Ivory and Paper

by Ray Hudson

  “Come to me!”

  The feathers squirmed until I felt like I was squeezing a small frantic bird.

  “Anna!”

  I passed the empty reception room and burst into the ceremonial hall just as the feathers twisted from my fingers. The lemming stood at the base of the scaffolding twirling his arms like a windmill.

  “This way!” he screamed and scampered onto the lowest branch. I was halfway up the scaffolding before Summer-Face-Woman began shaking it. I looked down. She stood wrapped in a towel like a crab in a furious tangle of seaweed. She held the feathers in one hand and shook with the other. I scrambled up to the next level and grabbed for the top row of branches just as a tremor struck, deeper and longer than anything coming from the woman herself. The scaffolding heaved sideways.

  “Earthquake!” I shouted. Summer-Face-Woman, oblivious of the quake, threw herself against the frame with maniacal fury. In a moment I was in the air, upside down and then sideways, tumbling through the web of branches from row to row. Like a banana in a blender, I thought, as the room flipped upside down. The next time I was aware of anything, my arms were tied behind my back, my feet were bound at my ankles, and, wherever I was, I was sitting in the dark.

  33. Anna

  The amber beads were on my wrist. I turned them on their fine leather cord. They were the first things that had registered with me in a long long time. I remembered Ash standing beside me. He had taken my hand and slipped the beads around my wrist. I’d resisted. I didn’t want him touching me. But almost immediately I had relaxed as he fastened the cord so securely I couldn’t slip it off.

  “Keep them,” he had whispered as he let my arm go. “Don’t remove them.”

  That had been yesterday. Now, today, I stood dressed in the ceremonial parka under the inspecting eyes of the Moon’s Sister.

  “Much too plain,” the Moon’s Sister decided after she saw them. I don’t know if she objected to the beads as much as to the simple cord on which they were strung.

  “How about this,” I said and tucked them under the sleeve of the parka.

  She raised an eyebrow but didn’t object.

  “Turn a bit, my dear,” she said as she checked the decorative border along the bottom hem. If I could orbit her like the moon itself maybe I’d disappear. The parka fit beautifully. I wanted to keep it.

  “As I feared,” she said, “it needs a slight adjusting, just a smudge.”

  “I think you mean smidge.”

  “Smidge, smudge. Tomato, Tomawto.”

  “But smidge and smudge are different words,” I said.

  “Which is why I have the needle,” she said as I slipped the garment off and handed it to her. She frowned a smidge when she saw the darkening blotches on my shoulders before I put on my everyday bird-skin parka.

  I studied the fancy parka as she applied needle and thread. The last time I remembered seeing it, it hadn’t been this beautiful. There was a gigantic gap in my memory, a space where things had happened. It was like my memory was an old mirror whose cracks and peelings cut the reflections into pieces. I remembered Summer-Face-Woman had said gravity would take over. I was feeling its pull.

  Maybe it’s a good thing, I thought. Maybe it’s best to just let it happen.

  I fingered the pale-blue beads around my neck. That’s what I’m here for. Forget the past. This is what everything has come to.

  I heard the Sister-of-the-Moon say, “You must look your very best, Anna. It goes without saying.”

  But she said it anyway. She said it again and again.

  “It goes without saying.”

  What goes without saying? I asked myself as I turned the beads on my wrist. It was something important that I couldn’t remember. I realized that today was the day. Either the last or the first, but in any case I’d never be the same after today.

  I took a steam bath as instructed. I put on a plain parka until it was time for the ceremonial one, the garment that would become my skin. I sat on the bed while the Moon’s Sister brushed my hair. I hadn’t seen Booker since when? I had a vague feeling that he had been avoiding me.

  I fingered the beads on my wrist.

  A rustle of wings and the clapping of flippers and padded feet in the hallway brought me to the doorway. The Moon’s Sister was right beside me.

  “The first guests are arriving,” she said. Fat and thin, heavy and light; feathers, fur, muscle, and flab, creating a din of twitters and snorts, quacks and barks, cackles and growls.

  We tiptoed to an alcove to watch.

