Isi rushed forward, thrust the sun-bright talisman up and followed with his knife. The bear’s glazed white eyes reflected the incredible light until it closed them in apparent pain. Isi slashed at the creature’s throat, and though he barely nicked it the bear turned aside, screamed a woman’s scream, and disappeared. The storm and the foul air disappeared with it.
Isi stood alone on the ice field, surrounded by debris.
He sat on his ruined sledge and lamented. The whalebone runners he had fashioned, the precious scraps of driftwood he had retrieved from the sea, lovingly laced together and kept strong and in good repair for so many years, now broken by a bear spirit that turned out to be his own dead mother; all five of his dogs dead; his chest torn and ribs likely broken; and for what? To keep him from getting to Etah? To divert him from delivering the amulet?
The amulet bag in his hand glowed more softly now. Its light faded as fast as the day brightened around him, until it was just a torn leather bag.
* * *
Isi sat on the sledge until the sun cleared the mountain behind him, the leather bag with the amulet cold and heavy in his hand.
Gradually it occurred to him that real bears might find him, enticed by the dogs’ blood if not his own. He should start moving.
But which way? Back to Neqi, the tiny camp where he stayed two nights ago? Or onward to Etah, where the angakkoq waited for the amulet hidden in its leather pouch?
Neqi was closer, but Etah must still be his goal.
It took Isi until the sun reached its zenith to refit the unbroken pieces of his old sledge into a miniature version to pull behind him. He loaded it with everything he could salvage: walrus meat, some of the better skins, peat to burn, the precious stalks of dry grass in their fox-skin pouch. As he moved, his ribs rubbed their broken ends together inside his chest; the pain tormented him with everything he picked up, every knot he tied, every breath. The shaft of his harpoon was undamaged, and he fitted a new head onto it; the other had apparently disappeared with the bear-creature. He never found his walrus tusk.
Rather than lay it on the little sledge, he fashioned a sling to carry the amulet bag close to him.
Before he set out, Isi replaced the insulating grass in the bottom of his boots. He placed a last stalk in his mouth, crossways, to protect his lips from frostbite, and started north.
That night, Isi sheltered against the mountain, out of the wind. If ice or rocks might bury him, he little cared.
The next day dawned dreary and cold. Isi walked through icy fog, with only the obscured sun to help him keep going in the right direction. As the sun slipped down to the horizon, he found himself in the middle of a snow field adjacent to the mouth of a small glacier. He didn’t think a piece would calve off the glacier in the night, but living through another day made him wish for more days still; he was reluctant to take the chance.
Isi tested the snow with his harpoon, and found it a good consistency for an illuliaq. He stood in one spot and scribed a circle around himself with the harpoon, then carefully cut and set the snow blocks in place. He was growing accustomed to doing regular tasks with the limited vision of his new eyes, and though it took him twice as long as it should have he was satisfied with the snow house when he finished.
Isi lay on the skins atop the small snow shelf he’d left for sleeping, when the smell of death returned.
“You should turn back,” she said.
Isi picked up the amulet bag, intending to ward her off, but the light coming from it was barely brighter than a seal-oil lamp. Its pale, grey, misty light reflected off the snow domed around him. Isi choked on sudden terror. Had he drained the amulet of its power?
She chuckled, and anger flooded over his fear. “Come closer,” he said, “so I can slash your throat again.”
“Such disrespect for your mother,” she said.
“Such disrespect for your son, witch-woman.”
She snarled, more like a fox than a bear. “Why should I respect a no-good who never married?” she said. “Who never gave me grandchildren to carry my name? Who didn’t even turn and look when I stepped off the sledge to pee? When I yelled and yelled?”
Isi tried to remember that day. She hadn’t yelled. Had she?
Had she never meant to relieve the people of her loathsome presence? That, Isi realized, would be more like her.
She must know she was the reason he hadn’t married. When she was alive, no girls considered him because none of them wanted to live in the peat house with her.
