The Storyteller Trilogy

by Sue Harrison

  Chapter Fifty-six

  THE COUSIN RIVER VILLAGE

  NIGHT MAN PULLED OFF his parka and thrust his bad shoulder toward her, but Dii’s eyes went first to his right shoulder, well-muscled and large. She had heard the stories, how Chakliux had been attacked by Night Man and his three brothers. How he and the dog Snow Hawk had killed two of those brothers and wounded Night Man.

  She had been a girl then, living here in the Cousin River Village. She remembered the whispers of the old women, predicting death when Night Man’s shoulder festered. Sometimes a person passing close to Long Eyes’s lodge would hear him cry out, demanding revenge even in the dreams of his sickness.

  But during the time Dii had lived in the Near River Village, Night Man had recovered, though his arm never regained its strength. People said K’os had saved him, and perhaps that was so. Her medicines were strong. Who could deny that she saved as well as killed? But if she had, why did Night Man’s illness linger until Aqamdax became his wife?

  Perhaps it was the strength of that good shoulder that made the wounded shoulder look worse now than it was. Taken alone, it was not so terrible. New tissue, pink and shiny, wet with a trickle of pus, seemed to bubble from the hole left by Chakliux’s spear. The shoulder and arm were withered, and a scattering of pimples ringed the scar, then spread out over his chest.

  “Can a wife live with a husband like this?” Night Man demanded, his voice belligerent. “But perhaps a woman who has spread her legs for a Near River man would not even notice my wound.”

  “A good wife looks first to the strength that lives inside her husband,” said Dii, meaning the words to be a compliment.

  Night Man’s face darkened, and he roared out an insult. “You think you have much value, woman?” he asked. “If you are so desirable, why would you take a husband like me?”

  When Dii had been wife to Anaay, she accepted his insults, said nothing, only worked harder to please him. But his death had made her realize her own power. If she was as weak and worthless as Night Man wanted her to believe, how could she have hidden Anaay’s body, then found her way home to the Cousin River Village? If she was not worthy, even to be Night Man’s wife, why had the caribou chosen to sing their songs into her dreams?

  “I am here to honor the wishes of my aunt,” she said to Night Man, her words calm and firm. “If my days as your wife are to be filled with insults, I will leave. I have dogs and food from the Near River People, enough to survive on my own, with or without a husband.” She stood up, started toward the entrance tunnel.

  “And the hunter who takes you not only receives that food and those dogs, but also an old aunt with a complaining mouth,” Night Man said.

  Dii lifted her chin toward the side of the lodge where Long Eyes sat mumbling a rhythm of words as she sewed a boot sole to an upper. “And you offer the gift of a mother who can barely feed herself.”

  “She is stronger,” Night Man said, his words too quick.

  Dii studied the woman for a moment, shrugged her shoulders, but said nothing. Again she started for the entrance tunnel.

  “I need a wife,” said Night Man. “I have gifts.”

  “Keep your gifts,” Dii told him. “As wife I ask but one thing. Respect.”

  “And this?” Night Man said, gesturing toward his shoulder.

  “I have no problem with your shoulder,” she said. “You are the one who has allowed it to be something too important. You are the one who has used that wound as an excuse to hate and to pity yourself, rather than grow strong within.”

  He clenched his teeth, and Dii thought he would order her from the lodge, but he said, “Please stay.”

  “I did not say I was leaving,” Dii told him. She went to the entrance tunnel, brought in her blankets and mats, began to arrange her bedding on the women’s side of the lodge.

  THE FOUR RIVERS VILLAGE

  There was blood—more than Red Leaf remembered from Tsaani’s death. And River Ice Dancer had fought, but his efforts were undermined by his bewilderment that K’os would try to kill him. His fists had left bruises on Red Leaf’s belly and arms, but he had been unable to wrest the knife from her hands. The first cut she had made, before he began to fight, was a death wound, and eventually the loss of blood slowed his hands and mind. Only when he finally lay still, in the last moments before his death, did he realize she was not K’os. Then, in his relief, he let his spirit go, and though Red Leaf crouched waiting in fear for some retribution, there was none.

