The World Above the Sky (23 page)

“The starving time is past,” Keswalqw assured him. “The dogs chased three deer onto a frozen lake.”

Henry clung to Keswalqw. “Hard hooves on harder ice. Legs splayed. They fell time and again. Didn't they? At last they could only stand and await their end, poor things. You took them easily. Torn flesh. Cracked bones. Blood spilled. All blood is God's blood. Wolves and men. We drink it.”

“Yes. We do. There is plenty for all.”

“Is the great hall prepared for feasting, Sir Athol?” he asked.

“My Lord?”

“Does my wife Igidia await me?”

“She will, Henry. Soon enough. Now put one foot before you. I say, put one foot before the other. Good, Henry. Good. Now, another step...”

“Are my daughters with her?”

“Where you left them. Sheltered in the outer Orkney Isles. Where else would they be?”

“Not here?”

“No.”

Sunlight flooded the maple grove. Henry raised his grateful face to the sky. Beneath his feet Henry felt the frozen earth begin its spring surrender.

“Ah, yes. I remember now. Yes. Where we left them.”

A sudden jubilation of sound filled the air. Migrating geese in a perfect chevron high above angled to the north.

On the Earth World below, Henry's weight rested on the shoulders of his friends.

“This is a strange, bewitching land,” he said.

“Aye, laddie,” Athol replied. “It is that.”

THE SKY WORLD

Spring, 1399

• • •

Eugainia arched backward, exposing her chest and throat to the warming rays of the sun. She worked sheaths of low-back muscle with the heels of her palms. She straightened, bent forward, let her arms hang loose. Her hair screened her face and brushed the crusted snow. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk'd found himself utterly unable to read her mood these days. He'd been rebuffed repeatedly by she whose heart and mind had become as available to him as his own. He stepped behind her. His fisted knuckles dug into knots on either side of her spine. He rolled the pressure downward, dissolving tension from her shoulder blades, then down rib by rib to her lower sacrum.

Eugainia sighed with pleasure, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk with relief. Perhaps her foul mood was lifting at last.

“After autumn, spring's my favourite time of year,” he ventured.

Eugainia did not reply.

“Except for summer, which is wonderful,” he continued. “I like summer too much.”

“Very much,” Eugainia corrected.

“Very much. And there's something about a good, snowy winter...”

He waited. Again, nothing.

“But spring!
E'ee
! Grandfather Sun stirs in his sleep.” Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk allowed his hands to rest on Eugainia's hips. “He wakes. His gaze grows strong.” His hands slipped down her outer thighs. “He concentrates his Power.” He pressed against her. “The frozen world concedes.” She did not step away. “The earth becomes soft and warm. Receptive. Yielding. But—” he hastened to add when he felt her stiffen, “—not submissive. Grandmother Moon wakes the seeds, urges roots to grow.”

Eugainia gently, but firmly, pushed him away. “I'm feeling very cranky and altogether ungoddesslike this morning.”

“Oh?”

“I need something.”

“What?”

“I don't know. Something human. I don't know what.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk embraced her again. She remained inert, incapable it seemed of either flight or concession.

“I know what it is,” he whispered in her ear.

“No, not that.”

“Are you certain?”

Eugainia untangled his fingers, laced low on her belly.

“Men. You're all the same. You think the solution to every problem lies at the tip of your guign. The entire world revolves around that tiny unblinking eye.”

“You speak from much personal experience?” He slipped his hands into the hip-slits of her buckskin dress.

His fingers slid down. Her resolve wavered.

“No,” he whispered. “No
guign
here.”

“Get away from me...” Her annoyance was edged with amusement. She pressed back against him.

“Your mouth says stop, but your body says
e'eee
…!”

Eugainia fled. More or less. Running on snowshoes remained all but impossible. She huffed and puffed with frustration, aware the ungainly lift and fall of her big round feet over banks of soggy snow rendered her vulnerable and, even worse, ridiculous.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk pursued at a leisurely pace. He soon held his willing captive again. “Are you sure? Most times my
guign
is right!”

“Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, I'm confused,” she muttered, irritated by the pleasure of practised fingers bedevilling her ribs.

“Yes. I can tell.”

“I thought I was, but I'm not in the mood.”

“There's always later. We await your command.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk sped off, the essence of efficiency, to a plateau of bare rock angled out into the heart of the swollen stream. He executed a cartwheel, the wood-rimed snowshoes ringing on the rock surface, their silly clop-clop sound at odds with his elegant athleticism. He executed a second perfect cartwheel in a tight little clop-clop loop. Eugainia laughed aloud in spite of herself. He spun another. Then another...clop-clop spin. Clop-clop spin. Clop-clop spin....Seven complete revolutions brought him full circle.

Clop-clop stop.

He landed upright, four-square, still as a tree, nose to nose with his cranky, unable-to-conceal-her-love lover. He leaned forward. She pulled back. He caught the front of her robe, gently pulled her near. He kissed her. She opened briefly, then turned away.

“I really am sorry. I'm just not in the mood. And certainly not in the middle of the woods with these ridiculous things on my feet.” She stomped her way back among the trees. “I'll never get used to these ruddy snow...boot...shoe...things. Anyway. It wouldn't kill us to wait a day or two. We've had enough to last most mortals four lifetimes.”

“We aren't most mortals.”

“No,” Eugainia replied. “We're barely human at all when we make love. It frightens me.”

A faint, distant airborne gabble disturbed the morning calm. The lovers stood silent in the spruce thicket. Eugainia could hear Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's breathing quicken. Then her own. Then her beating heart. Then his. The silence was dense and moist. Eugainia could hear the snow melt. A great exultation, much nearer the ground, rattled the air. Three low-flying chevrons of black-necked, brown-bodied geese burst into view close above the trees.

“
Sulumgw
!” Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk cried in delight, the geese so near their white cheek pads flashed.

“Geese!” Eugainia echoed.

“Ha! If the sound of migrating
sulumgw
dosen't raise your spirits, nothing will.”

Seasoned geese and ganders egged the young on. Dig deep, they seemed to say, down to the last of your reserves. Stay the course. The young responded with a joyful noise, happy their maiden migration back to their hatchling home was all but complete.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk followed the flying Vs with his heart and his stomach. “Home with their lifelong mates. Thus, and so the great wheel turns.”

“The Two will become One.”

“The two shall become many. Up to fourteen goslings in a nest, in a good year.”

“Will this be a good year, do you think, for the geese and goslings?” she asked.

“It might be a too good year, I think. Already it's been a very good year. For me, at least. For you?”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk placed her hands, one on top of the other, on his chest. “I miss The People very much,” he said. He searched her face. Nothing would have pleased Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk more than to hear his feelings echoed by the one he adored above all others. Echoed and expanded in his own language, spoken well or ill, it didn't matter. Eugainia kept her silence. He returned her arms to her sides.

“Maybe you need your people,” he said.

Eugainia responded after a time. “I'm sorry, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk. I truly am. Lately—well, last night, actually. When we made love, I felt a greater presence. An uninvited stranger at the feast. It was disconcerting.”

“When we join I feel
e'ee
! I'm the Great Spirit Himself.”

“I dread facing Henry.”

“Stay near Keswalqw. She has my interests, therefore your interests at heart. Fat!”

“What?”

“Is it fat you need?”

“No. No more fat.”

“Not fat. Then you need lean meat.”

“No.”

“Duck?”

“I swear if I eat another duck I'll start to lay eggs and quack.”

“Seal?”

“No. Too gamey. Too salty. Too greasy.”

“Walrus. I could take a walrus calf. It's the season.”

“No. Nothing infant or childlike.”

“Turkey? You love turkey.”

“No.”

“You couldn't get enough turkey this winter.”

“It was winter. I was tired. Turkey helps me sleep.”

