Call Down the Stars (36 page)

The men sitting close enough to hear Qumalix murmured their agreement, and so Yikaas lifted his voice to ask the others in the ulax what they wanted.

“Make the Daughter part quick,” one man called out.

“Tell us what Ghaden found,” said another.

“Where’s Cen?”

Yikaas shrugged and lifted his hands. “What choice does a storyteller have but to please those who listen?”

He laughed, and the men laughed with him. Even Sky Catcher settled himself on one of the notches cut partway down the climbing log and perched there, hands on his knees, as if ready to listen.

“So concerning Daughter and K’os,” Yikaas said, “it is enough for you to know that K’os is anxious to start her journey back to the River People she had left so many years before, and Daughter is a good wife, worried about her husband’s return.

“But before I tell you about Cen, let me talk a little about Ghaden.”

There was a murmur of agreement, although Sky Catcher grumbled out complaints. Qumalix scolded him, and the two began to argue. For once Yikaas was glad he did not understand much of the First Men language and so did not need to hear Sky Catcher’s opinions about his stories.

He pressed his lips together and considered where to start. Finally he raised his voice above Sky Catcher’s bickering and said, “Though Ghaden loved his father, he was also angry with him because Cen had never taken Ghaden to the Four Rivers Village and sometimes went years without seeing him. But as Ghaden searched for Cen, he forgot his anger and remembered only the good things …”

The Bering Sea

6435 B.C.

The mist lay so wet and heavy that it slowed Ghaden’s hands on the paddle and dimmed his eyes as if they were cauled by age. The men had kept their iqyan close to the shoreline, twice leaving the sea to poke among heaps of driftwood beached by the storm, but they found nothing. Ghaden’s thoughts moved as slowly as his hands, and he saw his father’s face again and again, in the waves, in the sky, even in the grasses as they moved in the wind.

His first full memory as a child was of Cen smiling at him during a serious discussion about some broken toy. A spear, yes, that was it, carved from a stick that Cen had sharpened and hardened by charring in the hearth fire. Ghaden had taken the spear outside. In the innocence that allows a child to think he is capable of all his father does, he had truly believed he would bring back a hare. But his first effort at throwing had ended with the spear sunk deeply into a tussock of tundra grass. To his horror, when he had attempted to pull the spear out, he had stumbled, fallen against his little weapon, and cracked the shaft.

Even now, as a man, Ghaden could feel the sorrow he had known at the loss of that spear. When he had taken it back to Cen, expecting to be scolded, Cen had merely grunted, then whittled Ghaden another. Ghaden had made his first kill with that spear, though by then Cen had left their village.

Months later, Cen had returned and stolen Ghaden and his older sister Aqamdax. He took them to the Cousin River village, a village that had eventually been destroyed in the battle between the Cousin River and Near River People.

Somehow during that battle Cen had disgraced himself. Ghaden had heard the people discuss how Cen had run even before the fighting began. Ghaden had always wanted to talk to him about that, but how does a son bring up his father’s cowardice? Ghaden wanted denial, or at least an honorable reason for Cen’s choice, but what if Cen had no reason other than his own fear?

When Ghaden’s mother Daes had been killed, and Ghaden had been knifed and left for dead, Cen was blamed. At the time, the people of the village had nearly taken Cen’s life in revenge, but Cen had stood before them all, asked if his son Ghaden still lived, and, grabbing a knife from one of the men who held him captive, had cut off his own finger as a sacrifice for Ghaden’s recovery. How could a man who had the bravery to do that be afraid of battle?

Cen was no coward, and he would have faced the storm in strength. If anyone could have survived, Ghaden assured himself, it would have been his father.

A shout from one of the other men pulled Ghaden from his thoughts. The hunter used a paddle to point toward the beach, and Ghaden saw another heap of broken wood. The tide was low, but there were few rocks and the sea broke gently against the shore, an unlikely place for anything to wash up, but in a storm any beach could become treacherous.

One of the men was Dog Feet’s oldest brother, a Walrus trader with perhaps eight handfuls of years. The others—three of them—Ghaden knew only as First Men hunters, and he was even unsure of their names, but they were so skilled with their iqyan that by watching them, Ghaden had added to his own abilities.

