Call Down the Stars (17 page)

She thought of a riddle, and it made her smile. She spoke it to the sky and told the wind to carry it above the clouds to those few stars that lived over the Sea Hunters’ islands. They seldom shone, those stars, and when they did, their light was faint, as if in finding their way through the clouds, they used up nearly all their brightness. But each dim star reminded her of the great dome of night sky that rose over the River People’s villages. And now she had more hope that she would live under those bright stars again.

“Look! What do I see?” she called to those First Men stars. “A daughter of light to guide my iqyax.”

I
N DAUGHTER’S DREAM, THE
otter jumped from the sea into their boat. It chewed off the grandfather’s arm, then came toward her, its teeth bared. She screamed and woke herself up. She opened her eyes and saw that she was no longer in the boat, and the memories of what had happened returned. She was inside the earth, she and the grandfather and an old woman.

She unwrapped herself from the bedding furs and stood up, but the motion of the grandfather’s boat seemed to be a part of her arms and legs, and she walked with a lurch that made her reach out toward the earthen walls to keep her balance.

Then she saw the grandfather. He was lying where the old woman had left him, on mats of woven grass that looked a little like the mats her own people used. Only a short stump, little more than the length of Daughter’s hand, remained where his left arm had been. Daughter remembered the bundle beside the notched log and her hopes of sewing the arm back on, but when she went to the log, the bundle was gone, nothing left of it but a scattering of dried blood in the floor-grass where it had lain. The old woman was gone, too, and Daughter decided she must have taken the grandfather’s arm with her.

The loss of that arm made an ache in Daughter’s chest, and as she crouched beside the grandfather she crooned a song her mother had taught her. It was a song for grass cuts and scraped knees, probably not much good for the grandfather, but it was all Daughter knew. She laid a hand on his forehead and was surprised to discover that his skin was cool.

Had the arm itself made him sick? If so, maybe the old woman had been right in cutting it off. At least the grandfather was alive. Daughter looked at her own small arms, so thin that they seemed little more than bone. She tucked her left hand behind her back and thought about living with only one arm.

She could still eat, she told herself. She could still pick up things. It would be hard for the grandfather to carry something heavy, but she still had two good arms. She would carry what he could not.

Water Gourd slept for five days, and when he opened his eyes to the darkness of the ulax, his first thoughts were of death. He had died, of course, and they had laid him in the earth. They had given him more honor than he deserved, for his grave was large. He tried to remember what he might have done to earn such a grave, but no remembrance of bravery or wisdom came to him. Maybe it was only that he had been killed when the Bear-god men attacked their village, and all those who had died were given honor burials. But the memory of many days in the outrigger boat came to him, and he thought of Daughter.

Suddenly he realized that in the darkness above him he could see ribs. Bones, they were, he was sure. He remembered his fight with the sea otter; he remembered his arm swollen and so painful that finally he could bear it no longer, and he had escaped into a sleep of spirit-wandering.

A sea dragon, no doubt, had found them and swallowed them whole while Water Gourd slept. He was now within that monster’s belly, for no grave he had ever seen was made with bone rafters. Where was Daughter? He thought of the little girl, and his heart crept into his throat. Why, in his cowardice, had he slept? Surely he was man enough to endure pain, and if he had stayed awake, he might have been able to save them both from the dragon.

His arm still hurt, shooting pains that began in his shoulder and ended at his wrist, but some of the spirits that had entered with the otter’s teeth had left, for the pain was merely a nuisance, nothing compared to what it had been. He tried to sit up, but his head spun, and he sank again to the floor of the dragon’s belly. He lay there for a time, drifted into thoughts that were nearly dreams, but finally tried again. This time he managed to do so, though an ache began at the top of his skull and ground into his teeth, so that he clenched his jaw and bit his tongue. He tasted blood, swallowed, and gagged. He felt unsteady, like a child just learning to keep his balance. He tipped to one side and reached to catch himself before he fell, but his arm did not respond. He looked down, and, in horror at what he saw, screamed.

He fell, his weight mashing what was left of the arm, so that his second scream was one of pain.

