by Ken Altabef
“I am,” said Alaana. She pulled up her hood and went out the flap.
“What’s she going to do?” asked McPearson.
Aquppak shrugged, holding the empty cup out for a refill.
McPearson pressed him further. “It’s a storm. Certainly you don’t believe she can do anything about it?”
“No, I don’t,” said Aquppak with a twisted half-smile. “But she’ll go out there and try anyway.”
McPearson thought he would like to watch such a ceremony, but there was no way he was going to leave the tent. “She’ll catch her death.”
“No, she won’t,” said Aquppak.
“She’s a tough woman, I’ll give you that, but–”
“She’s a friend to the wind and snow,” explained Aquppak. “She doesn’t feel the cold as we do.”
“Well, that’s a neat trick.”
“And she’ll come back with no results. Let the people see. She never does anything for us that we don’t do for ourselves.”
“Well, that’s cold comfort for us,” said McPearson, snickering at the inadvertent pun. The joke was lost on Aquppak.
“Well, I don’t think it’s so very funny,” Oakes said. “I didn’t come up here to die. I didn’t come here to freeze to death.”
Aquppak and McPearson cast Oakes a matching pair of withering glances.
“Shut up.”
It was the coldest day ever in the memories of old men and old women.
Higilak, who was an old weather woman, said, “There is no end in sight. This storm will not lift.”
“I’ve never seen it so bad,” agreed Nuralak, “And I’ve seen a few more winters than you.”
His voice was a good match for his saturnine appearance — deep and somber. At the front of his tent his two sons worked at the lashings. Nuralak lowered his voice so that his family, who had little else to do but listen to their conversation, might not hear. “If the storm blows down anybody’s tent tonight they’ll be dead. Simple as that.”
Higilak ran her fingers down along the front of her anorak and put on a polite half-smile. She was used to having an audience, but knew well enough how to talk in secret amid a tent full of people.
“Everything frozen solid in one night,” whispered Nuralak, “and no way to cut through. Without an iglu, we’ve no chance. These tents won’t last. If we survive this night, we’ll have to leave. Try and outrun the storm. It’s not much of a choice, but…”
Higilak said, “Give Alaana a chance.”
Nuralak shook his head. “I don’t like to rely on the shaman. We have Aquppak now. If tested, he’ll see us through.”
“No,” remarked Higilak. “This is Alaana’s duty. This is no natural storm.”
“Not a natural storm,” mused Nuralak softly. “I can believe that.”
Outside the wind howled its fury down from the raging sky.
Higilak touched the flat of the old man’s hand. “Alaana will pull us through.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“You must believe. We all must. The spirits require our good faith. Use your influence. Settle their fears as best you can. Your voice holds weight, your calm eyes speak too. If I have to go from tent to tent, I will.” Higilak spoke forcefully, intent on impressing Nuralak. Her hair was white, her face wrinkled, but her will was still strong.
“Alaana can’t do it by herself,” she continued. “She needs our support. But the people are divided. You saw what happened yesterday with that girl.”
“It’s the shaman’s responsibility to keep the people united, clean in their thoughts, strong against any spiritual threat.”
“And what about you?” she asked, much too loudly. “Don’t you have a responsibility?”
“I am old,” he whispered. “And very tired. Things are changing. I’ve heard rumors from the other bands. Shamans being killed throughout the land. Our world is crumbling away. The power of the shaman fades like the failing Moon. Will it ever rise again?”
Higilak clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
“You know it’s true,” said Nuralak. “I remember Klah Kritlaq.”
Higilak pursed her lips as if to object but the old man cut her off. “Yes, I know. Your husband had good reason to strike him down. He was mad with his own power and dangerous. But he had great power! I saw him dissolve a storm almost as fierce as this one. I saw it with my own eyes. And Old Manatook. You must agree, your husband was a great shaman. He had the power of the white bear. And he was a great hunter as well.”
Higilak nodded, and Nuralak went on, “And Civiliaq. Remember? He used to go about shirtless and bootless even in the depths of winter.”
