Song of the River (11 page)

He motioned for the man to hold the knife closer, and studied it carefully. There must have been a struggle. Some of the hair that wrapped the handle was torn. It hung like a black fringe from the carved antler haft. Cen’s thoughts tangled into one another. For a moment he could not remember anything anyone had given him for his knives. Furs? Yes, he was sure of it. Probably fishskin baskets.

“You see,” Cen said, pointing with his chin at the knife, “the handle is loose. The hunter who traded me these knives was from the Caribou People. He glues the handle to the stone blade with spruce pitch.”

“What does that matter to us?” the younger man asked.

No, the glue would not matter to them, but the words would slow the people down, make them think. When men took time to think, they were less apt to act in anger. Cen’s words also seemed to calm his own thoughts, and he suddenly remembered what he needed to know.

“You bought such a knife,” he said, looking into Sok’s face, seeing in Sok’s eyes the slight widening of surprise. Cen turned to another man. “And you,” he said. He pointed to several others, even tilted his head toward one of the men who held him. “You also,” he said.

“Yes,” said the man holding him, and released his grip on Cen’s shoulder. The hunter pushed up his sleeve to show a knife in a sheath strapped above his wrist. “I still have it.”

“Mine, also, I have,” said another man, and another. Sok, still standing before the trader, held up a knife. Other knives went up, more knives than Cen had traded to these men, many more knives. At another place, another time, he would have laughed.

But why not show a knife? Better to claim having one than to be accused of killing.

The large man, still holding the murder knife, turned to look at the hunters, at their blades lifted to the sky. In that moment, with one arm free and people no longer watching him, Cen moved quickly to grab the weapon from the large man’s hand. He roared, but Cen turned the knife toward him, then toward the other man who still held him. That one, a village elder, let him go.

But there were too many of them, and too many weapons. Cen could never get away. Besides, how far could he run with ribs broken, eyes nearly swollen shut? The men were wary. Why be the first to close in on the trader? Why be the one to feel his blade? If he had killed once, he would not hesitate to kill again.

“One of you traded for this knife,” Cen said. He continued to hold the blade out, and he circled slowly as he spoke. The men were quiet, but all watched, waited, their own knives in their hands. “One of you killed the woman, and this man’s grandfather.” Cen lifted his chin toward Sok. “One of you tried to kill my son. For that, I will kill you, whoever you are. If I do not find you during my life, I will find you after I am dead, when I am spirit and can move without being seen.

“I tell each of you this. I did not kill anyone. I did not hurt my son.”

Cen steadied his feet against the earth. What good were words if dizziness claimed him?

Suddenly an image came to him, something he had long ago tried to put out of his mind—a mourning ceremony he had seen far to the north, among people he could not now even give a name. A woman had lost her husband, a father his son. They had cut themselves with knives to show their sorrow. That in itself was not so unusual, but the woman had also cut off a finger, the man a strip of flesh from the calf of his leg.

Blood for blood, Cen thought, and called out, “I lift my own voice in mourning.” He looked at Sok. “I mourn the man you called grandfather,” Cen said. “I mourn the woman who was mother and wife among you.”

He waited, but no one moved toward him; no one spoke.

“I did not kill them,” he said again. “And I did not injure my son. I lift my voice to spirits who might call my son to their world. I offer blood for blood. Mine for his.”

Cen clenched his jaw. They wanted blood, like dogs panting for the lungs of newly killed caribou. He could see it in their eyes. Did these men hope it would ease their pain? Or did they need to show their own strength? Did they believe that if they controlled the power to kill it could not be used against them?

“Blood for blood,” Cen said again. He thrust the thin chert blade into his leg and peeled away a long curl of skin. The pain was more than he had imagined. Darkness closed in around his eyes. He clenched his teeth and waited until his mind cleared, then lifting the flap of skin, he cut it away from his leg and threw it on the ground. “To show my sorrow,” he said.

He bent over and picked up a fist-sized rock from the edge of the closest hearth fire. Sok moved toward him, but Cen held up his knife. “A trade with the spirits,” he explained.

