Skraelings: Clashes in the Old Arctic (5 page)

His heart began to race.

The boy had made a mistake. This knife was not made of kannujaq! The material was something like kannujaq, but far, far better. Kannujaq had assumed that, when Siku had spoken of “tools,” the boy had meant little things, like needles or hooks or bits for hand-rotated drills. But this …

The hunter in Kannujaq began to think about what he could do with such material. He thought:

And the boy says Angula owns a lot of this stuff?

While Kannujaq turned the knife in wonder, already feeling a bit resentful that he had to give the tool back, Siku explained that it was one that Angula was lending him in return for various services. The hint of a mischievous smile, however, told Kannujaq that the boy had stolen it.

Then Kannujaq sat up. He stared into the boy's wide blue eyes. How could he begin to explain what danger the Tuniit were in? If the Glaring One was indeed angry at the loss of these objects, as Siku had claimed, and if the giant-men owned many more of these treasures …

Kannujaq never got the chance to speak. A voice, deep, as though from a chest more bear than man, suddenly boomed from outside.

“Why, I wonder?” the speaker bellowed. “Why does our baby shaman hide a dogsledder in our camp?”

Siku went rigid, and the look of him told Kannujaq that the strange voice belonged to Angula.

“I wonder,” bellowed Angula again, “what a dogsledder wants from we Tuniit!”

Taking in a deep breath, then releasing it again as a sigh, Kannujaq stepped outside to face the voice's owner. There, he saw before him the fattest imaginable Tuniq man, chest adorned with set over set of clumsily arranged bear-tooth amulets. Rather than dangle, they seemed to rest on his middle-aged paunch. As a Tuniq, he was already rather short and squat. The added weight simply enhanced the boulder-like appearance that all Tuniit men possessed.

Here,
Kannujaq thought, unimpressed,
is the great Angula.

Angula stood flanked by three younger men, who watched Kannujaq out of the corners of their eyes, as though hoping he might vanish like some trick of the Land. Kannujaq—whose skepticism toward Siku's storytelling had waned on hearing, then seeing, Angula—suspected that the young men were Angula's cronies. Their allegiance had been bought with Angula's treasures. Fortunately, there were no weapons of any kind, much less those made of kannujaq, anywhere in sight. Kannujaq could see several other Tuniit men, women, and children, milling around behind Angula.

Everywhere Kannujaq looked, there were nervous glances.

Then, Kannujaq espied the first beautiful thing that he had seen since coming to the Tuniit camp.

It was a woman: one with eyes like dark stones
beneath sunlit water. But the lines of her face suggested that she did more frowning than smiling. Her hair was worn in normal braids, rather than in the crazy Tuniit way, and her clothes were of unusually high quality …

Wait!
thought Kannujaq.
She's no Tuniq!

She looked like one of his own people!

Though it took some effort, since she was lovely, Kannujaq forced his eyes from the woman. He greeted Angula perhaps a bit too late, for Angula ignored every sign of friendliness that Kannujaq tried to show, making only a bearlike chuffing noise in response. Again, Angula began to wonder—and loudly—why there was a “stranger hiding in his camp.” While he did so, Angula's cronies snickered next to him. Their eyes, however, as with most of the Tuniit here, betrayed the fact that they were uncomfortable with Angula's rude behaviour.

Angula, it seemed, not only knew of Kannujaq's “dogsledder” folk, but obviously had a problem with them. He spoke as a show of dominance, it seemed, for the sake of the onlookers, rather than directly addressing Kannujaq. He drove home his remarks by turning to look Kannujaq up and down, from moment to moment, wrinkling his face in disgust.

“It is obvious,” Angula went on, “that this is why the Siaraili have attacked yet again! This is a camp full of disobedience. I have been defied once more, for now someone has tried to hide one of the foreign dogsledders among us.”

Then the bully spotted the kannujaq knife, still held in Kannujaq's hand.

