The Chukchi Bible (8 page)

But this was not all.

He still needed to make a thin, unbroken lace with not a single knot in it, the kind you cut from a tanned nerpa skin that had been removed whole like a stocking.

Finally, all was ready for the important ritual.

Come morning, the people began to arrive at the klegran yaranga, the yaranga set aside for rituals, which had been placed in the middle of the village. This yaranga was uninhabited throughout the year, and served as the place of public meetings, shamans' ceremonies and rituals, men's councils on matters of communal life, and song-and-dance festivities.

A bright fire now burned inside the spacious chottagin, and a walrus-meat brew bubbled in the stone cauldron.

Outstretched Wings already soared amid the blue smoke and the autumnal daylight that filtered down through the smokehole. Slowly, it turned side to side, displaying one and then the other wing, painted with ornaments and symbols mysterious to the uninitiated eye.

The people did not like to look at the talisman. Although this was an object made by a man, still, there was something in it that was other, unearthly, belonging to a different world.

Settling down by a long dish carved from a single tree trunk, people helped themselves to hot chunks of walrus meat, passing each from hand to hand to cool it a bit.

The young mother sat upon a large whale vertebra, on the spot where a normal yaranga would have had its fur-lined sleeping polog. She stood out from the rest because of her all-white outfit, fashioned from choice deer hides from the autumn culling, and the large walrus tusk slivers plaited into her hair. The child goggled his little black eyes, clearly fascinated by the large and unfamiliar gathering.

The name that had been earmarked for him, so that he could carry on and even multiply his ancestor's deeds, was Mlemekym. If he added even just a bit to what previous bearers of the name had garnered, he would serve as a connecting link and a bright beacon in the rank and file of departing years. A shame, to let what had been acquired by dint of long and arduous resistance to stern Narginen
⁸
pass away with time. “So spoke Mlemekym!” “So did Mlemekym!” Like prayers, these words must serve as a reminder of the unbroken cord of time, a reminder that the person of today has another dimension – that the depth of ages past has given him knowledge and experience.

Kalyach sprinkled the motley surface of his shaman's yarar with water and brushed it lightly with his hand. The tautly stretched walrus stomach answered with a quiet ringing that resembled a faint human moan. The most senior elders of Uelen gathered in a circle underneath Outstretched Wings, the artifact soaring through waves of light and smoke. Here was Gaimo, who lived in the westernmost yaranga and was a great hunter of white bear. Here, Alyanto, one of the highly skilled boat builders who lived on the lagoon side of the settlement, and Kultyn from the eastern part of Uelen, a quarter famed for rearing whale and walrus hunters. The newborn belonged to Kultyn's clan, and more specifically to the family whose yaranga stood in the central part of the village, whose people descended from Mlemekym in an unbroken line.

 

Kalyach picked up his yarar and, before he began on the sacred songs, briefly narrowed his eyes. He was becoming imbued with ages past: times beyond the boundary of his own life filled him with the weight of complete knowledge.

And so it was: those sitting around Outstretched Wings suddenly saw Kalyach's feet, shod in nerpa-skin torbasses, in the smokehole opening as he sped away into the unknown, leaving behind only the stone water ladle used for moistening the surface of his yarar. A surprised, terrified sigh flew up over the heads of those seated upon whale vertebrae. Even the gurgling infant fell silent, his frightened mother staring at the empty place where the singing shaman had so recently stood.

Only Outstretched Wings remained steady, hanging from a thin ribbon of nerpa skin, revolving slowly and with great dignity on its own axis. There was a noise and a momentary darkness – and then Kalyach was back in his place, alive and well, holding his yarar. He continued to chant, as though there had been no mysterious disappearance that had so awed the assembly:

Kalyach laid the yarar down on the earthen floor and, drawing himself up slightly, peered at Outstretched Wings. Many of those present thought they saw sparks fly from the talisman's empty eye sockets and bounce off its surfaces of ornamented bone.

“Is the child's name Mlemekym?” Kalyach thundered, pointing to the infant, who had begun mewling. His finger seemed to elongate, almost touching the child.

Breaths held, everyone watched Outstretched Wings, but the talisman continued revolving dispassionately in the daylight-riven smoke.

Once again Kalyach lifted up the yarar. This time, his words were indistinguishable, and only from time to time the word Mlemekym could be made out.

The child began to cry. His mother went to quieten him, but Kalyach, making a sign with his hand, said loudly:

“Let him scream. Let him scream! It means that his true name is drawing near him!”

And again he asked in a voice like thunder:

“Is this newly arrived person named Mlemekym? We ask and we listen! Has he come to us, the one for whom we have waited so long?”

The rotation of Outstretched Wings slowed. It was as though they were pondering. And then, with absolute certainty, they rocked in the direction of the crying boy. And in that very instant the baby boy fell silent.

A silence descended inside the yaranga.

“He has come to us! He has returned to us – Mlemekym!” Kalyach shouted joyfully, as he picked up the child. “Look! Here he is, come on a long journey through the ages, through the years that have passed away! We welcome you, Mlemekym!”

