Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  Yikaas cupped the foot in his hand and spread his toes. They were webbed. “See?”

  He allowed himself a little smile, but said nothing more, waiting for her to agree with him. What else could she do but agree?

  “I’ll be back,” she said, and left to go into one of the curtained sleeping places. She returned carrying two small sealskin bags.

  “I have these,” she said. “You know the stories of Chagak and Kiin?”

  “I know them.”

  “Do you remember the carving Chagak owned, the one of man, wife, and child?”

  He was not happy about the way this was going. He shifted so that his otter foot was more visible to her. She opened one of the bags. It had a drawstring top, and she dumped out a little lump of dark yellowed ivory.

  “See, look,” she said.

  He picked up the ivory, turned it in his hand. It might have been a carving of three people, but it was so old and cracked, worn smooth by handling, that the faces were no longer truly faces and the bodies were merely suggestions of what they once had been.

  “Who can tell by this?” he asked. “It could be something the sea itself tumbled into being.”

  She leaned close to him and turned the carving upside down. “You can see that there was a little hole here where the carver Shuganan hid a knife blade.”

  There was a hole, but Yikaas shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. Qumalix blew out her breath in irritation and opened the other sealskin bag. “You cannot deny that this is a whale’s tooth carved to look like a shell.”

  He picked it up. “Yes, but why should I believe that it was the whale tooth shell that Kiin made? Anyone could have done this.”

  She snatched it out of his hand and dropped it back into the bag. “But anyone didn’t.”

  He smiled at her. “Even if it is Kiin’s, what does that prove? She wasn’t a storyteller.”

  “One of her children was.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth wide in a smile. “You just don’t want to admit that my story is true, and that the otter foot is the best proof.”

  She bowed her head, and for a moment, he felt a twinge of sadness for her.

  “I said your story was good,” he told her.

  She nodded. “But you are right,” she said. “The otter foot is the best proof.”

  Then she slowly unlaced her left boot, sat down on her rump and pulled it off, extended her leg until her foot was in his lap. She spread her webbed toes and began to laugh.

  EPILOGUE

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

  590 B.C.

  THE CHILD WIGGLED IN anticipation and looked up into his mother’s face. He never tired of the storytelling, though he had heard the stories so often. His mother leaned down to rub his foot. It ached a little after the long day playing with his new friends here. This was the first time his parents had brought him to the Traders’ Beach. When they visited the First Men, they usually left him with an old aunt at his father’s River village. But he knew the First Men language because his mother spoke it.

  “One last story,” his father was saying, and the people groaned that the storytelling was almost over for that day. “A tale of an old woman’s joy,” he said. “You remember the storyteller Qung who long ago lived in this very village?”

  There was a murmur of acknowledgment.

  “She finally grew so old and so bent that she stayed in her ulax all the time and depended on others to come to her. Her hearing had grown dim, and she lived mostly in the stories she held in her mind. But one day even her old ears could hear the excitement in the voices outside her ulax …”

  The Traders’ Beach

  6427 B.C.

  QUNG’S STORY

  Qung’s heart trembled within her chest. She remembered stories about villages attacked, of women raped and men killed. Her people had lived in peace a long time, but still, who could say when strange warriors might decide to come upon them? She pushed herself up on thin, gnarled legs and hobbled to her sleeping place. At the back of that small niche, under the grass mats that lined the walls, was the entrance to a hidden tunnel that led out of the ulax.

  The tunnel rose gradually, and Qung followed it on hands and feet, her knuckles scraping the bare earth of the floor, her fingers grasping at any handhold as she climbed the slope. When she reached the end of the tunnel, she thrust her head and upper body outside, trusted that the long grasses that grew over the sod of the tunnel roof would hide her from her enemies.

  The day was warm, even for summer, and a haze shimmered in the sky, blurring the sun and dimming the horizon. In spite of her age, her eyes were good, and she could make out men and women milling between the ulas.

  No one seemed afraid. No one seemed angry. She pulled herself up with stringy arms to sit on the edge of the opening, lifted her head as best she could to see through grasses that shifted in the wind.

