Call Down the Stars (46 page)

The oldest woman in the group leaned close. “You said you couldn’t find her.” She stared into Daes’s face, blinking rheumy eyes.

“I did not say she wouldn’t come back,” said Daes.

“Perhaps you did not look hard enough,” the old woman told her.

Daes held her breath, waiting for questions from the others, but though they glanced at her from the corners of their eyes, they said nothing, and when the women returned with the man from Chakliux’s village, all but Wing and the eldest of them left. That old one closed her eyes, began a soft chant, something to protect the village.

Daes played the part of politeness, her eyes downcast as the young man spoke.

“I am named Cries-loud,” he told her.

His voice was low, as though he spoke from sorrow.

“You’ve come to tell me that my father drowned in a storm,” Daes said, and met his eyes as though her boldness would be strong enough to make him deny the death.

He lifted a hand, brushed it nervously against his cheek, and Daes found herself staring at him, saw that Wing also stared. What was there about this man that seemed so familiar?

“Yes,” he said. “I need to find your mother and tell her.”

Wing poked her head between Daes and Cries-loud. “She is also dead,” Wing said.

The grandmother stopped her chant and hissed at her. “We do not know that!” she said. She clasped an amulet, dark with age, as protection against Wing’s words.

“You said …” Wing began.

“I said I couldn’t find her,” Daes shouted. “Only that. Not that she’s dead!”

Cries-loud lifted a hand as though to calm the women, and it seemed as though Daes were looking into still water at her own face. She shook her head, noticed that Wing was doing the same.

She looked at Cries-loud. “I have wood for a fire and food in my lodge,” she said. “Come and tell me about my father and the storm that took him.”

They left the grandmother and Wing behind, left the mourning chant that the old woman had wound around them, and somehow Daes knew without seeing that Cries-loud followed her, so it was not until she reached the lodge that she looked back, and then only to hold the doorflap open for him to go inside.

Cries-loud followed his sister to a fine, large lodge. At least it seemed that Cen had treated his mother well, that in taking her as wife, he had given her a good life. And this sister of his, she was strong and healthy, a large woman, with wide hips, good for babies. He had been careful with his questions since he came to the village, had asked cautiously—only as messenger—about his mother, and always called her by the name Gheli. He had said nothing about his sisters, and it was nearly a day before someone mentioned Daes by name. Even then he sensed some hesitation, as though there might be something wrong with her, so he was relieved to see that she looked normal and seemed to do all things as a woman should, quickly starting a fire, offering him water, and dragging in the packs that were set in the entrance tunnel.

“They say you just returned from fish camp,” Cries-loud said. “It’s late in the year for that.”

Daes shrugged. “My mother wanted to stay. She doesn’t like to come back to the village too soon. She says we miss too many fish doing that.”

He nodded, then asked, “Where is your sister?”

“They told you about my sister?”

“I’ve been waiting for you and your mother three days. A man can learn much in three days.”

Daes hung a boiling bag from the lodge poles, poured in several bladders of water, and added dried fish.

“Did you see the baby in that lodge where we were?” she asked. “That’s my sister. I brought her back from fish camp. I couldn’t find my mother. She was gone a long time. She went to pick berries or gather plants.” Daes stopped, passed a hand over her face.

There was something wrong about what she was telling him. Berries? Plants?

“You looked for her?” he asked.

“I spent a whole day looking for her, my sister crying in hunger,” Daes said. She began stirring the fish in the boiling bag, then with no explanation hurried into the entrance tunnel.

Cries-loud sat there thinking she had left the lodge, and wondered whether he should leave as well or wait for her return.

She came back with a handful of lovage, thrust it toward him as though it were something important. “She was looking for lovage. We dry it for winter to add flavor to our boiling bag.”

She shredded the leaves and dropped them into the boiling bag, stirred again.

“So she went for lovage, not berries.”

“Probably,” Daes said. “But if she found berries she would bring them as well. Highbush cranberries are good this time of year, after the first frost.”

Her words made sense, Cries-loud told himself, so why did he feel as though she were lying? And why hadn’t she asked about Cen?

