Kalik (18 page)

“We’ll come down and wait for you after six days,” said Paku. Tepulka and I watched him lead Tulu and Maka back across the river. They turned and waved as we led off the laden donkeys.

“We’re across!” said Tepulka.

“Let’s hope this dry spell lasts till we get back.”

Again we circled through the Cold Hills, practised calling each other Terek and Chech, sniffed for the coal smoke, the reek of the pigs’ pens. As if they had been waiting for us, several boys appeared, shouting, grinning before Tepulka could strike the gong at the Trading Ground.

“I wanted to hear it again, Chech.”

“Well, give it a bang,” I said. “Terek.”

The mellow sound shivered as Henga led down the same two young men. She laughed when she saw the laden donkeys.

We unloaded and set out our trade goods, and Henga matched them with hers: so many spear and arrowheads, axes, shovels. Knives, needles, mugs. Cooking pots with handles and chains to hang them over the fire; some with legs to stand in the embers. Shears and little scissors, just as I had drawn them. I snipped my hair and was delighted.

Proudly, the two young men produced three long scythe blades. “They’re beautiful!” I said, seeing stacks of dried grass. And then for a terrible moment I saw Taur scything the Salt Men.

Henga felt the tunics, blankets, rolls of cloth. “This is even finer work,” she said. “The colours! The patterns!” She traced them. As if her skin hungered for its touch, she held the cloth against her face.

We feasted again on the finest pork. They gave us each a precious potato, hot and roasted. I thought I knew where they
had come from and wished we could trade for some. Then Henga gave us three tools she called sickles, thin curved blades.

“You’ll find them useful,” she said, “for cutting this.” She opened two plump leather pouches. “Oats!”

I thought of the oat cakes Taur and I had eaten flavoured with honey. Now I would be able to make them for the Children. Henga looked at my face. “It’s one of the few things we can grow up here. We had a good crop.” Henga paused. “Do you know how to grow them?”

I remembered my old ambition. “I am a Gardener,” I said.

I drew out our presents, shawls, and lengths of cloth, each finer than the last. The young men clapped their hands. Henga sucked in her breath and clicked her tongue at Puli’s greatest work: a hooded full-length cloak. I put it around her shoulders where it settled and hung shimmering: green and yellow turning through red and gold and back to green. Henga spun like a young girl so the long cloak drifted out on the air, all shades, patterns of light and dark. She stood, and the cloak fell about her, lustre shifting, shot with lights.

I thought back to Tepulka’s words: “It’s like looking at long grass when the wind blows.”

“Who made this?” asked Henga.

“Our best weaver. She says it tells a story.”

Henga looked, and I told her Puli’s story of the queen who promised to give away her three babies. But I changed the names of Lutha and Kalik.

Henga sighed. “It reminds me of a story my mother used to tell when I was a girl. But we are the Iron People. We forgot the spinning stories, lost the secrets of weaving.” I knew Puli’s story would be told that night amongst the Iron People. Henga closed her eyes, until I thought she had gone to sleep. Perhaps she was older than she looked.

“You boys!” Henga woke and snapped directions. The boys came running down with two more leather pouches. Henga undid the straps and iron buckles and showed me the seeds in
one pouch. Like the grass seeds Kitimah and Sheenah found, but plumper, golden.

“Plant this lot in spring, and it will ripen in summer.” She tapped the second pouch. “Plant this lot in autumn. It will come up early and ripen in spring. So, even if you have a short summer, you still get a crop. Make sure you always set aside enough seed for next year.

“Cut it with the sickles. Grind it to flour, like the oats, but finer – a soft powder. And you can make bread.” Henga nodded. And suddenly I heard Old Hagar’s voice describing the grass seeds the Travellers had collected when she was a girl. The seeds they had lost and never found again. The name trembled on my tongue.

“Is it…?”

“Wheat!” Henga said and spun so her cloak belled and flowered. “Tell your Weaver the winter wheat is thanks for her cloak – the spring wheat thanks for her story.

“That Kalik came after your last visit, Chech. From Lake Ka.” Henga spat and made the gesture with her fingers. “He brought fine bearskins, the best of dried meat and fish, even some potatoes: those were the last we just ate. He said they were presents, that he didn’t want anything in return. But he asked the boys if they had seen a man called Ish with a band of children.” Henga’s sharp black eyes pricked at my own.

