The Calling

by Ken Altabef

  He would not turn away from Alaana, would not endanger the girl even if it should mean his own life. Higilak smiled thinly. She would be foolish to expect a father to do any less.

  As if by its own accord, the lamp winked out.

  There would be no sleep for either of them now. After a moment, she slipped back into his embrace. They held each other. In the cold and dark they held each other and waited for a dawn that would not come for many sleeps.

  CHAPTER 30

  INITIATION

  “How many… how many sleeps?” Alaana forced the words from her parched throat.

  “Seven,” replied Nunavik.

  Alaana pushed the air out in a dry chuckle. “That’s all? No sly comment about how stupid I must be to have lost count?”

  “No,” said the Walrus On The Ice.

  “Seven,” said Alaana. She lifted the beater from the head of the drum, but didn’t have strength enough to do more than that. Her fingers felt numb against the handle. Truth be told, she could feel little at all.

  “I’ll do that for you,” said Nunavik softly. The drum rang out in the close confines of the tiny snow house, sounding a slow, dolorous beat. Alaana sat on the floor. Naked, she leaned forward, her arms tucked into armpits, her legs hugged together, curling herself around whatever body heat remained. Her clothes had been taken away along with everything else. Anything that recalled her home or her family, or the Anatatook themselves, had been removed. She possessed only amulet and drum.

  Her eyes drifted closed. She wanted very much to sink down into sleep.

  Alaana had been asleep seven nights ago, snug in her furs, when the call for this initiation had come. She hadn’t slept well for many days, going in and out of dreams, with nightmares more frequent than ever before. Kigiuna, too, was always restless beside her.

  On that night Old Manatook’s blurry inuseq had manifested in the air near the iglu’s domed ceiling. “It’s time,” the old shaman had said. She slipped her parka over her head and dressed as quietly as possible, not wishing to wake her family. Then she crept outside into the cold pre-dawn gloom.

  Old Manatook carried her to a small ceremonial sled just large enough for one passenger. By tradition, she was not allowed to walk or stand upright until the initiation was complete. The Anatatook camp lay quiet and all still asleep. A brilliant stripe of orange streaked a snowy horizon of dark gray, heralding the first dawn of spring. There were no crowds assembled to see her off, no shouts of encouragement or wishes of good fortune, and no dog team to pull the sled. Old Manatook took up the traces himself.

  Alaana lay on the sled, facing back toward the camp. As Old Manatook readied himself to pull away, Kigiuna came bolting out of the iglu.

  “It is time,” said Old Manatook firmly. No less a statement than a warning.

  Alaana saw the pained expression that crossed her father’s face, a mixture of revulsion and concern. It was the same kind of worry she had seen only once before, when Ava was sick with the fever. Alaana wanted to console her father — to tell him this was not a call to danger or death but just a chore to be done, a step on her path — but she was prohibited from speaking.

  “Look after my daughter,” said Kigiuna. “Take care that nothing happens to her.”

  Old Manatook, irritated by both the interference and the sublime threat, said nothing more. Alaana lay motionless as the sled moved away.

  “Wake up! Wake up!” said Itiqtuq, bringing Alaana’s thoughts back to the present.

  Having sprouted tiny threadbare wings on either side of the skull, the little tunraq flitted about her face, eyes agog. Alaana responded with a grunt to indicate she hadn’t quite been sleeping.

  “Concentrate,” urged Nunavik. “You must make Sila come. Can you say the words? If you sing, the shivering will go away.”

  Alaana hadn’t realized she’d been shivering. She coughed softly. She was too thirsty to sing, too dry to chant any more. She stared at a crust of snow Old Manatook’s boots had roughed from the surface of the floor when he had carried her inside. She imagined reaching for it, putting the cool snow into her mouth.

  “You must not drink but what he brings you,” said Nunavik sternly.

