by Ken Altabef
It was so.
“Now make things disappear. Get rid of the tent – it’s no longer around us, we are out on the open plain. There is no we — I’m no longer sitting beside you. I no longer exist. The distant mountains lose their colors and their forms, breaking into tiny fragments, crumbling away, they fall to dust and are gone. See? There is only the bare ground alone, only the snow so white it seems not even to be there. It all fades away. Subtract the stones and the earth, take away the sky, until there is nothing left.”
Alaana dutifully nodded her head although she still saw everything as before, tent and walrus included.
“There is only pure, boundless space,” said Nunavik in a hypnotically soothing voice which sounded not like him at all.
“You exist in a vast plain of nothingness, an emptiness of the mind — in your case this should be fairly easy, allow your usual dumb stare to come over your face, now it suits our purposes. One must get rid of the moods, the joy, fear, sadness, rid yourself of the memories of any person or thing or event that has ever happened or ever will.”
“Does that include you?”
“Of course that includes me. We got rid of me long ago. Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said at all?”
Alaana didn’t answer.
“Well, answer me girl! Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said?”
“I can’t hear someone who isn’t here,” replied Alaana.
Nunavik let loose a full-throated roar. He was not in the least amused. “Now concentrate!” he said. “Feel the word coming to you through the strands of the air. The word will arise within you; you will feel it, having emptied your mind of all ideas of your own. The word will come.”
“It’s a type of food, isn’t it?”
“I’m not here to give you hints, girl.”
“It’s some kind of meat. . .”
“No, it’s not.”
“It’s a piece of equipment for the hunt…”
“Perhaps,” said Nunavik. “Concentrate! You make too much of this. It’s not a guessing game. You don’t have to figure it out, you simply have to receive. Old Manatook’s doing all the work.”
A moment later he added, “Unless you count all my time and effort. It’s hard work straining my patience like this. And what do I get for it? A headache. And none of the credit. But I suppose there’s nothing unusual in that. Getting anything yet?”
Alaana shook her head sadly.
The old walrus inflated his huge bulbous chest, then let out a frustrated growl. Alaana expected a blast of foul-smelling air to rush past her face. Of course there was none. The Walrus was spirit only.
“Relax your mind,” said Walrus On The Ice. “That’s the problem with the young, they never can concentrate on any little thing.”
“How old are you?” asked Alaana.
“Never you mind that! I was young and foolish once too. You could well learn a thing or two from my story.”
“You’re not here to tell me stories.”
“No. No, I’m not. I’ve much better things to do with my time and so do you. I don’t know why I do that crusty old shaman these favors. He owes me his life, you know.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh, now that’s a story, that one! Hah! Let him tell you about it sometime, you won’t hear any of it from me.” His flippers danced in front of his golden face in what Alaana imagined was a walrus’ show of modesty. “But maybe this is an idea. A proper story might relax your mind. What is there to lose, I’ve tried everything else?”
Nunavik’s tiny eyes widened in their sockets. “Let Uncle Walrus sing you a song! It’s a song of triumph and tragedy, although not in that order. It goes more like tragedy, more tragedy, triumph, tragedy, mild comedy, and a sort of triumph again. Its end is unwritten, but I suspect it will not conclude on a high note.”
Walrus On The Ice let out a deep braying laugh, but his eyes held a strange expression of sadness.
“My father, whom everyone called Big Bellow, was famous for his tremendous lungs. You could hear his bull roar far away, far out of sight, over the ice. Yes, but even he was surprised when he taught me to dive deep. No one could believe it, the way I could dive deep down. I became a sensation, diving down and circling below the glacier as the other young bulls chased me along the top of the ice. There aren’t so many great amusements for us walruses, you know. Still, after a while they grew tired of waiting for me to come back up.
“And each time I went, I stayed below a little bit longer, and went a little bit deeper. Each time there were new marvels for me to behold, new friends, new dangers. I went deeper and deeper. Once I saw a sea turtle as large as a beluga whale. I discovered strange types of fish that light up the murky depths like stars in the night sky. At last I came to the very bottom, to the place where Sedna dwells.”
