The Tundra Shall Burn!

by Ken Altabef

  “The same.”

  “All right,” said Guolna. “Aquppak of the Anatatook. You don’t mind if we test you for your word?”

  He signaled to his men, who immediately grabbed hold of Niak. Niak tried to shout, but the men stuffed a rag into his mouth.

  “Three hundred paces,” said Guolna.

  Vithrok, alone in his stronghold at the very top of the world, gazed into Kidan’s device. The stars above marked the night with their dizzying patterns as they played out their pageants across the sky. Not yet. Not quite yet.

  The Collarbone needs move just a little bit to the west. Just a little bit, he thought. Only the tiniest fraction. He was so close. The stars circled slowly, so very slowly, but he was almost there.

  “Almost there,” he said aloud. He had waited so long. An eternity it seemed.

  “The time will soon come,” he said aloud. And then the Thing That Was Cast Out, his secret treasure, would return.

  “If I could stop you,” said the voice of Tugto, “I would.”

  “Shut up!” snapped Vithrok. He could hardly countenance another unwanted and annoying interruption. But how could he silence the dead? The spirits of the old Tunrit shamans were connected to this place, having put so much of their souls into working the stone of these palace walls. Block them from seeing? The shield of liquid Beforetime which he had erected as barrier to prying eyes was useless against them.

  Vithrok focused the lens of Kidan’s device and scanned the stars with it. There were two kinds of stars, he had learned. The old stars, the ones that had shone in the sky since the beginning of the world, fixed in their constellations, slowly circling the heavens. And then there were the newer stars. These had appeared while he slept imprisoned in the Ring of Stones. And these were brighter and far closer than the others. These watched. These waited. These were, he knew, the souls of shamans long passed. Bits of the Beforetime that had gone up into the sky and therefore out of his reach. Among them, he supposed, were his old friends Tugto and Oogloon and Tulunigraq. Too far away and too diminished to do anything more against him than poke and pester.

  “Leave me be,” he said to Tugto. “You’ve already tried to stop me. You’ve had your say, you and the others, when you put me in the rock! You tried to stop me but you couldn’t. You failed. And why?”

  There came no answer from the stars.

  “I’ll tell you why. Because I am, and always have been, the better of you.”

  “We were… brothers…” said Tugto’s voice.

  “Yes we were. But brothers are not always equals, are they? I discovered powers far beyond you or any of the others. I taught you a little and you turned against me.”

  “This is your problem,” said Tugto. “You think… too much of yourself. Our time… is passed…”

  Vithrok smirked. “Oh, how little you know, even now! I never did anything for myself! It was always for you and the others, you know that. And what I do now, at great risk, my friend, at great risk, I do for others still. I do it for you. For everyone. I hoped you would understand that. In the Beforetime we were equal in spirit, we were all parts of the whole. When everything is restored to the Beforetime again we will all be equal again. I will have gained nothing for myself. Nothing! We will all be one again.”

  Silence.

  “No answer to that, eh? You stupid fool!”

  Nothing.

  “I’m doing what you wanted, what you begged me to do. Remember? When we first learned the sun had brought time to our world and that it was aging us, killing us. You begged me to put it back. The Thing will do that for us. It will take away the sun. And stop Time.”

  “Yes,” said Tugto weakly, “but there were… no men… in those dark days. What you do… will blot them out… as if they had never existed.”

  “So what? They are nothing.”

  “You only see… what you want to see.”

  This infuriated Vithrok.

  “The men… have the power of creation… as we did in the Before. Listen to their songs… hear their stories… and dreams. They will fly as we did… in their own way. They will go… farther than we ever could. They have replaced us.”

  “Replaced us? Replaced us??? You really are a fool, Tugto. This world is in decline. Don’t you see that? In the Before we were as gods, and in the great darkness we were Tunrit. Now? Now men are the weakest of all. The great spirits are losing their strength and power and then what will happen? Men will just be animals. All their tools and weapons don’t change that. A bunch of animals, they will destroy themselves. We were gods! They can’t commune with each other like we did, they can’t know the harmony with which we bathed ourselves. They can only throw stones at each other.

