Call Down the Stars (16 page)

“Each of us sees the world through different eyes, and that’s the greatest gift any storyteller can bestow—the gift of vision, and the growth that comes in understanding that vision.”

“So is Qumalix still telling her stories?” Yikaas asked, interrupting Kuy’aa.

She glanced at him from the sides of her eyes and sighed like a mother with a child. “People were tired and hungry,” she said, “so the storytelling is over until tomorrow. But I hope you will come back with me then.”

“To hear Qumalix?”

“No. The people have asked me to tell the stories of Chakliux and Aqamdax. Will you come?”

“Of course I will come.”

Her pleased look brought a grudging smile to his lips, and he thought she would say more. She was usually a woman of many words. But she only said, “I’m hungry. Help me up.”

He stood and offered his arm, held her until she was steady on her feet.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

“Later,” he told her, and watched as she tottered away, awkward as a puffin on the sand.

Again the earthen lodge was full of people. Again Yikaas took one of the honored places reserved for storytellers, and as Kuy’aa began her stories, her voice carried him to times long ago. Once again he was captured by the tales of Chakliux and Aqamdax. He became the man who was animal-gift to the River People, and he found himself filled with Chakliux’s wisdom, with his strength.

It was nearly dawn when the old woman completed her tales. By that time new people had come and others had left, but the lodge was still full. Yikaas could see the light of Kuy’aa’s stories in the faces of those who listened. They had earned wisdom and new ideas. A fair exchange for a night of lost sleep.

He could see that Kuy’aa was tired, and he went to her so she could lean against him. He helped her up the notched log to the top of the lodge and down the slippery grass thatching of the roof.

“You need to sleep, Aunt,” he told her.

“How can I sleep, boy?” she asked him. “Chakliux and Aqamdax still dance in my head. I will walk for a little while in the wind, and when I am ready, I will sleep.” She lifted her chin at him and reached out with a wrinkled hand to stroke the wolf fur that rimmed his parka hood. “Go back and listen. Qumalix is the next storyteller. This time see what you can learn from her. Listen with a true heart, then come and tell me what you think.”

She turned and walked away from him, and he watched to be sure that her step was steady. When she reached the path that led to the beach, he climbed up the roof of the lodge and let himself in through the square opening that was smokehole as well as entrance.

Qumalix was in the storyteller place, and she was telling the same tale—the one about Daughter. But Yikaas had promised that he would listen, and so he took a place in the lodge, not one of the storytellers’ seats, but a cramped, dark niche near the climbing log. He listened not only as a storyteller but also as a man so he would learn without prejudice, so he would hear without jealousy.

Soon her voice pulled him away into another place. He forgot that he was sitting in a Sea Hunter lodge, listening to a Sea Hunter woman. Instead, he became Daughter. He became Water Gourd, and he saw the world anew.

Yunaska Island, The Aleutian Chain

6447 B.C.

D
AUGHTER PULLED THE OTTER
pelt more tightly around her shoulders and made herself as small as she could. They were out of the boat, and for that she was glad, but by some magic, the old woman had taken them inside the earth, and Daughter was afraid. By another kind of magic, the woman had made fire on a rock, and now she was doing something to the grandfather’s arm with knives and cutting stones.

Daughter allowed herself a glance at the thick layer of earth above them, and she wondered if they were dead, she and the grandfather and this old woman. She had seen the death rites for one of her aunts, how they put her in the ground. Had someone given them death rites and buried them?

The floor was covered with grass, cut and scattered. Daughter had dug one foot through it and found hard-packed earth underneath, like the floor in her own father’s
iori.
It gave her some comfort, that floor. To have dirt under her feet, not boat, not water.

As small as it was—a circle of flames dancing above a rock—the fire threw off a good amount of heat. Daughter, so long in the cold of their boat, shivered at the warmth. Over the stone, the old woman had hung a skin bag full of water. She had put all kinds of things into that water, though none of it seemed like food, unless dead people ate dust and leaves rather than fish.