Then Daughter was beside him, her small cool hands patting his face, and there was a woman with her.

His first thought was of his favorite wife, that good woman, long dead. But how could it be? No sea dragon had swallowed her. She had died in a choking fit.

Then, as the woman eased him off his shoulder, laid him on his back, he saw her face, and knew that she was not even from his village. Her eyes were too round, her face too long, her nose too large.

Daughter was whimpering, and before he thought, Water Gourd reached out his right hand toward her, caught his breath in gratitude when he saw that the hand and arm were whole. But how would he carry water without his left arm?

Carry water, he thought, and mocked himself for his foolishness. He was dead! Did the dead need water?

“She cut it, grandfather,” Daughter said to him. “She cut it. I not find it.” There was fear in the girl’s voice, but Water Gourd saw something more. She looked stronger, her eyes brighter, her face fuller.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“Little village,” she said, and raised a finger to point at the huge ribs that stretched like rafters over their heads. “Inside the ground,” she said. She poked a finger into her mouth, sucked for a moment, then popped it out and told him, “You sick.” She lifted her head to look at the woman and said, “She feed you and me. Good fish.”

The woman said something to him, her voice low and thick in her throat, the words scraping against her teeth with sounds that were more grumbling than talking. Was she Bear-god?

No, he didn’t think so. Her skin was too dark, and her hair was black and straight. He realized that he smelled smoke, tasted fish oil each time he took a breath. The woman must be burning it, he decided. That fire, set somewhere behind his head, gave light so that he saw the glint of gray in her hair. She must be older than she looked, and though she was not what the Boat People would consider beautiful—her features were too strong for a woman—there was something about her face that caught the eye.

“We are inside the earth?” he asked Daughter.

She was sucking her fingers, and the woman had turned away from them, was doing something that blocked part of the light.

Daughter nodded.

“Can you go outside? Can you leave this place?”

Daughter twisted to point at an immense driftwood log propped up at an angle from floor to roof, and Water Gourd could see that it extended into the darkness beyond, through a square hole. His eyes were dim, but he thought he could see the sparkle of stars within that hole.

“Is it night?” he asked.

“Night,” she said, the word slurring around her fingers. “We go outside in morning. Catch fish.”

“There are other people?”

Daughter’s eyes were suddenly wet with tears. “Not my mama,” she said in a small voice.

“Other mamas?”

“Other mamas,” she said. “And babies.”

“Men? Hunters? Fishermen?”

“Mens,” she said. “Lots of mens.”

At first her answers brought him relief. They were not dead. Somehow their boat had found a village. But they were far from their own island, and these people, if they all spoke like the woman who was caring for him, did not know the Boat People’s language.

He and Daughter would be worthless in this village. Two more mouths to feed: a girl many years away from motherhood and an old man, weak and sick, and with only one arm.

At the thought, his elbow began to ache, not the elbow of his good arm, but the elbow he no longer had. Would it haunt him, that arm, blame him for the foolishness of trying to catch an otter? Would it give him pain that nothing could soothe? As a young man, when his hunting or fishing had made his arms ache, his wife would rub his muscles, bring life back into the flesh with her hands, but how could anyone rub what was not there? Could a man who knew medicine cut into the dead skin to bleed out the spirits of pain? Could a priest who knew prayer songs sing to an arm that was buried or burned?

The woman came to him then, slid a hand under his head and lifted him gently so he could sip from a wooden cup. He had expected water, but it was a warm tea that tasted of earth and plants, and it soothed his throat. He clasped Daughter’s hand, pulled her down to her knees. She snuggled against him, and the woman brought a robe to cover the girl.

There are worse things than being warm and dry with a woman to watch over me, Water Gourd told himself. There are worse things than having Daughter safe. Then, with Daughter warm at his side and the tea filling his belly, Water Gourd slid into a gentle sleep.

When he woke again, light streamed through the square hole in the roof of the earth
iori.
The woman and Daughter were sewing, and to Water Gourd’s surprise, when the woman spoke, Daughter answered. Sometimes the girl’s words were in the Boat People language, but other times she seemed to mimic the woman’s speech.

