Orluvoq

by Benny Hinrichs

  The words worked on Puigor, but he couldn’t get his brain to figure out how it all connected.

  “I will know it. This is why I have come tonight. I have taken one of yours, and I will cast his name from this world. Nominal death. Once I have killed his name, I will watch his body die. Or not. And the world will know.”

  Puigor’s spine wilted, and his mother wailed. He rushed to relight his candle. The clan tensed and a child joined its cries to the woman. Eyes jumped from face to face. Who would be the one to speak against this flagrant corruption? One of the archons? One of the hunters?

  “Qummukarpoq.”

  The screaming stopped. Heads swung around, searching from under anxiety-knitted brows to see who had spoken.

  Puigor took a step toward the tyrant. “Leave us be.”

  A single eyebrow on the prince’s head quirked up as the people parted for Puigor. He regarded the blue flame in the young angakkuq’s hand then let the eyebrow drop. “No.”

  Through the tuuaaq fog, Puigor’s gut wrenched. A single syllable devoid of bluster, planted like a sky-scraping pillar that no eye might shy away from. The prince knew Puigor posed no threat, and he forced that knowledge down Puigor’s throat with a word.

  “Then… then take me instead. Let my father return home. The clan needs him.”

  “You seem to think I’ve come to bargain. I have not. Your offer amounts to another errand on my shoulders. However, if you wish to add your name to the list beside his, I will put it there myself.”

  Puigor’s tongue clung dumb in his mouth.

  The prince closed his eyes as if the matter were done. His nostrils pumped out thick breaths. The clansfolk passed around an unsettled look. Who had ever heard of a single man coming into a village, throwing out threats, then standing with closed eyes before the clan’s hunters? Yet none of them moved to apprehend him.

  A gasp sucked through the crowd. Qummukarpoq slid open his eyes.

  “What was that?” asked one of the women. The question picked up echoes from the others.

  The prince pointed to Puigor’s mother. “This woman. What is the name of her husband?”

  Several people drew breaths as if to make a pronouncement, then their faces crumbled to confusion. The prince smiled, a poison slash, and Puigor’s mother broke out in inconsolable wailing.

  Puigor stood stunned. He had gotten swept away in the rhetoric and hadn’t even tried to stop the sorcery. What did he even hold a candle for? The light it gave was a pittance for the light the prince’s took.

  Qummukarpoq spoke to silence the people. “I want you to listen closely when I say g̨͏k̛͡ì̶̕͝q̴̨͜ý͘͞͏p̶͏̶̸̀ó҉ų̴̧̢̛q͢n̵̷͟t̴̴g̢̀͘͘i͏̶̡͞p͘.”

  Gloved hands flew to cover ears. Some cried out. The prince allowed himself another small smile, then fixed his sight on Puigor, face a wicked playground of light and shadow.

  “Now for you.”

  Panic stabbed into Puigor. “Wait, what?” The prince made no reply other than to close his eyes. Puigor flung his mind into the defensive, frantically dragging his name into his deepest bastion then throwing up as many walls around it as possible. Unknown instinct drove as he stood without a clue whether an angakkuq could even muster defense.

  Another shock rippled through the clansfolk. Something pried at Puigor, but it quickly passed over. The prince opened his eyes.

  “Your name,” he demanded Puigor. “Say it.”

  “Um. Puigor?” I did it! Puigor thought. I blocked him.

  His kin flinched. They flinched at his very name and backed away from him. His victory rung hollow.

  Qummukarpoq’s voice dropped low. “The next time you come to bother me, Puigor, I will wrest your very name from you. Be happy I let you keep it now.”

  Puigor trembled and dropped to his knees. The last shred of tusk burned dead in his hand. The prince, the tyrant at the start of the world, turned in a flourish and strode into the sky.

  Nameless. The boy was nameless to all but himself.

  14

  Orluvoq

  Bootfalls creaked through the whining wind that had arisen. Orluvoq didn’t look up. There was no one else it could be. She remained on forearms and knees, head hung low.