“What is this?” he exploded, going eye-to-eye with some of the folk. They seemed to shrink back from him, intimidated by his rage.

“A dogsledder comes among us to steal!” he fumed. “It is bad enough that their dogsledding kind always soil our traditional lands! But now the trespassers steal from us!”

Kannujaq noted that Angula was fond of that term: “dogsledder.” The bully used it a bit too much for Kannujaq's liking. The word seemed to convey some particular, special brand of hatred that Angula bore toward Kannujaq's folk; and something hot in Kannujaq's insides began to curl and hiss. Rather than speak out of fury, saying something he might later regret, Kannujaq stood rigid, keeping his lips pressed together.

Then Angula wheeled and pointed at Kannujaq, for the first time addressing him directly:

“You are jealous! That's why you have come to steal! You dogsledding foreigners always think you have better things than Tuniit! But now a Tuniq has better things than you. And you can't live with it, can you?”

Kannujaq remained shocked into silence throughout the tirade. But Angula's shameful antics were not allowed to continue. A youthful voice suddenly barked from Kannujaq's rear:

“Angula!”

Siku had emerged from his home. His blue eyes had paled further with rage, becoming like white sparks burning in Angula's direction. While all the camp stood silent, the boy uncurled the fingers of one palm.

Siku revealed his helper.

Shamans could have many helpers. These could be the monstrous and unseen beings they had ritually bound under their willpower, or the willing souls of animals or ancestors. Everything under the Sky had the potential for life. And so a helper could be dog or a piece of seaweed; a giant or a bumblebee; one's grandmother or a stone. Often, a helper was simply too bizarre for description. Helpers had only one thing in common: like the shaman, they were filled with the Strength of the Land. Helpers were not spiritual, in that they were neither worshipped nor held to be sacred. But their powers could be useful.

Kannujaq got one brief glimpse at a tiny, skeletal figure in the boy's palm—a carved figurine that symbolized the helper—before he turned his gaze away. Among Kannujaq's folk, it could be unhealthy to stare too long at some-seen things from the world of shamans. Maybe it was the same with the Tuniit.

Kannujaq heard gasps from the crowd all around him.

Then the boy began to speak at Angula. His voice was spidery. High-pitched. Nothing like that of the lad who had just spent the last little while telling Kannujaq about Angula and the Siaraili raids.

Kannujaq quickly realized that it was the helper, who announced itself as That One Bearing, speaking through the boy. No one would ever see That One Bearing (unless they were another helper or a shaman). But the boy could symbolize the helper through the figurine that he himself, or another shaman who had taught him, had carved. The figurine was just a representation, but for the moment, no less “real” than the helper itself. If necessary, Siku could also arm That One Bearing with invisible weapons, similar carvings of tiny knives or spears. Then he might send the helper to stab at somebody's soul, making them sick.

Kannujaq hoped, however, that Siku was not that kind of angakkuq.

It seemed, for now, that the helper was here as no more than a messenger. Borrowing Siku's voice to do its speaking, That One Bearing told Angula:

“You are no longer boss of this camp. It is the dogsledder who must become the camp's leader for a time. It is the kannujaq he wears about his neck, a thing the Siaraili also bear, that is a sign of this fact. It is up to the dogsledder to drive away the Siaraili.”

Drive the Siaraili away?
thought Kannujaq.
No way! I don't even want to be here!

Then the helper addressed the other Tuniit, saying:

“Angula's sins have brought the Siaraili among you. You will all perish if you continue to have Angula as leader. This I know by Hidden knowledge. If you doubt me, simply look at the dogsledder's necklace to see that his folk have power to match that of Siaraili.”

I don't!
Kannujaq thought.
I don't! Why would the helper say such an untrue thing?

Kannujaq began to wonder if it was the helper, or Siku himself, doing the talking here.

One way or another, the helper did not finish the message. There was a roar, and Angula rushed forward, knocking the shaman boy down.

