by Sue Harrison
She shredded the leaves and dropped them into the boiling bag, stirred again.
“So she went for lovage, not berries.”
“Probably,” Daes said. “But if she found berries she would bring them as well. Highbush cranberries are good this time of year, after the first frost.”
Her words made sense, Cries-loud told himself, so why did he feel as though she were lying? And why hadn’t she asked about Cen?
During the days walking to the village, he had tried to decide how to tell his mother and sister about Cen’s death. He had not even considered that they wouldn’t be in the village. Who stayed in fish camps when caribou hunts were about to begin?
Your mother, some small voice told him, when she’s worried her husband will bring Ghaden to the village. Ghaden, who might recognize her as Red Leaf.
Cries-loud watched his sister and wondered what it had been like for her, named after the dead Daes. Had the ghost followed her name to this new Daes? Had his mother—Red Leaf, Gheli—feared the power of that name? Surely she lived in dread lest someone come to the village who would recognize her. There were always men—hunters, traders—going back and forth between villages. How better to hide herself than to spend the summers in some remote fish camp?
She also must have learned to sew differently, for, according to Yaa, a woman can recognize other women’s work, especially sewing as gifted as Red Leaf’s. And Cen would surely want to trade his wife’s fine parkas. Had she somehow changed her stitches so they no longer spoke her name?
Suddenly he realized that Daes was holding a bowl of food before him. He wrapped his hands around the bowl, inhaled the steam, smelled the smoky fires that had dried the fish. The smell pulled him away from the lodge, from his sister whom he had known only as a baby. He stayed for a moment in that safe place, then opened his eyes and came back.
“Thank you,” he told Daes.
He lifted the bowl to his lips, used his fingers to push a little of the meat into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed, then lowered the bowl to his lap, and motioned for her to sit down beside him. “Do you want me to tell you what I know?”
She squatted on her haunches, as though to be ready to refill his bowl.
“Sit,” he said, “unless you want to get yourself something to eat.”
“No.”
“Your father was a good man,” he began, and thought how strange it was to be telling this sister about Cen, to be telling her that her father was dead, when all along she belonged to Sok, a father who was alive and strong.
During the whole telling, she did not cry, and when he had finished, she stood, brushed her hands together, and pulled off the soft ground squirrel parka she had been wearing inside the lodge. Cries-loud expected her to begin a mourning cry, but she only stirred the boiling bag. Finally she calmly picked up a woman’s knife that lay on a hearthstone and drew the blade across her left arm, once, twice. She lifted her hand and leaned over the fire so the blood ran down her arm into the coals.
She showed no sign of pain, as though she had only cut a fish for drying, but she said to him, “Thank you for coming to tell us.”
He hoped she would add something about her mother, at least how to get to their fish camp. If Red Leaf were still alive, she needed to know about Cen, and she also needed to know that K’os was coming, she and her daughter Uutuk and Ghaden.
But when Daes spoke she said, “The man Ghaden, do you know him?”
“I know him. He lives in my village.” Almost he told her that he was married to Ghaden’s sister Yaa, but then for some reason did not.
“No one else from your village is coming, nae’?” she asked.
“There’s a woman from our village who knew your mother. Perhaps you recognize her name. K’os.”
“No,” Daes said.
“She’s coming to share your mother’s mourning, and she plans to travel with her husband Seal, a First Men trader, as well as a daughter and that daughter’s husband, Ghaden.”
For a moment—so quickly that Cries-loud almost missed it—Daes’s eyes widened, but she went to one of her packs and rummaged through it until she came up with a strip of caribou hide. “Let me help,” he said, and she held her arm out toward him.
He wrapped the strip tightly, then bent to look into her eyes, clasped her chin when she tried to turn away. “You know Ghaden,” he said.
“My mother speaks about him sometimes.”
“And me?” he asked. “Does she speak about me?”