  Aa, yes, there was Beach Cutter—the old fool—and his new young wife. But who was that beside them? He wore a chigdax, so she knew he had just come from his iqyax. There was a boy with him, nearly as tall as he was. Several more children. A woman.

  Qung gasped, and without even feeling the pain of old joints, she was on her feet, lifting herself as straight as she could possibly stand. And then she was calling, shouting to be heard above the voices of the grass.

  The woman lifted her head, cried out, then ran up the hill. She scooped Qung into her arms as if the old woman was just a child.

  “Aunt!” she said. “You waited. I thought … I was afraid …”

  “I told you I would wait,” Qung said in a querulous voice. “You thought I would be dead? Ha!” Then her bravado was lost to tears.

  She lifted a veined hand and smoothed back a tangle of hair that had come loose from the braids Aqamdax wore at the sides of her head. Qung clicked her tongue. “You need to learn how to fix your hair,” she said, and jerked on one of the braids. “Someone might think you are a River woman.”

  “Aunt, can you walk down to meet my family?” Aqamdax asked. “Chakliux and I brought them all, our son and his wife, two more sons, three daughters not yet married, and our youngest, another son.”

  Qung leaned on Aqamdax, turned her head to study the woman’s face as they walked to the beach. Small lines spread from the corners of Aqamdax’s eyes, as though her face was often crinkled in laughter. A swath of white, bright in the darkness of her hair, fell from the crown of her head to be caught into one of her braids. Her hands were splotched and red, most likely from the days traveling in the iqyax.

  Chakliux came to Qung, gathered her in his arms, squeezed until her bones creaked.

  “Enough!” she said and batted at him with her hands. He introduced their children, fine and strong with the look of Chakliux in the eyes, but with Aqamdax’s nose and round face.

  “Angax has come to hunt, and his wife wants to learn to make birdskin garments, but this daughter …” Chakliux pushed the girl forward. “We want you to teach her your stories.”

  Qung looked at the girl in surprise. She appeared to have eight, nine summers, and she was shy. She met Qung’s eyes only for a moment, gave her a quick smile, then looked down at the ground, stood balanced on one foot. Qung was not surprised to see that her raised foot was otter.

  “How long will you stay?” Qung asked. Though the question seemed rude, she needed to know. If she was to have only a few days, or only a moon, she would teach this girl differently than if she had a whole winter.

  “As long as you have stories, we will stay,” Chakliux said.

  “As long as I have stories?” said Qung. Her surprise lifted those words so they sounded like a question. She cleared her throat and repeated herself: “As long as I have stories,” she said in a firm voice. “As long as I have stories.”

  Suddenly she raised her head and laughed.

  “As long as I have stories!” she shouted. “How wonderful. You will be here forever!”

  AUTHOR’S NOTESr />
  I BELIEVE WITHOUT DOUBT that my path as a novelist was surveyed and cleared when I was still a tiny child. My parents love books and are each gifted storytellers. During any long car trip my father kept us enthralled with a continuing comic saga of the “Goody-Goody Family,” who faced incredible dangers, but always survived against the odds. Each week, as she ironed clothes, my mother delighted us by telling the traditional well-loved fairy tales. Each night as I lay in my bed, I became the heroine of my own adventures until dreams claimed the story rights.

  Even now, as an adult, when I walk into a bookstore or hold a book in my hands, I sense the magic. It dances in my head, lifts my heart, and slips the silver shoes on my feet!

  I’m sure my readers have come to realize that The Storyteller Trilogy is a series of stories within a story, and in that way, very much an imitation of life. Each of us lives our own story, but at the same time we play parts in the stories of others. Circles intersect circles and at the best of times, in the best of worlds, create a marvelous mosaic of color and realization. In the worst of times, of course, the creation is one of chaos, which is, as all readers and writers know, the stuff of which novels are made—the incredible, fertile soil from which spring the alluring and beckoning words that draw storytellers and listeners alike. What if … What if … What if …

  The first “what if” that planted the seeds for Call Down the Stars came from our friend Mike Livingston. My husband, Neil, and I were having a conversation with Mike and his wife, Rayna, about Mike’s Aleut heritage. He happened to mention that he believed there was some link between the Japanese and Aleut cultures and peoples. It was an intriguing thought, but at the time I didn’t follow it up. Several years later, when Neil and I were in Japan on a book tour for my Japanese publisher, Shobun-sha, Mike’s words came back to me.

