The Storyteller Trilogy (12 page)

But why worry about Salmon’s hunting or think about his wives? Only two days ago Aqamdax had thought she would soon be wife. She had believed Day Breaker’s whispered promises, but this morning, as she sat with He Sings and his four wives, Day Breaker came to them, announced he would marry Smiles Much, a woman whose mother and father lived in the village, a woman with four strong brothers. Later, when Day Breaker and He Sings had gone to visit the father of Smiles Much, Aqamdax had heard Grass Eyes and Fish Taker whispering. They giggled behind their hands, saying that Smiles Much already carried Day Breaker’s child in her belly, that she had missed three moons of bleeding.

Then Aqamdax knew Day Breaker’s promises had been lies, told to give him access to her bed.

So why should she hesitate to enjoy Salmon, even in the middle of the day? The village women already despised her, spat after her as she walked by. Aqamdax did not care. They only envied her beauty. They saw the desire in their husbands’ eyes when she passed. They knew their sons sought her out when the light was long in summer evenings.

Salmon thrust aside his breechcloth and lay over Aqamdax, pushing her back on the woven grass mats which covered the ulax floor. His fingers fumbled at the strings that secured her grass aprons, long woven panels, one hanging from her waist in front, the other hanging over her buttocks, the only clothing First Men women wore inside the ulax.

Salmon’s fingers were large and clumsy, and he had not yet succeeded in untying the aprons when Aqamdax heard a screech and knew it was Grass Eyes.

Aqamdax chided herself for her foolishness in not taking Salmon with her into her sleeping place. Though Grass Eyes would have known what they were doing, at least she would have seen nothing, and Aqamdax could have denied the woman’s accusations.

Salmon scrambled to his feet, grabbed his parka and ran. He paused long enough to allow Grass Eyes to jump off the notched log propped on a slant from the ulax floor to the square entrance hole in the roof. Then he climbed the log and was outside before Grass Eyes’s screams could become words.

Aqamdax would not even look at her. Instead, she straightened her aprons and pushed her long hair back over her ears. Then she curled one corner of her lips into the smile she knew Grass Eyes hated.

Grass Eyes picked up the basket Aqamdax had been making. It was a large, open-weave basket, made for gathering. She threw it at Aqamdax.

“You are worthless,” she cried. “All the women of this village are ashamed when they see you. You are worse than your mother. Don’t you know the men laugh at you? How can you be that stupid? Get out of my sight. I curse the day your mother left you!”

Aqamdax picked up the basket. “Look at this basket,” she said, speaking to Grass Eyes in a quiet voice. “It is better than anything you can make, yet you tell me I am worthless. No one in this village weaves as well as I do. I weave until my eyes burn and my fingers bleed. You trade my baskets and keep the trade goods, then tell me I am worthless. Have you forgotten that Fish Taker is so lazy she does not scrape the edges of hides, but instead leaves them rough and stiff? What about Spotted Leaf? Her fingers are so slow, it would take her a year to make one sax, even using cormorant skins. And I do not have to tell you that Turn Around is only a child. What can she do except please your husband in his bed? Perhaps you are the one who is worthless. Why else would He Sings need three other wives? You must not know how to please him.” Aqamdax smiled. “I will be glad to teach you.”

Grass Eyes hooked her fingers into claws and ran at Aqamdax. Aqamdax grabbed her birdskin sax from the floor where she had laid it and escaped up the climbing log. She slid down the side of the ulax, ignoring the burn of ice and frozen grass on her bare legs, then ran toward the beach.

The ground was cold under her bare feet. She had been foolish not to take her seal flipper boots. She did not like the feel of them. They were hard against her bones, always trying to shape her feet into the narrow daintiness favored by Spotted Leaf, the chief’s third wife—but they were better than walking barefoot in snow. Aqamdax pulled on her sax. It was long, fashioned in the traditional manner of the First Men, hanging loose well past her knees. She crouched beside a hummock of beach grass, her back to the wind, and tucked the sax around her legs and under her feet.

She hated living in the chief’s ulax, but what choice had she been given? Without father or grandparents living, and her mother no longer in the village, she had to stay where the elders decided.

Aqamdax tried to think back to the night her mother had left, but with each year that passed, the memory dimmed, and now it seemed almost like a dream.

