Call Down the Stars (59 page)

“You think you can kill me?” K’os said. “Why now, when you have never been able to do it before?”

“Go, Uutuk!” Chakliux told the girl, but Uutuk hesitated, looking first at him, then at her mother. “Now, Uutuk!”

“Do it quickly,” Uutuk said to him and suddenly gagged. She caught her breath and straightened, moved a hand to her belly. K’os’s eyes went wide.

“No!” Uutuk said, and she covered her stomach with both hands.

K’os threw back her head and began to laugh. “No wonder you are both so anxious to kill me. Even you, Uutuk. You think I will curse that babe you carry?” She dropped the boot from her hand and spread her arms wide, took a step toward Uutuk, and suddenly Chakliux realized that she had a knife in her hand, a small-bladed crooked knife. One a woman would use for sewing. She clapped a hand on Uutuk’s shoulder and the girl flinched, but K’os’s grasp was strong. She pressed the knife close to Uutuk’s neck.

“Such a small blade,” K’os said. “What damage could it do?” She laughed. “There is poison you probably don’t know, Chakliux.”

Uutuk groaned.

“You were foolish, Chakliux, not to get her out of here one way or another before you came in with your spears. But how good for me that you did not. For now I know that I have a grandchild. I think I might like to take him with me to the spirit world. It’s a long journey and better made with a companion, nae’? Think what a favor I did all these Four Rivers People who once tried to kill me. I let them go together. Now they’ll have a village there. And you think I have no compassion. Remember, they made me go alone, in winter.” She moved the knife. “Aaa, I was telling you about the poison. It’s used by whale hunters on the tips of their harpoons. It stops the breathing; it stills the heart. Uutuk, a small scratch might allow you to live and only take the babe, but I’m not sure. I’ve much to learn about this poison. Perhaps it will take you, too. Then the three of us can go together, you and me and our baby.”

Then, suddenly, someone in the entrance tunnel called to Chakliux. The old woman Near Mouse came in carrying a bag that smelled of cooked meat. She stopped just inside the door. Her mouth fell open, and she let out a scream. In that moment, Uutuk dropped to the floor, and K’os lost her grip on the girl’s shoulder. Then Chakliux threw a spear, took K’os high in the center of her chest, threw another that caught her in the throat. The weight of the spears and the thrust of Chakliux’s throws took K’os backward to the floor.

Blood pooled around her head and neck, and when she no longer twitched, Chakliux went close enough to kick the crooked knife from her hand. Uutuk came into his arms, and they held one another. He thought she was crying, but when she finally pulled away, he saw that her eyes were dry.

“I cannot mourn her,” she said softly.

“Leave now,” he said, and asked Near Mouse to take Uutuk back to her lodge. When they were gone, he knelt beside K’os’s body and carefully cut her apart at each joint.

Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

602 B.C.

“Your story is better,” one of the River men told Qumalix.

“No,” said another. “Yikaas’s story is the way it happened.”

An old woman spoke up and said, “I heard that Ghaden killed her, to protect his wife, and when K’os was dead, her throat looked like a wolf had torn it out, so everyone knew that the dog Biter had come back to protect Ghaden.”

Several others murmured that they had heard the same story. Another said that Uutuk had killed K’os, and another that Cen had done it. One old man told them that he heard Cries-loud had killed K’os to protect his mother.

“Which one should we believe?” a little boy asked. “How do we know what is true?”

Then Kuy’aa stood up. “Perhaps the truth is that K’os died many times in many ways. Did she deserve any less than that?”

Yikaas and Qumalix sat together in the storyteller’s ulax. By the time everyone had left and old Kuy’aa was snoring in one of the curtained sleeping places, Yikaas himself had been ready to sleep. But now that he and Qumalix were alone, his mind was suddenly clear. Even his eyes no longer burned from the smoke of the seal oil lamp.

“Your story about K’os’s death was good,” Yikaas said. He turned so he could watch Qumalix’s face as he spoke to her. The walls of his heart suddenly seemed too thin, so that with each pulse of his blood, they trembled, but he held his voice steady, and spoke with a boldness he did not feel. “I still think my story is right, but that doesn’t mean that yours isn’t good.”