The woman dipped into the bag with a bone ladle much like the one Daughter’s own mother had used, then she lifted the grandfather’s head and pressed the ladle to his mouth. The grandfather moaned, but though his eyes were closed, he drank. Suddenly he gasped, choked, and turned his head away. The old woman pinched his nose shut, and when he opened his mouth to take a breath, she poured the rest of the liquid down his throat. He gagged and choked again.

Daughter leapt to her feet and ran to his side, her small hands balled into fists, her teeth bared. The old woman looked at her, surprise rounding her eyes, but she tipped back her head and laughed. She spoke in words that Daughter did not understand, and as she spoke she used her hands to give the words meaning. She directed Daughter’s eyes toward the grandfather’s arm, swollen and purple and oozing pus. Then she raised a knife. The blade was so black and glossy that it looked like water frozen into stone. It caught the light from the fire and seemed to glow in the old woman’s hand.

She motioned to show Daughter that she would use the knife on the festering arm. The old woman had fed Daughter a piece of fish, and now it rose into Daughter’s throat. She leaned over and vomited on the floor. The woman hissed at her, shouted angrily, then pushed Daughter back toward her place against the earthen wall. Daughter hunkered on her haunches, and the old woman crouched beside the grandfather. Her knife flashed light. Daughter covered her eyes with her hands, tried to stop up her ears by hunching her shoulders as the grandfather cried out again and again.

When he finally stopped screaming, Daughter slowly took her hands from her eyes. The old woman had removed her feathered coat and was bare from the waist up. Her face was wet, as shiny as her knife, and little rivers of sweat made paths between her breasts.

Daughter gathered her courage and said, “Do not hurt him anymore.” But her voice was tiny, and it seemed as though the earth sucked up the sound of her words. The old woman did not even look up from what she was doing. There was a sharp crack, stone against bone, another garbled cry from the grandfather, and then the old woman lifted the severed arm.

Blood dripped to the grass on the floor, and Daughter turned her back, leaned her head against the cold earthen wall, and wept. What would the grandfather do without his arm? How could he carry water? How could he fish?

She stayed huddled beside the wall until the old woman came and pulled her away. Daughter kept her eyes squeezed shut to close out the remembrance of the blood and the knife. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself in fear that the old woman would decide to cut her as well, but the woman only picked her up and crooned a song in a voice that was rich and comforting.

At first Daughter held herself stiff and still, but finally she ventured to turn her head, look at the grandfather. He seemed to be asleep, his face peaceful, as if he dreamed good dreams. Daughter’s eyes filled with tears as she thought of his sadness when he awoke and saw that his arm was gone. If she could find it and somehow save it, then maybe the grandfather could sew it back on, like her mother sewed sleeves on a coat.

She scanned the floor for the arm. The bloodstained bundle was lying near a notched log that rose from the floor to a square hole in the earth. Above the hole it was dark. Did the log lead out into the night, or was the darkness only more dirt above them? When the old woman had taken them from the boat, there were other people who helped her, but one of them had wrapped Daughter in a fur blanket, had covered her so completely that she had not seen how they got down into the earth.

When the old woman finished her song, she gave Daughter water and more fish. The fish smelled good, like the smoke of a cooking fire, and Daughter tried to eat, but her throat seemed too small, and it was difficult for her to swallow. Finally the old woman gave her a cup of broth, but after one sip, Daughter drank no more. The woman made her a bed, padded with furs and layered with otter skins, sweet smelling, like the skins her own mother used for their beds.

She took the wooden cup from Daughter’s hands, said something that Daughter did not understand, then lifted her chin toward the bed. Daughter crept into the furs, made herself a nest, closed her eyes, and pretended to sleep. But as she lay there, she thought of how she and the grandfather could sew his arm back on. If the old woman had knives, she must have needles and sinew thread. Daughter had not yet learned to sew. Her mother had said she was too little for needles. But she had watched her mother and her grandmother, and she was sure she knew how. Perhaps even the grandfather knew a little. After all, when a man was away hunting or fishing, who else would repair his clothes but he himself?

