Shadows

by Ken Altabef

  He is not alone. Another presence keeps pace beside him. They sail on, side by side, soaring and dipping, swimming and floundering playfully through twists and turns of the ever-shifting landscape. The other parallels his movements perfectly, thinking nearly identical thoughts.

  The other. Who is the other? The question seems out of place, destructive, somewhat poisonous. None of them have names in the Beforetime. That came later, after the great shadow fell over them all. And yet his memories of the Beforetime have been forever tainted by the names that the others later assumed. Those names, formed in the depths of darkness that followed the Rift, seep like corruption through his remembrances. Remembrances?

  He feels himself once again imprisoned within an empty, soulless chamber. Alone in the taunting dark, facing a contemptuous scorn as absolute as the eclipse which clouds his eyes. The sudden shift is a burning spear through the heart, the crushing weight of eternity suddenly leavened upon him. One moment paradise and flights of fancy and limitless freedom. Now gone. Now, nothing again. An empty prison. A silent prison. Time shrinks and contracts as the moments ebb and flow, drifting forward, drifting back as the blinking of some great cosmic eye.

  Vithrok feels himself falling, plunging helplessly through a vast lightless expanse toward a speck of radiance so far below it can never be reached, but marks the iris of that implacable eye. He tumbles toward it for ages, spinning end over end over end, growing no nearer. But it is the iris of the eye of Time; he is sure of that. And if he waits long enough...

  Not dead, he reminds himself, I’m not dead.

  The eye blinks.

  Vithrok is again soaring across the heavens, his heart thrown wide, his perception as all-encompassing as the universe around him. There is everywhere to go, an opportunity to indulge in his richest fantasies, to create, to destroy, to play any imaginative game one could devise. In this moment of perfect understanding there is no conflict. Death remains yet unknown. There is no darkness; all is light.

  But contentment is snatched away. He remembers darkness; he remembers death. He had felt the touch of its cold hand. He had dished it out with ruthless equanimity. But that came later. He mustn’t think on that. He must try not to remember. It was too painful to think about.

  He was here, he is here, that’s all that matters.

  The two of them, soaring through space and time, side by side. But who was the other? She was composed primarily of the being who would ultimately become Sedna. Just as he was Vithrok, in part and parcel. In the Beforetime individual people didn’t exist. Without names and distinct personalities, identity was a concept that had not yet become relevant. All were parts of the world whole — neither specific nor separate. As the concept of body was malleable, so their spirits flowed freely, combining and recombining into an ever increasing array of possibilities. Parts of souls went here and there — other parts were gained and lost. He had been so different then, so expansive, not limited as now. Now?

  How many centuries have creaked past? How many heartbeats?

  Dead, but not dead.

  For a moment he feels time drifting backward. It does that, he knows, in the waiting silence, in the endless dark of his prison, holding on.

  He must hold on.

  Time flexes and crawls, his implacable nemesis, its cruelty unimaginable. Oh, how it plays tricks. Every moment drawn out to an eternity in paralytic dark, waiting. Waiting.

  None of them had names. There were no names, but some combinations were more prevalent than others. So, then, traveling beside him was a being composed mostly of that which would become Sedna. And he was primarily Vithrok. The two of them, dressed in warm shades of shimmering lilac and virescent green, sat upon a beach. The sand writhed and flowed beneath them, composed of millions of tiny auk skulls which Sedna had created, each a different color. The water flowed as bands of pure light, lapping the shore with eerie strains of music.

  They make love in the way of the Beforetime. This is not a physical joining, but a communion, a sharing of the raw ecstasy that is life itself. They know each other’s thoughts, feel the touch of every blissful emotion they have ever endured, pleasure heaped upon pleasure. Time creeps forward, grain by grain, each moment lasting as if forever. The crescendo builds and builds.

  And they are flying again, soaring through the twists and turns of a sky fashioned of liquid gold. A wind blows by, caressing them with a burning sensuality, and the wind is part of them as well. They sail through a vermillion cloud bank, falling through the mists and on the other side they find a different world. Another entity waits there. This one has aspects of Kidan and Tornarssuk and the Moon-Man, and others, too. Too many to name.