  A scheduled interview with Hashida Yoshinori, a writer for Kyodo News, opened a whole new world of possibilities when he began to talk about the Jomon era of ancient Japan. He gave me books and introduced me to the Jomon Era Information Transmitting Association. I found the similarities between the ancient Aleut and the Jomon People to be fascinating.

  A little research in the Aleutian Islands turned up various written and word-of-mouth tales about ancient people from strange lands who came to the islands via storms and shipwrecks. Some oceanic sleuthing led to information about the Kuroshio Current, which pulses north from the eastern side of Japan to the southern Aleutian Islands. What more does an author need than such fascinating weft and warp to weave a tale of possibilities?

  As with all my novels, in Call Down the Stars, legends play a large part in determining my storyline. Readers familiar with the mythology of northern peoples will recognize Daughter’s story as a gentler version of the widespread and well-known Sedna legends. In the original, the daughter loses more than a toe, and for less pressing reasons than starvation.

  A few other comments, mostly for clarification: I am aware that the tundra and northern boreal forests are not as plentiful in game as more temperate regions in North America, but when Chakliux’s people comment on the blessings of their game-filled land, the reader must realize that those ancient hunter-gatherers had not experienced life in other areas, where a greater number and variety of plants and animals abound.

  Anthropologists and population experts have noticed that after a devastating war, a disproportionate number of male babies are born in the ensuing years. Not being an expert in this area, I’ll take their word for it, and rather than try to explain it, include the phenomenon as fact in my novels.

  It was my pleasure in the late 1980s and early 1990s to teach creative and advanced creative writing at Lake Superior State University, a small school on the eastern shore of Michigan’s northern peninsula. I’m sure my students taught me more about writing than I was able to teach them, and in this novel much of what I learned is revealed through the conversations, successes, and failures experienced by the young storyteller Yikaas. For example, in Chapter Thirty, Yikaas unwisely continues his tale beyond its natural conclusion, and thus dilutes the power of the denouement. I purposely include this and various other storytelling weaknesses or errors to highlight the growth process that every storyteller experiences. It is a continual struggle. Perfection is impossible. What joy! What frustration!

  Among Athabascan peoples, and indeed, within all Native American cultures I have studied, names are considered sacred and carry spiritual significance. Thus, when Red Leaf agrees to name her daughter Daes, she has committed an immense betrayal that will place her daughter in spiritual danger.

  One last note, and this is for those readers, so close to my heart, who celebrate the etymology of words. In Chapter Twelve, when K’os tries to get Cries-loud to take the name Tigangiyaanen (expert hunter or warrior), she is tempting him to step beyond his rights as a young hunter to boast of a prowess he does not yet possess. She also seeks to control him by elevating herself to the position of name-giver. The root of this Ahtna Athabascan word is yaa, which has multiple meanings, but in this context refers to growing into maturity. Within the word tigangiyaanen, the root yaa most likely originated from another root, yae, in which growth means the healing of a wound. If Cries-loud assumes the name, then he is also recognizing K’os’s worth as a healer. Thus, in tempting Cries-loud with the name Tigangiyaanen, K’os is seeking to increase her own power and status by compromising Cries-loud’s integrity.

  GLOSSARY OF NATIVE AMERICAN WORDS

  AA, AAA (Aleut, Athabascan) Interjection used to express surprise: “Oh!” (The double or triple a carries a long a sound.)

  ANGAX (Aleut) Power. Anga is the root used in the Aleut word for elder brother. (The a’s are short; because it falls before the letter n, the first a takes on more of a short e sound. The Aleut n is quite nasal; the g is a voiced velar fricative, quite guttural; and the final x is a voiceless velar fricative.)

