POTN 7

POETRY  |  FICTION EXCERPT

The Cold of Snow & Ghosts

by Charles A. Gramlich, art by M.B.Simon

He ran northward across the frozen tundra, with the pure light of the Aurora streaming above him in broad arcs that sparked green and red with ionization. His flying feet seemed barely to skim the ground, leaving behind prints in the snow that were as delicate as fallen petals, and as ephemeral. Over his shoulder hung a caribou stag with its throat wrapped in a necklace of frozen black blood.

He hoped that he would be in time.

In the papal courts of the Borgias his name had been Joachim Martel. At the side of the German Chancellor Bismarck he had simply been called Krieg. Now, in the frozen north of the Americas, with two world wars behind him, he was known to the Innuit as Kainja. They feared him as a devil — because his skin held the appearance of snow and he dwelt in the cold night where only ghosts and devils dwelt. Sometimes the Eskimos even told stories about him. And sometimes he came right up to the walls of the snow houses and listened to the tales with ears that could hear the blood coursing through the hearts behind the ice blocks.

In the spring he was said to have ridden on a narwhal as it fought with an orca for its life. He had loped with wolves before the black and gray bruise of a massing storm; the hunters had heard him howling and knew his voice by its different pitch. He had eaten snow at the birthing place of the seals, where the fine ivory powder was turned to crimson sludge from the afterbirth of ten thousand parturitions. In the fall he had been seen pirouetting on the backs of a running herd of caribou, had slept in the den of Kakwik, the wolverine who was his supposed servant, had taken sled dogs while they drowsed in a curled ball with their mates. In the winter he had eaten children. The stories were all true, except for the first and the last. He was no devil, and he did not feed on children.

He hoped that he would be in time.

The being known as Kainja had crossed a hundred miles tonight with the worry of time riding him. And there had been more miles in the nights before, all for one caribou. Though he had hoped for many. He had even traveled in the few short hours of the northern winter’s day, through the weak light of an arctic sun that still held enough vigor to generate an uncomfortable heat on skin that could not sweat, on eyes that could not tear. But he had to make it north in time, in enough time to fend off the starvation that was overtaking the sixteen members of the Innuit band of Powhuktuk, where lived the dark-eyed Konala with her parents.

A week ago Kainja had drifted out of the winter deadness of the poles to find hunger stalking a people he had unilaterally adopted as his own. At this time of year there were only a few hours of light each day for the Innuit to hunt, and little enough to shoot at even if there had been more time. The dogs had already been eaten. The north was always a place where starvation threatened, but Powhuktuk’s people had been amply supplied only a few weeks ago when Kainja had gone into the polar night for his annual time of seclusion. Something must have broken into their caches of meat, a white bear perhaps, or maybe wolverines, for which he would be blamed. For whatever reason, the people had been left to boil sinews and old deer hides for food before Kainja had come once more and put his face against the igloos to read the moans of bodies in want. It was a sound/scent that he knew well, though it never came so often for him as it did for humans.

Among the need-filled bodies had been that of Konala, whose soul’s birth-scream had brought him to the arctic fourteen years ago. He had been living in the Yucatan jungles when he heard it, dreaming dreams that had been scribed on Mayan stelae centuries before. The scream had driven him to his knees, forced blood in spurts from his eyes and ears. He knew the voice that cried out. It belonged to his own soul, which had died five hundred years ago when he became a vampire, and which was being reborn in the body of a tiny Innuit girl. He had known it would happen, if he waited long enough. And since that time he had been watching over the child as she grew with a vampire’s soul inside of her, a soul that offered Kainja a second chance to achieve a kind of humanity.