The Calling

by Ken Altabef

  Civiliaq, for all his arrogance, possessed the ability to enter the trance state on demand. Already his face had gone blank, his clean-shaven chin slumped against his bare chest.

  Old Manatook huffed. Headstrong fool. He should have waited.

  Closing his eyes, he took up his own power chant. He quickened his heartbeat, blunted his breathing — these alterations of the body helped prepare his mind for journeying and seeing in the realms beyond. It was a familiar trip, a breach he had leapt in spirit many times before.

  As his own spirit guardian Tornarssuk, who was the avatar of the polar bears, spent much time in the depths of the earth, the way was quickly opened before him. Old Manatook envisioned the entrance as a swirling vortex just below his knees where they rested on the woven mat. To match his accelerated heartbeat, the vortex spun faster and faster. The pack snow became soft and immaterial as it whirled, and the impenetrable ever-frost dissolved away, as did the solid rock of the world itself.

  Old Manatook’s inuseq stepped out of his body and left it behind, an empty shell of flesh and blood and bone. He went traveling down the tube created by the spinning vortex of his imagination, passing through concentric rings of rock and ice circling an endless void.

  A barrage of new and unpleasant sensations, sensed with neither ears nor eyes but by his outflung mind itself, assaulted the shaman’s soul as he entered the Underworld.

  The scene was cast entirely in odd shades of gray that alternately shimmered, glowed, or shone with absolute darkness. He entered a series of caves below the earth. Some were dimly lit and others lay swathed in darkness; some had water running through them and others did not. Seen up close the surfaces of the rock walls held weird textures that did not exist in ordinary reality; they were not smooth and glistening, but made of innumerable tiny spikes in agitated motion. The water that trickled down was not water at all, but grainy particles of dust each with a will of its own, marking a chaotic pattern of movement, flowing down and up and in a sideways crawl along the rock.

  Caught between the unfamiliar and the unknown, the mood of this place was as dangerous and dark as any he had ever experienced. In this world without scent, his imagination supplied the pungent smell of scorched stone as lord over all.

  Kuanak awaited him in a large dark cavern that rang with the howling of demons and the melancholy songs of dead men. Wolf Head’s spirit-form possessed a distinctly more feral character than his ordinary appearance. His hair flew long and free, the gray folds of fur that lined his parka in the normal reality merged inseparably with the lines of his face. His eyes shone with a strange golden tint. In his unfettered hands he held the power staff.

  “Civiliaq?” asked Old Manatook.

  “He’s gone ahead,” said Kuanak. “I can sense him. He’s not far, but we have to hurry.”

  Old Manatook called out in the way the shamans spoke through the air over distance. “Civiliaq, wait!”

  Civiliaq’s answer drifted back. “Nonsense, I’ll have done with this long before either of you old men catch up.”

  “Fool!” roared Old Manatook.

  A swarm of ragged, bat-like creatures cut across the cavern. Old Manatook recognized them as the corrupted souls of women who had died in childbirth. Their acid guano spattered down at the two shamans, threatening to eat away at the skin of their soul-men with its unrelenting taint of remorse and bitter regret.

  “Away!” shouted Old Manatook. The fickle tatterdemalions proved more afraid of the shamans than intent on mischief. They darted quickly away to their desolate caves and lonely roosts.

  “Hurry,” said Kuanak. He sidestepped a crumbling altar whose face depicted one of the foul, monstrous creatures who made their home in the Underworld.

  The walls of the next chamber were composed of fleshy skin covered with shimmering gray scales. Old Manatook balked at the delay as he and Kuanak fought their way through vast congeries of psychic webs and tendrils that rang of guilt and shame and the sting of missed opportunities. The going was slow, and Old Manatook kept a sharp eye along the shadows for the weaver of such a web, though no such monster presented itself. It was too easy to fall into a trap here. Too many evil and perverted things lay in wait in this wretched place.

  As he batted the dusty obstructions from their path, Old Manatook’s deepest worries were realized. He sensed Civiliaq had reached the enemy’s lair and had engaged the fever demon on his own.

