The Storyteller Trilogy (31 page)

“You remember what she looked like?”

“Young, a round face like an otter. A large mouth, and she wore a parka of bird skins, much like the one the traders brought with them from the First Men Village.”

“Did you dream this before you saw that parka or after?” Yehl asked.

“Before. Last night, before the traders returned.”

Yehl raised his eyebrows. Then the dream was not because Sun Beater wanted the parka. Perhaps it came because he needed a woman. “Your wife, is she in moon blood time?”

Sun Beater frowned. “No.”

“When was the last time you visited her sleeping place?”

“Last night,” Sun Beater said.

Yehl closed his eyes, sat for a moment, then said to Sun Beater, “There might be something to this dream. Since she was wearing a birdskin parka, perhaps this woman is of the First Men. Perhaps we should go and speak to our traders, see if they found such a woman there. If she has some special power …” He glanced at Sun Beater and looked away. In his old age, sometimes he spoke too quickly, said too much. What if this woman did have spirit powers? Perhaps if he could get her as wife, her strength would compensate for his weakness. “You said she had a large mouth?” he asked.

“Too large. Her face was beautiful except for that mouth.”

Yehl pulled on a parka and motioned Sun Beater to follow him from the tent.

“Perhaps I should eat,” Sun Beater said, looking down into the food bag as they left.

“It will be here when we get back,” Yehl said. “Those traders will soon remember their wives and close their doorflaps to all of us. Then even a shaman will not be welcome.” He laughed, and Sun Beater joined his laughter.

Chakliux walked with Sok to the traders’ tents. Tut had explained that the traders were brothers, four of them, and they shared the same lodge in the winter village. In this summer place near the North Sea, they placed their tents close to one another. They should go to the eldest brother’s tent, Tut had told them. He was the one who did most of the trading. She told Sok to bring other trade goods, things the River People were known for—bark and fishskin baskets, caribou leggings embroidered with porcupine quills, and the warm hare fur blankets that their women made. But Sok had laughed at Tut’s suggestions.

“She sees value in those things because she is a woman,” he said to Chakliux. “What will a Walrus Hunter trader give for a basket that holds no more power than what some woman put into it?”

Instead he brought gaffs, traps and hooks for river fishing, snow goggles and snowshoes, chert knives with caribou bone handles and spearheads made with a bone base scored to hold thin stone blades, each no longer than a man’s smallest finger, half as thick as the quill end of an eagle feather. He wore the parka, as Tut suggested he should, and he brought one hare fur robe.

“She knows nothing about trading,” Sok said. “What woman does?”

“Most do not, at least among the River People,” Chakliux said, “but perhaps here …”

“You have told me,” Sok said. “Each village has its own ways.”

Chakliux lowered his head and did not try to reason with his brother. Sometimes words only made things more difficult.

There were nearly as many people gathered around the traders’ summer lodges as there had been when they beached their iqyan. As many women as men, Chakliux noticed, and the women often raised their voices, making offers for one trade good or another. Sok pushed his way through the crowd to where one of the traders stood. He was dealing with a man for a bone-tipped harpoon. Unlike Walrus Hunter harpoons, this one had a tip that carried most of its barbs on one side. The trader lifted the harpoon, unwrapped the sinew that covered the joint where the harpoon head met a bone foreshaft and showed the small beveled tongue of ivory that was inserted into a slot carved into the foreshaft.

“Like man into woman,” the hunter joked.

“Yes,” answered the trader, “and like man into woman, it works well. You will not miss seal or sea lion with this harpoon.”

“Too small for walrus,” the hunter said.

“They do not hunt walrus, those First Men.”

“Then why do I need this small spear, good only for seals? Perhaps I am foolish to look at it.”

“They also hunt whales,” Chakliux said softly, speaking in Walrus words. He heard Tut hiss. Ah, he had probably broken some taboo.

The hunter spun, lifted his upper lip in derision at Chakliux, but the trader laughed, raised one hand as though in greeting.

“There, you see, friend,” the trader told the hunter. “Even the River People know that First Men hunt whales.”

“With that?” the hunter asked, and pointed at the harpoon.

The trader looked at Chakliux, raised his eyebrows.

