
“Here,” he said, making a rough circle around what was clearly Iceland, “is Iceland. Austurland, at least where I think we were going, is about sixty-five degrees north, fourteen degrees west. Right now, we’re around seventy degrees north, eight degrees west. Jan, if you’ll check our coordinates?”
Feeling more than a bit queasy, Jan did so.
“Frank’s right,” he croaked.
Frank’s smiled broadened.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to the land of the midnight sun.”
ØØØ
They spent most of the next half hour huddled around Frank’s map, debating what to do. Linke was still phenomenally pissed at Frank for not telling them until they’d spent far too much time on a pointless trek. He was working on keeping his anger down, if only because Frank was the only one of them responsible enough to have brought a receiver with him. That counted for something.
“There’s an island here,” Juri said, pointing to what seemed little more than a dot to the east of Greenland. “Jan Mayen. It’s possible there are people on it.”
“Yeah, but how do we get there?” Jan asked. “The seiner’s gone.”
“It might not be.” Their best hope was finding the seiner and making their way back south. They’d have to find the other two as well, but they could hold that off until it was absolutely necessary. “They’re probably circling this place looking for us.”
“What exactly is this place? It’s definitely not on the map.” Jan looked at him, but Linke had no answer to that. Their coordinates were too far east to be Jan Mayen and too far west to be Greenland. They were, in point of fact, nowhere. “Do you think this could be an undiscovered island?” he sounded excited.
“Yes,” Linked deadpanned. “An undiscovered, frozen hunk of rock in the Arctic. Just what everyone’s dying to hear about.”
Jan made a rude noise in Linke’s direction. Linke stuck his tongue out at him.
“I don’t think the boat’s looking for us,” Frank said. Linke looked at him. “Really, I don’t. We got off because it was going to crash, right? Who’s to say it didn’t?”
Juri nodded.
“Frank is right.”
“So you don’t want to look for them.”
“It’s not that. I’m not sure there’s anything to look for. We don’t know how big this island is, and we can’t keep walking forever. We can’t go east-” the entirety of their travels had been in a general westerly direction, as best as the shoreline would allow “-and that’s where they probably are, if they survived.”
“You’re not making sense, Frank.”
“We need to go up; see where we are and how big this island is. Maybe this island is a lot longer than it is wide. We might be making more work for ourselves.”
Linke glanced up at the imposing granite cliff. It wasn’t nearly as sheer as it had been where they landed. He could make out possible paths through the rock, handholds and footholds, even places that could function as rough stairs. He didn’t like it.
Despite this, they went that way. Linke’s opinion, it seemed, didn’t count for much when it came to practical matters.
ØØØ
“Hold up,” Linke said hours later when his calves and quadriceps were throbbing in a disturbingly persistent rhythm. It had been hell to scale the cliff, but the vast steppe that lay beyond was taxing for the sole reason that it seemed to go on for kilometers in every direction, just one great expanse of chest-high grasses. It was ringed by a line of mountains to the east, the west seeming to go on forever, just grass followed by grass followed by grass. The steppe dropped off into a river of ice, which might be a glacier. Linke was no geologist. “You’ll offer to carry Jan but not my pack?”
Juri shrugged, making Jan wobble a little as he clambered onto the much taller man’s back.
“I like Jan,” he said, neatly ignoring the fact that what was chest-high grass on Juri and Linke was eyebrow-height or more on Jan. Linke knew this not because he’d been exactly paying attention to Jan’s grass issues but because Jan had made everyone patently aware of them.“I don’t care all that much for your pack.”
Juri was so matter of fact about it that Linke couldn’t really argue with him. At the moment, Linke didn’t care all that much for his pack, either.
“Besides,” Juri said, hefting Jan up, “he’ll keep me warm.”
Jan stuck his tongue out at Linke as Juri trotted on ahead, paradoxically more energetic with an extra fifty kilos on his back. Frank smiled noncommittally when Linke looked to him for support.
Goddamn everyone was against him today.
Juri only carried Jan for all of fifteen minutes, but Jan made such a show of it that he sunk Linke right into a funk so deep it was a miracle the entire sky wasn’t black. His pack was heavy, ice was crusting around the edges of the straps digging into his shoulders, and it just so much effort to keep himself going when no one else had the same burden that it would have irritated him anyway. But he’d rather blame it on Jan.
Linke had long since begun to think they’d made a critical error in going the opposite way of the only known people on this landmass. It was reasonable, then, to assume that they would never reach any place where they could hope to spot the main crew (and in the shifting winds and turbulent waters, there was no reason to think the boat had gone in any particular direction).
