A cold and ancient rite

Ben Simiault walked briskly through the Beijing railway station. Dust from the street made his neck itch around the collar of his flannel shirt. The sooty mid-November wind caused him to shiver slightly. This, his final day in China, was also the coldest day to date in his stay, and he was underdressed.

He could not pick out much in the coarse, throaty Mandarin of the capital, having become decently accustomed to the lilting speech of farmers in the tranquil countryside near Chengdu for the past seven months. He boarded the train bound for St. Petersburg (via a somewhat circuitous route that avoided Mongolia) at five o’clock, stirred by a sense of adventure that was cooled and mitigated only by fatigue from the previous day’s bus journey and foreboding about the restrooms that would await him in coach. He was thin from the country diet and his muscular neck was tense and knotty. His chestnut hair, pressed back in a bandana, and his bristly beard, had grown long. His emotions drifted gently in the vague sea of purposeless travel, on whose misty horizons the dim shades of memory and possibility idled.

The lavatory was better than anticipated, as was his cabin. The wide window, streaked with yellow grime, promised an awesome view of the passing landscapes. He shared the smallish room with a young couple: a tall bald Englishman with big shaky hands and his plain, plump Chinese wife. There was a fourth passenger as well, already asleep in the left top bunk: her long, tapering, porcelain-white fingers hung down intriguingly from beneath an immensely thick blanket.

He began to read Marx: a mistake. The big, nervous Englishman’s mouth quivered with excitement as began, “Fantastic, that. I mean, say what you will about Bolshevism…” and proceeded to expound Marx’s merit in generalities, using the word “scientific” no less than a dozen times in reference to Die Deutsche Ideologie. The man’s name was Tom. He did not introduce his wife. They were honeymooning. They would be stopping in Harbin for the renowned ice festival – “temples and pagodas, dragons and chariots and things, all made of ice, with pink, yellow, and purple lights illuminating them – fantastic sort of thing, really. Going to be trying for a little one while we’re there, I think, heh – hope the bugger takes after her!” His wife gave no signal that she heard or understood the conversation.

Beijing’s outskirts were a switchboard of weather- and tire-beaten asphalt, corrugated roofs, and open construction areas whose perimeters housed mounds of rusted scrap metal. Taxi drivers with leathery faces smoked cigarettes beside shops, invariably hung with Coca Cola signs in lieu of a name. China was a nation full of dusty, cramped Coca Cola shops. As Ben watched, the drivers on the roadside gesticulated intensely, soliloquizing to themselves, or yawned and adjusted their winter caps against the brisk evening.

When dusk gave way to dark the train was in the country. The sun set over grayish hills. Tom and Ben walked together to the mess, five cars down. They passed a clutch of solemn little women in plump downy coats, and, in the broader, sleeker corridor of first class, an elegant young couple arguing languidly in French.

“So, what brings you to the—uh—well to Russia, China, sort of thing, then?” asked Tom as they sat at a booth. “Lucky thing that they’ve seated us together, two English speakers. You said you’re from Montreal?”

“Vancouver. Well, Calgary now.”

“Right, right, Vancouver.” He stretched the word: Vancoouuvah. “Lovely. Never been. So you said you’re just traveling, sort of thing?”

“It’s hard to explain. I just wanted to do something more real. I travel a lot. It’s stupid.” Ben tended to dodge lengthy explanations to that most frequent question of the road.

“Right, right.More real than what? Don’t mean to pry, heh-heh, just curious.”

“I was—am—was—a pipe-fitter, in Calgary. Great money, but it was just—hellish. Hellish work. Long hours and an aching back. I decided I would come here—to China that is, Chengdu, in the south?—live in the country for a while, ground myself a bit. Now I’ve grown bored with the countryside, so I’ve decided to embark on this Trans-Siberian journey.”

“Right, fantastic! A journey indeed.” A brief silence followed. A waitress with dyed hair sauntered slowly toward their corner of the mess. “Pipe-fitting,” Tom murmured as an afterthought, to himself. He chuckled nervously.

Vodka was ordered. Dinner came: sausage and mashed potatoes with a strange, dull seasoning. More vodka was ordered. Ben sighed and relaxed into the crumbling cushion of the booth. A few shots melted the fatigue of the past few days into a simmering warmth. The glow of adventure was upon his brow. He looked around: bony old men, padded old women; two little blond-haired boys hitting each other under the table, shouting Slavic insults; a sheepish young couple, a dour-faced older pair in expensive black pea coats.

