But no. It would take her too long just to excise the memory from one of the crew, let alone the ship’s full complement. And maybe it was like Ariki Haka’atu said. Just because you can crush a thousand ants with a step, it doesn’t make you any better for doing it.
“Hello.” She snuffed her candle. “I’m looking for Ka’emu.” It shouldn’t take tuuaaq and a moai to find her.
Passengers, some still removing their parkas, flashed each other shaded looks. Two thumbed toward the stern where Qaffa spotted a bundle of furs huddled in on itself. She skipped forward and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder.
“Ka’emu! Guess who came while you were gone.”
Ocean noise filled the gap as Qaffa waited for an answer. The hunkered-down girl didn’t move.
“Ka’emu?”
But Ka’emu kept her silence, and in the keeping she forced it on the world.
How could she stand to be smothered in all that outerwear topside? She obviously needed some assistance remembering the nature of the sun. Qaffa reached over the boat’s side to the garland of bird feathers and plucked one out. She stuck it around her friend’s hood and wiggled it across her nose.
“Ka’emuuuu,” she teased.
Ka’emu slapped her hand and shrieked. “Stop it!”
Qaffa drew her stinging hand to her chest. She struggled between returning anger for anger and attending to her friend’s obvious distress. “Sorry. I… You should take the parka off. It’s hot. Ka’emu?”
Now Ka’emu moved and gave a continuous response. Small shakes and hitched sobs.
Qaffa returned a hand to her shoulder. “Hey, hey. What’s the matter?”
“J-j-just go h-home, Qaffa. Go.” Ka’emu wouldn’t lift her face from the crook of her arm.
“No, I’ve been waiting for you for a month. What’s the matter?” Qaffa tried to pull her friend around. Ka’emu wrenched her shoulder away.
“I’m not t-t-talking to anyone a-a-again. Lea-leave, Qaffa.”
“I’m your friend. Let me help. What’s the problem?”
Ka’emu’s breathing got heavier. “What’s the problem? Your mother. She’s terrible. I hate her.”
Qaffanngilaq’s brow knit patterns of bemusement. “My mother? What could she—”
Qaffa didn’t need to finish the question. The realization stabbed into her gut like flutes of ice. She had been so stupid. What other reason would a pretty, young girl like Ka’emu be doing on a trading voyage?
Ka’emu swung her head around, pulling back her hood. Qaffa cringed backward, hand flying to her mouth. The face before her was her friend but bred with mongrel deformations and pariah perversions. It pained and pinned her eyes to look at.
“Ka’emu… You’re—”
“A demon.”
So stupid. How could Qaffa not have realized? She would have made every protest when the trip was being organized. They would have listened, too, she being the princess of their country of destination. Her hands wavered for comfort, and nowhere offered solace.
“I’ll figure out a way to…” She trailed off, thumbing the candle in her left hand. To steal your beauty back, she’d been on the cusp of asserting. Only, that wasn’t wholly possible. The stealing part might be a cinch, given that she had some more time to cultivate her skill with the blue flame. Transferring further to Ka’emu, though. The tirigusuusik way catered far more closely to taking than giving. “I didn’t realize it was this bad. That thing my mother does.”
Ka’emu ignored the second statement entirely. Glinting hope pierced her red eyes. “You can get it back? Get me back?”
Gutstrings tremored in Qaffa’s belly. Could she really instate a vendetta against her own mother? Mere minutes ago, the question would have landed on her in a grotesque splay of tentacles and slime. Mere minutes ago, Qaffa only knew of her mother’s gruesome side the way a tree knows the ocean: a body of undrinkable water viewed from a distance. Now she knew of the monster Orluvoq the way a tree knows the ocean after it is felled, carved, warped into ship beams, and forced to drink the salt for the rest of its days.
And yet. Even if she were to forge enmity in her heart, she could only ever hope to provide retribution. There could be no recompense. She again assessed her friend’s foul features, not daring to wonder how she looked beneath the parka. Perhaps retribution would suffice.