He expected an angry retort. Qumalix always said what she thought, and he had grown to like that. She looked at him with brows raised.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“Because it
is
good,” he told her.

“No, not about my story, about your own. Why do you say yours is right?”

“The storytellers in my village have been telling the right story since it happened.”

“And mine haven’t?”

He shrugged, turned his head to stare at the seal oil lamp. He missed the good hearthfires of his own people. The poor flickering lamp gave so little flame. How was a man supposed to have his thoughts strengthened by that?

“Look,” he finally said, and slipped his caribou hide boot from his right foot. He expected her to be surprised, and she was, so surprised that she spoke in her own language, then, apologizing, said, “Otter foot,” in the River tongue.

“I understood the first time,” he told her. He had not lived in a First Men village most of the summer without picking up some of their words. “This is why my story is right and yours is wrong. My foot proves that Chakliux’s spirit, some small part of it, lives in me.”

Yikaas cupped the foot in his hand and spread his toes. They were webbed. “See?”

He allowed himself a little smile, but said nothing more, waiting for her to agree with him. What else could she do but agree?

“I’ll be back,” she said, and left to go into one of the curtained sleeping places. She returned carrying two small sealskin bags.

“I have these,” she said. “You know the stories of Chagak and Kiin?”

“I know them.”

“Do you remember the carving Chagak owned, the one of man, wife, and child?”

He was not happy about the way this was going. He shifted so that his otter foot was more visible to her. She opened one of the bags. It had a drawstring top, and she dumped out a little lump of dark yellowed ivory.

“See, look,” she said.

He picked up the ivory, turned it in his hand. It might have been a carving of three people, but it was so old and cracked, worn smooth by handling, that the faces were no longer truly faces and the bodies were merely suggestions of what they once had been.

“Who can tell by this?” he asked. “It could be something the sea itself tumbled into being.”

She leaned close to him and turned the carving upside down. “You can see that there was a little hole here where the carver Shuganan hid a knife blade.”

There was a hole, but Yikaas shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. Qumalix blew out her breath in irritation and opened the other sealskin bag. “You cannot deny that this is a whale’s tooth carved to look like a shell.”

He picked it up. “Yes, but why should I believe that it was the whale tooth shell that Kiin made? Anyone could have done this.”

She snatched it out of his hand and dropped it back into the bag. “But anyone didn’t.”

He smiled at her. “Even if it is Kiin’s, what does that prove? She wasn’t a storyteller.”

“One of her children was.”

He shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth wide in a smile. “You just don’t want to admit that my story is true, and that the otter foot is the best proof.”

She bowed her head, and for a moment, he felt a twinge of sadness for her.

“I said your story was good,” he told her.

She nodded. “But you are right,” she said. “The otter foot is the best proof.”

Then she slowly unlaced her left boot, sat down on her rump and pulled it off, extended her leg until her foot was in his lap. She spread her webbed toes and began to laugh.

Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

590 B.C.

T
HE CHILD WIGGLED IN
anticipation and looked up into his mother’s face. He never tired of the storytelling, though he had heard the stories so often. His mother leaned down to rub his foot. It ached a little after the long day playing with his new friends here. This was the first time his parents had brought him to the Traders’ Beach. When they visited the First Men, they usually left him with an old aunt at his father’s River village. But he knew the First Men language because his mother spoke it.

“One last story,” his father was saying, and the people groaned that the storytelling was almost over for that day. “A tale of an old woman’s joy,” he said. “You remember the storyteller Qung who long ago lived in this very village?”

There was a murmur of acknowledgment.

“She finally grew so old and so bent that she stayed in her ulax all the time and depended on others to come to her. Her hearing had grown dim, and she lived mostly in the stories she held in her mind. But one day even her old ears could hear the excitement in the voices outside her ulax …”

The Traders’ Beach

6427 B.C.

Qung’s heart trembled within her chest. She remembered stories about villages attacked, of women raped and men killed. Her people had lived in peace a long time, but still, who could say when strange warriors might decide to come upon them? She pushed herself up on thin, gnarled legs and hobbled to her sleeping place. At the back of that small niche, under the grass mats that lined the walls, was the entrance to a hidden tunnel that led out of the ulax.