It was the young men and women who now stepped forward to the center of the yaranga, underneath the rocking Outstretched Wings, and began the Universal Dance of Joy.

Kalyach wandered down the beach. Although the wind had died down, huge waves still battered the shingled spit. Low clouds seemed to brush his face, leaving behind a salty residue. Kalyach tested the moisture with his tongue. He should have been feeling happy. He had awed the people with his powers, flying up and out of the chottagin for all to see; he'd brought back the almost forgotten name of the legendary Mlemekym, a man who had imbibed the experience of the ages of legend, and yet . . . An inchoate feeling of unease lay upon his soul like a dark cloud, his joy flattened by a presentiment of disaster. Uelen had lived well and ithout worry, these last years – too well. It could not continue forever. Something was bound to happen. Just as in nature good weather can't last indefinitely, so too must there always be times of trial in human lives. A pity that with all his wisdom Kalyach could not foretell the future that lay in wait for his tribesmen.

His sharpened mind could sense big changes drawing near, but he could not guess what was coming. And the return of the name Mlemekym was one of many small attempts to make the people of Uelen remember their heroic, shining past, to make them feel sure and steady upon this narrow shingled spit, battered though it was by the ocean's gigantic waves.

This event can be dated with a certain precision, as it is part of recorded history, set down in writing by witnesses and participants; it is a subject of study, lauded in poetry and novels, reconstructed on film. There are memorials to mark the event, one of which stands about thirty kilometers east of Uelen, in abandoned Nuvuken, the ancient Aivanalin settlement destroyed at the end of the 1950s on the whim of a Soviet bureaucrat.

Semyon Dezhnev – Cossack, sailor, and native of the northern Russian settlement of Great Ustiug – is commonly acknowledged as the leader of the first Russian expedition to Uelen. An old lighthouse stands over a cape bearing his name. It was Dezhnev and his comrades who, taking advantage of unusually favorable ice conditions, first sailed a small fleet of
kotchas
, or large sailboats, from the mouth of the Kolyma River to Uelen.

 

On a wet and windless evening in early spring, 1648, old granny Cheivuneh was gathering seaweed to spice a thick walrus-meat stew. A dense, moist, almost tangible fog smothered the fastness of the ocean, and from behind this curtain of mist, over the hissing of the quiet tide, she heard strange noises and even the sound of people speaking an unknown tongue. In the
last few years this had happened to her often, and Cheivuneh attributed it to her advanced age, a time when a keen ear begins to pick up the sounds of the other world.

But then the curtain of mist was rent and the old woman saw creatures even the worst of nightmares could not conjure.

They were gigantic, these monsters with their black wings flapping in the weak breeze, and they were inexorably gaining on the land. Their low-slung bellies were full of human-looking but oddly hair-mouthed beings who disgorged strange guttural sounds as they peered at the shore. With a heartrending scream, the old lady bolted, dropping the seaweed she'd gathered for her repast. Her scream was so loud and so piercing that it was heard in almost every yaranga. Villagers peering out of their dwellings beheld the approaching black monstrosities with terror. From a distance they resembled boats, grown to a gigantic size, and their flapping wings, sails.

Mlemekym, whom all Uelen called Mekym for short, rushed outside with all his family, and he too was seized by a chill horror. Neither the ancient legends nor fairy tales ever made mention of anything like this.

Snatching up their children and their few belongings, the people ran for the tundra on the opposite bank of the lagoon. In the gathering gloom, the women's frightened cries mingled with those of the children.

They could hear voices coming from the shore, where the monsters were landing, and the voices resembled human speech. They seemed to be calling or hailing someone, but their language was incomprehensible, utterly unlike that of any of the Chukchi's neighboring tribes.

Mekym was one of the last to leave Uelen. The men had grabbed their weapons as they left, their spears, their bows and quivers full of arrows. Some even managed to carry off their battle shields and walrus-hide armor.
Kalyanto, the young shaman, also seemed frightened and spoke in a quiet voice.

From the top of Great Crag, the villagers watched the strange-looking humans scatter from the enormous black monsters like maggots from a cured chunk of walrus meat. Neither their looks nor their clothing brought to mind anything seen or heard of before. They had faces like animals, covered in bristles up to the eyes, and their speech too was more akin to wolfish growling, walrus snorting, or the cawing of crows. They spoke to one another so loudly that their voices muffled the sound of the incoming tide.

“We've never had anything like that in Uelen before,” Kalyanto said thoughtfully.

“And what if they've come to live here forever?” asked Unu.

“If they don't scram,” said Mekym, “we'll have to kill them.”

Kalyanto was uncertain. “But are they even mortal?”

“We'll soon find out,” Mekym said with an air of mystery.

The men of Uelen stayed atop Great Crag and kept watch over the abandoned settlement.

As darkness fell, the strangers lit a chain of bonfires. In the flickering light, they dashed between yarangas, grabbing things, carrying them back to shore.