Shadows

by Ken Altabef

  Alaana yanked the mat from the seal’s claw. The wind tore it open and Alaana placed the mat pattern-side-down upon the top of the crumbling wind break. Sila be damned. She stabbed the harpoon head into the mat and climbed up. The shaman stood high above the camp, her back braced against the spear shaft, in plain sight of any who cared to brave the icy wind and have a look. Watching from cracks and corners, let them see.

  “They want to see,” she said. “Let them all see!”

  The wind picked up. Alaana tried an old whaler’s trick to find the direction of a storm. Standing with back to the wind, she stretched both arms wide.

  Keeping her arms out, she turned slightly one way and then the other until facing straight into the teeth of the wind. The center of the storm must lie directly forward of her right hand’s direction.

  It came from two days’ journey to the north, approximately centered around the Ring of Stones. Not a coincidence, she thought. That was a place of mystical energies going back to the dawn of time. It had also been the site of her confrontation with the revengeful spirit of Beluga Killer, the gigantic polar bear that had sought vengeance on Higilak. Vengeance that Alaana had denied by summoning ghosts from the past, the spirits of noble Tunrit hunters who put the beast down.

  “Up!” she said to Tiki.

  The poor thing scrabbled at the icebreak with its claws, unable to climb up the crumbling surface. Alaana stretched out her leg and the tupilaq grabbed on. She swung her leg up and sat the creature beside her.

  She studied the patterns of the snowflakes, looking for any sign of the thing Noona had described. Meanwhile, the camp had sprung to life. It seemed as if all the men were out of their tents seeing to the dogs and the sleds. The creature would come, she was sure of it. She only hoped she was conspicuous enough, high up on the wind-break.

  She began to sing. It was not an invocation for spiritual aid. It was not a song in praise of Sila or any of the great spirits. It was a song of the common Anatatook man, the seal hunter, sitting out on the freezing ice, passing the time.

  Tiki recognized the song, for it had once been a seal under the ice, hunted by men from the Tanaina camp.

  “Are you hunting seal?” asked the tupilaq.

  “No,” replied Alaana. “In this we are both the hunter and the prey.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand. There is something killing my people, something none of us has ever seen before. And why should it come among us now?”

  “Maybe it has grown hungry?”

  “I don’t think so. The white bear sleeps all winter when it’s cold. This thing comes now because it is so cold, colder than we have ever known before. Maybe it sleeps during the summer, a summer that lasts years and hundreds of years, and walks again only in rare winter.”

  “I hope it doesn’t come,” said the tupilaq.

  “It must come,” returned Alaana. “But you don’t have to worry. It won’t hurt you I guess, since you’re already dead.”

  “I’ll bite it!”

  “That won’t do this time. There can be only one way to destroy something like this. Burn it away.”

  “Burn! Kill!”

  “That’s right,” said Alaana sadly. “You will help.”

  “I will!” said Tiki.

  “I’m going to give you something for safekeeping, but only for a short while.”

  “What is it?”

  “A part of me. A spark of life, taken from my own soul. I need you to hold it for a little while. This you will do?”

  “Yes.”

  Of the three souls contained by the human body, the spark of life was the most difficult to control, and the most dangerous. Alaana could separate her inua from her physical body and journey among the seven worlds. Her name-soul contained her true name and all that went with it, inherited or passed down from someone who had gone before. The name went always with the inua. The third soul, the spark of life, always remained with the body. Without its spark the body would perish, setting the inua forever adrift.

  She had been trained by Old Manatook in the control of the body and the mind. This she could do. She set the conditions for the body, conditions that would generate the tumo. She slowed her breathing and heart rate. This she had done many times before. But what she attempted now she had never thought to do before. To split apart her spark of life, taking a small piece of it and giving it to the tupilaq.

  The tumo began to build. Alaana felt the intense heat welling up in her belly. She brought herself to the brink, the mystic flame surging in her belly, eager to set forth. She held it there with great effort, in the moment just before, but did not let it spark to flame.

