by Sue Harrison
She lifted a hand toward the fire, invited Cries-loud to join them. “We’ve eaten,” she said, “but there’s food left for you, if you do not mind dried fish dipped in seal oil.”
Aqamdax always had a belly of seal oil in her lodge, and Cries-loud had learned to like the taste of it. He crouched by the fire on his haunches, imitating K’os rather than sitting cross-legged like most River men. He lifted his chin toward her and said, “I see you are First Men now.”
“In many ways,” she told him.
“How did you get yourself this daughter?”
Her jaw jutted as though she had been insulted, and she said, “How does anyone get a daughter?”
He kept his other questions hidden under his tongue. Why risk the anger of a woman like K’os when Ghaden could tell him what he wanted to know? He watched Uutuk as she brought him a wooden bowl of seal oil, a handful of fish, and a water bladder. She was a beautiful woman, round-faced and small-boned, with eyes even more narrow than Aqamdax’s. Except for her thick dark hair, there was no resemblance between her and K’os.
He turned his mind toward the man Seal, decided that the girl was his and somehow K’os had earned herself a place as his wife. Most likely the girl’s true mother was dead. Cries-loud wondered if K’os had killed her.
“So why did you want to see me?” he asked after he had begun eating. The fish was good, dried and smoked, rich with the seal oil.
“I thought perhaps you would like to travel with us to the Four Rivers village. Ghaden wants to tell his father’s wife that she is a widow.”
Cries-loud was suddenly very still. He was wise enough to know that K’os was wolf as well as woman, rejoiced in the stalk nearly as much as the kill. He gave his attention to the food, drank long from the water bladder, then asked Uutuk several questions about their journey.
Finally, K’os interrupted to say, “So I thought you might like to come with us and see if your sister is still living in that village. Or perhaps you have visited her already in these years since I’ve been gone.”
“Once I went in summer,” Cries-loud said, “but the people were all scattered into fish camps and I never did find her.”
He had not told the Four Rivers People that he was her brother. Why give his sister problems that she did not need? There were sure to be questions about the mother they shared, dead though she was. He himself thought about Red Leaf too often, and Yaa never tired of reminding him that he did so. Because he preferred to hunt alone, she accused him of searching for her. Yaa was wrong, of course. What man would waste time foolishly looking for someone who no longer walked the earth? But still, there was something that called him into the forests. Perhaps her spirit.
Red Leaf might have killed others, but he had never doubted her love for him. He was not afraid of her, not even her spirit. So why, then, did he avoid the Four Rivers village? Did he not want to know his sister, or take a brother’s responsibility for her children?
Those children would be young—a good time to visit them, so they would learn to recognize his face, and in future years when he returned, they would know him as uncle. But what of Yaa? Each year that passed, each baby that died, made her cling more tightly to him. Would a sister with children hurt or help?
He shook his head. Who could say? Yaa was not a woman easily understood. He looked up to see K’os watching him.
“You don’t want to go, then?” she asked him.
He looked at her, puzzled, then realized that she had misunderstood the reason he was shaking his head.
“I haven’t decided,” he said, and was glad she did not know that he had already told Ghaden he wanted to accompany them. To escape K’os’s questions, he turned toward Uutuk and said, “I’m sorry I cannot speak to you in your own language.”
“That is no problem, since I speak yours. My mother taught me well.”
“A wise thing to do,” said Cries-loud, “especially now that you are a River wife. Of course, she could not have known that would happen.”
He caught the sudden darkening of K’os’s eyes as she leaned forward to thrust a few sticks into the fire.
Aaa, but she had known, Cries-loud thought, or at least had hoped for such a thing. He was suddenly cold and moved closer to the flames. Why believe K’os had changed just because she had a good daughter?
“You should come with us to the Four Rivers village,” K’os said, and Uutuk added, “My husband has missed all of the people in his village very much. He’d be glad for you to come.”
“I was thinking of my wife,” Cries-loud said. “She has recently mourned the death of another baby, and I think it would be good for her to leave the village for a while. The child’s ghost seems to linger.”