“You saw her? What does she look like? Is she horrible?”
“Ackk! The most horrible woman you could ever imagine. Her hair is wild and dark, strewn with strands of seaweed and kelp that writhe like snakes; her flesh is a scaly green and bathed with sea slime. Her eyes are like knives; her mouth is cruel, her lips thin and blue, forming a crusty cave in which reside the teeth of a barracuda.”
“Is it true what they say?”
“What?” asked Nunavik, with an irritated flash of his head at the interruption. “That she was the daughter of two giants with such an uncontrollable urge for flesh that she tried to devour her parents in their sleep? Or that she was a young beauty forced to marry an elderly neighbor, who by some trick turned out to be a monstrous carrion bird, leaving her no route of escape except into the salty deeps? Or perhaps, as some say, she was a poor orphan girl mistreated by her community and cast into the sea by the other children, who cut off her fingers as she clung desperately to the side of the kayak?”
“Which story is true?”
“All of them. Every story is true, I suppose. Looking at her, it is easy to see that she is cruel and terrible, quick to rip open your chest and tear your liver with her teeth, but in her eyes can also be seen the tears and desperation of a young girl forced to marry, beaten and rejected. All the great spirits and turgats that we know, they all came into being at the moment of the Great Rift, fashioned out of those who inhabited the Beforetime. So who knows? Perhaps in the Beforetime, where dreams were reality, she was all those things, lived all those lives. It doesn’t matter. On this side of the divide she is Sedna, the Sea Mother who controls the supply of game animals from the ocean.
“Now listen! Great whirlpools guard the entrance to her house, a palace of glittering coral at the bottom of the sea. No living creature might reach those brilliant gates but my lungs were prodigious, and my flippers young and strong, and I wanted to see. I had to see what came next, what lay just around the corner. And I spied her there, on her bed of kelp. Her husband, Kktakaluk, is an even more hideous creature — a giant sea scorpion, blood red in color and twice the size of a man.”
Nunavik snapped a flipper in the air in fair imitation of a sea scorpion’s spiked claw. Alaana laughed, though a bit nervously, the image of the gigantic deadly creature alive in her mind.
“There was a daughter,” added Nunavik. “Coming of such parentage you might think she would be ugly and cruel, but it was not so. She was beautiful, such a fragile and delicate thing. She had no cruelty in her, only loneliness. A profound loneliness as deep and as relentless as the sea itself. I could see it in her face, in the hesitant way she moved, so vulnerable and shy and demure. How could I help but fall in love with such a creature? They kept her locked away, visible to me only through a crack in the coral wall. I longed to talk with her but by then my lungs were fit to burst and up I must go. Up for air and down again, and again, but never enough air for squeak or squawk or whispered hello.
“And so it went. I dared not think she could return my affections — a craggy thick-skinned walrus with a flat head and beady little eyes! Get that smirk off your face, girl! I was a good-looking
walrus, but what a homely creature I must appear to her. That’s what I meant. One time as I peered into her chamber our eyes met and I would have… Acck, but the father scared me off, venomous devil. He is cruelty personified. Those claws! Snipped a piece of my hind flipper clean off.”
Nunavik leaned far forward, raising his tail with a flourish. Sure enough, there was a sizable piece missing.
“After that I was afraid to go back. Anyone would have been. You can understand that?”
Alaana nodded.
“Well, understand this,” continued Nunavik, “I did go back, Kktakaluk be damned. I went back again and again. Always he was there — talk about a flat head and beady eyes — with those claws and that enormous deadly tail.”
Again he exhibited his damaged tail. “There seemed no way around him. They kept her there, imprisoned for her protection, they said. She didn’t see it that way. There’s another one young and foolish…” The walrus’ eyes, small and beady as they were, glossed over for a moment and Alaana realized it was painful for him, talking about his first love.