“Alaana can warm without fire, just as well as Civiliaq ever did,” said Higilak. “I’ve felt it myself. She doesn’t like to show off, that’s all.”
“Perhaps that’s her great failing,” offered Nuralak. “She was always reluctant, even as a young girl. And hesitant as a woman, it doesn’t take a hawk’s eye to see that. But putting on a show is a part of it, for the people to believe and have faith.”
Higilak nodded. It was true. Alaana had never wanted to be the shaman. All her life, she had only desired to be a normal woman among the Anatatook.
Nuralak brushed silver hair back from his forehead. “She means well, our young shaman does. But I don’t think that’s enough. I will counsel Aquppak. We must leave this place. As for Alaana, I wish her well for all our sakes, but I won’t rely on her efforts. Might as well plead with the wind.”
“Don’t worry,” Higilak said, “That’s just what she’ll do.”
Alaana dug out her ceremonial gear, now buried in the collapsed karigi tent. A lone pole identified the mound, marked at the top with a red ribbon flailing against the grayed skies. The pole seemed now only half its original height. Tikiqaq had its face buried in the mound, scooping out dollops of crusted snow with its claws.
At the kennel, Anaktuvik was having a hard time with the dogs. Judging by the growling and barking it sounded as if they might rip themselves apart. First he tossed food at them but when that didn’t work he beat them with a switch of baleen, telling them to settle down. The panicked animals yanked hard at the whalebone stakes. They didn’t succeed in pulling loose but the lines slackened and fighting broke out. As Alaana watched, one frozen line snapped and a large gray huskie escaped.
The dog, not knowing what to do with its newfound freedom, ran wildly through the camp. Anaktuvik chased after it.
The wayward huskie charged directly at Alaana. She stretched out an arm, projecting a soothing state of mind, and the animal halted. It tilted its head, its gaze curious.
“What is it?” Alaana whispered into the wind. “What’s got you so frightened?”
The dog had no answer. It grew suspicious and made to run off, but too late. Anaktuvik grabbed the dog’s harness.
“Thanks,” he said, and dragged the animal away.
Alaana propped up part of the karigi skin so she could crawl inside and get at her things. She didn’t require much for the ceremony. She snatched up her ceremonial parka, the Wind mask, and bundled a prayer mat under her arm.
“Come,” she said to Tiki.
The woven mat was stiff with cold, and cracked as Alaana forced it open. The strips of caribou hide had varied shades of brown and tan in a pattern that represented the vagaries of the wild wind. Her white ceremonial parka flapped wildly in the wind as she drew it over her normal coat.
“What will you do?” asked the tupilaq.
Alaana kneeled on the mat, ushering Tiki beside her. “I’m going to appeal to Sila. Only he can stop the wind.”
Tiki’s moonbeam eyes rolled up toward the sky. Swirling eddies of snow flew through the air in chaotic patterns. The storm flogged the encampment in full force, coming from both the south and the north in equal measure. It seemed an impossible storm.
“What drum do I use?” asked the tupilaq.
“What drum could be heard in this riot?
” shouted Alaana back.
“Then what am I to do?” asked Tiki. It looked forlorn and out of place, half buried in the snow, its black hide dusted with white.
“Do you think I will succeed?” asked Alaana.
“Of course,” replied the tupilaq.
“Then you are doing enough. Sit beside me and be quiet.”
Alaana considered Sila, the Walker In The Wind. Her guardian spirit had been an inconstant friend all along. Sila had first come to her as a child when she lay sick with the fever. The great spirit, bearing a face that was all faces and an expansive voice that contained all voices, had commanded her to become a shaman, telling her that she would do great things. After that, the wind walker’s gifts had remained — the spirit-vision and the ability to travel outside of her body throughout the unseen worlds. Though the spirit had promised to walk with Alaana on her journey, Sila had rarely come again.
But Alaana had been heartened by her most recent encounter with Sila. The powerful spirit had promised she would find her daughter Tama again, filling her with hope.
