The Storyteller Trilogy

by Sue Harrison

  Daughter was curled on his feet, the girl so still that his breath caught. He reached down, lifted her, and she stretched out slowly, as though she were a stiff-jointed old woman. Water Gourd set her on his lap, grimaced at how cold she was. Her hair was frosted with salt, stiff as ice, and she lifted raw, red hands to swipe at her eyes, but when she looked up at him she smiled, and when he offered her a sea urchin, she ate willingly.

  He ate also, then reached for the paddle he had wedged between his leg and the side of the boat. The sea was nearly calm, and he could see the place of the sun behind the clouds. He would paddle west toward his home, and even if the storm winds rose again, at least he would have gained back a little of the distance he had lost.

  His hand closed over nothing, and he grasped again before he looked and saw that the paddle was gone. He clambered into the bow, dumping Daughter from his lap, did not even hear her cries of protest. He pushed his hands into the pile of sea urchins, ignored the prickling of their shells, then scrambled into the back of the boat, even over the outrigger rails to the small shaped log that kept them from capsizing in the waves.

  The paddle wasn’t in the boat. He stood, looked out in all directions. It wasn’t even floating nearby. His despair was so great that he considered flinging himself into the sea. Why continue to fight when the storm had managed to take his best weapon? But as he looked into the cold depths, he lost his courage or perhaps regained it. The sea might take him, but he would not give up willingly.

  He pulled the bailing gourd from inside his woven rush shirt, filled it from the bottom of the boat, and drank. The water was brackish and tasted of burnt wood, dark from the char that had not been carved away, salty, but not as salty as sea water—rain mixed with what the waves had brought in. He offered some to Daughter, then began to bail.

  It seemed as though he had bailed forever. Four days since the storm had begun. How many days since he had left his village? Seven? Eight?

  As he bailed, he watched the sky and realized that the sea was taking them north. But then the storm again howled down upon them, this time from the south and the east. He wrapped himself and Daughter in a deerskin blanket, and he continued to bail, working through that day and the next.

  The morning of the sixth day, the sky divided, the clouds cut asunder as though by a knife, and Water Gourd knew that the storm’s back had been broken. At midday the sun shone down on them.

  The boat and outrigger, the blankets, even the bottle gourds were coated with ice. The storm had driven them north, far beyond their own village, or any of the Boat People’s villages. Perhaps he and Daughter were not meant to survive, for surely the storm had brought them to the small northern islands of the Bear-god People. Without a paddle. With a dwindling supply of sea urchins. With only ice rime and the water in the gourds. What hope did they have?

  As the days passed, Water Gourd’s hands went through the motions of keeping himself and Daughter alive. He carefully scraped the ice from the boat and blankets each morning, placed it in the split gourd, and held the gourd between his legs until the ice melted. Then he divided it between Daughter and himself, taking care to share it equally. Each night, they both took a swallow of water from the gourds.

  In his thirst he thought much about water. As water carrier, it had been his life, but his first days hauling spring water had been filled with resentment. All the years hunting and fishing had brought him only the dishonor of doing boy’s work. Anger had filled him so full that he didn’t have room to swallow his own spit. He had seen other old men like that, drooling until chins were wet and crusted with saliva. He did not want to be like them, but still his hatred grew.

  He hated the water he carried. He hated the bottle gourds. He hated the path that wound its way to the spring, slippery in winter, prickly with sharp-edged grass in summer. How much easier to hate than to look honestly at his own weak legs, his bent and gnarled fingers. But now in the boat, mouth parched, he thought longingly of those gourds, water beads on their tough, smooth shells. He remembered the smiles women gave him when he filled their water pots. He thought of the small gifts they offered in return—chestnut cakes, mussels and sea urchins, seeds roasted on hearthstones.

  He began to realize that his work of carrying water had not been without honor. He had done what he was able to do, and maybe in some ways that was even more respectable than having a place as a wise elder, sitting and talking, expecting others to bring him food and water.