“One day she escaped! I don’t know how she did it. But I know why. She was coming up to find me. She must have been, I suppose, simply curious,” he said with a sigh. “Searching for me or not, she found instead the fishermen of the North. She became entangled in their nets. Poor helpless creature. To them she appeared monstrous; their eyes could not see the charming, delicate and gentle being that I had found.
“Now comes tragedy and more tragedy. They killed her, of course. And Sedna flew into a monstrous rage of whipping gales and smashing storms. The Sea Mother’s revenge was ruthless. No longer would she allow the game animals up to the surface to feed the men.
“My sorrow was beyond the telling, and my terror even greater than that. The souls of all the sea creatures are Sedna’s playthings. It seemed inevitable she would discover my part in this disaster and then… one can not even imagine what torturous end her wrath would bring to me. There was no place I could run. There was no place for me to hide.
“That’s when I met Kaokortok, a broken-down Tungus shaman who had stranded himself at sea. He’d been carried off on a piece of ice which broke away while he was hunting seal. He had never had much luck on the water; his guardian spirit was the vole, you see. Really he was the most pathetic sort of shaman I’ve ever met, and I’ve known quite a few.
“Many days he drifted until, starving and weak, he drew his belt-knife with the brilliant idea of ending his miserable long-suffering life. I told him to stay his hand, the ridiculous fool. Land was only a few feet away. I nudged his floe toward the iceberg as best I could and tossed him a few fresh-caught tomcod. In his gratitude he did me a service. He hid my soul in my left tusk, the very one that you hold now in your greasy little paw. Those carvings you see there were done by the shaky hand of Kaokortok. The man was a complete idiot, and came to a bad end shortly thereafter, but his spirit cage was a good one. He hid my soul from the wrath of Sedna.
“The men began to starve, but Sedna would send no more food to them. The people grew mad in their starvation and hunted whatever seal and walrus they could find to utter destruction. I saw all my friends and family destroyed, killed and eaten, every one, even though it wasn’t their time. I wanted to die along with them myself but I thought of old Kaokortok lost at sea with the belt-knife in his shaky hand. What an inspiration, eh? At least I knew what I didn’t want to do.
“But what to do?
“Alone on the ice, soulless, steeped in tragedy. I sat on a rocky cleft overlooking the sea.
“Where had I gone wrong? What had brought me to that place? I had dived too deep, I had touched upon things that should not have been seen by mortal eyes. I had went too far, asked too many questions. But I resolved, there and then, sitting on that miserable rock, to stumble blindly no more. No mortal creature of the sea was meant to witness what I had seen, to meddle in the affairs of the Great Spirits. And yet I had done so. Something within me had made it possible. I would push it as far as it would go. I would learn all there was to know about magic and the spirits and all the other worlds.
“And so it began, my odyssey into the—
“Oh, but wait. I wasn’t asked here to fill your head with stories about me, as enlightening and instructive as they might be to an empty-headed girl. The strands. The word on the wind. Concentrate!”
But Alaana could not concentrate. Nunavik’s wondrous story had sparked too many new ideas. Alaana thought of Sedna and giant sea scorpions, of storms and spells, of the ill-fated romance Nunavik had so long ago suffered, and Maguan’s recent marriage.
“I wonder how it’ll be when I’m married?” she asked.
“Marriage is not a certainty for shamans,” replied the golden walrus.
“Why not? Kuanak and Civiliaq were married, and Old Manatook too. They all have children, except for Old Manatook and Higilak but they’re too old for that.”
“People fear what they don’t understand,” said Nunavik grimly. “Now get back to the task at hand. I’m not here for idle chatter. Concentrate on the message, ungarpaluk.” This last word was twisted sarcastically, a nickname Nunavik had adopted for Alaana which meant ‘The Little Harpoon’.
“Harpoon,” said Alaana, with sudden inspiration. “That’s the word, isn’t it?”
Nunavik’s eyes bulged, his golden face reddened. “You guessed that from what I said!”
“I’m right,” trilled Alaana, “I’m right.” Glee rang out in her voice. “And now that we’ve finished early, I can go and help mother repair the nets.”
