by neetha Napew
“Hmmph,” said the old man, listening to the wolves. “What Thunder Speaker could not kill, Umak will not abandon to be meat for beasts.”
It took all of his energy and concentration to force himself to go on, but this he did, hefting his grandson, speaking aloud to the dog and the wolves and the savage distances of open tundra that still lay ahead of him. “This man is Umak. He is spirit master. He will run with the wind, and it will speed him on his way. Soon Umak will be home. He will warn his people. Together they will stand against the great mammoth. They will feast upon its flesh and send its spirit away.”
And because he was a spirit master, it seemed to him that the wind did rise to speed him on his way, giving power to his limbs to keep them moving, bending, lifting, falling; in his mind he flew across the night, with Torka weightless upon his back and the wild dog leaping across the sky beside him.
It came upon them out of the night, as all true terrors must ultimately come—in silence, from out of that black pit in which fear is cradled, and from which crawl all of the horrors that evade the light of day. It came in stealth, walking into the wind so that its scent at first blew back and away. Only the pressure of its footfall onto the shallow skin of the permafrost betrayed its approach.
Within Torka’s pit hut, little Kipu stirred in his sleep. It was the deep sleep that comes toward night’s end, when the heartbeats slow, and the blood runs deep, and the mind lies inert and dreamless.
Across the warm, black substance of that dreamless ness a vague and undefined awareness of danger ran like wind currents across the black surface of a pitch pool on a moonless night: invisible but sending subtle tremors deep. There was nothing tangible to fear—only the darkness, only the silence, only the familiar rank and musty life smells of the pit hut and the soft, rhythmic rubbings and creakings of hide chafing against bone as gusts of wind intermittently sucked and slapped at the exterior walls of the hut.
The boy sighed and changed position beneath his bed furs. He moaned softly, still deeply asleep but no longer peaceful in his slumber.
Egatsop heard him. With the sleeping infant curled against her breasts, she lay half-awake, listening. Her nostrils picked up the faintest essence of crushed spruce bark and clotted blood as an inference of enormous height and weight slurred across her senses. The hide walls of the conical little pit hut strained softly against the thong-lashed bone framework that held the structure upright.
It is only the wind, she decided. It blows from the distant mountains where the spruce forests grow;. But why the smell of blood? She opened her eyes, staring into darkness, scenting the air like a small animal huddled in its burrow, fearing that something huge and hungry stalks it from above. But she could hear no one moving about outside. If there were a predator lurking within the encampment, the hunters would have sensed its presence, been up and in pursuit with spears and blades and bold shouts to warn the women and children to stay inside until all was safe. But the hunters evidently slept undisturbed, each within his own shelter.
Egatsop lay with her infant daughter and little son, feeling vulnerable and alone as she longed for the warmth and reassurance of her man. Torka! She had never missed him more. Why had he not returned? If he did not come back to the encampment soon, Egatsop would have to accept another man. The headman would insist upon it. A woman could not live alone.
A small, hard knot tightened hurt fully at the back of her throat. There were other men who wanted her, but she would not think of that yet. Not as long as there was a chance that Torka might still be alive. She lay very still. Something was outside. But what? She resolved not to be afraid. She told herself that it was only her fear that walked within the night.
A pang of regret caused her briefly to lament her earlier goading of Umax. Had he been here, he would have ventured out to check. But he was gone, and she was not really sorry. For reasons that had always eluded her, the old man had made her feel less than worthy to be Torka’s woman and the mother of Umak’s great-grandchildren. She wondered if he was dead yet. She hoped that he was, then remembered that the spirits of the dead always lingered around an encampment until a newborn infant was named for them, thus allowing them to reenter the world of the living. Perhaps what had awakened her was only old Umak’s ghost plucking at the walls of the little hut, trying to get in out of the cold.