Two cars past the mess, toward the head of the train, was a small room, a sliver of the car, really, where one could get a breath of fresh air as one smoked. Ben wanted to be exclusively in his own company for a few moments. He was a bit drunk, stumbling and swaying as he made his way to the sliver and lit a moist Chinese cigarette.

The night was cold and breathtaking. Black tree branches danced by, against a glimmering sky; gone were the haze and lights of Beijing. The chill northern lands that rushed by were agreeable to Ben. He had a romantic vision of the distant connection between this land—these elder trees, the wolves, bears, and owls they hid, the Oriental luster of the fallen snow—with his own native soil. Ancient Pangaea, nomadic men bundled, huddled, under a sickle moon, nursing fire.
He was an outdoorsman and would often trek through wild Canada in winter. He was anything but a pipe-fitter, miner, grave-digger, or any other such work which his lack of formal education and wanderlust had compelled him to engage for fixed periods of time. Those times passed away, dead to his recollection, moldering hollows in the tree of his human life’s argument.
Bitter going down, the vodka had left pleasant warmth in his chest and a teasing taste on the back of his throat. He had had a lot. Yellow stars fluctuated in the sky. He was experiencing a miniature reverie, the kind that he had expended time, money, youth, and good health chasing.

A land of contrasts. The phrase, meaningless, bestowed upon a thousand landscapes in television programs, bubbled in his mind. He chuckled, somewhat manically.

A striking hand appeared on the cold rail that ran along the wall, holding an elegant cigarette. He seemed to recall it out of the abyss of a recent dream, a cold and muddled dream; maybe not recent—old, even—but suddenly immediate. No—of course; it was the porcelain-white hand of the fourth traveler in his cabin.

Awkwardly, drunkenly, he took in a first impression of the woman standing next to him—not woman, girl. She was slender, neither tall nor short. Pale white against her black, many-layered outfit, her straight black hair glinting harshly, her soft chest exposed slightly between her scarf and jacket. Her face was strange and beautiful: wide black eyes, a slender nose that rose ever so slightly to a rounded tip, high cheek bones, fine teeth with glistening canines, cool, sensual lips. There was something deeply disturbing in her visage that pertained to no one feature. In the crackling orange light of the little sliver-room her skin glowed intensely white, but underneath there was another shade, a gray pallid aura, as though a spectral ancestor cohabited her lithe frame.

She put the cigarette to her lips. “English?” she asked. Her voice: was it feathery or was it deep, hollow?
“Canada,” he replied foolishly.

“I am Russia.” He did not think she sounded Russian. I must be quite drunk, he thought.

“Are you going to St. Petersburg?” His voice seemed to him filmy, strangled. She was having a strange effect on him, this beauty. He felt something wolf-like in himself, in his response to her presence. He felt ancient, cold, dry, and vigorous.

“No, my uncle needs help.”

“Where is he?”

She laughed—a cackle, punctuated by a high crystalline note that resonated in his ear. “He is in forest. Not far.” She motioned vaguely, her hand sweeping eloquently over the passing blackness, as if her poor old uncle might be right out there, awaiting her in the frigid wilds of northern China.

“Good night,” she said. His eyes were drawn into hers. Black against white, lids elongated sensually in the corners like the points on holly leaves. She smiled, flashing white teeth, her face feline, merciless, captivating. He imagined himself reflected in those orbs: creased forehead, limpid, unkempt hair, and his expression—at this moment he must look like a stupefied doe, a vaguely alarmed mendicant.

She left swiftly, her black dress flitting up about her sharp boots.

Ben smoked another cigarette. It had no taste. The stars were hushed. He hesitated, stood, stared, and after a long empty moment walked back to his cabin, to the thin sheet-sheathed pan that would be his bed for days to come, adjacent to her, the girl whose frame was now hidden, whose pale body he imagined naked and prone beneath her mountainous blanket, emitting a howling, silvery glow to rival the cold moon.

////

The train had stopped in the early morning in Harbin, and Tom and his wife had slipped away quietly. Ben had missed the city of ice and light. Several more whistling stops had disturbed his sleep at cold, uncertain hours. Now the earth had rolled over and revealed the sun suspended in gray space.