  They decide to fight, and the other takes the form of an immense grizzly bear. He stands upright, teeth dripping spittle and venom. He charges. Laughing, Vithrok sprouts the head of a walrus with a hundred tusks that curl and stretch dangerously before him. The other returns the attack with twelve lunging arms, all with needle-sharp claws. Vithrok changes tactic and takes to the air on the wings of a falcon. The fight rages in the sky as Sedna, forgotten already, slowly dissolves into other combinations of souls seeking other pursuits.

  The fight takes forever, just long enough until the combatants tire of it, changing shapes, never having the same limbs or the same head from one moment to the next. There is no fear or anger, just joy in the fighting, no pain or wounds that can’t be made to heal themselves. What were their bodies after all in paradise, but mere afterthoughts?

  Vithrok’s memory of the event becomes hazy. Pieces of the others have come and gone from him and he finds that by the end of the fight he is no longer the same Vithrok who had begun the contest. Parts of that soul have moved on in different combinations, enjoying divergent pleasures. These memories, so fragmented and conflicting, become painful, clawing at him.

  His adversary lunges and strikes, driving a narwhal horn straight through Vithrok’s chest. A tremendous, searing pain as the burning spear pierces his heart, and yet again the crushing weight of eternity is suddenly flung down on him. So much has been lost.

  From a twilight world of past, present and future which is no longer within our reality, Vithrok awakes.

  A momentary panic takes hold. Dead but not dead. The darkness, the loneliness, the unyielding walls of stone all around. Not again, he thinks desperately. Help me. I can’t last another moment. I can’t hold on.

  But wait, this is not the soulless stone where he has been imprisoned forever, helpless and alone. He is not helpless. And he is not alone. This stone has a soul; he holds that soul tightly in his clenched fist. He hears it screaming.

  Vithrok had been released from his imprisonment. A shaman had come to the Ring of Stones, some pathetic little creature seeking warrior souls to aid her cause. The shaman thought herself clever, reversing the turnings of time and opening a portal through which Vithrok was able to escape. He left the soulless catchstone behind. But there had been no time for delay. This new world, so dizzying and disorienting, did not welcome him and the portal was calling him back. His spirit took flight, leaping blindly through the ether, away from that cursed catchstone, to come to rest here, within this other stone.

  The inua of the stone continued to scream. The sound twisted and reverberated, stretching psychedelically, back and forth through time.

  “Tell me. How many turnings?” asked Vithrok.

  Held tight in his spiked grasp, the spirit of the stone let out a horrified gasp. It was unable to reply, so completely terrified by its tormenter.

  Vithrok began to wind and stretch the soul to its limits, threatening to pull it apart. Still no answer, only the sound of the earth groaning and cracking.

  “How long have I hidden here? How many turnings of the sky?”

  “Ten,” signaled the rock, “and two again.”

  Twelve years? The span had passed in a moment, but Vithrok knew the fickleness of time. He had drowned in it. He had felt the moments simultaneously contract and expand, e
ach second stretched into a day, a day that could last for all eternity.

  He had only been dreaming himself still imprisoned and alone. But this was not the truth. He was not still caged within the soulless catchstone, from which there was no release, no keeper with whom to negotiate. From this petty little stone, he could escape whenever he chose.

  Vithrok released his hold on the screaming soul and it retreated in grief and shivering torment. This pathetic thing would gladly let him out.

  Vithrok drew his inuseq together. He gathered all the shoots and tendrils, the twisted folds of his own soul which had sprawled into the cracks and crevasses of the rock. He had lain asleep for too long. Twelve years. Lethargy and weakness had set in. It was hard to move, hard to pull together. Exerting his will, flexing ligaments of spirit which had previously held the strength of eons, he drew himself up.

  And passed out of the stone.