  “Why didn’t I realize that my life was good?” he asked Daughter.

  She looked up at him with solemn eyes, perhaps surprised that he had spoken to her. Their world was mostly one of silence. He crooned a little when he wanted her to sleep, but his voice was ragged and harsh, brittle with age. Sometimes he heard her singing a song, muffled by the fingers that were always in her mouth, and sometimes she cried, but she had stopped asking for her mother.

  Water Gourd no longer attempted to count the days. He was past numbering them. Too many days without enough food, without fire for warmth, without good water.

  The storm had filled the earthenware pot, so the dried meat and fish inside had rotted. Each day he forced himself to choke down a little, and each day he tried to get Daughter to eat some, too, but usually she refused. He could not say he was sad when the food in that pot was finally gone.

  Besides the spoiled meat, he allowed Daughter one sea urchin a day, himself two, but the morning finally came when there was only one left. He ate the eggs from three of the ovaries, gave Daughter the rest.

  As Water Gourd licked the last of them from his thumbnail, his eyes began to prickle. He squeezed them shut, then rubbed the heels of his hands against the lids, was startled to find that his cheeks were wet with tears. I cry for Daughter, he told himself. Why waste pity on myself? He had lived well, had wives and sons. Daughter was the one who deserved a longer life. He looked down at her small face—at the eyes, once so bright, now sunken and dull with hunger—and sorrow burned at the center of his chest.

  She is only a girl, he reminded himself. A girl’s life was not easy, nor even necessarily good. As wife, she would spend her days working hard, her nights serving a husband who might not be easy to please.

  He had been good to his own wives, Water Gourd assured himself. Most of the time, anyway. Perhaps in his youth he had been more impatient with his first wife than he should have been. Demanding. But surely he had made up for that over the years, and paid for it with his fourth wife, wicked and self-centered as she had been.

  Perhaps, then, for both he and Daughter, it was good that the sea urchins were gone. Perhaps neither of them had much to live for. Now, he could give serious thought to dying. How can a man consider the necessity of death when he still has food?

  He set his thoughts onto ways of dying. Starvation was certainly one, drowning another, but neither seemed appealing. Water Gourd still had his knife. He could cut into his veins, knotted like blue worms under his skin. But thinking of blood turned his thoughts to butchering, and for most of that first day after their food was gone, Water Gourd was lost in remembering the feasts of the past, times of celebration.

  He filled his mind with the remembrance of sea urchins, split and ready to eat, rich as the boar fat that dripped from spits into the roasting fires. Delicate chestnut cakes, roasted nuts and tubers, grass seeds pounded fine and mixed with water, cooked on flat stones and rolled around a paste of fish. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to eat his way through such a meal, finishing with flower blossoms, bitten and sucked to get at the nectar.

  And it wasn’t until Daughter’s whimpering brought him from his feast back to the cold, wet hulk of the boat that he realized that instead of thinking about death, he had spent most of the day considering life.

  He was disgusted with himself. If he wasted his time thinking about eating, how could he hope for an honorable death?

  “There is nothing to eat,” he told Daughter sadly, and she pulled her fingers out of her mouth an
d puckered her lips into a pout.

  “Fish,” she said.

  “No fish,” he told her.

  She pointed at several empty sea urchin shells that littered the bottom of the boat. “Fish,” she said again, in a more demanding way. He leaned down and picked up a shell, handed it to her. She licked at the inside, then played with it for a while, and for the first time he realized that she needed a toy. Didn’t all children have toys? He considered cutting away the edge of one of the blankets, tying it into something that would look like a doll—legs and arms and head—but then he realized his foolishness. They needed the blankets much more than Daughter needed a doll. She was happy enough with the sea urchin shell, prickly though it was.