“I had warned them, so they said nothing. He noticed your woven tunics, and the boys told him a trading party had come from the Weaving People to the east. He and his warriors set off that way, but winter comes early in the Cold Hills, and the boys saw him turn back to Lake Ka. When he comes back this spring, I’ll make sure he searches east again. But I will send him further, describe a river, one the Weavers said they came up. He will spend time looking for it.”

I felt uncomfortable. Henga knew we had not come from the east.

Her old eyes snapped black. “Traders have to be good at
keeping secrets, Chech.” She drew the hood of Puli’s cloak over her head as we said goodbye.

We circled through the eastern hills, made a fire under a leaning rock and left sign as if we had camped. We travelled east again and left more sign, fireplaces, and fern bedding. When we found a dry stream bed running west, bare rocks and hard clay, we turned and led the donkeys north and then west. Picking up their dung, sweeping over their hoof marks, we descended and crossed the open valley with Kalik’s trading track.

Afternoon, and the river rumbled sullen under mist, rising, turning brown. We went straight into the first channel. Paku, Tulu, and Maka saw us and came over. The donkeys were better used to the crossing. The weight of their loads helped them keep their footing. By the time we got to the first island, Paku was leading the others on to it.

“You should have waited for us!” growled Maka, smiling. We led the donkeys across the middle channel, one at a time. The river fought as if it knew we were never coming back. I led Hika last, and we were swept off our feet. This time I was ready and landed easily. As we trotted up to the head of the island, I noticed it was shrinking.

Wind moaned. Heavy rain swept down the valley. The last channel rose suddenly as the five of us surrounded Hika and led him over. We stood streaming water and rain on the far bank, laughing, and watching the river come up.

“This rain will melt the snow in the heads,” I said. “No one can cross now until late summer.”

A last look at Chak’s grave next morning. Downstream the gong of the waterfall made the valley tremble. All the way up the spur, the river shouted after us.

The little ones would have clipped the sheep and goats naked with the shears. Hurk tried clipping his own hair and sliced the top off one ear. Tepulka stitched it back on with Puli’s finest thread. It healed, but that ear always looked lopsided. Puli said we should have clipped his other ear as well.

When I drew the shape of a scythe handle, Tepulka nodded. Within a day or two he had found and shaped a bent sapling for one scythe, adjusted the metal sock and the little strut at the bottom, and was teaching himself how to scythe grass.

But that first day, everyone had to handle the trade goods. Every arrowhead, pot, and axe, every needle. All our work gathering goat hair and wool, cleaning and washing and combing and spinning it into yarn, all the hours at the looms had been traded for these. Kimi and Tupu jigged with satisfaction, and Hurk would have joined them.

“Keep still,” Puli told him, “or your ear will fall off.”

“Draw the letter for spring, and the one for winter,” she said to me.

“S” I wrote in charcoal on the pouch of spring wheat, and “W” on the other. Puli worked the letters into two watertight bags of oily wool as she wove them. “They’ll keep out rain better than the leather,” she said. And she wove another bag with “O” upon it.

“See, I told you it’s useful, knowing how to read and write,” I heard her tell Tama. “You’re going to have to learn.”

Tama took back his donkeys jealously and fattened them on the best grass. They grew sleek, their sides round. One morning we loaded them, ourselves, and the bigger sheep and goats with packs. In addition to deerskin tents and all our metal tools and weapons, we carried Henga’s seeds as well as those from the gardens, dried herbs, the salves and ointments Tepulka and I had made during winter. One donkey carried a loom with a piece half-finished, that Puli could work on wherever we stopped. A basket slung one side of Hika held Arak and Perrah.

“Travellers own only what they can carry,” I told everyone.

Hurk had cried when I said his collection of stones was too heavy to take. Kimi tried to sneak in a lump of wood she said was her baby.

“I’ll carve you a doll with a face like a real baby, when we get to where we’re going,” Tepulka told her. Kimi smiled but
still had a few tears. “It’ll have real hair!” Tepulka promised.

“True?” Tepulka nodded and Kimi gave up her lump of wood. We all had to make a sacrifice. Because the donkeys also carried something else we hadn’t owned at the beginning of winter.