  On the outside his spirit took the form to which it had become accustomed, a Tunrit sorcerer. Tall and broad at the shoulder, clad in soot-colored furs and a war-shirt fashioned of tight rows of animal teeth that covered his chest. The sorcerer lifted a hand toward his face. The fingers were blackened by frost scars, the nails long and cracked. And he felt again a pang of tremendous loss, an echo of the Great Rift. What had Time made of him? He seemed so reduced, so limited. But he had risen above this crushing realization once before, with the Tunrit at his back. And he will do so again. Alone, if need be.

  He found himself on a vast snow-covered plain. Existing in spirit only, he could not touch anything. He could feel neither the cold nor the snow. He could feel nothing. The spirit-vision showed the shimmering souls all around —the banks of snow, the vast plains of ice, the great slumbering bergs in the distance. There were so few colors. It was all purples and grays. The sight struck like a burning spear through the heart. The many-colored sky of the Beforetime could not possibly have been replaced by this pathetic, desolate expanse that the world had become.

  And yet it was so. The night sky loomed above, black and foreboding. The stars gave him pause. They seemed larger than he remembered.

  Looking down he noticed the stone which he had used to shield himself these past twelve years, finding it nothing more than a tiny pebble. He laughed, for it had seemed such a vast prison only moments before. Bending closer, he could just make out the dull gray shimmer of its soul drawn deep within itself, an oily quivering mass. But it could not hide from him.

  He reached down and snuffed the soul. It offered little sustenance, practically useless, but there was a modicum of strength to gain from it. And he would require a lot more. Stones and snow and sands could not supply him with what he needed.

  He had survived these past twelve years, hidden in a pebble on the tundra. But he was running out of time, time running like water, falling, he must slow it down. He was vulnerable. He thought of the shaman who had released him, the one whose aura had burned so very brightly. That one knows I’m here, thought Vithrok. If she should come back and find me…

  Vithrok moved forward, slowly, slowly. His spirit moaned and creaked, straining unused muscles of soul.

  He caught a rustle on the ground before him, something moving among the broken, frost-covered fragments of shale. White on white, it was perhaps well-hidden to the normal eye but the spirit-vision outlined its soul clearly. Vithrok stared at it for a moment, mesmerized by the whorls of vitality that throbbed and flowed there in red and blue. A living soul.

  The hare shuddered, sensing that something was wrong. It jerked its head this way and that but couldn’t decide which way to run. Tensed for flight, its heart pounding wildly in blind panic, its blood boiling. It started off, striking out one way and then the other. Too late.

  Vithrok drank deep. The soul of the snow hare tasted bitter and disappointing. It was but a morsel.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE TUPILAQ

  The blue-gray sky was thick with clouds but there was no threat of storm in the air, only the smell of the sea prickling Alaana’s nostrils. A wide belt of froth and steam hugged the beach where the frozen land met the restless, deep-green water. Waves slapped noisily against the shore ice; the jagged blocks creaked and groaned as they shifted and rearranged.

  The voices of the Anatatook spring camp drifted toward water’s edge. Women sang cheerfully and hearty laughter from the men. The mood was light and hopeful. All were well-fed and happy.

  Alaana was caught between these two conflicting tides on the beach. On one hand the unrelenting power of nature, and on the other, the gentle souls of the people who persevered in the face of such frightful majesty.

  Something thumped painfully against her instep.

  “Tama!” she hissed. Her youngest daughter, six winters old, darted in and out between her legs, giggling and kicking up snow and sand. Her full name, Tamuanuaq, meant ‘The Little Mouthful.’

  “Be careful,” said Alaana. “You’ll drop the pup.”

  No sooner had she said it, but Tama stumbled on the ice-push and flopped down into the snow. With a startled yelp, the little dog tumbled across the heap of ice.

  Tamuanuaq was up on her feet again and running along the ridge. She never walked anywhere, but ran in little spurts broken only by a pause to consider what she was looking at, and then scooting off to the next destination, even if it left her making a circle. She went over the top of the ridge, presumably in search of the puppy, and then peeked up again.

