The Storyteller Trilogy (52 page)

“Here,” Brown Water said, her fingers probing over Yaa’s left ear.

Happy Mouth pressed her own fingers in the same place, and Chakliux saw Yaa wince. “It hurts?” Happy Mouth asked the girl.

“Yes,” Yaa said in a tiny voice.

Chakliux, kneeling behind the women, felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see Ligige’.

“Best Fist came and got me,” she whispered to him. “Where did you find Yaa?”

“Out by the women’s path there is a large spruce. Under it—”

“I know the place,” Ligige’ said. “Do you know what happened to her?”

“No.”

Yaa lifted her head, struggled to see past her mother and Brown Water, her eyes seeking out Chakliux. “Ghaden?” she asked.

“He was not there.”

She fell back against the bedding furs, closed her eyes. “I should have … he wanted to bring Biter. They took him.”

“Who took him?” Chakliux asked.

“And Aqamdax,” she said.

“That woman,” said Brown Water. “That woman took him. I knew she would. We should send hunters after them. She can’t be too far, a woman with a child.”

“No,” Yaa said, but Brown Water had lifted her voice, was telling Chakliux to speak to the elders, was asking Ligige’ to find young hunters.

“No!” Yaa said again, and then she suddenly sat up, cupped her hands over her mouth and began to retch.

Happy Mouth grabbed a bark sael and held it under her daughter’s chin, but Brown Water turned to Chakliux. “You know that Sea Hunter woman as well as anyone. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly.

“Her husband threw her away this morning,” Ligige’ said. “She came to me after. She had a pack of trade goods, and she was looking for Ghaden and Yaa.”

“You told her where they were?” Brown Water screeched. She flung one arm back to Yaa’s bed. “Look what she did to our little daughter.”

“She might have decided to leave the village,” Ligige’ said, ignoring Brown Water. “She might want to return to her own people, but I do not think she would hurt anyone, especially a child.”

Brown Water pressed one finger into Chakliux’s chest. “You and your brother, this is your fault. Go find her and bring back Ghaden.”

Chakliux looked past Brown Water to Ligige’. “She did not say where she was going?”

“No.”

“I will find her,” Chakliux said. “Take care of the little daughter.” He pulled a sinew string of smooth shell beads from his neck. It was one of the gifts he had planned to give Aqamdax. He handed it to Happy Mouth. “For Yaa,” he said, “when she is feeling better.” Then he left the lodge.

“I found it. It is mine,” River Ice Dancer said.

“We all found it. We were all together. It has to belong to all of us,” said Black Moon.

The four boys stood around the iqyax. It had been nestled inside a bark cache set high in a tree.

“It might be my uncle’s,” Carries Much told the others, but they hooted out their derision.

Carries Much shrugged his shoulders.

“Did your uncle say he had an iqyax?”

“He never talked about it,” Carries Much said. “But he knows how to make them. So does my father.”

“Do you see their mark on it?” Black Moon asked.

Carries Much ran his hand over the smooth walrus hide cover. “Maybe that,” he said, and lifted his chin toward a series of white circles near the pointed bow.

“Maybe that,” River Ice Dancer said, his voice pitched higher to imitate Carries Much.

River Ice Dancer was the oldest of the boys, several years older than Carries Much, and larger than all of them. “It’s mine,” he told them again. “I’m going to keep it.” Suddenly he lunged out and grabbed the front of Carries Much’s parka, twisted his hand into the fur until Carries Much began to choke. “And if anybody tells his uncle or any uncle, he can count himself happy to be dead.” He released Carries Much so suddenly that the boy nearly fell to the ground.

The other boys laughed nervously, then Black Moon leaned down and offered Carries Much his hand.

“I think I’ll put it in a different place,” River Ice Dancer said. “If we find a tree with some good-sized branches, that should be rack enough for it. Just to keep it off the ground.”

He set his right shoulder under one side and lifted. “Here, help me. Black Moon, you get on the other side. Stone Thrower, you take the back. Carries Much, go home to your mother. You might need to suck on her teats.”

She wouldn’t leave without talking to him, Chakliux told himself. Their friendship had been too deep … but perhaps only to him. He was brother to her husband. Why should she think Chakliux would want her once Sok in anger threw her away?