While Paku, Tulu, and Maka waited to help at our last crossing of the wild river, Tupu had disappeared at Wild Dog Creek. Kitimah remembered her saying something about going up to the gardens. When she did not return, Kimi and Hurk looked for her. They came back having found her basket with some herbs.

Now Kitimah wished Paku were there to tell her what to do. She sent Tama up to the gardens before dark, but he found nothing. Kimi and Hurk cried themselves to sleep that night.

Before first light next morning, Tama took Gobble and Hurry and two pups, Bar and Tag. The gardens were empty. “Tupu! Tupu!” No reply. Tama had a look up an old track to a trickle of water. The track must have been well-used by whoever first made the gardens, because it was still clear between the trees.

“Tupu!” he called. “Tupu!” Now Gobble and Hurry disappeared, and Bar and Tag began yelping. Listening to something. Yelping again. When Tama told us, he imitated the way they stood and pricked their ears. Bar and Tag led him up a little spur, more and more excited.

The day before, Tupu had gone up to the gardens to pick the last leaves of the herb I wanted. One that was useful for lowering her fever when she was ill. She left the basket at the bottom of the gardens and searched for any plants she might have missed. At the top, she followed the track to the tiny stream. She walked up it and climbed the spur above, finding somebody had cleared the trees and sowed more of the plants along its top.

The spur dropped steeply either side. Tupu was picking leaves when the ground opened. She fell and thumped, hearing
herself cry out. Looking up and seeing a scrap of sky. She tried to climb the smooth walls that curved above. “Like trying to climb up the inside of a big, empty egg,” she said.

The slab of wood which had collapsed beneath her feet fell to powder when she tried to dig steps. Tupu scratched away with her hands, but the sandy soil resisted her. She tried heaping up the things that rolled beneath her in the bottom of the hole, but the scrap of blue sky was as far out of reach as ever. If only it had been her turn to wear a knife!

Tupu cried, scratched till her fingertips were raw, and called out all that long day. “When it got dark, I pulled my legs up under my tunic. I curled against the side of the hole and tried to imagine I was sleeping next to Kitimah, because she’s warm!”

Next morning, Gobble and Hurry tumbled into the hole on top of Tupu. She was cuddling them when she heard Bar and Tag bark. Tama heard a hoarse whisper and saw the hole. He poked a branch down, clambered in himself, and pushed Tupu up into the sun under the wide blue sky. Gobble and Hurry were busy eating something and squealed when Tama lifted them out.

He piggybacked Tupu back to camp. She ate the stew Kitimah had ready and slept all day, her skinned fingertips wrapped in bandages smeared with a soft ointment. When we returned her face was still flushed, and I was afraid she was suffering the fever of the wasting disease again.

I took a shovel up to the gardens at once to dig out the side of the hole so nobody else would ever fall in and die there alone. I found what Gobble and Hurry had been eating. A heap stored in the bottom. Dry because of the spur falling away either side, and because the sandy soil drained well. That was why they were in such good condition, the things that rolled when Tupu tried to stand on them. I searched and found several more holes along the top of the spur. The entry into each covered with a slab of tote.

The night of our return, I hugged Tupu on my lap and
said: “Once upon a time there were some people who ran away from a wicked man who wanted to kill them. They escaped in a canoe, ran down a tunnel, crossed a river, and built themselves a winter camp. They gathered all the food they could: leaves, plants, roots, berries. They caught fish. They tamed pigs and goats and sheep and dogs.

“One of them, a little girl called Tupu, went looking for herbs and fell down a hole. Next day two little pigs and two little dogs led their clever master to the hole. He got Tupu out. And they all lived happily ever after.”

Tupu wriggled. Tama shifted on the edge of the circle.

“And Tupu discovered something that was going to help her people forever and ever. Because that wasn’t an ordinary hole.”

“It was special!” said Kimi. She jiggled, eyes flashing with impatience.

“It had something special in it.”

“Magic!”

“Not just magic,” I said.

“What?” asked Tupu.

I tipped out a basket so they rolled and bumped across the floor of the camp. “Potatoes!

“There’s five other pits filled with them. Plenty to eat. And plenty to take with us, for seeds. They’re going to make life easier.”