Daes had come into the sleeping place she and Aqamdax shared. She came whispering her love, then told Aqamdax she was leaving the village, that she was going to the River People. Aqamdax, crying, had begged to go with her, but her mother said the trader would not take both of them. She promised to return, to bring gifts. So Aqamdax had stayed in the sleeping place and only later realized that she did not know which trader her mother meant, or to which River village they were traveling.

During the first year, even in winter, Aqamdax had gone to the beach each day, had waited and watched. She asked every trader who came to the village if he had heard anything about her mother. None had.

She had heard the village women’s gossip. They said her mother had run away to be with that trader, but Aqamdax knew the true reason her mother had left.

A moon before, Aqamdax’s father had drowned while hunting. After his death, anger took root inside Aqamdax’s chest, and she lashed out at everyone, even her mother, until Daes had left with the first man who showed any interest in her.

Aqamdax’s throat tightened, but she did not allow herself to cry. Tears would not return her father to life or bring her mother back from the River People. Tears would not even help her live through another day with the chief hunter’s wives.

They hated her, those four women. Each was so sure she was the most important woman in the village: Grass Eyes, because she was the chief’s first wife; Fish Taker, because she had borne the most children; Spotted Leaf, for her beauty; and Turn Around, because she was the chief’s favorite.

The first two years Aqamdax lived in He Sings’s ulax, she had hoped he would claim her as daughter. She would have been assured of a husband. Who would hesitate to take the chief hunter’s daughter as wife? But when anything went wrong, she was blamed. The sister-wives raised their eyebrows and clacked their tongues, whispered behind their hands and watched her from slitted eyes.

Finally, when Aqamdax realized she had no hope of ever pleasing them, she spent her nights thinking of ways to make them angry. Why not have the fun of mischief when she was blamed for every problem anyway?

How did Spotted Leaf’s necklace get into the bottom of Fish Taker’s sewing basket? Why did Turn Around eat the berries Grass Eyes was saving for their husband? And the beautiful parka Grass Eyes made, how did it happen to fall apart the first time the chief wore it?

Each year Aqamdax assured herself some hunter would ask for her as wife—perhaps one of the old men, perhaps someone very young—then she would be able to leave the chief hunter’s ulax. All the girls she had grown up with, her childhood playmates, were wives. Most of them had babies, but no man claimed Aqamdax.

Then Day Breaker had begun sneaking into her sleeping place at night….

Aqamdax lifted her eyes to look out over the bay. Jagged chunks of ice layered the beach, and a wind blew from the west, ruffling the feathers of Aqamdax’s sax. She lifted her shoulders so the high collar rim covered her ears. She needed a parka, an otter fur parka with a hood like the Walrus Hunters wore, but where would she get the pelts to make such a thing?

She could ask the men who slept with her, but they might get angry and stop coming. Then how could she bear the loneliness? Her only hope was to get pregnant, claim the child belonged to the hunter most able to accept her as wife. Yet, in spite of all the men she had pleasured, she had never missed a moon blood time.

She lay her hand against her belly. Old Qung sometimes told stories of women who, in punishment for a taboo broken, were denied children. Perhaps Aqamdax should treat the chief’s wives with more respect.

She sighed. It would not be easy; each of them had such a contrary spirit, but if she started with a gift they might believe she intended to change. She looked out over the beach. There was little chance to find something with the bay still frozen. Even the village hunters were home with their wives.

Of course, there was always driftwood, if she was willing to work hard enough to get it. A large chunk of wood, as long as her arm, as thick as a hunter’s thigh, had been frozen into the shore ice since the second winter storm. After the storm, several women had worked at getting it loose but had finally given up. Aqamdax could take it back to Grass Eyes. Perhaps the woman would accept it as an offering for peace and forget that she had found Salmon and Aqamdax together.

Aqamdax went back to the ulax and got her seal flipper boots. Grass Eyes’s two young daughters were sitting beside their mother, each whining as Grass Eyes tried to teach them to weave baskets.

“I will soon be back to help you,” Aqamdax said.

The woman looked at her but said nothing.