Perhaps she only pretended friendship. As storyteller, he had something to offer her. He had told her tales from Caribou traders, even shared stories the North Tundra men said were from people who lived so close to the rising sun that they lit their cooking hearths from its flame.

But whatever had been between them, whether it was true or not true, if Aqamdax had decided to return to her own people and take her brother with her, how would she go? She would have to follow the river to the sea, then walk the shore. She could take birds with nets and fish with a handline, but her brother would slow her down. He was too old to carry far and too young to walk any great distance. Surely she knew it was too close to winter to make such a journey. Surely she knew someone would come after her, if only to get the boy back.

Then a thought came that pulled his breath from his chest, as though someone had sunk a fist into his belly. She might have taken his iqyax.

With the iqyax her brother would be no hindrance, and she could paddle wide around the Walrus Hunter Village, where the people might still want to kill her. So then, he asked himself, do you sit here and wonder, or do you go and see if your iqyax is still there?

He stopped at Red Leaf’s lodge, took spear and throwing board, another knife and a bladder of oil. It was foolish to think Aqamdax would have taken the iqyax, he told himself, but he should go and oil the cover, remove it and store it in a dry place for the winter. By the time he reached the storage cache, it was nearly dark.

He climbed up into the tree, then called out his anguish, a warrior’s cry.

T
HEY DID NOT BELIEVE
her. Not Brown Water. Not the elders. Not even her mother. At first, it did not matter. Yaa’s head had hurt so badly that she could not think around the pain, but now that she felt better, now that her eyes could focus again, her anger grew each time she tried to talk to them. Finally she decided that she could not remain in Brown Water’s lodge, doing nothing. It was bad enough that Chakliux stayed in Aqamdax’s lodge, did not look for them. He would not even eat, some of the women said.

There were many angry people in the village: elders mad that Aqamdax had stolen Ghaden; Chakliux mad that she took his iqyax; Brown Water mad that Yaa was hurt. Everyone was mad that Wolf-and-Raven did not have the power to stop Aqamdax, and Wolf-and-Raven was mad about everything.

Now, according to what Best Fist told her this morning, Wolf-and-Raven had new reason to be angry. Women were saying that his daughter Snow-in-her-hair was sleeping with many men in the village, trying to catch a baby in her belly so one of them would decide she was worth claiming.

Yaa’s mother and Brown Water spent much time at the village hearths, talking and talking. Other families were leaving for the caribou hunts. Brown Water said that soon Sok and Chakliux would go, that River Ice Dancer and his family had already left. Perhaps this was a good time for her to go also, Yaa thought. With everyone thinking about other things, it would take them longer to notice that she was gone. She would need food and extra boots, water and a woman’s knife. Maybe she could sneak one of her father’s throwing spears, one of the few that had not been left with his body on the death scaffold. She would say she was going to visit Best Fist, to spend the day teaching her how to make coiled grass baskets. Then she and Biter would leave.

It would be difficult to follow those two men after so many days, but Biter had a good nose.

Besides, she knew where those men were from. The last thing she had seen before the darkness came and pulled her away was the old man’s boot, with seams made in the foolish way of the Cousin River People.

Chakliux’s body ached, his tongue was swollen. Sweat had plastered his hair to his neck and shoulders. It was his third day of fasting, his third day of praying, and for most of that time he had also lived without water. He left his prayers only to dream, and now his dreams were visions of war, the Cousin and the Near River Peoples destroying each other.

Chakliux, too, fought, moving in his dreams to attack first one group, then the other, but no matter which village he fought against, the person always at the other side of his knife, at the tip of his spear, was Aqamdax, her hair loose and flying and Ghaden slung on her hip. Each time he pinned her to the ground, spear poised over her heart, he stopped, suddenly unable to move. In this dream, they fought from iqyan, and as he lifted his spear to thrust it into her heart, she threw her spear first, not into his flesh but into the taut cover of his iqyax, piercing the deck and hull, so that Chakliux felt the cold water flood his craft and pull him down into the sea.

He cried out, and suddenly he was in Aqamdax’s lodge, the place he had chosen to use during his fast, away from the shouts and conversations of Carries Much and Cries-loud, from the fussing and worry of Red Leaf, from Sok’s sly plans to take Snow-in-her-hair as second wife.