  “I know.” It had been two days since Old Manatook had brought the few sips of water and the scrap of meat that had been her only nourishment since the beginning of this ordeal. Two days. And it would soon be daylight again. A faint haze had replaced the circlet of starry sky in the little iglu’s vent hole, marking the few moments that the sun would peek above the horizon. Maybe Old Manatook would come again today. Maybe there would be a cool drink or some scrap of food. Alaana could only think of food in a disinterested, abstract way. She no longer felt hungry; all competing sensations were dwarfed by the incredible thirst. In the same way she no longer felt the cold. In fact it seemed to be getting warmer…

  The beat of the drum trailed away. Alaana’s mind sank to a lower level, a place below the reality of the iglu, a vast emptiness with no beginning and no end. She could find no familiar sign by which to find her way home. There was only the burning thirst, an all-consuming fever. A hand reaching out for her, long slender fingers, sharp, curving nails. Was that her mother’s voice calling softly to her, there and then gone, lost beneath the ever louder thumping of her own heartbeat? Surely Amauraq had never sung such a strange, melancholy lullaby. No. It was her!. An unmistakable stink of helplessness and despair. Alaana recoiled from the sight of that hideous face, the leering hag who had killed so many including Kuanak and Civiliaq and her poor dear sister, the demon who had heralded the start of this incredible journey. But the fever demon had been defeated, driven down into the ice by Old Manatook, far away, so far from this place. Was it reaching out to her from that distance, or from somewhere deep within? Was there some lingering taint of the fever still lurking inside her soul?

  Her head hurt, her throat burned, her eyes were sealed shut.

  “There are no barriers,” Old Manatook had told her once. “All realities are one. There is no separation between vision and reality, no inside and no outside.”

  The withered old hag, the Red Ke’le, looked just the same as she had during the time of the fever. Her eyes, small and black, regarded Alaana as intently as a hungry owl studies its prey. She flicked her lips with the tip of a rotten gray tongue. As the demon reached for her, Alaana felt the pull of eternity in her grasp.

  “Aneenaq?” said Alaana, the name a painful rasp.

  The clawed hand recoiled. Yes, she was also Aneenaq, a little girl lost and alone, and left to die. Old Manatook had driven her down, had beaten her into the ice, but he had not helped her. He had not released her from her suffering and torment. From her hunger. She had sought to be a twisted mother to the children she had snatched from the Anatatook, just as she had longed to be a beloved child to her own. Old Manatook had bested her, but he had not released her, as Alaana would have done. As she would do. “I promise,” she rasped. If ever there was the chance again, she would help Aneenaq’s restless spirit find peace.

  Alaana’s eyes opened. Dawn had indeed come again. The faint light from the vent hole illuminated the interior of the snow house as a dull white blur broken only by the golden glow of the Walrus.

  “Beneath the… blue sky,” she said to Nunavik. “I remember the words. I remember.”

  She looked to the Walrus for some sign of encouragement but there was none. The golden glow did not belong to the walrus at all. The golden figure resolved itself into a much smaller form, nestled within the rounded contours of a fur-lined parka. It was Avalaaqiaq.

  Alaana felt pulled in two directions at once. One part suffered again the terrible crushing pain and loss; the other basked in the joy of seeing her sister once more. All the pleasant memories she carried with her. The crooked smile, the hair flopping over her eyes, the tickling laugh.

  She thought what a relief it would be to join her sister among the murmuring voices, to laugh and play, even if it meant suffering the everla
sting chill of death itself.

  “Of all the foolish, misguided notions…” grumbled Old Manatook. “Go away!”

  Sitting cross-legged in his own tiny snow house a hundred paces from the one that housed Alaana, Manatook monitored his student’s progress. Unseen, listening but unheard, felt but not known, he smoothed the ripples forming in Alaana’s mind. The girl’s approach was all wrong. It was as if she had forgotten everything she had been taught. Still concerned with her family, still plying for aid and comfort they could not give, when she should be directing her efforts at Sila.

  Old Manatook raged partly at himself. He was no good teacher for young children. This was folly on a grand scale. Either the girl did not listen, or her teacher was a fool. Helplessness tugged at his soul. In truth, there was little left he could do. Alaana was dying.

  At least he had drawn the ghost girl’s attention. “I said go away! Leave her be!”