Daes looked at him, puzzled. “No,” she said slowly. “Why should she?”
She glanced down when Cries-loud tucked the end of the hide strip into place near her elbow. For a moment, he thought she was studying the wrap, but then she raised her hand to his, held it there. His hand was larger, but otherwise they looked the same, even to the pattern of their veins.
She lifted her eyes to his face and asked, “Who are you?”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula
602 B.C.
THERE WERE MURMURS OF protest when Kuy’aa stopped her story. One of the bolder women said, “We want to know what he tells her. We want to know if he decides he can trust her.”
“Do you think he can?” Kuy’aa asked.
“No!” most of the men called out.
“Of course,” said one of the chief hunter’s wives. “Once she knows she is his sister, she will not do anything to harm him.”
Another woman said, “You cannot trust her. Look how often she lies, and she just took her baby sister and left her mother.”
“Her mother deserved to be left. Who could live in a fish camp all winter? The baby would have died!”
The arguing continued, the voices rising. Yikaas glanced at Kuy’aa and saw that she was smiling. Qumalix moved to sit beside her, and Sky Catcher did the same.
“It must be a difficult story to tell,” said Qumalix, “because it is a difficult story to hear. You don’t know whether Daes is good or bad. You don’t know how to feel about her.”
“There are many ways to tell this story,” Kuy’aa said. The old woman licked her lips, and Yikaas saw that they were dry and cracked. He asked if anyone had a water bladder, and soon one was thrust into his hands. He gave it to her, waited as she drank, and then said, “So then, Aunt, why did you tell it this way?”
“It needed to be short,” she said. “There are too many people in this ulax, and they distract one another from the telling. If I were to tell it only to you, I would also have let you know what Gheli was thinking and perhaps even how the baby felt. That way you would have other people to think about, and you wouldn’t be so frustrated with Daes.”
“You want her to be good,” Qumalix broke in to say. “And gradually you realize that she’s not as good as she should be.”
“But she’s not as bad as K’os,” Yikaas said. “She does think about others. She was worried about her sister.” He saw that Sky Catcher was trying to listen, and so asked with a gesture of his eyes for Qumalix to translate what he had said into First Men words.
Then Sky Catcher said, “Not worried enough to take her back to Gheli after that first day on the trail.”
“Well,” said Yikaas, “think about this. Daes turned out better than she could have. Look how selfish her mother, Gheli, is. She won’t go back to the winter village because she thinks Ghaden might be there. She puts her own daughters’ lives at risk …”
“Ha! That is foolish,” said Sky Catcher. “Better to be a little cold in a fish camp tent than dead because someone remembers that you killed his mother.”
Qumalix interrupted in a soft voice. “What about her name?” she asked. “What do you think of when I say the word daes?”
“It is a River word. What does it mean?” Sky Catcher asked.
“A shallow bit of water, not much good to anyone.”
“The right name for her,” said Yikaas.
“But what chance does it give her?” asked Sky Catcher. �
��The name itself is a curse, and it would always remind Gheli of what she did to that first Daes.”
“If you remember the stories of the first Daes,” Yikaas said, “you know that she was a selfish woman. Not wicked, but selfish. She left her daughter Aqamdax to run away with Cen. She married an old man she did not care about just because he would take her son Ghaden as his own. It really wasn’t until she was dying, Red Leaf’s knife slicing away her life, that she reached beyond herself and thought of someone else.”
“Who?” asked Sky Catcher.
“Remember, she lay over Ghaden so he would not freeze to death.”
“But Ghaden was just a little boy. Any mother would do the same.”
Qumalix translated what Sky Catcher had said, then raised her hands to press them against the sides of her head. “You two need to learn each other’s languages,” she told Sky Catcher and Yikaas. “My head aches from carrying your words back and forth.”
