So, he watched the band diminish, the band whose roots he was to roam. Soon it was so slight and yonder, blinking nearly made no difference. The wall he could no longer see. Not see nor touch nor hear nor hate. He closed his eyes and held himself while shivers rippled through his frame.
It was so dark.
It was so cold.
32
Orluvoq
Bellies to the ice, heads peeking out over Nunapisu, Orluvoq and Qaffa looked at each other.
“Did you feel that?” asked Orluvoq.
Qaffa nodded. “Something’s changed.”
Qummukarpoq and Nalor weren’t so far down the cliff as to be invisible, but they didn’t present an abundance of details either. Two little figures in a floating lake of green. But that had changed, and now there stood only one little figure upon the wall. Distance obscured, but it took only seconds before the queen and her daughter knew that the aurora was shifting up. The figure was coming for them, and with it Arsarneq.
“Is that… father?” asked Qaffa.
Orluvoq tapped into the glim in her hand and probed toward the advancing shadow. Identifying individuals at a distance had never been her highest of proficiencies, but after two decades, she knew within a heartbeat whether a person-shaped feeling was the king. A loping grin spread across her face.
“It’s not him. It’s Nalor.”
Qaffa let out a whoop, and the two of them stood and backed from the edge. Arsarneq made a rumbling growl as it climbed toward its seat. It cascaded billowing refulgence up and upward, down and forever. Drafts of puissance affluxed over them, sloughing up from its ascent. Then the silence of the river, the passing of the aurora itself. Always Orluvoq had sought out the sky’s light. Now it found her and enshrouded her in its tripartite calm, the unperverted essence of name, body, and spirit.
Arsarneq sailed past queen and princess, leaving them tottering on their feet. Orluvoq caught her balance and gawked. Near Nunapisu’s verge rested a tremendous pillar of stone on its side—the largest stone she’d ever seen—worked to the cast of a Nuktipik’s face. Before the pillar stood Nalor, candle burning cooly in his hand. He saw her and broke into a grin.
“Oh, now this is just fun. Seeing each other at the place we first exchanged names? You make me feel like I’m eighty-three again.”
The green gloss continued to fade as Arsarneq flew higher.
“Nalor. Is my husband…”
“Dead?” he walked forward, checking his parka for debris. “No. Will he be in a few days when his body is completely dehydrated? Sounds likely.”
A few lethargic feelings nudged each other around in her head. None came to the front. Qummukarpoq was no more. That ice shelf ever hanging over her had calved off and missed her by a hair. But had he really deserved to die? She decided to be happy for the moment. After twenty years, every path was open to her once more.
“You’re here?” Qaffa pointed an incredulous finger. “Who are you?”
“I am Nalorsitsaarut. But you may, at last, call me Puigor.”
Far above, Arsarneq settled back into its groove and the light evened out.
“Alright, Puigor.” The word worked its way out of Qaffa slowly. “How did you get a moai?”
“I asked.” He twisted his lips into an impish smirk. “Though it did help that one of the kingdoms up island-side thinks I’m the god of the underworld.”
“What?” said mother and daughter.
He chuckled. “I’ve been sending bluebodies topside for many decades, but I couldn’t go myself until you and our falling friend opened Sulluliaq. Once I manifested in person, rather than just one of my ‘servants’, I suggested they construct me the biggest moai they could manage. And as you can see,” he waved behind himself.
Qaffa began to make demands about which islanders, but Orluvoq cut her off. “That’s fancy and all, but how did you get that thing here, much less down there?”
“I learned that for whatever reason, the kings have a terror of a time trying to fly their own moai for any distance. I reckoned pairing with the candles I could do better, but I couldn’t bet everything on that. Flying down Sulluliaq was one feat, but perhaps the easiest stage, as it’s more just falling. Getting it here to Nunapisu, on the other hand. That, I feel, is worth the best cut of whale meat during summer’s longest feast.”
“And how exactly did you do that?” Orluvoq kept wondering how she could have missed a giant obelisk of rock sliding through her greatest matter of stewardship.