All onlookers, including Kannujaq, stood paralyzed with shock. It was not that Angula had attacked a shaman. It was not even that he had attacked a boy. It was that he had done it openly. In front of everyone. Open violence, above all violence, was no different from madness. At least, that was the case among Kannujaq's people ….

Crazy,
thought Kannujaq, staring at Angula, who stood wide-eyed, panting like an animal.

Angula's out of his mind.

The mysterious, beautiful, non-Tuniit woman was by Siku's side in an instant, though the young shaman was back up on his feet after only a moment. His blue eyes were fixed on Angula. Kannujaq had never before seen such murder in a young boy's gaze.

Angula was still panting, perhaps more with stress than exertion, and he quickly whirled about, pointing at Kannujaq.

“This is exactly what I was afraid of!” he bellowed. “Look what you made me do! You are an evil angakkuq, manipulating us all!”

But his eyes shifted about, a bit frightened and uncertain.

“I will forgive Siku!” Angula huffed. “He is just under your dogsledder control! But you will leave now! Try to stay, and you die!”

Angula glanced at his cronies, but they looked scared, uneasy with the situation. They refused to gaze directly at Kannujaq.

“None of us,” Angula roared at the Tuniit, “is to follow this dogsledder! Or listen to his lies! Anyone who does so will die!”

For a time, the only motion in the world seemed to be windcast snow. The only sounds were those howls and yips of Kannujaq's distant dog team, anxious for his return. Kannujaq began to ache for his dogs. He had never so wanted to leave this horrid place.

After a long moment, Kannujaq threw down Angula's knife at his feet. He then stepped over the kannujaq blade, and walked away. His dark eyes briefly met Siku's blue ones. The boy seemed confused. Maybe he felt a bit betrayed. For a moment, Kannujaq almost paused, almost opened his mouth to apologize to the young shaman.

But why should he? He hadn't done anything wrong. He had made no promises of assistance to the Tuniit. He was only here, among them, because he and his dogs had mistaken the place for a human camp. Well … maybe the Tuniit were also human. In a way. But that didn't mean Kannujaq owed them anything.

They're Tuniit, and they're crazy,
he thought as he shouldered his way past the sooty camp folk.
And I'm not a bad person for leaving them.

I'm not.

While you were reading, we were just discussing whether or not Kannujaq had done the right thing. Leaving the Tuniit to their fate, that is. After all, from what Kannujaq had seen of the Siaraili, they were pretty intimidating. He was wrong about the Tuniit being crazy—they were just scared and had their own ways of understanding things, and that can make people seem a bit nuts, sometimes. But what Kannujaq really needed to understand was that he was part of a larger world, and his people could no longer keep roaming without expecting to bump into other weird folk. In the end, life would not leave him any choice: the wider Arctic was a fact that he had to face. Keep reading and you'll see what we mean.

Kannujaq went straight to his dogs. There were sounds behind him as he left: Angula roaring at people, making more announcements. He ignored it all and left the sounds of the Tuniit foolishness behind him.

And there were his dogs. He had never realized,
until that moment, how much he loved these shaggy, jumping, yipping creatures. He had never realized what a treasure he possessed in his simple sled.

Kannujaq only had scraps of dried meat to throw for the dogs, but it would keep them going. The storm had pretty much passed, leaving a bit of snow behind. It was an ideal time for departure. He went to see if everything was lashed down properly in the sled. Then he went to relieve himself.

He took a step. There was the sudden flutter of wings. White appeared out of nowhere—a male ptarmigan hidden in an old snow patch. The potential food item nearly flew straight over his head, and Kannujaq desperately looked around for a rock to wing it with.

Then he saw them.

There were four of them, one grossly fat. Kannujaq knew that that one was Angula. So, he had decided not to let Kannujaq live, after all. They were coming on fast, carrying obscenely long knives, all made of the stuff that Siku had believed to be kannujaq—and much larger than the knife the boy had shown him.