Brother Wind (41 page)

“Shuku?” Kiin said, but her throat was raw and the words were only a harsh whisper.

The woman looked up and stood, the baby still nursing. “Baby?” she said in the Walrus tongue and held the child toward Kiin.

Kiin pushed herself to her knees, then to her feet, and took several stumbling steps. The woman hurried to her side, holding the baby in one arm.

Kiin grabbed the woman’s shoulder and, with breath held tightly behind her teeth, looked down at the baby. In one joyous cry she called out, “Shuku!”

Shuku, nursing with eyes closed, jerked and turned, then let loose of the woman’s breast and held out his arms toward his mother. Kiin, her legs too weak to hold her, dropped down to the floor, sitting in the manner of the Walrus People, legs folded. The woman said something to the man and he left the ulaq, then she laid Shuku in Kiin’s lap. Shuku reached up to wrap his arms around his mother’s neck, pulled himself to his feet, and held tightly, humming a small tune of baby words between quick breaths.

Kiin looked up at the woman, pressed her lips together to hold in her tears. “Thank you,” she said in the Walrus language.

The woman smiled and, pointing at Shuku, said, “He … he …” She paused and traced fingers down her cheeks, to show a line of tears. “I … mmm … I.” Her face wrinkled in concentration, and she finally pointed to her breast, the nipple still pink and elongated from Shuku’s sucking. “I, me did,” she finished and smiled.

“Thank you,” Kiin said again, then for the first time noticed the weave of the woman’s grass apron. Kiin smiled and changed her words from Walrus to those of the First Men, asking, “You are First Men?”

The woman raised her eyebrows and began to laugh. “I am named Small Plant Woman. You are not Walrus?” she asked, speaking clearly in the First Men’s language and pointing at Kiin’s clothing—the Walrus People parka, the caribou skin leggings.

“No, First Men,” Kiin said. “I am Kiin, from the Seal Hunter People.”

The woman tried to answer but could not force her words out through her giggles, and Kiin, with Shuku warm and well in her arms, felt giggles rise in her own throat, so that for a time neither woman spoke, but let laughter weave its net between them, catching them together in joy.

They are Ugyuun, Kiin told herself, as she sat with Small Plant Woman and the six other women who had come to the ulaq. Each woman had the snarled and dirty hair of the Ugyuun. Even the smell of their skin was like something sour and old.

With the knowledge came a heaviness in Kiin’s chest, but then she rolled up her leggings, looked at the cuts and scrapes on her shins and feet. They were well healed, with no red lines running up from her wounds to spread their poison to her heart.

“So,” her spirit voice whispered, “they are Ugyuun. You see the caring in their eyes; you hear their laughter as they speak to one another about the small things of life. Why should you care what village they call their own? They are good people.”

And Kiin nodded. What mattered the most? The cleanliness of a woman’s suk or what she carried in her heart?

“Six days you slept,” an old woman said. “Six days my daughter here, she watched over you and fed your baby when she could not get you to feed him.”

Kiin looked at Small Plant Woman. “I slept for six days?” she asked.

Small Plant Woman’s soft smile told Kiin she held no resentment over the time Kiin had claimed from her.

“Six days,” the old woman said again and nodded her head quickly many times, something all the Ugyuun women seemed to do when they wanted to impress Kiin with the truth of their words.

“Sometimes, though, you seemed awake,” said Small Plant Woman. “You spoke in Walrus words and often called your son. He is named Shuku?”

“Yes,” Kiin said.

“What happened to your legs and feet?” Small Plant Woman asked.

Kiin crossed her arms over Shuku, the baby sitting in the circle of her legs. He watched the Ugyuun women, sometimes looking back over his shoulder at Kiin, his dark eyes as serious as those of an old man. “I fell down a cliff,” Kiin explained. “I was gathering eggs.”

“Yes,” Small Plant Woman said. “My husband Eagle found you on the bird beach. You and your son.”

“You did not know to put salmonberry leaves on your legs?” an old woman asked. She shook her head at Kiin and clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “There are salmonberries in the mountains.”

“Yes,” Kiin said, meeting the old woman’s eyes. “But my thoughts were on other things.”

“You were on that beach alone?” another woman asked, and then the other women, the four that sat on the floor with Small Plant Woman, and the two that stood behind them with arms crossed, all began to speak, their words flowing together in many questions, their voices rising until finally one of the women standing in the back shouted out, “Be quiet! We are worse than murres on their eggs.”

