by Ken Altabef
Tooky blushed. “That’s beautiful. He carried you away and you fell into his arms!”
Aolajut snickered, shaking her head slightly.
“It wasn’t quite that simple,” said Higilak.
“I was always told ‘first comes marriage, then comes love’.”
Tookymingia was so young. Poor girl, thought Higilak, given away to a husband from a strange village. “My point,” she said, “is that I am also from the south. It took me a long while to get used to the women’s vigil of the hunt. I think you’re doing well for your first time.”
“In a way this is a first for you, too, Higilak,” remarked Aolajut. “Alaana never went out before. You don’t seem very worried for her, in that skinny little boat.”
“I needn’t fear for Alaana. The ocean is her friend, and the fishes, and the ice floes and the winds themselves. She’ll not die this day.”
“I don’t understand,” said Tooky, “If it’s so dangerous, why is my husband so obsessed with the whale?”
“You know nothing of men,” said Aolajut flatly.
Tooky’s pout curled into a wry smile, “I know something.”
“Yes,” snapped Aolajut, “The same something I’ve known for twenty turnings of the sky. Nothing new. And much less than in former days. Tugtutsiak is not his younger self any more, however he may pretend.”
“Noona!” called Higilak, in an attempt to cool the tone of the conversation by way of distraction. She gestured for Alaana’s daughter to approach. Noona dashed across the wet ground with her little brother Kinak, an eight-year-old boy, in tow.
“Where is your sister, the Little Mouthful?” asked Higilak.
Noona shrugged her shoulders. “At the beach. Playing.”
Higilak clapped her hands sharply. “Go and find her. I told her to stay close to the camp.”
“So did I,” said Noona. “I told her, ‘The sea monster will stuff you in its amaut and take you home, if you play alone on the beach’.”
Even though she knew Noona was joking, Higilak found the thought a frightening one. “She shouldn’t be alone. Not while the hunt is on. Noona, go and fetch your sister. I’ll look after Kinak.”
Noona, ten years old, was apparently not interested in a walk to the beach. She stomped her foot in the snow.
A tremendous crack resounded across the straits of the Tongue. Noona stared down at her boot for a moment as if wondering whether she had caused the terrific noise, though it was obvious the sound had come from the coastline.
“What’s that, Old Mother?” the little girl asked.
Higilak cocked her head. “Something is wrong at sea.”
In a moment they all heard it. An eerie whine slicing down the coast from the north. A long, lonely wail like the wind out on the flats at night, but it was not the wind. It was the ice.
The women remained fixed in place. They would not turn to look toward the sea.
The keening whine rose in pitch. The ice was on the move, driven by a force of nature. And such powerful forces could never be denied.
Tookymingia burst into tears. “Oh, no!”
The others looked sharply at her. Her face reddened, her eyes squeezed shut. She was weeping.
The cry of the ice grew louder as it stretched and strained, rising, rising, until their ears could stand it no longer. The sound that followed, a tremendous boom that nearly knocked them all from their seats, came as no relief.
There could be no pretense now. Aolajut stood up, her hands balled into fists. She was the first to realize what must have happened. “What did you do?” she roared. “What did you do?”
Tooky choked on her sobs. “We couldn’t stop ourselves. Oh, this is all my fault. It’s all my fault. I didn’t want to but…he was so eager and I thought…”
The earth and snow beneath their feet began to tremble.
Aolajut seized Tooky by the shoulders and shook the poor young wife like a rag doll. “What did you do?”
“Oh, no. No!” cried Tooky between sobs. “We made love the night before the hunt.”
The entire peninsula spasmed as the pack ice rammed the shore. The tents shook apart and collapsed. Gaping cracks opened along the ground, cutting through the Anatatook camp. Angry sea water rose through the newly formed breaks, and the women screamed.
CHAPTER 6
DISASTER AT SEA
The whale churned the water in its death struggle. It burst through the ice directly in front of Tugtutsiak’s umiak.
