Shadows

by Ken Altabef

“Aquppak, and Nuralak’s clan, and Ikeega too,” said Kigiuna. “And how many stand with us? Not enough, by my count.”

  The big man suddenly looked at Kigiuna through slitted eyes. “Did you count me as one or two?”

  “Two, of course,” said Kigiuna. He chuckled softly. “But we still don’t have enough. This divide will ruin us.” And it was, Kigiuna believed, partly Alaana’s fault. Although she had taken on the duties of shaman she had not let them harden her, not like the shamans that had gone before. Kuanak used to bark out orders to the men and expected them to be obeyed. Civiliaq walked among them always barefoot and bare-chested even in deepest winter, an arrogant reminder that he was far superior to even the strongest Anatatook man. But Alaana was a different kind of shaman. No, not a hard woman at all. Alaana had stayed the same — gentle and kind. She only wanted to be seen as an ordinary person and this, Kigiuna knew, was too easily perceived as weakness.

  “Let’s worry about that later,” said Iggy. “Maybe it won’t matter in the end.”

  “True enough. This storm might eat us all up first.”

  “Bad times,” said Iggy. “We’ve had that before. We’ve got through. We’ll make it.” His was the voice of youth and strength.

  Kigiuna wished he could be so sure. “We’ll get through,” he agreed. “Things will be better once we reach the caves.”

  Word came from Aquppak, carried down the line. A man’s voice shouted at them from the sled just ahead, “Leave the sleds! Cut the dogs loose! Take what food you can carry.”

  Kigiuna sighed. He needed to rig up a small sled to drag Alaana the rest of the way.

  “I have to get back,” said Iggy. “I’ve got Tooky on my sled.”

  “Tooky?” remarked Kigiuna. “On your sled?”

  Iggy’s round face, pale from cold and exposure, could not blush. But his eyes did. “Don’t ask. That little demon-seal of Alaana’s won’t let me get near her anyway. Remind me when she’s feeling better to ask her to call that damned thing off.”

  Iggy’s laugh disappeared into the storm. As he moved back down the line, he said again, “Take heart, Kigiuna. We’ll make it.”

  “We’re going to die!” screamed Roy Oakes.

  McPearson grabbed his friend by the throat and threw him down before the fire. “Oh, shut up.”

  “We’re in a cave! We’re in a bloody cave like animals.”

  “One more word out of you, and I’ll end your misery right here. Everyone is staring. The men won’t forget this.”

  “You’re worried about the men? You’re worried about what the bloody savages are going to think. Oh, God!”

  “I’m warning you,” growled McPearson.

  Oakes’ face went slack. A sarcastic leer curled his lip. “What more could you do? What more could you possibly do to me? Punch me in the face? Well go ahead. I’m so numb I can’t feel anything. I can’t feel anything at all. Don’t you understand? We’re going to die here.”

  McPearson jabbed the point of his pistol into his friend’s ribs. “One more word, Oakes. One more word.”

  “So shoot me!” said Oakes. “Shoot me and get it over with.”

  Oakes pushed McPearson aside. It seemed he might make a mad dash for the cave entrance but when he turned around Maguan was there. Oakes froze.

  Maguan’s face held an expression of both disdain and extreme compassion. He might have been staring down a wayward child, locking eyes with Oakes as perhaps his sister the shaman would have done, beaming strength into him. Here was a man, dressed in animal skins and furs, who had spent his entire life in perilous conditions such as these. He faced death with equanimity and determination. This man would never give up. Oakes backed away

  McPearson was impressed. He shoved Oakes to the floor in front of the fire. “Now you tend the fire,” he said, “while I see what they’re doing about the supplies.”

  Oakes doled out another spoonful of coal oil into the fire pit. The cave had two central braziers carved out of the rock itself, like two burning eye sockets in a skull of black rock.

  “And don’t put so much on,” added McPearson. “We have to make it last.” He stepped to the other side of the vast cavern where the men were assessing the supplies.

  Ben understood the Englishmen’s words perfectly. English was his native language, after all. He understood that Oakes had reached his limit. Despair and panic had brought him to his knees. Ben felt much the same. Though he had lived most of his life in the arctic, he was not meant for this; he still remembered the warm summer nights in Louisiana.