“Yes, bring her,” Uutuk said. “She can tell me about the village, and how I can be a good wife to a River man.” A smile lighted her face, and she clapped her hands like a child, but K’os’s voice cut into the darkness, rose above the snapping of the fire.
“Uutuk, I should have told you that this man is married to your husband’s sister, Yaa.”
“I know,” Uutuk said. “Ghaden told me all the people in his family.”
“You see how quickly my daughter learns, Tigangiyaanen,” K’os said, boasting as any mother might, but Cries-loud heard more than boasting in her words. Her pride was eclipsed by some darkness. Jealousy, and something else as well. Fear?
Most likely she did not want Yaa to come with them. Yaa might be able to tell Uutuk more than K’os wanted her to know, for unlike Ghaden, Yaa, being older, was more likely to remember some of the evil that K’os had done when she lived in their village and owned Aqamdax as slave.
“Perhaps you will want your wife to go with you, or perhaps you will not,” K’os said quietly.
Uutuk began to protest, and Cries-loud was surprised that the girl should do so. Perhaps K’os had softened, raised this child differently than she had raised Chakliux.
“Be still, Uutuk!” K’os said sharply, and lifted one hand, palm out, as though to stop her daughter’s words. “There are things here you do not understand and don’t need to know. Go get wood. The fire is eating more than its share, and the night gives warning that winter isn’t far away.”
Uutuk’s face puckered into worry, but she left them. Cries-loud felt his heart walk with her, into the evening shadows of the trees. A First Men woman would fear the forests, yet K’os seemed to give no thought to her terror.
“You shouldn’t send her out there alone,” Cries-loud said. “She’ll be afraid.”
“My daughter knows how to live above her fear,” K’os told him. “Besides, what I have to say will not take long; then you can go with her if you wish.” She looked into the fire and said, “A question first. You mentioned that Yaa lost a child. How many children do you have?”
“Four in the spirit world, and now she spends most of her time treating me like a child.”
The words were out before he could stop them, the complaint as nasty and whining as anything he could have said. He closed his eyes in regret. How stupid to give K’os such a weapon against him and against Yaa.
“I fear I did the same to my husbands in my longing for a child. It’s difficult for men to understand, but every woman does. You have another wife?”
He expected the question. Anyone who heard that Yaa had no living children was surprised that Cries-loud had not taken himself another woman. He gave K’os the answer he had given others.
“When Yaa has ended her mourning, I plan to take a second wife.” He did not tell her that Yaa never ended her mourning, that with each birth and death, she wrapped herself more tightly into her sorrow.
“Perhaps you’ll find someone at the Four Rivers village.”
“There are still more than enough young women in our village for any hunter,” Cries-loud said.
K’os lifted her brows in acknowledgment. “Wars are foolishness.” She shook her head as though she had had no part in the hatred that had pushed the Near and
Cousin River villages into battle.
“You need to go with us to the Four Rivers village,” she said. “Without Yaa. Not for your sister, but for yourself.”
He began to offer reasons Yaa should go, excuses, but she cut him off. “Listen to what I have to tell you, then make your decision, about yourself and about your wife.
“Cen died in a storm. I suppose Ghaden told you that.”
“They’ll have a mourning for him tomorrow night,” Cries-loud said and was embarrassed at the sullenness in his voice. His wife had made him too bitter with her condescending ways, and now it seemed he had begun to act like a child.
But K’os continued as though she gave no consideration to his words. “Before he left the Traders’ Beach, I had time to speak to him of his life in the Four Rivers village. Once, years ago, I nearly took Cen as my own husband. We did not forget that friendship.”
“I didn’t know,” Cries-loud said.
“You were too young to know,” K’os told him. “Besides, that was when I lived in the Cousin village and you were with your mother and father in the Near River village. But that doesn’t matter. You remember when Chakliux forced me to leave his hunting camp?”
“I remember.”
“I went to live in the Four Rivers village.”
“You told me that. Long ago, you told me that.”