He ate eggs with slippery tomato in the mess, hunched, his mind wandering. He brought bitter black tea back to the cabin, and a bowl of hot water into which he poured instant noodles, desiccated peas and corn, and an impressively spicy, faintly rancid-smelling sauce. Two women sat where Tom and his wife had been. They were middle-aged but lined with wrinkles. One was clipping her toenails noisily, the other slurping tea. They paid no mind to their cabin mate. The girl was not there. Her colorless blanket was folded into a corner of her bed like a threatened cat. Perhaps she had detrained and forgotten it. Perhaps she was in another cabin. He tried not to think of her.

They had entered southeastern Russia. Pines fanned their snow-laden limbs stoically beside the big rails. White hills departed into the distance, still tinged by shadow. A chill penetrated the cabin. Tom grabbed his blanket from his bed and pulled it about his shoulders.

He pulled out a nineteenth century Russian novel, about a wealthy patriarch who descends into madness and a tormented death. His mind wandered as he read brusque, sarcastic descriptions of insolent servants and busybody politicians, and he quickly lost the thread. He tried to focus, mouthing the words of a particular sentence several times, but the meaning escaped the grasp of his weary faculties. It was a complex and awkward sentence, with too many given and family names woven together in dim relation. He put down the book and sipped his tea, staring placidly at the pines.

Traveling like this afforded his meditative mind leisure to unfurl itself and pulsate in whatever direction. He always grappled with the problem of knowledge. He was frustrated by his inability to synthesize the great mass of information which he purposely sought out or passively absorbed. He could not conceive of taking up a firm stance on things; on anything: the state of the world economy, the human condition, the novels of Nabokov, the decision to mine local mountains. This he felt as a personal failing: there were great spaces in his understanding through which new books and articles, new encounters, long meditations, all seemed to slip like water down steep rocks. Tom had asked at the end of his spiel whether Ben were a Marxist. “I don't know, really. I don't know enough about how the whole thing works.” – “Right, right, okay.” Ben’s answer had seemed adolescent, the stereotypical answer of the Westerner lost abroad, slightly redeemed he felt by its honesty and lack of pretension. Months ago a man had encountered him reading a fringe text, a broad essay on conspiracy and esotericism, ranging from the Order of the Golden Fleece to September Eleventh. The man had excitedly confirmed to him the veracity of the text, verbally flitting across its various fields of inquiry: UFO sightings, investment banks, Siberian shamanism.

“And they actually drank their own urine afterward, to purify, intensify, and relive the amanita muscaria experience! Incredible! Mad men howling at the moon!” The man, a barrel-chested Greek, had grinned eagerly. “This is where the Santa Claus myth comes from: pure hallucination, madness, myth! The speckled red head of the amanita.The Slavs, ha!” He had thrown up his hands—jubilant or exasperated at the queer conditions which ensconced and obscured everything. Ben had responded feebly, “Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s an interesting book. I’m trying to process it all, you know?” - “Yes, process it—and believe it, because it’s true!” He had tapped his hairy skull rhythmically: “Use… your… mind.”

These chance encounters with strange men and women held a strong mythopoeic fascination for that part of Ben’s mind which saw his life as a stream whose purpose was to absorb the many fragmented strands of human thought and release them into the delta of some transcendent future project: a project of preservation, cultivation, wisdom. This part of his mind was kept alive by travel, reflection, and reading, even into early middle age. He had seen it snuffed quietly, an unnoticed death, in some of those few friends who had ever had it.

The train rolled, the landscapes became harder and colder, and the towering pines adopted harsh aspects as the day wore on.

////

In infinite black space, a golden point of light, darting, daemonic. An echoing cry, cherubic and innocent. He awoke with a start from the dream, sweating lightly, instantly lucid. The cabin reeked of burnt tea leaves. A distant rumbling and clattering, and a muffled but grating high-pitched whine seeped in through the thin walls: music from somewhere further up in the train, the mess hall perhaps. He fumbled, reached for the light switch, slipped, and fell from his metal bed, hitting his head and crying out, “Jesus! Fuck!”

The women in the lower bunks stirred, snorted, and turned. “Sorry,” he whispered in English. Silly, he thought.

He pulled his stained jeans over his pajama pants and put on his brown goose-feather coat and a winter cap. He could see his breath like a black mist against the pale blue light of the glowing cabin window. The muffled clatter and whine continued in arrhythmic arrangements. Ben shivered.

The sound rose to a deafening crescendo as he reached the mess. No one in the adjacent cars seemed to be bothered. He had left his watch in his sack, but surely, he thought, it was well past midnight.

