The Spirit Keeper (8 page)

I started to gesture, then stopt as tears welled in my eyes. Keenly aware of his intense gaze, I worked to control myself. “I—not good for you,” I gestured. I frowned, confined by the clumsy hand-language. How could I convey the concept of “not good
enough
”? I did the best I could with my limited vocabulary. “You are good, more good, more, more, more good than me. I not good for you.” I let my hands fall in defeat. All I could do was hope my meaning was clear.

It was. When at last I looked up, Syawa’s face had transformed from a worried frown to an amused reproach. “You are good,” he gestured, as if I’d said something silly. “You are good for me. You are as I see you in my Vision. You are smart. You are strong. You are brave.”

I shook my head and sighed, looking away. “You not know me,” I gestured.

He knelt beside me. “You do not know many, many things,” he said, speaking softly in his language to accompany his gestures. “You do not know me. You do not know you. I know what you do not know. Trust me. You will learn.” He moved so that his face was in the line of vision of my averted eyes. He smiled, hopefully, teasingly.

He almost made me smile, but I shook my head as I gestured, “You are right. I not know many things. You have Visions. I not have Visions. I not what you think. I not . . .” I froze for a moment, racking my brain, but Tomi had ne’er shown me the gesture for “worthy.” “I not good for you,” I finished weakly.

Syawa put his hands on my shoulders and looked me in the eyes as he said something. He waited a moment, then gestured, “You must trust me. I have seen it. You are the one in my Vision.”

As I looked at him, the tears building up, he leant slowly towards me ’til our foreheads touched. We breathed each other’s air for a long moment, my tears drying up, my heart beating faster and faster. He pulled back only a few inches, grinning that hopelessly infectious grin of his. “You see?” he said softly, and in my sudden delirium I scarce noticed I understood his words. Before I could reply, he leant forward again to touch his lips gently, delicately, to mine, and instantly I was o’erwhelmingly dizzy. I have been kissed many times in my life, but it was ne’er like this, nothing like this.

I remember little of parting, of sitting back to talk further, or of Hector returning with a bird of some sort, which he went on to cook. All I remember is the spinning euphoria and the absolute devotion I was beginning to feel towards this strange, very special savage man.

From that night on, I prayed almost continuously that I might, as he insisted, be good for him.

~8~

I
HAVE, UP TO THIS POINT
, been so consumed with explaining my predicament and describing my companions that I have completely ignored one of the key elements of my situation, which was the idyllic landscape through which we traveled.

Heretofore, as stated, I was not particularly enamored of the out-of-doors, and true wilderness seemed as dark and ominous to me as the Stygian depths. I longed for the comfort and security of the bustling towns of my childhood, the excitement and energy of the Old World cities I had oft heard of. Yet here I found myself wandering deeper and deeper into a wilderness as vast as the ocean itself, with no knowledge at all of how much longer or farther I was destined to roam. Not only did I have only the vaguest notion of where on earth I was, but by this time I rarely knew whether I was facing north, south, east, or west, so numerous were the twists and turns of our fast-paced travels.

Each day I expected to arrive at our destination, or at least to find signs that we were nearing our goal. Each evening when we stopt to make camp, I was forced to reconsider just how far Syawa had traveled in order to find me, and how far I was now being removed from the proximity of the only world I had e’er known. The distance was staggering and growing by miles and miles every day.

I took some comfort in the fact that my companions seemed to know exactly where we were at all times. I did not know if we were following the very trail they took on their eastward journey or if they were merely going in a certain direction, but Hector was an obsessive navigator, always studying our surroundings with a keen eye. Every time we so much as paused, he scanned the lay of the land, oft stopping to examine a tree, bush, or even weed. Once I found him squatting beside a delicate spring flower, curiously studying its unique features.

I asked Syawa why Hector did this, and he explained that much of the flora and fauna in this land were unknown to them. His friend, he said fondly, was always interested in new things.

Having ne’er considered the subject, I was surprised to learn plants and animals were not the same everywhere, and e’en more surprised that a brute as seemingly cold and rough as Hector might be curious about a pretty little posy.

