A man in snow white raiment entered a door she hadn’t noticed. He wore an atigi with no parka, and a tall crown of tuuaaq ringed his brow. Like Nalor, his face displayed ethereal age. He had attained forty years, but whether today or decades ago she couldn’t say.
“Is any of your tuuaaq high lingering, or is your system clear?” he asked.
The question and the authority behind it took her off guard. She reassessed the diadem adorning his head and attempted to remember anything other than plunging into that eternal wall of water. It seemed burning blue could only offset so much of the tuuaaq high. She ran his words through her mind once more and fingers of ice clutched at her stomach. She wasn’t dead, and that was Qummukarpoq.
She swallowed at her withered vocal folds. “Um, I think it’s gone.” Just saying that made her wish it weren’t so.
“Do you know where you are?” His eyes pierced like augers.
“Qilaknakka? Or, the castle in front of it?”
He made no confirmation. “You have come to be my wife.”
“I—I suppose I have.” Her voice sounded small to her.
“How many others do you believe have come to claim that title?”
She took another dry gulp. “Twenty maybe?”
“Some have come of their own accord, while others have been commissioned by their clan to come. All told there have been more than forty, and yet, I remain unwed. What makes you superior?”
Something inside railed against the unfairness of him asking such probing questions so soon after her waking. This was not a man who countenanced diffidence. Her reply must strike with sincere confidence. “Because none of them was as beautiful as I am?” She cursed at herself for turning the sentence into a question.
“The answer is tuuaaq.” He drew closer to the bed. “Why do you think I issued the rumor I was looking to take the world’s most beautiful woman to wife?”
Her faux surety departed. Everything she had done since leaving the north had been playing to the plans of a man she’d never met. Not a very good mark of strength. Betrayal’s burn slushed through her, but it had no one to mark save herself. Her own fresh-faced stupidity had led her to this bed at the start of the world.
“That is right,” said the king, confirming what she spoke with eyes alone. “The only woman who can ascend the echelons of beauty is an adept tirigusuusik.”
“You mistake me. I’m not adept. I’ve only just begun working the blue flame a couple days ago.” The words weighed heavy on her heart as soon as they left her mouth.
Qummukarpoq’s lips itched a minute grin. “Then there is no further debate. You are my wife.”
Such a slew of emotions rushed Orluvoq that she couldn’t discern a one. “What do you mean? Why is it so important to have a tirigusuusik for a wife?”
“Come eat. Come drink. Come learn of the great things that await you.”
Her vitals trembled as she beheld the majestic man blending so cleanly into the castle walls. His eyes were quick even when they did not move. Not a drop of poise spilled from his brimming cruse of a body. True, she desired strength, but he emanated an aura much colder than strength.
She longed for the empty expanse of Nunapisu. For the easy days when flames glowed orange. For the euphonic tones of her parents chatting through a morning. For the delights and distresses she had forsaken, perhaps for all time.
But. But she had succeeded. What had seemed a faint illusion spun by Nalor’s tongue days earlier had transpired. Her transgressions bore fruit beyond ignominy. A king—the king, the peerless angakkuq of all the world—wanted her. Just then, she feared him more than she coveted whatever power he had to offer. She may very well leave after he and she worked a magic so great that…
That what? What if they failed and Qilaknakka fell, sweeping every man, woman, and child into Nunapisu’s gaping maw? What if they killed Arsarneq, and neither aurora nor narwhal was seen among the Nuktipik peoples again? The hazards of the blue flame could not be avoided.
Figuring there was no other way to satisfy the curiosities, she pushed herself from the bed and followed Qummukarpoq into the corridor with a woozy sway.
Orluvoq sank her teeth into the fat of seals, relishing the oleaginous chunks on her tongue. The viands a shade pinker than white brought her back to days with her first parents. Days when she could cling to the bowsprit and fancy herself a merchant lord as they sailed the ice. When she had hounds for bedfellows and hardened men doting on her and the sunbeams of innocence she cast throughout the ship.