He slipped the rock into his left hand then pressed it against his chest. He gripped the knife and with all his strength cut down across his smallest finger, just above the middle joint. The blade bit through his flesh, a high, screaming pain, then into his bone. Cen felt the deep ache as the knife penetrated and crushed. He did not stop until the blade reached stone.

The severed finger fell to the ground, and Cen dropped the rock. “A trade with the spirits,” he said again. With the dripping blade, he pointed at the finger. “For my son’s life.”

Sok caught him as he fell.

Chapter Six

THE FIRST MEN VILLAGE

SALMON LEANED FORWARD AND
ran his fingers over Aqamdax’s face. He smelled of fish, but his touch was warm, and she felt the slow tightening of her belly. He moved his hand down to cup her left breast.

“It has been a long time for me,” he said, his words a whisper.

Aqamdax looked away from him. He had come to her in the middle of the day, interrupted her basket weaving, and when he saw she was alone in the ulax, began talking in sweet and cunning words. His first wife was in her fifth month of pregnancy with their third child. His other wife, a woman who had the same number of summers as Aqamdax, had just given him a daughter. For the sake of his hunting, Salmon should discipline himself to wait.

But why worry about Salmon’s hunting or think about his wives? Only two days ago Aqamdax had thought she would soon be wife. She had believed Day Breaker’s whispered promises, but this morning, as she sat with He Sings and his four wives, Day Breaker came to them, announced he would marry Smiles Much, a woman whose mother and father lived in the village, a woman with four strong brothers. Later, when Day Breaker and He Sings had gone to visit the father of Smiles Much, Aqamdax had heard Grass Eyes and Fish Taker whispering. They giggled behind their hands, saying that Smiles Much already carried Day Breaker’s child in her belly, that she had missed three moons of bleeding.

Then Aqamdax knew Day Breaker’s promises had been lies, told to give him access to her bed.

So why should she hesitate to enjoy Salmon, even in the middle of the day? The village women already despised her, spat after her as she walked by. Aqamdax did not care. They only envied her beauty. They saw the desire in their husbands’ eyes when she passed. They knew their sons sought her out when the light was long in summer evenings.

Salmon thrust aside his breechcloth and lay over Aqamdax, pushing her back on the woven grass mats which covered the ulax floor. His fingers fumbled at the strings that secured her grass aprons, long woven panels, one hanging from her waist in front, the other hanging over her buttocks, the only clothing First Men women wore inside the ulax.

Salmon’s fingers were large and clumsy, and he had not yet succeeded in untying the aprons when Aqamdax heard a screech and knew it was Grass Eyes.

Aqamdax chided herself for her foolishness in not taking Salmon with her into her sleeping place. Though Grass Eyes would have known what they were doing, at least she would have seen nothing, and Aqamdax could have denied the woman’s accusations.

Salmon scrambled to his feet, grabbed his parka and ran. He paused long enough to allow Grass Eyes to jump off the notched log propped on a slant from the ulax floor to the square entrance hole in the roof. Then he climbed the log and was outside before Grass Eyes’s screams could become words.

Aqamdax would not even look at her. Instead, she straightened her aprons and pushed her long hair back over her ears. Then she curled one corner of her lips into the smile she knew Grass Eyes hated.

Grass Eyes picked up the basket Aqamdax had been making. It was a large, open-weave basket, made for gathering. She threw it at Aqamdax.

“You are worthless,” she cried. “All the women of this village are ashamed when they see you. You are worse than your mother. Don’t you know the men laugh at you? How can you be that stupid? Get out of my sight. I curse the day your mother left you!”

Aqamdax picked up the basket. “Look at this basket,” she said, speaking to Grass Eyes in a quiet voice. “It is better than anything you can make, yet you tell me I am worthless. No one in this village weaves as well as I do. I weave until my eyes burn and my fingers bleed. You trade my baskets and keep the trade goods, then tell me I am worthless. Have you forgotten that Fish Taker is so lazy she does not scrape the edges of hides, but instead leaves them rough and stiff? What about Spotted Leaf? Her fingers are so slow, it would take her a year to make one sax, even using cormorant skins. And I do not have to tell you that Turn Around is only a child. What can she do except please your husband in his bed? Perhaps you are the one who is worthless. Why else would He Sings need three other wives? You must not know how to please him.” Aqamdax smiled. “I will be glad to teach you.”