Alaana was thrown against the side of Ipalook. This was not simply the fight of a hunted beast. Everything was becoming clear — the whale’s strangely violent reaction, the headman’s bad luck with the line, and now this. There could be only one explanation. Tugtutsiak had broken faith with the spirits.
The whale’s head came up, splintering the ice sheet. It made no sound as it turned in the water, casting them all a long glance with its gigantic baleful eye. The warmth had gone out of it, leaving a gaze as cold as the icy depths.
It went under again, sending the two opposing ice floes on either side crashing back against each other. They collided with tremendous force, sending ice roaring up out of the sea.
The captains screamed at the others to heave to with the paddles, get the boats out of the way, hurry, hurry.
For Tugtutsiak it was already too late. His crew had been swept off into the sea, and flailed helplessly in the waters. The headman flung himself back into the rounded bottom of his vessel as the fore bench tilted forward and down. The front of the ship was pulled under the water. Tugtutsiak slid along the bottom, held aloft only by his grip on the hand braces. Knowing the strength of that grip, Alaana thought he would be safe until the swell receded and the boat righted itself. Not so. The floes stood up again and came crashing toward the center, the boat trapped between them. With an unearthly booming crack the ice sheets smashed together like two gigantic hands clapping and cut the boat and its captain in half.
The front half of the vessel, still sitting above water, lurched backward. Its shell of wrecked bone and shredded walrus hide still held the upper body of Tugtutsiak, trailing gouts of blood and strewn intestine. Alaana watched helplessly as the man’s eyes glazed over and his fingers let loose the holds on the collapsed sides of the boat. He slid into the waters and went straight down.
The crew of his boat survived. The men were pulled out of the icy waters with lance poles and hooks meant for towing the carcass of the whale. They crowded into the two remaining umiaks. The crews sculled for shore as fast as their weary arms could take them. Tugtutsiak’s men, still facing danger of freezing to death, hurried to strip off their wet clothes.
The death of Tugtutsiak played out over and over again in Alaana’s mind. There had been no last words at the end, no recriminations or apologies, just a look of helpless resignation on the headman’s face.
She bent over the shivering body of Oaniak, Tugtutsiak’s youngest son, and pressed her mouth over the boy’s eye sockets to help keep his eyes from freezing.
Once the boats had been hauled ashore, the men at last tended to warming the frozen sailors. As soon as her boots touched ground Alaana knew something was terribly wrong. It was as if the soil and snow held a dire message for her, a warning of tragedy that hit home with heartbreaking clarity. Her eyes flashed. She tore along the coastline, her wet boots struggling against the sand and slush as if the land itself wanted to hold her back, to protect her from what she might find.
At the sandstone cliff by the beach she saw the body of her youngest daughter lying face down in the little tidal pool. The ava stood behind her, looking down. There was a blank expression on the little doll-like face, but as Alaana burst upon the scene with an agonized roar, the doll stepped back.
“What have you done?” she raged. She yanked her little girl’s head out of the water and turned her over on the rocky sand. She already knew Tama was dead because her soul-light was gone. Gone. That fiery spark, that ineffable radiance that danced behind her eyes and infused her sm
ile. It was gone. She refused to believe it.
“What have you done?”
The little sprite shrank back, terrified at the shaman’s wrath. Her tiny eyes, expressionless and black as stone set in the doughy surface of the face, bulged wide. Her slit of a mouth moued in horror.
"AAAAAHHH!" the ava shrieked, as if upon waking from a dream and finding herself confronted with a living nightmare, a monster of flesh and blood.
She lurched about in a panic, looking down at what she had done, and then at the angry shaman. Her tiny feet carried her in a little circle in front of the cave.
Alaana forced herself to calm down. It was inconceivable that this little spirit could have drowned her daughter. The ava were never malicious. It was not in them to hurt a human being.
“Why have you done this?” she asked flatly. “I want to know why.”
The ava’s tiny black eyes blinked and she swallowed a gulp of air. “The Whale-Man,” she whispered in helpless torment, “The Whale-Man told me to do it.”