The palace was much emptier than she had envisaged. No army of maids fussing over sullied nooks. No dignitaries pacing the halls with heads bent together in principled conversation, nor majordomo imposing order on orderlies. No detachment of hunters and fishers keeping the larder flush, nor faculty of angakkuit heating the castle proper. In fact, she had yet to see anyone save the king. Was his occupation so simple it could be executed by a lone man, or was the man so great that the task of ruling measured itself against him?
“What do you know of Arsarneq?” asked Qummukarpoq from across the wooden table. His eyes yet glinted with that same intensity.
She brought her eyes back from roaming the heights and accoutrements of the hall. “It’s the vein that gives life to all the Nuktipik peoples. The reasons behind its comings and goings are known only to the abyss.” She wished Paarsisoq were here. He’d say something less obvious and more poignant.
“Some will tell you a great mother composed of seething blackness labored years a thousand up in the sky before delivering Arsarneq to the world. Or that deep within Nunapisu’s guts is an upturned shadow mountain upon which stars fall like rain, and the runoff trickles through our sky.
“Then there are those who don’t believe. They fear. They fear Arsarneq is slowly falling and will one distant day sunder the earth in twain. Or they fear that each manifestation of the aurora is a shedding from the great serpent Tisaruk. He slumbers in the summer, and when winter comes, he takes every occasion to gobble children up, growing and shedding. But his ever-expanding bulk takes an appetite to match, and his insatiety grows. One day he will swallow the world and thereafter go mad with hunger.”
Orluvoq restarted her chewing after she realized her mouth had gone slack. “I’ve heard a couple of those. After being up there myself, none of those sound too likely. Except maybe the stars one. What do you believe about it?” Should she have said “know” instead?
“It is the essence of all things. Body, spirit, and name, these three come from that indefatigable source, and to there they all return in the end. Unless, perhaps, you cast yourself off the precipice of Nunapisu.
“I have, in times long gone, designed to probe the source. To walk right up its throat, find the head, and look it in the eyes. Yet there is no account of any ever returned from such a venture, so I will save those exploits for a later time. Mayhap there floats transcendence within the grasp of every angakkuq. It shall be my final journey.
“But now that you are here, I can attempt exactly the opposite. My attentions have, as of late, been pointed toward the other end of Asarneq.” He wiped a smooth gesture, presumably toward the south and the terrifying expanse of sky-snatching water.
It was the “but now that you are here” part that set Orluvoq’s teeth on edge. The rest of the monologue enthralled her and planted miniature aspirations to charge down the aurora and into the abyss. “What precisely do you mean ‘now that I’m here’? If your angakkuq powers are truly as great as I’ve heard, what use am I?” She attempted a coquettish spin on the last statement, but her anticipation twisted it timorous.
He regarded her a moment, lower eyelids hiking up. “The conduit.”
Two words and thoughts of reneging on the marriage seized her mind. “The… conduit?”
“The conduit. The channel. The flume.” He quirked a finger upward. “That formless cascade of essence yearns to speak as the world does, and through you it may attain fluency.”
Orluvoq tried to let it sink in, but it merely swilled on the surface while malformed crumbs twirled down. She was to be nothing more than a mortal scepter of channeling? “What will happen to me? Will I… be burned to nothing?”
“I don’t have reason to believe thus.” Qummukarpoq's lips poised to amend the pronouncement. “But neither have I proof to the contrary.”
Hold now. She literally might die for this? That was a sight more than she wanted to have truck with. Did Nunapisu’s reach even extend across the sea, to this isle of exalted exile? Forget the Warren of Immortality. No archive perpetuated by shamanic crypsis could serve her a single scintilla if her body was consumed by the elements.
“Has your ingestion of tuuaaq ever resulted in injury to your body?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “Nothing that wasn’t caused by my state of mind.”
“Likewise, you have naught to fear from your role in the broaching of Qilaknakka.”
