Call Down the Stars (35 page)

He tested the knot that bound his chigdax hood tight around his face, then braced his legs wide inside the iqyax. Once more he filled his chest with air, once more he filled his eyes with the sight of the sky, and as the wave loomed over him, as whitewater curled down the sheer green of its sides, he flipped his iqyax and drove the bow into its mouth.

Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

602 B.C.

Yikaas stopped. Sky Catcher had chosen to sit directly in front of him, and the longer Yikaas spoke, the more noise Sky Catcher made. First he merely sucked at his teeth; then he began clicking the blade of his sleeve knife against the flats of his fingernails. Now he was snorting and coughing and clearing his throat.

Yikaas had tried to keep his thoughts on the story, but Sky Catcher’s small irritations began to thrust themselves between each of his words.

It is a good place to stop, Yikaas told himself. He had heard other storytellers do so. He nodded his head and repeated the traditional story ending: “That is the way it happened, so they say.” Then he thanked Qumalix for her translation.

“You’re done? The story is over?” she asked.

“You can’t stop there,” shouted a River man.

Several others protested, some in the River language, others shouting out First Men words.

Sky Catcher stood and swaggered into the storytellers’ circle. “I will tell you a better story than that,” he said, and Qumalix translated his words into River, flashed her eyes at Yikaas, as though he should do something to stop the man.

She leaned close to Yikaas and said, “Finish your story.” But her words were more demand than request, so he told her, “It is finished.”

The nearest trader stood up and shoved the flats of his hands against Sky Catcher’s chest. “Sit down, go back and sit down,” the trader said, then lifted his chin toward Yikaas and asked politely, “Will you tell us the rest of the story?”

“The story is told,” Yikaas said, and glanced at Qumalix, saw that her face was pinched, her lips tight.

Then she smiled at him, a forced smile that showed her teeth, white as gull feathers. “Perhaps there is a story that follows this one,” she said, “but if you have no more stories about Cen, then I guess we will listen to Sky Catcher.”

Several First Men spoke, and Qumalix told Yikaas, “They say they would rather hear your story.”

“Ask how many want to hear my story and how many want Sky Catcher’s.”

She asked, and every man in the ulax chose Yikaas. Sky Catcher puffed out his cheeks and spat a word of insult, then made his way to the climbing log and left the ulax.

“He’s a child in a man’s body,” Qumalix said to Yikaas. “I’m glad that you are wiser than he.”

“Sometimes I’m wise,” Yikaas said. “Other times I’m as foolish as any child could be.”

“Women have their own ways of foolishness,” Qumalix said, and though neither had spoken words of apology, Yikaas felt his heart lighten.

“So, then, my friend,” Qumalix said, “will you finish the story?”

“Tell them that in the River tradition this story is sometimes stopped at this place so the listeners can give ideas to the storyteller.”

As she translated his words, there was a murmur of surprise among the traders, then one of the First Men, a hunter called Fish shouted out words in broken River, “Cen dead. No chance.”

Several First Men began to quarrel. Qumalix laughed and told Yikaas, “They claim that Fish will curse Cen’s chance to survive.”

A River trader heard her translation and also began to argue, drawing in other River men. Two hunters discussed the best way to roll an iqyax, and several men told of their own experiences in heavy surf. The arguing began again, and Qumalix finally held both hands up, laughing. She pinched the bridge of her nose as though to say that her head was aching.

“Enough!” she said in the River language. “Arguments are too difficult to translate. Tell your story, Yikaas. Please.”

Yikaas took his place again in the storyteller circle and held his arms out, hands palm up. “Perhaps the prayers of all those who have lived these many years since Cen fought that wave, perhaps those prayers have traveled back to make a difference for him.”

There was a roar of approval from the men who thought Cen would survive, but then Yikaas said, “Of course, there is that chance that those prayers did not help at all.”

Then the other traders began to laugh, and Yikaas lifted his voice to finish Cen’s story.

The Bering Sea

6435 B.C.

He had been inside waves before, had turned his iqyax so the bottom of the craft, rather than his own head, took the brunt of a breaker. He expected the cold that suddenly enveloped his body. He did not worry when the noise of the wind was replaced by the sound of the water and by the hollow voice of his own heart pushing his blood.