During the days walking to the village, he had tried to decide how to tell his mother and sister about Cen’s death. He had not even considered that they wouldn’t be in the village. Who stayed in fish camps when caribou hunts were about to begin?

Your mother, some small voice told him, when she’s worried her husband will bring Ghaden to the village. Ghaden, who might recognize her as Red Leaf.

Cries-loud watched his sister and wondered what it had been like for her, named after the dead Daes. Had the ghost followed her name to this new Daes? Had his mother—Red Leaf, Gheli—feared the power of that name? Surely she lived in dread lest someone come to the village who would recognize her. There were always men—hunters, traders—going back and forth between villages. How better to hide herself than to spend the summers in some remote fish camp?

She also must have learned to sew differently, for, according to Yaa, a woman can recognize other women’s work, especially sewing as gifted as Red Leaf’s. And Cen would surely want to trade his wife’s fine parkas. Had she somehow changed her stitches so they no longer spoke her name?

Suddenly he realized that Daes was holding a bowl of food before him. He wrapped his hands around the bowl, inhaled the steam, smelled the smoky fires that had dried the fish. The smell pulled him away from the lodge, from his sister whom he had known only as a baby. He stayed for a moment in that safe place, then opened his eyes and came back.

“Thank you,” he told Daes.

He lifted the bowl to his lips, used his fingers to push a little of the meat into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed, then lowered the bowl to his lap, and motioned for her to sit down beside him. “Do you want me to tell you what I know?”

She squatted on her haunches, as though to be ready to refill his bowl.

“Sit,” he said, “unless you want to get yourself something to eat.”

“No.”

“Your father was a good man,” he began, and thought how strange it was to be telling this sister about Cen, to be telling her that her father was dead, when all along she belonged to Sok, a father who was alive and strong.

During the whole telling, she did not cry, and when he had finished, she stood, brushed her hands together, and pulled off the soft ground squirrel parka she had been wearing inside the lodge. Cries-loud expected her to begin a mourning cry, but she only stirred the boiling bag. Finally she calmly picked up a woman’s knife that lay on a hearthstone and drew the blade across her left arm, once, twice. She lifted her hand and leaned over the fire so the blood ran down her arm into the coals.

She showed no sign of pain, as though she had only cut a fish for drying, but she said to him, “Thank you for coming to tell us.”

He hoped she would add something about her mother, at least how to get to their fish camp. If Red Leaf were still alive, she needed to know about Cen, and she also needed to know that K’os was coming, she and her daughter Uutuk and Ghaden.

But when Daes spoke she said, “The man Ghaden, do you know him?”

“I know him. He lives in my village.” Almost he told her that he was married to Ghaden’s sister Yaa, but then for some reason did not.

“No one else from your village is coming, nae’?” she asked.

“There’s a woman from our village who knew your mother. Perhaps you recognize her name. K’os.”

“No,” Daes said.

“She’s coming to share your mother’s mourning, and she plans to travel with her husband Seal, a First Men trader, as well as a daughter and that daughter’s husband, Ghaden.”

For a moment—so quickly that Cries-loud almost missed it—Daes’s eyes widened, but she went to one of her packs and rummaged through it until she came up with a strip of caribou hide. “Let me help,” he said, and she held her arm out toward him.

He wrapped the strip tightly, then bent to look into her eyes, clasped her chin when she tried to turn away. “You know Ghaden,” he said.

“My mother speaks about him sometimes.”

“And me?” he asked. “Does she speak about me?”

Daes looked at him, puzzled. “No,” she said slowly. “Why should she?”

She glanced down when Cries-loud tucked the end of the hide strip into place near her elbow. For a moment, he thought she was studying the wrap, but then she raised her hand to his, held it there. His hand was larger, but otherwise they looked the same, even to the pattern of their veins.

She lifted her eyes to his face and asked, “Who are you?”

Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

602 B.C.

T
HERE WERE MURMURS OF
protest when Kuy’aa stopped her story. One of the bolder women said, “We want to know what he tells her. We want to know if he decides he can trust her.”