The window of the mess door was shuttered. He pushed against the cold steel frame.

Entering, he grinned. It appeared a real, boisterous Slavic party had been joined, a spontaneous collective incentive perhaps to dissipate the bleakness of the wintry lands through which the train was pressing. The floor between the bar and the booths had been cleared out, and a band was playing raucously in the far corner, banging cymbals, smashing accordions, and braying upon horns and trumpets. Men and women danced in ragged circles, bare white legs kicking up, brown curls shaking, polished shoes gliding, workman's boots stomping.

A freezing mug of beer slid into his palm after making its way through a succession of hands from the natty barman. Ben smiled and nodded, holding up the glass, mouthing Nostrovia! The young man winked.

Several old men smiled pleasantly as he passed them by. They had flaccid hair, sunken eyes, and concave chests. He noticed markings across their forearms, cyphers in black ink. At another booth sat several striking women smoking cigarettes. They regarded him coolly. The music was outrageous, penetrating, consuming. Smoke hung on the humid, human-drenched air. A man in anachronistic bowler cap and splayed coat-tails pranced by absurdly; one of his eyes darted fickly, a golden glint upon it, while the other stayed put, regarding the invisible line of his dance's lunatic unfolding.

In something of a swoon Ben took a seat by the band. They were comical, cartoonish characters: the brass men, hair parted in the middle, long whiskers greased and curled; the percussionists, bizarre twins in abstracted Indian headwraps; and the accordionist, an indescribable maniac. Ben gulped his beer quickly. It was icy and without taste. He fidgeted instinctively for his packet of cigarettes and exited the mess from the opposite end he had entered – an irrational dread of the inevitable return stole over him, tightening his gut, as he rushed through the darkness of the adjacent car, toward the little sliver where he could get fresh air as he smoked.

Before he could take a puff a frigid hand alighted gently upon his hot, tense neck. He flinched and turned slowly, swallowing his nerves. “Oh, hello. I thought you'd gotten off.”

“No, Canada. Come for a drink with my friends.”

“All right. Where’s that?”

One car up, toward the end of the corridor: smoke and light slithered through the edges of the metal doorframe.

She led him in by the hand. It was a broad, well-lit room with a round table covered with cards and expensive-looking vodka bottles. He was in such a daze he had not noticed what she was wearing. Now, as she gently let go of his hand and glided across the room, he saw her elegant dress, black but shimmering white with sequins, framing her voluptuous figure, obsidian hair perfectly coiffed under a lacy snood.

To his dismay she sat down in the lap of a hulking man at the far corner. His scalp was shaved neatly and his jaw jutted, slightly off-kilter with his round, blank forehead. She crossed her legs sensuously, deliberately, her eyes piercing Ben’s, her mouth unreadable, her white feet sheathed in dagger heels. The fire of the alpha male swelled in him, and he felt acutely the infrequency with which his chest and loins were thusly heated.

“Please, sit,” said the great man. Several men sat on either side of him. The one closest to Ben stood arrogantly and kicked a stool out from under the table, then thrust his open palm toward the seat, agitated, offering it up. Ben sat.

The great man reached into his pocket and retrieved an article that was completely hidden by his wide, hairless fist as he brought it up. He slammed it on the table: a revolver, sleek, black, weighty. Ben nearly jumped. Sweat streaked his forehead. The man spun it in a circle and slid it across to Ben.

“Roulette.” He grinned. His teeth were white and razor sharp.

Ben froze. He felt the chords of his neck stiffen and cramp, his blood ran cold.

The man laughed. “Ha, ha! Canada! Kidding, of course. A game of roulette, ha, ha!” The others laughed uproariously.A fat man seated to Ben’s left, whose purple chin protruded from a blubbery neck, spluttered and giggled: “Aren’t they delightful? The whole thing is so exotic.” Ben had no idea what the man was referring to.

The intense man who had kicked the stool out for Ben now grabbed the gun and whisked it back across the table, where the great man nimbly folded it into his meaty palm and deposited it back in his pocket. “Here, have a drink! Tell us your history, your philosophy, your way of seeing things. What are your impressions of this land? Hostile, no? Come, come. We’re all curious of adventurous foreigners.”