Egatsop drew her baby close, for the first time glad that it was not a male child. Now that the old man had released his life spirit, custom would have decreed that a male child be named for Umak so that the old man could live again within the baby’s body. Egatsop frowned with revulsion as she thought of that possibility; of old Umak sucking new life from the breasts of the very one who had sent him out to die.
As though sensing her thoughts, the sleeping infant rooted at her breasts, found a nipple, and closed in hard, pulling fretfully with hot, hard gums.
Egatsop winced. Had the old man already occupied the infant’s body? Uinak had been a spirit master in his day, and a good one. Perhaps he would maneuver his way back into the world through trickery. Egatsop recalled how tenaciously he had clung to life, how he had refused to acknowledge his age or the extent of his injury, and how she had been forced to shame him into abandoning his spirit to the winds. But would any male be so hungry for life that he would willingly degrade his masculine spirit by consigning it to live as a female? No. Not even Umak would do that.
The baby made sleepy little bleats of dissatisfaction as it nursed. Egatsop had not lied to the old man when she had told him she feared her breasts were beginning to dry. It was already happening. If Torka and the others did not return with game by tomorrow’s dark, she would expose this infant before it began to sap her of the strength she would need to keep herself and her son alive.
She lay quietly, thinking about how she would do it. Without ceremony. Since it has no name, it has no spirit. It is not alive. Its fate is no consequence. This woman will carry it well out from the camp. This woman will pack its mouth and nostrils with snow so that none of the living will be disturbed by the cries of the dead as it is abandoned naked to the cold. That was how she would prefer to do it; but for the sake of her son and the starving members of her band, she knew that she could not be so wasteful. This baby would be bait for wild dogs while it still had strength enough to cry and lure them to the traps.
The smell of spruce and blood was suddenly very strong in the air as the shallow skin of the permafrost twitched and rolled, like the flesh of a gnat-stung giant. Egatsop sat up, startled and frightened. The movement stopped, then began again in hard, sharp jolts. Footfalls.
Kipu was awake. He sat up, knuckling sleep from his eyes. “W-what is it?” His voice was tremulous, but he tried to put a masculine edge to it, flat, uncaring, as though he asked not out of fear and curiosity but out of indolent afterthought, like a hunter asking politely about what sort of prey his friend has sighted when he himself has already taken all the game he can hope to eat in an entire winter.
Egatsop’s eyes were round with dread. The little boy saw his mother’s fear and reacted to it. He was on his feet, five years old and protector of his father’s woman.
The scent of crushed spruce bark was overpowering. Kipu’s head went up. His nostrils dilated. He drew in the scent and tried to define it, as Umak had taught him to do: Take the scent deep into memory, into that place where a man’s images are collected. But Kipu was not a man. He was a little boy. The place within him where images were collected was still a reservoir far from brimming. He had never been to the faraway mountains. He had never seen a forest or a tree of any kind.
But Egatsop had and knew now that her fear had been well-founded. The stench that filled her nostrils was less the stink of spruce than of the animal that ate it—an animal whose diet was composed almost entirely of spruce, so that its flesh and hide and hair and breath all stank of that sap-rich tree even when it strayed far from the forests onto the tundral plain.
“MAMMOTH!”
It w
as the cry of the headman. A shout of warning was given just as the beast itself cracked the sky with its trumpeting.
Beyond the walls of the little pit hut, the encampment was suddenly rent with screaming. The confused shouts of men, the startled cries of women, and the screams of frightened children told Egatsop all that she needed to know.
Thunder Speaker .. . World Shaker .. . He Who Parts the Clouds and Destroys the Lives of Men .. . the litany of dreaded names rolled through her mind as she remembered the old tales of terror. She drew in the stink of the mammoth’s breath and bloodied hair and hide and knew, with a sick, sinking certainty that the blood she smelled was Torka’s. The Destroyer had killed her man.
The beast was on a rampage now, cutting back and forth across the encampment. She could feel its movements in the earth. Scenes conjured from the nightmare stories of her childhood were afire within her brain as Egatsop leaped to her feet, clutching her daughter to her breast, forgetting that the infant was a spiritless suckling. She was a real child to her now.