Gritting her teeth against the rush of wind, Alaana nodded at the tupilaq. If she had doubts about her chances of success, the tupilaq did not. She had created the tupilaq, and its faith was her own, from a time before she had become so shaken. Before she had lost her daughter and her peace of mind. Tikiqaq’s faith was her own, stored for safe-keeping. This was what she must recapture.
Alaana raised the Wind mask to her face. Like most of her masks and drums, it had been handed down to her from Old Manatook. The mask had a tall, elliptical face, with flaring nostrils and large baleful eyes. It was constructed of hollow tubes of gray driftwood from top to bottom. These tubes opened out along the forehead and the protruding mouth to allow winter and summer winds to blow through. The top was embellished with white and silver feathers to represent a row of clouds and sea birds in flight.
She rolled a small black stone in her hand. Many times she had tried to contact Sila by means of this stone, found in narrow mountain defiles, a stone that had felt the wind continually for centuries.
The wind blasted through the hollow tubes of the Wind mask, making it sing. A pair of white feathers blew from the top, ripped away by the fierce wind. Alaana lowered her state of consciousness, clearing her mind of anything but the sound of the wind shrieking through the pipes. That, if anything, was the voice of Sila.
Alaana remembered something the golden walrus Nunavik had told her, “When the winds of fate howl, when the big hand reaches for the Anatatook, only with Sila’s help may you avert the storm.” She was not sure if her helper spirit had anticipated this particular moment or had been speaking in general, but the words rang true.
The walrus had also said, “You walk the path Sila has chosen for you. There is no turning back.”
And that was perhaps a more appropriate lesson than any other. There was no room for failure. Not now. Not ever. She had lost sight of so much. Alaana vowed to make an end to that now. She would concentrate. She would not rise up from this mat until Sila made himself known once again, and had come to the aid of the Anatatook. She would succeed today, or die here in the snow.
During her initiation Alaana had been near death, freezing and half-starved. Only then had Sila appeared.
Is that what it takes, she wondered, a threat of death?
Now she had so much more to lose. She had a family of her own. But if she didn’t succeed she would lose all anyway. They would all die.
Release, she told herself.
Release.
Flow like the wind.
“Great Sila, help me to help them!” Alaana’s voice rang out, passionate and humble:
“Beneath the blue sky,
Beneath the white cloud,
Keeper of the echo in the high mountains,
Keeper of the winds across the wide sea,
Master of the wild wind,
Come to me.”
The wind roared down into the pipes, a barrage of shrieking notes flowing through the Wind mask, flowing through Alaana herself. The voice of Sila carried her away. The wind swept her inuseq out of her body and up into the air.
As the Anatatook camp fell away below, Alaana’s spirit-woman was tossed roughly about. Snow and hailstones circled and flew around her and through her. Alaana was startled. She’d been lifted in the arms of Sila before, but never handled so harshly. She had no way of controlling what was happening to her, no way to counter its terrific force, no point in doing so. She must surrender to it.
“Woman?” shrieked the wind. “Are you responsible for this?”
Alaana faced Sila himself. Whereas before Sila bore the face of all things molded into that of a kindly old man, this time its face was something much wilder, composed entirely of strands of wind braided together, winding and unwinding. Where before it had held an abundance of kindness and compassion, this figure seemed completely chaotic. Its aspect was unmistakable, a cruel and ambivalent force of nature.
Sila stared at her with revulsion. Its long, sloping nose hooked disapprovingly at the end like that of a falcon. The eyes held a fierce, cutting gaze as sharp as any icy wind.
“Answer me,” said the Wind, “before I slice you apart. What role have you in this?”
“I called upon you, Great Sila,” replied Alaana forcefully, “to stop this blow. To direct it away from my people, the faithful Anatatook.”
Sila’s features turned from anger to disbelief, but no less fearsome and cruel. “You called me?”
“Yes, patron. You promised you would help.”