“No,” said Chakliux. “But I know stories that tell of Sea Hunters taking whales.”

“So then,” the trader said, “the same hands make both whale and seal harpoons. You do not see the power in that?”

Another hunter stepped forward. “If he does not, I do,” he said.

The first hunter grabbed the harpoon and lifted a chin toward a summer tent pitched on the seaward side of the village. “I will give what you asked for. Two seal skins of oil. Two walrus harpoons. My daughter is in that tent. She will make you a willow root basket.” He spun away from the trader, shot a look of disgust at Chakliux and left.

“So then, River man,” the trader said to Chakliux, “you are next. What is it you want to trade for?”

Chakliux laid a hand on Sok’s shoulder. “My brother is the one who has come to trade,” he said.

Sok stepped forward, then leaned back to whisper to Chakliux, “Do not help me in the trading. Just tell me what they say. I do not need to follow the steps of that last hunter.”

“My mouth is closed,” Chakliux said, but he could not keep a smile from his lips.

Tut crowded close to Chakliux, and, as the trader began to speak, she translated the finer meanings of his words, those things Chakliux was not yet able to pick up.

“He asks what you want,” Chakliux told Sok.

Sok pointed with his chin toward the birdskin parka. A hum of amazement came from the crowd of people, and the trader lifted his voice in a shout of laughter. He chattered out a series of words too quickly for Chakliux to follow.

“He says your brother must be a gifted hunter to have enough furs and meat to offer for the sax,” Tut said.

“The what?”

“Sax, a First Men word. Sax. It means ‘parka.’” Tut paused. “Almost, it means ‘parka.’ That garment you see lying there, that is a sax.”

Sok turned back toward Chakliux. “Tell him that I will trade equal for equal. This fine parka I wear for that birdskin parka. Tell him this parka I have is caribou and wolf, fox and weasel, much more powerful than something made of bird skins. And warmer also.”

“Offer less first,” Tut told Sok.

“Old woman,” Sok said, “leave the trading to the men.”

Tut lifted her head and shrugged her shoulders. “Equal for equal,” she said in the River language, then repeated the words in the Walrus tongue.

Sok turned, said the same words to the trader. Again the trader laughed.

“And what do you have that is equal?” he asked.

Chakliux translated his words, and Sok held out his arms, turned so the trader could see the sun design pieced on the back of his parka.

“It is worth something,” the trader said. “But what woman does not know how to sew caribou parkas? Bird skins, though, that is something different. Are there any women here who can work bird skins?”

Sok turned to Chakliux, raised eyebrows to ask what was being said.

“Leave,” Tut told Sok. “You have already lost. Leave. You have nothing he will take.”

Sok spat on the ground. “Do not tell me what to do, woman,” he said, then turned again to the trader, lifted the hare fur blanket he had draped over one arm.

The trader shook his head.

“What is the word for spear points?” Sok asked Chakliux without looking back. “For snow goggles, fish traps?”

Tut gave him the words, and Sok repeated them to the trader.

Again the trader shook his head.

“Your brother, he does not know how to trade,” Tut whispered to Chakliux. “He has nothing else?”

“Nothing.”

“I have grass baskets, leggings, a little oil.”

“He does not need the sax, Tut. Do not give your things to satisfy his wants. He is not a child. Besides, he has already lost honor in this exchange in front of the whole village. He would not appreciate your help.”

“So with a brother like Sok, how did you become so wise?” Tut asked.

Chakliux smiled at her. “In ways I would not wish on another,” he said.

Sok turned away, pushed through the crowd. He had started down the path to the beach when Sun Beater came out of the trader’s tent, called to him. Sok looked at Sun Beater with surprise in his eyes, then wended his way back through the crowd, whispering to Chakliux as he passed, “Wait for me.”

“Be careful of that one,” Tut told Sok. “He wants more than he should have.”

“I am not a child, woman,” Sok said, and pushed past her.

Tut watched him leave, then turned to look at Chakliux. She said nothing, but Chakliux saw that her eyes were dark with worry, and for a moment it was as though he were again with Gguzaakk, gaining wisdom through her wisdom.