Kiin thought she recognized the woman—her sharp-edged nose—from long ago when Kiin and her brother Qakan had come to this Ugyuun village before Qakan sold Kiin to the Raven. A chill of uneasiness passed over her, but her spirit whispered, “She will not remember you. You are strong now, inside. Then you were only beginning to be strong. You do not look the same. You are not the same.”

So Kiin lifted her head, let her eyes shine with the strength she had won through prayers and songs and living. She laughed as the Ugyuun women laughed, and waited for the next question.

Again the old woman spoke: “Small Plant Woman says you are named Kiin. Was the name something you chose yourself or was it given to you by another?”

“By my father,” Kiin said.

“Why would a father call his daughter such a name?” another woman asked.

Kiin pressed her lips together, felt her face grow hot. Yes, what father would name his daughter Kiin—“Who,” a denial of her existence?

Kiin looked at the woman. “He wanted a son,” she said, explaining nothing more—not the beatings nor the years she had lived believing she had no soul, the years when she could not speak without stuttering.

Several of the women nodded their heads, then one asked, “Where is your husband?”

“Not far from here,” Kiin said. “The Traders’ Beach.”

Several of the women nodded.

“Why do you wear Walrus clothing?” Small Plant Woman asked. Another woman, young and looking so much like Small Plant Woman, with thin face and round black eyes, that Kiin knew they must be sisters, nodded her agreement with Small Plant Woman’s question. “Why do you call your baby by a Walrus name?”

Kiin looked into the Ugyuun women’s faces. Each woman was thin; each woman’s skin too pale, each woman’s lips dry and peeling. Kiin thought of what the Raven would give for her return, and she was afraid.

“My father is a trader,” Kiin said slowly, beginning with words that were true, hoping the Ugyuun women would see that truth in her eyes, in the straightness of her words. “My brother also, until he died. These clothes were made by my own hands after the manner of the Walrus People. When other women see them, they want them for use in winter, and so my father can trade these things and bring in knives, oil, and meat to the Seal Hunters because of what I made.”

Some of the Ugyuun women, including Small Plant Woman, smiled their understanding; but others, like the large woman with the loud voice, narrowed their eyes as though they wanted to see through Kiin’s skin to the secrets she hid in her heart.

“And the baby?” the loud-voiced woman asked. “Why is he Shuku?”

“His name was given by a Walrus shaman,” Kiin said. “It is a name of power.”

The woman tilted her head, as though considering Kiin’s answer. Her next question was about sewing leggings, so that Kiin knew the woman believed her. Then all the women were talking, and Kiin hugged Shuku to her chest, and smiled her happiness at being in the Ugyuun village, safe and so close to the Traders’ Beach.

L
ATER THAT DAY,
Small Plant Woman helped Kiin climb up out of the ulaq. They sat together on the ulaq roof, Small Plant Woman with Shuku in her arms. It was a warm day; the sun was high in the sky, shining against the top of Kiin’s head.

Her joints ached at elbows and knees, but she stretched her arms up toward the sky, winced as the scabs on legs and feet pulled against her skin.

Small Plant Woman looked into her face and said in a quiet voice, “I have goose grease, new this spring. It will soften the scabs.”

Kiin smiled at her, but shook her head. How could she take goose grease—which could be used for food—from a woman who had so little?

“I am fine,” Kiin said. “Already the sun makes me feel strong.” She held her arms out toward Shuku, and noticed that despite her sickness, despite the days of starving, her arms and hands looked fuller, stronger, than Small Plant Woman’s. Who could not see, in the lines on their faces, the brittleness of their hair, that the Ugyuun women had starved during the winter, perhaps through many winters? Yet these six days, Small Plant Woman had fed her and watched over Shuku.

Shuku leaned toward his mother, but for a moment Small Plant Woman held the boy tightly, pressing him to her chest. “I had a son,” she said softly, then released Shuku into Kiin’s arms.

Kiin glanced into the woman’s eyes. She saw pain there, but the pain was private, something that belonged to Small Plant Woman, so Kiin looked quickly away.

“Last winter was hard,” Small Plant Woman murmured.