“Do you think he can?” Kuy’aa asked.

“No!” most of the men called out.

“Of course,” said one of the chief hunter’s wives. “Once she knows she is his sister, she will not do anything to harm him.”

Another woman said, “You cannot trust her. Look how often she lies, and she just took her baby sister and left her mother.”

“Her mother deserved to be left. Who could live in a fish camp all winter? The baby would have died!”

The arguing continued, the voices rising. Yikaas glanced at Kuy’aa and saw that she was smiling. Qumalix moved to sit beside her, and Sky Catcher did the same.

“It must be a difficult story to tell,” said Qumalix, “because it is a difficult story to hear. You don’t know whether Daes is good or bad. You don’t know how to feel about her.”

“There are many ways to tell this story,” Kuy’aa said. The old woman licked her lips, and Yikaas saw that they were dry and cracked. He asked if anyone had a water bladder, and soon one was thrust into his hands. He gave it to her, waited as she drank, and then said, “So then, Aunt, why did you tell it this way?”

“It needed to be short,” she said. “There are too many people in this ulax, and they distract one another from the telling. If I were to tell it only to you, I would also have let you know what Gheli was thinking and perhaps even how the baby felt. That way you would have other people to think about, and you wouldn’t be so frustrated with Daes.”

“You want her to be good,” Qumalix broke in to say. “And gradually you realize that she’s not as good as she should be.”

“But she’s not as bad as K’os,” Yikaas said. “She does think about others. She was worried about her sister.” He saw that Sky Catcher was trying to listen, and so asked with a gesture of his eyes for Qumalix to translate what he had said into First Men words.

Then Sky Catcher said, “Not worried enough to take her back to Gheli after that first day on the trail.”

“Well,” said Yikaas, “think about this. Daes turned out better than she could have. Look how selfish her mother, Gheli, is. She won’t go back to the winter village because she thinks Ghaden might be there. She puts her own daughters’ lives at risk …”

“Ha! That is foolish,” said Sky Catcher. “Better to be a little cold in a fish camp tent than dead because someone remembers that you killed his mother.”

Qumalix interrupted in a soft voice. “What about her name?” she asked. “What do you think of when I say the word
daes
?”

“It is a River word. What does it mean?” Sky Catcher asked.

“A shallow bit of water, not much good to anyone.”

“The right name for her,” said Yikaas.

“But what chance does it give her?” asked Sky Catcher. “The name itself is a curse, and it would always remind Gheli of what she did to that first Daes.”

“If you remember the stories of the first Daes,” Yikaas said, “you know that she was a selfish woman. Not wicked, but selfish. She left her daughter Aqamdax to run away with Cen. She married an old man she did not care about just because he would take her son Ghaden as his own. It really wasn’t until she was dying, Red Leaf’s knife slicing away her life, that she reached beyond herself and thought of someone else.”

“Who?” asked Sky Catcher.

“Remember, she lay over Ghaden so he would not freeze to death.”

“But Ghaden was just a little boy. Any mother would do the same.”

Qumalix translated what Sky Catcher had said, then raised her hands to press them against the sides of her head. “You two need to learn each other’s languages,” she told Sky Catcher and Yikaas. “My head aches from carrying your words back and forth.”

Sky Catcher laughed and thrust a hand toward the top of the ulax. He said something and started up the climbing log, but Qumalix shook her head at him. Yikaas realized he had been holding his breath, waiting for her answer, afraid she would do as Sky Catcher asked. Instead, she looked at Yikaas, lifted her mouth in a half-smile.

“He complains for lack of sleep,” Qumalix said, but avoided Yikaas’s eyes.

Sky Catcher said something else, yelled it down rudely from the top of the ulax before he went outside. Qumalix’s face turned red, and to cover her embarrassment, Yikaas asked, “So, do you think the name
Daes
passed on that first Daes’s selfishness?”

Qumalix shook her head. “How could anyone know?” she said.

Kuy’aa had settled down on her haunches, and Yikaas squatted beside her, asked her the same question. She tipped her head to look at him and said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not. The important thing to remember is that she was selfish, and she lied without shame.”