  The procession began with a flood tide of small birds filling the hall from ceiling to floor, pushing and shoving as they clambered over one another in an almost solid wall of feathers. Song sparrows and wrens flickered among throngs of marbled murrelets and pigeon guillemots. King eiders competed wing-to-wing with rosy finches while a cluster of fat buntings bullied their way through. Behind them, a sextet of black oystercatchers nervously tapped their spindly legs along the stone floor. Their Day-Glo orange beaks cut at the air like clipping shears.

  Ducks of all sizes and varieties came next: mallards and teals, eiders and grebes, and five harlequin ducks with their giddy galloping. A dozen emperor geese unfolded like a magnificent black, white, and gray carpet, while behind them cormorants pivoted their long necks in unison.

  After the last of the feathered flock had swept by, I heard the loud shuffle of mammals: two white sea otters, a family of fur seals, and a tussle of excited hair seals trailed by a pack of red, silver, and black fox snapping delightedly at the air. At the very end came men who for an instant were sea lions—probably brothers of my wrestling coach—and women and men who, for moments quicker than sparks, were killer whales. This crowd continuously transformed itself as it jerked forward: human, animal, animal, human.

  The Moon’s Sister touched my arm. “It goes without saying, my dear, this is all for you. All for you.”

  I followed her back to the room where she seated herself and picked up the ceremonial parka.

  I’m not a shy person, but I did not want whatever was about to happen to me taking place in front of that crowd. Not in front of any crowd. If something is going to happen to me, I said to myself, let it happen while I’m alone.

  Or with Booker, I thought.

  I felt calmer when I rolled the two beads Ash had put on my wrists between my fingers. I pressed them into the veins of my wrist until I felt my pulse beating under them.

  “Do you still have those beads on?” the Sister-of-the-Moon asked as she looked over at me.

  I lifted my cuff.

  “Too common! Too common!”

  “They’re nice,” I said.

  “We’ll let Summer-Face-Woman decide,” she said as she rearranged the fancy parka to examine the bottom hem.

  I walked to the table and picked up the water pitcher. There was no way I’d be allowed to keep something from Ash.

  “This is empty,” I said to the Moon’s Sister. “Would you mind if I filled it with fresh water?”

  “I’d be delighted,” she said.

  I placed the pitcher beneath the small stream that flowed into the stone sink. While the pitcher filled, I removed the necklace of blue pearls, and there I was.

  At Gram’s. In her kitchen. And my mother was there, and she wasn’t saying anything. She was just sitting and looking at Gram. It went without saying. I began to understand. Nobody had said anything. Not my mother, not Gram. There was nothing for me to remember. She hadn’t forgiven Gram. She hadn’t asked Gram to forgive her. Mrs. Skagit had lied. Forgiveness had passed between them like an unspoken language. Gram hadn’t asked for forgiveness.

  I needed to get home. I needed to forgive her by being there. Her was both of them: my gram and my mother. I needed them to forgive me.

  I jerked around. The Sister-of-the-Moon was sewing away. She hadn’t even looked up. I returned to the pitcher of water. I untied the knot on the necklace and slid two beads free before retying it and slipping it back
on.

  “I think a few more stitches will wrap it up,” she said.

  I poured a cup for myself and then dropped a bead into the pitcher. I swirled the water to speed up the dissolving and carried it over to her.

  “You’ve been working hard,” I said as I poured a cup for her.

  She held up the dress for my inspection before laying it to one side and taking the cup. “I appreciate this.”

  “I really am thankful for all you are doing,” I said. I meant it.

  “Excellent!” The Moon’s Sister said after taking a sip. She raised the glass in praise of its contents before downing it completely.

  “Very refreshing,” I said and drank from my cup.

  The Sister-of-the-Moon asked, “Have I ever told you about the journey I took through the sky to visit my brother, the moon?”

  She moved her arm in a wide arc over her head as though mapping the Milky Way. “I had been digging lupine roots,” she said, “delicious roots when prepared correctly.”

  I refilled her cup and she drank it down. “Always eat them with seal oil, never by themselves. You’ll have a bad reaction without the seal oil. Anyway, when I pulled the root digger out of the ground—”

  “Thank you,” she said as I filled her cup a third time. “—there was a hole. A cold draft blew up through it, and when I looked down into it, why—” she yawned widely and stopped talking.