Dog Feet’s brother had already turned his iqyax toward land, and Ghaden followed. When the sea was shallow he loosened the spray skirt that made a watertight seal around his coaming and jumped from his iqyax before it ran aground.

The sea was cold against his bare feet and ankles, but it felt good to stand after such a long time of paddling. He looked up into the sky, tried to make out the position of the sun, but the mist was too thick. The color of the light that squeezed down to them let Ghaden know that the day was near its end, and that they might be wise to consider staying on the beach for the night.

One of the hunters, now in shallow water, held up a stringer of fish, kelp greenlings he must have caught sometime during that day of traveling, but Ghaden did not remember seeing him trail a handline.

“I am hungry,” the man called out. “Will you eat with me?”

Each of the others held up something, a pouch of dried fish, a net of sea urchins. Dog Feet’s brother, standing atop a foothill that browed over the gravel tide flats, called, “There is iitikaalux here.” He pointed to several tall, thick-stalked plants that towered above the grasses.

Uutuk had given Ghaden a belly of smoked fish and another of seal oil, and her mother had added a packet of dried fireweed leaves for tea. He pulled the storage packs from his iqyax, and Dog Feet’s brother—striding down the hill with the iitikaalux bundled in a sheaf of grass—cried out his readiness to eat. But suddenly the man’s voice broke, and he made a sound as though he were choking. He ran to the heap of driftwood and began digging through it, wailing as he worked.

The others, still out on the sea, dealing with the undertow of waves and the few rocks that studded the shallow water, did not seem to notice, but Ghaden heard the despair in the man’s voice and felt his own heart clutch within his chest. He dropped his packs and hurried toward Dog Feet’s brother.

When Ghaden saw the arm, he added his own groan of agony, and began throwing aside the driftwood. Days in the sea had bloated the body, turned the skin as white as the underbelly of a fish. When Ghaden saw the body’s left hand, the smallest finger missing, he was sure it was his father. But then he realized that the finger and much of the hand had been eaten away. He looked at the chigdax, still mostly intact, and knew the man was not Cen. Dog Feet’s brother turned and retched, and when he was heaving up nothing but his own sorrow, he managed to choke out, “It is my brother. I know his chigdax.”

Ghaden squatted beside him, placed an arm over his shoulders, and helped him to his feet, drew him to where the wind blew away the stench of the dead.

When the others beached their iqyan, they lifted their voices together and sang the mourning songs as best they could without women to make the high ululations that reach beyond wind and sky to the dancing lights where Dog Feet would hear and know that he was honored.

They made a burial of stones. Dog Feet’s brother laid one of his own harpoons over the body so Dog Feet would have weapons in the spirit world. Ghaden gave a sleeve knife; one of the other hunters offered a handline and hooks, another a hunter’s lamp.

“He will be glad for your gifts,” the brother said, forcing his words past a throat that sounded raw with pain.

Afterward, as Ghaden sorted through the rubble of driftwood at the water’s edge, he found nothing that belonged to Cen, and so although he mourned Dog Feet he felt relief that he could still cling to some hope.

They made their camp far enough from the burial that they could not see the mound of stone, and so that any spirit lingering, called to the beach by Dog Feet’s death, would not easily see them. They set out food but ate little, spoke little before rolling themselves into sleeping furs for the night.

Ghaden woke often, plagued by dreams of death and drowning. The next morning, Dog Feet’s brother had traded sorrow for anger, and his loss had sharpened his tongue.

“Your father, too, is dead,” he told Ghaden, “and so is He-points-the-way. No man was better in his iqyax than my brother. If he is dead, then all are dead.”

Ghaden, his spirit still possessed by his dreams, was convinced by the man’s words. So that day on the sea, Ghaden sang mourning songs, and in his thoughts laid stones, one by one, over Cen’s body as they had over Dog Feet’s, and when after three more days they found two paddles drifting, Ghaden was not surprised to see that both belonged to Cen.