After she died in the cold waste—and now Isi imagined he might have heard a voice on the wind that day—his migrations along the coast always seemed contrary to those of any marriageable girls. As for giving her grandchildren, he did not know. He didn’t think so. In Qeqertaq, one of the hunters had loaned Isi his wife for a time, because she wanted him, but the baby she bore was her husband’s, not Isi’s. She said so, and the mother always knew.
The mother always knew—what did his mother know? Had she yelled when she fell off the sledge? Isi forced his mind back to that day, back when all the villages were more prosperous and he himself owned seven dogs. They were on the move, trying to make distance while tiny pellets of ice whistled through the air all around them. She was on the sledge, riding, and Isi had gone forward to jog with the dogs and scout the path. Did he hear a plaintive wail on the wind? He thought not; he thought maybe; he thought so.
Beside him, his corpse-mother laughed her horrid laugh. “Are you suffering enough yet?”
Isi left the past. It did not matter what he heard or didn’t hear; what mattered was that his mother was supposed to be dead but apparently was not. He considered her question. If he said yes, it would be like admitting defeat and inviting the release of death. If he said no, it would be like asking for more suffering. The snow house was quiet except for her hideous breathing.
“Are you dead enough yet?” he asked.
His not-dead mother gave a great cackling laugh that filled the illuliaq with her vile breath.
“Not yet, my thankless, far-seeing son. Not yet.”
She touched him then, and he tensed, but it was a surprisingly soft, intensely cold caress. He backed up on the sleeping shelf, knocking the amulet bag to the illuliaq’s floor.
Her fingers dipped into his oozing wounds and walked their way up his chest, and her naked arm was no longer split and leathery but smooth and supple. Her face was complete, and young, and beautiful; she was naked, as if it was summer, and her breasts were firm and had never felt a baby’s mouth.
She leaned in toward him, and the light in the illuliaq grew.
Isi turned his head away, and at the edge of his vision he saw her as she really was—putrid and horrifying.
She clamped her bony fingers on his throat and pushed him back into the snow wall, snarling fetid breath through rotten teeth. His vision wavered, and beneath his mother’s dead face he glimpsed another face—an animal face, like a seal’s but skinless and with thick, powerful jaws and large, jagged teeth.
Isi groped for the amulet bag, but it was not in reach.
He grasped his savik instead and thrust it up, past her other arm. She leaned her head back, away from the blade, fighting as she continued to choke him, but Isi’s arm was stronger and longer than hers. The blade slipped in next to her windpipe, tore through cartilage and gristle, and came out the other side. The meteoric iron, pride of Savigssivik, felt hot in his hands.
His mother—or the thing that looked like his mother—released him and grabbed her own throat, wheezing out horrid breath that could no longer form a scream, and vanished.
Isi sat up and rubbed his own throat. The light from the amulet bag at his feet faded, to yellow, and to grey, and to darkness.
* * *
Isi reached Etah three days later. The tiny sledge behind him was piled only with a few worn skins. All the walrus meat was gone; he had eaten it on the run, and to make haste had not even tried to hunt at the seal breathing-holes he passe
d. He had not slept, for fear that his mother’s shade or something worse would visit him. He could barely stand.
But he could see now, after a fashion. His eyesight had not cleared, but the blurred center of his vision seemed smaller and easier to see around.
He swayed but stayed upright at the edge of the ice field before the tiny village, farther than any of the men could hurl a harpoon. He tried to shout, but managed only a whisper. “Anoraa.”
“I am here,” said a voice beside him.
The old—no, the ancient—sorcerer smiled at Isi. Isi was too tired even to express surprise that the angakkoq had come upon him as swift and silent as the wind.
“You have something for me,” Anoraa said.
Isi collapsed to his knees. He unslung the amulet bag and held it out to Anoraa.
Anoraa pushed Isi’s arm away. The angakkoq reached in and dug his fingers into Isi’s side. Isi gasped as the old man probed his cracked ribs. He wanted to faint, but his body did not permit it.
Anoraa moved his fingers to the bloody gouges on Isi’s chest and back to his side, again and again, and each time Isi found it easier to breathe.