  “Yes?” I asked. “What did you see?”

  The Moon’s Sister tried to focus. She seemed to be traveling through the sky.

  “Where?”

  “In the lupine hole.”

  “You need to eat lupine roots with seal oil, my dear. Always,” she yawned again. “I mean, never, never, never. Never without seal oil.”

  Her yawns gave way to contented snoring. I laid her down gently and covered her with a mat. The ceremonial parka was just too good to leave. I quickly changed into it before opening the door just as four regal ptarmigan strutted by, ruffling their feathered coats like ermine capes. I was startled by the rolls of sharp mechanical clicking, like pebbles rattling in tin cans, that accompanied the glances they cast from side to side. Clearly they disapproved of just about everything that wasn’t ptarmiginean. A particularly large and fierce member of the quartet stared directly at me. Its eyes were like fire.

  Once they had gone on their way, I walked into Booker’s cell. It was empty. With or without him, I decided, I need to get away. Even just for an hour or two. Complete escape was out of the question. I knew that. I didn’t need to be told that. I needed to get away long enough for whatever change was going to happen to me to happen in private. And then I would or I wouldn’t be able to escape. Then I would or I wouldn’t want to escape.

  A blend of laughter and music in the distance signaled the guests were in the reception room. I walked to the door leading to the hall as a pair of harlequin ducks bobbed past unsteadily.

  I see they’ve discovered the punch, I thought and smiled as one of them waved a wing at me. It knocked the other off balance and sent both of them careening into the wall. They ruffled themselves together with furious indignity and poked their beaks in my direction. Then suddenly they froze.

  A faint growl, like the slow tearing of a sheet of paper, crawled out from behind a nearby corner and sent them squawking in the opposite direction.

  A pointed snout followed the growl as a young red fox emerged.

  “Are you lost?” I realized I was talking to a fox. It had been studying the ducks and, was it possible? licking its lips. The fox raised an eyebrow, and I gasped in recognition.

  “You!” I said.

  “Me,” said the boy, no longer in his fox body.

  “But don’t you know the danger? What are you doing here?”

  “My father thought you might need help. He wanted to repay you.”

  “Your father?”

  “For returning this,” and he touched the ivory fox that hung around his neck. “We were picking berries yesterday, and a frantic lemming arrived.”

  I was too surprised to say anything except, “Txin qaaasakuqing, Chakna.”

  I thank you, Stink.

  “I’ve lost my friend,” I said and swept my arm into the empty cell.

  The boy flipped back into his fox shape and sniffed Booker’s bunk from one end to the other. He was about to repeat the circuit when we heard a congested nasal honking.

  “I think the tipsy duo is returning.”

  He nodded in the direction of the door and gave a long sniff.

  “With reinforcements.”

  We slipped from the room and down the hallway. I heard the harlequin ducks arguing as I followed the fox into a passage that curved away.

  “Good,” the fox said. “Good.” And he began nosing his way along the corridor, pausing every so often to inhale a prolonged draft of air. We passed three or four doors before he stopped at the entrance to a narrow hall. He signaled for me to be quiet. I stuck my head around the corner and saw a door with a scruffy mat in front of it, a mat that stirred and got to its wobbly feet. I ducked out of sight.

  The two foxes yipped and yapped a bit and then the old fox wobbled past me and down the corridor.

  “I told him he should go see the transformation ceremony,” Stink said. “I promised to keep an eye on the door.”

  The room was dark when I pushed it open, but the light from the hallway showed me enough. Booker, with his arms tied behind him, his feet bound, and his mouth gagged, was sitting up against the opposite wall. He did a sort of frantic dance when the light hit him. And when Stink leapt at him, his eyes widened in terror. But instantly in the boy’s body, Stink untied his feet while I loosened the rag around his mouth. Stink made rapid work of the knots at his wrists. Booker was too startled to do anything except gawk at the boy.

  “His father sent him to help us.”

  “His father?”

  “Little Wren,” the boy said. “Chief of Kagamil Island. We were picking berries when father learned you needed help.”

