The Tower: Part 5: Imbolc

Post #42: In which tending the Mother ...

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CHAPTER 15

The next morning, Pim once again set out for his village, promising to bring back a hide tent for better shelter. Marceau, Poseidon and Morfran returned to the sea, this time in search of salmon. Clarissa and Vasilisa stayed with Sedna, melting snow water and trying to discover some way to connect with the remote, angry, handless woman.

Pim addressed her as ‘Lady’ or ‘Ice Mother’, but Clarissa couldn’t view Sedna as a goddess. Aside from smoldering anger, she appeared powerless, as well as terribly alone. Her spirit seemed to mirror her mutilated body. Clarissa thought she would have been content to lie naked against the whale’s backbone and die rather than seek food, company and shelter, either on land or in the sea.

Yet she accepted both food and water, as well as Vasilisa’s attention to her hair. She ate like one who intended to live. She no longer asked them to leave, watched and listened to all that went on, though rarely contributed. If she possessed power, she didn’t use it to help herself or drive them away.

There was plenty of blubber, so they lit the qulliq and continued melting snow and ice for water. Vasilisa, pinching the arctic cotton carefully along the shallow bowl’s rim to encourage an even, smokeless flame, said to Sedna, “I think this fat would help your hair and skin. The cold and wind suck away our moisture. May I comb some through your hair?”

Sedna nodded without speaking. Vasilisa rubbed a blob of half-melted fat between her palms and rubbed her hands through Sedna’s hair from scalp to ends. She picked up the carved ivory comb and began using it. Clarissa copied her gesture of melting a pinch of fat between her warm palms and knelt before Sedna. She took one of her forearms gently in her hands and began rubbing the fat into her skin.

Photo by Xavier Balderas Cejudo on Unsplash

It was strange to see arms without hands. Her eyes couldn’t get used to the wrongness of it. The stumps had healed cleanly and looked pathetic rather than grotesque. Sedna’s skin was chapped, peeling and flaking, but her arm felt warm and living, reassuringly normal. Clarissa smoothed the fat into it, rubbing gently, and watched Sedna’s skin drink it in. Sedna kept her eyes lowered, looking down into her lap, but she let Clarissa handle her arms docilely. Her passive acquiescence emboldened Clarissa, and she lifted Sedna’s chin with one hand and applied a fingertip coated with fat to her lips with the other. Sedna’s eyes were the deep green of cold water and made Clarissa think of seals and selchie in the strangely-lit world beneath the ice.

“Will you tell us the rest of the story you began yesterday?” she asked.

She removed her hand from Sedna’s chin, and once again her gaze lowered and she hooded her eyes. Clarissa made sure Sedna’s arms were tucked into the shelter of the furs draped over her shoulders and moved back. Vasilisa’s ministrations were bringing Sedna’s dull hair into shining life.

“She wanted to touch it,” Sedna began, as though there had been no interruption in the story.

“The girl and the wolf circled each other as the sun rose higher in the sky and the land’s rocky bones bloomed with lichen. The ice and snow receded, revealing cushions of moss and mats of grasses and wildflowers. By the time the sun’s spiral had nearly reached its highest apex, never falling below the horizon, the girl and wolf rolled and played together in the sedge and cotton grass, tasting one another’s scent and breath, and she knew his coat’s depth and warmth, which he shed in heavy white tufts.

One day he led her out to the edge of the summer ice and sprang into the water, disappearing in the green depths. For a moment, her heart faltered and withered. Then, a blunt black head with a white throat and eye patch emerged from the water and an orca rested its chin on the ice beside her. It looked sideways at her out of a small black eye and opened its mouth as though smiling, revealing an efficient row of sharp, peg-like teeth and a thick tongue.

‘Akhlut?’ she said, in wonder.

The creature nodded its head, slid off the ice and gamboled, leaping, rolling and slapping its tail in a spray of water that caught the sunlight like diamonds and streaked the blue green sea with foam.

Thus, the girl understood the mystery of the giant wolf tracks disappearing and reappearing at the ice’s edge.

When Akhlut clambered out of the sea, he shook himself vigorously, teeth bared in a grin much like that of the orca, and she knelt beside him and combed her fingers through his coat, pulling loose his winter hair and leaving behind a shorter, darker pelt. He luxuriated under her touch, panting.

