“Under the mountain?” I repeated. So that’s why his regard always seemed unfocused, why he looked past and through me! Why his raking stare sometimes seemed to be scoring across my face, sometimes seeing beneath the skin, looking into my mind.
“I told you, we were trying to swing the raft across the river when the Salt Men cut our rope.”
So that was why all his gear was so neatly stacked and hung. Why everything had its place. He could feel with his hands, for everything. Could find it at once.
That was how he had found us that first time. He’d been fishing downwind of the cave and was following the smell of smoke home. It explained so many things. The way he felt Jak’s side. How he touched my face, the first time we met. He kept the mask on to hide his eyes.
Perhaps it explained other things, too. His staring into the fire. Not answering my questions. Seeming to be away in another world.
“Yes, we came under the mountain, too. On a raft of blownup goatskins. Luck again, I suppose.”
“People who are lucky usually deserve it.” It was about as close as he could bring himself to saying I had done well.
“Drawing!” There was a wild note in the exclamation, then his mouth snapped shut. He had given too much of himself away. I looked down so I could not see his embarrassment.
“This drawing of yours, I can see what you mean by it. The bear. The dogs. The hunter.” I shut up. My voice sounded false to me. I did not want to hurt the Bear Man.
“You can tell what it is?”
“It’s not well-drawn.” I must be honest. “But I can see what you meant.”
“How do you know I drew it? There have been many others before me in the cave. What are you drawing now?”
“Just finishing what I was doing.” In fact, I was covering Lutha’s nakedness with a stroke or two so she now wore a tunic. “In case I forget.” A few more quick strokes, and I had sketched the Bear Man’s face: masked eyes, high-raised blade of the nose, strong chin. “There!” As I had first seen him, the hood falling back off his head, body hidden beneath the white bearskin. The heavy forehead, lined and cracked skin. The sense of power. Something to do with awe.
He stirred uneasy. “Finished!” I didn’t want him to guess what I was doing. “How far does the cave go?” I dropped the last fragment of charcoal.
“Further than anyone has explored, so it’s said.” He turned.
We were walking back towards the fire when again I heard that distant mutter. Like a chuckle. Or was it a grumble of pain and loneliness? A far bellow?
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Like something bellowing.”
“A rock falling. Echoes.”
Probably the floor of the cave told his feet where he was. And the heat from the fire. I closed my own eyes, walked a few steps, and had to open them. The Bear Man went straight to his bench and sat, not even touching it with his fingertips.
“The cave is a world within a world,” he said. “How far it goes, its end nobody knows. How do you draw the end of something, the edge of it?”
“With a line, I suppose,” I told him. “Or by shading it. The axe, there’s no edge to its blade in this light. It just curves away into the dark like the wall of the tunnel. The back of its head, though, that finishes in a black line, from where I’m looking. Change the light, you change what you’re seeing. A drawing’s got to change, too.”
“So sometimes there’s no edge?”
“Mmm. I don’t suppose there is. Especially where its turning away from you. No clear edge. Like the wall of the cave, disappearing around that bend. You wouldn’t draw an end to it, but you draw the arch of it disappearing out of the light and into the darkness. Or the darkness appearing into the light. It depends which way you look at it.”
“Did somebody teach you all this?”
“I grew up drawing with a stick in the sand as we followed the Animals. Drawing on the walls as we walked through Hammertun. Scratching with a stone on the cliffs we passed. And thinking about it. Nobody taught me anything.”
“Did you see other people drawing?”
“Sometimes. And there were old drawings, scratches. I suppose I worked out that things don’t always end in a neat line. Maybe it depends on the light.”
I’d got interested now, trying to understand it. But the Bear Man seemed to be thinking of something else. I got the axe. “Feel this!” I guided his fingers. “Here where the handle goes into the head. It’s a clear line in this light. But if I take the axe back and lean it against the wall, the line disappears into a shadow. You have to show that in a drawing by shading. There’s no line then.”
His hand was cold as stone. Had I gone too far? I sat down in my place. But the Bear Man was sitting, the axe across his knees, running his fingers along the line, the meeting of its head and handle. “I see. Yes. I think I could draw that, the line, but not the darkness, the shading.
“What you’re saying.” He stopped and thought. “What you’re saying is: things look different at different times.”
“We see them differently, too. Not just because of the light. Because of how we’re feeling. If we’re not interested, it shows in our drawing.” I thought of Lutha. How she had been different at different times. How she growled the first time. How she had been different the other times I had seen her. No, I hadn’t seen her the second time. Only heard her in the darkness of the cell. Felt the soft round of her breast as she adjusted the cord around my neck. Her lips. The hardness of her hands.
“If you see differently at different times,” said the Bear Man, “how can you draw the same thing twice?”
“Just draw it as you see it each time.” I thought a moment. “But you can draw it from memory. And you’ve got to remember some things do change, too. Like Jak. He looks different today, better than yesterday.”
“What if you start drawing and go back and finish it another time?”
“Then I suppose you finish it the way you’re seeing it now.” The Bear Man was making me think. “Or,” I said, “you could finish it – the second time – looking the way you saw it the first time. You remember what you saw and what you drew the first time and keep to that picture, not the one you’re seeing now.”
That must be how we draw things from memory. I looked at the Bear Man’s shadow on the wall behind him. He had thought a lot about it but could not see what he tried to draw. Only the pictures in his mind. I wondered what they looked like. Had he been blind always? No, because he’d talked about seeing things years ago. Like the man’s cut leg.
