Born of the Wind

I wrote this doped up on cold medicine and hallucinating with a 102 degree fever. I started doodling and drew this androgynous Inuit-looking kid and named him/her Nyjhrr. Then I decided that a name that cool HAD to mean something, so I decided it meant

 

I am Nyjhrr, child born of the wind.  I have seen many winters, and the devastation they bring to my people.  It harshest and most brutal for the children, the young babes barely weaned from their mother’s breasts, and most of them do not survive long enough for the days to outlast the nights.  Because of this, my people have always been practical enough to never threaten the good of the tribe for the uncertain good of the children.  When winter comes and food is scarce, we select the youngest and oldest, the weakest of us, like the polar wolves select their prey, and leave us to the torrents of the weather, and the terrors of the wild. 

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One such devastating winter, all the babies and many of the oldest tribesmembers were to venture to the woods, with only snow to shield them from the wind’s harsh caresses.

            There were five babies and eleven elders sent away that night, and they were honored and anointed for their sacrifice; everyone, from chief to sapling warrior child, murmured blessings over the selected.  At the lodge, the rest of the tribe danced the dance for the dead, danced for meat and furs, and danced to warm the earth with their calloused footprints around the fire pit; the danced with pointy ribs and distended bellies; they danced to draw back the sun.

            While the tribe was dancing, the eleven elders marched far into the long night, babes in their arms and in bundles on their backs.  Their proud feeling of sanctity and honor soon faded, when empty bellies from fasting began to grumble, and bones weary with age began to creak in protest.  Waning, they continued, keeping the vow of silence as they journeyed the three-night’s trek into the black howls of the frozen steppe.

            After three nights of journeying, rarely stopping and eating only snow to sooth their burning throats, the elders—their number decreased to ten—formed a wide circle, an arm’s length from each other; they passed around those babies that had survived; there were four: a boy and three girls.  While passing them in the circle, they mumbled prayers to them, blessing them with bear fat grease and sacred herbs.

            Then, when all four babies had been blessed by each of the elders, the babes were placed in the center of the circle.  For eight days, the elders sat in that circle, maintaining their vows of silence, fasting, and never touching each other.  Kirdaath the elder was the Presider.

            He sat, silent and still and wrinkled as an ancient oak, gnarled and wise, his wind-burned dark skin scratched and bleeding as he stared with closed eyes straight ahead of him.  The first night, a baby died, one of the girls; by the second day, two of the elders had crossed.  One of them, Mona, had wailed and shrieked; she could not bear listing to the crying of the babies, could not sit mere feet from them, listening to their piercing howls in fear and cold and hunger, doing nothing at all, until the baying of the wind was the only sound, and she knew she had listened to someone’s death.

            By the second night, the little boy was dead.  Roth, Tynarr, and Selak had joined him.  It would not be long.

            Night and day passed that way; Kirdaath found himself listening to Thurff’s singing and rambling, rather than silencing his descent into madness with the Oath.  How much could oaths matter now, anyway?  Oaths were for the people swearing them, and what was the point when no one was listening?

            By the beginning of the fourth night, only Kirdaath and one female child had survived.  Kirdaath had suspected grey-eyed Shirda of feeding her on bear’s fat and herbs left over from the anointment, but Shirda was long dead.  The last hours--how long?--had been long and tedious; as the oldest, even of the elders, he had prepared himself for these days, and spent them in meditation, and even celebration, preparing himself for his reward in the next world; his death-right as longest survivor, Presider of the dead.

            But on that last, desperate night, Kirdaath ached to die, ached for the baby to die; it takes much energy to force one’s body to live on, when one’s heart threatened to stop at any moment.  Kirdaath lived those long, dragging hours with a constant battle raging between body and spirit, and in that way, he envied those who were able to simply let their mortality claim them as it will, naturally.  Kirdaath had forbidden himself to die until all the others were safely on the other side, until he had no reason to sit vigil over their empty husks.

            The wind was baying, a dying wolf and an enraged pack chasing the sky through valleys and snowdrifts and ice-stilled pines.  Sometimes it could have reached the skies on the other side of the world.  Joining the haunting and ethereal choir of winter was the guttural cry of a swaddling babe, it’s voice throaty and raw, and very much alive.

            Kirdaath sighed and resigned himself to outlast the babe.  He spent the night in agony of body and conflict of soul, wanting desperately to stop his concentration, to let his spirit seep gratefully from his empty body, and soar away beyond that forests and mountains.  But first, he knew he must wait.

            Kirdaath listened as winds and wolves and the child crecendoed their pleas and protests, wailing to bring down the night upon the circle, wailing as if to split the earth itself, and drown the moon in the rivers that ran beneath.  He listened as the wolves ceased, and even the wind retired to its caves in the mountains.  But still the child kept crying; it wailed its outrage to the sky, to the moon, to the gods themselves.  It howled to the stark and naked trees, and to the ice of the frozen tundra.  But once it howled to the dawn’s chill light, Kirdaath heard only silence.

            It is a barren winter, numb and desolate; a snowy owl flies home ahead of grey sunlight, over a circle of ten, with four in the middle.  Fourteen, and only one left alive.  Not even scavengers had ventured here; the frozen corpses lay, untouched as vestals, porcelain and pale.  In the silence of the dawning day, only the sound of the owl’s wings was heard.  From a circle of dead, between two chill and preserved bodies, a tiny eyelid fluttered, dislodging snowflakes on the delicate lashes.  The babe wailed once again, the last of its human audience gone; and the wind and wolves joined in the chorus.

            I am Nyjhrr, child born of the wind.

Author's Note

I KNOW everybody should have died much sooner. And that the whole premise is stupid. I was out of my mind! The point is...err...doesn't it sound COLD?

Reviews

[Khef Kha]

I enjoyed the story. The pacing isn't bad although the first paragraph took a second reading to understood fully.