“Timing and panache.” He twiddled his fingers inside his gloves. “When the ice takes bodies to Nunapisu, it doesn’t leave behind the clothes or the trinkets. I learned that so long as things are positioned right, the ice will take any object.”
“But… where did you leave the moai to get taken by the ice?”
“Beside your castle.”
Orluvoq scrambled her head from side to side. “You what? How? I never saw or sensed you.”
“It was only earlier tonight, after Qummukarpoq had left the castle.”
Numbers streamed through Orluvoq’s head. “But how did you skywalk here faster than the king?”
“Orluvoq.” He gave a single chuckle. “I was with the moai and dead body. The ice pulled me here.”
The queen reeled. Never would she have thought to travel the world by hugging a corpse and playing dead. “Who did you kill?”
“No one. They had already died. One of my, ah, followers. I wouldn’t have had to do the burying part had I known that it’s quite easy to carry the moai once you’re in Arsarneq, as I've just discovered.”
“But this all seems overly complex,” Qaffa injected. “If you had a moai and are an angakkuq, why go to the trouble of doing the fight all the way out here? You could outmatch my father at the castle.”
Nalor’s lips pulled into a humorless grin. “Though I just fought a battle, I am no warrior. Haka’atu is jealous of his portal to the ice world, and he has an alliance with the king and queen. How do you think he reacted when I rode right up with a massive moai and dropped into Sulluliaq?”
“He probably mustered every matatoa on his islands and chased after you,” said Qaffa.
“Brilliant girl. Must take after your mother. Yes. Ships were already dotting the horizon when I fell down Sulluliaq. If I tried to fight the battle at the castle, I’d have an army of trained matatoa hot on my neck, the most feared angakkuq in the world to my front, and me completely untrained with the moai in the middle.”
“I see.” Qaffa pondered a moment. “But it’s taken you how long, and now you’re stranded out here with a moai? What are you going to do with it?”
“The plan was always to take it back topside. As I said, using Arsarneq will make that much easier. There are certain things I want to explore. Things about heaven. Let’s hope I don’t end up blind.” He winked.
A frown had set into Orluvoq’s features. “I think I understand how you did everything, but I still don’t understand why. What is Qummukarpoq to you?”
“First, did you never consider what would happen to you once he was able to work the powers of the islands and the ice in concert?”
The frown pinched. “What do you mean?”
Nalor’s easy demeanor hardened. “Second, he killed my father by stealing his name from everyone who’d ever met him. He stole my name from everyone but myself, thereby almost killing me. He’s crossed many others, none who could defend themselves. At last, I have defended us all.”
The knives of Orluvoq’s brain trimmed and dressed the proclamation. Her voice came out cool. “So you had me marry the man you considered a monster just to get revenge?”
His brow froze into one solid furrow. “Not revenge. Justice.”
She pushed tension into her jaw and stared him down. “You’ve had me throw more than half of my life into Nunapisu’s pit all in search of justice for one man?”
He met the stare. “I did what I thought was expedient. If I require to be brought to justice of my o
wn, then so be it. But I have, at last, fulfilled my duty.”
“Expedient. Expedient is just one of evil’s masks.” She waved a hand at her face. “Trust me.”
“If duty must wear one of evil’s masks, does it cease to be duty?” He narrowed his eyes against the world’s end breeze. “The difference between evil and justice is a question of who strikes first, not a question of who never strikes.”
“Who struck first, me or you?”
The night wind purred through the fur of their hoods, giving voice to the chill while Nalor gathered words. “At times, the difference between duty and justice may also find itself to be a question of who strikes first.”
She let her wrath heat her insides without melting anything. Twenty years. Twenty years he had thrown her to hardship for the sake of his revenge. She did not much care whether evil or duty lay beneath the mask. She was quite finished with masks. “I do not like your justice, Nalorsitsaarut. Perhaps it would be expedient if you left.”
Nalor weathered her gaze for a time, then he nodded. “As you say.”
