Secrets

by Ken Altabef

  One of the advancing men was suddenly pulled back.

  “Aiyah! What nonsense is this, now?” said a strong, although cracked, voice. An old woman appeared in the gap. Like a whirlwind she pushed the men away, each in turn, separating the mad pack and bringing some reason back into their veiled eyes.

  “Has all sense fled? Look at this man! Our Alaana brought him here to us.” She stepped right in front of Ben saying, “Ivalu, Aolajut! Surely you’ve better things to do. Go and see to your homes and cooking pots. And the rest of you men, go back to your families. Get!”

  “Look at him. What is he?” asked Talliituk, eldest son of the headman. He held a hunting knife ready in his hand.

  “Never you mind!” Higilak said. “He’s a friend of the shaman, that’s what. Now go take care of your iglu.”

  The old woman kept pushing at them and the people began to disperse. Ben walked away. He was disappointed by this reception but not entirely surprised. In all the time he’d lived in the arctic, he’d never seen another black man either.

  His stomach growled as he stomped through the snow. He’d been walking all night, and he was damn tired.

  When he reached a point on the outskirts of the camp, he began cutting the snow with a makeshift scoop, the shoulder blade of a caribou which he plucked from among the wreckage. He struggled to lift the blocks of snow with his one good arm and pile them around the tiny circle of the widening depression. As the walls rose higher he cut the wedges narrower. He couldn’t stack them all the way to the top and the soft snow of his half-shelter began to falter. With a heavy heart he watched one side and then the other sag and cave in. Then it all came tumbling down, leaving him half-buried in the slush.

  The old woman’s face peered above the rim of the wrecked iglu.

  “If you want to know,” she said in a soft, confidential tone, “I can build an iglu myself, but I wouldn’t admit it in front of all these men.”

  The old woman’s face looked like a bird’s nest of wrinkles with two gleaming black eyes as the eggs. The many cracks and creases were exaggerated by a wide smile that revealed an equal measure of stubbly white teeth and pink gums. Judging by her small nose Ben thought she must have been regarded as beautiful many, many years ago. Now her body had withered and bent, leaving the impression that her head was slightly too large for her slender frame. She wore a warm and handsome parka made of equal part fox fur and caribou hide. A well-formed hand that had seen many years of hard work reached down for him.

  Ben stood up, leaning only slightly on the woman’s fragile hand, and brushed white crust from the front of his parka.

  “I’ll try again,” he said. “I think the snow closer to the inlet will be more solid.”

  Old Higilak shook her head. “No food, no equipment. All you have is the snow. And the snow’s too soft.”

  Ben looked around for the caribou shoulder but couldn’t find it. He kicked aimlessly at the tumult of snow. At last he looked back at the old lady, returning her warm gaze and said, “I’m hungry.”

  “Finally you’re talking some sense. Sometimes it’s best to let the stomach do the thinking for us. Quite a lot of the time, actually.” Higilak smiled again. “Come with me. I know you’re afraid. No one will harm you. I promise you that.”

  Ben smiled back. It hurt his face to do so. He had not smiled since he’d received the many bruises that mottled his cheeks. At least with the old woman he wouldn’t have to worry about what he’d have to do to earn his next meal.

  “I’m not afraid,” he said.

  “But they’re afraid of you. That’s a problem.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ve never seen a man with brown skin before, but I’ve seen a lot of things. And I’m not afraid of much.”

  Higilak led him to a modest iglu near the bay.

  “Alaana and I live here,” she explained.

  “Alaana?” Ben stepped back. “I don’t—”

  “Don’t worry,” returned Higilak. “This is my place. Here you are my guest, not hers. She’ll keep to herself.”

  CHAPTER 9

  MAGUAN’S LONG JOURNEY HOME

  “He doesn’t wake up.” Kigiuna reached down to the sleeping ledge and shook Maguan roughly by the shoulder.

  Alaana said, “I wouldn’t do that, father.”

  Kigiuna pulled his hand away.

  “He’s been like this since the attack,” said Amauraq. Her worry seemed to fill the iglu. “He was struck down in front of our house.”

  Alaana remembered witnessing the attack on her brother as the Yupikut dragged her off, bound by the ankles to their sled. “I saw.”