But in this wave, he had expected darkness. What light could survive in the belly of the sea? To his surprise, although the sky scarcely held the first rays of dawn, somehow the wave had captured that brightness, and the water glowed.

Cen tried to right himself, arched his spine back over the hard wooden ridge of the iqyax coaming, thrust his upper body and his paddle forward with enough force to move quickly through the water. The sea grabbed Cen and his blade, slowed their thrust. Once, twice, he arched and pulled. The third time the iqyax rolled upright, but in numbing despair Cen realized that he was still trapped within the mountain of water.

He had misjudged his air, allowed the stored breath that expanded his lungs to hiss out between his teeth when the iqyax finally turned. Now his lungs begged for new breath.

There were currents within the wave. They caught Cen and fought to tumble him and his iqyax, to break their bones. Ignoring his lungs, Cen thrust his paddle against those currents, and managed to keep himself straight most of the time. Just when he thought the water was brightening—as though the sky were reaching down to show him that he did not have much farther to travel—the wave slapped the bottom of his iqyax and thrust the point of the bow up into the breaking curl so quickly that Cen could not react.

It turned him end for end and hurled him down toward the bottom of the sea. He lost his paddle, so he clasped the edges of his coaming, drew up his knees until they touched the underside of the iqyax’s deck, and in that way he held himself within the craft.

Pain knifed his ears, and he saw blood rise in curls around his face. The wave thrust him up again, and the pressure eased. His hands, clenched into tight fists, were bruised by the force of the water, but that pain was nothing compared to his lungs, now aching so badly that it seemed as if someone had reached inside his chest and shredded them.

Ghaden’s face burned into his mind, then again he saw Daes, heard her voice as though she welcomed him into death.

“Daes,” he whispered, and released his last small bubble of air. It rose past his eyes to join the froth of the breaking wave and was lost there.

He drew in a great mouthful of water, knew for an instant the relief of that drawing, and then he was choking, taking water into his lungs, his belly, coughing and breathing until his whole body shook with spasms.

Then, suddenly, all things were calm. His lungs, as though satisfied with the water that filled them, no longer tried to draw in more, and the iqyax steadied within the wave. Even his ears stopped throbbing, although thin trails of blood still curled before his eyes, red as fireweed blossoms.

The beauty of the water gripped him, and he was grateful for seeing the sea from inside, as if he had been granted the eyes of an otter in compensation for his death. And why not? His friend Chakliux, that man of otter foot and otter wisdom, had made Cen’s iqyax.

Then, as though the iqyax knew itself as otter, it shuddered and thrust its bow up, nose toward the sun. It climbed within the water, finally breaking out into the dawn, sliding sideways down the back of the wave, like a river otter on ice. It landed on its side, then righted itself, bobbing in the wave’s choppy wake.

All this Cen saw as though he were watching some other man caught in the sea. But then the water he had swallowed thrust itself out of his lungs and belly, up his throat and through his mouth and nose, burning like salt on raw flesh.

He gagged and choked and retched, his hands still clutching the coaming, his fingers so cold and stiff that it seemed that they had taken the grip of a dead man, and so would ever remain bound to the iqyax.

He brought up the contents of his stomach, fish and bile and more sea water, then was finally able to draw in a breath. He realized that even more than the cold and the water, his own fear had filled him, and now as it drained from his body, his fingers finally relaxed, and he began to shake.

For a long time, he could do nothing but sit and battle down his dread, try to lift himself above his pain. He was rock, then animal, and finally man, able to catch his thoughts, twist them together like one who makes a rope from many strands, and in that joining finds strength.

The Traders’ Beach

T
WO DAYS AFTER THE
storm, hunters brought pieces of broken iqyan to the Traders’ Beach, and a young man was sent to the Walrus Village to tell the families that Dog Feet and He-points-the-way had died in a storm. The sea had swallowed the bodies, as the sea often does, and though they had little hope of finding the remains, Dog Feet’s brother and several older hunters from the Traders’ village went out to search shores and inlets.