He stepped toward the moai carved in effigy of him and yanked on Arsarneq. The aurora responded to his call like a dog to its name. The snow grew lambent with vapors of green as the light descended. It hit the tundra and clamped all noise to nothing.
Nalor looked down the tunnel of light. His soft words lanced straight to her. “Goodbye, Orluvoq. And thank you.”
Arsarneq lifted from the ice at the end of the world and bore Nalor heavenward. The sounds of breezes and far off animals returned. Orluvoq suddenly felt as though she had loaned out three warm hearts and they had all returned to her frozen and cracked. She sagged.
Qaffa inserted herself beneath her mother’s arm and they tottered toward the igloo.
“The path of obsolescence,” said Orluvoq.
“The what? I didn’t grow up here, you have to use smaller words.”
“That’s what Nalor meant.” Her eyes hung wide. “Your father always intended to reach a point where he no longer needed me. The plan was to try and combine candle and moai to control Sulluliaq. Then he could get rid of me.”
Qaffa glanced at the queen. “Well, he’s gone now.”
“So he is.”
Inside the igloo felt like the thing Orluvoq had been craving for decades. Home. The stability of her first parents. Boundless security provided by the small bounds of walls. A mass of strangling helplessness split from her spirit and drifted toward her abysmal husband. She fell to her haunches and dropped her head into her hands.
“What was all that, Orluvoq?” asked Paarsisoq from his blankets. “I’ve never seen Arsarneq act so wild.”
“Remember how I said we needed to leave?” Orluvoq slid over to him and took his hand. “You go back to sleep. I’m staying.”
Serenity in a smile wandered onto Paarsisoq’s face. “She always said you’d come back.” He looked on her awhile then let his eyes slide shut.
“Mother? Er, Mama?” said Qaffa.
Orluvoq turned to her daughter.
“How long do you think until Sulluliaq closes?”
“A few days. Why?”
“I love you, I think, but this is not my land. I would feel forever lost if I were cut off from the islands. I—I want to go back.”
“Sulluliaq will close. You will never see the narwhals in their pods again. Never hear a tern cry, telling you the sea is close. Never slay a bear in combat and wear its white pelt in honor. Never smell the ice. Never touch another candle. Never see Nunapisu and all your ancestors. You know this?”
Qaffa bowed her head. “I know. It is much to give up. But it is not who I am.”
Orluvoq, still on the floor, reached out and touched her leg. “Then go, my daughter.”
Qaffa looked up and smiled. Were those tears? “Thank you, Mama. If it’s alright, I think I’ll go tomorrow night.”
Orluvoq smiled back, already laying plans for her last day with her daughter. The first full day of walking a new path. “Tomorrow is perfect.”
Epilogue
Qaffa walked into the burning afternoon sun, quickly hopping off the palace flagstones burning under her feet. She had been gone under a week. Was she already so weak to the heat?
Ariki Haka’atu stepped out after her, tattooed hands laced atop his belly. “Look at that. Not a single rain cloud has come to greet you. What did you do to offend them?”
She turned to him and planted her hands akimbo. “Maybe it’s you they don’t like. How do I know you didn’t do something to anger them while I was gone?”
He boomed a laugh, eyes swallowed in squints. “Maybe you’re right! I haven’t been eating enough and the clouds are offended that I do not appreciate the harvest they give us.”
Qaffa smiled. It was good to be back. “I’m just glad I made it back.”
The king gestured over his shoulder to the ten or so honor guard with him. “My matatoa say that your ocean tunnel is all closed up. Looks like you have to stay here forever, princess. If that’s the case, you’re going to have to get a lot better at eating properly.”
She knew she’d been cutting it close trying to get back topside, but if Sulluliaq was shut less than a day after her return, she’d been risking more than she knew. “Be that the case, I’ll be eternally grateful for your hospitality. However, the volcano’s still thinking.”
He’d taught her the saying. One could never say how many years—or days—until the volcano exploded. To always live like it would erupt tomorrow wasted everything you could be.
