The Tower: Part 5: Imbolc
Post #40: In which succor ...
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Clarissa never forgot that night. She missed her father, Irvin, acutely. He would have gloried in the Selchies’ grotto, a cave half filled with water and illuminated by shallow half-moon bowls of burning blubber set in natural stone niches above the water line. Both Selchie and grotto smelled strongly of fish. Selchie and merfolk alike satisfied their hunger with raw fish as they swam to the grotto. Once there, after more complete introductions, the Selchie and half-humans found one another equally fascinating. Morfran, whose grandfather had been a selchie, appeared more animated and eager than Clarissa had ever seen him.
Having established mutually friendly relations, Poseidon and Marceau turned the talk toward Yrtym and the consequences of its breakdown. The selchie listened with interest as Poseidon outlined Yrtym’s ubiquitous role on Webbd.
“It is an invisible net, then, catching and holding all life? The sea as well as the land?”
“Even the stars,” said Marceau. “The constellations are changing. On land, life is dying. Gateways between peoples and places are breaking down. In the sea, volcanic activity heats the water, which disrupts the food web. Before long, people such as yourselves will be impacted.”
“We already are,” said one of the selchie. “Nurseries and breeding grounds disappear as the sea withdraws from the land. The threshold places are empty and barren. Sedna’s anger smolders, and no one knows how to comfort her. The land people cry out for food and the sea’s return so they can hunt on the ice again. Nothing is as it should be.”
Clarissa, worn out after the long swim, found a place against the grotto’s wall to sleep, and drifted away to the selchie’s silvery-sounding voices and the deeper tones of Poseidon and Marceau, rocked in a watery cradle of stone.
The next morning the selchie accompanied them back to the sea’s edge. After a friendly parting, the company from the birch wood swam out of the wall of water and slid down to the bared sea floor, following Clarissa’s example and transitioning into human form as they did so. When Clarissa stood once again on two legs and looked around, she saw a stranger, a man approximately Morfran’s age with large dark eyes and silky black hair brushing his shoulders. A stylized black seal tattoo decorated his left upper arm.
He smiled apologetically at their surprise. “One of the selchie is my mother. I was visiting her when we found you, and I chose not to reveal myself while we talked. My father is human.” He pointed toward the distant land with his chin and gestured at the bare sea bed before them. “This is like a hole in my center.”
“What’s your name?” Vasilisa asked.
“Please call me Pim.” He turned to Poseidon. “Traditionally, the shaman visits Sedna to honor her and ensure good hunting, but when the sea left the land Sedna forsook her people. The shaman can no longer approach her. The places where we hunted seal and walrus are nothing but bitter stone and dried salt. The whales do not come to feed, and the polar bears are dying. Our fishermen must walk a long way, carrying their kayaks, to reach the water, and they cannot launch their boats onto the sea without climbing a rock or an ice slab.
“Then you arrived, talking about Yrtym and trouble elsewhere on Webbd, and I realize what is happening to me and my people is only a small part of a larger change. I am a man with two tribes and two families, belonging wholly to neither. I am not a shaman. I’m a drummer and a storyteller, a bridge between the selchie and the ice people. I want to help both my families. Sedna is our mother. We depend on her. I want to go with you to talk with her.”
“You’re welcome to join us,” said Poseidon. “We don’t know how to live here, or anything about Sedna. Perhaps we can help one another.”
They looked across the barren, rocky plain of salt-encrusted ice and sea debris at a world without color. The dark watery wall behind them emphasized a landscape of grey and white in which sky, the distant land and the bared seabed merged together. A dry wind knifed through Clarissa’s unprotected flesh, making her feel weak and vulnerable. Some way ahead she could see a structure. It reminded her of the shipwreck in which Marceau made his home, but this skeleton looked like bone. It leaned tipsily, like a bleached ship.
“Sedna is there,” said Pim. “Ever since the water receded, she has been there. We don’t know why she doesn’t return to the sea.”
They began walking, bare-footed, across the harsh sea floor. The cold pressed against them like an invisible barrier. The rocks hurt Clarissa’s feet. Morfran, with his twisted hip, struggled to keep his footing, and Marceau took his arm.
Pim fell into step beside Clarissa.
“I’m a storyteller too,” she said.
He glanced sideways at her and smiled. “Are you? Maybe we’ll have time to share some stories. I don’t have my drum with me, but I could show you some of our dances, too.”