He buried one on shore that night, made chants in hopes that the paddle would find its way to Cen in the spirit world, and he also buried a knife, a harpoon, a sax, and a pair of seal flipper boots he had brought in hopes of finding his father, new clothes to take away the bad luck of the old.

They found nothing of He-points-the-way, but how could that trader have lived when the others did not? And so the next night they made mourning and burial for him, offering more weapons and a belly of oil. Then they turned back toward the Traders’ Beach, and when they arrived, the village again mourned the three men lost, made gifts of food and clothing and weapons, so Cen and Dog Feet and He-points-the-way would have what they needed to keep them strong in that other world where they now lived.

T
HE SEA HAD STOLEN
everything he needed to survive: both his paddles, all his harpoons. Somehow it had even ripped the hood from his chigdax and pulled his sleeve knife from its sheath. Cen’s ribs were broken, both his own and those of his iqyax. Each breath Cen drew rattled, as though the wind were throwing gaming bones in his chest.

But far worse, somehow the sea had taken his hearing. Even yet, a whole day after the wave had passed, new blood still oozed into the crust that blocked his ears. He remembered elders whose inner ears had dried up with age. They complained of hearing nothing, but Cen’s ears were filled with the roar of that wave, as though it had taken all the sounds of the earth and replaced them with its own voice.

The sea had battered his head so that his eyes were swollen shut and his nose was broken. He had lost two teeth, a dog tooth and the one behind it. That tooth was not entirely gone, but what was left ached more than his nose. Long ago, when the Near River People had accused Cen of killing Daes, they had beaten him and smashed his nose, splintering the bone. Somehow over the years the nose had sewn itself into a hump. Now it was flat again, but he had long ago learned to breathe through his mouth.

The pain he could live with. What trader does not learn to accept injury as a companion? But when a man has no paddle, when his iqyax is held together only by its seal hide covering and his chigdax can no longer hold out the sea, what does he do? He listens, and when he hears the birds, kittiwake, and gull, then he directs his iqyan with movements of his legs, by paddling with his hands, until, if he has good luck, he is caught in a current that brings him toward shore. If his luck is bad, he is thrust by breakers into cliffs, though at least there is a chance for him.

But a man without hearing, how does he even know which way to direct his iqyax? By watching. When he sees those gulls, he follows them, but a man who cannot see and cannot hear, what does he do?

Cen asked himself that question many times, and the answer that came to him was this: A man has two choices. He can quit and wait to die, or he can sing. For there was always the chance that some hunter or trader would hear his voice and come his way. Even if that did not happen, the songs might please the spirits so they themselves would direct his iqyax. And of course, if he lived long enough, his eyes would most likely open again, for when he pried at the lids, he could see light, and so had hope that the injury would heal.

The wave had taken much, but it had also left him a little, too. He still had dried fish and two bladders of water. His hands were cut and sore, but no fingers were broken, and his arms were strong, his legs also. The spray skirt of his coaming was still watertight, and he drew it as high as he could under his arms.

He lifted his voice and sang, but without his ears, he did not know whether he sang loudly or only in whispers, for his lungs screamed agony with each breath and his throat was rasped raw by the sea water he had swallowed. But still he sang, praises mostly to the earth and the sea and the One who created them, for Cen was not sure which spirits hovered close, if any, but none of them should be insulted by songs lifted to the Creator or to the earth or even the sea. So he sang and waited, trailing his hands in the water to catch any change in direction by his iqyax. And while he sang he raised prayers that a good current would push him to a safe beach where he might wait until his eyes could see again.

The Traders’ Beach

During the days Ghaden was gone, Daughter found many reasons to work near the beach. She needed to watch over her husband’s trade goods and those of his father. She needed to collect sea urchins, and to fish with a handline from the shore, or to wade out and cut limpets from rocks at low tide, to dig for mussels. But even as she worked, her eyes were always on the bay, always searching the horizon, hoping to see her husband and his father in their iqyan.

The day Ghaden did return was full of fog, so that although she was on the beach, Daughter did not see him until he was already out of his iqyax and dragging it ashore. She had a moment to study his face, and so knew that Cen was dead. It was not until several women began wailing a mourning song that she managed to make her feet move toward her husband.