Fire Star (14 page)

S
he came two days ago,” Apak said, lobbing a pebble into the snow. He was sitting on an upturned
umiak,
a wide-bottomed boat, trying to hit the pebble that his brother, Tootega, had already thrown. It was a game they had played many times as boys, but never before without laughter in their hearts. Apak’s pebble came to rest just beyond his brother’s throw. Tootega, standing solemnly beside the boat, threw another stone and also missed.

Apak took aim again. “It happened in the middle of the night. Peter Amitak said he was woken from his sleep by a spirit calling out to him across the ocean. He rose from his bed, put on his boots and a fur covering, and opened the door to his house. The moon had
spread her light across the bay and he could see the ridges in the ice very clearly. With his hunter’s eye, he noticed a movement. One of the ridges was growing in size, swelling at its summit and then becoming still. He knew, as any Inuk would, that a bear had climbed to the top of the ridge and was sitting there staring back into his soul. Peter Amitak went inside for his spyglass. What he saw is still being spoken of in whispers.”

He threw his pebble. It broke the crust of the snow, lodging close to the target stone, but still not touching.

Tootega turned his head and looked across the vast and shadowed landscape. The dark kiss of winter, collecting in speckled frost all around the fur of his parka hood, had stopped out all but the largest features. But he did not doubt Peter Amitak’s story. He bade his brother, Apak, tell the rest.

The younger Inuk beat a fist against his heart. Although he respected the ways of the elders, he had never lived by their primitive traditions or taken shelter among their beliefs. And yet when he spoke there were tremors in his voice, a quiet fear coming from a distant
time, deep beyond his thirty-three years. “Peter Amitak says Nanuk was waiting for their eyes to meet. When he focused the spyglass, the bear was looking straight at him, he says. He saw the white fire burning in its eyes and the mark of Oomara clearly on its head.”

“Ayah,” Tootega muttered through his teeth, hurling his remaining stones away. One hit the rusting wing of a snowmobile, wedged in a drift like a bright red wafer. The others scattered like dead black seeds, waiting, as all things did, for the thaw.

Apak, knowing the game was over, merely put his pebbles aside. “Peter Amitak called to his wife. ‘Kimalu, come see! Quickly, woman! The spirit of our ancestors is here among us!’ Kimalu came and put the glass to her eye. She tells how Nanuk opened his mouth and a bay of stars poured out of him. He breathed them wide across the ocean and they turned into a blizzard of burning snow. By the time the last ashes were resting on the surface, Nanuk had gone and the ice was still. Peter Amitak rode his Ski-Doo down the hill, shaking the wits into the rest of the village. Andrew Irniq and
others raced after him, crying, ‘What is happening? What is happening?’ I was among them. At the foot of the ridge where the bear had been, we found the girl.

“Her skin was blue and she was taking in no more air than a bird. Her eyes were half-open, but seeing nothing. Peter Amitak fell to his knees, saying she was Sedna come to eat our fingers. Andrew Irniq said he had the brains of a dog and sent him away to chew on a bone. We wrapped the girl and I carried her here, to grandfather’s house. He called her ‘Qannialaaq,’ falling snow, and said she was the one he had seen in his journeys.”

Tootega gave his brother a questioning look.

Apak pointed into the dusk. “Taliriktug has been traveling among the spirits. He says there is a yellow star shining in the sky. This star, he says, is a sign that Oomara will appear among us again. Others are saying it must be so, for how else could this pale white girl have survived the jaws of the ice and the bear? And now here are you, telling stories of Oomara with spirits on his shoulders. What did you really see there, brother?”

Tootega stared ahead, as if the cold had reached
inside his skull and frozen his brain and eyes from within. “I saw Oomara take off his coat. He was shaped like Nanuk, and then he was a man. In this form, he lifted the girl from the ice. Then the blizzard came down and I saw no more.”

Apak stretched his fingers inside his mittens. “People are saying this girl is a goddess, resting on human bones. Grandfather is guiding her in the old ways.”

“How?” Tootega grunted scornfully. “Taliriktug speaks as much English as this boat.”

Apak shrugged. “She uses Inuktitut, in a tongue only a shaman like him would understand. She has a name for it. She calls it dragontongue.”