It was all too real to her now.,
Kipu was gathering up the spears that old Umak had left behind, spears that would be useless in the hands of a child. Egatsop kicked out at him. He fell flat on his belly as she bent and scooped him up by an armpit with one hand.
“We must run. If we stay within the hut, it will smash us flat.”
“I will kill this mammoth!” brazened the child, daring to name his intended prey, fighting against his mother as she shoved him out into the fading night through the piece of hide that served as a door. He was furious with her as he turned back from several paces ahead to tell her that he was her only protector now, that he must retrieve his weapons. She had stopped, still bending low, with one hand holding the hide door open as she looked up and beyond Kipu. She had the strangest expression on her face, and he could not comprehend why she screamed his name the way she did-high-pitched and half-strangling, with her pretty features twisted into ugliness.
She was the last thing that he saw, and he did not even see her very well through the blue darkness of the Arctic dawn. But for one split second everything went very bright as something hit him from behind and above. Kipu did not even have time to wonder what it was that killed him.
But Egatsop knew. It paused as it crushed her little son beneath one vast foot and then came at her. She could have run—she was a small, lithe woman. She could have ducked away like a dancer at a hunting feast, throwing the spiritless suckling at the monster to distract it from its charge. But she did not, could not. In that last moment, when Torka’s woman looked up into the eyes of Death, she tried her best to throw herself out of its path, curling her body protectively around her baby in a vain attempt to save its life at the cost of her own.
The world was blue. Above, below, snow, sky, even the air and the distant sounds of death and terror—all seemed blue. And Torka fell through the blueness, through miles of it, like a man tumbling into a glacial crevasse, hurtling downward through a bottomless chasm of blue ice, plummeting while a companion called helplessly from above, his voice dwindling .. . dwindling .. . until there was no sound but that of his own frightened breaths and gasps and sobs of terror as he fell .. . and fell ... his body bouncing off ragged, ever-narrowing walls of ice until ”Torka!”
Umak’s voice. Far away, at the top of the crevasse, above the blue, parting it somehow. The old man called down, as if by magic arresting Torka’s fall into oblivion, drawing him back up into the pain and reality.
He lay on his side in the snow, hurting; it did not seem possible that he could hurt so much. The fall to death within the blue abyss seemed preferable to so much pain. He sank back into it for a moment, but Umak, beside him in the snow, pulled him up, gripping him with gloved, unrelenting hands, and shook him hard.
“Torka! We must go on. But this old man, his knee will no longer bend to his power as spirit master. It has tripped him. He has fallen. Umak can carry you no farther.”
“Carry?” The word was less question than protest. He was Torka. No man carried Torka. Not even Umak. Unless, with this half-formed supposition, he fell into the abyss again, only this time it was not blue and filled with ice; it was bright and filled with memories, which stabbed at him and erased any vestiges of torpor.
With Umak’s help, he sat up, half-fainting with pain; then, drawing strength from the pain, he told himself that it was not there and almost believed it. He leaned against Umak, against that old, hard body with a heart inside it as deep and full of power as the unchanging, rock-hard underpinnings of the tundral plain. There had always been comfort and renewed strength for him in the mere closeness of that old man, and he drew upon it now, as the dying dawn tangled itself in the shimmering sweep of the aurora borealis, stole its color, and bathed the world with the full golden light of morning.
“Listen!” commanded Umak, and there was something in the old man’s voice that sharpened Torka’s battered senses and brought him up out of pain-dulled lethargy.
He listened to the silence of the Arctic morning, the unnatural absence of wind, the erratic beat of his heart, the even suck of the old man’s breath, and the uneven, shallow wheeze of his own. It was quiet .. . too quiet ... as though, within the entire world and sky, only he and Umak were left alive.
