Ivory and Paper

by Ray Hudson

  “Knowing doesn’t help,” the woman said. “Not in this case. Not now.”

  “She will need your help,” Ash said.

  My yelp came out at as a squeak, and Volcano Woman gave me a look that suggested: Mouse, Sparrow?

  “Is that why I’m making this spear?”

  Ash shook his head and laughed. “Let’s hope you don’t have to use that.”

  It did look pretty pathetic.

  “Eventually enough changes will accumulate,” he said, “and she will tilt one way or the other. In either case, sooner or later, she will need your assistance, in one way or another.”

  “You just need to be ready,” the woman said and left the room.

  22. Anna

  “What do you mean leave?”

  “We have got to get out of here.” Booker put down the spear he had been making. It was looking pretty good. “Now. Or soon. Whenever. But we cannot stay.”

  We’d been having this argument for several days.

  “Why the hurry?”

  “The hurry is, that, well,” he said, “I told you what was happening.”

  “And I said you were nuts.”

  “Anna, just look at your hands.”

  “I know,” I said. The shadows had darkened and passed beyond my wrists. “Weird, isn’t it? But they don’t hurt or anything. It’s a rash. I just need the right ointment.”

  I got a kick out of watching him get so agitated.

  If I were turning into something, I would have felt it. If I were changing into a raven or into an auklet, don’t you think I’d have felt it? I mean, that’s doing something really weird. Volcano Woman herself had said I was destined. I was fated to do something important, something significant. I had no idea what. Booker had said I might have to kill a raven. I didn’t like that idea. Ravens were neat birds. Anyway, if I was changing into anything, it was into a real Unanga. The old lady from the kitchen got me started weaving a basket. The first time she saw the stains on my hands and wrists, she backed away like I was contagious. But now she always treated me real nice. She wasn’t a very systematic teacher, but whenever I got stuck I’d go down and she’d redo it for me. Not that she ever said much. I’d just have to watch the way she did it and then try to repeat that. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. She seemed pleased with every attempt I made. In any event, I was getting better and my basket bottom was gradually expanding into a perfect circle.

  I was learning things, true things, things I needed to know. And I was collecting things. Granted, some of it was junk, like the two broken knives I’d taken from the kitchen. But I also had a role of sinew thread and two flat gut containers with feathers along their seams. Those were treasures. It seems like every room I went into had something I wanted. And then there was Ash.

  He had been totally unwilling to help us return the fox to the Kagamil people. I didn’t blame him. Nobody wants to be a slave. But the Kagamil people weren’t all bad. He needed to learn to forgive a little. Like us. I mean, he didn’t seem to have a grudge against us for having escaped. If he had been upset, well, he had gotten over it. He should get over his hatred for the Kagamil people.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good.”

  “We’ll have to make a plan,” I said, even though I had no intention of leaving until I had mastered a few more skills.

  “I’ve been working on one,” he said, but he didn’t look very pleased with it.

  “Let’s do a little more exploring,” I suggested. “Maybe we’ll turn up a secret exit. This time I get to lead.”

  “You always lead, Anna,” he said. But I could tell he was happy.

  We had the Volcano Woman’s main room to ourselves. I checked all the cubbyholes and recesses, but she must have gone out. The log pole was in place; the hatch was open. We had been here before, of course. Almost every day. I had studied the grass fish baskets and the bentwood containers. I had examined the grass mats, trying to figure out which end the weavers had started at. I positioned a stool made from a whale vertebra and stood on it to examine the small ivory carvings on a high shelf. Booker got his own stool and joined me. Three sea otters had parallel lines across their stomachs. Two seals were diving and another was perched on a smooth rock. There were birds with wings tucked at their sides and with wings outspread. Some of the carvings had been stained with dark-black ink. Two had red feet. None of them were exactly like the ivory fox. Speaking of which, I had finally figured something out. We were here because I had returned the carving and been rewarded, chosen to do something grand and given the opportunity to learn all these old-time things.