  She rolled him back into his bed, tucked his robes around him, and pushed the knife under nearby floor mats. Someone would find it there. Not K’os, she hoped.

  She took a water bladder from the rafters, rinsed her hands and face. She suddenly saw herself caught by K’os or Cen, naked and bloody, River Ice Dancer dead on his sleeping mats, and she shivered. But no one came, and when Red Leaf had managed to wash away all the blood, she dressed again and went out into the night.

  She walked back to Cen’s lodge, listened long in the entrance tunnel, a lie resting on her lips: she had been to the women’s place to vomit. Why curse others in this lodge with her illness?

  She listened and heard nothing, so she finally crept inside. K’os and Cen were still asleep, both lying where they had been when she left the lodge. Red Leaf’s bed was still warm. Had she been gone only that short a time? So quickly, a young, strong hunter was dead.

  He was cruel, Red Leaf reminded herself. He was selfish. But she remembered his mother’s joy when he had been born, only son of the Near River hunter Wolf Head. She remembered his first kill, the celebration over a hare taken with a boy’s hunting stick. Red Leaf began to shake. She sat up and clutched the wooden bowl K’os had left next to her bed. Her retching woke Cen, and he squatted beside her, stroked her hair, murmured soft prayers until Red Leaf was able to lie down again. He stayed with her until she fell asleep.

  In the morning Red Leaf felt someone bend over her. She opened her eyes to see K’os.

  “You are alive,” K’os said, her voice betraying her surprise. She prepared another cup of water laced with powder from the red-stringed pouch. Red Leaf drank it.

  CHAKLIUX’S CAMP

  In his dream, Sok again heard the wind. It was Snow-in-her-hair, though her voice was weak, as if she called from a great distance. He opened his mouth, cried out for her to wait. He went outside, saw the faint light of the new morning, the sun still hidden by the curve of the earth.

  Then, as though Snow-in-her-hair were standing beside him, he heard her voice, clear and hard as ice. “I have waited long enough,” she said. “I am going now. Come if you wish.”

  “Let me tell my brother that I go,” Sok begged. “He has come all this way with me. He needs to know so he will not worry.”

  Snow-in-her-hair laughed, a laughter touched with anger. “You ask me to wait just so you can tell your brother? What kind of brother is he, trying to keep you here when you do not want to stay? Go, see if he is worth your concern. Then if you hurry, you will find me.”

  Her voice faded, and he ducked back into the tent, felt the heat of the banked coals pushing hard to keep the cold outside the caribou skin walls. He crouched beside Chakliux, saw that his brother had fallen asleep sitting up, leaning back against one of their storage packs, his fur blankets drawn over his head. Sok called his name, but Chakliux did not answer. Sok pulled away the blankets, saw the gleam of his brother’s eyes, open as if in death. Sok called again, but Chakliux did not move. In growing fear Sok lay a hand against Chakliux’s chest. There was no heartbeat. Snow-in-her-hair. In her fear that Sok would not come with her, she had taken Chakliux. Sok cursed his dead wife, and the curses rose with his mourning wails.

  When Sok finally came to himself, he was outside, a pack strapped on his back, snowshoes on his feet. He felt like a child first coming to know the world. His chest ached as though from an old wound, but he found that his body moved in spite of his pain, and that his mind worked, his thoughts no longer the muddle the
y had been since Snow had died. But now he also mourned his brother, took each step in sorrow, drew each breath in fear. What if Snow, in her need for him to join her, had taken not only Chakliux but also the others who held him to the earth: his sons?

  THE HUNTERS’ SPRING

  Aqamdax woke to nausea. She pulled back her bedding furs and crawled over Snow Hawk toward the doorflap. Outside, she began to retch, but her belly was empty, so she brought up only bile. When her stomach stopped heaving, she scooped up a handful of snow, let it melt in her mouth and trickle down her throat. She went back into the lean-to and rubbed her hands dry in Snow Hawk’s thick fur.

  The day before, she had decided to chance a hearth fire. The nights had grown too cold for her to survive without one. So now she coaxed the coals back to life.

