Brother Wind (52 page)

Big Teeth nodded. “I do not want to let her go,” he said, and his voice broke like water on rock.

“Let her do this. Each time you go out to hunt, do you think she wants to see you go? Do you think you are less because you have a strong wife? You are the one who made her strong. Do not forget what she was when she was wife to Waxtal.”

Big Teeth squatted on his heels, reached down to shift sand through his fingers. “They offered two bellies of oil,” he said.

Kayugh opened his mouth to say, “Good trade,” but then thought, How can a man place value on a good wife? What are two bellies of oil compared to the heat of a woman’s skin, compared to the fire that snaps in her eyes?

“Save them,” Kayugh said. “If we have to, we will buy her back.”

“I thought I might give them to the wind spirits, to ask their protection.”

Kayugh shrugged. “Do what you think is the right thing. She is your wife. You know what is best.”

“First Snow says Ice Hunter will leave tomorrow.”

“They want her tonight?”

“Yes, but First Snow told them they could not have her until they were leaving. I will have her one more night. She will not sleep on this beach with traders.”

“You have decided when you will meet her?”

Big Teeth held up one finger. “I will go for her at the next full moon. If I do not find her, I will go to the Walrus village and buy her back, even if it takes all I have.”

Kayugh said nothing, only looked into Big Teeth’s eyes, brother to brother.

Too much sorrow, Kiin thought. She had returned to find Takha all she hoped he would be—strong, full of laughter—and Three Fish wiser, gentler, a true sister. But she had lost Shuku. She had returned to find her father gone, banished from the tribe, her mother happy as wife to Big Teeth. But now her mother would be sold as slave. And what hope did an old woman have? No man would want her as wife. She would be used for the hardest work, and would receive little to eat.

“For one moon, only that,” Blue Shell said to her, then reached out, the two falling into an embrace.

Kiin clutched her mother tightly and held back a sob. Blue Shell pulled away, looked into Kiin’s face, lifted a hand to smooth away a tear on Kiin’s cheek.

“Daughter, let me do this for you. There is so much I did not do,” Blue Shell said. “I let your father beat you …” She choked on the words, then took a long breath. “I was afraid. Let me show you I have courage. Let me show myself …”

Kiin nodded. “I wish I could go instead,” she said.

“They know you.”

“Perhaps they will also know you.”

Blue Shell smiled, shook her head. “No, I am only a gray-hair. Someone to prepare food and sew parkas. They will not know me. But I must go now. I have this night to spend with my husband.” Blue Shell turned and walked to the climbing log. She looked back at her daughter. “I only hope I will be as strong as you are,” she said.

Kiin reached out her hand, and Blue Shell did also. The two were apart the width of the ulaq, but it seemed that their fingers touched.

The Kuskokwim River, Alaska

D
YENEN STOOD AND WATCHED
the ik as it started downriver. An easy journey to the sea, Dyenen thought. But the journey to the Walrus village? Not easy for a man alone in an ik. Ah, why worry? If Saghani died, he died.

Dyenen felt uncomfortable knowing how many of his tricks he had shared with the man. Saghani saw no value in the herb medicines, and the tricks were not meant to deceive, only to convince the people that the medicines had power. But Saghani—what would he do with such knowledge?

Of course, if the Walrus People felt fear instead of wonder, the voices would cease to carry power, and the tricks would be used only to entertain children and make men and women forget for a time the harshness of life.

Dyenen turned and walked back to his lodge. His new wife was there with Mouse and Shuku. He had asked her to carve a bird for him to wear as an amulet near his heart. He was an old man. The end of his life was coming. He needed something to remind his spirit to look up, to fly when it was released from his body.

But before that time came, this woman would give him a son. Her powers were strong, even if both boys were not her own.

Dyenen entered his lodge, settled himself against a backrest of woven willow branches. He had told his other wives to stay away for the six days normally given a new bride. Young men might go out to a quiet place along the river, but he was old and had grown accustomed to the comforts of his lodge. He would spend the six days with Kiin, here.

Kiin was beautiful, and Dyenen found himself anxious to take her into his bed. But when he walked into the lodge, she did not greet him, and even now her eyes were on the ivory she held in her hands.

