"Grumman?" said the black-bearded fur trader. "From the Berlin Academy? Reckless. I met him five years back over at the northern end of the Urals. I thought he was dead."
Sam sino, an old acquaintand a Texan like Lee Scoresby, sat in the naphtha-laden, smoky bar of the Samirsky Hotel and tossed back a shot glass of bitingly cold vodka. He he plate of pickled fish and black bread toward Lee, who took a mouthful and nodded for Sam to tell him more.
"Hed walked into a trap that fool Yakovlev laid," the fur trader went on, "and cut his leg open to the bone. Instead of using regular medies, he insisted on using the stuff the bears use— bloodmoss—some kind of li, it aint a true moss. Anyway, he was lying on a sledge alternately r with pain and calling out instrus to his men—they were taking star sights, and they had to get the measurements right or hed lash them with his tongue, and boy, he had a tongue like barbed wire. A lean man, tough, powerful, curious about everything. You know he was a Tartar, by initiation?"
"You dont say," said Lee Scoresby, tipping more vodka into Sams glass. His daemoer, crouched at his elbow on the bar, eyes half-closed as usual, ears flat along her back.
Lee had arrived that afternoon, boro Nova Zembla by the wind the witches had called up, and once hed stowed his equipment hed made straight for the Samirsky Hotel, he fish-pag station. This lace where many Arctic drifters stopped to exge news or look for employment or leave messages for one another, and Lee Scoresby had spent several days there in the past, waiting for a tract or a passenger or a fair wind, so there was nothing unusual in his duow.
And with the vast ges they sensed in the world around them, it was natural for people to gather and talk. With every day that passed came more news: the river Yenisei was free of ice, and at this time of year, too; part of the o had drained away, exposing strange regular formations of stone on the seabed; a squid a hundred feet long had snatched three fishermen out of their boat and torn them apart....
And the fog tio roll in from the north, dense and cold and occasionally drenched with the stra imaginable light, in which great forms could be vaguely seen, and mysterious voices heard.
Altogether it was a bad time to work, which was why the bar of the Samirsky Hotel was full.
"Did you say Grumman?" said the man sitting just along the bar, an elderly man in seal hunters rig, whose lemming daemon looked out solemnly from his pocket. "He was a Tartar all right. I was there when he joihat tribe. I saw him having his skull drilled. He had another oo—a Tartar name; Ill think of it in a minute."
"Well, how about that," said Lee Scoresby. "Let me buy you a drink, my friend. Im looking for news of this man. What tribe was it he joined?"
"The Yenisei Pakhtars. At the foot of the Semyone. Near a fork of the Yenisei and the—I fet what its called— a river that es down from the hills. Theres a rock the size of a house at the landing stage."
"Ah, sure," said Lee. "I remember it now. Ive flow. And Grumman had his skull drilled, you say? Why was that?"
"He was a shaman," said the old seal hunter. "I think the tribe reized him as a shaman before they adopted him. Some business, that drilling. It goes on for two nights and a day. They use a bow drill, like fhting a fire."
"Ah, that ats for the way his team was obeying him," said Sam sino. "They were the roug