Leaving behind clumps of discarded wet hair, they left the sea ice behind, and Akhlut led the girl to a place of springy turf protected by a stone the size of a snow shelter, and there he revealed his third and last form, that of a man.

And so the girl became a woman under the wakeful sun, and for a few short weeks she lived in joy with her mate in all his aspects, putting aside thoughts of the future and the expectations of her people along with her heavy winter clothing. She lay, unashamed and bare, under the sun in the stone’s kind shelter. and Akhlut wove saxifrage stems through her hair.

The season of midnight sun burned in everyone’s loins, and she knew the village would hardly sleep during the light days and nights. There would be singing and dancing, drumming, visiting, repair work and the fashioning of new tools, clothing and other materials. As snow shelters sank and melted, watering the earth, her people moved into hide tents, lashed against the unceasing wind.

Summer’s bounty does not last, and the people scattered across the tundra to collect cotton grass for the qulliq, willow wood and berries. A whisper of the girl playing with a large white wolf grew to a murmur of someone hearing lovers’ laughter from behind a rock, and someone else swore they saw a woman fondling the head of an orca near the sea ice. The village seethed and muttered. Life depended on knowing one’s place in the world of ice, snow, land and sea. Magic was a fearsome force, and might bring who knew what ruin to the people. The girl and her uncanny lover must be stopped.

The sun’s spiral sank and night’s cold shadow spread like a wing across the land. The hide tents flapped in the wind and the land’s fugitive green faded to dun and brown, russet and grey.

One day, the girl’s father begged her to accompany him in his sea kayak to fish. Once, they had been happy companions on the sea, fishing, laughing and telling stories. She had not fished with her father since childhood, but he insisted, saying he missed her, he hardly saw her these days, and she agreed.

They set out early one grey morning when the clouds were heavy and low and the wind quiet. For a time, all went well, and they harvested several pounds of salmon, a good start to their fall supply.

When they had been out for many hours, the wind increased and the sea grew choppy. The skin boat floated low in the water, heavy with fish, and the girl wanted to go home. All day she had thought of Akhlut, and she longed to be with him again. He would be waiting for her.

Her father lingered, checking one good fishing spot, and then another, talking about everything and nothing, yet casting frequent looks at the sea and sky, as though worried about the changing weather.

‘What are you waiting for?’ she asked.

‘Nothing. It’s a shame to go back before we carry a full load, is all.’

‘Father, we have a full load already!’

He didn’t meet her eyes, but looked back toward land, as though waiting for a signal.

Fear seized her, though she didn’t know what she feared. Something was wrong.

‘Father!’

He didn’t turn toward her but continued surveying the low hump of land and iron sky.

‘The hunters went in search of meat today,’ he said distantly. ‘Let us hope they find caribou…or skins for the winter.’

‘I did not know there was to be a hunt. Why didn’t you accompany the others?’

He turned to look at her then, and she knew. His task was to keep her out of the way while they hunted Akhlut. They had been seen.

In a haze of fear and rage, she struck out at him. Glowering, he shoved her with his paddle, and she toppled out of the boat.

The cold water stole her breath, and her heavy hides and furs weighed her down so she could hardly kick hard enough to keep her head out of the water. Gasping and choking, she grasped the side of the skin boat so he could heave her back in.

He struck her clinging hands with the paddle.

‘Father!’ she cried.

‘You shame me!’ he roared. ‘You, with your uncanny lover! You bring ruin upon us! You’re bad!’

‘Father, please!’

When the paddle smashed down on her fingers again, she let go, floundering in the water.

‘Unnatural woman! You forget your place and your people!’

She grasped the boat again, her legs heavy as lead.

‘I love him!’

He dropped the paddle and lunged for her with his knife in his hand, bringing the blade down in a chopping motion. She watched in bewilderment as her severed hand with its white fingers fell into the water in a spray of blood. She reached for them with her bleeding stump as they sank into the green water. They were her fingers. They mustn’t be lost in the sea. As though in a dream, she watched them sink, watched her raw stump reach for them. She could feel her cupped hand grasping, the skin of her fingers alert for the feel of what they sought, though they were no longer there.