“I’d like that,” said Clarissa.
The structure was the tilting skeleton of a whale. As they drew near, the wind brought a stench of rotting fish and flesh. Clarissa clapped a hand over her nose and mouth. “What is that?”
“I believe it’s the skins,” said Marceau, gesturing to several skins flung over the whale’s rib bones. The ivory bones were pitted, broken and cracked, the backbone tapering gradually to the tail. Lying on her side with her knees drawn up, her back against the ridges and knobs of the spine, lay a slight figure cloaked in snarled black hair.
Clarissa saw no evidence of fire. Gnawed bones were scattered around the whale skeleton, but none looked fresh. One of the skins was that of a polar bear, the fur yellowed and thin, and Clarissa could see strips of tattered flesh still adhered to it. There were also a couple of sealskins, the fur looking soft and thick but smelling powerful enough to make her eyes water. She wondered how Sedna, if this woebegone figure was Sedna, could stand it.
The curled-up figure remained motionless and Poseidon and Marceau stood looking down at it uncertainly. Surprisingly, Morfran awkwardly lowered himself onto one knee on the hard stones.
“Lady? Sedna? We’ve come to speak with you.”
Slowly, the child-like figure stirred, uncurling. The head turned and Clarissa saw a face decorated with tattoos, a graceful V from hairline to the bridge of her nose and vertical double lines running from lower lip to below her chin. Her dark eyes burned like embers. She tensed and hissed, baring her teeth like a cornered animal. In an explosive movement that made Clarissa take a hasty step back, the woman twisted into an upright position on her knees.
Clarissa gasped.
The woman was handless. Each arm ended at the wrist in a healed stump.
Sedna shot her a fiery look of pride and bitterness and Clarissa felt her cold cheeks color with shame.
Morfran, who remained on one knee, bringing him eye to eye with the starveling figure, said, “We mean no harm. We only came to talk with you.”
“I have nothing to give you,” Sedna snarled.
“We come to give, not to take,” said Morfran.
Eyes blazing, Sedna looked them over. A ridge of muscle stood out in her thin cheek.
“Lady,” Poseidon said when she caught his eye. He inclined his head respectfully.
“I am Marceau, a sea king,” Marceau introduced himself. “Vasilisa, my daughter, who is half human, and Morfran, my grandson, who is half selchie.”
“You are one of my people,” Sedna said to Pim in a harsh voice.
“Yes, Lady,” he replied. “I am called Pim. My mother is a selchie and my father a human. This is Clarissa.”
“You are not a shaman. Why have you come?”
Pim hesitated. Clarissa thought it the question was dangerous. Sedna radiated anger mixed with despair. Perhaps following Morfran’s lead, Pim said, “I’ve come to see if I may serve you.”
Sedna examined their faces in silence. Clarissa felt frozen, her skin plucked into gooseflesh.
“You have nothing I need,” Sedna said at last, and made as though to turn her back on them and lie down again. “Go away.”
“Are you hungry, Lady?” asked Morfran. “May we hunt for you?”
Sedna sat straight again. “You wish to feed me?”
“We would be honored,” said Marceau, with a glance at Pim, who nodded slightly.
“Very well,” said Sedna, and she sat where she was, her dark hair draping her shoulders, as they organized themselves.
After a muttered conference, they decided Pim would go back to his village for furs and clothing. Morfran, Marceau and Poseidon would seek out the selchie and attempt to find a walrus, which would be large enough to feed them all. Vasilisa and Clarissa, to Clarissa’s consternation, would stay with Sedna.
“Offer to comb her hair,” Pim said in a low voice.
“With what?” Vasilisa asked.
“She has a comb.”
The hunters trudged away to the water, looking cold and puny against the back drop of low sun, the strangely arrested wall of water and the desolate sea floor. Pim walked in the other direction, toward land. Vasilisa and Clarissa looked at one another.
Vasilisa approached Sedna and sat, tucking her legs comfortably in imitation, and Clarissa dropped down next to her.
“Your hair is beautiful,” said Vasilisa. “It must be hard to take care of.”
Without hands, thought Clarissa, imagining trying live with such a pitiful loss.
“May I comb it for you?” Vasilisa asked.
Sedna regarded her.
“I have nothing to give you, so don’t waste your time.”