She considered needles and thread, finger protectors made of hide, awls, and sewing knives, until finally they all danced together like wind-bent flowers. She watched them until it seemed as if she were again back in the boat, the sea rocking her, and she fell asleep.

Through the night, K’os kept vigil beside the old man. He was strong, that one. The arm had been so badly festered that he should have died days before. She placed a hand on his forehead. There were spirits of sickness in him, no doubt of that, but his pulse was steady.

She was glad that her husband Seal was away hunting. He probably would not have let her bring the man or his little girl into the ulax.

At least the chief hunter had not been so foolish. There were tales of others who had come to the First Men’s islands from distant shores, brought by storm winds. The chief’s own family was said to have ancestors who had arrived in such a way, so the storytellers said.

The old man’s boat was strange, unlike anything River People would build. None of the First Men had seen one like it, but if you could get beyond the stink, you could see that there was some merit in the way it was made. Even several hunters had commented on its stability in sea waves. But who would waste two good logs on building one boat when there was enough wood in them to make four or five iqyan? A greedy man, this one must be, those hunters had decided.

K’os had stood up for him, had told of lands where there were enough trees to make two handfuls of log boats for every hunter. They had considered what she said, but none of them had traveled much beyond their island, and her husband, the only trader among them, was not there to take her side. Surprisingly, K’os’s sister-wife Eye-Taker had. Boasting, she told of the many strange lands where their husband had traveled, of places where trees grew as thick as grass. And finally, with Eye-Taker’s words to back her, K’os had won permission to try to save the old man.

She could also keep the girl, the chief hunter said. At least until Seal returned from his hunting trip. Then the whole village would gather and decided what to do with both man and child.

After all, even thin and scabbed as she was, and also missing a toe, the girl was not ugly, and perhaps someday she could be a wife for one of their sons. Of course by the time she had learned to speak their language, she would have forgotten what she knew of her own people, where they lived and why they built their boats in such way, for she was not yet to the age of remembering. But the old man, he would know much, and the chief hunter was anxious to learn what he had to tell them. For the man was not River, nor even Caribou, and not North Tundra. All those people the First Men knew or at least had heard about. So yes, the chief hunter and the elders agreed, K’os should try to save him, and they would find places for Eye-Taker and her children in their ulas, since Eye-Taker had decided that the old man probably carried some curse. As long as he was sick, she and her children would leave Seal’s ulax and stay in a safer place.

But who would care if K’os were cursed? She was, after all, a River woman, old, and only a second wife.

When the gray of sunrise finally pushed back the night, K’os ate a chunk of dried fish and roused the old man enough to give him something to drink. He fought against her, but finally she managed to get some willow bark tea down his throat. The girl was still asleep, and for a moment K’os considered waking her, but then she decided to wait. She climbed out of the ulax into the dawn wind, and she walked to the beach, where the grandfather’s boat still lay, its tail in the waves.

She used a strip of driftwood to scrape the rotted meat and fish from the inside of the boat, then went back to the village and found several boys to help her. They approached the boat with fingers pinched over their noses, and even K’os could not keep from puckering her lips in distaste as the wind carried the smell to them.

“I need you to help me lift it past the reach of storm waves and into the shelter of those rocks,” K’os told them, raising her chin toward a hedge of rocks that sat above the rise of the beach.

“Why keep it?” one of the boys asked. “It will never lose its stink.”

“Perhaps the old man will want it someday,” K’os told him.

“My uncle says he will die, that his arm is too rotten.”

K’os shrugged her shoulders. “If he dies, he dies,” she said, “but for now we will move the boat.”

They complained, but they helped her, groaning and whining until K’os began complimenting them on their strength. Then they worked all the harder, each vying for her praise, and finally the boat was behind the rocks. The boys left her and ran back to the village, but K’os sat beside the boat, laid a hand on the wet, sated wood, and considered the gifts the sea had brought her—a good boat, and a daughter to raise more wisely than she had raised Chakliux.