With an angry roar, her father brought the knife down on her other hand, and then she thrashed low in the water, cold salt in her mouth, her ears singing. Her father’s face looked as hard as stone. The sea covered her eyes as she sank, too cold to struggle any longer, but still she gazed up, unblinking, until too much water flowed between them to make out his features any longer.

Her hands, white and graceful, sank slowly with her. Blood swirled and congealed in fantastic shapes, rolling and turning, forming into spirals around her as she sank. She saw a large dark eye, curious and gentle. She saw a sharp, curving tusk beside stiff whiskers. She saw an endless hairless body, thick and massive, with a huge tail. She saw a twisting spike in a smooth, blunt head, and shades of white, grey, black and brown skin and fur.

Down and down she sank, escorted by the whirling creatures around her, and she realized suddenly she was not drowning, but breathed as easily beneath as she did above. Her hands were gone. Her father and the skin boat were gone. Akhlut was surely gone. Her old life was gone. Once again, she was born in a cloud of blood, but this time she was not alone. This time, her bone and blood and flesh peopled the sea with walrus, seal and whale.

So Sedna, who never bore a child and knew a lover only for a few short weeks, became the Ice Mother, the one who feeds the animals above and below. She feeds the humans, too, but grudgingly, for they murdered her lover and cast her out, and she demands gifts and attention before she releases an animal to feed them. The shamans must undertake the long and dangerous spirit journey beneath to propitiate her, and she insists they comb her hair and perform other services in exchange for food.”

Clarissa, absorbed by the horror of the story, realized Sedna wept. Her tears did not distort her voice, but the fur around her was spotted with moisture. During the story, Vasilisa finished braiding Sedna’s hair and wrapped it carefully around her small head, leaving her slender neck and the finely modeled cheeks exposed, though her head remained bent and her eyes lowered, as usual. The tattooed lines on her chin gave her an exotic look.

“Do your hands pain you?” Vasilisa asked, and Clarissa felt shocked. The question seemed an inadequate and inappropriate response to the terrible story. What did one say to someone who had endured such anguish? How did one acknowledge such pain and begin soothing it?

Sedna appeared surprised, too. She raised her head and looked at Vasilisa over her shoulder. Her dark eyes still smoldered with pride and rage, but Clarissa saw respect there, as well. She remembered suddenly that Vasilisa had been maimed once and had a malformed foot as a result. Her question was genuine. Clarissa wondered for the first time if Vasilisa’s foot pained her, and that was why the question occurred to her.

“Sometimes,” said Sedna. “Sometimes I dream of Akhlut. He comes to me as a wolf, and I reach out for him, expecting to feel the softness and depth of his winter coat, but my hands are not there and my stumps are bleeding so his white fur is stained with blood. When I wake, my hands itch and tingle and throb as though warming after frostbite.”

“Are you certain he’s dead?” asked Clarissa.

“He would have come to find me if he could have,” said Sedna.

Clarissa nodded.

“So, you are Ice Mother, but no one cares for you. Your children inhabit the sea. Your people exiled you and fear you, though they depend upon you,” said Vasilisa.

Photo by Francois Falanga on Unsplash

“The shamans visit me only when the people need of food,” said Sedna.

“No one loves you for yourself. You must feed all, but no one feeds you. You are alone.”

Vasilisa’s voice remained steady. Clarissa felt surprised at her cruelty. Surely comfort would be kinder, some kind of reassurance, some hope Sedna was loved apart from her ability to provide food, even if it was false hope.

Sedna sprang violently and unexpectedly to her feet, making Clarissa flinch and gasp. It was the first time she’d seen her stand up. The skins around her shoulders slid off, leaving her pitifully thin and naked, but her twisted crown of hair gave her a regal look. She ran lightly away from the camp, bounding as though weightless, making a keening sound of rage and grief. After a moment she stopped and bent, bracing her mutilated forearms against her thighs, sobbing and retching as though she would tear herself apart. Clarissa made as though to follow her, but Vasilisa laid a hand on her arm and shook her head. “Let her be,” she commanded.

Beyond Sedna, the heavily-laden figure of Pim appeared, emerging out of the white and grey landscape.