She decided there was something wholly too immotile about his face. It stiffened where it ought supple. Froze where it ought flex. But worst, it pierced where it ought not perceive. His gaze flayed the seal from off her sanctum. Disembarrassed her of her confidence. She tensed to stymie a shiver, but it jittered past her stiffness and down her spine.
“Do I have the option of leaving?” Her voice parted from her lips in a diminutive parody of speech. None of this great magic sounded like her reaching greater heights.
“For your entire life, the option of never coming has been present and prominent. To walk across the firmament and prostrate yourself before an angakkuq of estimable power has never been the simple or obvious option. Yet now that you have gone to the pain of pursuing that path, you would squawk and squall for the option of never coming to be restored unto you?”
She shrank as though she’d drunk a draught of bitter poison. She could in no whit gainsay him. She never had to come—never should have come.
Never should have left…
Her every footstep, from the world’s whisperless end to its awe-striking origin, was a slur on her character. A reproach on her intellect. Perhaps she deserved this. What had those women been to her but vessels of beauty? Could she count herself their better? No, in the taking she had cast herself below the most debased whore. Where the aspiration for survival spurred them to lustful congress, the lust for greatness seduced her into grinding their faces into the ice. So long as she stood taller, what did it matter if it were heads she stood upon? If she compounded the misery of the miserable?
No matter how she twisted it in her mind, the conclusion twisted back, ineluctable as winter’s black dawn. She deserved to be nothing more than a vessel. Qummukarpoq’s crawling came with a price, and she had come to pay it.
“Why is there no one else here?” she said in an attempt to shoo the future from her head. “Where are your hunters and custodians? Your, I don’t know, deputies and what have you?”
King Qummukarpoq transpierced Orluvoq with his gaze for moments far too many. When enough time had expired for her to imagine every possible harangue, he spake between the silence.
“I am sufficient.”
The terse return crippled her crooked conjectures. Truly, there was no pomp that propped him up. No porous pedestal of vainglory. He was as genuine as the hoarfrost riming the nostrils of every wanderer—and just as much cause for shivering.
He stood from the table and declined his chin toward her. “Rest until tomorrow’s nightfall. We attempt to broach the wall at first black. If you require me, light a candle and call for me.”
Before he could turn, Orluvoq posed a soft question. “You plan to get married after this ritual? Who will come?”
He regarded her, fingertips of his right hand barely brushing the table. “I am the king. My word is law. I have already declared we are wed.” No reprimanding tone marked his voice.
“Oh…” Orluvoq’s heart diminished inside her, her body deflating around it.
Qummukarpoq gave her a dip of the head, then exited the hall in a flourish of white.
She dropped her eyes to the remnants of the seal fat, unsure what emotion would first spurt out of the boiling concoction within her.
He had never even asked her name.
Night at the start of the world came much as night any elsewhere, but it passed with greater unease. Orluvoq’s mind warped in thrawn contortions.
Surely if she were to skulk on toe tips and peer around the jamb, she would behold demons of ungainly proportions dragging their nails on the hall floor, rictus grins shearing their faces wide. Or an interminable basilisk would slither out of Qilaknakka, torrents of water sheeting from its hide, and snatch her from her restless tossing. Or she’d tumble into some secret oubliette and come face to face with the faceless king, his skin cast aside for the night.
The air fairly prickled as she spun the litany of horrors; the dread of imagination that diverted her from the dread of reality. Strange that she should find respite in horror. But she had allied herself with dire straits and now scrambled any-which-way to forswear.
Dawn at the start of the world came unlike any elsewhere she had seen. Having met little success in her bid at sleep, she’d arisen before sunrise and found an east-facing vantage markedly removed from the ocean below. She plopped her elbows on the sill and watched the first scruples of dayspring leach into the heaven.
Stars vanished as if swallowed and ported to their own Nunapisu far above. Blisters of light coruscated through the august wall of water and gushed out in geometries of saffron and gold. She averted her eyes as tears blurred her vision—an artifact of the ascendant sun, no doubt. Nothing to do with ruminations over what else might burst from Qilaknakka in mere hours.
