The Terror

⁶² CROZIER

Sedna at the bottom of the sea decides whether to send the seal up to the surface to face being hunted by other animals and the Real People, but in a real sense, it is the seal himself who decides whether to allow himself to be killed or not. In another real sense, there is only one seal.

Seals are like Real People in that they each have two spirits — a life spirit that dies with the body and a permanent spirit that departs the body at the time of death. This longer-lasting soul, the tarnic, hides in the seal as a tiny bubble of air and blood that a hunter can find in the seal’s gut and is the same shape as the seal itself, only much smaller.

When a seal dies, its permanent spirit departs and returns in exactly the same form in a baby seal descended from the seal who has decided to allow itself to be taken and eaten.

The Real People know that a hunter, over his lifetime, will be capturing and killing the same seal or walrus or bear or bird many times over.

Precisely the same thing happens to the permanent spirit of a member of the Real People when his life spirit dies with the body. The inua — the permanent spirit-soul — travels, with all of its memories and skills intact, only hidden, to a boy or girl in the line of the dead person’s family. This is one of the reasons that the Real People never discipline their children, no matter how rowdy or even impertinent they may become. Besides the child-soul in that child, there resides an adult’s inua — a father, uncle, grandfather, great-grandfather, mother, aunt, grandmother, or great-grandmother, with all its hunter’s and matriarch’s or shaman’s wisdom — and it should not be rebuked.

The seal will not yield itself up to just any Real People hunter. The hunter must win them over, not just through his guile and stealth and skill but also through the quality of the hunter’s own courage and inua.

These inua — the spirits of the Real People, seals, walruses, bears, caribou, birds, whales — existed as spirits before the Earth, and the Earth is old.

During the first period of the universe, the Earth was a floating disk beneath a sky supported by four pillars. Beneath the Earth was a dark place where the spirits lived (and where most live to this day). This early Earth was under water most of the time and without any human beings — the Real People or others — until two men, Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq, crawled out of humps in the earth. These two became the first of the Real People.

There were no stars in that era, no moon, no sun, and the two men and their descendants had to live and hunt in total darkness. Since there were no shamans to guide the Real People in their behavior, the human beings had very little power and could hunt only the smallest of animals — hares, ptarmigan, the occasional raven — and they did not know how to live properly. Their only decoration was to wear the occasional aanguaq, an amulet made from a sea urchin shell.

Women had joined the two men on the Earth in this earliest of times (they came from the glaciers much as the men had come from the Earth), but they were barren and spent all their time walking the coastlines staring into the sea or digging into the ground in search of children.

The Second Cycle of the universe appeared after a long and bitter contest between a fox and a raven. The seasons appeared then, and then life and death itself; shortly after the seasons arrived, a new era began in which the life spirit of human beings would die with the bodies and the inua-spirit would travel elsewhere.

Shamans learned some of the secrets of the cosmic order then and were able to help the Real People learn how to live properly — creating rules which forbade incest and marrying out of the family or murder or other behavior which goes against the Order of Things. The shamans were also able to see back even into the time before Aakulujjuusi and Uumaaniirtuq crawled out of the Earth and to explain to the human beings about the origins of the great spirits in the universe — the inuat — such as the Spirit of the Moon, or about Naarjuk, the spirit of consciousness itself, or about Sila, the Spirit of the Air, who is also the most vital of all ancient forces; it is Sila who created and permeates and gives energy to all things and who expresses her wrath through blizzards and storms.

This is also the time when the Real People learned about Sedna, who is known in other cold places as Uinigumauituq or Nuliajuk. The shamans explained that all human beings — the Real People, the redder-skinned native human beings who lived far south of the Real People, the Ijirait caribou spirits, and even the pale people who appeared so much later — were born after Sedna-Uinigumauituq-Nuliajuk coupled with a dog. This also explains why dogs are allowed to have names and a name-soul and even share their master’s inua.

The moon’s inua, Aningat, had incest with and otherwise abused his sister, Siqniq, the inua of the sun. Aningat’s wife, Ulilarnaq, loved to disembowel victims — animal or Real People — and so disliked the shamans’ meddling in spirit matters that she would punish them by making them laugh uncontrollably. To this day, the shamans may be seized by uncontrollable laughter and frequently die from it.

The Real People enjoy knowing about these three most powerful spirits in the cosmos — the all-pervasive Spirit of the Air, the Spirit of the Sea, who controls all animals who live in the sea or depend upon the sea, and the final member of this trinity, the Spirit of the Moon — but these three original inuat are too powerful to pay much attention to the Real People (or to human beings of any sort) since these ultimate inuat are as far above the many other spirits as those lesser spirits are above human beings, so the Real People do not worship this trinity. Shamans rarely try to contact these most powerful of spirits — such as Sedna — and content themselves with making sure that the Real People do not break taboos that would anger the Spirit of the Sea, the Spirit of the Moon, or the Spirit of the Air.