“I want nothing from you,” said Vasilisa, meeting Sedna’s smoldering gaze. “It would give me pleasure to comb your hair. I like cutting and combing hair.”
“There’s a comb somewhere,” said Sedna ungraciously.
Clarissa began searching the campsite and found the carved ivory comb lying within the whale’s ribcage. It was a beautiful object, and she handed it to Vasilisa, wondering who had made it and why it belonged to a woman with no hands.
Vasilisa moved closer to Sedna and asked her to sit sideways to the whale’s backbone so Vasilisa could work with her hair. As Sedna acquiesced, Clarissa felt emboldened to ask, “Are you cold?”
“I am not as cold as you are,” said Sedna, “but you may throw a sealskin around my shoulders.”
Trying not to gag at the idea of the putrid skin wrapped around her bare body, Clarissa draped a sealskin carefully around Sedna, stepping back hastily to distance herself from the smell.
Vasilisa, rather pinched about the nostrils, gathered Sedna’s hair in one hand at the nape of her neck and let it spill over the sealskin. Taking a firm handful of hair near the ends, she began combing through the tangled, salt-stiffened locks.
Clarissa watched the dark fire die out of Sedna’s eyes, leaving only dull apathy, as Vasilisa combed. She looked down at the stumps resting in her lap. The skin on her arms was dry and peeling. Sedna’s lips were cracked and her hair remained lifeless and dingy in spite of Vasilisa’s ministrations. The rancid fur hid her torso, but Clarissa had seen the washboard of her ribs and her shriveled breasts. She hoped the hunters returned soon with food.
The skins draped over the whale ribs shielded Sedna’s spot from the worst of the wind. Clarissa resigned herself to the stench and sat close beside Vasilisa and Sedna, wrapping her arms around her body for warmth.
“This reminds me of meeting another friend of mine,” said Vasilisa casually. “Her name is Rose Red. Her hair is black, too, but shorter and curly.”
Sedna, eyes closed, made no reply.
“Tell us the story,” said Clarissa, exchanging a glance with Vasilisa.
Vasilisa, in a low, soothing voice, told the story of Rose Red and her girlhood in her father’s castle with her mother, Queen Snow White. She described their first meeting in a forest clearing, where she’d found Rose Red sobbing. She remembered the Dwarves in their stone cottage, who befriended Rose Red, and Jenny, another friend. Section by section, she combed Sedna’s hair, smoothing it, running her fingers through it, and passing her palms over Sedna’s shoulders, head and back with firm strokes. Gradually, Sedna’s rigid pose melted. She collapsed inward, looking more childlike than ever, and Clarissa wondered how anyone could fear such a lonely, pitiful figure.
“I’d like to meet Rose Red,” Clarissa said as Vasilisa’s story ended.
“If you go to Rowan Tree, you will,” said Vasilisa.
Clarissa realized she’d forgotten about Rowan Tree and Seren for nearly a whole day. “Do you think she’d mind if I told her story?”
“I don’t think so,” said Vasilisa, “but you can ask her yourself. “Clarissa collects stories,” she said to Sedna.
“Do you know any stories, Sedna?” Clarissa asked.
Sedna shook her head and rubbed her right stump over her eyes.
“Pim said he knew some. Maybe he’ll tell them to us when he gets back. I’d like to know more about this place. I’ve never been anywhere like it.”
“In a land where snow drifts like fallen stars and night sky ripples with color,” Sedna muttered.
Vasilisa and Clarissa exchanged looks.
“That’s beautiful,” said Clarissa. “Do you mean this land?”
“It’s how they used to begin stories,” said Sedna, “when I was a child.”
“Do you remember a children’s story, then?” Clarissa coaxed.
Vasilisa smoothed a section of hair from scalp to ends, and began combing it in long, slow, sensuous strokes.
Sedna did not reply. Clarissa opened her mouth to cajole further, but Vasilisa, catching her eye, shook her head.
They sat silently. Clarissa fidgeted on the hard stones, remembering again how cold and uncomfortable she felt and wishing the others would return.
Then Sedna began speaking, her voice harsh and cracked, as though she hadn’t used it in a long time. Her words were hesitant at first, as she groped for meaning and syntax.
“In a land where snow drifts like fallen stars and night sky ripples with color, there lived a girl, the most beautiful girl in the village. Her mother was dead, and her father a hunter and fisherman.