Sky Catcher laughed and thrust a hand toward the top of the ulax. He said something and started up the climbing log, but Qumalix shook her head at him. Yikaas realized he had been holding his breath, waiting for her answer, afraid she would do as Sky Catcher asked. Instead, she looked at Yikaas, lifted her mouth in a half-smile.
“He complains for lack of sleep,” Qumalix said, but avoided Yikaas’s eyes.
Sky Catcher said something else, yelled it down rudely from the top of the ulax before he went outside. Qumalix’s face turned red, and to cover her embarrassment, Yikaas asked, “So, do you think the name Daes passed on that first Daes’s selfishness?”
Qumalix shook her head. “How could anyone know?” she said.
Kuy’aa had settled down on her haunches, and Yikaas squatted beside her, asked her the same question. She tipped her head to look at him and said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not. The important thing to remember is that she was selfish, and she lied without shame.”
Yikaas noticed that the old woman was lifting her voice higher and higher to be heard above the arguments of those around them. Finally she began to laugh and said, “Yikaas, you are the loudest of us all. Tell them to be quiet. I think they need another story.”
So Yikaas whistled and clapped his hands until the people in the ulax had stopped their arguing.
“My aunt is ready to continue her story,” he told them, but Kuy’aa tugged at his hand, shook her head.
She placed her fingers against her throat and said, “You take a turn.”
“I don’t know Daes’s story.”
“They’ve heard enough about Daes. Tell them about K’os and Daughter. Talk to them about Ghaden. A storyteller has to realize that people don’t want to think about someone like Daes for very long. We are often too much like her, not quite evil and not quite good. Tell us about K’os. She is so evil, we feel good about ourselves. Or tell us about Ghaden and Daughter. We want to be like them, so it is easy to fall into their story.”
“But they want to know what Cries-loud tells Daes.”
“You can’t think of some way to put that in a story about K’os or Ghaden?”
Yikaas smiled at his aunt’s wisdom and lifted his voice to begin.
Near the Four Rivers Village
6435 B.C.
K’OS’S STORY
K’os woke from her dream smiling. They were less than a day away from the Four Rivers village. The path was familiar now to her feet. Aa, she had been young when she lived here, wife to the boy River Ice Dancer. She laughed under her breath. He had cost her much, that one. The fool! Who could believe he would steal her brideprice from his father’s caches? And worse, that his father would take K’os as slave after River Ice Dancer died?
She owed Cen for that death. Who else would have killed the boy but him, though she had never decided why he did it. Perhaps only so she would take the blame, and the Four Rivers People would drive her out of their village.
Cen was dead, but surely his spirit would know what she did to Ghaden, the son receiving the revenge she had intended for his father. And the people of the Four Rivers village, they, too, would know her vengeance. It would not take long. She had found a wonderful poison on her First Men’s island, a plant that also grew here in the River People’s country, but was not well known and was difficult to find.
The First Men placed it on the points of their whale harpoons, a secret K’os had learned while bedding a hunter. It had taken her some time to learn how to use the plant, dry it down to increase its strength. She had tried it on birds—baby gulls children kept as pets—watched in delight as the birds staggered and gasped and died within a day, the poison so strong that none of them escaped.
K’os always buried the birds after the poison had stopped their hearts. After all, what would a mother do with a dead bird her child brought her other than strip the feathers and add the flesh to her boiling bag? And who knew when someone might in generosity give you a bowl of that soup?
Age had changed K’os much, but she did not doubt that some of the Four Rivers People would recognize her. She would have to play the part of a First Men wife and play it well, satisfy them that they had been wrong in driving her away. How strange that with all the people she had killed, the one she did not—River Ice Dancer—had been responsible for her slavery. Gheli, Red Leaf, would be an enemy, but with Cries-loud sent ahead to warn his mother of Ghaden’s arrival, they would probably not see the woman at all.
“We are close?” Uutuk asked.
“I have set traplines near this trail,” K’os told her. “It is less than a day’s walk to the village. You think it is better to travel like the First Men, with iqyan and paddles?”