  “How can we wake him?” asked Pilarqaq. Maguan’s wife held a crying baby in her arms, another young child clinging to her legs.

  Alaana placed her hand along her brother’s fevered brow. Maguan was a handsome man of twenty-three winters, tall, thin and wiry. He had the same wispy mustache and curly hint of beard as their father, though his black hair was much straighter than Kigiuna’s. Maguan’s good temper and pleasant smile made him popular among the Anatatook, who saw him as a more moderate version of his sometimes hot-headed father.

  Alaana leaned forward. Her brother’s eyes were open but they didn’t see anything.

  “His eyes are dead,” said Kigiuna.

  “No,” replied Alaana. She bent over the pallet, concentrating on Maguan’s left eye where a sleeping man’s soul could often be seen. But there was too much noise, too many people in the small iglu. One of the children began wailing and instead of comforting the child his mother added her own voice to the clamor.

  Maguan shifted uneasily. His eye rolled upward.

  “Sometimes he seems just to be sleeping and other times he’s struggling against something, but I don’t know what?” said Kigiuna.

  Amauraq took Alaana by the elbow. “What is it?” she whispered. “What is he fighting against?”

  Alaana couldn’t concentrate with all these people crying and children underfoot.

  “Himself,” she answered. “He’s fighting himself.” She turned to her father. “We’ll have to bring him to the karigi.”

  Amauraq tugged again at her arm. “He’s going to die,” she said. “Oh Alaana, please don’t let him die like this.”

  “Mother…” Alaana wanted to tell her that such an attitude certainly didn’t help Maguan and was putting him in even more danger. She couldn’t think of a way to say such a thing without hurting her mother’s feelings, but she must get her to stop. “He can hear what you say.” she said softly.

  Amauraq’s eyes bulged, sprouting tears.

  By the time Alaana turned around, Kigiuna already had his eldest son in his arms.

  “I’ve got him. Let’s go.”

  Sometime after the attack, the ceremonial ice house had been converted from iglu to qaqmaq. A huge tarp of caribou hide had been strung up to replace the sagging dome. Alaana assumed the combined body heat of all the men confined in the iglu had finally caused the softening ice of the roof to collapse. Spring was on its way.

  The interior was a mess. All of her ceremonial things had been disturbed. The drums and masks were out of place and several broken.

  Alaana cleared off a driftwood platform in the center of the large room, and Kigiuna lay Maguan down. Here at least she had some measure of quiet and room enough to work. She could hear her mother and several other sympathetic voices still clamoring outside the ceremonial house, but she supposed nothing could be done about that.

  Bending over her brother again, Alaana gently held the lid of his left eye open and gazed inside. The eye, which usually conveyed a cheerful glow, seemed as lifeless and dull as the surface of a frozen lake.

  She took a series of deep breaths and brought her spirit to a relaxed state of concentration. Then she peered down into the abyss of the dark pupil in search of her brother’s troubled soul.

  “He’s still there,” she said softly. “I can help him if I can get in.”

  She
positioned her father at the base of the platform and handed him a small round drum no larger than the palm of his hand. The beater was a dried raven claw to which Alaana hastily attached a white owl feather.

  “Alternate the beats,” Alaana said, demonstrating the proper rhythm. A thin white line separated the drumhead skin into two equal parts, one light and one dark, representing the worlds of the living and the dead.

  Her father set to beating the drum with an air of concentration worthy of the most serious acolyte any shaman could ever have desired. Alaana still could not get over the sight. Kigiuna had long been a skeptic when it came to the world of the spirits. He had even tried to stop Alaana’s initiation, going so far as to threaten murder against Old Manatook. But on that day, as his daughter rose into the air atop a whirlwind of spiritual energy, he had witnessed first-hand the power of Alaana’s spirit-guide Sila. Kigiuna’s skepticism had all been burned away. Now he served as an unlikely but earnest assistant to his daughter the shaman. He did this mostly out of paternal instinct, an innate desire to protect her from unearthly danger, but somewhere down deep Kigiuna longed to see for himself those mysteries which were forever invisible to him.

  Alaana ran the palm of her hand over the surface of the drum, touching the patterns that Old Manatook had painted.