It was also reasonable to assume that the rest of their crew, or anyone else for that matter, hadn’t built a fire up in the mountain range they were currently trekking across.
Nevertheless, the small trickle of smoke across the sky proved that someone had.
ØØØ
The oddly silent, fur-clad people led them forward, not quite prodding them with their wooden spears (cliché much?) but certainly making their intent for Linke and his fellows to keep moving.
Linke was resolved to never again walk up to someone else’s fire pit when he was stranded on an Arctic island. He’d thought there were some basic signs signifying non-hostility that would work for any culture. Apparently not.
Now they were being led down a gentle slope to the single tree for kilometers with no idea what was going to be done with them. The Neanderthals for lack of a better word frown-glared (Linke genuinely could not tell whether they were angry or just beyond puzzled by the appearance of what probably looked to them like strangely-clad, pale outsiders) at them, nudging with their spears anyone who tried to step out of line.
The opening to the cave was a tight squeeze through a rock-lined sinkhole that opened almost immediately into a room with a high ceiling and a long shaft filled with large and small broken boulders and slabs of rock. The air, several degrees cooler than outside, was hazy with smoke from burning, acrid torches.
“Tiki torches,” Frank supplied helpfully, his bright smile bringing a pang to Linke’s chest. “They look like tiki torches.”
“They do,” Linke agreed.
The headman waved them onwards, down into the shaft and the fallen rock. The light was low, flickering, and making it incredibly difficult to know where to put your feet. Linke felt uneasy. One misstep and you would tumble for a long, long way.
“It’s just breakdown,” Frank told him, grabbing Linke by the wrist and leading the way. “Step where I step and you should be fine.” Linke wasn’t sure about that- Frank’s feet were smaller than his- but he wasn’t about to pull his arm back from a touch freely given. He didn’t get a lot of that nowadays.
They made their way slowly. The headman and his clan members moved easily, with sure steps. Jan moved quickly, too, able to put his feet in smaller places and grasp handholds with the tips of his fingers. Linke kept going and contented himself in that, Juri’s pace far enough behind him that he didn’t have to think about the man tripping and taking them all down with him.
“We’re here.” Frank’s voice was quiet as he let go of Linke’s wrist. Linke swallowed, pushing away the bereft feeling.
“Here” was a small room ringed in torches. The floor was covered in numerous woven grass mats and animal furs that the clan members immediately sat down upon. Conversation started up, the sounds foreign and strange.
Linke sighed internally. Of course, it fell to him to find out whether these people were hostile.
ØØØ
Linke appeared to be talking to the headman, whose name involved an impossible amount of vowel sounds and syllables, in a combination of halting Icelandic and hand gestures. It did not seem to be going well. Jan sighed and plopped down where he was. He could feel a little bit of the bonfire. It wouldn’t dry out his clothes any time soon, but he also wasn’t going to die of hypothermia and he was tired and hungry and freaking wet, and he did not care enough to move another ten steps.
Juri sat down next to him, their sides almost touching, spreading a little of his body heat.
He was silent. Jan was silent back. It wasn’t uncomfortable in the least.
Juri nudged Jan and pointed to Frank. He was smiling broadly at a beautiful young woman, who was smiling shyly back. As Jan watched, she offered him a bowl of steaming something.
“Naturally,” Jan snorted. “Five bucks he gets in her pants when no one’s looking.”
“Next winter there’ll be a blue-eyed terror running about the place.”
Jan grinned.
“You should go stop him before the headdude decides we need an emergency wedding.”
An elderly woman gestured at Jan from her place by the fire, pointing to him, then to the place beside her. Jan widened his eyes and looked around, but there was no doubt she meant him. The fire looked so warm. He’d never had much self-control.
Jan went.
The woman placed some sort of cracked grain cake in his lap and nodded as though expecting him to take it. He looked at her wizened face and hoped she wasn’t trying to poison him.
He chewed.
“It’s good,” he said after swallowing. “You don’t understand me, but it’s good.”
“I…know what you…say,” the woman said haltingly in a very thick, almost Pomeranian accent. Jan dropped the cake in shock.
“You speak German!”
“Yes.”
“But if you speak German, why didn’t you say anything before? We’ve got a guy over there using what he remembers from a guidebook he read a week ago to talk to your headman!”
The woman raised her hands.
“Slow,” she said. There was something strange about her accent, outdated. “I am not practiced for…long time. I am not…comfortable talking…to persons I do not…know. Like you.” She paused, leaning down to pick up the cake Jan had dropped. “Eat, please.”