When one is certain of being in a dream, one normally tests one’s limits, shocks oneself awake. Ben reached for the nearest vodka bottle, tilted it at an extreme angle to his suddenly parched lips, and drank, and drank. The tasteless liquid swam into him, bitterly cold on his tongue but fiery in his chest. When he had finished the bottle he pounded it on the table, triumphant, giddy. And in a dizzying trance, his mouth leagues away from his scintillating mind, he regaled these grotesque strangers with his History, his Philosophy, his Way of Seeing Things, with phrases that strung themselves like gems in an ornament of knowledge that had finally coalesced out of a lifetime of scraping and sifting in the reek. And as he spoke he looked into her eyes, black and deep as a frozen well on a dead winter night, and at her glistening teeth.

////

Grateful for warm water, he stood still, letting the low-pressure shower slowly bathe him, soothe his tense muscles, wash away the grime of the night—the night. He did not trust his impressions of it. He had been tired. He had become intoxicated quite rapidly. There was a vague shroud around the whole thing, as though it might never have happened. He felt nervous, he longed for his motherland.

Against his own life, he was wont to measure the lives of several men whom he had met, not in an obsessive way but in a continuous process of self-assessment. He thought now of Collin, an old wandering Scot whom he had met in Vietnam as a green traveler. Collin had greasy gray hair, a clerical face softened and spotted by drink and drug, and wild eyes that bulged from his head. It was normally difficult to get much out of him.

“I been on the road a long fucking time,” he had said to Ben one night, drinking cheap Vietnamese whiskey by the mug,
finally opening up to his young companion. “Sometimes you get a bit lonely. You get a real horrifying type of feeling, like your whole life, the sum of it all, so to speak, will be your face in a photograph—a stranger’s photograph, someone you met for one day, and then they’re gone. And they've got your face in that fucking picture, and it might outlast anything else you leave behind here.

“And there’s the places—the places I've seen. I've been everywhere. Passing through by bus, hitchhiking through, train, plane, whatever it is. You get to realize: you'll never know any of these places. The darkness on the horizon stretches out, and you’ll never overtake it. You go to a place, and you see the shadow that place and that people have cast on the world—the myth. The shadow they've cast—it's not the reality, you know. It's a filmy screen that's been placed over the real thing. Not the fucking reality of the place. There are hidden things, dark things, old traditions and forgotten ways, that don’t come out to play with just any passersby. There are some places in this world… Some places… Well…” And he had downed the rest of his whiskey, and his bulging eyes had wandered away to a hazy place where young Ben could not at that time follow.

Ben measured himself against Collin, whom he saw as an archetypal lost Western traveler, a man who, when he woke up in the morning, saw little ahead of him except chance encounters, vague disinterested discussions with strangers about their future plans, a meandering road that he had to keep walking though it may have run its course years ago. He had respected Collin’s stoic self-reliance, but feared him, feared becoming him, feared the place the old man’s big, glazed eyes drifted to in the empty moments.

The water in the little greasy shower began to run cold. Within seconds it was painfully freezing, as though it trickled from ice that had just been shoveled into the train.

He toweled off, shuddering with cold, and walked down the hall to his cabin. It was empty. He heard the train creaking to a halt. He looked out the window—a high fence fringed with barbed wire, separating the track from the tall trees, marked the train's passage into a small station. Flurries of snow blew on a morning wind.

A shape in the doorframe: an old, bent lady wrapped in charcoal black fabric, huddled, brooding.

She pulled her scarf back slightly from her brow, and he saw that his sight had deceived him. There she was, beautiful but somewhat haggard. Gone were the sequined dress, the shapely coiffure, the dagger heels. Her dark hair was tangled, eyes shot through with red veins, her features strained and sagging. The wind whipped against the grimy window.

“Ben, I need your help. My uncle lives here, very near. I need your help, desperately.” Her accent was strange—not Russian, not anything easy to pick out. A gray flush was upon her.

He hesitated, trying to recall whether he had ever properly introduced himself as Ben Simiault. He still did not know her name.

“I—How long are we here for? What’s the name of this station? I’m rather tired,” he stammered.

She squinted her eyes at him. Her pale lips were dry, icy. “Please, Ben. Come with me. Very near. We have plenty of time.” She stepped closer to him. He was naked save for his dripping towel—freezing to death, he thought. She pawed at him with her long tapering fingers, almost pleading, her poise, her cold grace exhausted, spent. Her hand ran across his stomach. He shuddered, his skin crawled, hairs stood on end.

“All right, of course. What’s the trouble with your uncle?” Ridiculous, he thought—absurd.