“So it is, so it is.” He stepped off the flagstones. “Well, shall we see if it works?”
Qaffa tried not to look too eager as she skipped up to the massive cylinder of stone lying in front of the palace.
“Like I said, we made it for your big man, but he never came by to pick it up.” Haka’atu reached up slapped a thick hand against the moai. “You might be able to bond with it since it was made for your blood relation. If you can, it’s yours.”
Excitement shivered off her. She’d gone to watch the stonecutters work on it many times. She knew its exact measurements—just slightly less than Haka’atu’s.
“So, what’s the trick to making it work?”
“You have to make it see your spirit.” The king floated up to stand atop the rock.
“Why does it matter that it was made for someone in my bloodline?”
“If it’s not close enough to your body, it won’t recognize your spirit even if it sees it.”
That sounded eerily familiar to the body, spirit, name belief of the Nuktipik. Qaffa would have to think about it more later. For now, she placed a hand against the long, gray stone and exposed her spirit.
The response inundated her immediately. She stumbled back, mouth hanging wide. A colossal bar of energy sat before her like a second sun, and all she had to do was reach.
She reached.
Qaffa exploded up into the sky, wind and wind and sunshine chafing past as she flew. She laughed to the heavens as she rushed into their bosom. As the surrounding air chilled, the bar of energy dimmed until she knew she could go no higher. Full of smiles and childlike delight, she dove back to the palace.
The king waved a hand and the matatoa broke into applause as she landed. Qaffa performed three over-indulgent bows. The two things Qummukarpoq had said that opening Sulluliaq required were a powerful angakkuq and a perfect vessel to pass Arsarneq’s light through. If moai really were analogous to bodies, what more perfect vessel could there be than one carved over twenty years? Might not hurt to sneak in an occasional visit to her mother.
“Of course, I am happy to have you here,” said Haka’atu. “But a woman with a moai that proper needs an island of her own. Ariki Qaffa. How do you like the sound of that?”
Visions of a peck of land somewhere in the vicinity of Nanaka’i, Ragaka’i, and the wall of cloud that ascended forever upward gushed into her head. How difficult could it be to poke around a little yet avoid becoming a Hokih
o successor?
She smiled. “I like it very much.”
The Watcher sat at the end of the earth; she sat at the start of the sky. Today she watched errant flakes of snow drift over the edge in glittering gusts of chance. It was one of the many beauties her eyes would never tire of, their ambling drift shimmering before a backdrop of inexhaustible darkness. Because she was a lucky woman, that wouldn’t be the only beauty she saw today.
Orluvoq turned from Nunapisu’s edge and walked to the igloo that she once again named as home. She’d quested out as far as candles would allow. No one was coming, whether to bring company or to throw themselves into nullity. That was fine, as far as she was concerned. She had somewhere important to be.
The Watcher ducked into the igloo, lit a mundane candle, and walked over to the bundle of blankets against the far wall. “Dad?”
Paarsisoq stirred in his bed. “Eh? Thought you could sneak up on me, Orluvoq? I’ve got the nose of a bear and the rump of a bear.”
She laughed in spite—because?—of the confusing analogies. “Oh, I would never dare sneak up on you.”
His eyes remained closed. “You couldn’t anyway, with a face that beautiful. I’d see you leagues away.”
“Dad…” Nearly a year she had lived at the end of the world. A year more resplendent than any since childhood. Nevertheless, a year for time to start finally catching up to her face and body. She’d had relative success turning her gaze outward and finding beauty inherent in the world, but she couldn’t quite escape her shriveling skin.
He knew what she’d done. What she’d been. The multitudes she’d hurt at the start of the world while he tried to save them at the end. The ugliness of her spirit. He called her beautiful anyway.
Paarsisoq coughed and Orluvoq reached to brace his head. After the fit had subsided, he gave a thin smile. “I’m not all I used to be, my dear. Not all at all. At all at all.”
She knelt beside him. “You’re strong. The strongest man I know.”
Orluvoq Page 34