“How do you know how to speak German?” Jan pressed excitedly.
“Slow,” she reminded him. Jan was quickly becoming acclimated to her strange accent and it was becoming easier to understand her. “My…grandmother?” Jan nodded. “She was like you…in accident- ship accident-”
“Shipwreck,” Jan supplied.
“Shipwreck,” she repeated. “When she was young woman, there was shipwreck and she was here. Grandmother came from a country. They call it Prussia. Does Prussia still exist?”
Jan shook his head.
“It joined with Germany and then there were a few wars, and it’s gone now. There are still Prussians, though.” He tried to make the last seem hopeful. It didn’t work.
“I had hoped…to visit Prussia one day,” the woman said. “Pity. Eat.”
“So, um, what’s your name?” Jan asked between a bite of the cracked grain cake, since that seemed polite and possibly necessary in the near future. It might also be helpful in identifying the language group these people spoke- oh, who was Jan kidding: languages were not his forte or even his friends. Linke would probably be able to narrow things down, but Jan certainly couldn’t.
The sound she uttered didn’t even register in Jan’s mind as a possible word.
“I’m sorry, what?”
She repeated it. Jan shook his head sadly, feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“Iv-gal-re-a,” she said, this time slowly and almost pedantically. Jan cringed inside, already feeling like a bit of a failure for not catching her name the first two times.
“I’m Jan,” he offered, hoping it would make up for, um, being a terrible anthropologist, apparently. He didn’t know what he was feeling right then. It would be really nice if Franky or Linke, or even Juri would come and talk to this Ivgalrea lady so he could stop embarrassing the hell out of himself. Yep, that would be awesome, which, of course, meant it didn’t happen.
“Jan,” Ivgalrea repeated perfectly. Jan felt a little bad for mangling her name, but he’d yet to come across someone who couldn’t say his or a close enough approximation, so maybe it was just one of those things that, uh, happened. Short names made for easy saying.
ØØØ
“We’re leaving,” Jo said a few minutes before noon. Mäx didn’t have a functioning watch, so he couldn’t prove that it was before and not after noon, but the sun was almost directly overhead. Basic logic dictated that it was slightly before noon. “I can’t stand to be around them anymore.”
They’d buried the captain that morning, if only to avoid the stench of a rotting body and the attraction it would have for any predators. Halla had lined the grave in small stones, her face set hard.
The Kaulitzes had largely ignored Jo’s and Fabi’s questions, not even telling them whether the radio was working or if there was any way to call for help. Mostly, they had talked between themselves. Mäx was under the impression that everyone else was equally lacking in information.
They needed to cancel the excavation, send out an SOS, and send out a search party for the six missing team members. It was possible the Kaulitzes and Halla had done the former two. Certainly no one was even discussing forming a search party. It put a bad taste in Mäx’s mouth, only exacerbated by the fact that he actually knew everyone who had gone overboard.
“He’s just jealous,” Fabi told Mäx in an aside.
“Duh,” the stockier man replied. Jo, of course, wasn’t leaving solely because he was jealous of the Kaulitzes’ good looks, fame, or fortune, though there was a certain measure of that, but it made Fabi snicker and lightened the mood a bit. With one death and possibly six more, they needed that.
They trudged out across the gravel beach with little direction (west along the shoreline) and a hazy destination (that place back there where the others had maybe landed). This turned out to be a terrible idea.
Color Mäx surprised.
ØØØ
It was so cold, Jo was sure, if he spit, his saliva would freeze before it hit the ground. The snow was still falling all around them, the wind blowing viciously enough to scourge their cheeks but the snow not thick enough to be called a blizzard. And it was getting dark.
They never should have scaled the cliff. That had been where things started to go wrong. For a while, there had been hills and high grass. That had melted into flat, snow-covered land. No matter how far they walked, they couldn’t get away from the snow. Jo had thought they could find shelter up here, an idea he had suspected Timo, Linke, and the others had had, too. That idea turned out to be completely, utterly wrong.
There was nothing around them now but more snow, no mountains where they could hope to find a cave or a rock overhang, no cliffs back to the sea where they might have some protection from the wind. Even Fabi’s spirits were depressingly low and his strides were getting slower and shorter.
They needed to find shelter and soon.
“There’s nothing here,” Mäx murmured. “We won’t make it back to the ocean before the sun goes down.”
Jo grimaced but kept moving. There had to be something somewhere, some rock or hole. Those shaggy horses they had seen earlier had to go somewhere.
“Then we keep going straight. Go further west if we have to.”