THE FIRST MEN VILLAGE

AQAMDAX CUT THE STALK
of rye grass, holding the six leaf blades in her left hand as she cut with her right. The new grass grew from the pale remains of many previous summers’ grass, as though each mound were a family, the parents and grandparents pushing the new green fronds up toward the sun. She laid the stalk in the growing bundle at her feet. Qung said the grass on this hill was best for baskets. Not as coarse as the rye near the beaches, it grew among the ferns and tried to mimic their lacy fronds, stretching tall and strong and graceful, until its outer blades were longer than a woman’s arms.

The salmon were running in the river nearest their village, and all the women were busy cleaning and drying what the men brought in, but Qung was a woman of baskets, and insisted that, since she was too old to walk to this particularly good growth of grass, Aqamdax must go. She must go now, when the heads of grain had just begun to peak out of the stalks, before the early storms creased and twisted the grass, before snow and ice tore away the outer blades and made those pale center leaves brittle and sharp.

Aqamdax had argued with her. They would not be able to eat baskets when the hard moons of winter came. Better they had fish dried and stored than basket grass.

Others would bring food, Qung had told her. They always did, and Qung had been so sure in her pronouncement that Aqamdax had finally allowed herself to be persuaded. So here she was cutting grass a quarter day’s walk from the village when she should be helping Qung with fish.

The sun had burned away the haze of morning and shone hot on her head. Now and again Aqamdax raised her eyes to the hills where ptarmigan grass and red-flowering fireweed grew; where coarse stalks of iitikaalux stood dark against the grasses, and yellow cup flowers, and orange paintbrushes bent in the wind. She knew what the village women would say. Not only was she a thief of husbands, she was also lazy, leaving an old woman alone to catch fish.

Hii! Let them whisper. She was pleasing Qung and that was the most important thing. Never had she known anyone to be so particular about basket grass, but then she had never seen anyone who made baskets like Qung’s.

Qung slit the grass into fine strands as all women did, but instead of gathering the split grass into a coil and sewing with stitches tight enough to cover the coil as it wound its way up the basket, she tied several strands of grass together at their centers and fanned them out like a chuhnusix leaf. Then using two strands of grass as weavers, she twisted them in and out among the tied strands, making a circle that would be the bottom of the basket.

It was something that could not be done without the right grass, dried in the right way, Qung had told Aqamdax, then sent her to gather. In exchange she promised to tell Aqamdax two stories, old ones that most First Men had never heard. Aqamdax had not told Qung she would have gathered the grass for her anyway, without promise of stories.

Of course, the village women, especially the old ones, would talk, would use subtle words to shame her, but still, they came to hear her stories. Yes, they would listen and nod, hum their agreement, or sometimes interrupt to tell her another way they had heard the same story told. But that was good. How else did a person learn except by listening to others’ ideas, then choosing what was best?

Usually in summer, there was little time for stories, save those a grandmother or aunt might tell in teaching, stories that were a part of every child’s life. The story evenings, with most of the village people gathered in one ulax, were better saved for the long dark of winter. This summer the salmon runs were small, not so that the people would starve—seals, sea lions and halibut were plentiful—but some worried about curses and spells, perhaps in punishment for old ways forsaken.

Now, to help the people remember those ways, He Sings had asked for story evenings. This night and the next and the next after that, Qung and Aqamdax would tell stories. They would talk until the elders could be sure all things were being done in honorable ways.

During the past few days, as Aqamdax worked gaffing salmon, cutting grass, sewing, weaving, she told stories to herself in silent words that colored her thoughts as brightly as the grasses and flowers colored the hills.

As she practiced the stories, she sometimes stopped to lift prayers, and each prayer was a request that the people would not realize that the greatest change in the village was the new storyteller, a woman who had once taken hunters to her bed without worry over hunting taboos or the hearts of their wives.

Chakliux switched his paddle, three strokes left, then again, three strokes right. The rhythm seemed as natural as breathing.

When Old Tusk first began to teach him, the iqyax was strange, like a man he did not know, someone to face with arms crossed, right hand drawing strength from the hard bone haft of a sleeve knife. Now the iqyax was as familiar to him as his own body. When he paddled he was truly otter, the sea as much his home as any grass-covered hill.