  “Tulukkam-ittuq,” she said, addressing the helper-spirit that lived inside the drum. “I need your help.”

  “I answer to Old Manatook,” said the helper spirit.

  “You know me too,” said Alaana.

  “I answer only to Old Manatook.”

  “Manatook is dead.”

  Alaana felt the spirit bristle at the news. She could see it, a small black shape deep inside the drum skin. Old Manatook had trapped this powerful wraith on a visit to the Underworld. Suddenly Tulukkam-ittuq surged, expanding to fill the entire drum with seething blackness. It tried to force itself from the drum, but was constrained by the sigils on the painted surface.

  “Release me!” demanded Tulukkam-ittuq.

  “Help me! This one time, I beg of you. My brother lies here half-dead. Help me to help him.”

  The spirit settled back into the drum. It petulantly buried its beaked head beneath a serrated wing.

  Alaana sighed. Another of her teacher’s tools rendered useless. She licked her finger, then rubbed away the sigil binding the spirit. Its soul surged again, rising up and expanding until it filled the room. Gigantic wings, luxurious with dark plumage, raked against the iglu’s circular wall. Knife-sharp feathers rippled, crackling with black fire. The walls of the ice house shook, dropping slivers and little chunks of ice down on their heads.

  “What is it?” asked Kigiuna, straining to see the invisible. “What do you see?”

  Alaana gently squeezed her father’s forearm to silence his interruption. Kigiuna’s attempts to protect her from the strange and dangerous world of the spirits would have been laughable if they were not so heartfelt.

  “Please! My brother…” said Alaana desperately, in the secret language of the shamans. “Please! Just this one time, I beg of you.”

  Tulukkam-ittuq growled. Its burning gaze settled on Alaana and she thought the fiery eyes of the bird-like spirit were reading her soul with its own version of the spirit-vision. After a long moment the dark spirit relented and settled back inside the drum.

  “Start the rhythm, Father. Don’t let up until I say.”

  Kigiuna began to pound the drum and Alaana, positioned at the head of the platform, took up the chant. “Halala, halalalee; halala, halaalalee!”

  She stared deep into her brother’s eye. As the helper spirit empowered her song, Alaana forced the dark circle of Maguan’s pupil to expand. The brown rim of his iris sparkled slightly as it began to spin, circling the black abyss.

  A swirling vortex, the eye.

  The spinning portal formed a tunnel, a narrow gateway to the soul.

  The moment was now. With a series of three deep breaths Alaana surrendered herself to the state of relaxation that freed her inuseq for traveling. Alaana’s spirit-woman leapt immediately down into the tunnel.

  It was a short tumble, down the vortex of the eye, to where Maguan’s soul lay resting beneath.

  The shadowy half-light of the tunnel gave way to bright sunshine.

  The sun blazed high overhead at the peak of the sky’s dome, shedding warmth and light. The Anatatook littered the frosty plain in small groups, like islands separated by streams of giggling children as they ran by. The air was thick with voices — women exchanging recent gossip and men telling tales of the hunt and lascivious jokes. Maguan sat at the head of a table, a sealskin tarp draped across a long flat stone. Behind him the tundra lay resplendent, alive with a colorful array of budding wildflowers.

  Alaana plodded through the muddy field toward her brother. Though she walked in spirit only, she felt the cool, wet slush against her boots and the warm kiss of the sun on her face. This did not surprise her. All was spirit here.

  Maguan shouted, “Alaana, you’re back!” Their whole family was assembled at table, with Kigiuna sitting beside Maguan on one side and their uncle Anaktuvik on the other. Alaana’s second brother Itoriksak motioned her to come closer. “Have something to eat.”

  Some of the women, sitting at the other end of the table, acknowledged Alaana with a smile or half-wave.

  All sorts of good things to eat lay spread out on the tarp. Oysters, cakes of fresh tallow, red and black berries.

  “It’s much too warm for spring,” said Alaana. “And the sun’s too high.”

  Maguan shook his head, smiling fondly. “My sister the shaman,” he said, “talks so very often in riddles.”

  “I’ll speak more plainly,” replied Alaana. “It’s not summer yet, and you know it. We’ve just awakened from winter. The days are still short, the sun just barely over the land line.”