“We can’t outwalk the sun.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jo snapped, softly so Fabi wouldn’t hear.
“Jo.” Mäx’s voice was low, gravely. “You’re tired. Fabi’s about to collapse. We need to rest.”
“Where?” Jo asked testily.
“Here.”
“We can’t-”
“You and Fabi sit. Now.”
Jo glared but crouched down, motioning to Fabi to do the same. His brother all but flopped to the ground, spreading his arms out like he was about to make a snow angel.
Mäx took out his Opinel and began tapping his foot along the ground, looking for something Jo didn’t know. Jo pulled his knees to his chest to conserve energy and watched him. Mäx didn’t find what he was looking for, apparently, and moved farther and farther away, moving in circles.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Fabi’s voice floated over from where he was sitting.
“We’ve just hit a rough patch, that’s all. Come over here,” Jo said, “you’re going to freeze like that.” Fabi scooted over and Jo wrapped an arm around him, feeling his own heat leech away.
The cold sapped energy so much the snow soon became the most comfortable thing in the world. Fabi was slumped against Jo’s shoulder, Mäx scraping away at the ground with his pocketknife, looking like nothing so much as a man out of his mind. And Jo wasn’t going to stop him. At least two of them were warm. At least two of them had a chance for a little while longer.
He had to stay awake. He had to, but it was getting harder and harder. Jo shivered; shoved his hands a little farther into his underarms. He shoved Fabi to make sure he was awake, far too relieved when Fabi let out an irritated noise. Irritation meant Fabi still had it together. Irritation meant Fabi hadn’t given up, even though it was so, so cold and the wind was searing through their wet, freezing clothes.
A blazing hot hand shook his shoulder roughly, forcing Jo to open his eyes blearily. He turned
to the side instinctively, searching for Fabi. His little brother was still there, still breathing. It was Mäx who had shaken him.
“Wake up,” Mäx told him, shaking him again. “Follow me.”
ØØØ
There was a hole in the ground. That’s what Mäx had been doing: digging a hole.
“Get in,” Mäx said, pushing him forward. “Fabi’ll help me put the blanket on top.”
“Blanket?” Jo asked. Mäx wanted him to go into a hole. In the ground. He peered inside and all he saw was snow. “It’s snow.”
“Yeah. It’s shallow. I hit frozen ground pretty quickly, but there’s enough room for the three of us. I’ve packed the snow enough that it’ll reflect our body heat back on us. It’ll work.” Mäx didn’t sound too sure.
Jo stepped inside. He had to crouch once he was inside, the ceiling just high enough that he could sit up. Fabi would probably hit his head.
Mäx tossed a packet inside.
“It’s the other emergency blanket,” he said.
Jo nodded tiredly and began unfolding the Mylar sheet, spreading it out on the ground. He had to turn the sides in. There just wasn’t enough room. How had Mäx done all this? Shit, how long had he been out?
The hole suddenly became dark, and Jo looked up. Mäx and Fabi had laid down the other emergency blanket then. Mäx held a corner up and Fabi slipped inside with plenty of room for Mäx, who followed soon after, pulling the corner under so they would have air. There was more room than Jo had thought, then.
Mäx smirked, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.
“You did it,” Jo said just to talk since he didn’t know what he meant by “it”.
“I did,” Mäx agreed, blowing on his hands again. “Now, come on, let’s get some rest. It’ll be a long walk back in the morning.”
Previous
Next
“There has to be someone nearby. We’ll just follow the coast until we see a boat.”
When Juri had said this, it had seemed reasonable to Jan, especially as it was what they had been doing for the last hour, just following the coast and hoping to run into rescue. It had been a completely fruitless endeavor, but, with the only other option being staying where they were and risking low body temperatures of the deadly kind (huddling together could only do so much when you were soaked to the skin in arctic conditions), Jan had rolled with it. No one else was complaining, which was a plus in the “this is a good idea” department.
“What boats?” Frank asked, coming out of whatever La la-land he’d been holed up in. Jan hadn’t been able to get a coherent sentence out of him since they’d started out. He’d written it off as shock over nearly getting killed multiple times and left Frank alone.
“Fishing boats,” Linke answered, giving Frank the hairy eye, like it was his fault for not paying attention, which it kind of was. That was kind of mean, though, since Frank was rarely good at paying attention. It wasn’t that he was slow, exactly, just not all there sometimes or most of the times. Some days it wasn’t even any of the times. “You know, locals?”
“What locals?”
Now Juri, who was usually very tolerant of Frank’s spaciness, was looking at him funny.
