Twelvetyde: A Short Mythical Story from Greenland Read online

  Contents

  Twelvetyde

  Map: Greenland

  Introduction

  Glossary

  Twelvetyde

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  Twelvetyde

  A Luui Angakkuarneq Short Story

  with David ‘Dave’ Bennett

  Introduction

  Twelvetyde is a short story featuring Luui Angakkuarneq from the Greenland Missing Persons series and Northwind. It follows directly on from Northwind, with more mythical magic and mayhem.

  However, this story also introduces a new character as a direct result of a Kickstarter campaign. Backers had the opportunity to pledge for a campaign reward and be written into a short story alongside a character of their choice.

  The story itself remains true to the typical storyline and setting readers will recognise from other Christmas stories with Luui, with the added bonus of a personal touch.

  Chris

  December 2022

  Denmark

  Glossary of West Greenlandic words

  aap – yes

  ana – grandmother

  anaana – mother

  angakkoq – shaman

  Arsarnerit – Northern Lights

  ata – grandfather

  ataata – father

  eeqqi – no (East Greenland)

  iiji – yes (East Greenland)

  imaqa – maybe

  naamik – no

  Juulimaaq – Santa Claus/Father Christmas

  Juullimi Pilluarit – Merry Christmas (singular)

  Juullimi Pilluaritsi – Merry Christmas (plural)

  kaffemik – celebration/party

  kamikker/kamiks – sealskin boots

  mattak – whale skin and blubber delicacy

  qajaq – kayak

  qujanaq – thank you

  suna? – what?

  terianniaq – fox

  Tupilaq/Tupilak – a small magical figure made by shaman

  Tupilaat – more than one Tupilaq/Tupilak

  tuttu – reindeer

  ukaleq – Arctic hare

  Twelvetyde

  1

  Luui Angakkuarneq received the letter during the period of Twelvetide, between Christmas Day and the fifth of January. It wasn’t a Greenlandic holiday, and not something Luui celebrated or even thought about, but it obviously meant something to the sender of the letter as they signed it Twelvetyde, and Twelvetide was the only thing Luui could link it to. That the letter was written in ink from a narwhal kidney upon a thin patch of sealskin, tied with a knot of tough Arctic sedge, and delivered on a breath of wind from the south bothered Luui far less than the signature, and not at all when she read the contents of the letter in the flame light leaking out of the glass window of the pot-bellied stove in her cabin in the Svartenhuk Mountains, north of Uummannaq, seven hundred kilometres above the Arctic Circle on the west coast of Greenland.

  “Twelvetyde wants me to go to Nuuk,” she said, reading it once more. “Why?”

  The cabin was silent, but for the crackle and spit of driftwood burning in the stove. Luui reached for the mug of Christmas tea she had made – her father’s favourite – and turned the letter in the light, wondering if there was more to it than a summons to Greenland’s capital city by the mysterious Twelvetyde. But no matter which way she turned it, the letter revealed nothing more than the roughly scripted words.

  She put the letter down on the blackwood floor of the cabin, crossed her legs and sipped her tea. Luui glanced at the letter with every other sip – still curious, and, if she was honest, more than a little annoyed that she had to leave her cabin.

  There was no alternative.

  Even if she knew the sender’s identity, the nature of the letter and its composition with a generous dose of Arctic magic wrapped around it, suggested it was important and that she could not refuse.

  Luui finished her tea, rolled and tied the letter into a stiff tube, and set about packing for her journey.

  “By boat,” she whispered as she selected the clothes she would wear, including a set of casual clothes more becoming of a twenty-eight-year-old woman in Greenland’s biggest city. She gathered everything into a slingpack, dressed in furs and rubber boots for the journey, and then left the cabin.

  Luui left the stove burning for the Qamallarlutik – the tiny fur-clad brother and sister who lived in the small cave behind her cabin – together with a note explaining where she was going. She hadn’t seen them for a few days, and since Aunix Cobick, Luui’s pilot friend, had flown south to pick up spare parts for her plane, Luui had no real reason to stay in the cabin.

  She shut the door and then trudged through the snow to the small beach below the cabin.

  “Why Nuuk?” she mused, breath steaming in front of her face all the way to her father’s very old, and very beaten dinghy.

  2

  Since the sea ice had failed to settle over the past decade of winters, Luui had no trouble sailing the dinghy into the dark waters of Uummannaq fjord. The Northern Lights drifted in the winter sky above her, and Luui watched them for a moment, enjoying the playful twists and drapes of the green spectral curtains before picking a point on the horizon and adjusting her course according to the moon.

  It was a long way to Nuuk, but Luui hoped she might persuade a friend or two to help her shorten the journey. Since letting her father’s spirit rest, Luui had graduated from shaman’s daughter to shaman, and it seemed to her that the change had made it a little more difficult to entice one helper spirit or another out of the spirit world to assist her.

  “As if I had a rebate for being a daughter. Now I have to pay the full price.”