From above them, suddenly, they heard a sharp croak. A dark bird was circling under the clouds.

Tootega reached inside his coat for a knife.

Apak clicked his tongue. “Slay a raven, you bring death upon us all.”

“It follows me,” Tootega said, spitting phlegm.

Apak watched the bird seep into the underbelly of a cloud. “So many signs,” he said. “People fear a change
is coming. They say the ice is about to burn. Some say the world will be consumed by it. Grandfather says Qannialaaq has come to save us from these things.”

“A-yah,” growled Tootega and dismissed it with a wave.

“He says you will be there to see it,” Apak added, but these quiet words dissolved into the crunching snow as Tootega stomped away to the old man’s house.

He found them, Taliriktug and Zanna, in the room in which Nauja accepted visitors. They were sitting cross-legged on the bare wooden floor, facing each other just a few feet apart. The furniture had all been pushed aside and a blind had been drawn across the window. A seal oil lamp was flickering its light near Taliriktug’s elbow. The air was thick with the jarring smell of incense. The wooden walls rattled to the song of the wind.

“Tootega is with us,” Zanna said, even though her head was down and her face was hidden by her falling hair.

The hand of fear squeezed the Inuk’s heart. His
brother was right. The girl
could
speak a broad Inuktitut. But the dialect was odd, guttural, like an animal. The words had formed in her throat, not on her tongue.

The old man said nothing to indicate displeasure. He was rocking gently back and forth, beating a thin drum against his thigh. He was almost in a trance, Tootega knew. Soon he would be traveling to the ocean or the stars.

Zanna, who was dressed from head to toe in furs, passed her hand over a line of small rocks, laid out in a shallow arc before her. To his astonishment, Tootega saw the stones wobble and knew she had crossed them with a stroke of magic. She lifted her head and shook her hair proudly. Feathers and beads had been sewn into the strands. Her face was pale, like the coat of a seal pup. Black rings, mixed from charcoal and grease, were painted around her eyes. “We need to prepare,” she said.

Tootega, not comprehending this, merely jutted his dimpled chin at her and said, “What do you want here, girl?”

Taliriktug beat his drum and wailed softly. The footsteps of the wind crept through the house, whistling where they found any weakness in the timbers. The seal lamp flickered but did not go out.

Zanna pointed to the far left stone. For a second or two, a faint light seemed to pulse from its surface, then it grew a head, four legs, and two wings.

Tootega stumbled back against the wall in fright.

“This was the beginning,” Zanna said in dragontongue, touching the stone and turning it green. With her other hand, she pointed at the far right stone. “And this is the end.” And that stone, too, made the shape of a dragon.

“Leave!” snapped Tootega. “Go back to the ocean!”

“I intend to,” said Zanna, studying the stones, “and you will be coming with me, Inuk. We have a date on the Tooth of Ragnar.”

Tootega half laughed. Was the girl insane?

“But that’s not the next part of the story,” she muttered, running her hands across the stones once more.

At the second pass, she paused by a flattish piece of rock. She picked it up and laid it in her palm.

Like the others, it began to alter its form. Tootega saw the developing shape and cursed it through his gritted teeth.

“It’s an island,” said Zanna, wonder and surprise creeping into her voice. “But where …?”

But it did not look like an island to Tootega. He knew the shape well. Every Inuk did. Some gave it credence. Some did not. To him, it had always been a vague curiosity, another soapstone carving, nothing more. He had never found answers or comfort in its promises. Yet in some deep place it frightened him, because of the trust many white men placed in it. He formed spittle in his mouth, but swallowed instead. This girl. This dark, unwelcome witch, who could play games with solid stones. Why had she called that figure an island? No island he had ever seen was shaped like a cross.

Just then, Taliriktug let out a groan so unworldly that it might have been his last. He put back his head
and stopped his breath. In that instant, the wind beat its cold fist against the house and the window blind tore itself away from its fastenings. Flapping behind the glass was a raven.

Tootega, half in, half out of his wits, picked up a piece of southern decadence — a boot scraper — and hurled it with all his strength through the glass. The bird squealed in alarm. In its panic, it was somehow sucked forward by the pressure, raking its talons against the cut edge of glass. A bead of blood rolled down the pane. The bird fluttered and dropped backward, mortally pierced by a shard of flying glass.