  But the thought of cutting the blanket set another idea into his mind. Perhaps he could make some kind of line from the blanket, or better yet from the fiber of his shirt. He began to examine the edges of the jacket where stitches caught up a hem of sorts to keep the fabric from unraveling. He picked at the thread, wondered what it was made of. He had seen the women of the village pounding bark, perhaps to separate it into threads for sewing. Sometimes they twisted sinew, but what man paid attention to that? Curses were too easy to come by as it was. Why bring them on yourself with an inordinate interest in women’s work?

  By the time he had picked out the stitches, he had a section of thread as long as his arms stretched wide. Perhaps enough to catch a fish, he thought. He tugged at it, and decided it was strong enough to hold. He used his knife to cut away a section of wood from the edge of the boat, managed to take off a piece as long as his fist and as big around as two fingers. He smoothed the center of the wood, then tied one end of the line around it.

  “A hand line,” he said to Daughter, and she repeated the words. “For fish,” he told her.

  “Fish,” she said, and clasped her hands to her belly and began to cry. “Fish,” she said. “I want fish.”

  He gave her a little of his hoarded water, and it seemed to calm her. He held her tightly against the warmth of his stomach and watched as her eyes closed, fluttered open and closed again. Finally she slept, and he began to consider how to make a hook.

  When the Bear-gods attacked his outrigger, two of their spears landed inside the boat. Water Gourd had nearly thrown them into the sea, fearful of the curse they might carry, but then he had decided to keep them. His first thought had been to use them on land to hunt small animals he and Daughter might come across, but now that they were so far out on the sea and their paddle was gone, how could he hope to hunt?

  He had spent several days, when they still had sea urchins to eat, holding one of the spears poised over the edge of the boat, ready to thrust it at any fish that came close, but he had seen no fish, and finally gave up. What could he expect? he asked himself. It was a Bear-god spear, and what did the Bear-god People know about the sea? The fish had probably seen the spear as insult, and most likely thought he, himself, was a Bear-god.

  He had tried to fashion a paddle using a spear as a shaft, but he couldn’t gouge out a wide enough piece of wood from the boat to serve as blade. Besides, the spears were thrusting lances, the shafts too short for paddles unless he leaned far over the edge of the boat.

  Before he made his decision, Daughter’s warmth against his belly drew him into sleep, and in his dreams he was again a boy, idle for some reason and watching the village stone knapper. That stone knapper was long dead, and even in his dream, Water Gourd had a hard time remembering the man’s name. Finally it came to him. Carver—probably not his true name, but a name, like Water Gourd, bestowed because of what the man did.

  In that time long ago, Carver had made most of the spears, knives, and tools for the people of the village. For two years, Water Gourd had been his apprentice, learning the patient art of stone knapping, but then in the foolishness of his youth, he had decided he would rather hunt or fish.

  But that night in the cedar boat, Water Gourd watched Carver in his dreams, and he realized that he remembered much. There was the pad of leather used to protect the left hand as it cradled the stone; the deer antler punch and the fist-sized rock used as hammer; punches, drills, and incising tools to make arrow points from bone. All that night of sleeping, Water Gourd watched and learned.

  In the morning, he unwound the sinew that bound the Bear-god spearhead to its shaft. He spoke in soothing tones to the stone as he freed it, so it would not be afraid of what he was about to do. He didn’t want it to shatter in his hands.

  He wrapped the sinew around his wrist and tied it, so he would not lose it. Then he carved himself a punch from the bone haft of his wrist knife, made a new handle from the shaft of the Bear-god spear. The knife wasn’t as beautiful, but it was usable. He chose a ballast stone to be his hammer and padded his left hand with a corner of the smaller deerskin blanket. He gripped the spearhead and began a careful reshaping, narrowing and thinning the base of the blade until he was able to chip away several long thin splinters of stone.

  Water Gourd looked at his fingers in wonder, at the swollen, misshapen joints, and was amazed at what he was able to do. It seemed as though he could feel Carver’s hands on his own, guiding, teaching, for surely the work was not Water Gourd’s alone.