  “It is morning,” she said to Snow Hawk, “though the sun is not yet up in the sky. How is your stomach? Are you sick?”

  They had eaten much the same things, the two of them, though Aqamdax knew Snow Hawk also hunted on her own. But the dog seemed well, and once Aqamdax had eaten a little, she felt better, as strong as though she had not been sick.

  Snow Hawk spent more time away from Aqamdax each day. Aqamdax worried at first, thinking Night Man, on some hunting trip, would see the dog and know Take More had allowed them to live. She worried about wolves. What chance would Snow Hawk have against a pack, except the same chance any female had—that one of the males would want her? But each day at dusk Snow Hawk returned to take her share of food, to sleep outside the tent, untethered, to creep inside if the night grew too cold.

  Each morning Aqamdax checked and reset her traps, gutting and skinning any hares she caught, then she rolled the pelts flesh side in to store with the carcasses under the caribou hide cover of her platform cache.

  This day, her traps held three fat hares, and when she had finished skinning them, she took her spear sticks and walked to the south side of the woods. The wind had died, though it kicked up a skiff of snow now and again over the tundra beyond the trees.

  Aqamdax had become more accurate with the spear sticks, and her muscles did not burn as they once had after time spent throwing. Now she was trying to learn to throw while making a short run. She had seen the men take game in such a way, but though her spear went farther, she found it more difficult to keep her eyes on her target, and so lost her accuracy.

  She retrieved her spear sticks, had them in her hand, when a voice suddenly called out, “You need a throwing board.”

  Aqamdax whirled, a spear ready, but as quickly as she turned, she lowered her weapon. Take More stood at the far side of the marsh clearing, a dog beside him, a haunch of frozen caribou meat on the travois the dog was pulling.

  “You would greet an old man in such a way, one who has brought you meat?”

  Tears gathered in Aqamdax’s eyes, but she called out as though she were a wife offering the hospitality of her lodge to one of her husband’s friends. “You are hungry?”

  “Perhaps I could eat. I started out this morning in darkness so my wives would not see what I brought you.”

  “You can stay for the night?” Aqamdax asked.

  Take More laughed. “You are not afraid I will ask for more than food?”

  “I think you respect my husband and will not ask his wife to share her bed.”

  Take More’s face reddened, but Aqamdax pretended not to see. Perhaps, for bringing meat, the old man deserved more than a bowl of stew, but what wife could offer such hospitality without the approval of her husband?

  He helped her put the haunch in her cache and answered her questions about the people in the village. He said that Ghaden, Yaa and Sok’s sons were well, that Ligige’ spent much time telling others how to live their lives, and that Sok and Chakliux had not yet returned. Aqamdax closed her eyes in quick sadness when he said that Twisted Stalk had given her niece Dii to Night Man.

  When he had nothing more to tell her, Take More spoke of being young, hunting and marrying wives. Finally, he ran out of words. Then he left, and her tent seemed too quiet, too empty. But that night, as Aqamdax went to sleep, she repeated his hunting stories to herself, whispered them into her dreams, and she did not feel so alone.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  CHAKLIUX’S CAMP

  IN THE DREAM, AQAMDAX was beside him, her hands gentle on his face. She leaned close, and he raised up to gather her into his arms. Suddenly she was not Aqamdax but Star, her face white and drained of blood, ice glazed over her cheeks, her eyes dark and sightless.

  Chakliux cried out, and the sound of his voice woke him. His heart slowed as he realized he had been dreaming, then he scolded himself. He had fallen asleep. In the darkness of the tent, he looked over at Sok’s bed, saw the raised outline of a light-colored fur robe and sighed his relief. Sok was asleep, but what if he had awakened while Chakliux slept? He could have wandered outside….

  Chakliux crept forward on hands and knees, reached to pat his brother’s shoulder. The empty hare fur blanket collapsed under his hand. He jerked the blanket away. Even Sok’s sleeping mats were gone. Chakliux quickly pulled on his boots and strapped snowshoes to his feet.

  Outside, he was surprised to see that the sun had risen, a pale yellow disk barely above the horizon, the sky dark toward north and west. New snow had come during the night. Less than a hand’s breadth had fallen, but it had drifted over Sok’s trail so that Chakliux found nothing but the first few steps Sok had taken, heading west.