  She stretched a hand out to Tikiqaq, placing her palm to the creature’s forehead just above the raven’s beak. From her hand to the tupilaq, she sent a tiny bit of her soul. She drew her hand back, recoiling from the spark as it passed her fingertips. If there was some ill effect from loss of that bit of spark, Alaana did not feel it.

  Poised on the verge of the tumo, she searched the snow pattern for the thing Noona had described.

  It came, as she knew it would. Drawing itself out of the chill, it started as a glittering seed balanced in midair. Untouched by the battering winds it extended like a snowflake growing larger and larger as it formed out of the very cold itself. It churned and boiled, making a dry crackling sound like straining frost, as it assumed an inhuman shape with so many sharp edges that it seemed impossible. Any one of those edges could flay a man alive. Alaana felt a chill to think her daughter had looked upon such a monstrous thing with relative equanimity, when its shape caused her such a deep, primordial fear.

  “What do you want?” she demanded. “Why do you kill us? Why do you destroy my friends, my family?”

  The frost-demon spoke, its voice a high-pitched buzzing drone. “You don’t belong here. This is ours.”

  The air grew dense with swirling powder.

  “You are the one who doesn’t belong,” said Alaana. Her voice was strained, as she struggled to hold the tumo on the point of ignition. “This is not your time. This is just a temporary storm, a moment. You are like an early bud on the vine. Warmth shall soon return. Then you go back to sleep. Perhaps one day the long, deep cold will return again and then you can come out. But this is not your time.”

  “You killed us before. In the dark. Invaders! You killed us.”

  That must have been long ago, thought Alaana. In the time of the Tunrit.

  “I don’t want to kill anything,” she said. “I beg you. Enjoy your moment, before the deep sleep calls you again. You’ve no need to kill us. Leave us be.”

  Alaana felt the cold intensify. It won’t bargain, she thought. It refuses to understand. So be it.

  She knew what was coming next, and yet was completely unready for it.

  The demon surged into her, freezing her heart.

  Her entire body shook with the sudden chill. Her heart slowed down in the grip of that icy monster, bile rising in her throat. She envisioned an unforgiving, creeping cold traveling over the village, freezing everything and everyone in their places. The camp buried under a rippling mass of snow, laid as flat as the barren wastes. The meat caches frozen over, the kennels abandoned, the tents crashed in with the weight of the snow. The empty living spaces and beds filled with merciless drifts. And glittering on the crusted surface of snow like red jewels the shattered remnants of the Anatatook people, her family and friends. The ice spirit had won. Panic beckoned from the depths of her soul but when it reached for her, she would have none of it. She did not fight for life; she surrendered herself to the cold embrace of death.

  In the instant before her heart stopped, Alaana’s spirit leapt from her body. Her inuseq hovered free, unseen by the ice creature. Alaana saw her lifeless body now before her, washed of all color, drained of heat. The Anatatook camp had not yet been consumed by almighty cold. The people were still safe for now; it was only their shaman that faced mortal da
nger.

  Koonooyah had spoken true. The creature attacked from within, entering the body before doing its dirty work of rending and splitting apart. Now having killed her, the creature rushed inside. She couldn’t let her body be shattered.

  “Now!” she said to Tikiqaq, “Now!”

  When the spark went into Tikiqaq, everything changed. It was just a tiny spark but it was a heady draught to a creature who had long been dying of thirst. The curtain was lifted. Instead of experiencing the world as under foggy waters, the tupilaq was once again alive.

  Alive again. It had forgotten what living felt like. The taste of salt water swept into its mouth. It savored the tang of fresh tomcod on the tip of its tongue. In drawing breath again, the frosty air seared its lungs. Glorious. It felt the tug of natural urges it hadn’t experienced in a long time. It tensed sagging muscles. Oh, the wonderful things it would do, alive again. Only now did it realize how diminished it had been, how pathetic the sluggish existence of an animated corpse.

  “Now!” said Alaana.

  What was its master saying? Now. Now give it back?

  “Hurry!” said Alaana.