“I must bring him some food and—some medicine. It’s very cold in Siberia—dark, and cold, and he’s alone, mostly.”

He dressed, he grabbed the sack with his essentials and slung it over his shoulder, and they descended onto the platform: windswept, bereft of sound and movement. She took his hand, pulled her scarf tightly about herself. They left the station—the only sign of life was the shadow of a man, looking on—or perhaps his back was turned—from his cubicle in a little frozen office by the entrance’s walkway.

"Why does your uncle live out here?” asked Ben as they made their way across a cracked and ice-riddled tarmac toward the line of trees. “We’ve got cold winters where I live, and I love it—but I don’t know how one could stand it in a place like this.”
“It’s a family place,” she said vaguely—he thought he detected a hint of worry, even alarm, in her voice. “He has business here. Thank you for coming. Thank you!”

He looked back at the station, at the barbed wire fence, the little frozen office, the stairs to the monochrome platform, and the train, motionless, without steam, an image in a long-finished painting.

She held his hand very firmly in hers. He could feel warmth draining from his, dissipating into the barren midday. At the tree line she pointed out a snow laden path marked by jagged rocks set in deranged attitudes in the hard earth. The pines loomed over the path but dared not encroach with root or limb.

Timelessness accompanied the whistling wind, the hard snow whose fall waxed and waned as they walked. She placed her arm around his waist, pressing herself to him. His teeth chattered, he felt a strange comfort descend upon him, the pines bowed and gave way to their shrouded, silent footfalls. In his eyes he saw the image of the two of them, a black speck against a whirling white world, plodding forward toward—toward what?, he wondered detachedly.

At length the path began to descend into a dark little valley. The wind grew quiet and powerful, the snowfall ceased.
A circle of gray resolved into focus: a stone courtyard by a frozen stream. A black smudge became a solitary man, seated, hunched. In the middle of the courtyard, a ruin: perhaps once a tall fountain.

They descended into the circle of stone. The hunched man was weeping. He was old; his clothes were peasant’s rags, or something more primitive; his beard was a great mangy bloom about his jowly face.
On the ground beside him was a heap of melted flesh and bone, red and brown and covered in fresh ice. In his hand was a skull, dry, bleeding, jaw ajar, chunks of frozen flesh clinging to it, eyes a mess of grayish pulp, nearly gone. The man wept—he howled, sobbed, spat, and hunched.

She walked up beside the hunched man, patted his shoulder, rubbed it soothingly. Her face was shrouded, her aura gray as Siberian dawn. He did not seem to notice her. Ben stood transfixed by the ruined fountain, hands quivering, body frozen beneath his heavy clothes.

The old bearded man wailed horribly, an infant’s wail, dumb and desperate. And his wail was returned. From somewhere deep in the dark little valley, on the other side of the frozen stream, a wretched cry went up, a monstrous child screaming for warm blood in a cold land. She walked away from the old bearded man, to stand behind Ben, beside the fountain. Her arms went up, her scarf was thrown back. He looked, a cry turned to ice in his throat: an old wrinkled thing with blood streaming from its eyes and streaking its cheeks, and a howling mouth of black, festering fangs: priestess of a forgotten dimension. She was frozen, dead, waiting. He belonged to her. The old man wept and cradled the skull, and the air crackled and sighed as a limber beast approach the court of stone in silence, felt but unseen.

Most absurd of visions: a bear’s head, dumb, blind, peering from behind a grim pine. Ben regarded it madly, giggling, rapt with terror beyond terror; he might have been looking at a funny photograph, a comic postcard from a friend. But it was awful. This fat, dumb face reminded him of something, a dream-memory: mounted on a wall in a Calgary pub, eons ago. Young and fresh-faced, Ben had posed beside it with long-forgotten acquaintances, grinning. He had been a new thing in an ancient world. He had seen the great stream and been eager to follow it. Now the stream was frozen.

The bear's head was a gruesome mask, a fresh-made mask. The thing which wore it stepped forward. It towered over him, naked, rotting, frigid blue skin scored with sores which had blighted it in another epoch. Its hands were claws of ice. Black birds wheeled about it in the frozen forest’s canopy, shrieking, terrified, anxiously reiterating the terms of their agreement.

The great fountain cracked in the courtyard of stone. Ben saw the train, still and silent, in his mind’s eye: it would never leave its station. The darkling sky was still and the frozen earth rumbled, troubled by a dark dream in the deep slumber of winter.