Chapter 8 #3
The wind was particularly cruel that night, but it hadn’t kept members of the tribe from bundling their furs around their faces to watch the standoff, hearts in their throats.
If I could hear their worry, so could Nanook.
“Name yourself,” he growled.
Cowardice wouldn’t serve me. I made my way to the top of the hill, close enough for him to reach me with teeth, claws, and weight, should it come to that. “I have no name that would satisfy you.”
“What do they call you?” Nanook’s voice was the powerful eddy of the rocks churning at the bottom of the sea. He spoke mind to mind in the immortal tongue, a booming voice inside my skull, yet threatening snarls to all who watched.
“Mortals have no formal name for me,” I answered honestly.
Though I spoke into his mind, I felt the need to raise my voice above the howling wind. “I am a protector of one. I’m nothing more.”
He planted his feet on the snow dune and sniffed the air around me. I did my best to keep still, though I knew the two of us took mortal shape, his body would be every bit as towering as the bear was now. Faith was alive and well in the north, and these were no idle gods.
A bluff charge accompanied his growl. “Half-truths.”
“Hell,” I sputtered. “Hell has no relation with the Adlivun pantheon, and with any luck, our paths may never cross again. I know of your gods—I know Sedna, your goddess of the sea, though we’d had no occasion to meet.
I’ve met Igaluk, though he was disinterested, and that’s all I can hope for.
I mean your people no harm, but I also have no interest in them. ”
“Then you know you do not belong.” He towered over me. “And you know you should leave.”
“I have a human,” I said, wondering if I sounded as pathetic as I felt.
She was a secret to many, but I had no quarrel with these gods, nor did they deal with any of Hell’s enemies.
I could use an ally. “Only one. She’s called Yuka at present, but I’ve followed her for several lifetimes, across continents, realms, and languages.
I’m connected to her. Please don’t send me away. ”
Please. I’d never prostrated myself before a god like this. But my title, my kingdom, my realm, meant nothing here. I was an intruder, and his word was final.
Nanook huffed, looking over my shoulder to where the villagers watched a wolf the size of a man face off against a bear three times its size. I could only imagine how our growls sounded to human ears.
I lowered my head in my best imitation of a bow. “I swear to you: I lay no claim to your people, save for the girl.”
The people remained statue-still as Nanook descended from the dune.
I—the one they believed to be their protector—remained on the hill, unmoving.
I caught Yuka’s eyes in the torchlight and shook my head once more.
Don’t move.
Nanook looked even larger as he passed the nomadic huts. His hide alone would create an entire home, if not two, had he been a mortal bear.
Silver moonlight mingled with the shadows cast by flickering orange torches as the bear walked amongst the people, casting idle glances with coal-black eyes as he left enormous prints in the snow.
The tribe knew from the exchange that they were on their own, and in response, they remained utterly still.
The night came and went. I had passed the test, at least for the time being.
Satisfied that I would not interfere with Nanook’s mastery, he never challenged my presence again.
But he was not the only bear on the ice.
As if life in the Arctic wasn’t hard enough, there is no predator more blood thirsty and dangerous than a hungry polar bear.
In our years together, the tribe needed protection, and I threw my body between any claw, tooth, storm, or weapon that might put Yuka in danger.
The predators were half the god’s size, with none of his ethereal shimmer, but every bit as dangerous to squishy, vulnerable mortals.
Each bear kept its life for all of three minutes from the time it threatened the village to its last breath.
I’d been Fluffy for so long that I nearly forgot I’d ever been anything else. I may have remained Fluffy if Yuka hadn’t asked.
Twenty years on this earth with ten of them at my side, Yuka stroked my fur as she did every other night.
Her mother feasted with neighboring villagers, leaving us to settle by the fire.
Meals with friends always resulted in her spending a familial night in their tent, as she’d become the village’s mother.
She knew Yuka was safe with me and deserved her own senses of companionship where she found them.
Nights like these we knew we had to ourselves.
“You are no wolf,” she said. “The village watched our protector appear from the air and we have believed in you faithfully. We’ve known peace. We’ve known prosperity. And never once have I asked you to reveal yourself.”