Something cold formed in her chest. Not the hot of animosity. Not the ire of thundering kings. A placid feud she offered berth, to carry to her mother’s feet and cast it in her face. She would take back what was taken. Steal the starlight from the queen. And should the channel Sulluliaq torrent into naught, so much the better for the generation growing tall.
Qaffanngilaq laid her hand again on Ka’emu’s shoulder and looked into her eager eyes. “I can try.”
25
Orluvoq
Feigning sleep. Had she truly been feigning sleep, letting reality dance impiously before her closed eyes, muttering assurances that any defilement she made was but a vagary of dream? That if she could not see a better path, it was because one could not be found, not because she dared not open her eyes?
Nalor’s poison of yestersleep, so effortlessly trickled beneath her skin, had worked its needling sermonry. She’d thought herself strong for her command of the candle, but she’d been soliciting impotence all along. Of course she could walk no other path when permanently genuflecting before the king.
The time had come to cast off her feigned slumber. Soon her new path would be found, with or without Qummukarpoq’s approval. But tonight, there was another who’d fallen victim to her pretend slumber.
Qaffa.
Orluvoq lit a candle, cycled through several deep breaths, and strode out of her room on the upper floor.
Emeraldine fillets cut from Arsarneq’s hide skittered through the castle’s halls. In winter’s deep, the auroral gleam was all that did betoken night. Window by window, the prancing flickers followed before her as she stepped. Toward the chambers of her husband. Toward a fear of mighty grip. The tuuaaq taper in her hand, it glimmered with a mundane orange. The icecraft walls about her sides, they stole the hue and cursed it cold.
He would not suffer her compunctions; merely left her to her griefs. Their daughter’s drifting vexed him nothing. For his folk he hadn’t a fret. So on she walked. On to face the music he disclaimed.
The king at the start of the world was not a man to be hectored. Every lash of her tongue she laid upon him left her sucking blood. And however harsh his integument, his angakkuq aptitude yielded even less. Doubtless even now he sensed her approach. Her assault would have to be quick.
She stopped her walk outside his door, guarding what presence she could with the tusk. Surely he felt her. If he spurned sleep, as was his wont, then already he'd seen the breath of her candle sighing orange around his fishskin door. If she dared reach out with angakkuq threads, doubtless he’d rebuff and snare her in blue. He who broke demons with scarcely a thought would varnish her will in his and fold her to a crookback serf.
She reached.
The days of chest clutching would be numbered in retrospect only, in one matter at least. Her angakkuq fibers quested through the door and met their mark. Her heart fluttered, for he lay on his bed without so much as a stub of candle spitting life. Quick as the wind smiting the naked, she pushed into his head. Nimble and thorough she worked her craft, drowning his cognition in draughts of vision, just like she used to do for the sailors thirty years ago.
When he seemed good and intoxicated on lurid illusions of tusk and desire, she stole through the doorway to prove her his sleep. The body lay supine still in its parka of white. Breaths swelled the chest in constant cadence. Eyes bobbled beneath lids, snatching after details the mind dredged like spice.
The king at the start of the world was under her spell. Time to turn her candle blue.
She walked to the window, stepped up on the sill, then bracing a foot on impalpable air, she stepped into the sky. Far beneath, t
he sea muttered to the shore, but its petitions were soon supplanted by the rushing of wind. Its salty tang dried to the scent of pure frigidity. She angled for Sulluliaq, that hole of pitch black faintly smoldering with Arsarneq’s green.
Up the tunnel she skywalked while gathering her wits, toward the land of a hundred kings. Toward the garth of smoking islands. All that lay before her must be accomplished before her husband woke, for once his dormancy abated, he would seek, and he would find.
Out the tunnel’s maw, across the drowsy waters, above the sandy beaches of Rapai’i’s prime island, and into the palace of Ariki Haka’atu. The guards on watch passed eyes right through her, blessed in shadows as she was. Tenderly, with tuuaaq-damped footfalls, she let her candle fall orange and stalked into the royal halls.
The first room she chanced upon, she spied a woman asleep within. The dark concealed the sleeper’s face, but the body’s shape evinced enough to know the woman was an islander. Some relation of the king? A servant would likely not be allotted private quarters. Orluvoq stepped into the room.