  Hurry, for its master lay dead on the ice, with only Tikiqaq to save her. But Tikiqaq thought it need not obey that commanding voice. The shaman had no real hold over it. It needn’t return to that dull, starved existence that awaited it. It didn’t want to do it. It didn’t have to, but…

  Though it broke its heart, Tikiqaq returned the spark to its master.

  Alaana sparked back to life, the frost-demon still inside her chest. Her body had been frozen exactly as she had left it, still poised on the brink of the tumo, still holding back the flame.

  No longer. Alaana released the mystic fire. She felt the flame rage within her breast, the nascent fireball bursting forth, expanding, feeding on itself. The fire sped along artery and vein, joining the palms of her hands to the soles of her feet.

  The monster screamed.

  The fire burned within her. She didn’t care how it worked, she didn’t care where it came from. For this she asked no permission from spirits, she begged no favors. She knew what fueled the flame, burning as never before, a fire inside her, a love for the Anatatook.

  Caught trapped in her cage of flesh, the frost-creature sizzled and howled. And then it was gone.

  “Is it dead?” asked Tiki.

  Alaana slumped down into the snow. Every breath was a labor, every sinew strained and aching. The fire left her, and she felt the intense cold come crashing down. She lay trembling in the snow, close to death. She had crossed the great divide once already and, now returned, stood not very far back into the other side.

  “It’s not gone,” said Tiki. “I can still see it.” The tupilaq’s moonbeam eyes studied the gusting snow. The edges on the frost were too sharp, too weirdly shaped. “It’s still there, hidden in the air, between the flakes.”

  “It is enough,” said Alaana, her voice a dry rasp. “Enough for them to get to the caves. Safe for the people to move.”

  She collapsed into the snow.

  Tiki shook Alaana with a clawed flipper but it couldn’t nudge its master awake. It worried that the little spark had not been enough. Not enough to bring the shaman all the way back across the great divide. Or perhaps it had hesitated too long, when its moment of indecision had stretched. But surely it had only suffered the tiniest moment of indecision. Alaana would be all right.

  The tupilaq tugged at the shoulder of Alaana’s albino parka, but it could not possibly drag a grown woman across the snow. And yet it must. It must get her inside where she could be warm.

  Or get help. It had to get Maguan. Tiki flapped its flippers frantically along the deep snow. Its moonbeam eyes had perfect sight, even in the haze of the storm. The tents seemed very far away.

  Its flippers pedaling snow, Tiki made for the encampment.

  Maguan met the tupilaq, coming the other way.

  “Hurry,” it said. “Your sister, she’s hurt.”

  “I know. I saw. We all saw.”

  Maguan reached his sister, who lay on a frozen circle of new-formed ice. The ice cracked beneath Maguan’s feet as he lifted Alaana up on his shoulders.

  CHAPTER 34

  BLACK FACE

  Aquppak signaled the caravan to stop, and the command carried down the line.

  Kigiuna was glad for the rest, his mukluks sinking knee-deep, his legs tired. The constant struggle against snow and wind left his thighs cramping painfully, sending unrelieved agony through his knees. The dogs fought hard against the fierce blow but the sled kept sinking through the soft crust, getting stuck every few paces.

  “Hooo!” Kigiuna called out, but the team had already stopped. The sled was stuck again. He couldn’t see three paces ahead for wafts of drifting snow, and the cold went all the way to the bones.

  Not content to rest, the dogs began to snarl and bicker, tangling the traces. Luckily the drifted snow made it as difficult to fight as to walk. The dogs struck ineffectually at each other; sealskin pads had been laced to their feet to keep the soft snow from packing between their toes. Kigiuna gave a signal to Makaartunghak, who led his team. The gigantic huskie seemed even more bulky with all the loose snow clogging the hairs of his pelt. The big dog yanked his lines taught and stood his ground, hauling the others back into line.

  Iggy stepped up next to Kigiuna. His heavy parka was so crusted with frost, Kigiuna hadn’t seen him coming.

  “Kigiuna? Are you all right?”

  Kigiuna nodded. Leaning back against the stanchion, he almost tumbled onto the crowded sled. “I’m thankful for the break,” he managed to say, the breath wheezing in and out between words. Each breath brought fine frost crystals into his nose and mouth.