I felt a cold nose touch the back of my hand. Realised Jak was standing beside me.
“Oh, Jak!” I dropped to my knees. “I’ll get you something to eat. Is that what you want?” And even as I ran for some meat, I knew the Bear Man was listening to our movements, seeing us in his mind. I knew he envied me Jak’s company. Because I had learned the Bear Man didn’t just want to know how to draw.
Jak chewed steadily, not his usual wolfing. Head on one side. As if he found it a bit tough. I cut the meat smaller, and he got the bits down. Then, as I watched, he was tired. Weaving, swaying. As sudden as that. I carried him beside the fire, and he let himself go, spread out as I lay him down, and slept again. But he was going to get well.
“That must be hard to draw.” I looked up. “Somebody bending over, putting down a heavy weight, not wanting to drop it,” the Bear Man said. “The bend of their body. The feeling of the weight. Being careful not to hurt whatever it is.”
For a moment I thought he was not blind after all. Then I realised he had listened to all the sounds as I picked up Jak, carried him, bent down. The little noises of Jak’s fur, my clothes rubbing. Our breathing. He heard them all and made up the picture in his mind.
“You’d need to look hard and quick to fix the memory, so you could draw it.” Again the things he said were making me think about what I’d always just done.
“I can see it’s tricky,” said the Bear Man. “Like drawing things that look as if they’re sitting on the ground instead of floating in the air. I’ve often thought about that. Do you know what I mean?”
“Sometimes I still draw things that float, that won’t sit on the ground. I’ve seen old drawings in caves like that. Sometimes they sit there, solid. I can do it most of the time now.”
“My drawing of the bear and the dogs, did they stand on the snow.”
“No.” Because he was being honest, I was honest, too. “They’re a bit jumbled, one on top of the other.”
There was a long silence. I stared at the red shapes of the coals and asked the Bear Man, “How big is the South Land?”
He stretched. “How big is the South Land?”
“I mean,” I said, “we came to the end of the North Land. It finished in the sea. Does the South Land finish like that?”
“The People of the White Bear talk about how it ends in ice on the sea. Beyond their village, there is an island. South of that, they say, the sea ice goes on for ever. How big is the South Land?” he said again. “It’s like asking how big is the world?”
He stood, his back to the great fire of coal. “How big is the world?” I heard the change in his voice. “Away to the north of the world,” he said, “before the sun went mad, there were two brothers who married two sisters. The brothers were great hunters. Each day they brought home the seals they killed. Each night their wives fed them and mended and dried their clothes.
“They cured the skins and made new clothes. They sewed new boots and mittens. And, as they talked, while the brothers hunted, they played a game of questions.
“‘How big is the world?’ one asked her sister.
“‘What questions you ask! I don’t know how big the world is! But I’ll tell you what – tonight, I’ll ask my husband.’ She nodded at her sister and laughed.
“That night she asked her husband, ‘How big is the world?’
“‘My brother asked me the same question today!’ he exclaimed. ‘As far as we have hunted, there is still more ice and snow ahead. In summer, no matter how far we paddle our canoes, there is still sea before us.’
“All four of them laughed. It was a silly question. They ate their food and crawled beneath their furs to sleep, still laughing.
“Next night, the brothers came home to find their wives still asking, ‘How big is the world?’ The brothers laughed. ‘We kept asking each other the same silly question,’ they said.
“Again they all went to bed laughing. But next morning they got up, and one of the brothers said, ‘We’ll go this way. You go that way.’
“‘And when we meet again,’ said his brother, ‘we’ll know how big the world is!’
“One pair drove their sledge this way, the others that way. Just once they each turned and looked at the others growing smaller. They waved and went out of sight around the curve of the world.
“When the wind blew too hard, when the snow was too thick for the dogs to breathe, they stopped. They built snowhouses. The storm blew over, and they went on.
“Summer came. The snow disappeared, the ice melted. They tied together frameworks of willow branches, covered them with skins, and sailed on. When winter came and the sea froze they lashed their sledges together, tied the dogs in their traces, and drove on.
“Both the sisters had babies. And they travelled on. They had more children. The years went by. They travelled on and met other people. Their children grew up and took wives and husbands and they travelled on. All together.
“Many years later, a crowd came over a snowfield, hundreds of people, all travelling together. The ones near the front called out, and others ran up from behind and stared, pointing. For coming in the opposite direction was another huge crowd.
“In front of each crowd was a sledge so old its runners had been worn out and replaced many times.
“On top of each sledge were two little old people. A woman and a man. Shrunken with age. Their fur clothes were old-fashioned. The women’s long boots had embroidered tops, below the fringe of white bear’s hair. And the necks of their tunics were stitched with the same patterns, red and blue. The horn drinking cups tied at their waists had been dipped in so many rivers, they were worn down level with the handles. They could hold only a mouthful of water.
“The two crowds came together. The old men and women were helped down off the sledges by their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The two brothers leaned their heads against each other. The two sisters stroked each other’s faces.”
The Bear Man tottered forward a couple of steps, lifted his arms, and drew a face on the air with his fingertips, stroking, touching it, the lines and marks. His own hands became the hands of somebody small and old, tracing the outline of his face, feeling the mask, running down the deep lines, touching the cracked skin of his forehead and cheeks and chin.
“They felt the lines of a thousand storms, many winters, summers. And one sister said, ‘So that’s how big the world is!’”
The Bear Man dropped his hands, slumped on his bench by the fire.