“You have finished the bird?” Dyenen asked, speaking the Walrus tongue.

The woman looked up at him, her eyes round, as though he had startled her. “You speak Walrus,” she said.

“Do not tell Saghani,” said Dyenen and smiled.

The woman also smiled, but then she looked down at the carving in her hands and frowned. “It takes a long time to carve some things,” she said.

“Your seal, you carved it in one evening,” said Dyenen.

“A bird is not as easy—the wings. How would you carve a wing?”

Dyenen heard the edge in her voice, the tears closing her throat. He left his backrest and squatted beside her. “Put down the knife,” he said, his voice like the voice of someone talking to a child. “Why do you cry? Do you want to go back with Saghani?”

The woman lowered her head until her chin rested against her chest. “No.”

“You do not want to be my wife?”

The woman’s eyes were suddenly wide. “I am glad to be your wife,” she said.

“You are afraid because I know one of the babies does not belong to you.”

The woman scooted back away from him.

“You think I am a fool? You think I cannot see?” Dyenen asked.

“I did have two sons,” the woman said. “Born together.” She pointed at Mouse. “One died. In my sorrow, Raven—Saghani—brought me Shuku in trade.”

“Will you give me a son?” Dyenen asked.

“I am good at making sons.”

“You have others?”

“Someday I will,” the woman said, and a smile lifted one corner of her mouth. She looked at the babies. They slept. She stood up and untied the string of her aprons. They fell to the floor. “It is a good day for sons,” she said, and leaned forward to cup Dyenen’s face in her hands. “Let us try now.”

Lemming Tail smiled. The old man’s snores shook the lodge. She had satisfied him. If she could lure him into bed each night, he would soon be too tired to worry about her carving.

Shuku began to whimper, and Lemming Tail slid from her sleeping robes to nurse him. He ate too much, this child. Maybe if she did not nurse him so often, he would not grow so fast. Then Mouse would catch up with him. She took Shuku to Dyenen’s place near the hearth fire and leaned against his willow backrest. Shuku, eyes closed, found her nipple and began to suck, the ivory ikyak pendant that Kiin had carved for him clasped in his hand.

Lemming Tail pulled the pendant from his fingers. She had first noticed the pendant when Kiin returned to the Walrus village. It held some power of protection, Lemming Tail knew.

“It should belong to Mouse,” Lemming Tail whispered to Shuku. “He needs it more than you do.”

She let Shuku nurse until he fell asleep, then she returned him to his sleeping robes. She woke up Mouse and fed him, too, and as he nursed, she sewed the ikyak pendant to his parka.

Chagvan Bay, Alaska

B
LUE SHELL LAY ON THE GRASS
mats and waited. One of the children whimpered in his sleep, and the hunter Chin Hairs mumbled and turned, rustling the sleeping furs on the bed platform. Blue Shell heard the soft snores that told of Day Girl’s sleeping, but she waited a little longer.

When she had first come to this Walrus lodge and the woman Day Girl had asked her name, Blue Shell had told Ice Hunter to say, “Asxahmaagikug.” And though Day Girl did not know what that First Men word meant, she had nodded her acceptance. Blue Shell had chosen the name herself, in the manner of men celebrating or remembering. A new name to add to what had been, something that carried its own spirit and would say what could not be said in another way. So now she was Asxahmaagikug.

Asxahmaagikug—I am lonesome—Asxahmaagikug.

Blue Shell worked hard and without the surliness of many slaves, and so received nearly enough to eat. And though she had worn her old suk, Crooked Nose had cleverly lined it with ground squirrel skins and sewn many things in the seams and hidden pouches—a woman’s knife, needles, fishhooks, kelp line, burins—tools and supplies Blue Shell might need on the return journey to the Traders’ Beach with Shuku.

But now Blue Shell knew it would not be with Shuku. The child was not in the Walrus village, and for a long time, Blue Shell could find out nothing about him, so that in the nights when she was lying on her bed and finally had time for thoughts of her own, her heart grew cold in dread. The child must be dead.