But slowly, over many generations, the shamans — known as angakkuit among the Real People — have learned more secrets of the hidden universe and of the lesser inuat spirits. Over many centuries, some of the shamans have acquired the gift that Memo Moira called the Second Sight — clairvoyance. The Real People call these abilities qaumaniq or angakkua, depending upon how they manifest themselves. Just as human beings once tamed their cousin-spirits, the wolves, to become dogs who shared their masters’ inua, so did the angakkuit with the hearing-thoughts or sending-thoughts gifts learn how to tame and domesticate and control the smaller spirits who appeared to them. These helping-spirits were called tuurngait, and they not only helped the shamans see the invisible spirit world and look back to times before human beings, but also allowed them to look into other human beings’ minds to see the faults committed by the Real People when they break the rules of the universe’s order. The tuurngait helping-spirits aid the shamans in restoring order and balance. They taught the angakkuit their language, the language of the small spirits, which is called irinaliutit, so that the shamans could address themselves directly to their own ancestors and to the more powerful inuat powers of the universe.

Once the shamans had learned the irinaliutit language of the spirit-helper tuurngait, the shamans could then help human beings confess their misbehavior and faults so as to cure diseases and to restore order out of the confusion that is human affairs, thus restoring the order of the world itself. This system of rules and taboos passed down by the shamans was as complex as the crisscross string patterns created between the fingers of Real People women to this day.

The shamans also acted as protectors.

Some minor evil spirits roam among the Real People, haunting them and bringing bad weather, but the shamans have learned how to create and consecrate a sacred knife and to kill these tupilait.

To stop the storms themselves, the angakkuit found and handed down a special hook that can cut the silagiksaqtuq, the vein of the wind.

The shamans can also fly and act as mediators between the Real People and the spirits, but they can — and frequently do — also betray the trust of their own powers and harm human beings by using ilisiiqsiniq, powerful spells they cast which stir up jealousy and rivalry and which can even create a hatred sufficient to compel a Real Person to kill others for no reason. Frequently a shaman loses control of his tuurngait helping-spirits, and when that happens, if it is not remedied quickly, that incompetent shaman is like a large metallic rock calling down the summer’s lightning and there is little choice except for the Real People either to bind up the shaman and leave him behind or to kill him, cutting off his head and keeping it separate from the body so that the shaman cannot bring himself back to life and pursue them.

Most shamans with any power at all can fly, heal people, families, and entire villages (actually by helping people heal themselves by finding balance again after confessing their faults), leave their bodies to travel to the moon or to the bottom of the sea (wherever the inuat most powerful of spirits might dwell), and — after the proper irinaliutit shamanic incantions, singing, and beating of drums — turn themselves into animals such as the white bear.

While most spirits who are not contained in souls are content to dwell down in the spirit world, there are creatures abroad who carry the inua spirits of monsters.

Some of the smaller of these monsters are called tupilek and were actually brought to life by people called ilisituk hundreds and thousands of years ago. These ilisituk were not shamans, but rather evil old men and women who learned much of the shamans’ powers but used them to dabble in magic rather than in healing and faith.

All humans, and especially the Real People, live by eating souls — they know this well. What is hunting but one soul seeking out another soul and willing it into the ultimate submission of death? When a seal, for instance, agrees to be killed by a hunter, that hunter must honor the inua of the seal who has agreed to be killed, after it is killed but before it is eaten — since it is a creature of the water — by giving it a small ceremonial drink of water. Some of the Real People hunters carry small cups on a stick for that purpose, but some of the oldest and finest hunters still pass the water from their own mouths to the dead seals’ mouths.

We are all eaters of souls.

But the evil ilisituk old men and women were soul-robbers. They used their incantations to take control of hunters, who often then took their families away from the village to live — and die — far away on the ice or in the interior mountains. Any descendants of these victims of soul-robbery were known as qivitok and were always more savage than human.

When families and villages began to suspect the old ilisituk of their evil, the sorcerers would often create small evil animals — the tupilek — to stalk, injure, or kill their enemies. The tupilek started out as lifeless things as small as fingerstones, but after being animated by the ilisituk’s magic, they would grow to any size they wanted and take on terrible, unspeakable shapes. But since such monsters were easy for their victims to spot and flee from in the daylight, the stealthy tupilek usually chose to take the approximate shape of any true living thing — a walrus, perhaps, or a white bear. Then the unsuspecting hunter who had been cursed by the evil ilisituk would become the hunted. Human beings very rarely escaped the murderous tupilek once they were sent out to do their killing.