  “I can't hear their voices anymore,” she said, trying to ignore the ringing in her ears. “I remember her saying once, ‘Orluvoq, don't let the dog lick inside your mouth.’ But I can't hear it. They speak to me no more. I… I don’t even know if I can see their faces any longer.

  “Where did they go? Does that mean their spirits are gone? Can you hear your mother’s voice? See your father’s face?”

  She awaited Nalor’s reply, but he never gave it. His silence galled her. She found her teeth gritted.

  “After all you just did to me, you can’t even grace me with a reply?” She raised her head, eyes level with his shins. “More fun. Remember saying that? It’d be more fun if I didn’t know what we were walking into?” She pushed herself up. “I think that you—”

  She stumbled back.

  It wasn’t Nalor.

  “I should kill you right here.” Orange candlelight played with shadow on the Madame’s glowering face. “I should punch your ugly witch face until it stops bleeding. I—” she cut off, seeing Orluvoq’s face for the first time. “Tiaavuluk! You… you’re beyond beautiful.”

  Two tears spilled onto Orluvoq’s cheeks, hot, then immediately cold. “I didn’t want to do it. It was only supposed to be a bit. A tiny bit from each girl. But once it started, I couldn’t stop. I drank it all. I want to give it back, but I can’t. It doesn’t work that way. I… I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”

  The Madame’s voice grew distant. “So this is what the beauty of a dozen women buys…”

  Orluvoq scoured the barely lit face for signs. For traces of mercy. Was that awe commingled with… hate? Certainly none of the convivial air that bubbled off her back at the igloos.

  Fingers flashed hot across her face, the sting of the slap mixing with the bite of the frigid air. Orluvoq recoiled to the ice.

  “You,” said the Madame, “are coming right back with me, and never touching a candle again.” She thrust hands through Orluvoq’s parka and trousers, extracting every tuuaaq taper she could find. Orluvoq watched in a numb stupor.

  “Do you know how much business you’ve just cost me?” the Madame spat. “How many of those girls will starve now? No, your broken psychopath brain probably doesn’t think past whatever prick of a man you think this little facade is going to land you. Let’s go.” She yanked on the stunned Orluvoq’s hood.

  When Orluvoq’s bulk didn’t budge from the ice, the Madame lashed out another open palm. Orluvoq’s head cracked to the side. Pain. Stupid pain that knocked her mind off her moral woes for a moment.

  “Get up.” The Madame pulled again. “Or I will slap your face until I get back every drop of beauty you took from my girls.”

  Orluvoq struggled to her feet, pulling her hood back over her head. Under the Madame’s brusque guidance, she began stumbling back whence she came. The den in which the monster Orluvoq had been born.

  How had it happened? She had held the reins to tuuaaq, but as quickly as she tried to direct its course, they were jerked from her. She wanted to try again—to prove that she was more than a single night of mistakes. Start with something a touch simpler. Simultaneously, she gagged on the thought of more tuuaaq slipping down her throat. The monster, she feared, would claw its way from the womb anew each time she bent the azure fire.

  Perhaps she need not worry. If the Madame were to revoke her access to tuuaaq, like had happened five years ago, the monster would remain veiled. Perhaps the night of her crimes had lived its short life, and now was come the day of her repentance, to be spent ever pleasing hordes of faceless men.

  After a couple minutes of walking, the Madame’s constant dribble of curses dried up, and she pulled Orluvoq to a halt. She held the candle out in front of them, squinting at the dark.


  “Do you see anything?” she asked.

  Orluvoq strained to glimpse any anomalies on the barren horizon. Not so much as a flicker on the ill-lit landscape. “Nothing.”

  The Madame’s mouth twisted downward. Her candle was but a short burn from extinguishment. “Something’s off.” She slid her eyes closed to quest out with aid from the candle, Orluvoq intuited.

  The flame sputtered cold; its meager but substantial light snuffed to nowhere. The Madame’s eyes flew open, and she released Orluvoq in a panicked rush to relight the taper. Movement ahead drew Oluvoq’s eyes away from the clumsy attempts at ignition.