Anoraa stepped back. “Rise, he who was once Isigippoq,” he said, and pulled Isi to his feet.
Isi stood easily. He was still hungry, still weary, but in much less pain. Slowly he registered what Anoraa had said. “What?”
“You are no longer Isigippoq, at least not fully. But you have seen the truth of the false bear, and the truth of the false witch, and you have it in you to see more fantastic visions yet.”
Isi did not question how Anoraa knew what he said; he was the village angakkoq, skilled in such things. But the old man was not finished speaking.
“You do not know who you are, but I do. I thought to name you Takunnippoq, but that only speaks to your past journey. For you now and for the future, I prefer Isigaa.”
Isi’s fatigue made him slow to understand—“has had a vision” was true enough, but “can see it”? He wasn’t sure if he liked the new name, or if he believed it.
Anoraa slapped Isi on the back, and a jolt of pain woke him from considering the name. He was not yet whole, though he felt better than he had in days.
“Come,” Anoraa said, “you will share my kiviaq.”
Isi’s stomach rumbled at the thought of the tasty fermented birds, but the pain that throbbed through him reminded him of his errand. He again held the amulet bag out to Anoraa. “This is for you,” he said.
Anoraa’s eyes glittered with reflected sunlight. He took the bag, but said nothing when he saw the popped stitches. He drew his savik and slit the remainder of the seam. The crisp grass complained as he withdrew a smooth, polished egg of meteoric iron from its grasp; the egg hung in an intricate woven sling suspended from a thick leather thong. As Isi looked closer, he saw that the amulet was not shaped quite like a bird’s egg: it had no pointed end and fat end, but its ends were similarly rounded. Though dark iron, it seemed to glow inside its web. Somehow the shape soothed Isi to look at.
The amulet held Isi’s attention, even in the center of his damaged vision, the way a dancing flame enraptures a child. He turned his head a bit to the left, and the amulet’s shape sharpened and its color shifted. It may have been a trick of the springtime sunshine, but the smooth edges of the near-ellipsoid metal shone as if it remembered its fiery descent to the earth.
Isi’s nose caught a hint of foulness in the air. He looked away from the amulet, first toward the village where three of the hunters were approaching, harpoons in hand, then in a wide circle of sky and ice cap and still-frozen sea.
Anoraa wrinkled his nose. “Tipi,” he said.
“Yes,” Isi said. “It stinks. It is the same smell. What is it?”
“You know what it is. You know what they are, Isigaa. You can see it.”
The memory came to him of that inhuman face behind his mother’s dead one, and he did know.
“Yes, Isi. You saw the Tornit’s true face.”
Isi shivered. The Tornit, the old ones who used to share the world with the people, had been thwarted long ago. They were supposed to be very powerful sorcerers, but the people had chased them away beyond the great ice. Everyone assumed they were gone forever—only stories now, to keep the children close to the houses in the deep winter dark.
“No, Isi, not just stories. They are coming back, and we must be ready. You will—”
Isi looked to the south, and in the center of his blurred vision saw a speck on the ice cap. He turned his head slightly, but it was still a speck.
“Hold this, and see,” Anoraa said, and placed the iron egg in Isi’s hand.
Isi felt the amulet’s power again. The speck resolved into his mother’s ruined form, and then into a barely human form, huge and malevolent, with strong, twisted limbs and the strange naked animal face. In his long vision, the creature bared great bloody teeth at them. Then the foul wind blew a curtain of ice in front of it, and the Tornit vanished.
Anoraa exhaled a great sudden breath, with the sound of an iceberg calving off the end of a glacier. Isi turned as the Tornit, larger than a bear, roared its foul breath and swung its huge clawed hand at the old angakkoq’s head. Anoraa crouched and turned aside and put up one hand which the Tornit grabbed. It lifted the old man up off the ground and shook him. Anoraa’s shoulder popped and cracked as the joint shook loose. The sorcerer screamed.
Isi’s hand found his savik. The blade seemed so small against such a creature, and his harpoon was on the remains of his sledge. He hesitated for an eyeblink.