Though Daughter begged Ghaden to stay in the village, reminded him that none of the wreckage seemed to belong to Cen’s iqyax, Ghaden went with the hunters. For all the days they were gone, the skies remained clear and the sea calm, as though all the summer’s anger had been spent in one storm.

When the village’s four days of mourning had ended, life continued as it always had, traders coming and going, women fishing and gathering and sewing, men hunting and repairing their iqyan.

The storm had brought some bounty to their inlet, and children helped the old ones gather kelp bulbs, which the women would stuff with meat and bake, or dry and grind for medicine to help bones heal. The young women collected driftwood to use for cooking fires and hunters’ hats, iqyax frames, and ulax rafters.

Daughter did more than her share of work, starting her days too early and staying awake long into the nights. She walked the beaches, a pack of driftwood heavy on her back, waiting with hope and dread for Ghaden, afraid of what he would find, but needing him to return to her.

K’os seemed to observe her own strange kind of mourning, at first singing for Cen as if she were his wife, insulting Seal with her tears and even slashing her arms as a wife might do. But on the fourth day she had risen from her bed with clear eyes and new strength, so that when Daughter was near her, she could feel the humming of some power move the air like the quick beat of duck’s wings.

That day, K’os joined Daughter on the beach, helped gather driftwood and kelp, but K’os kept her eyes on the inlet, pausing to watch whenever an iqyax came into view.

At first Daughter thought that some dream had come to K’os and told her Cen was still alive. Though Daughter waited mostly for Ghaden, she found herself straining to see if any incoming iqyax carried Cen’s bright markings.

Finally, Daughter had asked K’os if she thought Cen was still alive. K’os had laughed, ridicule in her voice, and said, “How could any man survive a storm like that? It came too quickly. Did you hear what one trader said about the village near the place they found the remains of the iqyan, how many of the ulas were damaged?”

“But what if the men were on shore and the iqyan were merely swept out to sea?” It was a hope that Daughter had heard some of the younger women express.

K’os shook her head. “Even if they had time to get to shore, I heard the chief hunter say that where it hit the hardest, women found driftwood at the tops of the foothills. They might have lived, but there is little chance. When Ghaden returns, we should leave this place and go with him to the River villages. Cen’s family needs to know what happened. Perhaps they will find some comfort when they hear that Ghaden has taken you as wife. Perhaps Cen’s wife will rejoice that she has a new daughter.”

Thoughts of a journey to Cen’s village seemed to pull K’os from her mourning, so Daughter did not mention her doubts about their welcome. Best let K’os find happiness where she could. But Ghaden had told Uutuk that Cen’s wife Gheli had never even met him and seemed to have no desire to claim him as son. So why would she want Uutuk? Better for Daughter to put all her thoughts on Ghaden’s safe return to the Traders’ Beach.

Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

602 B.C.

A loud voice cut into Yikaas’s words, and he began to regret that he was telling his story mostly to men. Women were more polite as listeners, and men were more quiet when their wives and mothers were with them.

“So Cen lived,” one of the River traders called out to Yikaas.

“He lived,” Yikaas said.

Several men started a hunters’ chant, a song of victory sung in River celebrations, but they were interrupted by a rude shout that echoed down from the top of the climbing log. Yikaas recognized Sky Catcher’s voice, but because the man spoke in the First Men’s language, he had to wait for Qumalix to translate.

“He has questions,” Qumalix said. “‘If Cen is alive, why do we have to hear about the women? Tell us about him. Where is he? Why has he not yet returned to the Traders’ Beach?’” Qumalix smiled an apology and said, “Sky Catcher’s words, not mine.”

Yikaas stalked over to the log, shielded his eyes against the gray light coming from the hole in the roof of the ulax. “You have been listening, then?” he asked.

Sky Catcher’s voice was still belligerent when he spoke, and Qumalix leaned close to Yikaas to tell him, “He said that it has stopped raining and that he has better things to do than listen to stories about women.”

Yikaas went back to the storytellers’ place to continue his tale as though he had not been interrupted, then Qumalix met his eyes and said, “He’s rude, but he’s right. These men don’t want to hear about K’os and Daughter. They want to know what happened to Cen. Tell them that story.”