Northwind Episode 14

Northwind © Christoffer Petersen 2022 (Now available for pre-order from Amazon)

December 14

The trick to driving the great ice worm, Luui discovered, was incremental. Small adjustments. A subtle twist of the ice axe here, a nod to Assagissat to clamp one of her pincers there. Together they steered the beast north across the Svartenhuk Mountains, from one ridge to the next, leaving a small storm of ice in their wake.

Of course, Luui couldn’t see the wake, just as she couldn’t see the direction in the course Aassik took through the mountains, but she knew which way was north, by instinct – no magic. And the worm did the rest.

Life got interesting all of a sudden when Aassik started to climb Qaqqaq, the ever-growing mountain.

“He’s slowing down,” Luui said. She gripped the ice axe with both hands as gravity returned and she felt the worm rear up, driving its scaly body in a vertical ascent up the mountain.

“I grow weary, young female thing. You promised me Tupilaat.”

“Aap,” Luui said. “I did, and you will have them, but…”

“Weary and hungry,” Assagissat said, as she loosened her grip on Aassik’s innards.

“Wait…”

Luui lost her grip on the shaft of her ice axe as Assagissat tumbled into the dark depths of the worm’s guts, heading for the bowels, drifting out of sight. Aassik lurched left, rolling onto its side now that the irritating bite of the spirit’s claws was gone. Luui grunted as the sealskin cord bit into her wrist, and she dangled at the end of it. Aassik thrashed right, fell left, and thrashed again as it tried to get rid of the second bite that plagued its gut. Luui spun at the end of the cord, and then slammed into the wall, picking up another layer of Aassik’s digestive juices. She spat the weak acid that splashed into her mouth when she gasped, and then jammed the toe of her boot into a flap of gut skin. She hung there for a second or two, blinking in the dark. Naalanngitsoq returned to brush her face with a soft caress, drying the surface layer of worm gunk and drawing a welcome smile from Luui’s lips.

“You came back,” Luui said.

Naalanngitsoq flurried about Luui’s fringe in reply.

“Well…” Luui looked down, imagining an exit at the bottom of the black hole beneath her feet. Aassik lurched again, slamming its body into the side of the mountain and Luui bounced into a swing like a pendulum above the proverbial pit. “Except the pit is the worm’s anus,” she said, curious at the objective, almost clinical tone of her voice, as if such things were simply a matter of course, and the only course available to her was to let go and fall into the unknown. “Not unknown,” she said as she bounced off the wall once more. “The sphincter awaits.”

Luui laughed and her voice echoed briefly in the worm’s gut before the walls absorbed her brevity, just as Aassik’s acid tried to absorb her. Perhaps, she wondered, it was the shaman’s lot to endure and, hopefully, overcome such unpleasantness in life. It was, after all, the nature of the shaman’s journey, walking the unknown paths, facing untold dangers, and, “Emerging on the other side.”

She had journeyed to the spirit world often enough, even as a young girl, with Âmo to protect her. And yet, dangling at the end of a sealskin lanyard, Luui was alone in the belly of a beast, with little more than a cheeky wind almost out of breath for company.

And then she had it.

If not the way out, then, perhaps, a way through.

“Naalanngitsoq,” she said, swinging once more, biting back the pain of the cord digging into her wrist. “Can you gust?”

Naalanngitsoq blew the hair from Luui’s fringe in reply.

“Harder,” Luui said.

Naalanngitsoq blew Luui into the side of Aassik’s gut, holding her there in a long blast of air. It occurred to Luui that there was, of course, something unnatural about the cheeky little wind, blowing so hard without the benefit of moving fronts of hot and cold air. But then, dangling from an ice axe inside a giant ice worm was, she reminded herself, a little out of the ordinary.

“That’s good,” Luui said. “Now blow down there.” Luui pointed with her toe, hoping Naalanngitsoq could see or at least feel where Luui wanted her to blow. “Don’t stop until you’re through the sphincter.”

If Naalanngitsoq had a face, Luui guessed it might have frowned, but the cheeky little wind settled for a subtle pause, a brief reprieve in the gust with which it pinned Luui to the sticky wall of the worm, before funnelling down into the black depths of Aassik’s bowels. Luui felt the tug of the vortex, like a gravity well, tugging at her feet, pulling her down, if, and only if, she could free the pick of the ice axe from Aassik’s gut.

The worm helped, as if reading Luui’s mind, and dealing with a troublesome morsel of bad, barely digested food. Aassik slammed the left side of its body into the mountain and the pick of Luui’s ice axe bounced free. Luui enjoyed a second’s worth of pleasure as the cord around her wrist loosened for a moment, and then, with no time for a last gasp of cold, rotten air, Luui fell.

Naalanngitsoq did exactly what Luui asked. She blew a funnel through the beast’s bowels, flattening the walls as the fleshy tubes narrowed, shaping the passage through which Luui fell. But the wind was faster than Luui, and the tubes collapsed behind Naalanngitsoq, threatening to pinch Luui’s upper body, to grip her head, until the shaman’s daughter tucked her body into a ball, wrapping her arms around her knees as she hugged them to her chest, pressing her head down. Luui’s axe bounced off the walls of the worm’s anal tubes as she fell in the wake of the wind until, flapping with unnatural flatulence, the lips of the worm’s sphincter vibrated and Luui caught a glimpse of stars in the black skies above Greenland.

She might have wondered why she could see stars, as she thought she was falling. But, suddenly free of irritating pinches and picks in its bowels, the great ice worm bucked, arcing its body as it crashed through the surface snow and ice on the flanks of Qaqqaq, the ever-growing mountain, in search of less obnoxious sustenance.

Luui burst out of the worm’s anus like a cannonball.

She opened her arms and spread her legs, flying, if only for a second, before the granite walls of Qaqqaq rushed to greet her, knocking whatever wind she might once have had out of her lungs as Luui slammed into the side of the mountain.

To be continued on December 15

Northwind © Christoffer Petersen 2022

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