The Barsoom Project

Bowles chuckled. “Steam bath scene, Take One.”

Johnny relaxed; he smiled; his voice rose. “Gosh, Charles, wasn’t it nice of the cannibal king to let us use their bathhouse?”

“We should hurry, Johnny. There must be a dozen tribes outside waiting for us to finish.”

“They’re probably here for the feast the king promised-”

Martin Qaterliaraq spoke again. “This is the sweat lodge, the qasgiq of my people. Mph.” The old man pronounced the word kuzz-a-gick. “Here we dream our dreams and see into the world beyond. But Ahk-lut has t-t-torn the veil between matter and spirit. He would bring the chaos of his greed and fear into the world-mph-and destroy everything.”

The other Eskimos nodded assent. But Martin’s lips were twitching, and some others were having trouble keeping their faces solemn.

The trapdoor in the floor flapped open again. More Eskimos brought in handfuls of brittle driftwood and loaded them into the central fire pit.

Smoke curled up from the crackling wood and twisted through the ceiling. Watching it lulled Eviane into an almost hypnotic reverie.

The relaxation became dismay a few minutes later, when the air grew so close as to be almost unbreathable. Several of the refugees were choking and gasping for breath.

Then the smoke lightened. Pictures floated in a gray, misty ocean that merged into a gray, misty sky. Martin’s voice was strong once again. “It was the beginning, and there were not yet people upon the Earth,” he said. “For four days the first man lay coiled in the pod of a beach pea. On the fifth he burst forth and stood full-grown.”

A man, a proto-Eskimo, stood naked in the mist.

A black shape emerged from the sky, grew wings and a head, became a gigantic Raven. In Eviane’s mind the words of the ancient shaman and the images in the air melded together. The room around her receded from her awareness. She stood on an ancient beach, could see the oily gray sky, smell the protosurf.

The Raven covered a sizable patch of sky. It shrank as it glided to earth: perspective in reverse. It was man-sized when it touched the sand. It stared at the man, cocking its head to the side, and finally said: “What are you?”

The man stuttered in fear and confusion. The great Raven pushed its beak aside, and its feathers away, revealing smooth brown skin beneath. It became very like the man, not fearsome at all.

The man relaxed. “I know not who I am. I know that I hunger and thirst.”

The Raven opened his hand. The flesh of his palm melted and ran, and formed beads which darkened to berries. The man took them and ate.

With the sweep of an arm that was also a wing, the Raven transformed the sea into a creek running at the base of a snowcapped mountain. The Raven scooped clay from the bank of the river and molded it lovingly. He set two blobs on the earth, and waved his feathered arms again.

Two mountain sheep stood inanimate for a few moments, then opened their eyes, shuddered, and ran off to the mountains.

“The Raven made everything that lives,” Martin’s voice whispered behind her ear. Shapes were flowing from the Raven’s wing: reindeer, caribou, rabbits. The other wing swept out, square miles of glossy black shadow, and seals and whales and a thousand shapes of fish rained into the ocean.

The Raven was studying the man again in that odd, avian manner. He molded clay into another man-shape with a slightly different symmetry. He took long grass from the bank of the stream to cover the new creature’s head. Its eyes opened, and it was woman. She stretched her hand out for the man’s.

They walked away. As they passed over the land it blossomed, the stream ran with fish, and birds filled the sky.

Eviane snorted at the smell of smoke and was back in the qasgiq. Martin, half-visible in the smoke, was hunched over, talking as if to himself. “The Raven gave all sea life into the care of Sedna. All land life into the hands of her lover Torngarsoak. When these two are well, all creatures are fruitful and multiply…” And within the murk Eviane found herself deep underwater. Schools of fish streamed past a kneeling Eskimo woman with long, floating hair and a face not unlike that of Snow Goose. Playfully, she brushed her hands through a school of fish Her hands! Her fingers were stubs, chopped off just below the first knuckle.

Orson was whispering to Max: “-pretty typical myth pattern.

Sedna was a beautiful Eskimo girl who tried to escape an arranged marriage. Her father cut off her fingers. The joints fell into the ocean, became whales, seals, and so on.”

And yet there was no sense of tragedy or regret in Sedna’s beautiful face. Her eyes met Eviane’s; her lips twitched in a smile. Eviane was warmed by the beauty.

Smoke swirled. Land again: ice melting, green sprouting. She watched men multiplying, expanding across the land. The land filled with children, laughing, growing, mating, spreading their villages and hunting lands out beyond the horizon.