Tootega charged out of the house and found the raven laboring beneath the broken window, red stains seeping into the snow. The boot scraper lay among a nest of splintered glass. He lifted it again, intending to bring it down on the bird’s head. What did he care if this evil thing died? But as he tried to strike, he felt his wrist gripped by Zanna’s hand.

“No!” she snapped, and threw him aside with more force than her muscles ought by rights to have mustered.
She fell to her knees and cradled the bird, feeling its heartbeat slipping away. In its eye, she could see the mirror of its purpose. Dozens of reflections, one raven after another, running all the way back to a garden in America, where a young man sat on a bench in the drizzle, speaking to a crow he called Caractacus.
Tell her I love her.
“He sent you,” Zanna said. “David sent you to find me.” And she wept against the bird as it died in her hands.

“What is happening, here?” Apak came running. He gave a jolt of fear when he saw what he saw.

“Your brother killed a raven,” Zanna said coldly. “He thought it was the sibyl, Gwilanna; he was wrong.” She buried the bird and blessed it, then stood. “Get your things,” she said to Apak’s quaking brother. “We leave in one hour.”

“Going where?” scoffed Apak. “We are on the crust of winter!”

“It’s plenty warm enough where we’re going,” growled Zanna. “By the end of winter, your brother will have witnessed the birth of a dragon.”

S
ometimes it came down in beautiful flakes, or was blown across the cave in jeweled crystals when the wind skimmed the island’s icy escarpments, but mostly the snow was diced by the wind into a biting blizzard that did little more than plug the mouth of the cave and shut out the rest of the natural world. When it started, it blew for days. Though “days” was really an approximate guess. Time was almost impossible to gauge when the precious moments of clear white light could be counted in minutes rather than hours and the sun preferred to hide on the horizon rather than struggle above it. But there were two fresh scratch marks on Lucy’s wall anyway. Two days she reckoned she’d been left alone to fend for herself, living off a dwindling supply
of lichens and that “treat of all treats,” the boiled mushroom. If Gwilanna did not return soon, Lucy knew she would have to face the threat of starvation or the unknown dangers beyond the cave. Many people might have crumbled in such a situation, but the Pennykettle spirit, the dragon in her blood, merely made her more determined to overcome her captor and put what she knew about this place to some use.

She had done a lot of thinking in her time alone, projecting ahead to the month of February and wondering what was going to happen. The thought of seeing Gawain alive both terrified and excited her. The last true dragon. The Lord of the Skies. Would she fall down praying or scream and run for shelter? Her life would never be the same again. And yet, as she sat in the wake of the beast, listening to his great lungs grinding and shearing against the rocks, she could not help but remember her mother’s words, that Gawain should be left to rest in peace and not freed into a world where dragons, in general, were loathed and feared and misunderstood. But to do that, Gwilanna must be stopped, and she, Lucy Pennykettle,
daughter of Guinevere, part-sister to Gwendolen, was one of few people who might be capable of it.

A dragon’s tailpiece and a double hank of hair. What could she do with them? How could they help her? They must be special. They must have power. Why else would Gwendolen take them to her grave? Lucy tried to focus her mind. Gwilanna, she remembered, had come to Scrubbley with a scale of Gawain locked up in a case. She had worked spells with it. Perhaps Lucy could, too?

So she tried. Over and over again. Once, during a break in the blizzards, she stood in the cavemouth and held the isoscele up to the stars. In dragontongue, she implored the Earth goddess, Gaia, to take her back to her mother in Scrubbley. But it did not work. Nothing worked. Neither the moon, nor the sea, the ice, nor the bears, the bones in the den, nor the spirit of Gwendolen (whose bones she was certain lay in there) made any amendment or impression. After some time, Lucy threw her finds down and collected herself into a huddle of dismay. She might just as well bind the scale onto a stick and use it as a spoon to stir the sibyl’s stew!

Why could she not find magic in these relics? Why wouldn’t the universe come to her aid?