“Yes, when you sold me to the Walrus Hunters.”
“You said that my mother had survived even after she left my father, but that she had died in childbirth.”
“I thought she had.”
Cries-loud narrowed his eyes. In the light of the fire, K’os’s face had shadowed so it seemed as though she wore a dancer’s mask. Her mouth moved with her words, but otherwise she was very still, as though someone else were speaking, someone who stood behind her, hidden by the mask of her face. She sounded as though she told him the truth, but who could trust her? Perhaps she had lied before just to give him pain.
“You’re telling me that she’s alive?” he asked.
“I’m telling you that somehow she lived through that terrible birth and the illness that followed and when Cen left the Four Rivers village in early summer to trade, she was still alive.”
“No longer ill?”
“Strong enough that she had just given him another healthy daughter.”
Cries-loud had many questions, but he could not pull them from his throat. They crowded there choking him until he began to cough, finally gasping for breath.
He heard K’os’s low chuckle, and his anger burned against her. She did not tell him this to bring joy, but to see what he would do, to watch as though he were a dancer, to listen as though he were a storyteller.
“Decide then if you want to go with us, and if you want your wife to know about Red Leaf.” She paused for a moment, lifted her voice to call Uutuk back to the fire, then leaned close to say, “I suppose your father Sok is still alive. I suppose you don’t want him to know about your mother.”
“What does it matter?” he asked. “Ghaden is going. He still bears the scars of my mother’s knife. You think he will let her live?”
“Ghaden was only a child when Red Leaf tried to kill him. You think he will recognize her?” She shook her head. “Of course not. She has taken the name Gheli—I told you that, nae’? Ghaden won’t remember her, and I will not tell him. The choice is yours. Will you come?”
“Do you know when you will leave?”
She shrugged. “Most likely after the mourning. Should I tell my husband that you’ll travel with us?”
Uutuk walked into the light of their fire, set an armful of branches near the lean-to. K’os threw the branches over the coals until she had coaxed the flames into a leaping roar, forcing Cries-loud to move back from the heat.
“No, I will not go with you,” he said.
K’os smiled. “No,” she said, “of course not. If Ghaden comes to get Uutuk for the mourning, what should I tell him?”
“Tell him that I’m hunting. Tell him that I mourn his father in my own way and carry his sorrow in my heart.”
“Should I tell him that you carry his sorrow to the Four Rivers village?” K’os asked, but Cries-loud did not answer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula
602 B.C.
SKY CATCHER SPOKE OUT in the River language, and his voice was like a knife cutting into the story. Men shook their heads to bring themselves back to the day they were living.
“He says your tale has become foolish, Yikaas,” Qumalix translated. “He asks why Cries-loud would trust K’os. Surely through the years the storytellers would remind the people about the enmity that rose between the two villages and about K’os’s part in it.”
“Sky Catcher is wrong,” said one of the First Men traders. “Cries-loud is unhappy with his wife, and taken with this new woman, Uutuk. She is a beauty, right? He is thinking about her. Not K’os. I know more than one man who has gotten himself into trouble like that.”
The hunter next to him began to laugh. “Just because you are a fool, do not think all of us are,” he said.
The trader twisted his fingers into an insult, thrusting them toward the hunter, and the men’s attention was drawn from Yikaas and Sky Catcher to the two First Men, who had risen from their haunches as though ready to fight.
“Aa, men! A bunch of children, all of you. What are you fighting about now?”
It was Kuy’aa. Sometime during the stories she had slipped into a curtained sleeping place, and now she thrust her head out to scold them. She had spoken in the First Men’s language, but Yikaas had caught enough of the words to understand what she meant.
“They’re fighting over my story, Aunt,” Yikaas said to her.
“And what story did you tell them that brought out this foolishness?”
“A good story. About Cries-loud and his decision to go to the Four Rivers village. You remember.”
She wagged her head at him, and he saw a smile lurking at the sides of her mouth. “A good story,” she said, “but not worth fighting about. I would guess those two have something more than that bothering them.”
