by Ken Altabef
“I watched and waited until ultimately I found my chance. I saw a young girl and a situation, a certain chain of events that I might use. I created a shaman for myself. I would lead this girl to take an action to save an old friend, an action that would release a scourge upon this world.”
Alaana listened with fascination. All the guilt she had suffered over the long years for having released the sorcerer was suddenly taken away. It had not been her fault. None of it. The Long-Ago Shaman had planned the entire thing, using her as a tool, a mechanism that would release the sorcerer.
Tsungi continued, “Once free, the soul of the one called the Truth launched his own plan; this was again something which I foresaw as inevitable. He would seek your return, trying to use you for his own purposes. As my agent, he was even more effective than the shaman. He was unstoppable. His will was iron. He would not relent until he had accomplished the unthinkable.”
Alaana smarted at the idea that Tsungi favored Vithrok over her. Both puppets, she realized, both tools. She’d been blind to the whole thing.
“My plan unfolded as I knew it would. You would be brought here and we would meet again, that was the only thing that mattered. When the shaman killed the sorcerer, the Beforetime was released. I was free to look upon the sky again. Your approach raised me up.”
“I needed to see you again. We are drawn to each other.” Raigli’s expression remained impassive. “So here we are.”
“Yes, here we are,” said Tsungi. The two great spirits continued to gaze at each other, wide eyed, tight lipped. Eventually Tsungi asked, “Are you still angry with me?”
“I had a lot of time to think, drifting out there alone.”
“And so did I, at the center of the world.”
Raigli glanced around the plain. “And?”
“And I think you were right,” Tsungi said. “The idea was so strange, so new. I wasn’t ready for it. I was used to the old way — where we all existed as parts of the whole, exchanging pieces of our souls without even a care or a thought about it. But that time that we were together… Those feelings…”
“We had the perfect configuration,” she said, painfully. “We were in love. All we had to do was break free of the rest. Make a stand. Preserve those identities. Not change.”
“Identities,” he said. “Individuals. It was too new a concept for me. So different.”
“But we were in love,” she repeated. “If we changed configuration it would have been lost.”
“It would have been shared…” he mused.
“I didn’t want to share.” She was becoming angry again. “I wanted you for myself. Was that so wrong? But you turned away. You didn’t want to keep what we had.”
“I did want to,” he said. “I did. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how not to change. And then you became so unreasonable, so angry.”
The dark purple of her face blotched even a bit darker, tending toward black. Alaana interpreted the change as a flush of embarrassment. “It was your fault,” she said.
“I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t ready. You lashed out.”
“You turned away,” she insisted.
“I’ve learned a lot since then. I found wisdom from unlikely sources.”
For a moment it seemed Tsungi glanced down at Alaana.
“From animals. From creatures locked into one form or another. From people.”
“I only wanted to keep what we had,” she said.
“I did keep it,” he said.
She sighed. “I did too.”
“I’ve been trying to say you’re right,” he said. “We should be together. We couldn’t have been together then, but now… If you still desire it. There’s nothing to stop us now.”
“I’m glad you brought me back.” Her smile was a flash of black teeth in a blaze of whiteness.
The two spirits fell into each other. Their forms merged, Tsungi bringing all the blazing Beforetime he had taken from the crumbling citadel and Raigli absorbing it to fill her Dark void. The combined figure was so bright it left afterimages on Alaana’s eyes.
“Are you seeing this, Alaana?” asked the walrus.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“They’ve taken it all. Sedna, Erlaveersinioq, the spirit of the snow, everything.”
The two figures separated again, to stand once more as separate individuals, as equals. Raigli said, “I never thought to see this place again. It’s changed so much.”
“The world is different now, and shall be different hereafter. The lights of the shamans have come down from the sky. There shall be no more shamans. I have no more need of them. There is nothing to keep us here.”
The two beings flared so brightly Alaana was forced to look away.
“Nunavik?” she said. “Nunavik?”
Suddenly it was very cold.
CHAPTER 46
AFTERMATH
As a parting gift, Tsungi returned Alaana to the Forked River. She was delivered, bitter cold and trembling, into the arms of her family and friends who had kept a vigil at the mound. A simple thing, but a very precious gift after all.
Ben rushed to her side. As the two embraced, her husband looked back at her quizzically. He was able to see the change immediately. “It’s gone, isn’t it?” he whispered.
Alaana nodded. “It’s gone. It’s all gone. No more turgats and great spirits. No more Beforetime. Just plain human souls.”
“It’s what you wanted,” said Kigiuna. He smiled. “It’s what you wanted all along.”
“Yes,” said Alaana. Being a normal person would take some getting used to. But it had been her dream all along.
She turned to Ben. “So tell me again about this jambalaya. I want to know what to expect when we get there.”