How long had he slept? Through the turning of the moon? Through the seasons of a year? Or was Daughter still baby enough that words came easily, and she understood all languages?

This time when he struggled to sit up, the world stayed still, and what little dizziness he felt soon passed. He leaned against his good right arm and thought about how to tell the woman that he needed to release his water, that his bladder was full to bursting.

When he was sure he had his balance, he lifted the blanket that covered him and saw that he was naked. He leaned forward to gather the blanket around his waist and tried to ease himself to his knees. The woman looked up from her sewing and hissed, then rushed to help him. She lifted his arm over her shoulders, and slowly pulled him up. The world darkened until Water Gourd could see only a pinpoint of light, but he clenched his teeth and made himself stand until the darkness receded.

He motioned toward his penis, covered as it was by the sleeping robe, said the word for urine, but the woman did not understand. Then he saw Daughter point to a gully that was dug where the floor met the earthen wall. Sunk into that gully was a large wooden trough. The woman helped him walk, moved with him step by step until he stood beside the trough. By the smell Water Gourd knew it held old urine.

The women in his village also stored urine. When it ripened to a sharpness that burned the nostrils, it was good for many things—cleaning away fat or oil, preserving hides, killing the molds that rot grass mats during the rainy times of the year. But Boat women did not store the urine in their houses.

He was used to privacy when he relieved himself, and though the woman turned her head, it took him some time to release his stream. Finally he was done, and she led him back to his bed, helped him sit.

She offered him a bowl of broth, and he drank it greedily, surprised at his own hunger. When he had drained a second bowl, she knelt behind him, bracing his back with her knees, and began to knead his neck, so that under the pressure of her hands even the pain from his ghost arm lessened.

She laid him gently against his bedding and stroked her fingers through his hair until finally he slept again, and this time his dreams were good.

When Seal returned from his hunting trip, the First Men gathered in the chief hunter’s ulax. Though K’os usually sat in the least honored place—with the children, furthest from the seal oil lamp—this time she sat beside her husband, near the chief, beside his fat wife and her ugly daughter. K’os held herself straight and strong. She was old, but most men would rather come to her bed than to that of the chief’s daughter. She smiled as she thought of the day she and her husband Seal arrived at his village.

The men, seeing her from a distance, had thought Seal had brought a young and beautiful woman to their village. Only when they came close did they realize that she was as old as a grandmother.

Though she had not understood their language, she heard the tone of their words and knew they were ridiculing Seal. In her mind, she had given words to their jests. Why had Seal taken an old woman as wife? Even a young hunter could not hope to breed children from an old woman.

Seal had responded with angry shouts and showed them the scars left from his wound. As he spoke, he gestured toward his rebuilt iqyax and often pointed at his leg, so K’os had known what he was telling them. Then he pulled her close, reached a hand down the neck of her parka, ignored the sudden laughter of the young men, and finally pulled out her river otter medicine bag. They were quiet then, those young men, stilled by the knowledge of the power she held in that bag, and their ridicule had stopped.

Now, in the chief hunter’s lodge, she raised a hand and laid it against her chest where the bag hung, soft and dark, over her breasts. In the custom of the First Men, she had removed her sax when she entered the chief hunter’s ulax. To do otherwise would be an insult, a sign that the lodge was not warm enough for her.

Yes, there was power in that otter bag, but she did not allow herself to think of how few packets of each medicine she still had, and how few of the plants she needed grew on this Sea Hunter island. She was learning the island foliage, but the women were reluctant to teach her, and none of them were well versed in plant medicines. She had learned about a poison from one of the young hunters, a gift of knowledge in exchange for an afternoon in her bed. The plant was deadly, and she had gathered some, dried it and kept it in packets marked with red string, knotted four times. There was a tall, heavy-stemmed green plant whose roots made a good poultice for sore muscles, and there were others that she had known before—yarrow and fireweed and ground-hugging willow—but she worried that her healing powers would diminish as her supplies were used. Then what would she do, an old woman, River as she was, and second wife?