“We’re looking out for any fishermen,” he said slowly, “or anyone else on the water.”
“Like a nice, Icelandic fisherman,” Jan added, since Frank still seemed bewildered.
“Why? We’re nowhere near Iceland.”
ØØØ
“What?!” three separate voices chorused.
“What do you mean, ‘we’re nowhere near Iceland’?!” Linke asked, voice more than a bit shrill. “How do you even know that?”
“We’re not. We’re several hundred kilometers north.”
Jan felt panic rising within him. The storm had blown them hundreds of kilometers off course? How was that even possible?
“And you know this how?”
“GPS receiver. I brought one.” Frank smiled cheerfully, his face falling when he saw no one else was going along with it. “What’s wrong?”
Juri pinched the bridge of his nose and groaned softly. Linke continued to stare at Frank.
“Can I see it?” Jan asked, holding out his hand. Might as well check if Frank was right.
Frank beamed at him and slipped his right arm out of the strap of his backpack. Unzipping it, he produced a genuine, handheld GPS receiver and a map. He handed the former to Jan and opened the map.
“Here,” he said, making a rough circle around what was clearly Iceland, “is Iceland. Austurland, at least where I think we were going, is about sixty-five degrees north, fourteen degrees west. Right now, we’re around seventy degrees north, eight degrees west. Jan, if you’ll check our coordinates?”
Feeling more than a bit queasy, Jan did so.
“Frank’s right,” he croaked.
Frank’s smiled broadened.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to the land of the midnight sun.”
ØØØ
They spent most of the next half hour huddled around Frank’s map, debating what to do. Linke was still phenomenally pissed at Frank for not telling them until they’d spent far too much time on a pointless trek. He was working on keeping his anger down, if only because Frank was the only one of them responsible enough to have brought a receiver with him. That counted for something.
“There’s an island here,” Juri said, pointing to what seemed little more than a dot to the east of Greenland. “Jan Mayen. It’s possible there are people on it.”
“Yeah, but how do we get there?” Jan asked. “The seiner’s gone.”
“It might not be.” Their best hope was finding the seiner and making their way back south. They’d have to find the other two as well, but they could hold that off until it was absolutely necessary. “They’re probably circling this place looking for us.”
“What exactly is this place? It’s definitely not on the map.” Jan looked at him, but Linke had no answer to that. Their coordinates were too far east to be Jan Mayen and too far west to be Greenland. They were, in point of fact, nowhere. “Do you think this could be an undiscovered island?” he sounded excited.
“Yes,” Linked deadpanned. “An undiscovered, frozen hunk of rock in the Arctic. Just what everyone’s dying to hear about.”
Jan made a rude noise in Linke’s direction. Linke stuck his tongue out at him.
“I don’t think the boat’s looking for us,” Frank said. Linke looked at him. “Really, I don’t. We got off because it was going to crash, right? Who’s to say it didn’t?”
Juri nodded.
“Frank is right.”
“So you don’t want to look for them.”
“It’s not that. I’m not sure there’s anything to look for. We don’t know how big this island is, and we can’t keep walking forever. We can’t go east-” the entirety of their travels had been in a general westerly direction, as best as the shoreline would allow “-and that’s where they probably are, if they survived.”
“You’re not making sense, Frank.”
“We need to go up; see where we are and how big this island is. Maybe this island is a lot longer than it is wide. We might be making more work for ourselves.”
Linke glanced up at the imposing granite cliff. It wasn’t nearly as sheer as it had been where they landed. He could make out possible paths through the rock, handholds and footholds, even places that could function as rough stairs. He didn’t like it.
Despite this, they went that way. Linke’s opinion, it seemed, didn’t count for much when it came to practical matters.
ØØØ
“Hold up,” Linke said hours later when his calves and quadriceps were throbbing in a disturbingly persistent rhythm. It had been hell to scale the cliff, but the vast steppe that lay beyond was taxing for the sole reason that it seemed to go on for kilometers in every direction, just one great expanse of chest-high grasses. It was ringed by a line of mountains to the east, the west seeming to go on forever, just grass followed by grass followed by grass. The steppe dropped off into a river of ice, which might be a glacier. Linke was no geologist. “You’ll offer to carry Jan but not my pack?”
Juri shrugged, making Jan wobble a little as he clambered onto the much taller man’s back.
“I like Jan,” he said, neatly ignoring the fact that what was chest-high grass on Juri and Linke was eyebrow-height or more on Jan. Linke knew this not because he’d been exactly paying attention to Jan’s grass issues but because Jan had made everyone patently aware of them.“I don’t care all that much for your pack.”