Grass Eyes hooked her fingers into claws and ran at Aqamdax. Aqamdax grabbed her birdskin sax from the floor where she had laid it and escaped up the climbing log. She slid down the side of the ulax, ignoring the burn of ice and frozen grass on her bare legs, then ran toward the beach.

The ground was cold under her bare feet. She had been foolish not to take her seal flipper boots. She did not like the feel of them. They were hard against her bones, always trying to shape her feet into the narrow daintiness favored by Spotted Leaf, the chief’s third wife—but they were better than walking barefoot in snow. Aqamdax pulled on her sax. It was long, fashioned in the traditional manner of the First Men, hanging loose well past her knees. She crouched beside a hummock of beach grass, her back to the wind, and tucked the sax around her legs and under her feet.

She hated living in the chief’s ulax, but what choice had she been given? Without father or grandparents living, and her mother no longer in the village, she had to stay where the elders decided.

Aqamdax tried to think back to the night her mother had left, but with each year that passed, the memory dimmed, and now it seemed almost like a dream.

Daes had come into the sleeping place she and Aqamdax shared. She came whispering her love, then told Aqamdax she was leaving the village, that she was going to the River People. Aqamdax, crying, had begged to go with her, but her mother said the trader would not take both of them. She promised to return, to bring gifts. So Aqamdax had stayed in the sleeping place and only later realized that she did not know which trader her mother meant, or to which River village they were traveling.

During the first year, even in winter, Aqamdax had gone to the beach each day, had waited and watched. She asked every trader who came to the village if he had heard anything about her mother. None had.

She had heard the village women’s gossip. They said her mother had run away to be with that trader, but Aqamdax knew the true reason her mother had left.

A moon before, Aqamdax’s father had drowned while hunting. After his death, anger took root inside Aqamdax’s chest, and she lashed out at everyone, even her mother, until Daes had left with the first man who showed any interest in her.

Aqamdax’s throat tightened, but she did not allow herself to cry. Tears would not return her father to life or bring her mother back from the River People. Tears would not even help her live through another day with the chief hunter’s wives.

They hated her, those four women. Each was so sure she was the most important woman in the village: Grass Eyes, because she was the chief’s first wife; Fish Taker, because she had borne the most children; Spotted Leaf, for her beauty; and Turn Around, because she was the chief’s favorite.

The first two years Aqamdax lived in He Sings’s ulax, she had hoped he would claim her as daughter. She would have been assured of a husband. Who would hesitate to take the chief hunter’s daughter as wife? But when anything went wrong, she was blamed. The sister-wives raised their eyebrows and clacked their tongues, whispered behind their hands and watched her from slitted eyes.

Finally, when Aqamdax realized she had no hope of ever pleasing them, she spent her nights thinking of ways to make them angry. Why not have the fun of mischief when she was blamed for every problem anyway?

How did Spotted Leaf’s necklace get into the bottom of Fish Taker’s sewing basket? Why did Turn Around eat the berries Grass Eyes was saving for their husband? And the beautiful parka Grass Eyes made, how did it happen to fall apart the first time the chief wore it?

Each year Aqamdax assured herself some hunter would ask for her as wife—perhaps one of the old men, perhaps someone very young—then she would be able to leave the chief hunter’s ulax. All the girls she had grown up with, her childhood playmates, were wives. Most of them had babies, but no man claimed Aqamdax.

Then Day Breaker had begun sneaking into her sleeping place at night….

Aqamdax lifted her eyes to look out over the bay. Jagged chunks of ice layered the beach, and a wind blew from the west, ruffling the feathers of Aqamdax’s sax. She lifted her shoulders so the high collar rim covered her ears. She needed a parka, an otter fur parka with a hood like the Walrus Hunters wore, but where would she get the pelts to make such a thing?

She could ask the men who slept with her, but they might get angry and stop coming. Then how could she bear the loneliness? Her only hope was to get pregnant, claim the child belonged to the hunter most able to accept her as wife. Yet, in spite of all the men she had pleasured, she had never missed a moon blood time.