Aqamdax pulled on her boots and went back outside. She climbed over the beach ice until she got to the driftwood. About half of the wood was frozen in the ice, but Aqamdax thought she might be able to get it out. She walked up the beach to a scattering of fist-sized round stones, worn smooth over the years by water and wind. She kicked one free and carried it back to the driftwood. She lifted the rock in both hands and brought it down hard against the ice that held the wood.

Again and again, she smashed rock against ice, until her hands ached and her fingers bled. Finally, by leaning her full weight against it, she was able to move the driftwood, less than a finger’s width, but still, it moved. She tucked her hands into her sleeves to warm her fingers. They were numb, and, as feeling returned, they hurt enough to force tears from her eyes. She wiped her face on her sleeve and threw herself against the wood until it was loose enough to pull free.

She picked it up, heaved it to one shoulder and worked her way back over the shore ice, past the frozen clumps of grass that marked the line of high tide, up toward the village.

There were three tens of ulas in the village, each warm and strong enough to stand against the assault of the fierce winds that blew in from the sea. Most housed large families: hunters and wives, children, sometimes grandparents, aunts, uncles. The ulas were dug into the earth, roofed with driftwood or whale jaw rafters, then covered with grass mats, thatching and layers of sod.

Inside, one or two large lamps—boulders with tops chipped out to hold oil, or smaller stone lamps, each ringed with moss wicks and filled with seal oil—were kept burning. Their heat was enough to warm the ulax, even in winter.

The chief hunter’s ulax was larger than most. It had seven sleeping places, each large enough for two or three people, each padded with sea otter furs and fox pelts, then curtained off from the main room with woven grass panels. Food caches, storage for seal skins of oil and sea lion bellies of dried seal meat, dried fish, whelks and chiton, were also dug into the walls. Caribou bellies and bladders, fitted with carved ivory plugs and bulging with water, hung from the ulax rafters.

The village was a good place to live. Hunters were almost always successful; the children were well-fed and healthy. Even in winter there was enough to eat. Those hunters who were not killed by sudden storms or angry sea animals, those women who lived through childbirth, could look forward to many years as elders, respected, cared for, fed.

Traders came often to the beach. The First Men hunters always had meat, oil. Who made better baskets, finer birdskin parkas than the women of this First Men village?

The wind pushed against Aqamdax as she walked. She turned a shoulder into it, tucked her head down, so she did not see the old woman until she almost ran into her. Suddenly the dark cormorant feathers of the woman’s sax were before her, and Aqamdax stopped so quickly that the driftwood slipped from her shoulder, striking her ankle before hitting the ground.

Angry words came to Aqamdax’s mouth, but she held them in. The old woman was Qung, the village storyteller, respected by everyone.

Of those who spoke against Aqamdax, the oldest women were often the worst, but in the years since Aqamdax had first welcomed men to her bed, she had never heard Qung lift one word against her.

The thought brought a sudden surge of gratitude. She bent down and leaned forward to look into the old woman’s eyes, for the stiffening disease had truly cursed her, bending her until the hump of her back was as high as her head.

“I am sorry, Aunt,” said Aqamdax, addressing the old woman in politeness.

“Ah, my eyes are not good, child,” Qung answered. She turned her head sideways and up, squinting as she peered into Aqamdax’s face. “Aqamdax, is it?” she asked. “Daes’s daughter?”

“Yes, Aunt.”

Qung patted Aqamdax’s hand. “Poor child.”

Her words surprised Aqamdax. It was Qung, old and bent, walking with slow steps, who should be pitied.

“You dropped something,” Qung said.

“Driftwood,” Aqamdax told her. Then, anxious to show Qung that she could easily give things away and should not be pitied, Aqamdax said, “I do not need it. Would you like to have it?”

She waited as the old woman bent even closer to the ground, extended a gnarled hand to stroke the wood. The North Sea had taken its bark, leaving it smooth to the touch but rough to the eye. It was dense-grained, frozen, but not water-rotted.

Trees grew near the First Men’s village, mostly stunted willow and wind-sculpted black spruce, but if the storytellers were right, the First Men came from islands with no trees, where any wood they needed for iqyan or ulax rafters had to be scoured from beaches, a gift of the sea. Even yet, it was easier to bring wood from the beaches than to travel inland and cut the living trees.