The Shadow of Everything Existing

by Ken Altabef

  “Aquppak thought differently. He saw Vithrok as a traitor. Vithrok was the Light-Bringer, a figure out of legend who created the shadow world and then disappeared. Remember the exaltation we all felt when he reappeared? How he was going to help our people and make them real? But all he did was try to use the shadow people as weapons, to attack the daylight world and lure us to our deaths. So my husband and his followers have a poor appreciation for legend. Legends corrupted and ill-used. ‘Stab at me once and once only,’ he said. Our half of the people don’t want the lights put out. They want to hold onto what they have here. They see the good in it. It’s not paradise, but it’s all we have. We can be content to live in the shadows. And there can be love in this desolate place just the same.”

  Ivalu continued, “The two sides bitterly oppose each other. Aquppak was the only voice keeping the two factions from coming to blows. Now that he’s gone, who will lead them?”

  “You will. You have such strength in you. I know it. I’ve seen it, time and again, on the other side.”

  “Perhaps,” she said thoughtfully. “Perhaps I will. I used to have Old Higilak to give me advice but she’s gone.”

  “Seek out my father Kigiuna. He will help.”

  “The shadow of Kigiuna does not know you here. To him, you died many years ago.”

  “That doesn’t matter. He loves life more than anyone I know. Talk to him. He will see your point. And he gives very good advice.”

  Ivalu nodded. “I will try.”

  Alaana turned to go. She didn’t wish to tell Ivalu that all of her people were still in dreadful danger, and by extension all their shadows as well. She had enough troubles already.

  The Anatatook camp, once again, lay in ruins. Its tents, ripped and torn, flapped noisily in the icy wind. Yupikut sled dogs ran wildly about the camp. Alaana walked past Iggy, who was busy rounding up a brace of the huskies. Iggy smiled good-naturedly at his friend the shaman. He seemed pleased to finally own a new sled and a decent dog team to go with it.

  Alaana found Maguan standing beside a stacked pile of the Yupikut dead, giving instructions to a couple of the younger men about how to dispose of the bodies.

  “Alaana!” he said. He gestured to the stack of bodies. “Do you think this is all of them?”

  “I don’t know. They seem a lot less than I remember. But these days everything has changed. Who knows what may have happened to the Yupikut? Are you worried there will be another attack?”

  “No,” Maguan said confidently. “The Yupikut choose their targets carefully. Would they dare come back here after this? I don’t think so. But if they do, we will use their own weapons against them. We have some of their strength now. Guns and ammunition. They got nothing from us.”

  “Were any of them left alive?”

  “No. We’re taking these bodies to the crags so they won’t foul the river. Do we need to bury them?”

  Alaana gazed down at the smoldering ruins of the raiders with the second sight of her spirit-vision. She was relieved to find no angry souls of the Yupikut waiting over the bodies.

  “Not really. When the shadow and the human soul meet they both go immediately to the distant lands, as far as I can tell. At least there aren’t any ghosts hanging around the Yupikut dead. And I’m glad for that. What about our own?”

  Maguan jerked his head toward the center of the encampment, where five bodies lay on the ground, wrapped in fur blankets. “Our uncle,” he said sadly, “Anaktuvik.”

  Anaktuvik, thought Alaana. Kigiuna’s elder brother. He had been famous for his skill at raising and training sled dogs, he had enjoyed nothing so much as a good pipeful of fresh tobacco, and he never failed to make Kigiuna smile. He had taught most of the men in the village the best way to hunt seal, which included the singing of special songs that he had devised himself. Alaana always thought the whole thing was a joke Anaktuvik had been playing on the other men for twenty years, keeping a straight face all the while. The songs were absolutely terrible and more likely to frighten off the seal than anything else but his uncle’s track record was impressive. That man had been a mainstay of Alaana’s family all her life.

  Even now she could see her uncle’s inua, a vibrant ball of red and yellow, hovering over his dead body.

  “And Civiliaq’s son Guarina. Oaniuk, and two of Kamatsiaq’s sons as well.”

  “Then I have bitter duties to perform. I must soothe their spirits, comfort their widows within their sight, and see them off to the other side. In five days they’ll cross over. We shouldn’t move camp until then.”

  “Agreed.”

  Alaana healed the bear twins as best she could. She cut away the blood-matted fur and dug out the bullets. She cleansed their wounds with moss-fire. She made a protective salve the way the old bear shaman Balikqi had taught her. When she was done, Orfik was lame in one leg and Oktolik would have to keep the spearhead that was lodged in his chest. It was painful, but bears had survived like that before.

  Alaana ministered to them under a small rocky outcropping which was not quite a cave, just beyond the Forked River. The Anatatook would not allow the bears to remain inside their camp. They thought it much too dangerous to have wounded bears among the children. Alaana might have argued on their behalf, and the people might even have listened, but the bears would have none of it anyway. They had no desire to live that way, as crippled sympathy cases among the humans.

  “Why don’t you return to the Ice Mountain?” suggested Alaana. “You will be forgiven. I am sure of it.”

  “That’s not possible,” said Oktolik.

  “It is possible,” said Alaana.