She listened carefully. Everyone was asleep, she was sure. She crept from the lodge, from her place near the entrance tunnel. She went outside into the darkness of the night, stood and looked for the moon. It was in the far western sky. Nearly full, yes. Soon she would slip away, walk the night along the beach. But she would meet her husband with empty arms and would have nothing to tell her daughter when she returned to the First Men village, nothing to show for a moon of work among the Walrus People.

Still, she had a few more days. Even this morning, she had found out something that Kiin might be able to use in deciding what had happened to her son.

She had been digging clams with five of the Walrus women, she and Day Girl working side by side. The woman called Shale Thrower had mentioned someone named Lemming Tail. Blue Shell knew Lemming Tail was the one who had been Kiin’s sister-wife. But Shale Thrower spoke quickly, in the Walrus language, and though Blue Shell was learning many of their words—and had already known a few from Waxtal’s conversations with traders—she could not understand what they said.

Where was Lemming Tail? If she were dead, the Walrus women would not speak her name.

“Lemming Tail?” Blue Shell had asked, raising the name into a question. “Who Lemming Tail?”

Three of the women continued digging as though Blue Shell had not spoken. Another coughed out a short, tittering laugh. But Shale Thrower, a woman of many words and—as far as Blue Shell could tell—little sense, said, “Everyone knows Lemming Tail is Raven’s wife. But sometimes someone asks a foolish question. Sometimes a woman embarrasses herself by letting others know how stupid she is.”

Blue Shell understood many of Shale Thrower’s words, but more than that she understood the meanness behind the words, the taunting in Shale Thrower’s voice. Blue Shell opened her mouth to speak, but remembered that she was slave, had been slave for many years, according to what the Walrus People knew. So she lowered her head and kept her mouth shut. Then she realized she had learned nothing she did not already know. So again she spoke, this time spreading her hands. She pretended to look at the village and beach, then asked, “Lemming Tail? Where?”

This time Day Girl answered. “With Raven on a trading trip to the River People.”

“Why bother to tell her? She cannot understand you,” said Shale Thrower. “Besides, why should it matter to her? She is a slave.”

“I do not know why your husband bought her,” another woman said to Day Girl.

Day Girl started to answer, but before her words came out, Shale Thrower said, “He needed someone good in his bed.”

The other women laughed, and Blue Shell pretended she did not understand, but Day Girl threw her carrying net of clams to the ground and strode off in long steps up the bench. Blue Shell picked up the carrying net while one of the other women spoke in angry words to Shale Thrower.

Blue Shell, head bent, shoulders hunched, continued to dig, and one by one the Walrus women left the beach until only Blue Shell and Shale Thrower were left. Shale Thrower moved close to Blue Shell and spoke in slow words, each sound drawn out so that Blue Shell had to hide her laughter at the foolishness of the woman.

“Asxahmaagikug,” she said, “Lemming Tail went on a trading trip with her husband Raven. They have not yet come back.”

“Where?” Blue Shell asked.

Shale Thrower seemed surprised at the question but answered, “To the River People.” She raised one hand and pointed north. “They live far there. Three days, four days.” She shrugged. “Many days.”

“They come back?”

“How should I know?” Shale Thrower said. “Do I have the power to see the future? Ask Grandmother or Aunt. They know all things.”

“Grandmother, Aunt,” Blue Shell said and straightened slowly. Her back ached from the long time spent digging. She faced the village and pointed to the lodge where she thought the two old women lived.

“Yes,” Shale Thrower said, then began a long story of the old women. Soon Shale Thrower was speaking so quickly that Blue Shell could no longer understand most of what she said, so Blue Shell went back to her digging, and nodded sometimes to make Shale Thrower believe she was listening.

Now in the moonlight Blue Shell walked to the old women’s lodge. She had heard Kiin speak of them once, and there had been fear and anger in her daughter’s voice. But Blue Shell knew the Walrus People considered them to be shamans, with power for knowing what most people did not know. She skirted the lodges, staying in the night shadows, and when she finally came to the sisters’ lodge, she waited, suddenly afraid to scratch at the grass door flap.

Then she heard a voice calling, “Asxahmaagikug, we wait for you. Will you be outside all night?”

So Blue Shell crawled in through the door, stood up, and faced the sisters. Each woman sat with a death mat across her lap.