  Drapes of shadow unfurled before them in bulbous ripples, cutting through the aurora-tinged air like wrathful clouds severing earth from sun. From the bosom of the dissipating shadows stepped a man bearing a blue flame. Orluvoq relaxed at Nalor’s appearance. The Madame tensed, puffing out a nerve-filled breath cloud.

  “The girl comes with me.” Nalor’s voice flowed from the shadows curling around them.

  With a pinky still wrapped around her composure, the Madame replied, “She—she owes me a great deal. She is mine.” She succeeded in lighting the tusk, and just as soon, Nalor extinguished it again.

  “I am not asking.” He turned to Orluvoq. “Let’s go.”

  Orluvoq tottered away from her captor and followed the man she had been despairing only minutes earlier across the tundra.

  “No!”

  Orluvoq’s parka groped at her throat as the Madame grabbed her from behind. She let loose a choked cry, and Nalor turned.

  “Did you not hear me? She comes with me.” He made a gesture and the Madame dropped to the ice, hands distorting to clutch at nothing.

  “Orluvoq,” said the tirigusuusik. “Take her candles. Now.”

  She bustled to do his bidding, extricating candles with slightly more delicacy than the Madame had afforded her. She stashed the tapers in various pockets made for the very act and backed up to stand beside Nalor.

  The Madame coughed a fit as he released her, glaring hatred at him. “You’ll never be able to go anywhere again, sir. I’ll tell everyone I meet about this. You will be hunted.” She pointed at Orluvoq. “She may be a dumb wench, but that’s all she is. You’re the only mind her head knows. Don’t think this ends with you walking away.”

  Nalor regarded her with pinched brow. “Tell everyone? No. No, you won’t.” His eyes shut. His breath pumped in concentration.

  The Madame gasped, hands flying to her throat. Over and over she moved her jaw, but nothing save breath came out. Orluvoq watched with a turned head, as if she wanted to look away but couldn’t quite detach.

  Nalor opened his eyes and looked at the pathetic woman.

  “What did you do?” asked Orluvoq.

  “Our lovely hostess here expressed how eager she was to let her voice out, so I helped her.”

  “You took her voice?” she watched the woman beat the snow in anger, face awash with tears.

  Nalor turned and walked.

  In the mist-thin green light, Orluvoq stared upon the woman of ragged breaths, deliberating whether she ought do something. Frills of shame already buzzed along her bones from a night much lived. What was one more stripe?

  She turned and walked.

  A fresh sheet of snow dampened her footfalls as she trod after Nalor on the forlorn plains. Thoughts pooled in her mouth only to drain down her throat. He walked with too much aplomb. Every step an ensign planted, averring that deference was his due. What could she say that he wouldn’t discount?

  A long while they walked, looking, Nalor said, for a cave they could bed down in. While caves evaded them, Orluvoq tangled with more conversation starters. Anything to extract a shred of closure.

  “What would you do if I ran?” she asked.

  The question slid off his back. Or it seemed. Several strides later, he spoke. “What did I do the last time you ran away, just now?”

  Her stomach turned, the confirmation of her fears spilling in. She could flee, and he could follow. Their march continued.

  “Orluvoq,” he broke the silence. “I am not your captor. I won’t chase you from Nunapisu to Qilaknakka and back. I won’t compel the beasts of the ice and fowls of the air to harry you like common game. I won’t tie the aurora around your ankle and reel you in to my igloo in the sky. If you truly wish to be gone, then make it so.”

  Breath poured heavy from her nostrils. Her hand itched for a tuuaaq taper. Run. She could hare until her sleep-hungry body gave out. Maybe she could make it back to Paarsisioq and Kitornak by dawnlight. It could all be over. Naught but a dream that ferried her through winter’s long night.

  But her hand made no move. Her feet gathered no speed. Her mind hovered between the here and the there. And in hovering, it chose the here. For somewhere slumped within her depths, she knew that if she resorted to hiding again, she would bleed away her vital years in the blackened heart of obscurity.

  “You knew,” she said at last. “You knew that it would take me over and that I’d end up sucking the whole place dry.”

  “I know a great many things, so I can see where your confusion stems from. But no. I did not know you would go and drain the whole warren.”