  “You don’t understand the depth of our shame.”

  Alaana felt so saddened and shocked by that statement, she could not reply.

  “We were the defenders of the ice mountain…” said Orfik.

  “We were the protectors of the Heart,” said Oktolik.

  “And where is our treasure now? Smashed to bits.”

  “And how many died there? Because of our cowardice?”

  Orfik buried his head down among his forelegs. He couldn’t stand to hear his brother call himself a coward when he had been the one to talk Oktolik out of taking action.

  “You could explain,” suggested Alaana. “You could try--”

  “No, we can’t,” said Orfik.

  Alaana sighed. She didn’t know what to do with them.

  “We can’t go back…” said Oktolik.

  “Not like this,” finished Orfik.

  “Then what are you going to do? Wander around? Can you catch seal like this? You’d better go up north. There are many hunters here, bands without their shamans, desperate for food. Things are different now. They’ll kill you. You’ve already tasted their guns. They can kill from a hundred paces. You won’t even see death coming.”

  “We know all that,” said Orfik.

  “And?” demanded Alaana.

  “We have a better idea.”

  CHAPTER 40

  THINGS LOST

  Noona waited until Gekko fell off to sleep. She didn’t have long to wait. He was completely exhausted.

  She rolled out of their fur blanket and into the chill air inside their tiny iglu. For a moment she still felt the passion of his touch, his tender caresses against her skin, his kisses lingering their warmth on her body. She closed the blanket around Gekko as he lay snoring in the bed. She worried about him. He was a strong man despite his ridiculous chatter to the contrary. He said they weren’t going to make it, but he kept putting one foot ahead of the other, walking on and on, no matter how tired. No matter how weary. A man doesn’t do that if he’s given up.

  She knew that a severe headache almost always came with the snow-blindness, but Gekko hadn’t mentioned it. He was a very strong man. Still, everyone had their limits. At times he seemed on the verge of pibloktoq, the snow madness. She had shielded his eyes from the glare but nothing could ease the mind-bending monotony of a vast, unbroken expanse of white on white,
day after day. It was impossible to talk while they were walking; one had to take the deep cold of each breath only shallowly. And it was wearing on him. She felt it too.

  She loved him and she wanted to be married to him. But not like this, trapped on an endless death march across the wastes. Her mother might be searching for them but she would never find them. Not out here. This country was too vast and empty, even for the shaman. They had been walking for days and days and days and they hadn’t gotten very far.

  Noona got dressed, still on her knees in the tiny iglu. She donned her seal-skin trousers and parka, and then the heavier, fur lined winter coat. She pulled a strip of bear fur tight around her neck and pulled her hood up.

  She had to be realistic about their chances. Despite what she had been telling her husband, their prospects were grim. They couldn’t continue to exist for very long eating scrapings from the rocks and snow melt. Eventually if they kept traveling south as they must, they would come to snow that wasn’t hard-packed igluksak, not firm enough for an iglu. And then they’d have no shelter at all. The few furs they carried with them weren’t enough to make a serviceable tent.

  If they remained here, they would die of starvation. If they kept going south they would die of exposure.

  She slid out the entrance hole. The sky was still lit by summer daylight but it had grown a little hazy. The sun skimmed closer to the horizon instead of beaming down directly from above. Soon it would be night again. She could find no sign of the Moon. It was so hard to believe it was gone forever.

  The great rock was probably still up there, she knew, but it was too dead and dark to see. She worried for Tatqeq, the Moon Maid, her guardian, her friend.

  Noona stretched a length of seal gut between her rapidly numbing fingers. Without her Royal Navy mittens her fingers were already stiff and useless for fine motions but she had practiced this form so many times before, it was easily done. She strung the string tightly between thumb and forefinger then made the double loop through the lower center to complete the figure of the Moon Rising. It was this configuration of ipiitaq aularuq, the string dance, which had occasionally enabled her to contact her guardian spirit in the past. She stared into the double loop and thought hard, but with no Moon in the sky it was impossible.

  It simply wasn’t going to work. Well, she had to keep hoping. She desperately wanted to see something, some new sign to wipe away the vision she had last been shown. Tatqeq had been blind and on the run, fleeing her merciless half-brother Tingook. Her brother had been created by the Moon Man out of the lifeless rock of the dark side of the Moon, without need of a woman’s touch. Tingook was a twisted spirit, a relentlessly bitter soul, alone and quite mad, set in judgment over the lost souls that were frequently drawn to the Moon. After the death of the Moon Man he turned on his sister Tatqeq, whom he hated most of all. Noona’s last glimpse of the Moon Maid had been a nightmarish flight from bat-like demons, parts of Tingook himself, which her cruel brother had set upon her. Had he caught up to her? What would he do to her?

  She looked to the sky for answers, but there were none. The dome above had grown duskier than before. A broad ribbon of dark purple cloud looped overhead, crackling with liquid fire. A sudden terror struck at Noona’s heart. She had seen something like this once before, as a young girl. She remembered huddling with her brother and little sister, all three of them nestled in her father’s arms as lightning crashed down on the settlement, her mother the shaman unable to do anything about it.