  She didn’t know if that was the case, and without her father’s spirit to ask, she could only guess at this and wonder at that. Luui pushed the thought to the back of her mind and concentrated on reaching the top of the peninsular marking the entrance to the fjord and the beginning of the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn’t unheard of for small boats to make long journeys in the depths of a Greenland winter, but without the calming influence of the ice, the sea was at the mercy of the winds, and the cold pinch of air on Luui’s cheeks made her question her chosen method of transport.

  A sledge with a big team would have been preferable. But even before the climate changed, journeys up and down the coast with dogs were few and far between.

  “If Ataata had been here…”

  Luui left the sentence unfinished as she knew that even a powerful shaman such as Tuukula Angakkuarneq could not freeze a fjord, let alone an ocean, even if she only needed a strip of thick, smooth ice along the coastline.

  “I have to be more inventive,” she said, adjusting her grip on the tiller as the waves grew larger the closer she came to crossing the imaginary line between the fjord and the ocean.

  Boundaries on maps were a human thing, rarely respected by spirits. And yet, once they were committed to paper, a boundary line existed in the human world. When the authorities made the effort to patrol fishing grounds – more invisible boundaries drawn on a map – some spirits took notice. When their curiosity was sufficiently piqued, some of them even began to visit the different boundaries, bringing dark Arctic magic to dark winter waters. Luui steered to a point she guessed was right on the line, or as close as possible.

  She cut the power to the outboard motor and let the small fibreglass dinghy
drift as she, in turn, drifted in her mind, thinking of the different things she might offer a spirit in return for their help, and waiting for a nibble to see who might be tempted to come.

  3

  The dinghy drifted. Luui shivered inside her furs, wondering when the cold had seeped in, and where the gap might be so she could plug it. But then, in the distance, the moon lit a sliver of something white in the water. Luui held her breath and let the steam of her last breath drift away so she could see more clearly. The white sliver drifted closer, close enough that Luui could see it was a big qajaq, with brushed skin stretched across and around a large driftwood frame bound with knots of sealskin cord. She had built one once and experienced a prick of memory at the very tips of her fingers and her teeth as she remembered tying the cord tightly and biting it when she ran out of fingers. The qajaq drifted closer, and she saw the round rim of the wooden cockpit, and the tight cords strapped on the deck with a large paddle and a harpoon secure beneath them. Luui nodded when she spotted the sealskin sac behind the cockpit and the cord coiled beside it. She knew the sac would act as a float, keeping the hunter’s prey at the surface once he had harpooned it. But it was the determined course of the qajaq that interested her most, as, despite the growing waves, the sharp bow of the qajaq ploughed through the waters unhindered.

  And then she saw it.

  The curious kick of the stern – just as sharp as the bow – as it lifted in a one-two, one-two fashion, as if the qajaq was propelled by paddle feet.

  Luui took a closer look at the bow, glimpsing the pair of sharp tusks under the hull when the bow crested a wave, and again, exposed in the trough, before the qajaq slipped into another ocean swell.

  “Kisermaaq,” Luui whispered as she recognised the helper spirit who had answered her call.

  Luui breathed again and then yanked the cord to start the outboard motor. She throttled up to sail alongside the qajaq, suddenly conscious that the qajaq was three times longer than her dinghy. As she drew closer, Kisermaaq lifted its bow to reveal the tusks – easily the length of Luui’s forearms – and the black eyes in its skull, close to the forward rim of the cockpit, but normally hidden beneath the surface of the water.

  “I need your help, Kisermaaq,” Luui said as she looked into the spirit’s eye.

  Kisermaaq was not the most talkative of spirits, and Luui waited, as still and patient as the cold allowed, for Kisermaaq to decide whether or not to help the young shaman.

  There was little Luui could offer Kisermaaq that the spirit did not already possess, but she knew that, despite being fully at home in even the roughest waters around Greenland, Kisermaaq often lacked direction, and when Luui suggested a need to go in one specific direction, not just a random destination, Kisermaaq bumped the side of its hull against Luui’s dinghy. Luui throttled down, clicked the outboard motor out of gear, and stopped the engine. She tilted the outboard out of the water, secured the dinghy’s painter to the lines behind Kisermaaq’s cockpit, and then climbed onto the qajaq. She slipped inside the cockpit and sent a mental wave of gratitude to the spirit, as the cockpit was deep enough to shelter from the wind. And then, as Kisermaaq propelled the qajaq through the water with two great paddle-like paws close to the stern, Luui settled down to sleep as Kisermaaq paddled through the long winter night.

  4

  Luui woke when the wind slapped her face with a chilly gust, and she opened her eyes. Kisermaaq was gone, and she was back in her dinghy, drifting off the coast of Nuuk with a large fishing trawler powering towards her.

  Luui blinked in the sun.

  The sun!

  And then gathered her senses.

  There would be time for adapting to Nuuk’s more southerly climes later, just as soon as she lowered the outboard into position, yanked the starter cord…

  “Why won’t it start?”

  … pumped the small balloon to push fuel into the motor …

  Luui looked up as the captain of the trawler gave her a blast with the foghorn.