The Tornit drew back its left hand to strike Anoraa, and the motion seemed to draw Isi toward it. The amulet in one hand and his savik in the other, he stepped in on its right side and struck the horrible beast in the chest, under the arm that held Anoraa high.
Anoraa fell from its grasp. His hand grabbed Isi’s shoulder as if to hold himself up, but Isi felt himself pulled backward. His savik pulled free, and dark red blood spouted from the Tornit’s side.
The Tornit’s right hand, unburdened of the sorcerer, came down. Its claws ripped through Isi’s hood and tore chunks of skin and ear away from his head.
Isi fell, gasping from pain and fatigue and the stink of the thing.
The Tornit spun, and its left hand came a hand’s breadth away from destroying Isi’s chest.
Isi landed on top of Anoraa. He rolled to his left—the cold snow stung but had no time to numb his mangled face—and came up in a crouch. The Tornit held its side and stepped, snarling, toward the sorcerer.
The first harpoon hit the creature in the leg. The Tornit turned toward the approaching hunters, and the second harpoon passed between it and Isi. The third harpoon hit it in the gut, and it howled in rage.
Wind off the ice cap rose to match the pitch and fury of the Tornit’s scream, driving ice crystals that obscured all vision. Isi struggled forward, left hand holding the amulet in front of him. It glowed fiercely now, its light reflected on all sides by the blowing ice until Isi ran into the towering mass of the Tornit. The creature howled in new agony as Isi touched it.
Isi thrust his savik forward, unsure even what part of the creature he was trying to strike.
The blade moved through hair and hide and meat. Isi’s hand followed it in, pushing it deeper until the Tornit spun, pulled free, and backhanded Isi into the snow.
The wind shifted and whirled so violently it lifted Isi, tumbled him to the side, and piled a drift behind his back. Then it dissipated, and its fury melted away into the daylight.
The Tornit had disappeared.
Isi’s savik was gone. His arm was soaked with gore up to the elbow, as if he had been butchering a walrus and giving the hunters their shares. He still held the iron amulet in his left hand, its power and light fading again.
He pulled himself free of the drifted snow and crawled to Anoraa.
The old sorcerer was half-buried in snow. Isi scooped the snow away, staining it red and scattering sparkling bits acro
ss the frozen, blood-soaked ground. Anoraa winced when Isi touched him; he held his left arm tight against his chest.
Isi called to the Etah hunters for help. They stood in a row between him and the village, silent, but did not venture closer.
“Hold this,” Isi said, and put the amulet in the sorcerer’s hand. He stumbled to his small sledge and stopped to catch his breath. Drops of blood fell from his face onto the piled-up skins.
Isi pulled the sledge to Anoraa’s side. The angakkoq groaned as Isi maneuvered him onto the sledge, but he did not cry out.
Anoraa held up the amulet in its woven net. It looked inert, a smooth and shapely lump of iron, but as Isi watched a tiny ripple of light moved across its face. The sorcerer pressed the amulet against his wounded shoulder and covered it there with his palm.
“They will come again, Isi,” he said. “We must warn the people. And we must prepare.” His eyes closed and he looked as if he would faint. Isi gently propped the old man up so he would not tumble off the sledge. He thought of his mother, and guilt crept over him; he feared her memory would haunt him now, that on long moonless nights every icy breeze would call to him in her voice to turn the sledge around, to come back, come back.
Anoraa opened his eyes and looked straight into Isi’s.
“Look forward, Isigaa, not back. See things as they are, not as they appear.”
Isi looked back toward the ice cap, but nothing natural or unnatural moved on the white expanse. The wind blew against his face; it stung his wounds, but it was clear and fresh. He wondered how long it would be until the foul wind blew again.
“Take me home, Isi, and share my kiviaq,” Anoraa said, and Isi’s mouth watered. He turned away from the ice cap.
The angakkoq held out the amulet, which swung on its tether and flickered with light. “And keep this safe for me,” he said, “until we need it again.”
Isi brought the sorcerer into Etah. The amulet felt warm in his hand.
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