  According to his distant perceptions the monster was large and formidable, consisting of a vast and indistinct smoky haze, ragged sooty breathing, and a pervasive stench of rotting meat and piss and blood.

  Civiliaq perhaps envisioned something else, for Old Manatook heard him think, cryptically, “Only a woman.”

  “Don’t be a fool!” Old Manatook projected the warning across the distance. “Appearances may mislead.”

  Civiliaq fearlessly stood his ground. The younger shaman’s confidence was as much an asset as his overbearing arrogance was weakness. The lone black feather with which he was so fond of pointing out the transgressions of others existed on this plane as an obsidian dagger. He held the blade upright before him, in a steady hand. The spirit helper within the dagger purred, showing itself hungry for demon blood. Its name was Tuqutkaa, a fierce and loyal servant, having aided its master in slaying many a demon in days past.

  With an arrogant chuckle Civiliaq unleashed a group of his spirit helpers at the monster. These were airborne barbs made of parts of wild auks — each an odd mixture of clumped feathers and beak and claw — that squawked savagely as they darted forward. The demon made short work of them, sending beaks and streamers of bloodied entrails buzzing about the cavern.

  Tuqutkaa growled. Civiliaq stepped forward with the dagger, but when the demon-woman turned and smiled at him, his face ripened with doubt and wilted with fear. Old Manatook and Kuanak, still rushing to the scene of the battle, both sensed Civiliaq’s fatal flaw. His was an underlying fear that he wasn’t good enough. A weakness he covered with flash and bravado, but never completely laid to rest. Doubt and fear.

  Old Manatook’s impressions of the scene were interrupted as, in the next cavern, a pack of itgitlit rushed to meet them. These creatures, wild dogs with human heads and hands, were eager to attack Manatook, sensing an instinctual enemy. But they hesitated in their charge, leery of the wolf-like Kuanak. Hesitation most often proved fatal in the Underworld, and the same held true for the itgitlit. In a fit of snarling rage, Kuanak kicked them out of the way.

  They found Civiliaq’s inuseq where it lay on the floor of the next chamber. Old Manatook bent to him, sensing immediately that his spirit was crushed, with little spark left to cling to life. He turned to Kuanak for aid, thinking perhaps between the two of them they might be able to heal their friend.

  “No use,” said Kuanak, “the strain would be too great. To try and save him we must pull back, and then all will be lost.”

  Civiliaq’s spirit-man offered his familiar dry chuckle. “Too late. I’ve made the same mistake yet again.”

  “You should know by now, you needn’t prove yourself to us,” said Old Manatook.

  Civiliaq let out a heart-rending groan. “Miserable pride. And in the end, it proved me false. I wasn’t good enough.”

  Old Manatook felt a rising and dangerous panic. “We must strike together, we three before it is too late.”

  Civiliaq shook his head sadly.

  “We must stand together,” repeated Old Manatook.

  “Too late,” said Kuanak.

  Civiliaq was dead. His spirit-man shriveled up before their very eyes, shrinking away to the thin, dry consistency of a rind of shedded tree bark. Trapped here forever, his soul would never know peace.

  Old Manatook growled with rage.

  Kuanak picked up the obsidian blade.

  CHAPTER 3

  ON SILA’S WINGS

  To Kigiuna and the others watching in front of the karigi, the fate of Civiliaq became immediately known. His head lolled life
lessly on his chest. His face rapidly darkened, taking on a deep black color that engulfed his spiritual tattoos. In an accelerated form of disease, his cheeks and forehead erupted into flocks of blisters so numerous they ran and flowed into each other like melting tallow as the skin burned itself away. A gigantically swollen tongue, wracked with pustules, slid out between his lips.

  His wife shrieked.

  The shaman’s belly opened in a wide slit and his guts poured forth, spilling out in a bloody rush onto the crust of snow.

  Alaana writhed uneasily on the sleeping platform in her family’s tent, her head rocked by a dull throbbing as if it were a wheel being rolled back and forth along a patch of rough ice. Sweat stung as it dripped into her eyes, propelled by an uncontrollable shivering that left her breath ragged and desperate between the spasms. Was that her mother’s voice calling softly to her, there and then gone, lost beneath the ever louder thumping of her own heartbeat? Alaana could not be sure. Her pulse was quick and growing quicker, like the pounding of a crazy man beating at the drum.