  She pulled back the choke. Yanked the cord. And then grinned as the motor caught, coughing into life as Luui throttled it up and down, clicked out of neutral, into forward gear, and surged out of the trawler’s path with a wave to the captain, and a belated qujanaq intended for Kisermaaq, wherever he was. Luui throttled down to a more sedate speed and followed the coastline into Nuuk fjord, where she picked a course to the pontoon in the old part of the city she remembered from her childhood.

  “It feels like a long time ago,” she said, waving at a small fleet of pleasure boats loaded with families heading to a cabin to celebrate what she guessed would be New Year deeper in the fjord.

  Luui smiled when she spotted the pontoon – smaller than she remembered – and tied up alongside it ten minutes later. A rumble and growl in her belly dictated her next stop, and she changed into her city clothes – jeans, fleece shirt, a slim duvet jacket, and a pair of worn winter boots – before going into the city in search of food. She stashed her furs and rubber boots under the thwart seat and hoped she might find a café that might be open between Christmas and New Year.

  Luui paused at the end of the pontoon, blinking in the sun reflecting off the glass of the mini skyscrapers – more than she remembered – poking above the city skyline, and then smiled again as the sun caught the peak of Ukkusissaq, rising modestly above the city.

  “Pretty,” she said, and headed into town.

  5

  Everything was closed for the Christmas holidays. Almost everything. Luui opened the door of a small café in a row of tourist shops overlooking the fjord. The windows were frosted as the breath of the guests inside patterned the windows. Luui opened the door, started at the unexpected ring of an old-fashioned bell, and then smiled at the guests as she recovered. The tables were small, draped with red cotton tablecloths and decorated with candles set in fancy holders carved from whalebone. Luui searched for an empty chair and found one at a table for two closest to the window. While she might normally choose to sit alone, with no alternative, and a surprisingly warm feeling flooding her body at the sight of the sun, Luui approached the man at the table and asked if she could join him.

  “Ah,” he said, as he looked up from what Luui thought was a sketchpad, “I only speak English. But if you’d like to join me, you are very welcome.”

  Luui studied the man’s face for a second, noting the thick grey hair, generously thick glasses he wore, and his moustache – bushy and flecked with brown, remnants of his youth.

  “I’d like that,” she said, switching to English.

  “And I’d like the company,” he said. The man offered his hand and introduced himself as, “David Bennett. You can call me Dave.”

  Luui shook his hand and said, “Luui Angakkuarneq.”

  “That’s quite a mouthful,” Dave said, resting his hands on the table.

  “Just Luui,” Luui said. She leaned forward to look at Dave’s sketch book. “Those are really good.”

  “Doodles, really,” Dave said. He picked up the book and turned the page towards Luui. “Can you tell what they are?”

  “Birds?”

  “Yes.”

  Luui looked out of the window at the gulls and ravens squabbling over something in the street. “Those birds. Just chunkier.”

  “Caricatures, but yes.” Dave smiled. “Those birds. Although…” He put the book down with a sigh. “I’ve been drawing birds for quite a few years now.” He turned his left hand in the light of the candle, revealing a parched and wrinkled skin that reminded Luui of her father. “Quite a few years.”

  “Then you should draw something else,” Luui said.

  “I should, and I would, but I need a little inspiration.” Dave smiled and said, “It’s why I came back to Greenland.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “A few times,” Dave said. Another smile. “Had a few adventures.” He looked at Luui, tilted his head as he studied her face, the deep brown eyes, light scarring on her cheeks, and
the dark, unkempt, black hair she wore short, “And practical,” he whispered.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your hair,” Dave said. “I said it’s very practical.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “I think you might have had a few adventures.” Dave held up his hand as Luui’s cheeks coloured. “Gosh, that sounds like I just called you old. I do apologise. Not intended.”

  “Not offended,” Luui said.

  “I think it’s because I’m old. My wife – Jill – said I needed an adventure. She said I was moping about the house. I said I was too old for adventures, but she wouldn’t listen. She sent me packing. In fact,” he said, pausing as he remembered something. “I think she might have packed for me, arranged for one of our nieces to drive me to the airport, and shipped me to Greenland.”

  “She shipped you?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. “Sent by freight. Much cheaper.” He waited for Luui to laugh, and then nodded as a young waitress approached their table. “Let me buy you breakfast.”

  “Oh I…”

  “My treat. And,” he said, once Luui agreed, “in return, you can tell me of your adventures. Perhaps I will find some inspiration for my next doodle.”

  “Okay,” Luui said, with a smile. “It’s a deal.”

  6

  “A giant worm?” Dave said as Luui took another forkful of sausage. “Do you know,” he said, after a long pause. “I was about to say you were making it all up, but, honestly, I don’t think you are, are you?”

  “I can’t lie,” Luui said. “But neither do I tell many people about my adventures.”

  “But this Northwind…”

  “She’s still blowing.”

  “And the cheeky one…” Dave looked down at a note he had scribbled beside his ravens. “Oh, I can’t say it. And I certainly can’t spell it.”