“We have come too late,” said the old man, his flat voice revealing none of his anguish. He had come so far. Driving himself beyond exhaustion, he had reached the final boundary that any other man would have recognized and accepted as the ultimate limit of human endurance. But he, Umak, had willed himself to leap over it. With Torka on his back, he had gone on and on—young again, powerful again, invincible, until even the panting wild dog had looked at him with disbelief as it had strained to continue running beside him.
Now the dog lay in the snow, not far off, on a gentle slope of tundral rise, which lay above the little valley where Umak’s band had made its winter camp. It was upon that slope that the old man’s knee now made a mockery of his power. A spirit master he might be, but kneecaps were spiritless things, and his buckled without warning. He had fallen down hard, trying to hold onto Torka but failing, lying stunned and breathless and winded in the snow.
The trumpeting of the mammoth cleared his head. But no startled shouts and cries of his people reached him, and he knew that it was too late for him to warn them. He limped to the top of the rise, and what he saw caused him to drop to his knees. Gone was Umak, spirit master and slayer of beasts. He became an old man again, old and unarmed, no longer invincible but impotent. He bowed his head, and as the silence of his people’s catastrophe washed over him, he willed his own spirit to wash away with those among them who had died. But Umak had already learned that Death wanted no part of one stringy old man or of the injured hunter who lay in the snow moaning in delirium. He went to Torka, knelt, then lifted his grandson, attempting to soothe him, drawing strength from the young man’s need of him. He had been too late to warn his people of danger, but they would still have need of their spirit master’s skills as a healer in its aftermath. The thought restored a little of his sense of self-worth. He spoke to Torka, telling him that they must go on.
The silence continued, and Umak listened, knowing that the mammoth had gone its way. Soon, when the shock of its passing had ridden over the people like a great and terrible wave, the survivors of its devastation would begin to weep and wail. For Torka’s sake, Umak would try not to take too much noticeable pleasure in proving to Egatsop just how sorely she had underrated his worth as a healer.
But the moments passed. The silence did not abate. It thickened; it became palpable. And suddenly, Umak knew the truth, as Torka also knew it. The Destroyer had come and gone. And within all of the world, and beneath all of the broad, compassionless sky, only Torka and Umak were left alive to hear the renewed song of the wind and to listen to the desolate lament of a lone wolf as it cried out to them from the edges of the valley far below. They sat in silence, listening as a wolf sang a song that deepe
ned their anguish.
Neither Torka nor Umak knew which of them first realized that it was not the song of a wolf. But the wild dog knew and was on its feet, head held out and low, ears back, recognizing the sound of potential prey.
Umak rose slowly, as did Torka. He leaned on the old man for support, fighting and winning against pain and dizziness. He stood into the wind. It had turned and was from the east now, blowing out of the valley, across the devastated encampment, redefining the song of the wolf, transforming it into what, in fact, it was: the grief-maddened howls and wails of a woman.
They went down into the valley together, with the dog trailing at a wary distance. They paid no heed to it; Umak had forgotten that it existed.
The wailing of the woman had stopped, yet Torka willed himself to hear it anyway. The sound of that voice gave him back his strength and set his pulse pounding and his heart racing with hope: It was his woman’s voice! He was certain of it! Even though he was exhausted from pain and loss of blood, a new day was dawning. There was no way of knowing how many more of their people had been killed or injured, but Torka was alive, with Umak at his side. Egatsop called to him. Kipu would need him. The other survivors would also need him.
Somewhere deep inside the innermost core of what was left of his reason, Torka knew that his thoughts were irrational ramblings. But he could not face the truth. His thoughts were scabs, which covered a dangerous wound. They soothed him and lessened the pain that every step and breath cost him. Without them, he would succumb to insanity.
When at last he came to the edge of the encampment and saw what his mind would not allow him to grasp, he paused, stared, and told himself that somehow, amid the total carnage and ominous silence, survivors waited ... his woman and children waited .. . but the scabs cracked a little, and the wound beneath them began to bleed. His next step was less certain than the one before.