Daughter rolled her eyes toward the sky. “Much better,” she said.
“You will like the village. It is not as large as Chakliux’s. At least it was not when I lived there, but the people are good and generous. I stayed for a time with an old man and woman. They are surely dead by now. But they were like a mother and father to me, even helped me celebrate my marriage with a give-away. It was a good time, but when my husband died, some of the people in the village thought that it was my fault. They made me leave, but I hold no anger against them.”
K’os had never told Uutuk about River Ice Dancer’s death, and the girl looked at her now through frightened eyes.
“They blamed you?”
“He was killed as he slept, most likely by a young hunter who had something against him, but I was a new wife and not of their village. It was easier to blame me than to think that one of them did it.”
“How can you not be angry?”
“Think of this,” K’os said. “If I had stayed, I would never have found you and your grandfather.”
K’os cut her eyes away quickly when she saw the tears on Uutuk’s cheeks. The path narrowed, and Uutuk dropped back to walk behind her. By the time they could walk side by side again, the girl’s tears were gone, but K’os clicked her tongue in satisfaction when she saw the worry in Uutuk’s eyes.
“You think they still blame you, Mother?” Uutuk asked.
“No, it happened too long ago, and to a young man who was not of their village. They will have forgotten, most of them. And those who remember will see that I could not have been guilty. If I had killed my husband, his spirit would have never allowed me to survive those days of wandering alone in the forest and tundra.”
“Yes, Mother,” Uutuk said, but though she smiled, her forehead was still creased with concern.
Good, K’os thought. Worry, Uutuk, and take none of them into your heart.
Ghaden began a traders’ song as soon as he saw the smoke from the village hearths lying in a thin haze above the trees. Even before they came to the village, a hunter met them on the trail, he and two of his grown sons. Ghaden glanced at K’os, and she called out a greeting. “Blue Lance! We come to trade.”
The man squinted at her for a moment, then Ghaden saw the dismissal in his face. He didn’t recognize her, but she was only an old woman. Why worry? What harm could she do
?
“Your song says that you’re a trader,” Blue Lance said, the words rising like a question.
“My wife’s father, Seal, is the trader,” Ghaden told him. “He’s First Men and doesn’t speak the River language, so I sang the song for him.”
Ghaden did not intend to introduce K’os. What man would? But Blue Lance had begun to stare at her again, even as he told Ghaden that he was the village’s chief hunter and introduced his sons, Moon Slayer and Bird Hand. Blue Lance said that soon the Four Rivers men would leave to follow caribou, but that the traders were welcome to stay until then.
“It will be good for the young men of the village to have something to think about besides hunting,” he told Ghaden with laughter in his voice. “We have too many fights, too many loud words.”
It was the same in every village, Ghaden thought. Older hunters had learned to keep their excitement within, spend their energy to make and repair weapons, then pray for the strength and purity to have a good hunt. The young men were like dogs too long tethered, barking and snapping at one another, at their wives and even their children. Yes, traders would be a good diversion.
“We accept your hospitality,” Ghaden told him, “and thank you for it.” Then, turning to Seal, he explained what Blue Lance had said.
Seal’s dark face split into a grin. “Just like our young men, anxious to hunt.”
Ghaden translated, and Blue Lance began to laugh, slapped a hand on Seal’s shoulder, a good sign for any trader. Then Blue Lance lifted his chin toward K’os, asked, “She is wife? Mother?”
“Perhaps you remember her,” Ghaden said. “A long time ago she lived in your village. She is here now as wife to Seal and mother of my wife.” Ghaden glanced at Uutuk, huddled at the back of the group.
“Aaa! Too bad that one is already wife. You could get much in trade for her.”
“She’s a good wife,” Ghaden said carefully, so not to give offense. “I don’t want to trade her.”
The chief hunter did not seem to hear what he said, and Ghaden realized that the man’s eyes were again on K’os.