“Spring tonic. She-bear. You need the liver of a she-bear.”

Nausea bloomed carnivorous in Eugainia's gut. She suppressed a wave of revulsion.

“Fish?”

“Salmon! Yes. Salmon is exactly what I need!”

“For salmon, beloved, you'll need patience. But you're right. Little in life is sweeter than the first
taqawan
of spring. Except, perhaps,
sismo'qon
.”

“What's
sismo'qon
?”

“
Sismo'qon
is patience rewarded with mawiulta'suaqan.”

“
Ahsismo'qon
rewarded with
mawiulta'suaqan
. Sweetness rewarded with—don't tell me!
Ummawiulta'suaqan
. Happiness?”

“Happiness is more
mawiulta'sit
. Today you'll experience
mawiulta'suaqan
—pure joy, orally administered.”

Eugainia tensed.

“Relax. I speak, uh, what is your English word? Metaphorically. Follow me.”

The deer-cut trail crossed the feeder stream, then opened into a grove of sugar maples. Square birchbark buckets affixed to the trunks of the largest trees brimmed with clear liquid. Fresh v-shaped gashes in the bark directed the sap onto short twigs angled down into the drip pails, themselves cut and folded at the corners, their stitched joints seamed with pine resin to prevent leakage. Each bucket's rim was reinforced with a thin strip of wood, stitched to the rim with spruce-root fibre. The sturdy rim was secured to the tree trunk with strands of basswood bark and thicker spruce-root tendrils. The system was simple and elegant. From a distance it appeared the bucks grew natually from the side of the tree.

A pyramid of round stones protruded from the snow at the edge of the clearing. A second blunted pyramid, with rocks missing from its apex, sat nearby. In the centre of the maple grove, the remnants of what must have been a sizable blaze smoked.

“Did you do all this?”

“The People come here every
sismo'qonapu tepgunset
and have done so forever. Most of what you see was stashed last spring. I merely refreshed everything. The buckets needed a touch of pitch here and there. I gathered new rocks. To replace those split by the frost. Burned a new boiling trunk.”

“When?”

“These last few afternoons. While you slept. Last night I fired the stones.”

“
Sismo'qonapu tepgunset
means…?”

“Maple moon.”

Eugainia dipped her finger in the sap, which overflowed from the nearest pail. “It has no particular taste.”

“Not yet, it doesn't.”

“Is it medicinal?” she asked.

“What it will become is, yes. Medicine for the spirit and the body.
Sismo'qon
takes The People by the hand and leads us from the wigwams of winter to the tepees of summer. It carries the same joyful spirit as those wild geese, and the first chirping frogs the, ah...”

“Spring peepers.”

“Yes. The spring peepers in the ponds when the ice breaks free. When you taste what we'll prepare, you'll find the sky becomes more blue. The sun shines more brightly. We'll laugh more easily. And more often—and not through our noses, but up from our bellies, through our throats and out our mouths. When the laughter's finished, we'll find it easy to smile again. And talk. Winter's sorrows and secrets will fly north with the geese. We'll discover what's troubling you. You'll tell me and put my heart at ease. Then we'll feel the urge to sleep. If the Great Spirit is kind, we'll wake and our life together will begin again. We'll dream a new dream.” He took her hands. “I long to see your sea- and sky-coloured, ah, your blue green eyes grow big with delight and your snow white face turn pink and rosy again.”

Eugainia managed a vague smile. “What can it be, this miracle food?”

“Wait and see. If it's not exactly what you need, it will certainly entertain us until what you do need comes along.”

The air around the firepit in the centre of the clearing quivered with flameless heat. A fire-hollowed stump awaited the hot stones and cold maple sap. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk retrieved two wooden shoulder yokes stowed in the lower branches of a big-bellied spruce. He fitted himself and Eugainia for their work. When filled, they hung the large collector pails from short thongs attached to the extreme ends of the yokes. They emptied the heavy pails into the boiling stump, then returned to the trees.