  He knapped the narrow end of the largest stone splinter into a point, then cut another chunk of wood from the spear shaft, carved it down, and with his knife dug a hole where he inserted the blunt end of the splinter, the sharp end jutting up at an angle away from the wood. He bound the point in place with some of the sinew and used the rest as a leader to attach the completed hook to the length of line he had unraveled from his jacket.

  It had taken him most of the day, for he had had to stop several times in his work to comfort Daughter, to wash out the rags that were now always wet between her legs. Her buttocks and the tiny woman’s cleft between her legs were rough and red, swollen with a rash, and she fussed some, pulling at the rag now and again, but most of the time, she only sat, half asleep, so he wondered if she were considering death herself, a preparation to allow her spirit to slip easily from her body.

  He considered what he would do with her if she died. The easiest thing would be to drop her into the sea, but would that be wise? Surely her flesh would be good and sweet, though he would not eat her himself. What man could risk a curse like that? But if he dropped her body into the sea, the fish would eat her. So what difference would it make if he used her for bait? The fish would still eat her, but he would have a chance to get himself some food.

  He sat a long time watching her, and once she looked up at him, smiled around the fingers in her mouth. His heart squeezed tight, and he angrily batted at the tears that suddenly burned in his eyes. Ah ee! What foolishness, to care about a child so young that she could hardly talk!

  Maybe he could catch a fish before she died, and the meat would give her the strength to live a little longer. He sat the girl down in the middle of the boat, in a place that was not too wet. With the remaining part of the spear shaft, he began to dig through the debris in the bow. Perhaps he would find something—a hard fin left from the smoked fish that had been in Daughter’s pot, a glob of sea urchin eggs that he could rub on the hook.

  A tatter from one of the deerskin blankets might attract a fish, but there were curses that came when a man put land animals in fish bellies. Surely he had enough bad luck as it was. Why ask for more?

  He lifted each ballast stone, searched Daughter’s pack. Finally he found half a sea urchin shell. Except for that shell, there was nothing, not even a bit of waste from one of Daughter’s rags. That was what happened when a man went for too many years without a wife. He got used to cleaning up after himself.

  He finally took the shell and tied it on the hook, lowered the hand line into the water. He had thought he might need to attach a bit of stone to weight the line, but the stone hook was heavy enough to carry it down. He leaned over the boat and watched it drop as he unwound line from the wooden handle.

  He watched for a lon
g time, but saw no fish, and finally, his back aching, he sat up and scanned the sea. As swells lifted the boat, he looked out toward the horizon. Sometimes his eyes fooled him into thinking he saw land where there was none. Then the sea dropped the boat into a trough between the waves, and there was nothing but water rising, so that he marveled they had lived this long and not been swallowed up.

  This day, with his hook and line and the hope of fish, Water Gourd decided that the sea was friend rather than enemy. He sang a fisherman’s song in his old creaky voice, then told Daughter that the walls of water that rose smooth and green around them would soon bring a fish to his hook.

  Chapter Five

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

  602 B.C.

  A LOUD VOICE INTERRUPTED Qumalix’s story. She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head as though she needed to remind herself where she was. In the dim light of the ulax, Yikaas could see she was searching for the one who had called out.

  A man rose to his feet. He crossed his arms over his chest, puffed himself up with a full, long breath of air. He was First Men. He wore an otterskin sax, a long hoodless parka favored by both men and women of the Traders’ Beach, and ivory labrets pierced his skin at the corners of his mouth. Kuy’aa had explained to Yikaas that a man’s labrets were signs of his family’s lineage and his place in their village. This man’s labrets were large circles, and from each, a blunt tusk protruded the length of a finger joint. Vertical lines darkened his chin, and a path of circles and dots crossed his cheeks. No doubt he was a hunter from some powerful family. Did he not have a hunter’s tattoos?