Kiin nodded, though she did not remember the winter being particularly hard. Who could say? Perhaps any winter was a hard winter for the Ugyuun People. Who did not know that the Ugyuun men were poor hunters? Why else would their children always have the lip sores of those who ate ugyuun raw, without carefully peeling away the outer stalk, something hungry children might do?

Small Plant Woman slid down the side of the ulaq and led the way into the lee of a larger ulaq. There she squatted down on her haunches, motioning Kiin to do the same. Kiin moved slowly, her knees and hips so stiff that she finally laughed and said, “I have become like some old woman.”

Small Plant Woman smiled, then began to speak of the little things of living: slicing fish to dry, finding where the best berries grew, weaving mats. She told Kiin about the arguments that raged between a young woman named Crowberry and She Calls Out, sister to Small Plant Woman’s father. As Small Plant Woman spoke, Kiin came to realize that there was something more important Small Plant Woman had to say.

It always brought a smile to Kiin’s face to hear hunters as they talked first of weather and hunting before any man spoke of what truly lay against his heart. Now she realized that women did the same. Their stories might be of berry picking and preparing food, of other women and their words, but still, it was the same. So Kiin clasped her hands together over Shuku and made herself listen in politeness until Small Plant Woman was ready to say what she needed to say.

Questions rose in Kiin’s mind, made her legs jump in restlessness. Eagle, Small Plant Woman’s husband, had found her. Would he expect something in exchange for saving her and Shuku? What did Kiin have to give? Small Plant Woman had said nothing about Kiin’s carrying basket. Had it been lost? Kiin’s carving tools were in it.

Small Plant Woman finished a story about two Ugyuun women, how a fight between their children had become a fight between them, then she said, “My husband Eagle found you. He is out now in his ikyak, hunting seals, but when he returns he will talk to you.”

“You are good, you and your husband, to take me into your ulaq,” Kiin said.

Small Plant Woman looked away, would not meet Kiin’s eyes, and nervousness began to twist into a hard, tight knot in Kiin’s belly.

Eagle came to Kiin that evening, after a second oil lamp had been lit in the ulaq, after Small Plant Woman and Kiin had put away food and moved the cooking skin from its place over the large oil lamp to a hook hanging from the rafters near the back ulaq wall.

The man was large and thick, with hands as big as seals’ skulls. His face was flat, dipped in at the middle so the end of his nose was no higher than his eyebones, and his skin was black with soot. His suk was well made, of puffin skins and fur seal pelts, but it stank of mildew, so that Kiin took small breaths through her mouth to keep the smell from her nose.

“I found you,” he said, without politeness of small words. “You and your son.”

“Thank you,” Kiin said.

“I have your pack.”

Kiin nodded. She looked across the room, saw that Small Plant Woman was cradling Shuku on her lap. Shuku was fussing, whining sounds that told Kiin he was hungry. Small Plant Woman laid the baby on his back, moved him toward her left breast. Looking past Eagle, Kiin said to Small Plant Woman, “I will feed him.”

But Small Plant Woman acted as though she had not heard, and Eagle said, “Milk is milk. Who cares which woman feeds him? He belongs to both.”

His words were like a slap against Kiin’s head. She opened her mouth to speak, but could say nothing.

“I found you; if you have no husband, you are mine,” Eagle said.

Kiin sat, mouth open. She pulled her eyes away from Small Plant Woman and looked at Eagle.

Her spirit voice spoke. “Eagle!” it hissed. “Who would think to give the man such a name, slow and dirty as he is?” But Kiin shook her head until she heard not her spirit voice, but only the clear strong words of her own thoughts.

“I was traveling without my husband,” she said.

“Alone?” Eagle asked, his eyes narrowing, his lips drawing into a wet circle.

“Yes,” Kiin answered.

“How can a woman travel alone without a hunter? Without a man to protect her against spirits?”

“I am shaman,” Kiin answered, and the words, like knives cutting, sent pain into the center of her chest, so that her spirit voice cried out against the lie, and Kiin had to clamp her teeth together to prevent the cry from escaping her mouth.

At Kiin’s words, Shuku screeched, and Kiin jumped to her feet, fear so heavy in her chest that she could not breathe. The spirits might punish her for a lie, but would they also punish her child?

Without looking at Eagle, she went to Small Plant Woman, pulled Shuku from her arms, and settled the child, sobbing, tightly against her chest.