  “I won’t,” said Ava. “She’s my sister. She needs me!”

  “She needs to be rid of you,” said Old Manatook. “If she called out to you, she was mistaken. Now go away.”

  “I won’t leave her to die alone,” said Ava. The child’s lips pursed with resolve.

  “She needn’t die at all. And she most certainly is not alone, as you can very well see.”

  Their eyes met. Ava’s cheeks quivered as her face flooded with emotion.

  “Why didn’t you come for me?” she asked. “I was so frightened in that cave. It was so hot and I couldn’t breathe. The other children, they couldn’t play or speak to me. They could only cry and moan. They were already dead. And that terrible old woman, she tried to smother me. When she hugged me it felt like knives cutting me up. I kept calling out for help, for Civiliaq and for you but you didn’t come.”

  “I came, Nautchiaquraq,” he said, using the first name Ava had been given at birth, when Manatook had delivered her into the world. The name meant ‘Little Flower’. “I came.”

  Ava remembered how Old Manatook had arrived at last, dripping demon blood from his hands and teeth. How he had swung open the gates. And the other children of the Anatatook, those who had come after Ava, were released and sent back to their families and their lives. And when she had turned to leave, she could not go with them. The way was barred for her. She was left with the rest of the dead children. She had become one of them.

  The memory was a bitter one, bringing ghost tears to sting at Ava’s eyes.

  “Do you want the same for your sister?” Manatook asked. “Now leave her be, Little Flower On The Tundra. It’s not her time to die.”

  The old shaman’s words were enough to push the bewildered spirit away.

  Manatook turned his attention back to his charge. He could only meddle so much. Alaana was supposed to be alone, exposed to the rigors of the elements, depending entirely on her own helper spirits. But the training period had been so short for this one. Was the girl ready? Of course, that was the question this test was meant to answer.

  It was an excruciating ordeal, one that would either change Alaana forever or destroy her, and it was almost as difficult for him to stand by and watch. But this was the Way, naked existence without the distractions of family and community, with all worldly concerns stripped away, her inua laid bare to the spirits. Thirst and hunger and pain should be driving her to reach out, to seek deliverance by way of Sila instead of dredging through the past.

  Old Manatook felt the grip of Quixaaragon’s talons at his shoulder.

  “She must not die!” said the creature.

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  Manatook glared menacingly at the thing perched on his shoulder. The helper spirit looked remarkably solid for a creature made of white smoke. Its head, crowned with a ring of short, elegant horns, swayed on a long slender neck with slow, sinewy movements in time with the beat of its wings.

  “Pay attention!” snapped the familiar, “The girl’s determination is wavering.”

  “And so is my own,” admitted Old Manatook. “Sila is an unreliable guardian spirit. I have known no other who could claim him. So fickle and unpredictable. The wild wind ranges far, what if he is too distant to hear the call?”

  “There is no sense in questioning the will of the spirits.” Quixaaragon jabbed a pointed beak at the shaman.

  “Do you know? Will Sila answer?” spat Old Manatook. The little dragon irritated him. It spoke with such authority, as if it saw a bigger picture than he was able to appreciate. He was tired of stumbling about in a snowblind haze. He had resolved to do whatever he could to help the girl, but none of this had been his own decision. The situation had been forced upon him every step of the way by powers that would not bother to explain themselves to one as insignificant as a crusty old shaman.

  The dragon ruffled its downy wings. “How could it be Sila’s will to spark Alaana to greatness and then just let her die? I remind you. Doubt is not allowed.”

  “I have no doubts,” snapped Old Manatook. “My way is clear. To help my people whenever and however I can. I know my abilities and my own weaknesses. Whatever the spirits want from me, I will do. Whatever kind of sacrifice they demand this day, I will make. But what about the girl? If she should fail the test I will know the reason why if I have to wring the answers from your scrawny neck.”

  Old Manatook felt a twinge of satisfaction as the tunraq’s beak snapped shut.

  “Time is running out,” said Quixaaragon. “There are still doubts in Alaana’s mind. They must be purged.”

  “I know,” replied Old Manatook.

