Sedna’s monster soul-eater looked as if it might eat all the human-being souls on Earth.

But, as Sedna had hoped, the shamans of the hundreds of groups of the Real People huddled around the periphery of the cold north, sent verbal messages, then met in angakkuit shaman enclaves and talked, prayed to all their friendly spirits, conferred with their helping-spirits, and eventually came up with a plan to deal with the Tuunbaq.

They could not kill this God That Walked Like a Man – even Sila, the Spirit of the Air, and Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, could not kill the talipek Tuunbaq.

But they could contain it. They could keep it from coming south and killing all of the human beings and all of the Real People.

The best of the best shamans – the angakkuit – chose the best men and women among them with shamanic abilities of clairvoyant thought-hearing and thought-sending, and they bred these best men with the best women the way the Real People today breed sledge dogs to create an even better, stronger, smarter generation.

They called these beyond-shamanic clairvoyant children the sixam ieua, or spirit-governors-of-the-sky, and sent them north with their families to stop the Tuunbaq from slaughtering the Real People.

These sixam ieua were able to communicate directly with the Tuunbaq – not through the language of the tuurngait helping-spirits as the mere shaman had attempted, but by directly touching the Tuunbaq’s mind and life-soul.

The spirit-governors-of-the-sky learned to summon Tuunbaq with their throat singing. Devoting themselves to communicating with the Tuunbaq, they agreed to allow the jealous and monstrous creature to deprive them of their ability to speak to their fellow human beings. In exchange for the tupilek killing-creature no longer preying on human souls, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky promised the God Who Walks Like a Man that they – the human beings and Real People – would no longer make their dwelling places in its northernmost snowy domain. They promised the God Who Walks Like a Man that they would honour it by never fishing or hunting within its kingdom without the monster-creature’s permission.

They promised that all future generations would help feed the God Who Walks Like a Man’s voracious appetite, the sixam ieua and other Real People catching and bringing fish, walruses, seals, caribou, hares, whales, wolves, and even the Tuunbaq’s smaller cousins – the white bears – for it to feast on. They promised that no human being’s kayak or boat would trespass on the God Who Walks Like a Man’s sea-domain unless it was to bring food or to sing the throat songs that soothed the beast or to pay homage to the killing-thing.

The sixam ieua knew through their forward-thoughts that when the Tuunbaq’s domain was finally invaded by the pale people – the kabloona – it would be the beginning of the End of Times. Poisoned by the kabloonas’ pale souls, the Tuunbaq would sicken and die. The Real People would forget their ways and their language. Their homes would be filled with drunkenness and despair. Men would forget their kindness and beat their wives. The inua of the children would become confused, and the Real People would lose their good dreams.

When the Tuunbaq dies because of the kabloona sickness, the spirit-governors-of-the-sky knew, its cold, white domain will begin to heat and melt and thaw. The white bears will have no ice for a home, so their cubs will die. The whales and walruses will have nowhere to feed. The birds will wheel in circles and cry to the Raven for help, their breeding grounds gone.

This is the future they saw.

The sixam ieua knew that as terrible as the Tuunbaq was, this future without it – and without their cold world – would be worse.

But in the times before this should come to pass, and because the young clairvoyant men and women who were the spirit-governors-of-the-sky spoke to the Tuunbaq as only Sedna and the other spirits could – never with voices but always directly, mind to mind – the still-living God Who Walks Like a Man listened to their propositions and their promises.

The Tuunbaq, who – like all the greater inuat spirits – loves to be pampered, agreed. He would eat their offerings rather than their souls.

Over the generations, the sixam ieua clairvoyants continued to breed only with other human beings with the same skill. At an early age, each sixam ieua child gave up his or her ability to speak with his or her fellow human beings to show the God Who Walks Like a Man that they were devoted to speaking only to him, to the Tuunbaq.

Over the generations, the small families of the sixam ieua who live so much farther north than the other villages of Real People (who are still terrified of the Tuunbaq), always making their homes on the permanently snow-and-glacier-covered earth and ice pack, became known as the God-Walking People, and even their speaking-families’ language became a strange blend of the other Real People’s tongues.

Of course, the sixam ieua themselves can speak no language – except for the clairvoyant speech of qaumaniq and angakkua, thought-sending and thought-receiving. But they are still human beings, they still love their families and belong to their larger family groups, so to speak to the other Real People, the sixam ieua men use a special sign language and the sixam ieua women tend to use the string-shape games that their mothers taught them.

Before leaving our village,

and going out onto the ice

to find the man I must marry,

the man my father and I dreamt of,

back when the paddles were clean,

my father took a dark stone, aumaa,

and he marked each paddle.

he knew that he would not return

alive from the ice

we had both seen in our sixam ieua dreams,

the only dreams that are true,

that he, my beloved Aja,

would die out there,

at the hands of a pale-person.

since coming off the ice,

I’ve looked for that stone

in the hills

and on the river-beds,

but I have never found it.

upon my return to my people

I will find the paddle on which the aumaa

made its grey mark.

birth was a short line

at the blade tip.

but longer and above this,

death was drawn parallel.

come again! shouts the Raven.

63 CROZIER

Crozier awakes with one hell of a splitting headache.

He wakes most mornings these days with a splitting headache. One would think that with his back and chest and arms and shoulders peppered by shotgun blasts and with no fewer than three bullet wounds in his body, he’d have other pains to notice upon awakening, and while those agonies descend on him quickly enough, it’s the terrible headaches he notices first.

It reminds Crozier of all the years he drank whiskey every night and regretted it every morning after.

Sometimes he wakes, as he did this morning, with nonsense syllables and strings of meaningless words echoing in his aching skull. The words are all clickety-clack-sounding, like children making up vowel-heavy clucking noises just to find the right number of syllables for a jumping-rope song, but they seem to mean something in those few painful seconds before he comes fully awake. Crozier feels mentally tired all the time these days, as if he’s spent his nights reading Homer in Greek. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier has never in his life attempted to read Greek. Nor wanted to. He’s always left that to scholars and to poor book-obsessed souls like the old steward, Peglar’s friend, Bridgens.