“I promised you nothing. I come here to seek answers. I have never laid eyes on you before.” Sila nearly blew itself apart. The braid of its face raveled and unraveled leaving long, unruly pieces sticking out at all angles. This contorted appearance turned once again toward Alaana, the voice of the wind shrieking in agony. “It hurts!”
“Can’t you stop it?”
“Something twists and perverts me,” said the Wind. “And I will not have it!”
Alaana shuddered to think what force could be so great as to do that.
“My people–” she said.
“I care not for these or any other. You are no shaman. You are a distraction. Be gone.”
Alaana’s soul crashed down into her body. Gasping for air, the maelstrom roaring all around her, she glanced at Tiki. The tupilaq still sat beside her, thoroughly expecting a good outcome.
Alaana’s head spun with the force of this crushing revelation, the death of hope. There was no doubt about it, Sila was not her patron. The spirit she had just faced knew nothing of her or the Anatatook. And yet all her life she had been told by Old Manatook and others that she could achieve nothing without Sila, that all of her power came from Sila, the Walker In The Wind. The wind did not even know her name.
The adoring gaze of Tiki, so full of misplaced faith, sickened Alaana. Was everything she had been taught a lie? Was she alone? Alaana realized there had been hints and intimations to this effect all along. The ghost of Civiliaq, one of the previous shamans of the Anatatook, had come to her once with a promise to reveal the true source of her power. But the disgraced shaman was a liar and a heretic, condemned to the Underworld for his transgressions until Alaana released him to join the souls of the other shamans in the sky. If Civiliaq truly knew anything, that information was beyond reach.
Even so, Alaana had not been able to completely dismiss his words as tricks and lies. The center of the earth. She had long tried to find that place, taking journeys to the Lowerworld to communicate with the crystals she had once encountered there. Those ancients had seemed to know something too, but shut themselves away from her.
The helper spirits of her youth had all disappeared after the initiation. Chased away by Sila, or by the thing that had pretended to be Sila. What advice would Nunavik be able to offer on the subject, Alaana wondered. She thought of Old Manatook’s mysterious familiar, the elusive dragon made of white smoke that so often poised on
his shoulder. Would Quixaaragon know the answer to this riddle?
“The storm still rages,” observed Tikiqaq.
Alaana looked down at it with a repentant gaze. “I can’t stop it,” she said.
The shaman thought she recognized a touch of shock cross the face of the black seal carcass. Tiki’s large, moonbeam eyes blinked, its half-rotten snout crinkled. Alaana sighed. She had watched this strange creature joke and dance for the delight of the children; she had witnessed its devotion to Tooky. She had seen it look upon the world of snow and ice with eyes alight with wonder. The tupilaq had been created solely for revenge and destruction but had already become so much more.
“You can try again,” it said with a confident nod. “I’m sure he will hear you the second time.”
“You are a good friend indeed, Tiki, to stand with me against the storm.”
The moonbeam eyes brightened.
Alaana continued, “But it’s not enough. There’s no one I can call on for help. I am alone.”
Alaana felt the full force of the chill wind.
“Let’s go inside,” she said. “Before we die out here.”
CHAPTER 32
THE EYE BLINKS
“Nnnnnaaaaaoooo!” screeched Narssuk.
Vithrok squeezed again.
The diaper-clad weather spirit shrieked again.
Narssuk thrashed in pain and horror, driving the mad whirlwind that circled the pair. The very fabric of the sky frayed and tore as the wind gusted uncontrolled, spewing up chunks of dirt and blue ice where it scoured the ground.
Vithrok, his hands buried deep inside the weather spirit’s soul, recalled a memory of long ago, his hands grasping the sun. It was a bad memory, a flash of intense pain and regret that almost made him lose his grip. He had made mistakes in the past. He had made a terrible mistake. There had been time and time and time again to think upon it, amid the lonely echoes of the soulless catchstone. Alone, forever, in the dark. But all that was ended now, he reminded himself. Now had come the time to set things right, and in this he must not falter.