  “They can’t create anything of worth, not really, not moving from place to place, chasing around and around trying to feed themselves and their children, dying and breeding more, to what end? We had something so much better before it was ruined by Tsungi and the Thing. Ruined by them! Not by me! I was left with their mess to clean up. And clean it up I shall.”

  “Bringing the Thing back… is… too dangerous.”

  “It would be,” Vithrok agreed, “if the sun wasn’t there to neutralize it. Light meets dark in equal measure. And then they will both be gone. Leave me alone already. Stop haunting me. You should have helped me before instead of locking me in that stone.”

  “No. You were… too dangerous.”

  “Yes, I am dangerous.”

  “Taking chances…”

  “I have no choice.”

  I have no choice, thought Vithrok. This is the only way.

  He was willing to gamble everything, his life, his death, the world. Everything for that one chance to bring back paradise. What else could he do? Ride this barren rock as it hurtled towards its own destruction, with mankind merrily piping along? No, he had no choice.

  Tragically, it all depended on Raven, but there was nothing Vithrok could do about that. The Raven could never be trusted. Never. He had been there in the dark time just after the fall, naming the new creatures, fixing them in their new forms. But where had the Raven come from? Because he could walk the pathways of time, most Tunrit believed Raven had traveled backward from the future to name the names and fix the forms. Though it was equally likely he had raced forward from the Beforetime itself. No one could know. It didn’t matter. Vithrok must stick to his own plan, keep tugging on his celestial web, bringing the Thing to meet the sun and blot it out. Only in that way could he reverse the great mistake he had made in bringing it here in the first place.

  And after that he would unleash his store of Beforetime to set it all on fire.

  And if Raven didn’t help? Vithrok refused to think about that. Somehow he would succeed.

  The choice lay with Raven. It was a gamble, but Vithrok believed Raven would make the correct choice. He would do the right thing in the end.

  As if on cue, a raven’s caw sounded out in the citadel.

  Vithrok whirled around.

  A large black bird sat atop one of the filigreed arches of his stronghold, head tilted at a curious angle, gazing down at him. How had that thing gotten in? How had it penetrated his shield?

  Its eyes were the Raven’s eyes. What it saw, Tulukkaruq saw.

  The bird flapped its wings and lifted from the surface, no doubt ready to take flight and report to its master. Vithrok flushed with red rage. He shouldn’t feel so vulnerable, not here; this was his place. He reached out with psychic force, took firm hold of the bird’s soul, stopping its flight.

  He gazed into its yellowed eyes, watching as panic gripped the bird as tightly as Vithrok’s mental fist. Too late, of course. Raven had already seen. There was no hope of keeping secrets from the Raven.

  Vithrok increased his pressure, crushing the bird’s delicate chest as it stood transfixed in mid-flight. Crimson blood spattered outward, the yellowed eyes bulged, the beak flopped helplessly open. Vithrok dropped the dead raven to the floor.

  He ne
eded help, to be sure, but he was never helpless.

  CHAPTER 25

  A CHARMED LIFE

  Nunavik was certain that Alaana would never find him.

  Having no knowledge of where Nunavik had taken the lakespawn, Alaana would be unlikely to scour the ocean bottom looking for her friend. The Anatatook shaman held the physical tusk, but Nunavik’s spirit could no longer be found inside it. Should Alaana summon him, the walrus would not dare answer.

  He was trapped inside his spirit-tusk in the silt at the sea floor. Nunavik decided to extend just a small part of his consciousness out beyond the safety of his sanctuary, perhaps taking a cue from old Kaokortok, as little a piece as just an eye. In this way he opened a window out onto the sea to peer above the silt surface.