For a moment, she forgot her breath. Every quarrel twixt her and Qummukarpoq could be here laid to rest. She would no longer be the willful wife. He could belay his hounding words, his dialects of pique. A mere month more she needed endure, then let Sulluliaq thunder shut. Here lay the solitary offering that would bridge the weeks. Her finger itched toward the tusk to break her off a flake.
She cringed back in disgust and snapped into the present, cognizant of every sweaty drip the sultry air had pulled from her. Forthwith away from the sleeping shell and back into the hall. She reasserted her grip on her sputtering mind. The void had called, and she had been ready.
As always.
But, however much beauty begged to be taken, she only answered when it was given. Helping someone in their choice to get hurt preserved more of the spirit than hurting them for your choice alone.
Away she walked from her faltering and past a dozen rooms. It had been long since she’d visited, but she knew her path and found her destination. She pushed through the freshly plucked banana leaves hung across the doorway and into the chamber.
On a woven mat, leg slashed silver by the sickle moon, slept Qaffanngilaq, her wayward daughter. The true reason for her excursion tonight.
Orluvoq made to awaken the girl but stopped. The nub of tuuaaq she'd picked off in the other room still tickled her palm. In this scrap of time she’d stolen, she needed to impress upon her daughter that this was the wrong path. What better way to teach Qaffa the black side of the blue flame than a practical application? Sow in her the fear of its contaminations through pitiless emphasis. Orluvoq popped the tusk into her mouth.
With a thought and a push, her candle burned from orange to azure. The island swelter balked at the light incongruous with nature, and Orluvoq's parka felt pleasant once more. She uncurled her angakkuq threads and probed for her daughter's face, tipping off the ground to cluster closer.
As tendrils met skin, Qaffa’s eyes flew open. She opened her jaw to scream but produced only a gurgle. Orluvoq, face only half an arm away, smiled.
“Hello, daughter. If you weren’t having a nightmare, you are now.”
She began to pull, and Qaffa’s face warped like drifts driven wild by wrestling winds. Skin peeled from flesh, and the mask of Qaffanngilaq shuddered upward. On the verge where beauty would start to trickle, Orluvoq stayed her tugging. She suspended the moment, attended by Qaffa’s beggarly attempts to fill more than her uppermost lungs.
When she deemed an impression had been made, she abandoned the threads and swerved up to her feet. Qaffa’s face clasped back onto her head, and the girl broke into sobs.
“Wh-why would you d-do that? Why? What ha-have I done? How much did you take?” She pressed her hands to her face.
Orluvoq frowned at the islander accent on her own daughter’s tongue. “I took nothing. Tell me, why do we call it tirigusuusik?”
Qaffa didn’t answer, so Orluvoq repeated the lesson her daughter hadn’t retained yet. “It is an old word meaning, ‘a thing to avoid’. When I first burned blue, I had no idea of the grief it would bring me. If I could go back, I’d tell myself to never leave my home at Nunapisu. But you know the evils at play, so why do you seek to become a thing to avoid?”
Qaffa had regained some composure during the polemic. “I’m as old as you were when you became tirigusuusik. You’ve left me to make my own choices for more than ten years. Why now, when I’m fully capable of making my own decisions, do you decide that you need to come—come attack me?”
“Because I thought you were better.” Orluvoq damped their voices with the candle to avoid unwanted attention. “I thought you would know having grown up around it. I didn’t believe the things I heard about you for years. But now I’m here, and you’re denying nothing except my wishes.”
Her daughter stared for several incredulous seconds. “I didn’t grow up around it. You never told me anything the first six years of my life, then I was banished away here. I’ve grown up around unthinkable power, all the moai here. You know if they wanted to descend upon us, they would wipe out the Nuktipik people? What else could I do but reach for as much power as possible?”
Orluvoq noted they twain had spoken nothing concerning Qummukarpoq. As if by continuously casting aspersions at each other they could solve the issue entire. She could place some due fault on—
No. She halted that thought. It profited her nothing to shunt all blame to her husband, else her whole journey was vanity. She sighed.