  AQAMDAX (Aleut) Cloudberry, Rubus chamaemorus. (See Pharmacognosia.) (The a’s are short. The Aleut q is like a harsh English k, the m like an English m, and d much like the English th. The Aleut x is a voiceless velar fricative.)

  BABICHE (English—probably anglicized from the Cree word assababish, a diminutive of assabab, “thread.”) Lacing made from rawhide.

  CEN (Ahtna Athabascan) Tundra. (Ken—The c sounds like an English k. The e carries a short sound like the e in the English word set. The Ahtna n sounds like the English n.)

  CET’AENI (Ahtna Athabascan) Creatures of ancient Ahtna legend. They are tailed and live in trees and caves. (The c sounds like an English k. The e carries a short sound like the e in the English word set. The t’ is much like an English t followed by a glottal release. The diphthong ae is pronounced like the a in the English word cat. The n is much like the English n, and the final i has a short i sound as in the English word sit. The t’aen is accented.)

  CHAGAK (Aleut) Obsidian, red cedar. (The Aleut ch is much like the English ch, the g is like a guttural English g, and the k is a voiced fricative. The a’s are short like the aw in the English word paw. The accent falls on the last syllable.)

  CHAKLIUX (Ahtna Athabascan, as recorded by Pinart in 1872) Sea otter. (The word is pronounced as it would be in English, with the a taking on the sound of the u in the English word mutt, the i assuming a short sound as in the English word sit, and the u the sound of the oo in the English word brook. The final x is a voiceless velar fricative.)

  CHIGDAX (Aleut) A waterproof, watertight parka made of sea lion or bear intestines, esophagus of seal or sea lion, or the tongue skin of a whale. The hood had a drawstring, and the sleeves were tied at the wrists during sea travel. These knee-length garments were often decorated with feathers and bits of colored esophagus. (The Aleut ch is much like the English ch, the g like a guttural English g, and the d carries almost a th sound. The vowels are short. The x should be properly written as a careted x, and is a voiceless uvular fricative.)

  CHISUM NAGA (Aleut) Vagina. (The Aleut ch is much like the English ch, an
d the vowels are short. The Aleut s is like the English sh, the m like the English m, the n quite nasal, and the g is a voiced velar fricative, quite guttural.)

  CIXUDANGIX (Aleut) Sea gull flower—white anemone, anemone narcissiflora. (See Pharmacognosia.) (The c is pronounced like the English k; the vowels are short; the x’s are voiceless velar fricatives. The Aleut d carries almost a th sound, and the n is quite nasal. The g is like a guttural English g.)

  DAES (Ahtna Athabascan) Shallow, a shallow portion of a lake or stream. (The d is pronounced with tongue tip touching the backs of the top front teeth. It carries almost a t sound. The diphthong ae has a sound similar to that in the English word hat. The final s carries almost a sh sound.)

  DII (Ahtna Athabascan) One alone, on one’s own. (Dee—The d is pronounced with the tongue tip touching the backs of the top front teeth. It carries almost a t sound. The double i carries a long e sound as in the English word free.)

  DZUUGGI (Ahtna Athabascan) A favored child who receives special training, especially in oral traditions, from infancy. (The dz takes the sound of the final ds in the English word leads. The uu sounds like the ui in the English word fruit. The Ahtna gg has no English equivalent. It is very guttural and pronounced with the back of the tongue held against the soft palate. The i has a short i sound as in the English word sit. The accent is on the first syllable.)

  GGUZAAKK (Koyukon Athabascan) A thrush, Hylocichla minima, H. ustulata, and H. guttata. These birds sing an intricately beautiful song that the Koyukon people traditionally believe to indicate the presence of an unknown person or spirit. (The gg has no English equivalent. It is very guttural and pronounced with the back of the tongue held against the soft palate. The u sounds similar to the oo in the English word book. The z is similar in sound to zh, or the s in treasure. The aa carries an aw sound. The kk is a very hard c sound.)