  The first thing he saw was an enormous spiked claw. This claw was attached to the monstrous form of Kktakaluk, Sedna’s mate, the giant sea scorpion. Twice the size of a man, blood red in color, Kktakaluk was a living horror of spines, claws and armor plating. The claw descended, scooping through the silt not far from the spirit-tusk. The scorpion’s tapered head turned sharply and for a moment it leaned close, a pair of pitiless black eyes scouring the ocean bed. A thorny set of mandibles wavered as he spoke.

  “I know you’re there,” he said. But just exactly where, he was unsure. The eyes wavered on their little stalks, the claw violently snapped shut.

  Nunavik retreated back into the spirit-tusk. His situation had now grown completely hopeless. No, not hopeless. Never hopeless. He remembered the words of an old friend: “You still have one thing, the most important thing — hope. You will not ever let it go. Not you.”

  More than a thousand years ago, those words had been spoken to him by one of the great spirits. Nunavik, poor tormented thing, half-starved, crazed with loneliness and certainly near death, had crawled from his cave and out along the jagged shore ice. He had gazed longingly down at the sea in early winter, sluggish and half frozen. Its waters forever denied him, he peered into its frosted depths, hoping perchance to glimpse a darting cuttlefish or some other edible sea creature.

  From somewhere in the depths below a warm, golden glow suffused the waters. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before, shimmering and sparkling with spirited evanescence. Nunavik stared at it, enthralled by its seething color and hopeful aura. The sparkling light expanded, rising slowly amid a tinkling of bells as a golden starfish emerged from the depths. It breached the surface with a great burst of amber light, an ancient starfish about half the size of the walrus, crusted with age and luminous winking barnacles. The figure had no eyes or face, only a gaping mouth that puckered playfully. At its touch, the surrounding air seemed to coalesce and sparkle.

  “Greetings and felicitations!” boomed the starfish’s deep, sonorous voice.

  It smelled of honeysuckle.

  Nunavik sniffed, incongruous.

  “I’ve gone mad,” he mumbled. He began shuffling back along the ice, too weak to make good his escape.

  “Certainly not!” said the golden starfish. “I assure you, I am quite sane. That is, you are quite sane, I mean.”

  Nunavik paused his retreat, keeping a wary eye on the starfish as it hovered before him clothed in a cloud of honeyed air. Was it possible? Was this one of the great spirits of the North and not some crazy hallucination brought about by starvation and extreme loneliness?

  “I am Qityabnaqtuq!” the spirit said proudly. “Guardian of all the starfish in the sea!”

  “I’m not a starfish,” mumbled Nunavik.

  “Certainly not!” said Qityabnaqtuq. “For one thing, you haven’t any arms at all. But I also have a soft heart for the lost and disenfranchised.”

  Nunavik scratched at the folds of blubber behind one of his ears. He had no choice but to admit the obvious. “I don’t understand.”

  “I felt sorry for you,” explained the other. “This is not how you were meant to live — cut off from the sea, living off scraps from tidal pools, wandering the floes, moping about in a dark cave.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” said Nunavik.

  “I can help!” boomed the starfish. “I can set you free.”

  “Errrr,” said Nunavik. “Sedna’s put a curse on me. Maybe you don’t want to interfere.”

  “And maybe I do.” The golden starfish wavered in agitation, its forty crusted arms quivering madly. “Just maybe I do. That woman thinks she rules the entire ocean, lording it over the rest of us, but there are other turgats down below the waves too, you know. And some of us, well, maybe we think she deserves a little comeuppance once in a while. How about that? I know the Whale-Man would agree. You should hear some of the things he has to say when he’s drunk on krill. If Sedna wants you harmed, I say let’s give you the means to fight, or at least to escape.”

  “She has her reasons,” said Nunavik.

  “Based on spite and arrogance, I suppose?”

  Nunavik nodded his head. It was true.

  “That woman is a menace,” said Qityabnaqtuq. “She’s too full of herself. She’s mean and vengeful and cold as ice. And that miserable husband of hers...”

  “I know,” said Nunavik, waving his tail flipper. A large chunk of it had been cut away by Kktakaluk’s vicious claw. “I know.”

  “Just so,” said the golden starfish.