  I’m going to die, she thought. This is the end. No more Mother or Father. Gone her brothers Maguan and Itoriksak, and her beloved Avalaaqiaq. All gone.

  She was breathing hard and fast, but like a ladle dipping only shallowly at the pot there was not enough air. Helplessness and despair lay heavily upon her, a pair of sleeping furs so hot and smothering, so inexorable in their downward pull, she had no means to resist. And above all the pounding, pounding of that drum.

  With a tremendous gust of wind the roof panel of their house, a double layer of brown and tan caribou hide, blew skyward.

  Alaana felt herself lifted up, naked out of bed, nudged suddenly this way and that, pushed higher and higher by a multitude of unseen hands that seemed to be made of air. Up and up she went. As the cool evening draft rushed past her face a moment of inescapable panic took hold. From this new height she could see her body where it lay on the platform. Her mother, sobbing, bent over it.

  That startling vision receded in a jerky fashion as she continued to be buffeted on the insistent wind; she could feel it tugging at her soul from a hundred directions at once, pushing, nudging, carrying her higher.

  As Alaana kept on rising up, the breath caught in her lungs. She realized she was not breathing at all, did not need to breathe as the thump, thump of her rapid heartbeat grew fainter and fainter and she rose higher and higher, leaving her body behind, leaving it all behind.

  The thought of death terrified her, but there was nothing she could do about it. Resignation began to slowly quell the fear. In fact, she realized, it felt not so bad at all. All the discomforts had been left behind — the pains in the head, the labored breathing, her aching limbs would trouble her no more.

  Alaana marveled at the full expanse of the Anatatook spring settlement as it lay sprawled out below. A crowd of people had gathered in front of the karigi. She could see with incredible clarity every detail of the entire village, nestled in the curl of the river as it stretched out to the north. From such a height the arrangement of tents and enclosures, the kennels and meat racks, formed an oddly organic shape like a baby asleep and nestled comfortably in the folds of the tundra. It all seemed so small. And suddenly the great fear of dying left her completely. For who could be afraid of dying when they were flying through the air?

  She had often gazed upward, imagining herself a bird, a ruddy plover or ptarmigan or perhaps one of the great gray gulls sailing over the sea. She had wondered what it would feel like to soar through the sky weightless and totally free. And in this wondrous moment she came to know that exaltation.

  “Sila.” It was a warm and calming sound, a voice which was in fact a multitude of voices, a great buzzing chorus comprised of every voice she had ever heard. In that voice was the trill and coo of every bird, from longspur to whimbrel and snow sparrow. The grunting, groaning, moaning sounds of the walrus, the gentle calls of the caribou, the lonely whine of a fox.

  Alaana’s mind was filled with a perfect inner calm as she relaxed within the manifold embrace of the warm voice. Sila, the Dweller In The Wind, had drawn her up out of her shivering body and taken her into gentle, windswept arms.

  The voice had a face, but the face was impossible to see clearly, at once forming and unforming, it was there and yet it wasn’t, laughing or crying, coming and going. A face that was many faces, without discernible eyes or mouth. But somehow she basked in the glow of its kindly gaze and felt the grandfatherly warmth of its gentle smile.

  Sila spoke again. “Come, little one. Let me show you the world as it truly is.”

  The wind spirit bore her aloft, carrying her higher still.

  Floating far above the village, Alaana beheld not only the summer settlement and its collection of familiar people below, but also the vast expanse of tundra from glacier to open sea that made up Nunatsiaq, the beautiful land the Anatatook and the other bands called home. She witnessed the crystalline majesty of the ice mountains to the north as they calved icebergs and cast them into the sea, the lonely roosts of the seabirds atop cliffs high above, the walrus and bearded seal deftly dodging the crashing floes far below. Her gaze extended farther than any human eye could possibly see.

  More than that, it was a panorama both seen and experienced down to the smallest sensation.