She hobbled to the storyteller’s circle to stand beside Yikaas and Qumalix. She raised her voice, shouted out several First Men words that Yikaas did not know, and suddenly there was quiet. “You men,” she said, alternating between the River and First Men languages, “take your argument somewhere else. The rest of you be quiet! You men have had this storytelling ulax for far too long. It’s the women’s turn now.”
There were groans and protests, but most were good-natured. A few men left, pushing their way past Kuy’aa, slapping hands on Yikaas’s shoulders, expressing their opinions of his stories. Kuy’aa whispered something to Qumalix and she left also. A short time later, the women began to come, and Yikaas was surprised to find that he was disappointed that Qumalix was not among them.
As if he had asked about her, Kuy’aa said, “She’s hungry. I expect she’ll come back in a little while. Meanwhile, continue your story. I’ll do my best to translate for you.”
“My story is done,” he said. “Cries-loud has decided to go to the Four Rivers village. He wants to find his mother, and he’s tired of listening to his wife Yaa complain all the time.”
“Aa, Yaa, poor child,” Kuy’aa said, as though Yaa were some niece or granddaughter whom she had known all her life. “She truly has very few complaints against her husband. Her complaints are with herself and her own life.”
Yikaas nodded as though he, too, knew Yaa, then he set his hand against his throat, rubbed his neck, and said, “Aunt, I have had enough of telling stories. My throat is sore from too many words. Would you tell one of yours?”
There was a murmur of agreement from those nearest them, and Kuy’aa smiled so widely that Yikaas was glad he had asked her. She was the best storyteller among them, but it seemed that even the best sometimes needed to know that others appreciated their tales.
“Y
es, Aunt,” Yikaas said softly, “please,” as though he were again the boy who listened in her lodge.
“A little different story, then,” she said. “Daes’s story, a strange woman, that one.”
And a difficult story to tell, Yikaas thought. He fixed his eyes on Kuy’aa, saw the frown of concentration on her face. She usually told the story only to other storytellers because it was so easy for listeners to misunderstand. Why, then, try to tell it to this group, half of them rough men who wanted stories full of killing and hunting, of battles and anger? Even now, as they waited, a few of them had begun to grumble.
Kuy’aa raised her head and looked hard at them, then said, “There are things you need to know before I begin this story.” In politeness she spoke in the First Men’s language, then again, after, in the River tongue.
“Some of you have heard our tales of Chakliux and Aqamdax, those storytellers, husband and wife, River and First Men, who unite our peoples.”
Heads nodded, and there was a mumble of agreement. “Some of you have heard about Sok, Chakliux’s older brother, the chief hunter of Chakliux’s village. When he was young, before he was chief hunter, he had a wife called Red Leaf. That wife wanted him to be given the place and honor of chief hunter. She thought that his grandfather, the old man Tsaani, was keeping him from having that honor. So she dressed herself up as a man, went to Tsaani’s lodge in the night, and killed him. Sadly, another woman saw her, the woman Daes, who had an old husband, but had taken the trader Cen as her lover.
“Red Leaf killed Daes and also tried to kill Daes’s little son Ghaden.” As she spoke, Kuy’aa had closed her eyes, as though to keep her thoughts from drifting to what she might see in the ulax, but now she opened them and looked at the people gathered around her. “You all have heard of Ghaden, brother to Aqamdax and to Yaa.”
Again, they murmured their acknowledgment.
“Ghaden, of course, lived. At first the people did not know who had killed Tsaani and Daes, but eventually they discovered that it was Red Leaf. Her husband Sok decided to kill her, but she was pregnant with Sok’s child, and so he let her live until the baby was born. It was a girl, and after the birth, Sok and Red Leaf’s son Cries-loud helped Red Leaf escape. She went out into the wilderness with the baby and was trapped in the first hard snowstorm of the winter. Everyone thought she had died, but she managed to get to the Four Rivers village where the trader Cen was living. She changed her name to Gheli and eventually became Cen’s wife.