Juri was so matter of fact about it that Linke couldn’t really argue with him. At the moment, Linke didn’t care all that much for his pack, either.
“Besides,” Juri said, hefting Jan up, “he’ll keep me warm.”
Jan stuck his tongue out at Linke as Juri trotted on ahead, paradoxically more energetic with an extra fifty kilos on his back. Frank smiled noncommittally when Linke looked to him for support.
Goddamn everyone was against him today.
Juri only carried Jan for all of fifteen minutes, but Jan made such a show of it that he sunk Linke right into a funk so deep it was a miracle the entire sky wasn’t black. His pack was heavy, ice was crusting around the edges of the straps digging into his shoulders, and it just so much effort to keep himself going when no one else had the same burden that it would have irritated him anyway. But he’d rather blame it on Jan.
Linke had long since begun to think they’d made a critical error in going the opposite way of the only known people on this landmass. It was reasonable, then, to assume that they would never reach any place where they could hope to spot the main crew (and in the shifting winds and turbulent waters, there was no reason to think the boat had gone in any particular direction).
It was also reasonable to assume that the rest of their crew, or anyone else for that matter, hadn’t built a fire up in the mountain range they were currently trekking across.
Nevertheless, the small trickle of smoke across the sky proved that someone had.
ØØØ
The oddly silent, fur-clad people led them forward, not quite prodding them with their wooden spears (cliché much?) but certainly making their intent for Linke and his fellows to keep moving.
Linke was resolved to never again walk up to someone else’s fire pit when he was stranded on an Arctic island. He’d thought there were some basic signs signifying non-hostility that would work for any culture. Apparently not.
Now they were being led down a gentle slope to the single tree for kilometers with no idea what was going to be done with them. The Neanderthals for lack of a better word frown-glared (Linke genuinely could not tell whether they were angry or just beyond puzzled by the appearance of what probably looked to them like strangely-clad, pale outsiders) at them, nudging with their spears anyone who tried to step out of line.
The opening to the cave was a tight squeeze through a rock-lined sinkhole that opened almost immediately into a room with a high ceiling and a long shaft filled with large and small broken boulders and slabs of rock. The air, several degrees cooler than outside, was hazy with smoke from burning, acrid torches.
“Tiki torches,” Frank supplied helpfully, his bright smile bringing a pang to Linke’s chest. “They look like tiki torches.”
“They do,” Linke agreed.
The headman waved them onwards, down into the shaft and the fallen rock. The light was low, flickering, and making it incredibly difficult to know where to put your feet. Linke felt uneasy. One misstep and you would tumble for a long, long way.
“It’s just breakdown,” Frank told him, grabbing Linke by the wrist and leading the way. “Step where I step and you should be fine.” Linke wasn’t sure about that- Frank’s feet were smaller than his- but he wasn’t about to pull his arm back from a touch freely given. He didn’t get a lot of that nowadays.
They made their way slowly. The headman and his clan members moved easily, with sure steps. Jan moved quickly, too, able to put his feet in smaller places and grasp handholds with the tips of his fingers. Linke kept going and contented himself in that, Juri’s pace far enough behind him that he didn’t have to think about the man tripping and taking them all down with him.
“We’re here.” Frank’s voice was quiet as he let go of Linke’s wrist. Linke swallowed, pushing away the bereft feeling.
“Here” was a small room ringed in torches. The floor was covered in numerous woven grass mats and animal furs that the clan members immediately sat down upon. Conversation started up, the sounds foreign and strange.
Linke sighed internally. Of course, it fell to him to find out whether these people were hostile.
ØØØ
Linke appeared to be talking to the headman, whose name involved an impossible amount of vowel sounds and syllables, in a combination of halting Icelandic and hand gestures. It did not seem to be going well. Jan sighed and plopped down where he was. He could feel a little bit of the bonfire. It wouldn’t dry out his clothes any time soon, but he also wasn’t going to die of hypothermia and he was tired and hungry and freaking wet, and he did not care enough to move another ten steps.
Juri sat down next to him, their sides almost touching, spreading a little of his body heat.
He was silent. Jan was silent back. It wasn’t uncomfortable in the least.
Juri nudged Jan and pointed to Frank. He was smiling broadly at a beautiful young woman, who was smiling shyly back. As Jan watched, she offered him a bowl of steaming something.
“Naturally,” Jan snorted. “Five bucks he gets in her pants when no one’s looking.”
“Next winter there’ll be a blue-eyed terror running about the place.”
