Chapter 113: The Sea Fort
The firepit crackled low beneath the stretched hides of the long tent.
Smoke wove through the rafters of driftwood and bone. Outside, the snow hissed against the earth, falling heavy and wet, burying old trails.
Inside, they argued.
The Saqqaq war-chief Kunnuk stood with a carved seal-tusk staff in hand, his voice raised in frustration. Scars crossed his cheek and brow like claw marks.
"He is not like the others," Kunnuk said. "He is not Skraeling, not Vinlander. Not even the Norse we once drove from Iceland. This one brings war like a sickness. He builds traps where there are no men. He strikes in silence, then howls like a wolf."
"He calls himself a wolf," spat Atanarjuat, the Dorset chief draped in polar bear fur, his eyes sunken and rimmed red from age and smoke.
""He calls himself a wolf," spat Atanarjuat, the Dorset chief draped in polar bear fur, his eyes sunken and rimmed red from age and smoke. "But I remember when men like him were chased into the sea like dogs. Their longships burned. Their women wept. That was before he came. Before this white wolf.""
A third voice, quieter, rasped from the shadows. A shaman of both peoples, blind in one eye, his sealskin cloak stitched with feathers and bone.
"You cannot kill what does not sleep," the old man whispered. "He is the ghost of the winter. The Son of Ice. He comes not for land or meat, but for dominion."
A silence fell.
Even the fire seemed to hesitate.
Finally, Kunnuk slammed his staff against the ground. "We cannot run again. We ran from Grenland. We ran from the outer isles. We ran when his longboats came here, crawling over the sea like lice."