The tunnel rose gradually, and Qung followed it on hands and feet, her knuckles scraping the bare earth of the floor, her fingers grasping at any handhold as she climbed the slope. When she reached the end of the tunnel, she thrust her head and upper body outside, trusted that the long grasses that grew over the sod of the tunnel roof would hide her from her enemies.

The day was warm, even for summer, and a haze shimmered in the sky, blurring the sun and dimming the horizon. In spite of her age, her eyes were good, and she could make out men and women milling between the ulas.

No one seemed afraid. No one seemed angry. She pulled herself up with stringy arms to sit on the edge of the opening, lifted her head as best she could to see through grasses that shifted in the wind.

Aa, yes, there was Beach Cutter—the old fool—and his new young wife. But who was that beside them? He wore a chigdax, so she knew he had just come from his iqyax. There was a boy with him, nearly as tall as he was. Several more children. A woman.

Qung gasped, and without even feeling the pain of old joints, she was on her feet, lifting herself as straight as she could possibly stand. And then she was calling, shouting to be heard above the voices of the grass.

The woman lifted her head, cried out, then ran up the hill. She scooped Qung into her arms as if the old woman was just a child.

“Aunt!” she said. “You waited. I thought … I was afraid …”

“I told you I would wait,” Qung said in a querulous voice. “You thought I would be dead? Ha!” Then her bravado was lost to tears.

She lifted a veined hand and smoothed back a tangle of hair that had come loose from the braids Aqamdax wore at the sides of her head. Qung clicked her tongue. “You need to learn how to fix your hair,” she said, and jerked on one of the braids. “Someone might think you are a River woman.”

“Aunt, can you walk down to meet my family?” Aqamdax asked. “Chakliux and I brought them all, our son and his wife, two more sons, three daughters not yet married, and our youngest, another son.”

Qung leaned on Aqamdax, turned her head to study the woman’s face as they walked to the beach. Small lines spread from the corners of Aqamdax’s eyes, as though her face was often crinkled in laughter. A swath of white, bright in the darkness of her hair, fell from the crown of her head to be caught into one of her braids. Her hands were splotched and red, most likely from the days traveling in the iqyax.

Chakliux came to Qung, gathered her in his arms, squeezed until her bones creaked.

“Enough!” she said and batted at him with her hands. He introduced their children, fine and strong with the look of Chakliux in the eyes, but with Aqamdax’s nose and round face.

“Angax has come to hunt, and his wife wants to learn to make birdskin garments, but this daughter …” Chakliux pushed the girl forward. “We want you to teach her your stories.”

Qung looked at the girl in surprise. She appeared to have eight, nine summers, and she was shy. She met Qung’s eyes only for a moment, gave her a quick smile, then looked down at the ground, stood balanced on one foot. Qung was not surprised to see that her raised foot was otter.

“How long will you stay?” Qung asked. Though the question seemed rude, she needed to know. If she was to have only a few days, or only a moon, she would teach this girl differently than if she had a whole winter.

“As long as you have stories, we will stay,” Chakliux said.

“As long as I have stories?” said Qung. Her surprise lifted those words so they sounded like a question. She cleared her throat and repeated herself: “As long as I have stories,” she said in a firm voice. “As long as I have stories.”

Suddenly she raised her head and laughed.

“As long as I have stories!” she shouted. “How wonderful. You will be here forever!”

I
BELIEVE WITHOUT DOUBT
that my path as a novelist was surveyed and cleared when I was still a tiny child. My parents love books and are each gifted storytellers. During any long car trip my father kept us enthralled with a continuing comic saga of the “Goody-Goody Family,” who faced incredible dangers, but always survived against the odds. Each week, as she ironed clothes, my mother delighted us by telling the traditional well-loved fairy tales. Each night as I lay in my bed, I became the heroine of my own adventures until dreams claimed the story rights.