Indeed, ’twas this interest in wildflowers that first enabled me to feel any sort of kinship with Hector, for I, too, was increasingly enchanted by the beauty of the awakening landscape. Every day brought a new crop of fragrant blooms, and e’en when the skies were gray and gloomy, the ground was glowing with glorious greens and yellows and pinks and purples. For miles and miles the three of us flew across a forest floor literally carpeted with flowers. The abundance was so o’erwhelming I began to feel as if God Himself was bestowing me with blossoms to apologize for the dismal nature of the first seventeen years of my life.

One evening shortly after we departed Tomi’s village, I laid my bearskin upon a thick patch of violets and sat back to marvel at the spectacular sunset taking place across a meadow of purple and yellow flowers on the other side of the creek. The twilight sky was awash in reds and oranges, and all those fragrant blooms filled the air with an intoxicating perfume. Hector had just returned with two raccoons, which he was skinning as Syawa built the fire. They talked as they worked, but because I was too tired to decipher their words, I chose to enjoy the rare opportunity to bask in a perfect place, a perfect time. Surely, I thought, the Garden of Eden could not have been so blessed, or Adam and Eve would not’ve dared any action which might risk their expulsion.

I know not how long it took to realize the tone of my companions’ voices had changed, but at some point my attention was abruptly wrenched from the sunset.

Syawa and Hector were arguing.

I had heard Hector complain before, but ne’er had I heard the men exchange harsh words—certainly not in the way they were doing now. I strained to make out what they were saying, but tho’ my comprehension of their language was steadily improving, they spake far too rapidly for me. Ne’ertheless, I was sure I heard both say “Kay-oot-li,” and assumed they were arguing about me. What else did they have to argue about?

I crawled o’er to Syawa and gestured, asking what was wrong. He ignored me as he and Hector continued to bicker, their voices raised and rancorous. Suddenly, Hector threw down the raccoon and stomped off toward the creek. Syawa watched him walk away, the expression on his face impossible for me to read. Then he looked at me and shrugged, smiling apologetically.

“Why he angry?” I gestured.

Syawa looked into the fire. A long moment of uneasy silence passed. Then he sighed and gestured that Hector was unhappy because I was not helping with meal preparation. “Among my people,” he said and gestured, “men provide the game, women do the rest. My friend has never enjoyed doing women’s work, but now, with you here . . .”

I nodded, the problem clear to me. Any of my brothers would rather die than be caught working in a kitchen. “I—I not know how help,” I gestured. Just as when Hector complained about my body odor, I was surprised, embarrassed, and ashamed.

Up to this point, I felt my primary duty was to learn Syawa’s language—a view I believe he shared. Thus, each evening when Hector was off hunting or fishing, Syawa started a fire, set up our camp, and chattered away, but he neither asked for my help nor seemed to expect it. When Hector returned, he and Syawa skinned, cleaned, and cooked the food with the clockwork precision of people who had been working together for years—wordless, efficient, companionable. It was clear to me that should I attempt to interject myself into their routine, I could only muddle things up, and, at any rate, I had no idea what to do.

The problem was not that I was untrained—indeed, no girl could be considered marriageable who was not a fair hand in the kitchen—the problem was that I had neither the ingredients nor the tools I was accustomed to using, and without them I was lost. I had no milk, no eggs, no flour, no grains. I had no pan, no kettle, no spoons, no iron spit. All I had was the knife I packed when planning to run away.

The implication that I was somehow slacking cut me to the quick. I am not a lazy person. I worked in my mother’s kitchen from the day I could stand—stirring, peeling, chopping, kneading. And when it came to cleaning, well, in my life I had swept miles of floor, hauled oceans of water, and scraped up mountains of ash. No one in the world could have scrubbed more dishes in the preceding seventeen years than I.

Unfortunately, I knew nothing about the preparation of wild game nor the management of a wilderness camp. Before moving to the frontier, we kept chickens and milk cows, of course, but the only butchering I was involved with was our birds. In truth, meat was ne’er more than a small part of our diet, and when we were lucky enough to have it, we eked it out in soups, stews, or pies. For the most part we sated our hunger with pancakes, porridge, pudding, or pottage, and, of course, we ne’er ate a single meal without bread and butter.