  “Don’t,” Booker said when I reached for a long-beaked bird. My hand froze as I saw what had alarmed him. Its eyes were moving ever so slightly.

  I stepped down and walked over to where a group of masks were arranged on a wall. As far as I could tell, they were just masks. None of their eye sockets had eyes. They looked like they had been modeled after people I wouldn’t want to meet in the dark. They had protruding eyebrows and gigantic noses with mouths locked in snarls and grotesque grins. Two masks had wings flapping out behind their ears. One was devouring a rat. They had all been carved with immense skill, but, Ayaqaa!

  I removed one of the lesser horrors. It looked a bit like a bird.

  “Hey, Booker,” I said, “trick-or-treat!” I raised it toward my face. Then I tossed it to him. He lunged and, of course, missed. It flew a few feet before crashing into a log. I swear it gave out a weak groan as a crack spread from its crown to its chin and it split into two pieces.

  “Crap!” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I slipped behind a grass mat. He followed me down the hall. After we passed under a wide archway, the floor sloped steadily down. Eventually, the passage branched, and I went right, where the walls were carved out of rougher stone. The hallway narrowed until we had to go single-file. A sharp turn took us down three steps into a room lined with stone benches. Booker walked over to examine the walls, and I headed toward a closed door on the opposite side.

  “Hey, Anna,” he shouted, “the walls aren’t rock. They’re—” but I had opened the door, and a tide of wailing sent me stumbling against the nearest wall.

  “Chalk,” I said from where I had landed, “or feathers.”

  I pushed away from the weird walls and stepped through the door with Booker right behind me. The wailing had diminished to a pathetic crying.

  “I don’t like this,” Booker said as the hall narrowed and darkened until it was little more than a tunnel. At the far end of it, a pinprick of light illumined an opening to the outside world. The light tugged at me. I think Booker felt the same pull because we drifted down the passage like branches that had fallen into a river.

  “This could be our way out,” I said. Even if I wasn’t planning on leaving right away, it was good to know that escape was possible.

  We passed a shallow alcove where I could almost touch both sides with my outstretched arms. I stepped down through an arched opening into a wide foyer. I made out iron bars separating us from a deep cave.

  “It’s like a grotto,” Booker said. The kid had some vocabulary.

  Body-by-body and beak-by-beak, a crowd of skeletal birds emerged from the darkness beyond the bars. They perched on stone blocks and stood huddled on the floor. Their heads and shoulders were covered with open sores. Scabbed bellies were puffed with air. Every eye focused on us. The birds were consumed with hunger. They were dying of starvation and thirst.

  Booker unscrewed the lid of his leather canteen and stepped up to a stone depression just inside the bars. The instant the water hit the shallow trough, there was a cry like the opening of a wound as the birds lunged. The larger ones clawed and crushed their way across the smaller ones. Booker stumbled backward into me, and we scrambled out of the alcove on our hands and knees. I struggled to my feet as a flicker of light quivered at the far end of the tunnel, a shadow shifted, and something swept insid
e. The birds shrank back in a single breath.

  My heart beat in my ears. Every artery in my body pulsed. And then the pulsing shifted to outside my body and began to vibrate the floor. I heard pitiful mewing and turned to see three badly mauled creatures dragging themselves toward the back of the cave where a row of large birds were clicking their sharp beaks. The vibrations in the floor grew louder and heavier, closer and closer. I grabbed Booker’s hand and we ran. We ran as we had never run before. I slammed the door as we dove into the room with the chalky, feathery walls. And then we were out of there and past the kitchen and beyond the storage rooms and up the steps and safe.

  And I was ready to leave. Honest to God. I was ready to leave.

  23. Anna

  If I was so ready to leave twenty-four hours ago, why was I still here?

  It’s because the next afternoon I was told to return to the Volcano Woman’s main room.

  So I went.