“You mean it?” Ben’s face lit up. Alaana was taken aback for a moment. This was her first time seeing him without the second sight and she realized once again how handsome he was. His sensitive mouth, his strong jaw, and rich brown skin. She couldn’t see his soul directly, but it was there. It was there in the playful turn of his lips, and his broad smile and the love in his eyes.
“You’re serious?” he asked again.
“I can’t do anything more for them here. It’s like you said, they’ll have to get by on their own. They don’t need me any more.”
Ben smiled as broadly as she had ever seen him smile. “Well,” he said, “Near as I can recall it has to do mostly with sausage, onions and bell peppers. To tell you the truth I hardly remember myself.”
“Then we’ll have a bowl together.”
“And there are so many other things I want to show you. Wait till you see New Orleans. They have a carnival every year, a sort of a festival and big parade. People dress up in strange costumes and grotesque masks. You’ll be right at home. And there’s music, Alaana, such wonderful music—”
“Later, Ben. Just give me a little time.”
She parted from the crowd and walked away to be by herself, going back to her karigi. The sight of the masks and drums was almost painful now. She could no longer see the spirits that nested within them. On second thought, she realized, there were no spirits nesting within them. It was all gone. She would pack it all up and bury it under stone. There really was no reason for the Anatatook to carry these things around any more. No reason to pretend.
She noticed a strange black shadow against the snowy ground inside the tent. A pair of raven’s wings had been laid out on the floor.
Alaana stared down at them in silence. What was the meaning of this? They must have come from the Raven. They must be a joke. What type of cruel joke, she couldn’t imagine. The wings seemed to say that she could be the shaman again, that all she had to do was put them on. Fat chance.
“Hold still,” she said to Tikiqaq. “I’m not finished sewing you up.”
“It hurts,” said the tupilaq.
“No it doesn’t,” said Alaana. “Stop fussing.” She dragged the needle and sinew through the dead skin of the
seal carcass and pulled it tight.
“I still don’t know if I’ve done the right thing,” she said. “If I hadn’t killed Vithrok, Tsungi wouldn’t have been released. Vithrok’s plan might have succeeded. He might’ve brought back paradise.”
“Well, I guess you’ll never know,” said Tiki. “Some paradoxes can’t be solved.”
“It’s not a paradox,” said Alaana, “whatever that is. It was a plan. It was Tsungi’s plan all along. He called me a mechanism.”
“That’s harsh,” allowed the tupilaq.
Alaana pulled the sinew through again and cinched it tight.
“Owwww!” said Tikiqaq.
“You can’t feel that.”
“I do!” insisted the tupilaq.
Alaana supposed it was possible. So much else had changed.
“Are you certain they took all the angakua away?” asked Tiki.
“As far as I can tell. Qo’tirgin is the only shaman left alive, and he’s rendered as human as I am. The lights have all gone away.”
“The souls?”
“We still have souls, I guess, though no one may see them. It is a world without spirit guardians, a world without magic.”
Alaana considered that her father was right. She was glad to be rid of all of the trouble and dangers that the spiritual world had caused her. But every blessing has its own price; she would never see Nunavik again or any of the others. She didn’t really know what had happened to them. She imagined they’d gone on to the land of the ancestors, a place she had visited on occasion as the shaman, but now she wasn’t even sure if it still existed.
She’d find out one day.
Alaana was no stranger to uncertainty. She’d lived her entire life seeking answers to nagging questions. She’d found very many of those answers today out on the flat plain at the top of the world. But there were always new questions. Now she looked to the future with uncertain eyes, just like everyone else.
She was more than content to live out the rest of her days as an ordinary woman. She thought of her family. She thought of her son Kinak, and all the wonderful things he might achieve, free from the burden of his shaman mother.
Noona and Gekko seemed happy enough. Gekko had been permanently blinded by his experiences on the tundra but he had taken the situation in stride, exhibiting a fine British ‘stiff upper lip’ as he called it. He resolved to remain among the Anatatook, to act as an agent between the native people and the Europeans. He would teach them whatever he could of the modern ways of men. He and Noona made a strange pair, as she dedicated herself to telling the old stories she’d learned from Higilak. They represented a strange union of old and new. It pleased Alaana to see it.
“But…” said Tikiqaq, “what will happen?”
“The world will go on,” said Alaana, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “People will hunt, and eat, love, fight, everything else.”
“But that’s not what I meant,” said Tiki. “Why am I still here?”
“I don’t know. I put a little bit of my soul into you, I guess. And I’m still here. Maybe that’s why you go on. I can’t explain it.”
“I wonder if there are any other tupilaqs out there.”
“Oh, my love,” she said, “none like you.”
Alaana paused to admire her handiwork, smoothing the feathers on Tiki’s new pair of raven wings.
“All done,” she said.