My companions, on the other hand, ate meat, meat, and more meat, cooked in ways I ne’er imagined. They stuck it on a stick in the fire, wrapt it with leaves and buried it under hot coals, or boiled it in a pouch made from the animal’s stomach. All their ingredients and cooking methods were bizarre to me—how could I possibly help?

But I had neither the words nor the time to explain all this to Syawa. He picked up the carcass Hector had thrown down and finished skinning it, all the while explaining what he was doing. The process was painfully slow because he had to keep using his hands to gesture when I did not understand his words. When he was done with that first animal, he bade me prepare the second carcass, patiently advising me how to use his stone tool. The animal he prepared was cleanly cut and ready to cook, but by the time I was done hacking away at my poor raccoon, all that was left was a pile of mangled meat scraps. Syawa laughed good-naturedly and assured me I would improve, saying the important thing was that I was willing to try.

Once we set the meat a-cooking, I found, to my dismay, my lesson was far from over. Syawa explained that women were expected not only to turn the freshly killed game into a meal, but also to preserve all useful parts of the animal and then clean the camp of every single drop of blood. Unskilled as I was in campfire cooking, I was nigh hopeless when it came to preserving the hides, bones, and sinews, but I did my best to follow Syawa’s instructions as he showed me every grueling step of the painstaking process.

By the time we finisht all my new tasks and put our tools away, the meat had cooked to the consistency of dried leather. With Hector still nowhere in sight, Syawa and I went ahead and ate our share, tho’ I was so exhausted by this time I could scarce chew. Syawa ate happily, however, offering endless additional tips on how to skin, preserve, and store animal parts.

My mind was numb from all I’d learnt, leaving me incapable of following what he said anymore, so after a time he finally stopt talking to stare contentedly into the fire. I wondered about Hector’s absence, but Syawa seemed unconcerned. As my thoughts hearkened back to their argument, I remembered one particular set of sounds Hector used several times—it was a word I’d heard him use before in reference to me. I looked at Syawa and shattered the pleasant silence by asking what that word meant, struggling to pronounce the sounds exactly as I’d heard them.

Syawa raised his eyes from the fire to look at me for a long moment before he said and gestured: “That word means ‘not know how to do things.’”

Ah. It meant ignorant, stupid. Hector had called me stupid, and Syawa defended me. Now I understood why the argument had been so heated.

I looked at the ground with a humorless laugh. “Your friend thinks I stink and stupid,” I said with words and gestures. I looked at Syawa, who was smiling sympathetically. “I told you I not good for you.”

Syawa spake with both his words and hands. “You are stupid only because you do not know how
we
do things. I will teach you. You will learn.”

I nodded, but my thoughts were grim. Once again I felt completely undeserving of all this attention from someone of Syawa’s high status, and I worried that if the rest of his people were as intolerant of my many faults as Hector seemed to be, I was going to be in serious trouble. Syawa might be enamored of me now and therefore willing to put up with my incompetence, but once the newness wore off, he would surely despise me. How could he not? His friend clearly did.

I could almost hear my mother crowing—
I told ye so, I told ye so
 . . .

 • • •

When I awoke the next morning, Hector was back, but the men made no eye contact and did not speak that whole day. I was sickened by the strained silence—it was all my fault! Ne’er before had I seen a friendship like theirs, and the thought that
I
might be the cause of its demise crushed my soul. To make amends, I determined to do everything a woman was supposed to do e’en if I didn’t know how to do it, which meant, of course, that I made a terrific muddle of everything.

The evening after the big argument, I immediately set about starting a fire, which I now knew was my job. I collected wood, set up kindling, and shredded dry bark as I had seen Syawa do. Smiling encouragement, he handed me the horn in which he carried a coal from the night before, but when I dumped the glowing ember into the shredded bark, it fizzled, then expired. I gasped, horrified, but Syawa only laughed and set about making a new spark, the result of which was our fire was scarce smoldering by the time Hector returned with a fish.