  Some disagreement about the supplies broke out among the men. From what snippets of conversation drifted back, Ben could tell the situation wasn’t very good. He heard Talliituk moan, “That’s all?” in a frightened voice. Nuralak assured him it would be enough, but he would convince very few people with that helpless tone.

  Aquppak was in rough shape after so much exposure to the wind and ice. The young headman’s face was white at both cheeks, his nose half eaten away. His handsome good looks would never be the same, but there was no doubt he had saved all their lives.

  And his wife? Alaana lay beside him on the floor of the cave, unconscious, moaning softly. The skin on her face was cracked and bloody. The thing that had torn Koonooyah and his wife apart had nearly done the same to Alaana. The shaman had faced that danger willingly, and Ben had no doubt she had saved all their lives.

  Alaana moaned softly. What if she didn’t wake up, he wondered. What if she died? Would there be anything left to hold him here then? If he went back to the shadows…

  He glanced at Kinak, asleep in his aunt Pilarqaq’s lap. The boy would be taken care of in any case, and Noona hardly seemed to need anyone at all. What was holding him here now? Just worry over Tama. Where was she? What had happened to her? The answers lay on the other side.

  “He was such a good man,” said Higilak. She was comforting Massautsicq, his head in her lap. The old man let out a rattling cough between dry, rasping breaths. His eyes closed, his face pale, it seemed certain he would die.

  “I remember when I first came to the Anatatook,” continued Higilak. “Of course I was married to Manatook, and happy. Very happy. And Massautsicq had Saruna in those days. You should have seen him then. So tall, so strong. He was most impressive among the hunters.” She chuckled softly. “He used to carry the bucks back to camp on his shoulders. Oh, but he was a little bit arrogant way back then.” She glanced absently over at Aquppak. “Not so much different from our young headman.”

  Higilak stroked Massautsicq’s forehead, but he could neither feel her gentle touch nor hear her kind words. “He was a good father to his sons. You know he was Tugtutsiak’s father? He was a good friend to everyone, a good husband to Saruna. He loved her until the day she died. He loves her still.”

  “You were married to the shaman,” said Ben.

  “Oh, Manatook was the one for me, to be sure. But if ever things could have been different…” She sighed. “It would have been Massautsicq. Look at him now. His hair all white. He’s a far cry from the strong young man I used to know. And still, he’s the wisest among us. He always was.”

  “Father? Father?”

  It was Noona, calling from the far side of the cave. Ben stood up. He threaded his way carefully across the crowded floor of the huge cavern, stepping over rifts and valleys where people huddled under piles of furs. Noona stood before a wall. “Look! Look and see,” she said, indicating cave paintings illuminated by the dancing light of the coal oil fire.

  Ben peered at ancient designs rendered in primitive colors. The rock face itself was crumbling, the berry-juice paint flaking away, almost gone. Fabulous beasts snarled and roared their fury, all long gone from this world. Had such creatures ever walked the earth or did they represent merely primordial flights of fancy, Ben wondered. Most dramatic of all was a large bird sporting wings of fire in many colors. Such a thing could never have existed, not in this world. The figures of the men all bore proud, oversized
heads. “These must be left here from the time of the Tunrit,” he said.

  “Over here.” Noona pointed out a particular spot. “It’s the monster,” she said. “That’s just what it looks like.”

  The design, rendered in light blue and gray lines, appeared to be a stylized representation of a storm with sharp geometric edges. Or maybe just a large snowflake against a fiery background in the shape of a huge mushroom.

  “Hush, Noona. It’s just a design, meant to look like a snowflake. It’s no monster.”

  “It’s the thing, the beast.”

  “Tutt! There is no beast,” he said, knowing such soothing lies fell on deaf ears as far as Noona was concerned. Ben noticed a lone figure at the bottom of the mural. The figure was partially obscured by rinds of thick black smoke drawn in charcoal, but he recognized it. The large head was covered by a rough hood of tan hide, featureless except for two dead, black circles meant to mark the eyes. Rays of light came out of its head like horns, its chest covered by a war shirt made of rows of linked animal teeth. The figure held a withered hand to its masked face, the fingers blackened by frost, the nails long and sinister. It was the Tunrit sorcerer. The very same one he had glimpsed at the Ring of Stones when Alaana had raised the ghosts of Tunrit warriors to battle Beluga Killer. A dreadful chill raced through his shoulders and chest. It seemed as if his stomach was a fist, clenching tightly against itself. Painfully.