  The first blast struck the ice a hundred paces away, as if the mere thought had brought it crashing down. The bark of thunder was almost immediate. Where the lightning struck the wet ice it sent balls of static electricity skittering across the surface. A savage wind whipped up as well, throwing Noona’s hood back.

  The sky cracked again, spilling a blaze of light down to strike the tundra only a few paces from the iglu. A series of nearly-born discharges hung crackling in the air, then gathered and danced and slammed down, one after another. The smell of lightning so close was new for Noona, a sharp and stinging scent like none she’d experienced ever before. Lines of skyfire streaked overhead, setting the sky ablaze with overlapping flashes that left bright after-images on her eyes.

  Gekko came crawling out of the tunnel. He had hastily dressed in several layers of greatcoat and slops, the snow shield goggles in his hand. Unfortunately he risked a look around. The blasts of lightning were so painful to his poor tortured eyes he cried out as if they had struck him full in the face.

  “What in blue blazes is happening out here?”

  “It’s a summer lightning storm. I was looking for Tatqeq, the Moon Maid…”

  “Did you cause this?” he asked, incredulously.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said. Or was it?

  Another bolt of savage lightning smashed down only a few feet away. It struck the surface of the ice, blowing a hole in the thick plate. Seawater came spraying up in all directions.

  “Cover your eyes,” she said, although such a warning was unnecessary. Gekko had fixed the snow blindness visor over his face already.

  The lightning came down with a fevered pace now, a new strike every few seconds. The thunder was incredible, deafening. Wherever the lightning struck, the ice shattered with a tremendous crack. Water sprayed everywhere.

  “That’s salt water! I taste salt water!” shouted Gekko. “We’re still out on the ocean, aren’t we?”

  The lightning stabbed down, the water flew on the wind, and Noona thought they were certain to die today, either blown to bits by the sky fire or cast freezing into the cold black water below.

  “Where can we hide? What can we do?” asked Gekko.

  She couldn’t answer. Aside from their tiny iglu, which had already begun to slide into the water, there was nothing but flat ice as far as the eye could see.

  “Our furs!” screamed Gekko, as the iglu disappeared.

  Another ferocious bolt of skyfire exploded above them, bringing thunder so loud it threatened to drive them to madness. To make matters worse, egg-sized balls of hail began dropping from the sky. They skittered across the shattering ice, adding a tumultuous roar to the already deafening rumbles that surrounded them. Spheres of ball lightning bounced and rolled across the wet ice.

  Gekko pulled Noona down onto the floe as low as they could get. There was already more than a foot of water on the surface. They had no shield against the barrage of hailstones, which pelted them painfully despite the thickness of their clothing. He took her in his arms and held tight. There were so many things Noona wanted to say, but the crashing thunder and the shrieking ice floes made them all impossible. It didn’t matter, she thought. All that talk was unnecessary. She held her husband tight as they waited for the end.

  But instead she noticed a change in the wind. It swirled around them in a circle. The rush of air grew louder and louder almost like an inhuman voice rising above all the other noise and bluster, though she could not tell what it might be saying.

  “What’s that?” asked Gekko.

  He had noticed it too.

  The wind increased, the ice floe shook beneath them as it cracked further and further.

  And then they were lifted up. The wind lifted them up. Its hands were so rough and cold she thought in another moment she would be turned to ice. The two lovers clung together, fighting the pull of the swirling cyclone. But without a doubt they were being lifted up and carried into the sky, lurching and flailing, gasping desperately for every breath.

  Gekko screamed.

  CHAPTER 41

  FIRE AND ICE

  He must hold on.

  He must hold on.

  Vithrok struggled to contain the Beforetime. Its swirling, seething, ever-changing madness could never truly be controlled. It pulled him this way and that, dazzling him with every type of stimulation, all at once. It teased his senses with every color, sound, every smell and taste, real or imagined, in a wild jumble beyond rational interpretation.

&nb
sp; He must hold on. He must hold it back from erupting. He had thought, when he first calculated this plan, that he would spark the Beforetime to flame after Time had stopped. He had imagined himself standing above this tarnished creation, all the world frozen in a timeless moment, conquered and still, as he struck that fateful match.

  Reality had presented him a very different scenario. It required all of his willpower just to keep his store of Beforetime from igniting and consuming the entire world. Should the explosion come now, amid the stream of flowing time, all would be lost. He must hold on until the time was right. Time. Time between his blackened fingers, slipping forward and back.

  He had developed methods of maintaining himself, of preserving a state of control. Two things helped him in this. Chief among them was the fact that he now remained always within his mortal body. The cage of frozen flesh surrounded his troubled spirit, binding him to harsh reality.

  It was ironic because he remembered the time just after the Great Rift when the newly-formed Tunrit had lain scattered in the mud, when they had first been forced into these restrictive bodies that were no use for practically anything, and how many of them died there that day from the weight of despair. It seemed a horrible punishment for a crime they had not committed. Vithrok had roused them with noble words, telling them they must persevere, they must hold on. Now he embraced that same, limited form as it grounded him against the swirling chaos of possibilities that the unbridled Beforetime hurled at his soul.