  Suddenly Quixaaragon barked at him, “Go outside. Hurry! Someone comes.”

  There for just a moment, a golden flash, and then pulled away.

  “Ava, don’t go!”

  But her sister’s face was already fading, drawn backward by a multitude of hands and arms into the mists of the other side. For a moment Alaana glimpsed some of the faces beyond the shifting mass of fog that obscured the distant lands.

  A man leaned forward. His face was not so different from her father’s, but for the plumpness of middle age and the raw red scars cut across the forehead.

  It was the ancestor she had glimpsed through the skylight once before — Ulruk, who had been her father’s father. Alaana met the specter’s eyes full on; they glimmered with reflections of the past, echoes of the strife and struggle of a life well-lived.

  “I don’t trust Manatook,” her grandfather said. “I never did.”

  He went on, “When I was attacked by a brown bear, Manatook tended my wounds, he bound my mangled arm. But something struck me wrong about the shaman as he worked over me. The smell of the bear was on him too. And it shouldn’t have been.

  “When I lost my arm I blamed Manatook. My wife said it was my own fault, that if I had not doubted him, he might have been able to save that arm. But listen. He came to us from outside. He wasn’t Anatatook; neither was his wife. His clothes didn’t fit him right. He was taller than the Anatatook men, and had the full beard and bushy eyebrows of a kabloona.

  “He didn’t smell right,” said Ulruk. “I could tell. In those days I could smell when a storm was rolling in, long before the sky got dark, and I knew when a bull walrus would strike even before the creature knew it himself. You can’t trust him. He’s an outsider.”

  Alaana recalled the way Old Manatook had protected her, how he had saved her life at Uwelen and many times since. The way Old Manatook’s attitude toward her had softened, the bonds they had formed, the feelings of parental respect and love.

  “I don’t believe that,” said Alaana. “I think, Grandfather, that you are mistaken.”

  Ulruk’s image was replaced by that of his son, Kigiuna. Time had no meaning in the white room. Memory seeped into reality once more. “Take care of my daughter,” Kigiuna had warned, as Old Manatook pulled Alaana away on the sled.

  “Concentrate!” said Nunavik. “Use the chant.”

  But Alaana could not concentrate. The echo of Kigiuna’s
disapproval had disturbed her too much.

  “This is foolishness,” said Old Manatook, blocking Kigiuna’s advance. “You can not be here!”

  Kigiuna pressed forward. “It’s been seven sleeps. I’m worried about my daughter.”

  “And well you should be,” said Manatook, “but it’s not your place to interfere.”

  Kigiuna’s blazing scowl spoke volumes. He was beyond angry. He was afraid, and Old Manatook knew Kigiuna did not scare easily. A frightened man was a dangerous one.

  The old shaman wasn’t intimidated by Kigiuna. He could rebuff any attempt at violence easily enough. But this turmoil was too dangerous. Alaana’s little iglu lay only a few paces away. She might hear their voices, and if she sensed their discord, all would be lost.

  Kigiuna stood only a finger’s breadth from the shaman, glowering up into his eyes. “I am taking her home.”

  Old Manatook spoke calmly, “This does not help. She will sense your fear, your anger. Your actions are endangering her.”

  “I have no more use for talk,” said Kigiuna, drawing a long hunting knife from a sheath strung at his waist. “Stand aside.”

  Old Manatook eyed the weapon. It was a sharpened flat of caribou antler. The glimmer of the reindeer’s spirit that lingered deep within the blade was amenable to his influence. If he asked it, the knife would collapse into a dull lump all the way down to the hilt, melting as a piece of tallow in the heart of the lamp. But such a strategy would gain him nothing. Kigiuna would not be stopped by a petty show of magic.

  Instead he said, “Alaana and I share the same fate. I promise you Kigiuna, I will not return from this place alone. We pass this ordeal together, or not at all.”

  “That’s not good enough. I’ll tell you once more. Stand aside.”

  “You must not interfere. Our goal is the same. The only way to help Alaana is to see her through this trial. And I am the only one who can accomplish that. You must go away, or ruin her completely.”