  A merging of mind and matter took place. She was light — the sun’s blazing fire, the lamp’s soothing glow, the moon’s mysterious shimmer. She was air — the wind whipping along the tundra, the salt across the sea, the breath of life. She was one with the land — rocks, sand and glacier, all snow and ice. She was the heaving tides and crashing waves, the seals and the whales, the life-sustaining bounty of the ocean. This mind-bending moment of clarity, this intense joy of communion with the elements — this was the allaruk, the vision trance. It was a song of incredible beauty.

  “That is the beginning of knowledge,” announced Sila. “An understanding of the nature of being. This, now, is my gift to you.”

  The world reshaped itself again.

  Throughout the incredible landscape below a vast number of golden sparkles flared up abruptly, their radiance as deeply felt as seen. Suddenly it was clear to Alaana how the souls of all things were connected, like innumerable glittering embers in a giant smoldering hearth. She was fire — the spark of life in every living thing, miniscule in an infinite universe. From the lowliest creature scrabbling beneath the snows to the loftiest falcon, even the great frosted mountain peaks and the giant floes of implacable ice, every stone and plant and drift possessed an individual and unique spirit. And she came to know them all. It was a kaleidoscopic world where everything was alive. As her soul blew apart into countless fragments scattered on the wind, a process as indescribably thrilling as it was terrifying, each part forged a connection to some dauntless or struggling spirit, to each and every soul-light twinkling below.

  “This is the spirit-vision,” said Sila, the Walker In The Wind. “The world is ever-changing. The wind blows one way, and then the other. Those shimmering souls you see before you strive for order, for that is what they need to survive. You are a part of that struggle as are all people, a crust of lichen clinging to the surface of a pebble cast into a raging sea. Such is your nature. It is not given to you to decide.

  “And while I revel in the chaos, yet there must be balance. The wind can not too long follow the same course. It must reverse direction, it must also flow back. You are that balance.”

  “Why me?” said Alaana. The enormity of all she’d just witnessed left her feeling bewildered and small.

  The many-faceted voice of Sila laughed. “Ha! Not many would stand before me and ask such a question. I knew you would be different from the others! You see beauty where they see only dust and air, you question what others blindly accept. There is no limit to what you can imagine. You will do magnificent things. You will make things right.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Sila sighed, a sound as deep and momentous
as a rumble of distant thunder. “You don’t need to understand. Perhaps you never will. Two shamans fall this day, and destiny requires someone replace them. Though you had not the calling before, you will rise to it, Alaana.”

  Alaana was stunned by the sound of her own name as pronounced by the unfettered wind. She nearly lost herself in its endless echo.

  Then Sila sent her back.

  The plunge was drastic and breathtaking, yet came to a surprisingly gentle end when her soul settled once again into her trembling body. She fell into a restful slumber.

  A fragment of the ecstasy that was the allaruk lingered within her mind. She had touched the spirits in all things. She had achieved a union with every living thing at once. That bond would not soon be broken.

  The demon purred its contentment. Gazing at what was left of Civiliaq it said, “That young one was a tasty snack, but I prefer my meat a bit more seasoned.”

  A thin greasy drool slavered from between blackened and cracked lips. Standing revealed to his spirit-vision at last, Old Manatook saw the demon had indeed taken the form of a woman, hairless and naked. Twice the height of a man, it looked as one who had been dragged through the flames. Its body was steaming, dripping melted fat and strings of gristle. Skin, boiled and blackened as it seethed with thick gray smoke, sizzled with its every move.

  Seeing that Manatook carried no weapons, the demon went straight for Kuanak. Wolf Head hurled the obsidian dagger. But with the death of Civiliaq, the valiant spirit helper within the blade had already departed the Underworld. The weapon crumbled to dust as it flew through the air.

  The dagger was mere distraction. Kuanak had readied an attack of his own. He held the power staff extended, and in his gruff voice invoked his guardian spirit Quammaixiqsuq, lord of the lightning. The tip of the narwhal horn crackled to life and a white-hot blast of energy burst forth; tiny sparks shot out from the tips of Kuanak’s long hair. But Brother Lightning is weak below the surface of the earth and, absent his thunder sister Kallularuq, the blast had little effect on the fever demon.