  “Noona, come away from that wall right now.”

  “But Father…”

  “Just come away! Go and sit with your aunt over by the fire.”

  Ben tried to draw her away but Noona wouldn’t budge. Instead, the girl ran her fingers along the painting. Tiny flakes of color fell away.

  “Oh, fine,” said Ben. “Stare at it all you like.”

  CHAPTER 35

  HOPE FOR THE SHADOWS

  He didn’t know if it would work, here in a dark corner.

  The caves of Black Face had many chambers, but the people were all gathered together in the main room near the coal-oil fires. Here, out of sight of everyone else, Ben felt a terrible numbing cold. He couldn’t stay away from the fire for long.

  The shadow voices kept getting louder and more insistent, and now he heard them all the time. They called to him. They wanted him. They needed him. All the time.

  More and more his two worlds had begun to seem the same. Judging by the chorus of laments in the cave, the Anatatook seemed lost in the same sort of despair that filled the shadow world.

  Ben closed his eyes. He worried that he couldn’t make the jump. What if it doesn’t work inside a cave, he wondered, in darkness within darkness?

  Despair had carried him across the divide before, and he had plenty of that tonight. He wanted to see his little girl’s spirit again, even if only in shadow. If the shadow still existed, his daughter couldn’t be dead. But that sense of hope ruined his chances of seeing her again. One couldn’t travel to the shadow world with hope in hand. It simply wasn’t possible.

  Think of him, he told himself, think of the Light-Bringer. He will bring you there. He pictured an image of the Light-Bringer, a vision of color and light in a world of darkness. He burned so brightly, certainly he cast a shadow deep enough for Ben to use. For him to crawl into and lose himself.

  “Help me,” he whispered. “Take me across.”

  Ben felt a darkness creeping over his soul like a black curtain flapping in a rugged breeze. Like the wing of a bat flitting before his eyes, it creeped, it juttered, expanding, expanding. And then he was lost in it. He was blind and deaf, awash in a soup of inky blackness.

  “Ahhh, good. You’re back,” said the shadow Higilak. She was little more than a voice in the darkness. “The children kept asking.”

  Tama leapt into Ben’s arms. He hugged her close. Apparently the demon-storm ravaged the shadow lands as well; the tent-skins rippled with black rain, the gloom shivered and quaked.

  And the voices. So much louder, so much more urgent. Desperation heaped upon desperation, with one message made clear. Something very bad was coming.

  Another shadow sat beside Higilak. Ben peered into the gloom and saw Agruta’s outline beside him.

  “Is there any food?” asked Tama.

  “I don’t think so,” said Ben.

  Kinak plopped into Ben’s lap. Tama snuggled into his shoulder. It was a wonderful feeling until the little girl’s voice shattered the moment like a sheet of ice breaking. “I’m hungry,” she whined.

  “I know,” said Ben. He decided to play a song to take their minds off the hunger. Learning to play the shadow flute had not been easy. It was nothing more than a wisp of smoke after all, and made only a small sound. But it was enough.

  “She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes…”

  Kinak squealed with delight at his favorite song. Music was the only thing that seemed to lift their spirits. After a while, he played a song he had composed himself, inspired by the Light-Bringer. It was a lively tune and gave them hope.

  “Old Mother,” said Ben. “Have you ever seen the Light-Bringer?”

  “Seen him? Ahh, no. I just tell the tales, such as I can remember them. None of us ever sees him I’m afraid. He created this world, you know. He brought the sun and gave birth to all the shadows. We are his people.”

  The old woman looked away in the distracted fashion of the shadows.

  “Only good things are said of him,” she continued. “I carried the torch, telling the stories, while he was away. For so very long, just a memory of a memory. But I believe he has returned to us.”