  Why would Sok go in that direction? Their village was south and east. Then Chakliux knew Sok was following his dead wife, walking west toward the land of the spirits.

  Aaa, Sok, Chakliux thought, after all this have I lost you?

  Everything seemed the same, each ridge, each frozen stream like the one he had just crossed. Once a white fox trotted past him, once ravens circled, but otherwise, the earth and sky were empty. Sok sang his sons’ names under his breath, a rhythm for his feet, a reminder of the direction he should travel and why. He pitched his parka hood back, allowed the air to cool his head so he would not sweat, and when his ears began to ache from the cold, he drew the hood forward again. As the sun moved in its shallow arc, he fought against sleep, walking with his head down, his eyes closed.

  Sleep was escape, a place without decisions, without pain. There he would not have to tell Aqamdax that her husband was dead, killed by Snow-in-her-hair. He would not have to face each empty day without the wife he needed, without the brother he had learned to love. But he made himself walk, and he breathed his sons’ names, with each step spoke them into his thoughts until their faces danced before him, until their voices were louder than Snow’s as she called to him from the wind.

  THE FOUR RIVERS VILLAGE

  Brown Foot scratched at the side of K’os’s lodge. He was mumbling small curses against an old wife too lazy to get up in the morning to feed her husband, and against River Ice Dancer’s dogs, the animals barking as he waited.

  “What?” he finally shouted out. “Are all women lazy this morning? Is everyone still asleep? Look!” He raised his walking stick toward the southeast. “There is the sun.” He blew through his lips, a sound of rudeness, and pulled aside the outer doorflap. He went into the entrance tunnel and did not pause to call again before stepping inside the lodge.

  When he saw K’os was not there, he stopped his flow of curses. Then, glimpsing the thatch of River Ice Dancer’s dark hair above his sleeping robes, Brown Foot slapped his walking stick against the floor and shouted, “What hunter sleeps away a good day?”

  When the man did not answer, Brown Foot stepped closer and prodded him with his stick. “Where is your wife?” he asked. “Your hearth is cold.” He squatted on his haunches and muttered, “She’s a foolish woman, going out to the food cache before starting your morning fire. You might decide to get another. I have a granddaughter, you know….”

  He pushed a hand under River Ice Dancer’s blankets, then his mouth fell open. He stared at his fingers.
They were sticky with clotted blood.

  “How is your wife?” Near Mouse whispered, standing on tiptoe to peer over Cen’s shoulder into the lodge. Sand Fly scuttled past him, set the baby’s cradleboard on the floor. She unlaced the bindings and stripped out the moss padding, full of the baby’s wastes, then threw the moss into the hearth fire.

  The two old women had entered as if the lodge belonged to them, and Cen clenched his fists to keep his impatience from becoming anger. He was tired, awakened in the night by Gheli’s vomiting. She had quieted and then he had slept, but that sleep had been cursed with strange dreams and half-formed thoughts.

  At dawn, K’os had given Gheli more medicine, tea made with a pale green powder.

  “It is the strongest medicine I have,” she had told Cen. “It should drive away her pain, loosen her bowels and force the evil from her body. But if those pain spirits are too great…” She shook her head. “It is the best I can do for her,” she had said softly. “Perhaps you should ask one of the elders to come and make prayers.”

  Now, as Cen answered Near Mouse’s question, he found his eyes tearing and had to look away. “Gheli is still sick,” he said. “Is there anyone in the village who might know prayers?”

  “Our shaman died two…no…three summers ago. He was old, and my husband told us—”

  “I know,” Cen said, interrupting her. Near Mouse was a woman of too many words, and he did not have time for her foolishness. “Is there anyone else?”

  “Perhaps old Brown Foot.”

  Cen shook his head.

  Near Mouse pursed her lips into a frown. “He is always after more than his share of food, that is true,” she replied, “but he knows many prayers. He was brother to our shaman.”

  Cen glanced at Sand Fly; the woman was nursing his daughter. “He knows prayers,” she said without looking up from the baby.