  It was packed with birds, foxes, mice, and even a seal or two. I elbowed my way through until I found a whalebone stool and sat down. Booker stayed at the back, near a door. He looked miserable and uncomfortable, what with all those animals and birds giving him odd and slightly hungry glances. Ash took a seat in the front, facing the crowd. The Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons was already seated there. The whispered barks and squawks subsided when Volcano Woman strode in, dressed in another spectacular bird-skin parka. She stepped onto a slightly elevated platform as cheering filled the room—if squawks and chirps, growls and barks, and the occasional whistle constitute cheers. She raised her arms and silence descended.

  “It is rare that I interfere in your lives,” she began and bent her head to the crowd’s appreciative murmurs. “But once in a while I am moved to step in and make—” she paused, “adjustments.”

  Like at Pompeii, I thought, as a nervous rustle swept through the room.

  She’s talking to a room full of animals, I said to myself. Apart from Booker, Ash, and the woman from the kitchen, there wasn’t a human in sight except for myself. Things were about to get odder.

  “Everything will be explained in time, but for now,” and her voice rose above the murmuring, “I am here to make an announcement.”

  It took a minute or two for the cheers to subside. She resumed speaking and I managed to catch a few words over the approving squawks and growls before a tumultuous roar drowned her out and she swung an arm toward the crowd. I turned to see who had been announced. The shockwave of wings and fins shaking the room blocked my view. I stood up a little, but the shouting and stamping only grew louder, so I stood on the vertebra stool. I stood on my tiptoes. And suddenly the crowd sank back into their seats, and there I was, like a plastic figure on a wedding cake. Me and Booker. I mean, Booker was the only other person or thing standing. Then he sank down.

  “This girl,” the woman said as I struggled to hold on to the air—two wings and a paw pushed against my butt and kept me upright—“this young woman, has been chosen.”

  I stood a little straighter. Of course I had been.

  I caught Booker’s eye. He had never understood.

  “By theft and deception, she has confirmed her transformation.”

  Into a true Unanga, I said to myself.

  But what theft? I remembered the odds and ends I was collecting. Hardly theft.

  Deception? I glanced at Booker. So what if I had deceived him? Maybe now he’d realize how important this was. How important I was.

  “She will become,” and here the Woman of the Volcano spread both her arms out wide, “one of the Dark Bird’s companion spirits.”

  The dark bird’s what?

  The clamor in the room grew to a crescendo so that even the floor vibrated. The noise from the crowd subsided as the vibration took on a regular beat. The tread from which Booker and I had fled in the dark tunnel had returned. Pain seized both my arms, so intense and sustained that I crumpled onto the stool. It held me like a net as I bent my head to my knees and held my sides. The aching robbed me of every sense except hearing. Louder and closer and heavier, whatever it was had entered the room. Volcano Woman’s whisper cut through the hushed parting of the crowd, “Give welcome, all, to the Real Raven!”

  “The Boss! The Boss!” squeaked a tiny voice. “Make way! Make way!”

  I struggled to sit up. I opened my eyes as a mouse ran full speed into the legs of startled ptarmigan, bounced back, and took off again, his voice a little slurred, “Shmake way! Shmake way!” although there was no one even close to being in the way of the astonishing bird that had entered the room. His broad chest was thrown out. His vicious beak angled upward. He sucked the color out of everything he passed. Here was a sharp chunk of the original night, darkness as old as time itself. I stared transfixed by the great bird’s eyes, cavernous orbs from which nothing escaped, in which each pupil hovered like the earth in space.

  Creator.

  Destroyer.

  Raven shook, and his feathers glistened like knives. The air swirled violently, and the mouse let out a terrified squeal.

  I shrank into myself as he passed. His breath was like rancid meat. He reached the front of the room. Ash held his ground, only lowering his head ever so slightly. Raven bowed to Volcano Woman with what, I felt certain, was less respect than calculation.

  The roaring in the room became thunderous cheering as the Raven turned in my direction.

  “Soon,” the woman said and held up her hand, “but not today.”

  I looked toward Ash, hoping for something, but he had walked to a curtained doorway.