Then one day she had a brain wave. While she was gouging out her usual scratch, she thought about the paintings on the wall. She had tried, without success, to restore the images Gwilanna had shown her, but these were not the ones she was thinking of. On the wall inside the den where she had found the remains, she remembered seeing some drawings untouched. Maybe she could find some clue in those? Lighting up a firestick, she hurried down into the hole to see.

It took several minutes to locate what she thought was the start of the drawings, for they were scratched all around the circle of the den, as if the story they depicted was never ending. She started with a clear illustration of a polar bear. It was small. She guessed it was a baby, a cub. Through the sediments of centuries she traced its story. It wasn’t pleasant. It had fed on a child and been killed by a hunter. Then a bigger bear had come. The cub’s mother, perhaps? Some people had fled. Others had fought it. The bear had lost. Lucy
gulped at the picture of it feet up, speared like a large pincushion. Farther around was another bear, standing on its hind legs, roaring in anger. More fighting. Many stickmen spilled on the ground. A man crushed in the great bear’s arms. Then a spooky drawing of the bear’s head on the man’s body, lit by a heavenly light from above, and stickpeople falling to their knees and praying. Lucy moved closer, flaring the light until the old rocks blushed with the desire to burn. There was something odd about this part of the story. Someone had drawn what looked like a hole, stretching through the sky, way into the stars. People seemed to be floating through it. At the end of the hole was a picture of a dragon, holding out its wings as though it were an angel. Something on its head caught Lucy’s eye. A mark. It sparkled as she drew the flame nearer.

“That’s the same as on Zanna’s arm,” she muttered and was stepping backward to gather her focus when, without warning, the firestick flickered and the flame went out.

With a frightened gasp, Lucy scrabbled up the tunnel
on her hands and knees, finding, more to her surprise than horror, that all the lights in the cave, including the embers of the fire, had been extinguished. What’s more, she was not alone. She could sense a warm body and smell wet fur.

A bear had entered the cave.

Most people would have been mortally afraid to find themselves in such a predicament, for there was nowhere to run and no way to fight. The bear, if it desired, would have little reason not to kill her and eat her. But Lucy had encountered a spirit bear once and knew instinctively that this visitor was something out of the ordinary. Sure enough, as the north wind licked around the edges of the cave and the clouds outside were driven apart, a faint wash of light fell into the cave, picking out the bear’s exact position. It was silhouetted right in the center of the floor, sitting, as bears and cats often do, with its front paws tucked between its widespread rear paws, waiting, it seemed, to be formally greeted. Awed, but not afraid, Lucy stood up and brushed down her furs.

“Hello,” she said.

The bear snorted softly and shuffled its paws. “Child,” it said, in perfect dragontongue. Then the most bizarre thing happened: It appeared to absorb all the light from beyond and spread it luminescently throughout its body, until it was glowing like a Christmas decoration. Before long, Lucy had a perfect view of it. It looked old and wise, but not at all doddery. It was a bear that had seen many things, she thought.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The bear tilted its head and squinted at her kindly. “I am all things to all men,” it said. And the words seemed to wrap around Lucy’s head, as if they were a wind from another world.

“Is this your cave?”

“Sometimes,” it said.

“Have you come to save me?” She looked toward the cavemouth, wondering if her prayers had been heard, after all.

The bear pondered a moment, then shook its head. It raised itself and took a pace forward.

“Don’t hurt me,” Lucy gulped and clasped her hands to her chest.

The bear halted, then sat down once more. A second passed, then it lowered its head and the glimmer surrounding it grew more intense, until Lucy was almost blinded by the glow and lost sight of the animal in the brightness. She covered her eyes, but the light was quick to dim and when she looked again the bear had disappeared. In its place was a fair-skinned woman with flowing red hair and eyes of a pale, translucent pink.

“You!” she gasped.

“You remember me,” the woman said, looking pleased.

“I prayed to you,” said Lucy, and dipped her knee. “Zanna said you were the Earth mother, Gaia.”

The woman smiled. “Sometimes,” she said. “Look, child, I have something to show you.” She opened her hands. In each sat a dragon.

“G’reth!” Lucy cried, making out the handsome wisher at once. He waved a big paw and flew into her hands. She raised him up, hardly able to believe it.

“Where did you go? Where have you been? And … oh, who’s this?” The second dragon, an unusual-looking white creature, more the shape of a bird than a dragon, had landed on Lucy’s shoulder. On his way, he had picked up the isoscele and hair.