  “From whom?” Booker asked.

  “One of your rodent friends.”

  “But you’re yourself,” Booker said to me as he rubbed his wrists. He saw the blue pearl necklace around my neck. “With that on!”

  “I have this,” I said and showed him the beads on my wrist. “From Ash,” I said.

  “For strength and endurance,” he said.

  “How do you know that?”

  I didn’t wait for his answer. We avoided the regular corridors. Booker led for a time and then I took over, and deliberately or not, we ended up on a high balcony overlooking the ceremonial room. We crouched down and inched our way to the edge, where we looked down over the guests milling around wing-to-wing and shoulder-to-shoulder. A dark shadow stirred directly under us as the sharp blackness of the Real Raven released a faint putrid odor. Ash was seated on an ornately carved stool on the low stage. There was an identical stool that must have been reserved for me. Volcano Woman surveyed the room from a slightly elevated chair while Summer-Face-Woman stood directly behind her. The Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons was seated at the edge of the stage. The crowd stood or sat on three sides of a scaffolding that stretched from floor to ceiling on a grid of branches.

  “I made that,” Booker said.

  Was he nuts?

  “Haqada,” I said, determined to get away before we were discovered. I gave a slight tug to Booker’s sleeve just as two men dropped through the entrance hole. All three of us froze. The audience gasped as the men fell and gasped again as they latched onto the scaffolding halfway down and reversed directions. They deftly flipped up and across a set of branches before twisting off to opposite sides. The killer-whale people were extraordinary acrobats. Their swift dexterity turned their black-and-white clothing into gray blurs.

  I saw the Volcano Woman beckon the Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons to her side.

  A green-winged teal in the front row honked her approval and applauded as one of the acrobats made a
rapid rotating descent from bar to bar. His arms and legs were swept into a pure tapered flow of muscle. He twirled on the bar nearest the teal. Faster and faster. She clapped wildly and hooted her approval. Then she let out a terrified squawk and fainted backward.

  A ptarmigan clucked in disapproval as he ruffled his feathers like an angry grouse.

  But I had glimpsed what the teal had seen: a row of sharpened teeth beneath the skin.

  Ducks flocked to her aid from every roost in the room, fanning her and anyone within range of their wings. The four ptarmigan scattered while the six sea lion sons roared with laughter. In the confusion, we slipped away and down the hall. The same confusion must have delayed the departure of the Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons because we had reached the door to my room before I heard her coming. Stink and Booker slipped into his old room. I stood in my doorway and raised my feathered arms to block the view inside where the Moon’s Sister was sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

  “I have been sent to bring you to the performance and to see that you are ready,” announced the Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons when she saw me. “Or the other way around,” she added, correcting the order of her sentence.

  “We are almost ready.” I hoped I sounded like I was pleased and excited. “Isn’t that so, Sister-of-the-Moon?”

  I turned into the room but kept the view inside blocked.

  “That’s correct,” I mimicked an answer. “Just a minute or two more.”

  “Then be quick about it, Sister,” snapped the Woman-with-Six-Sea-Lion-Sons and departed.

  I walked inside. I dropped the other bead into the pitcher of water, swirled it around, and poured it into a cup. The Moon’s Sister took a long drink. Her head drooped and her body sagged into a heap. I gently scattered grass over her until she had disappeared from sight.

  I stepped into Booker’s cell where he and Stink were waiting. Booker slipped on his backpack, and we started off for Ash’s workroom and the bridge into the volcano. We hadn’t gone more than a few steps when Stink gave a faint bark and said, “You gotta see this.” He trotted in the opposite direction, back toward the balcony. We reluctantly followed.

  The assembled foxes were bowing in unison before the Volcano Woman. They were like knives reflecting fire: red and silver and black. In an instant they tangled into a ball of snarling and convulsing fury that sent the guests scattering in terror. And then, before an astonished crowd, they unfolded into a perfectly symmetrical, perfectly spherical sea anemone: on their backs, their feet slowly swaying like tentacles in the tide, their bushy tails sweeping in a circumference of gentle sea currents. The crowd erupted with cheers.