“Not so fast,” said Nunavik. He paused, probably to confer across the spirit of the air with Old Manatook, then said, “There is a new word. Try again.”
CHAPTER 10
THE WEDDING FEAST
There were no lessons for Alaana the next day. It was time for Maguan’s wedding feast.
Their family tent had been linked with her uncle Anaktuvik’s to form one large enclosure that would better accommodate all the people who happened to visit. Pilarqaq had laid the floor with broad, flat stones to cover the messy gravel. People came and went all day, passing in and out of the tents, staying for a while and eating their fill, then going away only to return some time later. Of the eight families that made up the spring encampment, four or five families were present at any one time. The women, having shaken off their outer garments, settled on the platform toward Kigiuna’s side of the enclosure, eating and snuggling among the furs. The men took to the other side, sitting cross-legged on the skins covering Anaktuvik’s floor, eating and smoking their pipes. The men paid no attention to the women unless the talk coming from their side grew too loud, at which time Kigiuna would object.
He wouldn’t speak to any of the women directly, but merely called out, “Hurry, men. Grab your slings and bows! The auks have hatched on the cliffside! I can hear their squawking from all the way over here!” The women would respond with a moment of shocked silence and then, with a ripple of laughter they would start up all over again.
The children took possession of the region between the two camps. The press of body heat rendered the tent quite warm. Discarded parkas littered the floor and the smaller children made a game of crawling under and between them. The older youths stood in a cluster at the choicest spot, the cooler region near the tent flaps. Alaana positioned herself directly in the middle, where she could hear some of the women’s gossip but still be close enough to watch Maguan. The mood inside the tent was so relaxed and joyful, Alaana felt happier than she had ever felt before. She was so very proud of her brother.
And the food! Heaping trays kept coming in the door as each hunter eagerly showed off the best his house had to offer. A competition was struck up in order to see who could bring the most — from fresh marrow melted into huge yellow cakes, to bittersweet willow greens and steaming walrus and seal meat. After a steady diet of fish over the past season the satisfying taste of meat raided from the stores was a welcome treat.
The women passed out lumps of sweet tallow and handfuls of fish eyes. Alaana chomped merrily on the salty treats, and she and Iggianguaq made a show of swallowing the tough kernels inside rather than spitting them out as Mikisork did. They remarked, quite falsely, on how delicious they were, just to watch the expressive oval of Miki’s face curdle with disgust.
“My mother says a boy’s not really a man until he gets married,” she said.
“And a girl’s not a woman until she bears her first child,” said Iggy completing the saying. He then made a variety of groaning noises and rubbed at his stomach in an approximation of giving birth. Given the oversized nature of Iggy’s belly, Alaana thought the act fairly convincing.
“Well, I can’t wait to have mine,” Alaana said indignantly. She puffed her cheeks and pulled her shirt out in front.
“Even if they look like Mikisork?” Iggy asked, twisting his expression into an exaggerated imitation of Mikisork with narrow cheeks and flared nostrils.
“Well, I don’t care,” said Alaana with a sulky curl of her lip. She thought Miki was handsome enough.
“Hey!” said Miki, who didn’t find the joke very funny either.
Iggy flapped air out of his mouth. Mikisork was well-known for his flatus.
“I don’t mind that either,” she insisted, “He’s good-natured and kind.”
Alaana had been promised to marry Miki ever since the day she’d been born. As Miki was one of the sons of the headman, Tugtutsiak, her father had thought this a very successful arrangement. Alaana had no quarrel with it either. She had looked upon Miki as her betrothed all her life, and he had always acted with a special affection toward her. She liked him a lot. Her father was very good at arranging marriages.
The feast was likely to extend for several sleeps. A few of the guests already dozed contentedly, having fallen asleep right where they sat. In the summer, when it was nearly always light outside, the days spilled together. Each household kept to its own sleeping schedule; and the children were free to play as long as they liked, or until exhaustion claimed them.