“Yes, I can see that. I’ve spoken in anger. I haven’t been the steadiest of mothers, and I can’t fix that in one night. But please listen to my words. I have walked the path you’re on, and it has only brought me misery.”
Qaffa spoke, and her voice was small. “It’s because of the blue flame that you had me.”
And then Orluvoq’s parka wasn’t enough. The chill of freshly sworn blood covenants on winter’s bleakest night stood her body hairs on end. Words caught twice in her throat. To agree was to accede that good could come of tirigusuusik. To deny was to discard her only daughter. Finally, she spoke, and her voice was smaller. “Just because there is beauty in tragedy does not mean a woman should seek tragedy.”
Qaffa took her time gathering up a response, speaking slowly as the words came to her. “There is an animal here called kekepu. You’ve seen pigs? Kekepu are smaller than that with a larger snout, and their coat is striped white and black. It has been a tradition for centuries to argue whether kekepu are black with white stripes, or white with black stripes. When someone good does something bad, people refer to her as a white kekepu. She may have black stripes, but she’s white underneath. When someone bad does something good, she’s called a black kekepu. Just because she has white stripes can’t hide the fact that she’s black underneath.
“I think you and I view the blue flame differently, mother. You think it’s a black kekepu, and I think it’s a white one. You think it’s tragedy with stripes of beauty and should be avoided. I think it’s beauty with stripes of tragedy, and I say just because there’s tragedy in beauty doesn’t mean a woman shouldn’t seek beauty. Say, doesn’t that about sum up the motto of your life?”
Orluvoq’s brain stopped except for one petite chunk keeping her composure lumped together. Since when had Qaffanngilaq been so infuriatingly astute? Orluvoq had truly let too much time slip between visits. Enough of her brain restarted for her to have and quell the thought of sucking Qaffa’s voice from her body.
“I understand your eagerness. But imagine you stocked food for winter, then told your children you were going on a trip, and you died a day into your journey without them knowing. They would laugh at all the abundance and waste their way through it in weeks. For those weeks, they would only see the beauty of no rules, all play, and endless food. When starvation and death finally hit them, tragedy would have the last laugh. I’ve been doing this for longer than your whole life. You’re not old enough to see
that this truly is a black kekepu.”
“Not old enough?” Qaffa threw up her hands. “I was old enough to get sent away from my parents at six because of the blue flame. Old enough at thirteen to see my friend get her beauty and future sucked away all so some adults could swap fruit. Old enough to see that you’re just father’s toy because of the blue flame, and that you’ve ruined your life due to it. But just because you’ve failed doesn’t mean no one else can have a chance.”
Orluvoq recoiled. A daughter’s words shouldn’t be able to pierce a mother—let alone a queen—with such brutality. The entire venture suddenly seemed unaccountably burdensome, and she wanted to beat a retreat home and sleep. Perhaps even feign sleep.
“I’m sorry I’m not the mother you deserve. But this…” She raised her free hand, then dropped it. “No, no excuses. I will let sorry be sorry. But I will still ask you to consider my words with real intent.”
Qaffa looked her in the eye. “After you, mother.”
A taste like blackened snow oozed into Orluvoq’s mouth. The Rapai’ian fug dazzled her dizzy. The parka choked her body like a pelt of wet flame. “Sleep well, Qaffanngilaq. I must return to the place where the world begins.”
She whisked through the banana leaf door, tiptoed on shadows past the guards, and skywalked toward the locus in the ocean that would swallow her away from this humid hell above. Down the green-tinged tunnel, into the bitter cold that didn’t soothe enough of her discomforts, and down to the castle below. Mind too scattered to extend her senses beyond herself, she lighted into her room ignorant of the presence already there.
“Back so soon?”
She started, eyes flying to the blue flicker in the corner. Muscles knotted down her front. “I come as I will.”
He didn’t honor the lie with a response.
“She denied you, didn’t she?”
Twenty years and his perspicacity still left her off-kilter; how her designs lay transparent before him. No, ‘Did you not find the Rapai’ian weather agreeable?’ Or, ‘How is our daughter?’ He sliced through all the blubber and lanced the heart of it.
Orluvoq Page 29