“Give me those,” she said, trying to snatch them from him. But he was quick, and buzzed to her other shoulder.

“Child,” said the woman in a soothing voice. “Groyne does not want to steal your possessions. He merely wants to take a lock of your hair.”

“Groyne?” queried Lucy. “But he was the one who —” She broke off suddenly to stare at G’reth, who was teasing out her hair between his wide front paws. There was a strange, bright glint in his oval eyes and their color was changing in merging swirls of violet and blue. At first, Lucy was frightened by it, for she thought that his fire tear was going to be shed. But then she recognized wonder, not sorrow, in his gaze and that, in a way, began to shake her even more. G’reth was studying her hair (which was longer and very much
redder now) as if he had never seen it before. How could that be?

Groyne turned the isoscele deftly through his claws until the sharp tip was pointed away from him. Lucy caught the movement and was suddenly alert. “Why does he want my hair?”

“It will help you sleep,” said the figure of Gaia.

The island rumbled. Lucy looked up at the roof of the cave. “Will Gawain
really
come alive again?”

“Always, child, in your dreams.”

Then the isoscele flashed and a thick lock of hair was quickly cut free. Lucy immediately buckled at the knees and fell into a heap on the floor of the cave. Groyne handed the hair to G’reth.

“There, you have what you need,” said Gaia. She looked at Groyne and said, “Twine the old strands around her wrist and place the isoscele in her hand.”

Groyne did this, amazed to see Lucy’s fingers curl around the age-old piece of dragon skin.

“She will be protected,” the woman whispered, and pointed at the firesticks on the wall. All three of them
flickered into flame once more. “Come, we have work to do.” And with a pulse of collapsing light she resumed the shape of a polar bear and walked out into the swirling blizzard.

It was an hour before the second bear entered the cave. She was old and walked tiredly, hobbling against an arthritic knee. There were patches in her rumpled fur and signs in the creased black lids around her eyes that her life was now a burden, not a joy. She’d been coming to this cave on the Tooth of Ragnar every third year of her twenty-one seasons. In that time she had delivered five litters of cubs. This time she was barren and believed she was coming here to sleep her last winter. The last thing she’d expected to trouble her in death was the prostrate body of a sleeping manchild and the cave lit by orange fire.

She nudged the body. There was no response. She nudged again and this time her snout caught the scent of a bear, next to the manchild’s skin. The old bear shuffled back and snorted in confusion. That was her
ancestors’
scent. How could this child be carrying a trace of the female, Sunasala, the fabled mate of Ragnar? That could not
be.

The mountain spoke. The bear snorted back. She was used to the island’s rumbling voice, but this groan had a hollow echo to it. A change of tone meant a change of shape. A new chamber must have opened somewhere.

So she hunted around and found what she knew to be a tunnel to a den. Deep within the dust of countless years, she found the scent of bones: human and bear.

She shook herself and looked at the girl again, remembering an old den story. A legend about a redhaired Inuk woman, who had walked with bears and devoted her life to them. A woman so respected by the Council of Nine, that when she had died a bear had been chosen to lay down beside her to protect her on her journey to the far side of the ice.

This was enough to convince the old bear that this child, too, should be protected. And so picking Lucy up between her jaws, she carried her carefully into the den. As her paws crunched through the ancient bones, she
began to wonder at the wisdom of her actions, fearful of the creeping whistle of the wind, taunting her from the mouth of the tunnel. But it was done. She was committed. There was no turning back. She set the girl down in the center of the space and washed her face with long sweeps of her tongue, according to the way it had been in legend. Then she curled around the child and fell into a slumber, never knowing if the sun would rise for her again.

This was how Gwilanna, the sibyl, found them. “Well, child,” she hissed, poking a firestick around the chamber, reading the drawings, taking them in, “you have surprised me yet again. Now you know a little more of our kind. Very well, lie down with your stinking bear, but remember: A child who sleeps with ghosts, sometimes wakes with them in her heart.”

And she doused the flame and climbed out of the tunnel, leaving Lucy and the bear in darkness and dormancy. And that would be the way of it for three long months: until the fire star moved into place above the island.