But there are very few evil, old ilisituk sorcerers left in the world today. One reason for this is that if the tupilek did not succeed in killing its assigned victim — if a shaman intervened or if the hunter was so clever as to escape by his own devices — the tupilek invariably returned to slaughter its creator. One by the one, the old ilisituk became victims of their own terrible creations.

Then there came a time, many thousands of years ago, when Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, became infuriated with her fellow spirits, the Spirit of the Air and the Spirit of the Moon.

To kill them — these other two parts of the Trinity that made up the basic forces of the universe — Sedna created her own tupilek.

This spirit-animated killing machine was so terrible that it had its own name-soul and became a thing called Tuunbaq.

The Tuunbaq was able to move freely between the spirit world and the Earth world of human beings, and it could take any shape it chose. Any form it took was so terrible that even a pure spirit could not look upon it directly without going mad. Its power — concentrated by Sedna only on the goals of wreaking havoc and death — was pure terror itself. On top of that, Sedna had granted her Tuunbaq the power of commanding the ixitqusiqjuk, the innumerable smaller evil spirits abroad.

By itself, one on one, the Tuunbaq could have killed either the Spirit of the Moon or Sila, the Spirit of the Air.

But the Tuunbaq, while terrible in every aspect, was not as stealthy as the tinier tupilek.

Sila, the Spirit of the Air, whose energy fills the universe, sensed its murderous presence as it stalked her through the spirit world. Knowing that she could be destroyed by the Tuunbaq and also knowing that if she was destroyed the universe would be thrown down into chaos again, Sila called on the Spirit of the Moon to help her defeat the creature.

The Spirit of the Moon was not interested in helping her. Nor was he concerned about the fate of the universe.

Sila then beseeched Naarjuk, the Spirit of Consciousness and one of the oldest inua deepspirits (who, like Sila, had appeared when the chaos of the cosmos had been separated from the thin but growing living green reed of order so very long ago), to help her.

Naarjuk agreed.

Together, in a battle that lasted for ten thousand years and which left craters and rents and vacuums in the fabric of the spirit world itself, Sila and Naarjuk defeated the terrible Tuunbaq’s attack.

As all tupilek who have failed in their assassination assignments are destined to do, the Tuunbaq then turned back to destroy its creator… Sedna.

But Sedna, who had learned all of her lessons the hard way since even before her father had betrayed her so long ago, had understood the danger the Tuunbaq posed to her even before she created it, so now she activated a secret weakness she had built into the Tuunbaq, chanting her own spiritworld irinaliutit incantations.

Instantly the Tuunbaq was banished to the surface of the Earth, never able to return to the spirit world nor to the deep bottom of the sea nor to hold pure spirit form in either place. Sedna was safe.

The Earth and all its denizens, on the other hand, were no longer safe.

Sedna had banished the Tuunbaq to the coldest, emptiest part of the crowded Earth — the perpetually frozen region near the north pole. She chose the far north rather than other distant, frozen areas because only the north, the center of the Earth to the many inuat gods, had shamans there with any history of dealing with angry evil spirits.

The Tuunbaq, deprived of its monstrous spirit form but still monstrous in essence, soon changed form — as all tupilek do — into the most terrible living thing it could find on Earth. It chose the shape and substance of the smartest, stealthiest, most deadly predator on Earth — the white northern bear — but was to the bear in size and cunning as a bear itself is to one of the dogs of the Real People. The Tuunbaq killed and ate the ferocious white bears — devouring their souls — as easily as the Real People hunted ptarmigan.

The more complicated the inua-soul of a living thing is, the more delicious it is to a soulpredator. The Tuunbaq soon learned that it enjoyed eating men more than eating nanuq, the bears, enjoyed eating man-souls more than it enjoyed eating walrus-souls, and enjoyed eating men more even than it enjoyed devouring the large, gentle, and intelligent inua-souls of the orca.

For generations, the Tuunbaq gorged itself on human beings. Large parts of the snowy north that once were thick with villages, areas of the sea that once saw fleets of kayaks, and sheltered places that had heard the laughter of thousands of the Real People were soon abandoned as human beings fled south.

But there was no fleeing the Tuunbaq. Sedna’s ultimate tupilek could outswim, outrun, outthink, outstalk, and outfight any human being alive. It commanded the ixitqusiqjuk bad spirits to move the glaciers farther south, making the glaciers themselves follow the human beings who’d fled into green lands so that the white-furred Tuunbaq would be comfortable and concealed in the cold as it continued to eat human souls.