  The big man stood between Kigiuna and the wind. “Why has Aquppak stopped us?”

  “Scouting ahead again,” answered Kigiuna, his words almost completely snatched away by the wind.

  “Oh.” Iggy squinted into the gusting white powder.

  It was hard to imagine a better leader than Aquppak. Under his direction they had not yet lost their way in the swirling maelstrom. The young headman went ahead of the sleds, looking for any sign, any rock or ridge he could identify. He disappeared and reappeared, nose to the ground, a dark smudge against the white, crossing their path systematically as he ran. He knew the terrain as well as any of the old men who didn’t have the stamina to go out in the storm. He couldn’t look to the horizon for landmarks, he could barely see twenty paces ahead. Likewise the line of the drifts, which served as a guide in finding direction even at night, was useless amid the chaotic torrent. This demon-storm did not blow in the same direction for two successive gusts.

  “Aquppak leads us well,” admitted Kigiuna.

  Iggy grunted in reluctant agreement. “How is Alaana?”

  Kigiuna glanced at the sled. Amauraq and Higilak had the children under the tarp with Alaana. First rule of the storm, thought Kigiuna, stay down out of the wind. Their sled was so full of people there was room for nothing else. Just a little food. All of their belongings left behind.

  He heard the children crying under the tarp, and Amauraq comforting them. Ben seemed aloof to the children’s cries. He tramped along on the other side of the sled, his face deep in his hood, his movements mechanical. Kigiuna wondered if he had succumbed to the delirium of the cold.

  “She’s in bad shape,” said Kigiuna. “When I first saw her, I thought she’s dead.”

  “Still breathing?” asked Iggy.

  “Yes. But she looks bad. She was dead.”

  “She’ll be all right?”

  “I think so,” said Kigiuna. But he wondered. Who would heal the shaman?

  “If we can just get her to the caves. It can’t be much farther.”

  “But in this?” Iggy shook his head. “The dogs can’t pull the sleds.”

  “I know,” said Kigiuna. “It’s taking too long. We’ll never make it this way. The trail’s too soft. Any time now, everyone will
have to walk.”

  In the dark they would be in even more trouble, and strength was waning fast. It was possible they wouldn’t make camp. The Anatatook wouldn’t be the first band to have been swallowed up by Nunatsiaq’s icy maw. Kigiuna had seen fifty-two winters, and it occurred to him that he might not make it. The women were rested, the children could be carried, but he was tired. He took one final deep breath, then announced, “I feel better. But in a storm like this, the children...”

  “If it comes to it, I’ll carry Kinak on my shoulders,” offered Iggy, “And Noona too.”

  “You’re a good man, Iggianguaq. Your father Kanak would have been proud.”

  Iggy shrugged off the compliment. “But what will we do with Alaana?”

  “I’ll put her on the runners and pull her myself,” said Kigiuna. “Ben will help too.”

  Even though his daughter had twenty-nine winters, Kigiuna still thought of Alaana as his little girl lost. Reluctant to be the shaman, her innocence stolen away. But that was silly. Who can retain innocence forever? A fighter at the core, Alaana had risen to the task. She had proven herself many times over, bearing all the hardships the rest of the Anatatook faced and fighting off demons and ghosts as well. A reluctant warrior perhaps, but she always seemed to win out in the end. Even now lying senseless on the sled, he knew Alaana would endure. “She’ll be all right.”

  “What did this to her?” asked Iggy. “What monster did she face up on that mound?”

  “I didn’t see anything. Whatever was out there, whatever evil she met in the storm, don’t doubt she chased it away.”

  “I don’t,” said Iggy. “Of course she’ll get no credit from Aquppak. And that troubles me.”

  “It’s worse than troubling,” said Kigiuna. “It’s going to come to bloodshed. Aquppak and Nuralak. What did they have to say when Alaana stood upon the mound, facing down whatever did this to her? Aquppak has taken to mocking Alaana openly. He thinks we don’t need the shaman, that we can do for ourselves.”

  “Fools,” said Iggy.