  She worked the muscles of her jaw. Truth, or convenient fabrication? And what could she do in the case of either? Just as she’d attested to the Madame, no length of tuuaaq would force what was stolen back into the dispossessed. What was done was done.

  The contorted faces that had then seemed a trivial artifact of her satisfaction paraded now across her mind, dragging her through the quag of terror she had churned up. Skin deep. The flimsy justification she had propped up for undertaking the theft at all. But she had seen the truth on their faces. Beauty was skin deep, but its roots stretched into the spirit. She had torn it out of them with grace tantamount to ripping all their hairs out in one draw.

  Her scalp crawled.

  “I’ve been giving your condition a lot of thought.” Nalor spoke as if he’d never stopped. “I’ve introduced a dozen and more people to the ways of the tirigusuusik, and not a one has ever reacted like that.”

  “Condition? You say it like I’m sick.”

  “Something like that,” he responded. “Everyone is born with talent for the candles. Often that talent sums to nothing, but in cases like myself, the talent is something substantial. In cases like yourself, it’s even greater.

  “It is my supposition that you are not only sensitive, but hypersensitive to the aurora’s power. So much that when you burn it both outside and inside, it’s as if the aurora itself is using you as a conduit to join itself to life.”

  “And what does any of that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m still working on it.” They made more footprints. “As the narwhals feed on the aurora, the excess they eat grows into their tusk, yes?”

  She nodded, then realized she was behind him. “Right.”

  “But what really is the aurora? What is it made of?”

  It hearkened back to their earlier conversations on the auroral origins, but she suspected it might just be a distraction technique this time. “That’s not the type of thing people can know. Plenty of people have been inside it and still have no clue.”

  “You’ve forgotten one thing in your calculations. I’ve been inside it. And I think I know.”

  Her worries about scathed women, blistered feet, and abscessed morals lifted slightly. “Oh?”

  “What are the three parts of a person?”

  “Body, name, and spirit. You’ve already asked me that.”

  “Then let me ask.” He turned to face her. “What are the three parts of all things?”

  She halted before him, lit by falling green and rising blue. “All things have three parts?”

  “What are they?”

  Orluvoq looked around, searching the snow for any hints. “Body, name, and spirit?” The words didn’t want to come out, but there they were.

  “Precisely.”


  “Wait, really?”

  “I believe that the world turns in an endless cycle. The first arc of its rotation is that.” He gestured above to Arsarneq gleaming. “Void of all but potential. And the second arc is this.” He swept his over his body. “The void given shape; body. Given identity; name. And given life; spirit. Snow and creature; ocean and air. All were once the same. But why do we die? What lies beyond the final heartbeat?

  “As I said. It is the cycle that turns without surcease. Once this thing that is everything has become something, it desires to return to nothing so that it might cycle through again and become something greater. When it is nothing, it forgets what it once was and simply desires to be something. Anything.

  “That is why we can work the candles. We burn the very fabric of life itself. And it is so eager to become anything that it becomes part of us; part of the world. And we become more than we could be alone.”

  He frowned. “But you. You seem to be more attuned to it than anyone I’ve met. I think with most people, it’s like the essence of the aurora is running through chest-high drifts of snow. But with you, it runs as if over hard-packed ice. I haven’t made sense of it yet.”

  Orluvoq had made far less sense of it. “So you’re saying I shouldn’t work the blue flame?”

  Nalor grinned. “On the contrary. You may very well make the greatest tirigusuusik the world has known.”

  Her face twisted into a moue. “And what if I don’t want to? What if I hate what I did to those girls?”

  “Success rarely accompanies one’s first trial.”

  “What if I hate what you did to the girls?”

  His head pulled back. “And what is to be meant by that?”

  “You took me there to do your dirty work, then you go and just take your pick of the flock and bed her down, mister most distinguished guest. And you didn’t even pay!” She would much rather no one be in the situation of those women, but they could at the very least be compensated for their miseries.

  “Appearances carry import. Do you know how they would have reacted had I insisted I sleep in the women’s quarters?”