#terror fic

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When she stays over, Silna’s maternal aunt tells her the unipkaaq of the one who never wanted to marry. That one’s father lost his temper when she refused marriage to any man and so he married her to his big white dog. 

“Hu’mat?” Silna can’t keep from asking: Why? Although her cousin Kappianaq hushes her for interrupting. 

“His anger made him foolish, and cruel,” her aunt says, shaking her head. “When his daughter became pregnant by his dog, he felt ashamed, and he took her and her dog husband away from Qi’miqtuuq so that she might be confined to a small island where none would see. But he was also resentful of providing meat to them because the dog could not hunt for itself like a proper husband. He stopped going over in his qajaq. 

“As the daughter’s belly swelled, her husband would swim over, and carry back their share of the meat in its packs. And one day, when the father was angry, he filled its packs not with meat but stones. 

“Then it started to swim back. It reached the middle of the channel, but the stones were so heavy, the current so strong, the water deep and cold. 

“It drowned.” 

Silna’s aunt pauses somberly, tending to the flickering lamp flame so that it burns steady. The rain patters softly upon the tent, blending with her aunt’s soft voice as she clears her throat and resumes. 

“As the father feared, the daughter gave birth to a whole litter. And they were Itqilliit, and qaplunaat, and some, even, were others. 

“His daughter loved her babies, but she grieved the murder of her dog husband, and still felt that it was wrong she had been married to it. So, one day, she told her children:— 

“‘Your grandfather was wrong to make you fatherless. When he comes to give us the meat, because he took your father from you, you should kill him.’ 

“And the children met him at his qajaq, licking the blood from the grandfather’s qajaq skin and fawning over him as they always did when he brought them their food, and then they tore apart the skin and fell upon him, and they mauled him to death.” 

Silna can see the old man in her mind’s eye, crumpled bloody in the surf from the children tearing at him with their hands and mouths. The pieces of the broken qajaq bobbing about him. 

“Now, because they were on an island without anyone else, they would have gone hungry. And so the mother sent her children out into the world that they might live; she sent the Itqilliit off via the water, in her inner boot slippers, and the qaplunaat she sent off in her outer boots, the footwear becoming their watercraft.” 

The pinnak and kammak plopped into the water transform as if through a trick of the light into Indian canoes and qaplunaat ships as the children step aboard. Their mother watches them till they disappear in their new watercraft past the shivering horizon, the sky bright and her eyes filling with tears. 

“All alone, the woman was griefstricken, and maddened with guilt for having murdered her father. So she waded out into the sea and cut off her fingers, the severed digits becoming the sea mammals—the ringed seal, the bearded seal, the harp seal, the walrus, the beluga and narwhal, even the orca and the bowhead. Then she threw herself into the sea after her husband, sinking to the bottom, and down there She established Her household from which She rules over the whole ocean. 

“Her dog guards the iglu, and Her father lives down there with Her, but is relegated to sleeping out in the tuqšuk wherein he traps wrongdoers beneath the smothering weight of his polar bear blanket. 

“It is with gratitude to the mother of the sea mammals that they might sustain us. When She is angry because people are breaking Her prohibitions and not abiding by Her laws, She withdraws, and Her hair grows tangled and filthy, and She traps the sea mammals under Her lamp’s drip basin, so that from time to time the most skilled aŋatkut must go down and comb Her hair and convince Her to release them. 

“We must abide by the laws so that She does not keep the animals from giving themselves. And for this reason, because of what happened to Her, because She has dominion over the sea and all its life, we know Nuliajuk, and we propitiate Her.” 

Silna comes out of the reverie which the story casts over her slowly, awed at now understanding how the principle sea spirit whom Silna has known all her life came to be as She is. Around herself are her maternal aunt and uncle and her parallel cousins Kappianaq and Qapuk, and in the time that her aunt has told the story, the evening light has darkened, the tupiq now dim but for the banked qulliq. The waves of the ocean roll hissing over and again onto the shore outwith.