  “He’s here. I can feel it.” This came from the shadow beside Higilak. Ben knew that voice. It was Massautsicq.

  “Can you feel it, Ben?” asked Agruta.

  He did. He felt the presence of the Light-Bringer often. He wondered why the Tunrit prince didn’t make himself known to the rest of them. Perhaps his light, like the shaman’s, would burn all the shadows away.

  “These are momentous times,” said Higilak, “full of signs and portents. The Light-Bringer has returned. And now you are here. What does it mean? For a moment I feel hope. Something I have never felt before. Aquppak feels it too. He spreads it to the men outside. You should hear him talk. How he inspires them, keeps them holding on. Hope for the future as the winter closes in.”

  The old woman took Ben’s hand. His fingers were numb, her touch insubstantial. By the sound of her voice, Ben knew that she was smiling.

  “You are our hope,” she said.

  “Am I?” said Ben. “No, I’m not. I can’t be. I only want to find my daughter.”

  “But haven’t you done that already? Isn’t that your little mouthful nestled in your arms? Is there any more precious to you? Surely, you belong here. With us.”

  Ben thought the old woman was probably right. He had the feeling he had already lived in this place for quite some time. Time passed differently on these desperate shores. A few moments seemed to stretch forever. How long had he been sitting here just now? It was hard to tell. There was so little to do here. Nothing to mark time’s flow, just the cold, the hunger, the darkness. Each moment so closely resembled the next, it seemed he spent more time here than in the real world.

  But which world was real? Why not this one? The other world seemed so far away now. The Anatatook huddled in that musty cave. He still heard an echo of their distant voices. But that was a place of many conflicting sensations and emotions. This world had but one. One pure emotion, all the more potent and real. Despair. It was so easy to believe he belonged here, if only he didn’t have to go back when night fell — if only he could stay. But when the sun went down this world ended. And the nights were getting longer, the days shorter and shorter. And soon, the long night of winter.

  “Old Mother, what happens here when the sun goes down?”

  “No, dear. Let’s talk of something else,” said the old woman.

  “How do they suffer?”

  Higilak would not answer.
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br />   For the first time Ben realized that the shadow of Noona knelt beside him. The girl was ever so quiet. She never asked for food.

  “Are you hungry, Noona?” said Ben.

  “Always.”

  “And cold?”

  “I’m not sure,” said the girl. “I’ve never felt warm.”

  “What have you made?” he asked. Noona was busy playing the ipiitaq aularuq, the string dance. Ben was impressed with the girl’s abilities, considering the string was made of black smoke.

  “I’m not making anything,” said Noona as she peered into the inky string. “I’m trying to find my father.”

  The child’s words stabbed Ben like a knife through the heart. He was aware there had been a shadow Ben before him, but that man was gone. How much did Noona know about it? Ben felt suddenly dizzy. There was a strange glint in Noona’s eyes as she peered into the string.

  Massautsicq made a tortured sound.

  The shadow Higilak gasped. “Oh, no!” she cried. “No!”

  One more plaintive wail came from Massautsicq, and then he was gone. His shadow had dissolved away into the gloom.

  “Gone,” spat Higilak. “Another one gone. Lost for no reason.” Her words were laced with a full measure of despair.

  “I don’t understand,” said Ben.

  “He’s gone.”

  Tama threw her arms around her father’s neck and held tight, crying softly.

  “It’s all right, baby,” Ben said.

  “What happens when winter comes?” he asked Higilak again. “When the sun hides its face for two moons? What then?”

  Again the old woman would not speak of it.

  “What happens in the dark? Tell me!”

  Hopelessness, dread, panic. Ben found it hard to breathe. The answer, or part of it, was obvious. He would have to leave Tama again. Leave her here to experience what? Something too horrible to tell?

  “I won’t leave. You hear? I won’t do it.”

  “Wake up. Wake up! Ben!”

  Ben opened his eyes. A clawed hand passed before his face, giving him a start. No, it wasn’t the sorcerer’s filthy paw, just the withered old hand of Higilak. Ben had fallen asleep in the little chamber off of the main cave in Black Face. How long had he been sitting like this? His legs had gone completely numb, and his hands as well.