Jan grinned.
“You should go stop him before the headdude decides we need an emergency wedding.”
An elderly woman gestured at Jan from her place by the fire, pointing to him, then to the place beside her. Jan widened his eyes and looked around, but there was no doubt she meant him. The fire looked so warm. He’d never had much self-control.
Jan went.
The woman placed some sort of cracked grain cake in his lap and nodded as though expecting him to take it. He looked at her wizened face and hoped she wasn’t trying to poison him.
He chewed.
“It’s good,” he said after swallowing. “You don’t understand me, but it’s good.”
“I…know what you…say,” the woman said haltingly in a very thick, almost Pomeranian accent. Jan dropped the cake in shock.
“You speak German!”
“Yes.”
“But if you speak German, why didn’t you say anything before? We’ve got a guy over there using what he remembers from a guidebook he read a week ago to talk to your headman!”
The woman raised her hands.
“Slow,” she said. There was something strange about her accent, outdated. “I am not practiced for…long time. I am not…comfortable talking…to persons I do not…know. Like you.” She paused, leaning down to pick up the cake Jan had dropped. “Eat, please.”
“How do you know how to speak German?” Jan pressed excitedly.
“Slow,” she reminded him. Jan was quickly becoming acclimated to her strange accent and it was becoming easier to understand her. “My…grandmother?” Jan nodded. “She was like you…in accident- ship accident-”
“Shipwreck,” Jan supplied.
“Shipwreck,” she repeated. “When she was young woman, there was shipwreck and she was here. Grandmother came from a country. They call it Prussia. Does Prussia still exist?”
Jan shook his head.
“It joined with Germany and then there were a few wars, and it’s gone now. There are still Prussians, though.” He tried to make the last seem hopeful. It didn’t work.
“I had hoped…to visit Prussia one day,” the woman said. “Pity. Eat.”
“So, um, what’s your name?” Jan asked between a bite of the cracked grain cake, since that seemed polite and possibly necessary in the near future. It might also be helpful in identifying the language group these people spoke- oh, who was Jan kidding: languages were not his forte or even his friends. Linke would probably be able to narrow things down, but Jan certainly couldn’t.
The sound she uttered didn’t even register in Jan’s mind as a possible word.
“I’m sorry, what?”
She repeated it. Jan shook his head sadly, feeling incredibly embarrassed.
“Iv-gal-re-a,” she said, this time slowly and almost pedantically. Jan cringed inside, already feeling like a bit of a failure for not catching her name the first two times.
“I’m Jan,” he offered, hoping it would make up for, um, being a terrible anthropologist, apparently. He didn’t know what he was feeling right then. It would be really nice if Franky or Linke, or even Juri would come and talk to this Ivgalrea lady so he could stop embarrassing the hell out of himself. Yep, that would be awesome, which, of course, meant it didn’t happen.
“Jan,” Ivgalrea repeated perfectly. Jan felt a little bad for mangling her name, but he’d yet to come across someone who couldn’t say his or a close enough approximation, so maybe it was just one of those things that, uh, happened. Short names made for easy saying.
ØØØ
“We’re leaving,” Jo said a few minutes before noon. Mäx didn’t have a functioning watch, so he couldn’t prove that it was before and not after noon, but the sun was almost directly overhead. Basic logic dictated that it was slightly before noon. “I can’t stand to be around them anymore.”
They’d buried the captain that morning, if only to avoid the stench of a rotting body and the attraction it would have for any predators. Halla had lined the grave in small stones, her face set hard.
The Kaulitzes had largely ignored Jo’s and Fabi’s questions, not even telling them whether the radio was working or if there was any way to call for help. Mostly, they had talked between themselves. Mäx was under the impression that everyone else was equally lacking in information.
They needed to cancel the excavation, send out an SOS, and send out a search party for the six missing team members. It was possible the Kaulitzes and Halla had done the former two. Certainly no one was even discussing forming a search party. It put a bad taste in Mäx’s mouth, only exacerbated by the fact that he actually knew everyone who had gone overboard.
“He’s just jealous,” Fabi told Mäx in an aside.
“Duh,” the stockier man replied. Jo, of course, wasn’t leaving solely because he was jealous of the Kaulitzes’ good looks, fame, or fortune, though there was a certain measure of that, but it made Fabi snicker and lightened the mood a bit. With one death and possibly six more, they needed that.
They trudged out across the gravel beach with little direction (west along the shoreline) and a hazy destination (that place back there where the others had maybe landed). This turned out to be a terrible idea.
Color Mäx surprised.