I knew what she was asking.
For the second time in years, I felt fear.
“Surely, you’d open your mouth, and say your name,” she continued. “One day, when you were ready, you’d show me what god walks the earth as a Great White Wolf.”
I’d spent years scouring the earth to find her. Once we’d connected in this life, I’d had no occasion to consider stepping out of my lupine form. She was safe. She was happy. I was with her. What else could we need?
“Fluffy? I know that isn’t your name. And I don’t know what I’ve done that I’ve failed to earn your trust…but I’d like to fix it. Tell me how I may honor you, how I may become worthy of knowing the god who walks among men.”
I got up from my reclining position. She pulled away, skin tight around her eyes, folding her legs stiffly as she watched me. She’d asked. She was ready. She wanted this. What’s more, she’d wrongfully shame herself if I refused.
And yet…I was terrified.
I hadn’t thought of Hell in a decade. My kingdom was fine without me.
The true panic was here in the snow, wondering how Yuka would receive me. She’d only known a creature, an animal, a dog. I was respected as something other, but I was not a man. What’s worse: I wasn’t a god. At least, not one of her gods.
In this life and the past, I wasn’t the god she’d called. Yet I’m the one who answered.
“I know you understand me,” she said.
Yuka had spent her life being told I was a god who’d taken wolf form, and it certainly didn’t hurt my case.
She’d never treated me like a pet. But once we crossed this line, there was no going back.
I wanted to be with her. Let me cling to my wolfish form one moment longer, I thought.
Let me stay right here, before your worldview cracks.
Let me have one more heartbeat of you choosing me.
“Please.”
There it was again. That feeling. A twist in the guts. A fear. A longing. A complicated, strange, terrible, wonderful, altogether newness that a demon couldn’t have experienced if he’d spent ten thousand years among peers in Hell.
This, here and now, was the appeal of gods adopting humans.
Black and white juxtapositions skewed my life in opposites. The cold war between Heaven and Hell defined our kingdom, drove our pantheon, and informed my every decision. And despite the stakes, gods, demons, angels, fae, and the like faced the monotony of foreverness.
Somewhere in the middle was a painful, beautifully, exciting, chaotic gift.
Immortals worry, stress, and donned responsibility when they took on a human.
Living among the mortals, caring for them, attaching ourselves to them, we were given the delicious, terrible rarity of agony, terror, and sorrow. And in this moment, on this night, I experienced a true, bone-chilling fear.
Beyond the tent, pink and emerald lights began to ring with the high, metallic hum of swords sharpened against one another, and I, myself, had become a believer. This was a sign from something bigger than me to treat the night as sacred.
“Please.” That word again. She dipped her chin. “I’m ready.”
I nodded, then left the tent, pausing in the antechamber of its insulated neck between the two leather flaps. It was a moment for myself and also to allow her the preparation she needed for my transformation.
The second flap of hides and furs caught the stray wind and snow, preventing the winter from entering the comfortable dome. With three deep breaths, I shifted into a man for the first time in nearly a decade.
I moved to pull back the fur and caught my hand’s tremble.
Destructive, interesting, miserable, rare, fresh fear coursed through me, but this sensation was no mystery.
I knew precisely what scared me. I was afraid that she’d grown to love the animal and would reject the man.
I was scared that she would look at me and send me from the tribe like the demon I was.
A wolf was one thing, but this form? Me?
Three more breaths.
I forced my hand to still and gripped the lip of the fur, startled by my own fingers, as if I’d forgotten how ice-white I was. I tried to move forward but was caught on the threshold by a note. She was humming.
It was no Qawiaraq song.
I’d heard their lullabies, their bonfire ballads, their histories sung for the better part of ten years.
This was something else. Nine haunting notes rising, five falling.
I listened to the fractured lullaby in a minor chord, over and over.
I’d heard it before, covering the scraping of basalt as she’d crushed grain with her mortar and pestle.
I’d listened to it in Athens as a student watched the stars beside a fountain.
But in nine years, I’d never heard it from Yuka.
I moved forward without thinking. I’d never spoken Qawiaraq aloud, yet my first words to her were, “How do you know that song?”