It was not her fault. Any thought of taking revenge fled from Alaana’s mind. It was not the ava’s fault. It was her own. The little ava backed away and went stumbling toward her cave dwelling.
And then there was only Tamuanuaq. Alaana staggered and sunk to her knees in the sand. She took her daughter’s tiny hand, caressing the pale flesh with trembling fingers.
“Tamuanuaq.”
She swept her daughter’s body up in her arms, pressing the cold, wet flesh to her breast. Pain cutting, tearing, clawing at her. Shredding her soul, setting it aflame. Tamuanuaq. Their Little Mouthful.
“No!” she roared, shaking her head. “No, no!”
She buried Tama’s face against her chest. She could not accept this. She was the shaman, and not without powers of her own. She would storm the spirit world, she would journey across the great divide, to the far lands, to the realm of death itself and she would bring her back. She would face down the Whale-Man, or Sedna of the seas, her scorpion husband, anyone or anything.
She broke down and sputtered, choking on both her sobs and her foolishness. She could do none of those things. She was less than a speck of dust as compared to those great spirits. She was nothing to them. Their will was inviolable. At best she might beg them, plead with them, and hope the Whale-Man could be reasoned with.
She laid Tama down on the sand. Kneeling, she tore open the front of her parka, sending a pair of caribou ear amulets flying. Alaana did not feel the numbing arctic cold. Instead, her body was aflame.
“You should kill me,” she said weakly. “You should kill me!” She flung her words out at the sea.
But it was no use. In the end the judgment of the turgats was final. And it was just. They had killed Tugtutsiak for his transgression, whatever it had been. And they had taken from her, because she had not prevented it, because she had made promises and failed to keep them. Because she was the shaman, and she had done the worst thing a shaman could ever do; she had become complacent.
Tamuanuaq was gone, forever gone.
“Mother?”
Alaana looked up to see her daughter’s ghost hovering over the body. She looked in death much the same as she had in life. The crazy mop of hair, those bright eyes, a puzzled expression. It was a heartbreaking sight. Alaana couldn’t bear to look, but she could not take her eyes away.
“Mother, what happened to me?”
She could not speak. Strangled with grief, she could not answer.
“Mother?”
CHAPTER 7
VITHROK KILLS
Of the three shamans who served the Yupikut, Anerjlik was the youngest. Shamanism had brought him little glory and much discomfort. In his heart he often desired to return to his former life as a simple hunter. But he heard the voices of the spirits as they sang their songs on the wind and whispered to him at night. They told him that someday he would be respected and valued even above the other two. It would be Anerjlik, the little boy with the clubbed foot and the big ears, who would lead them.
So now he found himself alone on the tundra in the dead of night, trapped by a sudden spring squall. The wind blew ferociously at the tiny tent he had erected out on the flats. Always it was Anerjlik who was called upon to make the long journeys, to go out into the wastes in search of the herbs and flowers that the shamans used, to suffer the wind and cold in the lonely hours.
Anerjlik had just fallen asleep when a windstorm blew suddenly up out of a cloudless night sky. It roared across the plain, rattling his caribou-hide tent nearly off the poles. He threw aside his blanket and went out, shivering, into the night.
His sled was firmly pegged. His team burrowed down beside it, making a warm bed for themselves in the drift. But when the winds gusted like this, throwing snow in the air with such force, it was too easy for the dogs to get completely buried and suffocate in their sleep. With a weary sigh, Anerjlik began to scoop a ventilation hole out of the mound, hoping to make short work of it and return to his bed.
The wind beat at his back like a wintry hand tapping on his shoulder. When he turned to look, the surge threw back the hood of his parka and hurled snow in his face. The Moon was high in the sky and bright, the long stretches of unbroken plain desolate and empty.
When he had finally punched his way through to the dogs, a pair of nondescript huddling masses of brown and gray fur, the slumbering animals didn’t even bother to stir. They were snug in their beds, much like all the other Yupikut back at the camp, sleeping soundly while he, poor Anerjlik, struggled on in the cold and wet.