Hundreds of hunters were sent out from the Real People villages to kill the thing, and none of the men returned alive. Sometimes the Tuunbaq would taunt the families of the dead hunters by returning parts of their bodies — sometimes leaving the heads and legs and arms and torsos of several hunters all mixed together so that the families could not even carry out the proper burial ceremonies.

Sedna’s monster soul-eater looked as if it might eat all the human-being souls on Earth.

But, as Sedna had hoped, the shamans of the hundreds of groups of the Real People huddled around the periphery of the cold north, sent verbal messages, then met in angakkuit shaman enclaves and talked, prayed to all their friendly spirits, conferred with their helping-spirits, and eventually came up with a plan to deal with the Tuunbaq.

They could not kill this God That Walked Like a Man — even Sila, the Spirit of the Air, and Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, could not kill the talipek Tuunbaq.

But they could contain it. They could keep it from coming south and killing all of the human beings and all of the Real People.

The best of the best shamans — the angakkuit — chose the best men and women among them with shamanic abilities of clairvoyant thought-hearing and thought-sending, and they bred these best men with the best women the way the Real People today breed sledge dogs to create an even better, stronger, smarter generation.

They called these beyond-shamanic clairvoyant children the sixam ieua, or spirit-governors-of-the-sky, and sent them north with their families to stop the Tuunbaq from slaughtering the Real People.

These sixam ieua were able to communicate directly with the Tuunbaq — not through the language of the tuurngait helping-spirits as the mere shaman had attempted, but by directly touching the Tuunbaq’s mind and lifesoul.

The spirit-governors-of-the-sky learned to summon Tuunbaq with their throat singing. Devoting themselves to communicating with the Tuunbaq, they agreed to allow the jealous and monstrous creature to deprive them of their ability to speak to their fellow human beings. In exchange for the tupilek killing-creature no longer preying on human souls, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky promised the God Who Walks Like a Man that they — the human beings and Real People — would no longer make their dwelling places in its northernmost snowy domain. They promised the God Who Walks Like a Man that they would honour it by never fishing or hunting within its kingdom without the monster-creature’s permission.

They promised that all future generations would help feed the God Who Walks Like a Man’s voracious appetite, the sixam ieua and other Real People catching and bringing fish, walruses, seals, caribou, hares, whales, wolves, and even the Tuunbaq’s smaller cousins — the white bears — for it to feast on. They promised that no human being’s kayak or boat would trespass on the God Who Walks Like a Man’s seadomain unless it was to bring food or to sing the throat songs that soothed the beast or to pay homage to the killing-thing.

The sixam ieua knew through their forward-thoughts that when the Tuunbaq’s domain was finally invaded by the pale people — the kabloona — it would be the beginning of the End of Times. Poisoned by the kabloonas’ pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die. The Real People would forget their ways and their language. Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair. Men would forget their kindness and beat their wives. The inua of the children would become confused, and the Real People would lose their good dreams.

When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw. The white bears will have no ice for a home, so their cubs will die. The whales and walruses will have nowhere to feed. The birds will wheel in circles and cry to the Raven for help, their breeding grounds gone.

This is the future they saw.

The sixam ieua knew that as terrible as the Tuunbaq was, this future without it — and without their cold world — would be worse.

But in the times before this should come to pass, and because the young clairvoyant men and women who were the spirit-governors-of-the-sky spoke to the Tuunbaq as only Sedna and the other spirits could — never with voices but always directly, mind to mind — the still-living God Who Walks Like a Man listened to their propositions and their promises.

The Tuunbaq, who — like all the greater inuat spirits — loves to be pampered, agreed. He would eat their offerings rather than their souls.

Over the generations, the sixam ieua clairvoyants continued to breed only with other human beings with the same skill. At an early age, each sixam ieua child gave up his or her ability to speak with his or her fellow human beings to show the God Who Walks Like a Man that they were devoted to speaking only to him, to the Tuunbaq.

Over the generations, the small families of the sixam ieua who live so much farther north than the other villages of Real People (who are still terrified of the Tuunbaq), always making their homes on the permanently snow-and-glacier-covered earth and ice pack, became known as the God-Walking People, and even their speaking-families’ language became a strange blend of the other Real People’s tongues.

Of course, the sixam ieua themselves can speak no language — except for the clairvoyant speech of qaumaniq and angakkua, thought-sending and thought-receiving. But they are still human beings, they still love their families and belong to their larger family groups, so to speak to the other Real People, the sixam ieua men use a special sign language and the sixam ieua women tend to use the stringshape games that their mothers taught them.