The tupilaq flapped its new wings enthusiastically, practically slapping Alaana in the face with their fluttering tips.
“Well, I guess they’re sewn on well enough,” she remarked, laughing. She stood up. “And now I have some business of my own to attend to. We’ll need a proper wedding feast for Noona before we go.”
Tikiqaq tested its weight against the wings. “Can we invite Qo’tirgin to the wedding?”
“Certainly he will be here,” said Alaana. “But you can’t stay, Tiki. It won’t be safe for you here. People will hunt you, they’ll kill you, they won’t understand.”
“What do you want me to do?” asked the tupilaq.
“I want you to fly.”
EPILOGUE:
The Raven perched at the topmost expanse of the ruined Tunrit citadel, which happened to be the jagged remains of one of the front doors, broken halfway up. It was a clear day at the pole, quiet all along the tundra. Boring.
He wondered what the white men would make of this place if they ever reached the pole. An empty mausoleum. There were many such ruins all around this world, pyramids and forgotten monuments of the past. They would probably look at it and wonder, but they would never know. A decent joke.
Not one of his best. Raven was particularly fond of the joke he’d played on Vithrok. Big, bad Vithrok, who thought he could torture poor little raven. And where was Vithrok now? Nonexistence. Sweet oblivion. Well, oblivion was too good for the likes of him, as far as Raven was concerned.
Raven recalled the beginnings of the joke, the night when he had leaned his beak in close to the Tunrit’s ear and whispered to him of the temptations of the sun, that jewel of the sky, so precious and irresistible. He had led Vithrok along the garden path, maneuvered him into destroying his friends and his people, to wind up suffering long eons of imprisonment until he was set free to pursue his own utterly destructive idea of redemption. He worked so hard, putting heart and soul into his plan, only to be outwitted by a human being. So long, Truth!
It had been a fine joke. A joke within a joke actually. The grandest joke of all was the trick he had played Raigli. Oh yes, Raven had been there too, at that precise moment when Raigli concocted a unique notion — the idea of a separate identity. The idea that she could only be happy one way. The idea that she was in love. And who was that, whispering such ridiculous ideas into Raigli’s ear? Could it have been Raven?
Yes, it well might have been. Raven fluttered his wings. He enjoyed causing arguments.
And what an argument! Raven had watched, breathless, as the Beforetime tore itself apart, to create this little world of mud and water, stone and ice. Thousands of years spinning helplessly in space, thousands of years trapped within the center of the earth. Well, Raven thought, if they were to have love and a happy ending they must first suffer for it. But at last clever Tsungi had solved his riddle, assembled the pieces, set them in motion. Raven had always liked Tsungi. And now the tale was done. A jest well played out. All magic gone. Well, except for him!
Still there were opportunities. Now he had the playground all to himself.
What next for poor lonely Tulukkaruq? Now what was he to do? Fold up his wings and rest? Not likely.
He thought about the ending he had already witnessed. A world burning in atomic fire and supreme devastation; a magnificent feast he had promised himself. It could still be arranged if he liked. There were so many possibilities. How would it end this time? He must consider. Everything had changed. The spirits were written out of the script, and science was on the rise. His little darlings the humans were ascendant. They would write their own future. He wondered what might happen next?
What new mischief might he concoct?
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In the summer of 1750, Eric Grayson discovers his wife of ten years is a faery spy, a member of a treacherous race the British-and the Grayson family in particular-have hunted and reviled for many years. As his dark family secrets unravel, will Eric ever break the cycle of death and madness that haunts him?
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Praise for “Il Teatro Oscuro”:
“A heartbreaking work of fantasy that addresses the call of the lost, golden past in the human heart.”
-- Lois Tilton for LOCUS online
Praise for “The Woman Who Married the Snow”:
“This is a rich, atmospheric tale of the interaction of spirits amongst both living and dead. I appreciated the writer’s impeccable voice.”
-- Colleen Chen for TANGENT online
“A well-told tale with great details about Inuit culture.”
-- Sam Tomaino for SFRevu
Praise for “The Lost Elephants of Kenyisha”:
“This well executed story deserves a 'thumbs up,' for its well-crafted writing.”
--KJ Hannah Greenberg, TANGENT online
“The herd of ghost elephants is a neat idea and a great premise for a story.”
--Lois Tilton, LOCUS online
“This was another well-told story that I enjoyed immensely.”
--Sam Tomaino, SF REVU
COMING 9/25/16:
The Kingdom or the Girl?
Bloodthirsty demons attack him.
Strange spirits protect him.
A seer foretells his shocking destiny.
In a primitive land filled with magic, witches and giants, a young musician named David is summoned by the king to chase away the nightmares that torment him, but the palace isn’t as safe as it seems. Demons haunt the king and two powerful foes—the Witch of Endor and a giant named Goliath—lead an army that threatens to enslave the country.