  I felt myself falling. I fell into a single memory from ages ago. That first night on the island with Booker when Vasilii had said, “Listen. Share. Don’t be boastful. Do the things you know are right. It’s what it means to be Unanga.”

  I rubbed my palms together.

  Get a grip on yourself, I whispered as I drifted back into my senses. I was seated on the stool and terrified. At the center of my right hand was a blackness I had never seen before.

  Vasilii’s voice was like a rope, but it was slipping through my hands.

  “Listen. Share. Don’t be boastful.”

  My palms were as slippery as feathers.

  The Volcano Woman’s smile was like ice or like fire. Like both. She had betrayed me. This isn’t what she had promised.

  “The day is approaching when we will gather for the final transformation.”

  She looked toward the doorway where Ash held open a hanging grass mat. “No one is more efficient at organizing events than Summer-Face-Woman.”

  A tall stately woman entered the room. Her face was perfectly proportioned, with its delicate mouth and high cheekbones, but her eyes gleamed with gristle and spite. She scanned the audience. Part-hawk, part-viper, she was a thousand times nastier than Mrs. Skagit ever thought of being.

  “Summer-Face-Woman is a master at organization,” Volcano Woman continued. “She will see that the rooms are prepared. She will arrange accommodations and invite the guests. Have no fear, you will all be included!” Cheering prevented me from hearing what she said next, but it must have had something to do with me because the woman stared directly at me.

  Mrs. Skagit’s eyes had been piggy and greedy, but these eyes were like the Real Raven’s. Hollow and dark. Greed had been entirely eaten away by hatred.

  “And myself, my dear, my dear?” A second woman held out both arms as she wobbled through the doorway and curtseyed to everything in sight.

  “The Sister-of-the-Moon,” announced Volcano Woman. “She will help with your clothing,” she said and looked in my direction. “Her sewing is even finer than mine.”

  “Too kind! Too kind!” The Sister-of-the-Moon again bowed deeply to everything and everybody and floated a little further into the room, her feet scarcely touching the floor.

  I saw Volcano Woman whisper something to Summer-Face-Woman and then she left. It was a moment before the crowd realized the gathering was over. A terrorized scream from the mouse br
ought their shuffling to a halt. The crowd parted and Real Raven exited with arrogant indifference while the mouse skittered from side to side to avoid being trampled. Then the winged crowd rose in a body and flew out the entrance hole. The mice and fox scampered up the notched ladder and the seals just disappeared down a dark passage.

  Ash stood speaking with the two strange women.

  I sat, petrified, my fingers curled into my palms like talons.

  SIX

  SYLLABLES OF MEMORY

  24. Booker

  I went to Ash’s workroom where Anna sometimes showed up, but she stayed in her cell for the rest of the afternoon. Ash was making what he told me was a throwing board for sea otter spears. It looked finished to me. It looked beautiful, but he kept making slight adjustments with a sharp knife.

  “What kind of wood is that?” I asked.

  “Lalu,” he said, “Yellow cedar.”

  “It smells sweet,” I said. I don’t think either of us wanted to talk about what had just happened.

  From one side he removed a sliver of wood like a small breath.

  “I don’t understand,” I finally said. “A few days ago the Volcano Woman said Anna was coming into her own. She said her guardian spirit would make itself known.”

  “I was there,” Ash said. “I heard it.” He took a wide and slightly curved piece of wood down from a shelf. “I hear you’ve been breaking masks.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  He just shook his head a bit and handed me a stone chisel. “See if you can shape a face out of that.”

  I turned the wood from side to side.

  “Like this,” he said, and he used the chisel to remove small flakes along one side.

  “So why did she change her mind and say that Anna will serve the Raven and not kill him? That she’d be his companion?”

  “I don’t know, Booker,” he said as he returned the mask and chisel to me. “She understands things. She knows things we can’t possibly know.”

  There was no way Anna could fight that colossal bird. Just the memory of him gave me the heebie-jeebies.