Anerjlik turned suddenly around, seized by a vague sense of terror. His hackles raised, his skin tingled sharply, but his inquisitive glance was met only by whirling snow and merciless wind. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling of danger close at hand.
He looked all around, but there was nothing on the plain except sweeping drifts of snow and ice, the bergs in the distance and the black sky, now streaked with dark gray clouds that rolled in front of the half Moon. And yet, the smell of burning embers stung his nostrils, the bitter reek of something so old and rotten it seemed completely alien to this world. A whispered threat, a malign presence.
He listened intently in the special way he had learned. He found the spirits conspicuously silent. The wind died down with a low moan; the flurry of snow drifted back to the ground, leaving behind a whirling mist. As the moonlight illuminated the creeping surface of the mist Anerjlik watched its slow crawl along the flats, thickening, seething in unnatural currents, like boiling water. And in its midst, a pair of smoldering eyes burning as embers.
The young shaman wanted to scream out but fear stole his voice. He shook his head. The fiery eyes disappeared, if they had ever been present at all.
He felt a momentary embarrassment at having been afraid. The shaman was a man who walked alone. He should be used to that by now. His eyes drifted to the packed sled where his weapons, both mystical and practical, were bundled away. He should get his war spear at the least. And yet he found he could not move his legs. He stood staring at the silvery mist. For the mist seemed to be gathering itself up a few paces ahead of him. The shifting clouds played with the moonlight, waxing and waning, the silver mist flowing. Silently it rose into a man-shape, swathed in bulky furs, standing nearly twice as tall as Anerjlik. It blocked his way to the tent, but he no longer cared for his bed or sleeping furs. He backed slowly away in the direction of the sled. The weapons.
The clouds shifted. A burst of moonlight revealed the spectre’s face.
Anerjlik sucked in a gasp of chill air and drifting frost. Such a face! The features were that of a Tunrit, a race of supermen who ruled in the dark time before human beings had even existed. There was no mistaking the oversized head, the prominent brow and jaw line, the deep-set ferocious eyes of that primordial race. And now those orange-yellow eyes, blazing in the twilight like a pair of malevolent stars, held him immobile.
The spectral Tunrit raised its arms, holding them out in front of its gleamin
g face. The fingers, scarred and bent by years of frostbite, resembled twisted, black claws.
Anerjlik’s jaw gaped in horror. The drifting snow blew into his open mouth. All the air was sucked out of him. He could not even scream.
***
The shaman’s soul was a jolt of white-hot flame. It tasted like a crystalline draught from an adamantine stream, like birds on the wing amid dizzying flight, like liquid fire surging and swelling, aching for release. It smacked of freedom.
Vithrok had known Anerjlik was a shaman, but he had not expected this. The man’s inua was not simply a human soul. It held something more; it had the angakua, the special light of the shaman. It was a shimmering fragment of what had gone before. It was a little piece of the Beforetime as manifested in this mundane, mud-splattered existence. A tiny bit of paradise.
This new energy jolted Vithrok, rocking the very core of his being.
He threw down the crumpled rag that was once a man. The supremely glorious, unbearably bitter taste of the Beforetime rang out in his mind.
Memories ripped through him, flashing, searing, burning. The memory of the Rift was the sharpest of all. It was a knife thrust through the heart. It was a screaming agony. The Great Rift.
There had been a war in heaven.
It was unthinkable. They all shared the same essence, the same thoughts communicated directly soul to soul. How could such a thing happen? And so quickly fanned from flame to conflagration?
An argument had taken shape, within a paradise where ideas were directly translated into action, arising from a stray thought that could not, or certainly should not, belong. An idea that seemed to be in direct violation of all they knew. And one soul rose up, gathering an immense payload of energy. Its idea rebuffed, it became as a gigantic, seething black cloud with a million tendrils flashing darkness and despair. Anger embodied. Scorn personified.
Another rose up to meet it. An opposite force. This soul also had been one of the many only moments before, if time could be said to have had any meaning at all. A power of light to rail against the darkness.