  Maguan chuckled awkwardly, waving away Alaana’s concerns. “Happy times,” he said, “Plenty of food here. Sit! Fill your belly, sister.”

  “The hunt was a great success,” added Itoriksak, “if only you’d been there to see it. Look, here we have mattak, freshly skinned off the whale.”

  Kigiuna said nothing. He looked up from his meal with a dull, slack-jawed expression on his face. Alaana looked away. That could not possibly be her father.

  “None of this is real,” said Alaana. “This food has no taste.” She swept the delicacies off the surface of the tarp. The friendly chatter stopped. “You were struck on the head, Maguan. Don’t you remember?”

  “Sit. Eat!” said Maguan. “We have plenty.”

  Alaana took her brother’s face in her hand, pinching the cheeks between thumb and fingers. “We were attacked by raiders. You were struck on the head. Don’t you remember?”

  She stared intently into her brother’s left eye.

  The eye blinked.

  The scene changed abruptly. Day for night, light for dark. The open spaces of Nunatsiaq now became the gloomy interior of a dirty iglu.

  Maguan, with a dreadful and grim expression, shook his face free of his sister’s grip. This was her brother as Alaana had never seen him before. Even in his darkest moments Maguan’s face always held a playful sparkle below the surface.

  The room, bounded by the oppressive dark, seemed terribly small. And yet it was crowded. A sea of ashen faces filled the iglu, stretching away into the murk, all wearing the same lost expression. In the center lay a table, the wrecked remains of a broken umiak, a shattered dream. It was the boat Maguan had always wanted to build, if ever he found enough whalebone struts. A deep pit yawned beneath the table, waiting to claim the unwary.

  And outside, the silence. The smothering quiet of the North.

  At first Alaana mistook the pale faces gathered around the wrecked umiak for expressionless skulls. A thick soot in the air made it difficult to see clearly, but as it swirled slowly away she began to recognize some familiar faces. Maguan’s lifelong friend Ipalook sat beside him on the left side, a
nd the shade of Kanak at his right hand. These somber revenants said nothing. Another face, leaning forward, came into view. Alaana was surprised to see Old Manatook, his white beard clotted gray with soot. The old man’s eyes rolled over her, but they held neither the glittering vitality nor the brilliant aura of the shaman.

  “You’re too late, sister,” said Maguan. “We’re all dead here. You don’t belong.”

  Amid all the soot and smoke, Alaana strained to see what lay on the table before them. What had they been eating? Was that the festering carcass of a whale amid the ashes? Or a rotting corpse?

  “Go away!” demanded a high-pitched, child-like voice. Alaana recognized her lost little sister, Avalaaqiaq, sitting at table. Ava had succumbed to sickness years ago. It was during this same fever period that Alaana received her calling as a shaman. Alaana had always felt guilty that she had gained so much, seemingly at the expense of her poor dear sister.

  Seeing Avalaaqiaq again tore at Alaana’s heart. She forced her eyes away, even though she knew this to be only a vision of her sister, a morbid fantasy created by Maguan.

  Alaana addressed her eldest brother, saying, “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “Home?” Maguan’s brow wrinkled. “I am home.” He gazed around at the crowded, smoky iglu, at the faces of the dead, many of them long gone from the Anatatook. “It’s not so bad being dead.”

  “You’re not dead,” insisted Alaana.

  The eye blinked.

  Sunlight, and day, again.

  The sea was choppy. The umiak rolled beneath them. Maguan laughed.

  The long boat was empty exception for Maguan, who stood at the headboard looking out over the horn, and one other. Alaana recognized the second man as her father’s father, whose name had been Ulruk. Ulruk had died long ago when Kigiuna was a boy, having drowned at sea. Alaana had never met the man in life, although she had encountered her grandfather’s ghost years ago. This vision of her grandfather, cobbled together by Maguan’s imagination from bits of stories and family lore, bore little resemblance to that ghost. The real Ulruk had Kigiuna’s sparkling eyes and a confident bearing. This man, dressed in a slick sealskin sea coat, took no joy in the sea or anything else. He steadied the flat-bottomed boat with practiced skill, using his stout legs braced against the sides.