Running and staying jousted back and forth in her head, an unfair match, for she didn’t have enough candles to skywalk north without Arsarneq. She paced from the highest corridor to the white beach. Back and forth, mulling and fretting. The day drug on like the oldest dog pulling the biggest ship, and when it was over, she found it had flown.
In the blear hours of gloam and star pricks, he found her with her cheek daubed by the sun’s last hue. Rather, she found him. A presence with no prelude, a tickle with no touch. She turned from the window view of Qilaknakka to look at her… husband. The concept perched aslant on her mind. They hadn’t even convened a paltry ceremony as would be had amongst the clans. The king’s benediction alone graced their union, and that couched in nonchalance.
He’d made no attempt to bed her, or even lie in the same room, for which a small part of her couldn’t help but be scandalized. Then again, she’d known nothing but the frugality of ship berths and igloos, where luxury was sleeping more than an arm’s length from another. Perhaps a castle full of empty rooms demanded use.
“Are you hungry?” asked Qummukarpoq, ungloved fingers characteristically looped around an azure-gleaming candle.
She shook her head. Enough nerves twined in her abdomen to sate her, vying against the urge to take a bite of tuuaaq.
He gave a measured nod as if he apprehended the true meaning in her mien. She watched the tall tuuaaq diadem bob and idly wondered what neck pains afflicted him. Did he sleep with the crown? Did he doff and don as sleep circuited through his body? Or, a better revision, did he sleep?
“Then we ascend to the roof to attempt the magic,” said the king. “You have a candle?”
“Don’t I have to prepare?”
“It is not you who calls down the sky. A candle will suffice.”
The nerves redoubled their twining. She dragged a weary hand to a pocket and pulled out a half-consumed taper, watching it with doleful yearning. If she just champed down on the chalky wick, she could muddle herself to muzziness and postpone the impending ritual. Then do it again the next day, and the next day, and…
And die of starvation in the world’s only castle. Queen for a day, whose sole undertaking was underwriting her inglorious demise. Not a word of her plight to her parents, which s
eemed grimmer than not securing them a place in the Warren of Immortality. She was more than that.
A considerable piece of resistance calved off her spirit, drifting away to melt in warmer climes. She would partake in the king’s moment of transcendence, and her power would grow, whether in knowledge, in strength, or in sheer infamy. She had not come all this way only to hide. Orluvoq lit the wick a mundane orange and stepped through the window after the king.
He scaled the winds and she the wall to land amidst the many cupolas that hummocked the castle roof like an artful assemblage of igloos. Orluvoq took in the ice beneath her feet, wondering what hand had sculpted it, and indeed upkept it. Questions for another time. Qummukarpoq likely wouldn’t welcome a sidetrack interrogation.
“This,” said the king, “is an hour I’ve long awaited. A moment of no meager moment. Though we carve out but a spindle of time, it is on this spindle the world will turn hereafter.”
His voice was still dignified, but it sizzled with a previously unheard élan. Orluvoq drew her parka hood closer around her face. It helped if she didn’t have to look at his eyes.
“Eat this.”
It took a few blinks for her to realize he was proffering something to her. She looked at his hand and her eyes flared like a caribou in the clutch of terror.
“That is a lot of tuuaaq.” She didn’t move to take the two fingers’ worth of tusk, more than thrice as much as she’d ever eaten in ten years. “I thought you said this wasn’t going to kill me.”
“You are the conduit,” was the simple reply. “This tuuaaq is not meant for you, but unless it passes through you, it will never reach Qilaknakka. This is the spark to start the flame.”
She despised how level and routine his speech sounded. As if he weren’t even attempting to convince her, for he knew she could step nowhere save along the preordained path. She pressed forward and took the psychoactive from his naked palm. Their intimacy reached a new zenith when her gloved hand brushed his bare skin, but she suspected it didn’t even register next to his concupiscence for Qilaknakka. What was one girl when he was on the verge of claiming the maidenhead of the world’s fountainhead?
Orluvoq Page 20