  “But what was that you said?” asked Nunavik. “The means to escape?”

  “That depends. Can I convince you to become my shaman?”

  “A shaman for the starfish? I wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do.”

  “No, no. You misunderstand. I have others for that. I have actual starfish down below who serve that purpose. You would be more like my ambassador to the world.”

  Again, Nunavik didn’t quite understand, but again he had nothing to lose.

  “Are you sure I’m the right choice for this?”

  The starfish beamed. “I, Qityabnaqtuq, have the gift of foresight. I see what is to come and I foresee some very great things for you. You have lost everything, and yet do you cast yourself out onto the rocks? No. And why not? You still have one thing, the most important thing — hope. You will not ever let it go. Not you. You’re perfect for a shaman! What’s more, you already have the light — how else could you have dived so deep and witnessed the sights of the spirit world below the waves? Did you ever wonder how you were able to see Sedna’s daughter, or the Great Sea Witch herself for that matter?”

  In truth, Nunavik had not ever questioned it. In those early days he had been a plain and simple walrus, and not hardly the well-travelled, worldly spirit he would later become.

  “You are no ordinary walrus,” continued the starfish. “You were meant to be a shaman all along. You just need a proper patron. It should have been Sedna of course, since the walrus all belong under her dominion. But perhaps a humble starfish might do. What do you say? Do you accept?”

  Nunavik bowed his head. “Such a great and venerable spirit, I could never refuse.”

  “That’s the stuff!” said Qityabnaqtuq.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You’ve already done it! The initiation rite requires the supplicant to surrender all earthly cares and property, a fast to the point of starvation, and exposure to the merciless elements. And I’ve happened upon you in just such a state. Bravo! You must have known I was coming. And if not — what’s the difference? It’s a job well done.

  “Of course, being a walrus, there’s a limit to what I can bestow upon you. You’re not quite built for most of the work. But I give you this. The power of ilimarpoq, the soul flight. Your soul shall leave your body on your command. You’ll be free to explore all the seven worlds of the spirits and wander wherever your heart desires. Though I’d suggest you avoid the ocean.”

  “Got that,” said Nunavik.

  With a peculiar grunting noise Qityabnaqtuq contorted himself into a bizarre folded shape and then, filling out again, announced, “It is done.”

  Nunavik f
elt something wonderful, a glittering seed, a warm sparkle deep within his chest.

  “I will always be with you,” announced the golden starfish. “But right now, actually, I must be going back down below.”

  “What do you ask from me in return?” asked Nunavik.

  The starfish laughed merrily. “Nothing.”

  “But… what do you want me to do?”

  Qityabnaqtuq shrugged, as much as an oversized starfish can be said to have shrugged. “Go wherever you will, do whatever you want.”

  “I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to fly,” said Nunavik.

  “Me too,” said the starfish. “Why don’t you show me?”

  For a long time Nunavik did not use his new gift. He continued to sulk along the shoreline, nosing into nooks and crannies for his meals of startled crawfish. The spirit-vision, if he had truly possessed it before, now grew sharper and sharper. With proper concentration, he was soon able to see the spirits within all things.

  Conversing with the spirits was another matter altogether, and Nunavik did not know any language other than the grunts and bellows of the walrus kind. So he marveled silently at their wondrous soul-lights — the lofty spirits of the clouds above, the ice floe’s subtle glow, and the fiery souls within the other creatures along the shore. He came upon so very few, mainly only mussels and cockles. He witnessed the little luminescences within their shells, small simple creatures who wanted nothing but to shuffle on, to scrabble along the ice and sand and perhaps meet a suitable female. As he came to know their souls he felt less inclined to consume them, but huger won out in the end and he gobbled up whatever he could find, with humble apologies.

  As far as escaping from his body, Qityabnaqtuq had failed to instruct him in the proper way and the golden starfish came back no more.

  Kaokortok stopped by occasionally for a visit, often bringing some welcome snack. On one such occasion, after Nunavik had gobbled up the shaman’s gift of sea cucumbers, the walrus put the question to him.