The lodge walls were close, pungent with the smell of hearth fire smoke. His body was heavy, his arms and legs slow and burdensome, as though he had forgotten how to use them. He stood, and his head spun. He pulled a bladder from a lodge pole. The water was tepid, dusky with the flavor of its storage container, but as he swallowed it, his thoughts cleared. He saw two faces, not those he might expect—Aqamdax or K’os, even his own Gguzaakk—but instead the girl Yaa and his young nephew Carries Much. He shook his head, took another drink, but the faces stayed, Yaa and Carries Much.

He used the remaining water in the bladder to clean the soot from his face, then he pulled on his parka and left Aqamdax’s lodge.

Yaa told her story slowly, this time with hope, her hands rubbing Biter’s ears as she spoke. Chakliux sat and listened, and seemed to ignore Brown Water’s sighs and protests, her rudeness once she realized that he intended to listen to Yaa.

Yaa lifted her voice to speak over Brown Water’s sudden decision to sing, over the woman’s clatter of wooden dishes, over a loud conversation she had with herself about the foolishness of young girls. Yaa told her story as best she remembered it from the time she and Ghaden first heard Aqamdax outside their den to the last blow to her head. She did not tell Chakliux she thought the men were Cousin River men. Why insult him? After all, was he not also from the Cousin River Village? But she did tell him that she thought they were old, and that the short one went for Aqamdax, that he had much white hair, that the other man wore a necklace of sea lion teeth.

She held her breath when she had finished speaking, hoping that he believed her, that he would go after Ghaden and Aqamdax. But he said nothing, merely nodded as she spoke, and then, when she was done, he thanked her and left the lodge.

She was disappointed, but even from the first he had seemed a little strange, his eyes focused above her head, his face drawn and pale, his hair dull and in strings, as though he had not combed oil through it in many days.

After he left, Brown Water scolded her and ordered her to go out and get firewood. It was the first time Brown Water had told her to do anything since she was hurt, but she was glad to get outside, to feel the wind on her face. Even the rough pieces of wood felt good under her fingers. When her mother saw her working, she came, concern in her eyes, but Yaa told her she felt strong. Then she asked if she could go to Best Fist’s lodge tomorrow and spend the day.

Happy Mouth, looking at the heavy load of wood in her daughter’s arms, at the whiteness of her daughter’s face, told Yaa it would be a good thing for her to spend a day in Best Fist’s lodge.

He slept a night and a day and another night, rousing himself only to take water. His sleeping seemed not so much a time to rest but to consider what Yaa had told him and to think back over all the conversations he and Aqamdax had shared.

He awoke hungry, and with the certainty that he knew what had happened. Yaa had said one of the attackers wore a necklace of sea lion teeth. Who else but Walrus Hunters and First Men wore sea lion teeth? Of those two peoples, who would seek revenge against Aqamdax? How like the Walrus Hunters to send elders to avenge the death of a shaman. If they were lost, the people would not suffer from their deaths as much as they would from the deaths of young hunters.

Chakliux sat up, peeled back his sleeping robes, then saw that he was not alone in Aqamdax’s lodge, that Carries Much was also there with him.

The words came to Chakliux’s mouth before he thought about them: “There is something you have to tell me,” he said.

“Yes,” Carries Much answered, and did not seem surprised that Chakliux knew.

When Carries Much began to speak, his voice was so soft Chakliux could barely hear him, but the more he spoke, the more he seemed to gather courage, and when he had finished, his voice was as strong as a man’s.

Then Chakliux spoke to him as though he were an adult, in the same manner that he might speak to Sok. “I have to make a journey, and I need my iqyax.”

Chakliux’s heart twisted at the thought that Aqamdax might already be dead, but the pain was not as great as it had been when he believed she had gone of her own choice, stealing what was his, something she knew he valued more than any other possession.

Chakliux stood and gestured for Carries Much to do the same. “So you will show me where River Ice Dancer put my iqyax?” he asked.

Carries Much nodded.

“Good. Then you will also help me take the food and supplies I need. Afterward, you will tell your father that I have gone to the Walrus Hunter Village. You will tell him that Walrus elders came and took Aqamdax, and since Ghaden was with her, they took him as well. Tell him I will try to bring them both back. And from now on you will not do what River Ice Dancer tells you to do.”