  Her little smile made Alaana catch her breath. Her daughter’s face closely resembled Ben’s, though ballooned into childlike proportions that rounded the cheeks and enlarged the eyes. She was glad Tama hadn’t taken after her, with her plain features, slightly upturned nose and wide, thin-lipped mouth. Beneath the child’s playful expression Alaana caught a glimpse of her father’s strength.

  Tama wore a long doeskin anorak with rabbit trim. The leather was cracked and well-worn, having already belonged to several of the family’s children, but Tama couldn’t bear to part with it. For lack of a hood, the gusting winds of the Tongue sent her shoulder-length hair dancing wildly. It whipped in and out of her face, leaving wayward strands momentarily perched at odd angles. Now and again she blinked it out of her eyes with a little shake of her head, drawing her lower lip into her mouth, but she never paused to wipe it away.

  Alaana stepped over the ridge. The shoreline was littered with huge hip-bones and vertebrae left over from old whale hunts. A pair of arctic tern ran along on their short legs, tracking the patches of snow that still frosted the expanse of tan-colored sand. Tama plunged blindly ahead, startling the terns who squawked and jabbed their red beaks at her. Alaana didn’t need to hear the peeps of the chicks to know the birds were defending a nest.

  She scooped her daughter up and carried her away from the nesting shorebirds. Tama wriggled playfully out of her grasp, pointed at the birds and began singing a song about the snow starling. The words were mostly nonsense but went something like this:

  “Ava-tali-guuvaq, ava-tali-guuvaq.

  Guuvaq-guuvaq.”

  These were followed by a fair imitation of the little birds’ chirping, and some fluttering of the arms.

  The mother tern squawked even louder. Seeking a convenient distraction, Alaana plucked a rounded lump of shale from the beach.

  “Look,” she said, showing her daughter the size and shape of the rock.

  Alaana squeezed the rock in her hand. She could clearly see the spirit within the stone, a sleepy gray flicker of soul-light.

  “Brother Stone,” she said in the secret language of the shamans. “I ask a small favor Brother Stone.”

  She politely begged the rock’s indulgence for a temporary change of shape in exchange for the gift of a child’s smile. It had been a long time since the stone had witnessed much of anything, let alone a child’s happiness. The bargain struck, Alaana grunted with false exertion as she squeezed the stone, though she was doing nothing much at all. Small pebbles of shale began to trickle down through
her fingers as if she were wringing them from the rock.

  Tama squealed with delight.

  “There, is that not the most delightful smile you have ever seen?” asked the shaman of the stone. She bent down and scooped the fragments back up. “Thank you, Brother Stone.” She replaced the reconstituted rock back where she had found it, and they were both the better for the bargain.

  Alaana and her daughter resumed their walk along the shore, trailed by the perky little huskie pup. They passed Pilarqaq coming back the other way from gathering driftwood on the beach. The little girl darted between Alaana’s legs at sight of her aunt. It was a familiar game. Pilarqaq delightedly took up the role, hunching herself over, stretching her fingers into claws and doing her best to put on the wicked face of a crone.

  “Come here, my little parka squirrel!” she cackled, chasing Tama with a half-crouched gait. Tama giggled as she dodged her aunt and Alaana laughed as well. Pilarqaq made the most unlikely old witch, considering she was the most beautiful woman Alaana had ever seen. Her tiny nose was nearly lost in a valley between vast rounded cheeks, and her mouth wore a gentle smile more often than not, especially whenever one of her nieces or nephews were involved.

  “Look!” cried Tama. She flitted toward a large mound of sandstone which had a small tidal pool before it. Crouched at the edge of the pool was an ava. At first Alaana didn’t think her daughter had seen the creature, a delicate thing which stood only two hands tall. She presumed Tama had been drawn to the reflecting pool.

  “She’s cute,” said Tama. “Oh so lovable! Can I play?”

  Tama turned her beaming eyes upon her mother and Alaana nodded consent. She watched in amazement as her daughter scuttled over to the little thing and sat beside it. The ava, one of the little spirit-women who lived by the seashore, jumped back, startled. As a rule they were notoriously shy and generally harmless.