ØØØ
It was so cold, Jo was sure, if he spit, his saliva would freeze before it hit the ground. The snow was still falling all around them, the wind blowing viciously enough to scourge their cheeks but the snow not thick enough to be called a blizzard. And it was getting dark.
They never should have scaled the cliff. That had been where things started to go wrong. For a while, there had been hills and high grass. That had melted into flat, snow-covered land. No matter how far they walked, they couldn’t get away from the snow. Jo had thought they could find shelter up here, an idea he had suspected Timo, Linke, and the others had had, too. That idea turned out to be completely, utterly wrong.
There was nothing around them now but more snow, no mountains where they could hope to find a cave or a rock overhang, no cliffs back to the sea where they might have some protection from the wind. Even Fabi’s spirits were depressingly low and his strides were getting slower and shorter.
They needed to find shelter and soon.
“There’s nothing here,” Mäx murmured. “We won’t make it back to the ocean before the sun goes down.”
Jo grimaced but kept moving. There had to be something somewhere, some rock or hole. Those shaggy horses they had seen earlier had to go somewhere.
“Then we keep going straight. Go further west if we have to.”
“We can’t outwalk the sun.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jo snapped, softly so Fabi wouldn’t hear.
“Jo.” Mäx’s voice was low, gravely. “You’re tired. Fabi’s about to collapse. We need to rest.”
“Where?” Jo asked testily.
“Here.”
“We can’t-”
“You and Fabi sit. Now.”
Jo glared but crouched down, motioning to Fabi to do the same. His brother all but flopped to the ground, spreading his arms out like he was about to make a snow angel.
Mäx took out his Opinel and began tapping his foot along the ground, looking for something Jo didn’t know. Jo pulled his knees to his chest to conserve energy and watched him. Mäx didn’t find what he was looking for, apparently, and moved farther and farther away, moving in circles.
“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” Fabi’s voice floated over from where he was sitting.
“We’ve just hit a rough patch, that’s all. Come over here,” Jo said, “you’re going to freeze like that.” Fabi scooted over and Jo wrapped an arm around him, feeling his own heat leech away.
The cold sapped energy so much the snow soon became the most comfortable thing in the world. Fabi was slumped against Jo’s shoulder, Mäx scraping away at the ground with his pocketknife, looking like nothing so much as a man out of his mind. And Jo wasn’t going to stop him. At least two of them were warm. At least two of them had a chance for a little while longer.
He had to stay awake. He had to, but it was getting harder and harder. Jo shivered; shoved his hands a little farther into his underarms. He shoved Fabi to make sure he was awake, far too relieved when Fabi let out an irritated noise. Irritation meant Fabi still had it together. Irritation meant Fabi hadn’t given up, even though it was so, so cold and the wind was searing through their wet, freezing clothes.
A blazing hot hand shook his shoulder roughly, forcing Jo to open his eyes blearily. He turned
to the side instinctively, searching for Fabi. His little brother was still there, still breathing. It was Mäx who had shaken him.
“Wake up,” Mäx told him, shaking him again. “Follow me.”
ØØØ
There was a hole in the ground. That’s what Mäx had been doing: digging a hole.
“Get in,” Mäx said, pushing him forward. “Fabi’ll help me put the blanket on top.”
“Blanket?” Jo asked. Mäx wanted him to go into a hole. In the ground. He peered inside and all he saw was snow. “It’s snow.”
“Yeah. It’s shallow. I hit frozen ground pretty quickly, but there’s enough room for the three of us. I’ve packed the snow enough that it’ll reflect our body heat back on us. It’ll work.” Mäx didn’t sound too sure.
Jo stepped inside. He had to crouch once he was inside, the ceiling just high enough that he could sit up. Fabi would probably hit his head.
Mäx tossed a packet inside.
“It’s the other emergency blanket,” he said.
Jo nodded tiredly and began unfolding the Mylar sheet, spreading it out on the ground. He had to turn the sides in. There just wasn’t enough room. How had Mäx done all this? Shit, how long had he been out?
The hole suddenly became dark, and Jo looked up. Mäx and Fabi had laid down the other emergency blanket then. Mäx held a corner up and Fabi slipped inside with plenty of room for Mäx, who followed soon after, pulling the corner under so they would have air. There was more room than Jo had thought, then.
Mäx smirked, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.
“You did it,” Jo said just to talk since he didn’t know what he meant by “it”.
“I did,” Mäx agreed, blowing on his hands again. “Now, come on, let’s get some rest. It’ll be a long walk back in the morning.”
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