When it was time for her to marry, men came to court her, but she was proud and refused them all. She wanted…something else. Something more, though she knew no name for what she sought. Her father was angry with her. Her repeated rejections caused bad feeling in the village. It was her duty to marry and bear children, as a young, unattached, beautiful woman was bound to cause problems. People began saying she was proud and haughty and her father could not control her.
One day, walking alone on the ice, the girl found gigantic wolf tracks. She followed the tracks a long way, but never saw the creature who made them.
It was the season of Yr’s return, and the girl walked alone every day, enjoying his warmth and light. She often saw the wolf tracks going inland from open sea among the floating ice.
One clear day she came over a hill and saw movement ahead. A large white wolf trotted toward the horizon, the low sun making its long shadow run beside it. The girl understood then why it had taken her so long to find the wolf. Unless it moved, it remained invisible against the snow and ice and white sky.
Her tracks began mingling with the wolf’s tracks, until she realized even as she followed it, it followed her. She began looking over her shoulder as often as she scanned the horizon ahead, not afraid, but filled with excitement and anticipation. She wanted to see the wolf up close, perhaps even speak to it. Sometimes she dropped to her hands and knees and sniffed fresh footprints, trying to catch a trace of the wolf’s warm scent in the world of empty cold wind and ice.
Every day the villagers shunned her a little more. She didn’t care. Her father, too, suffered, and took out his humiliation on her, but she paid no attention. She refused to see suitors. She thought only about the elusive white wolf. She called him Akhlut.
One spring day she jumped off an ice shelf and found him standing on the other side, as though waiting for her. The girl stood still and they regarded each other across the ice and snow. She judged the wolf to be at least eight feet long and nearly twice her weight. Its white coat looked thick enough to swallow her hand up to the wrist. It watched her out of grey eyes, then turned and trotted away.
After that, she saw it every time she went out, but seeing it no longer satisfied her.
She wanted to touch it.”
Clarissa was so engrossed by the story of the beautiful girl and the wolf she didn’t hear Pim return. She jumped and gasped when he draped a skin around her naked shoulders, and Sedna fell silent at once, the spell broken.
Vasilisa shot Pim an annoyed look.
“I’m sorry,” he said, contrite. “I didn’t want to interrupt you, Lady, but these two are unused to our cold. Perhaps you’ll honor us later with the rest of your story?”
Sedna nodded her head slightly without looking up.
Gratefully, Clarissa clothed herself in tanned hides, skins and fur-lined boots. She took the comb and continued working on Sedna’s hair so Vasilisa could dress as well. After asking for and receiving permission, Pim took the stinking fur from Sedna and replaced it with another, well-tanned and sweet.
While Clarissa combed, Pim and Vasilisa took the malodorous skins away from camp and laid them on a convenient rock. They gathered up the half-gnawed bones and flung them as far away as they could for scavengers. Clarissa watched as Pim unpacked a bale of clothing and furs, a shallow half-moon bowl, two long, sharp knives in hide sheaths and a piece of hide stretched over a hoop about four feet in diameter, along with a thick wooden peg.
Clarissa heard a shout and saw Morfran, Poseidon and Marceau returning, heavily laden. Pim and Vasilisa helped them haul their burden closer to camp, where they laid it down and Pim began butchering, pointing and instructing as he worked. Marceau picked up the second knife and assisted.
By the time Clarissa had finished combing out Sedna’s hair, everyone was appropriately dressed and several pounds of walrus meat and blubber were cut into long strips, ready for eating.
Pim squatted on the ground near Clarissa and Sedna with the shallow bowl, which he filled with walrus blubber. He set three squares of ice around the bowl as a shield from the wind. He showed Vasilisa and Clarissa how to pound the blubber with an ivory tool, and then pulled pinches of what he called “arctic cotton” from a hide bag, soaking them in the fat and tucking them carefully along the dish’s rim. He lit the cotton with a spark from his flint, and fire outlined the bowl’s edge.
“This is a qulliq,” he said. “My people have used them for hundreds of years. With a snow house, called an igloo, and a qulliq, we can cook, drink, dry our clothes, warm ourselves and provide light.”
Clarissa watched, fascinated, as he made a tripod over the qulliq and hung a battered pot filled with chunks of snow over it.